Killing the messenger: report of the global inquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the protection of journalists

The report will consider proposals for reinforcing existing levels of protection including the possible need for a new international convention dealing specifically with the safety and protection of journalists including, if required, an emblem to achieve a secure and safe environment for journalists and those who work with them

The quality and independence of British journalism

There is no shortage of comment about the state of British journalism. Critics point to the increasing role of public relations in shaping news output and financial constraints on the freedom of journalists to report accurately and independently. What is invariably lacking, however, is any serious empirical research on the subject. Our report aims to fill this gap. Our study is based on a number of parallel investigations. We looked at the number of journalists employed in the national press over the last two decades and the volume of work they are required to do. We studied the domestic news content at the ‘top end’ of British press and broadcast news in order to establish the extent to which journalists depend on public relations and other media (especially wire services), as well as the presence of information indicating robust journalistic practices. We carried out case studies to paint a picture of the role played by PR, other media and the wire services in shaping news content. We tested the ‘news value’ of PR inspired stories with a panel of experts, and we asked a number of journalists and PR professionals to tell us how their working environment has changed

The structure of the EU mediasphere

Background. A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed “data-driven inquiry” in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings. In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages detecting a clear structure in the choice of stories covered by the various outlets. This is significantly affected by objective national, geographic, economic and cultural relations among outlets and countries, e.g., outlets from countries sharing strong economic ties are more likely to cover the same stories. We also show that the deviation from average content is significantly correlated with membership to the eurozone, as well as with the year of accession to the EU. Conclusions/Significance. While independently making a multitude of small editorial decisions, the leading media of the 27 EU countries, over a period of six months, shaped the contents of the EU mediasphere in a way that reflects its deep geographic, economic and cultural relations. Detecting these subtle signals in a statistically rigorous way would be out of the reach of traditional methods. This analysis demonstrates the power of the available methods for significant automation of media content analysis

Practical research methods for media and cultural studies: Making people count

Many very intelligent people don't like dealing with numbers. Similarly, many gifted scientists are not especially interested in studying people and their cultural behaviour. In this book, we argue that being interested in people and their cultures, and helping students and others to use numbers to pursue these interests, are not mutually exclusive. Research methods are becoming an increasingly important requirement for students of all kinds. But many students, particularly those in the humanities, struggle with concepts drawn from the social sciences and find quantitative and statistical information inaccessible and daunting. Nonetheless, such concepts are found in nearly all areas of society, from market research and opinion polls to psychological studies of human behaviour. This book aims to provide a simple guide to the process of conducting research in the humanities, with special reference to media and culture, from the planning stage, through the data gathering, to the analysis and interpretation of results: 'planning it', 'doing it' and 'understanding it'. The book aims to show how students' own choice of research topic can be refined into a manageable research question and how the most appropriate methodologies can be applied. Each section draws on actual examples from research that the authors and their students have conducted. Topics covered include: choosing a research question and method; instrument design and pilot data; practical procedures; research with children; looking at statistics; and interpretation of results