engleski

Journalism Practices and Media Content: How to Break Out from the Vicious Circle?

The status of the journalist profession has eroded significantly. While their position vary depending on media platform and position in the hierarchical structure, in general - being an average journalist - often implies a precarious working position, with low level of autonomy and engaging in production processes often reduced to technical skills. This is related to different trends that effects media production such as commercialization and privatization of media, fast technological changes, and changing conditions in the labor market…This has serious repercussions on the quality of journalist work and media performance in general, especially measured against dominant normative media theories. The ‘dumbing down’ of media content is clearly visible in all the news media in Croatia regardless of the type of platform (TV, radio, internet, press). Light entertainment, infotainment, celebrities and the spectacle are the main narrative forms, while violent narratives, representation of crime and the emphasis on risk and insecurity permeate the dominant media. In this respect, alternative and critical discourses are hard to maintain. This low level of performance is often justified by the producers with the simplified ‘argumentation’ that they ‘only give the audiences what they want’. In this paper the voices of journalists that participate in everyday production is put to the fore. The paper will be based on three focus groups conducted with journalists in the end of 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia. The compositions of the focus group were loosely organized according to type of media within which they worked: small critically oriented media (mainly but not limited to civil society associations), commercial media, and public service media. The focus is on their experiences and their visions of the reasons lying behind the above mentioned trends. The main question is: can journalism as a profession survive in the contemporary context or do we need radical restructuring of the media system in order to preserve the quality of media performance?

journalism ; news media ; media content ; everyday practices ; focus groups

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