Since it emerged early this century, ‘citizen journalist’ and its related terms have been increasingly contested among groups including professional journalists, academics, and citizens themselves. This article creates a typology of five key participant groups in this contest and uses it to analyse the discursive constructs each group uses to advance their position.

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This article describes a use of visual imagery in research reporting that helps to emphasize the human and social dimensions of research issues and encourage different ways of thinking about the findings and implications. During the literature review, in order to establish the authors’ longitudinal research into adult literacy, they observed that research participants’ own perspectives and rich life-worlds were usually invisible in final reports and articles, submerged under layers of governmental or scholarly discourse. An irony was that, while literacy theory was moving towards acknowledging multi-literacies, reporting of literacy research remained heavily mono-modal. The authors of this research wanted to differ from this trend by giving people who were affected by adult literacy policy a vivid presence within their reports. They were intrigued by the use of visual means to foreground interviewees’ own words both as a way to register their importance to readers and to try to signal the multi-modal nature of literacy. They depicted their interviewees’ words as language spoken by imagined individuals typical of the interviewees, grounded within photographs of their research site. In this article, the authors describe their intentions and methods in making their reports visual and artistic composites rather than more traditional densely worded policy reports; they deconstruct some of the key images contained in their report in order to critique their efficacy in achieving their aims.

A qualitative thematic analysis of data from a 13-organization research study focusing on public relations ethics identified five main themes: first, that ethical dilemmas were frequent, widespread, and often handled in ways that practitioners themselves were uncomfortable with; second, labels and stereotypes about public relations practitioners as unscrupulous exacerbated the problem; third, hierarchies and silos of power in relationships within organizations, between organizations, and with clients contributed to the problem; fourth, there were barriers to, and inadequate channels or opportunities for, candid and forthright discussion about these hierarchies and silos, this lack typically manifesting as senior staff self-censoring or parroting optimistic organizational orthodoxy about ethics and junior staff feeling unsafe to criticize organizational processes; and fifth, practitioners used multiple coping strategies to deal with their sense of powerlessness including blaming others (particularly journalists), fatalism, reductive framing, and intentional blocking of awareness and evaluation of ethical issues. While it is possible these themes could be interpreted as evidence of public relations practitioners’ individual moral inadequacy, a broader analytical lens, taking into account the organizational and global power structures the practitioners described, suggests otherwise. Taking its cue from the power-attuned approach of feminist poststructuralists, this article argues that the data should be read as symptomatic, not causal, and that it is to the overarching operating power structures of global capitalism that public relations ethicists could most productively turn their attention if they want to identify loci for change.

Purpose – The literature is divided upon whether a gender difference occurs with respect to ethical decisions. Notable researchers Tannen and Gilligan demonstrated gender difference while subsequent researchers indicate that gender differences are becoming more neutralized. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This paper analyzes the gender demographic and intercultural influences on ethical decision-making by undergraduate students from New Zealand and the USA through four scenarios. Findings – Overall for the USA and New Zealand, this research demonstrates this split as well, since two scenarios showed significance while two did not. The two that demonstrated a significance dealt with personnel issues and a past client relationship. These two scenarios suggested that a relationship orientation and relativistic nature among women may influence their decision making. The two scenarios without significance were less relationship oriented, involving dealing with a customer (a stranger) and a subordinate (implying a professional supervisory responsibility). In addition, the neutrality exhibited in the latter two scenarios may reflect Tannen's illustration that there is a cross-gender influence on decision making. With respect to the geographic location, the USA, when compared with New Zealand, and the gender demographics, only the USA reported significant differences for two scenarios. Originality/value – Undergraduate students in the USA provided situations and discussions that resulted in the development of a number of scenarios. Additional research and evaluation of current events, led to a total of ten scenarios with four scenarios yielding business related situations.