JOURNALISM, May 1 2006, Volume 7, No. 2

Reporting through the lens of the past
from Challenger to Columbia Jill A. Edy
Miglena Daradanova
University of Oklahoma

Collective memory, the publicly shared meaning of a common past, can structure both news stories and reporters' search for information within the broader context of journalistic practices. It can also provide reporters with an independent perspective, balancing elite-dominated news frames. Following the space shuttle Columbia's crash, journalists turned repeatedly to the ‘lessons' of the accident that claimed the Challenger shuttle 17 years earlier both in formulating questions at NASA briefings and in reporting Columbia's destruction and the subsequent investigation in print. In many instances, journalists' reliance on these memories is entirely implicit in the finished news stories, making Challenger a ghostly presence that led reporters to focus on NASA's inadequacies rather than on the mechanical causes of Columbia's demise.
Key Words: Challenger crash • Columbia crash • collective memory • framing • hegemony • press autonomy • space reporting • typification
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What is good journalism? comparing Israeli public and journalists' perspectives Yariv Tsfati
Oren Meyers
University of Haifa, Israel
Yoram Peri
Tel Aviv University, Israel

The frequent referencing of service to the public interest as a core professional journalistic value raises the question of the correspondence between the perception of journalists and the public as to what constitutes good and bad journalism. In this study, a sample of Israeli journalists and a sample of the Israeli public were asked a series of questions about the core values and practices of journalism. Results suggest four major conclusions: first, Israeli journalists have a clear, relatively uniform perception of what constitutes worthy journalism. Second, journalists and the public differ in the degrees of significance they assign to various journalistic norms and practices. Third, the public is slightly more positive in its overall assessment of the Israeli media in comparison with the journalists. Finally, the two general assessments are constituted by different, or even opposing, components.
Key Words: Israel • journalistic values • public opinion
[Reprint (PDF) Version of Tsfati et al.]


Gendered mobility, the nation and the woman's page
exploring the mobile practices of the Canadian lady journalist, 1888–1895
Sandra Gabriele
Carleton University, Canada

This article explores the domestic travel writing of two women journalists who wrote for competing partisan papers in Toronto – Kit Coleman of The Daily Mail and Faith Fenton of The Empire. Using what I refer to as ‘mobile practices', Coleman and Fenton found a middle ground between the conventional regimes of domestic femininity represented in many of the features of their woman's pages, and the emerging conditions of modern travel that allowed women to explore new places. Woman's pages and travel writing allowed the newspaper to contribute to nation-building in a multitude of ways and across a number of sites, such as the family, the city and countryside, Canada's colonial history and women's roles as the moral heads of household. In turn, mobile practices were both strategies for dealing with the emerging conditions of modernity as much as they were instruments for its continuation.
Key Words: Coleman, Kathleen Blake (Kit) • domestic femininity • Freeman, Alice (Faith Fenton) • journalism history • modernity • newspapers • travel writing • women journalists
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Newspapers' transition from women's to style pages
what were they thinking?
Dustin Harp
University of Texas at Austin, USA

After nearly a century of publishing explicitly named women's pages, US newspapers starting in 1969 and into the 1970s began renaming them ‘style’ or ‘lifestyle’ sections, theoretically meaning they were for a general audience. This research investigates industry discourse during this time to determine what those in newsrooms were thinking about this transition. Seventy-two articles from three newspaper trade publications from 1969 through 1975 reveal that editors and reporters were most concerned with including serious content in these sections and unconcerned with the names of the sections. In fact the women editors of these style pages, who dominated the discourse, indicated that even after renaming the sections industry insiders thought of them as for and about women. The analysis also revealed that newsroom constraints, particularly those placed on lower level staff by male editors, prevented women editors of these women's/style sections from constructing the pages they desired.
Key Words: feminism • news • US newspapers • women • women's sections • women's pages
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Translation, adaptation, globalization
the Vietnam News
Theo van Leeuwen
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

The Vietnam News is an English language daily newspaper produced on behalf of the Vietnamese Government, as part of its market reform policies. Drawing on an analysis of 100 translations from the Vietnamese press and their rewrites by the paper's foreign sub-editors, as well as on interviews with sub-editors and journalist-translators working at the Vietnam News, the article documents the translation and adaptation decisions that constitute the process of globalizing the discourse of the Vietnamese press in this particular instance. Three kinds of decisions are discussed in turn: translation decisions affecting the English used, translation/adaptation decisions affecting journalistic style, and translation/adaptation decisions affecting cultural and ideological references in the source texts. The article ends by asking whether the Vietnamese press is best served by closely following the Anglo-Australian model, as it does at present, or by developing its own distinct local style.
Key Words: attribution • censorship • journalistic style • leads • localization • nominalization • sub-editing • Vietnamese press
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Public journalism
a reply to critics
Tanni Haas
Brooklyn College, USA
Linda Steiner
Rutgers University, USA

This article analyzes and responds to the most significant criticisms of public journalism made by scholars. After discussing public journalism advocates’ alleged failure to define public journalism clearly, we examine more specific criticisms. Among other issues, few advocates have taken seriously the likely impact of commercial imperatives on public journalism's modes of operation. We argue, however, that public journalism projects show that reform-oriented news organizations can challenge long-standing journalistic conventions, despite managements’ interests in maximizing profit. Ultimately, we argue, public journalism's long-term viability depends on continuing, explicit commitment by journalists, its institutionalization within newsrooms and journalism classrooms, and continued theory-development, research, and assessment.
Key Words: citizen participation • civic journalism • journalism theory • public sphere
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