The research question has guided the choice o f methods:
How do professional journalists balance their normative
commitments to society and democracy with the increasing
dominance o f economic and market priorities over their work, when
covering issues o f collective interest - such as environmental
change?
The grammar o f the question places ‘journalists’ and ‘balance’ in the centre o f attention
as, respectively, the subject and predicate o f the sentence. At this basic level o f analysis the
research question presupposes a focus on individual human beings and their specific
actions in real life, rather than pure analysis o f theoretical concepts. This claim dictates the
need o f performing empirical research, and suggests the use o f methods which should
enable the researcher to probe into the individual and personal aspects o f journalistic
practice: the decisions, motivations, actions and inactions o f individual journalists. The
research question therefore narrows down the spectrum o f available methodological
approaches to ones which enable the researcher to:
- observe and study individual journalists’ opinions, decisions, reactions and actions
in practice;
- examine how they engage with issues o f public interest and collective importance,
such as the ones linked to environmental change;
- identify influences related to market, commerce, economic and business
considerations on journalists’ practice; and
- compare these influences to journalists’ commitment to the ideals and practice of
liberal democracy, postulated by ‘Fourth Estate’ theory.
Accomplishing these research objectives involves establishing how journalists define and
conceptualise their own professional duties, roles, and obligations, and the way in which
they apply these conceptions in real life. It also involves direct observation o f the
procedures, processes, formats that shape editorial practice. Completing these objectives
requires almost unlimited access to journalists’ daily routines and a great deal o f reflexivity
during data collection Allan’s (2010 p. xxxiii) suggestion that “the gap between the
rhetoric o f journalistic identity and its lived materiality” is rendered specific by subtle, and
seemingly ‘common sensical’ factors like class, race or gender provide important
methodological guidance. It speaks to the need to identify methods that would allow me to
study these ‘common sensical’ factors as they appear in the everyday practice of
journalism.
To identify the range o f methods to be used for the purpose o f this research I have
examined previous studies with similar or related focus and purposes, comparing the
methods applied by their authors, and selecting the ones that have proven most successful
and delivered quality results. Researchers commonly use quantitative methods such as
content analysis o f articles or other published material (Antonov 1998, Bamhurst 2011,
Costera Meijer 2013) and surveys (Dickinson and Memon 2011). Qualitative and
ethnographic approaches among them enable researchers to gain knowledge o f both social
organization and the understandings and perceptions o f the participants in such social 47
settings (Silverman 1997). My research follows a similar pattern and aims to study the
human interactions of journalists with environmental or other public interest issues and the
actors associated to them on the one hand, but also the interactions that occur among
professional norms in the journalistic practice on the other. This is why I have decided to
rely on a set o f ethnographic and social approaches.
Following the guidance o f Hansen (1998), Machin (2002), and Pryke et al. (2003) I have
examined and compared a variety o f qualitative research methods, commonly used in
social and media studies, seeking to identify the ones that could make it possible to
accomplish the research objectives listed above. Among qualitative methods certain
scholars opt for focus groups (Dickinson and Memon 2011), qualitative content analysis of
online survey results (Tabakova and Antonov 2003). But the specific focus of the research
question on the way in which journalists respond on a daily basis to clashing and changing
professional parameters and norms requires in-depth insight o f their daily lives, routines
and actions. Such insight can successfully be obtained through ethnographic approaches
(Hansen 1998). In support o f this, Boyer and Hannerz write:
The ethnography o f journalists offers more fine-grained insights,
on the one hand, into the mediating practices o f representation
and circulation without which there would be no media, and, on the other, into the institutional and professional schemes and
technical instrumentaria that wreathe, suffuse, and to some extent set conditions o f possibility on the mediating labors o f journalism.
(2006 p.8)
In the light o f my project’s interest in the personal and professional decisions made as part
o f journalistic practice, an important consideration is that ethnography enables unearthing
data on multiple aspects o f a practice and provides an invaluable context for assessing the
articulatory process in practice. (Eijavec and Kovacic 2010). But it is also suitable for
studying the broader range o f political and economic factors that shape journalistic
practice. This is confirmed by Uzzi (1996) who justifies the use o f ethnographic methods
for establishing how mechanisms by which social structure affects economic outcomes -
an important leverage, given my project’s focus on the interrelations between social and
economic reasoning in journalistic practices.
Methods involving ethnographic approaches to the study o f social and media processes
include: ethnographic participant observation o f journalists’ professional and personal
activities; semi-structured interviews with journalists and media decision makers to obtain
their own takes on what is happening in their working practices; and elements o f
qualitative content analysis o f media publications to get an idea o f what actually comes out
o f these practices. Among them, following the repeated guidance o f other news production
scholars, and in order to obtain research data which thoroughly reflects upon I have looked
closely into ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews.