Making the News: Contemporary Journalism Practices and News Cultures in Europe
Publisher: Routledge (2008, December) [pp.200; ISBN: 978-0-415-46189-4 (paperback) £19.99; ISBN: 978-0-415-46188-7 (hardback) £70.00] Paschal Preston

About This Book

Making the News provides a distinctive multi-level and cross-national perspective on the key features of journalism and news-making cultures in the changing media landscape of contemporary Europe.

• Focusing on the key trends, practices and issues in contemporary journalism and news cultures, Making the News maps the major contours of change as well as the broader industrial, organizational, institutional and cultural factors shaping journalism practices over the past two decades.
• Making the News seeks to revisit and renew a multi-dimensional approach to understanding current journalism trends and the major influences on news making practices. The book is framed around a multi-layered approach in order to address the individual, meso-level and macro-level factors deemed essential to a rounded understanding of what or who influences the news. To this end, core chapters are focused on five major, if often overlapping, categories of influences. These five levels of analysis comprise:- individual, institutional, organizational, political economic and cultural.
• Making the News moves beyond the tendency to focus on journalism trends and newsmaking practices within a single country. It draws on unique, cross-national research to examine current journalism practices and related newsmaking cultures in 11 West, Central and East European countries. The background studies include in-depth interviews with almost 100 senior journalists and subsequent workshop discussions with other interest groups.
• The book addresses the growing role of online journalism, the internet and other digital media developments within a coherent framework. Whilst interrogating naive techno-centric perspectives, the book explores the interplay of professional, technical, organizational and other factors in shaping innovation and change in newsmaking practices across ‘new’ and ‘old’ news media sectors.
• Making the News also investigates the extent and forms of any emerging common news culture or shared ‘public sphere’ in contemporary Europe. In the context of the EU integration project (‘intensified globalisation’ at a world-region level) and the widespread adoption of digital technologies, it addresses the persistence of banal nationalism in journalism and news cultures.
• In sum, Making the News links reviews and discussions of the existing literature to original research engaging with the views and experiences of journalists working at the ