The United Nations' 'responsibility to protect' and the world's press: establishing a new humanitarian norm?

Since 2005 the United Nations has officially endorsed, though not always managed to enact, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine designed to safeguard human lives when a state either fails to protect, or grievously threatens, its own citizens. To what extent, how and when have these principles informed press journalism around the world and its news coverage of potential and actual R2P crises? This chapter briefly contextualizes the recent historical emergence of the R2P principle, and then, based on a systematic and detailed analysis of the world’s press across a ten-year period, summarizes key findings relating to press performance – both progressive and problematic – in the establishment of the R2P norm

Reporting civilizational collapse research notes from a world-in-crisis

There is a woeful silence in global media as well as a widespread reluctance in the fields of media and communication studies to fully recognize and research the systemic and interlocking nature of deepening existential threats that together now constitute today’s ‘world-in-crisis’. It is time to move beyond disaggregated news reporting and research parochialisms and grapple conceptually and theoretically as well as empirically and politically with the complexity of the planetary emergency and its communication. This article elaborates on these claims and provides conceptual and theoretical coordinates of use in re-imagining mainstream journalism’s potential for processes of transition and transformation

Rethinking media and disasters in a global age: What’s changed and why it matters

Today’s media ecology and communication flows circumscribe the globe, extending beyond and intensifying earlier spatial–temporal communication trends. New and old media increasingly enter into disasters shaping them from the inside out, and outside in, reconfiguring disaster social relations, channelling forms of political control and projects for change, and circulating deep-seated cultural views and sentiments. Approached in global context, disasters can also no longer be presumed to be territorially bounded or nationally confined events, seemingly erupting without warning to disrupt routines, established norms and social order. Many disasters are now increasingly best reconceptualised and theorised as endemic to, enmeshed within and potentially encompassing in today’s globally interconnected (dis)order. This article elaborates on these twin propositions about the changing ontology of disasters in a globalizing world and their epistemological constitution through media and communications and provides theoretical and conceptual coordinates for improved understanding and future research

Between display and deliberation: analyzing TV news as communicative architecture

Television journalism serves to display and deliberate consent and conflict in the contemporary world and it does so through a distinctive ‘communicative architecture’ structured in terms of a repertoire of ‘communicative frames’. This proves consequential for the public expression and engagement of views and voices, issues and identities, and exhibits a complexity that has so far remained unexplored and under-theorized. This article outlines our conceptualization of ‘communicative frames’ and demonstrates its relevance in a systematic, comparative international analysis of terrestrial and satellite, public service and commercial television news produced and/or circulated in six different countries: the USA, UK, Australia, India, Singapore and South Africa. Recent developments in social theory, political theory and journalism studies all underpin our approach to how these frames contribute to meaningful public deliberation and understanding and, potentially, to processes of mediatized ‘democratic deepening’. This article builds on these contemporary theoretical trajectories and develops a new approach for the empirical exploration and re-theorization of the fas -developing international ecology of TV journalism

The re-birth of the "beat": A hyperlocal online newsgathering model

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 754 - 765, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2012.667279.Scholars have long lamented the death of the 'beat' in news journalism. Today's journalists generate more copy than they used to, a deluge of PR releases often keeping them in the office, and away from their communities. Consolidation in industry has dislodged some journalists from their local sources. Yet hyperlocal online activity is thriving if journalists have the time and inclination to engage with it. This paper proposes an exploratory, normative schema intended to help local journalists systematically map and monitor their own hyperlocal online communities and contacts, with the aim of re-establishing local news beats online as networks. This model is, in part, technologically-independent. It encompasses proactive and reactive news-gathering and forward planning approaches. A schema is proposed, developed upon suggested news-gathering frameworks from the literature. These experiences were distilled into an iterative, replicable schema for local journalism. This model was then used to map out two real-world 'beats' for local news-gathering. Journalists working within these local beats were invited to trial the models created. It is hoped that this research will empower journalists by improving their information auditing, and could help re-define journalists' relationship with their online audiences

Paedophiles in the community: inter-agency conflict, news leaks and the local press

This article explores the leaking of confidential information about secret Home Office plans to house convicted paedophiles within a local community (albeit inside a prison). It argues that a politics of paedophilia has emerged in which inter-agency consensus on the issue of ‘what to do’ with high-profile sex offenders has broken down. Accordingly, the article situates newspaper ‘outing’ of paedophiles in the community in relation to vigilante journalism and leaked information from official agencies. The article then presents research findings from a case study of news events set in train following a whistle-blowing reaction by Prison Officers’ Association officials to Home Office plans. Drawing from a corpus of 10 interviews with journalists and key protagonists in the story, the article discusses both the dynamics of whistle blowing about paedophiles and also what happens after the whistle has blown