Comparative research across the world has shown that nation-level variables are strong predictors of professional roles in journalism. There is, however, still insufficient comparative research about three key issues: cross-national comparison of journalistic role performance, exploration of how – or whether – organizational variables account for variation in role performance across countries, and the performance of specific journalistic roles that prevail in regions with post-authoritarian political trajectories. This article tackles these three issues by comparatively measuring journalistic performance in five Latin American countries. Based on a content analysis of 9841 news items from 18 newspapers, this article reports findings from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, by analyzing the presence of the ‘interventionist’, ‘watchdog’, ‘loyal’, ‘service’, ‘infotainment’, and ‘civic’ roles. Results show that the region is far from homogeneous and that while ‘country’ is a strong predictor for most of the roles, other variables such as ‘media type’, ‘political orientation’, and ‘news topic’ are also significant predictors to varying levels.

This study proposes the interventionist and the detached orientations to watchdog journalism through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance. Based on a content analysis of 33,640 news stories from sixty-four media outlets in eighteen countries, we measure and compare both orientations across different countries using three performative aspects of monitoring: intensity of scrutiny, voice of the scrutiny, and source of the event. Our findings show that the interventionist approach of watchdog journalism is more likely to be found in democracies with traditionally partisan and opinion-oriented journalistic cultures or experiencing sociopolitical crises. In turn, the detached orientation predominates in democracies with journalistic traditions associated to objectivity. Although both orientations have a lower presence in transitional democracies, the detached watchdog prevails, while in non-democratic countries the watchdog role is almost absent. Our results also reveal that structural contexts of undemocratic political regimes and restricted press freedom are key definers of watchdog role performance overall. However, the type of political regime is actually more important—and in fact the most important predictor— for detached than for interventionist reporting.

Based on a standardized operationalization of the watchdog, civic, interventionist, loyal-facilitator, infotainment, and service roles, this study combines survey ( N = 643) and content analysis data ( N = 19,908) to explain gaps between newspaper journalists’ role conceptions and the performance of their press organizations in nine countries from Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia. Taking an institutional approach by focusing on institutional influences on the conception–performance gap at three levels (individual, organizational, societal), our results show that these gaps are largest for the two roles most connected with the public functions of journalism, the civic, and the watchdog roles. Multilevel analyses offer significant evidence on that, across all six analyzed roles, the size of the gaps differed more clearly between journalists and between media organizations, than among countries. Although influences on an individual level (i.e., perceived autonomy) have some explanatory power, influences on the organizational level and, more specifically, ownership and codified editorial policies are the factors that best explain conception–performance gaps. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the public skepticism about the performance of journalism and the media.

This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominentconsistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage-, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.

