Journalists have for considerable time been criticized for living in their own bubbles, a phenomenon industry commentators have referred to as groupthink, while in scholarship the tendency of individuals to connect with people who are like them is termed homophily. This ageold process has come under scrutiny in recent times due to the arrival of social network sites, which have been viewed as both working against but also leading to more homophily. In journalism scholarship, these processes are still little understood, however. Focusing on the social network site Twitter and drawing on a large-scale analysis of more than 600,000 tweets sent by 2908 Australian journalists during one year, this study shows that journalists continue to live in bubbles in their online interactions with each other. Most journalists were more likely to interact with journalists who have the same gender, work in the same organization, on the same beat or in the same location. However, the study also demonstrates some notable exceptions as well as the importance of differentiating between types of interaction.

Most research on mediatization focuses on media-related actions and structural adaptations that aim to increase media attention. However, social actors may also opt for defensive strategies and try to avoid media publicity. In this article, we conceptualize defensive and offensive mediatization strategies as complementary methods that social actors use to deal with media publicity and public attention as well as to proactively shape mediatization processes. We employ an exploratory approach to identify and systematize defensive mediatization strategies. Consequently, we contribute to a more complete understanding of mediatization and provide starting points for further empirical analyses of media-related strategies used by social actors. A secondary analysis of the data from previous research projects suggests establishing three categories of defensive mediatization strategies—persistence, shielding, and immunization—with regard to the levels of individual actors, organizations, and social systems’ routines and norms.

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In times of increasingly precarious media work, being recognized for one’s performance has become more and more important for journalists’ sense of well-being and can even constitute a competitive advantage in the journalistic field. As material forms of recognition, journalism awards decisively contribute to accumulated journalistic capital and work as an instrument of cultural hierarchy within the field. However, despite the growth in journalistic prizes and the added importance of recognition in times of crisis, we still have an incomplete understanding of how journalists themselves assess the meaning of awards for their position in the field. In this study, we therefore focus on journalists’ evaluations of awards. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with young awarded journalists we explore the meaning of prizes to better understand the relationship between recognition and capital. Our results indicate that from the perspective of awarded journalists receiving an award does not automatically contribute to prestige and hence the accumulation of journalistic capital. Instead, our study suggests that journalists consider prizes to be an ambiguous and ambivalent form of recognition. Whether an award is considered prestigious depends on aspects such as its scarcity, its sponsors, the composition of juries, the visibility of the award in the industry as well as the genre and category that is awarded.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical scientists became public personas as a result of their media appearances. However, this prominence also made them likely targets of harassment from an increasingly science-skeptic public. Such experiences may lead to scientists cutting back on their public engagement activities, threatening the quality of science communication. This study examines how medical scientists evaluate feedback they received as a result of their media appearances, and how they relate their experiences to general views of the public, as well as their motivations to serve as media experts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 Austrian medical scientists who served as media experts during the first year of the pandemic, we find substantial amounts of online abuse. Yet, this did not cause our respondents to avoid future media appearances, because their motivations to meet the needs of an unsettled public outweighed the experience of being harassed online.