« De nos envoyés spéciaux »

FR. L’envoyé spécial n’est jamais étudié en tant que catégorie spécifique par les études sur le journalisme. Il est tantôt considéré pour sa spécialité (par exemple politique internationale), son statut dans le journal (grand reporter ou pigiste), tantôt pour son genre d’écriture (grand reportage, chronique). L’appellation semble ainsi transparente, voire insignifiante. Mon article tente d’en cerner l’usage dans le cadre de la presse sportive. Dans un premier temps, il fait la distinction entre l’expression au singulier et au pluriel et il montre la fréquence de son usage grâce à une analyse numérique. Dans un second temps, il étudie la variété de ses emplois à propos d’un événement particulier : le reportage du Tour de France. L’analyse met en évidence des interventions que l’on peut qualifier de kaléidoscopiques, figurées dans l’espace même du journal par la typographie et l’éclatement entre plusieurs pages plus ou moins clairement consacrées au sport ou à l’événement particulier du Tour. Ce phénomène est par ailleurs multiplié par les liens que le journal quotidien entretient avec d’autres médias (photos, radios, magazines). En conclusion, il apparaît que l’envoyé spécial est une catégorie proprement journalistique, qui n’a pas d’utilité à l’extérieur de la publication périodique. Alors que nombre d’acteurs de la presse ou de rubriques existent à côté ou en dehors de celle-ci — on peut publier des reportages, des chroniques, des feuilletons sous forme d’ouvrages —l’envoyé spécial est par nature lié à un événement qui justifie et absorbe sa raison d’être. Il redevient journaliste, écrivain ou simple témoin dès que cette actualité est achevée ou dès que son rôle immédiat s’achève. *** EN. The figure of the special correspondent has never been considered by journalism studies as a specific category. Instead, special correspondents are generally categorized by field of expertise (foreign affairs for instance), the position held in the newsroom (senior reporter or freelancer), or the type of articles written (reportage, column, interviews, etc.). This categorization might seem unnoticeable, even anecdotal. This article attempts to identify its use in the context of the sports press. First, we make a distinction between the singular and the plural forms of this expression. We also highlight the frequency of their use through numerical analysis. Second, the diversity of its uses is studied in the context of a particular event: the Tour de France. The analysis highlights how contributions by correspondents constitute a kaleidoscope that takes shape through the typography and the presence of the topic in multiple pages in a newspaper, might the content be centered on the cycling performances or on the Tour as a social event. This phenomenon is amplified through links connecting daily newspapers and other media (photos, radio, magazines). Finally, the figure of the correspondent appears to be a category strictly limited to journalism and has no relevance outside the sphere of periodical publishing. While a number of press actors and sections also exists outside the world of journalism - reportages, column or news stories can also be published as books - the correspondent is by nature anchored to an event that justifies and absorbs his or her raison d'être. He or she becomes again a journalist, a writer or a simple witness, as soon as the event is over or as soon as the role of correspondent comes to an end. *** PT. O enviado especial nunca é analisado enquanto categoria específica pelos estudos de jornalismo. O termo, ora considerado por sua especialidade (por exemplo, na política internacional), ora por seu status no jornal (grande repórter ou freelancer), ora por seu gênero de escrita (grande reportagem, crônica), se torna transparente ou até insignificante. O presente artigo busca apreender seu uso no contexto da imprensa esportiva. Num primeiro momento, busca-se distinguir as formas singular e plural do termo e levantar sua frequência de uso por meio da análise de corpus. Depois, investiga-se a variação de seus usos em relação a um evento particular: a cobertura do Tour de France. A análise identifica ocorrências que podem ser descritas como caleidoscópicas, editadas no próprio espaço do jornal pela tipografia e pela divisão em múltiplas páginas, mais ou menos claramente dedicadas ao esporte ou ao evento particular do Tour. Esse fenômeno é também multiplicado pelos vínculos que o jornal diário estabelece com outros meios de comunicação (fotos, rádio, revistas). Em conclusão, ressalta-se que o enviado especial é uma categoria propriamente jornalística, desprovida de utilidade para além da publicação periódica. Enquanto muitos atores ou seções da imprensa coexistem ao lado ou fora dela - relatórios, crônicas e séries podem ser publicados em forma de livros -, o enviado especial vincula-se por natureza a um evento que justifica e absorve sua razão de ser. Ele volta a ser jornalista, escritor ou simples testemunha ao final do evento ou assim que seu papel imediato foi concluído. ***

