Original scientific paper
Societal Roles of Journalism in the Age of the Internet and Digital Television: Slovenian Online Journalists and their Self-Perceptions
Igor Vobič
; Faculty of Social Siences University of Ljubljanas
Abstract
This paper builds on previous international media and journalism scholarly work on societal roles of journalism, presents analysis of Slovenian online journalists’ self-perceptions and, unlike previous studies in this area, offers insights into how online journalists understand themselves through the prism of journalism’s roles in society and how they negotiate them in specific social, national and institutional contexts. In-depth interviews with online journalists of two Slovenian print media organizations, Delo and Dnevnik, are used in order to understand how they see their position in people’s ensemble of information and in their decision making. To explain the answers and to explore negotiations of normative principles of journalism in the context of specific cases, newsroom participant observation is employed. The study reveals that Delo and Dnevnik online journalists perceive their roles in society in accordance with a high-modern or classical paradigm of journalism, which emerged as a normative grounding of Slovenian journalism after the fall of socialism two decades ago. Additionally, ethnographic study indicates that online journalists under investigation have common difficulties in performing those roles in contingent institutional environments and self-deprecate themselves as news providers. Namely, online journalists cannot perform the desired critical watchdog role that they perceive as important, institutionally enforced online newswork – computer-bound shoveling of print content to the web, reassembling press agency news and translating news of foreign media – and is not regarded as journalistic byonline journalists, and their print counterparts and online staffers work in flexible labor relations, which negatively affect their motivation to make “better” journalism.
Keywords
journalism; societal roles; internet; digital television; online journalism; Slovenia
Hrčak ID:
80471
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2011.
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