Ethnic Minorities in the Mass Media: How Migrants Perceive Their Representation in Swiss Public Television

Communication research highlights deficiencies in the media's representation of migrants. The study at hand analyzes these deficiencies from the perspective of the migrants concerned: How do they perceive their representation in the media, especially on television? And how do they assess the perceived situation with regard to immigrant integration? This topic has been examined in a qualitative pilot study based on six group discussions amongst migrants and Swiss citizens with an immigration background in the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. The results show a high discrepancy between the desire for more presence and participation on the one hand, and the wish to stand in the spotlight less often, on the other han

When Creative Potentials are Being Undermined By Commercial Imperatives: Change and Resistance in Six Cases of Newsroom Reorganisation

The aim of this paper is to explore and discuss how newsroom restructuring in favour of cross-media news production is changing news production practices and to what extent media-specific norms, values and practices impede the strategy for change. In doing so, we use the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens as theoretical framework. With his concept of the dynamic relationship between structures and agency, and the analytical division of structures into recursively organised rules and resources, we look at planned newsroom reorganisation in order to analyse aspects leading to its implementation as well as factors resistant to change. Overall, our findings show that conflicts between journalistic norms (accurately researching content) and values (reliably informing citizens on socially relevant topics), and the requirement to produce more content within an ever shorter time, influence the implementation of the intended cross-media news production. Moreover, interviewees suggest that in addition to allocative resources (notably financial and human resources), authoritative resources, such as competencies and expert knowledge, have been relevant for adaptation or maintenance of newsroom structure