“George Orwell Invented Journalism Studies”

To inaugurate our series of conversations with scholars in journalism studies with a view to securing some useful insights into the history and practice of journalism education, Prof. Richard Lance Keeble appeared an obvious choice. Now an Honorary Professor at Liverpool Hope University, Prof. Keeble was first director of the International Journalism MA, then director of the Journalism and Social Science BA, at City University, London (1984-2003). He was then appointed Professor of Journalism (2003-present) at Lincoln University where he also became acting head of the Lincoln School of Journalism (2010-2013) and later a Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University (2015-2019). Prof. Keeble has been the recipient of prestigious and distinguished prizes, namely the National Teaching Fellowship Award (2011) and the Lifetime Achievement Award for services to journalism education (2014), the latter bestowed by the Association for Journalism Education in the UK. Parallel to his academic career, Prof. Keeble has always been a practising journalist. On completion of his studies in Modern History at Keble College, Oxford University (1967-70), he started a career in journalism, first as sub editor at the Nottingham Guardian Journal/Evening Post (1970-73) and then at the Cambridge Evening News (1973-77). He was deputy editor, then editor, of The Teacher, the weekly newspaper of the National Union of Teachers (1977-84). His dual pedigree in journalism, as a practitioner and a professor, led him to take on many editorial responsibilities. He is emeritus editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication and Ethics and joint editor of George Orwell Studies and is also on the board of an impressive number of journals, among which are Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Journalism Education, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Media Ethics, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, to name just a few. Prof. Keeble was also Chair of the Orwell Society1 (2013-2020) and has authored or edited no less than 44 books. They include Ethics for Journalists and The Newspapers Handbook,2 respectively on their second and fifth editions, as well as several volumes on George Orwell, investigative journalism, and the British media. It was an honour and privilege to talk to Prof. Keeble in a phone interview on March 25, 2021. The conversation was transcribed while some passages were edited for clarity. I hereby express my immense gratitude for his time, generosity, expertise, and humour. It is such a thrill to start our series of interviews in a way that only makes us want more such conversations.

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

Journalists as mobility agents: Labor mobilities, individualized identities, and emerging organizational forms

As mobility is becoming a distinctive feature of 21st century journalists, this theoretical article proposes a mobility turn in journalism studies. Drawing on sociological perspectives on mobilities, individualization, and turnover, it puts forward a shift from the analysis of news workers as static and fixed to the organizations that employ them to their analysis as mobility agents. By stressing that their capacity to move is transforming their employment and identities, it invites contemporary journalism scholars to recognize how this bottom-up disruption is reshaping the institution, the organizations and the labor of journalism. Since journalism’s corporate and industrial structures have not fully crumbled, this article’s emphasis on labor, physical and virtual mobilities offers an alternative to current theorizations of change in journalism.