No abstract

-The article supports the hypothesis that contemporary journalism is facing a crisis of governance, derived from the fraying of social relations between the media enterprises and their audiences (readers, sources, stakeholders, advertisers, subscribers). In contrast to the interpretations that limit the crisis to the funding issue or the business model, we argue that such difficulties are apparent manifestations of structural changes in relations between journalism and the public, affecting both production and circulation of journalistic information processes, particularly concerning its corporate organizational form. Each of these dimensions is affected by actions and representations of the audiences, heavily modified in just over a decade in response to the changes in technology and communication. The article demonstrates how the concept of governance gives a better understanding of the dimensions of the crisis and a glimpse into the possible solutions. Key words: Journalism. Governance. Public. Management. Mediapart. A GOVERNANÇA DO JORNALISMO E ALTERNATIVAS PARA A CRISERESUMO -O artigo sustenta a hipótese de que o jornalismo contemporâneo atravessa uma crise em sua governança, derivada do esgarçamento das relações sociais entre as empresas jornalísticas e seus públicos (audiências, fontes, stakeholders, anunciantes, assinantes). Contra as interpretações da crise que a circunscrevem ao financiamento ou ao modelo de negócio, argumenta-se que tais dificuldades são manifestações aparentes de transformações estruturais nas relações com os públicos, que afetam tanto os processos de produção e circulação da informação jornalística, quanto sua forma organizacional predominantemente empresarial. Sobre cada uma dessas dimensões incidem ações e representações dos públicos, fortemente modificadas num intervalo de pouco mais de uma década como reação às transformações tecnológicas e de comunicação. O artigo demonstra como o conceito de governança permite compreender melhor as dimensões da crise e vislumbrar possibilidades de saída. Palavras-chave: Jornalismo. Governança. Público. Gestão. Mediapart. GOVERNANCE OF JOURNALISM AND ALTERNATIVES TO THE CRISIS ARTICLES 115BRAZILIAN JOURNALISM RESEARCH -Volume 13 -Number 2 -August -2017 GOVERNANCE OF JOURNALISM AND ALTERNATIVES TO THE CRISISThe crisis currently hitting journalism, which has been credited mainly to the collapse of the financing (or business) model, has deeper roots than the fall in advertising, retail or subcription revenues: it is a crisis of governance, profoundly related to the erosion of credibility of the prevailing organizational structure of journalism in Western countries since the 19th century, the journalistic enterprise, along with the audiences to which it relates. If we accept this premise, the way to overcome the crisis lies less in pursuing new ways of making journalism profitable as a business opportunity offered by companies than in devising alternative forms of governance capable of recreating, in other bases, the relations between jour...

O artigo analisa a disparidade entre os índices declinantes de confiança nas mídias jornalísticas e as taxas estáveis (em patamar elevado) da credibilidade nos jornalistas no Brasil. O estudo recupera levantamentos sobre confiança na mídia jornalística no Brasil entre 1998 e 2018, indicando deterioração da credibilidade, e pesquisas recentes demonstrando que a confiança dos jornalistas como profissionais permanece acima da média. Para compreender as razões desse descolamento, são utilizados resultados de survey (N=543) e entrevistas em profundidade (N=44) com a avaliação da população a respeito da mídia jornalística local realizados na cidade de Joinville (SC), entre 2017 e 2018. A hipótese sustentada pelo artigo é de que a sociedade brasileira desenvolveu justificada suspeita em relação a interesses e ações dos proprietários das mídias jornalísticas, que subsiste em paralelo ao reconhecimento dos jornalistas como peritos que se esforçam para desenvolver suas funções e atender ao interesse público.

ResumoO artigo estuda as razões da baixa taxa de sindicalização dos jornalistas brasileiros -de 25,2% em 2012, conforme recente pesquisa de perfil da categoria (MICK; LIMA, 2013), índice inferior à metade da taxa de sindicalização dos trabalhadores urbanos do Brasil. Para identificar possíveis causas do fenômeno, o artigo compara as características demográficas, políticas e de trabalho dos sindicalizados e dos não sindicalizados. Na análise, consideram-se especialmente as variações por faixa etária, a diversificação do trabalho, as dimensões das equipes e as opções políticas dos dois grupos, como filiação partidária, autoidentificação ideológica e atuação em associações e entidades da sociedade civil. Os dados permitem produzir hipóteses relativas às dificuldades que dirigentes sindicais encontrarão se desejarem expandir a sindicalização na categoria. Palavras-chave: Jornalismo; perfil profissional; sindicalização. ABSTRACTThe article studies reasons for low rates of unionization among brazilian journalists -25,2% -, as shown in a recent research concerning the category's professional profile (MICK; LIMA, 2013), an index lower than half of the unionizationś rate among urban workers in Brazil. In order to identify possible causes to this phenomenon, the article compares the political and demographic characteristics of both unionized and non-unionized workers. Especially taken in account in the analysis of both groups are the diversification of labor, team size and political inclinationssuch as political affiliation, ideological selfidentification and protagonism in civil society associations and other entities. The data allows the production of hypotheses regarding the difficulties that union rulers will have if they desire to increase the unionization in the category.