THE USE OF WEB-SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS IN FORMING MEDIA LITERACY OF FUTURE JOURNALISTS

This research paper exposes functional features of the existing applications that are worth including in the journalism educational programs. Such inclusion will pursue the purpose of teaching media literacy to junior university students (namely, freshmen and sophomores) along with designing the Google browser AntiSepar Application. The application has been tested in practice by students majoring in journalism studies. The paper also sets the preconditions of the application’s technical tasks that were elaborated within the framework of the research project “Tools of asymmetric response to hybrid aggression in the humanitarian field” carried out at the Department of Publishing and Editing (Publishing and Printing Institute) at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, Kyiv, Ukraine. The designed questionnaire completed by university trainees has confirmed the efficacy of the developed system which can be a helpful tool for analyzing media content on a variety of topics (100 respondents filled out a survey). Additionally, during distant group discussions and practice sessions, senior journalism students were offered a more sophisticated algorithm of information processing worked out with the help of the automated systems of wavelet data analysis. A few media-cases were analyzed to work out the main schemes of information processing through InfoStream and Attack Index services. The second part of the research contains the results of the survey, conducted among the Master’s degree students (64 students were interviewed). Finally, the authors concluded that the application of these tools makes it possible for media specialists to monitor news streams and their interconnections as well as the sources of information dissemination with ease and efficacy.

The Concept of Hybridity in Journalism Studies

This paper considers the use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies, arguing that the concept of hybridity has served an important role in reorienting the field in the face of important processes of social change, but that as a “sensitizing concept” in the sense that Herbert Blumer used the term, it requires critical reflection and more careful specification of its various uses. In the first sections, we map three principal contexts in which the concept has been invoked: one focusing on new media and the blurring of professional boundaries it produces; one focusing on global flows of journalism culture, and a third which treats hybridity not as a novel but as quotidian and rooted in the structural context of the practice of journalism in general. The second part of the paper focuses on issues and challenges in the use of the concept of hybridity. We consider the tendency for hybridity to become a catch-all phrase that substitutes for more specific analysis, and the problem of treating novel phenomena as derivative forms of familiar ones. We then move to critique “presentism” in the discussion of hybridity and the distortions that result from drawing dichotomies between hybrid and “pure” forms, making the argument for taking seriously the idea that hybridity is universal. In the final section, we propose the idea of the hybridity cycle as a way of thinking about stability and change in journalism studies.

The decolonial turn: reference lists in PhD theses as markers of theoretical shift/stasis in media and journalism studies at selected South African universities

The supervision and production of a PhD thesis often presents a potentially interesting tension between PhDs as conforming to disciplinary epistemologies and PhDs as breaking epistemological boundaries. No academic discipline has been left untouched by decolonial thinking in the South African university space since the eruption of radicalized student protest movements in 2015. The Rhodes Must Fall student protest movement, which quickly morphed into Fees Must Fall, precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa. A new interdisciplinary conversation in the humanities and social sciences began to emerge which challenged established orthodoxies in favour of de-Westernizing, decolonizing and re-mooring epistemological and pedagogic practices away from Eurocentrism. Whether and how that theoretical ferment filtered into postgraduate students’ theses, however, remains to be established. This article deploys a decolonial theoretical framework to explore the tension between epistemic conformity and boundary transgressing in journalism studies by analysing reference lists of PhD theses submitted at three South African Universities three years after the protest movement Rhodes Must Fall. With specific focus on media and journalism studies as a discipline, this article argues that the PhD process represents a site for potential epistemic disobedience and disciplinary border-jumping, and for challenging the canonical insularity of Western theory in journalism studies. The findings appear to disconfirm the thesis that decolonial rhetoric has had a material influence so far on the media studies curriculum, as reflected in reference lists of cited works in their dissertations.

Does Numeracy in Digital Journalism Increase Story Believability?

This exploratory study contributes to the literature on numeracy in digital journalism studies by theoretically incorporating the audience/news consumers. While most studies have focused on journalists’ perception and role in the use of numeracy, this study examines how audience perceive stories with numerical values. Through an experimental design, and by comparing the United States, Zambia, and Tanzania, the study was able to demonstrate that news stories with numerical values diminished audience/readers’ affective consumption. In other words, news stories with numerical values were negatively associated with audience appeal. However, individuals with a lower understanding of probabilistic and numerical concepts seemed to trust news stories with numbers more than those with a higher level of numeracy. This was especially true in Zambia and Tanzania where most participants recorded lower numeracy levels. The overall sample in all the three countries seemed to favor news stories with less or no numeracy.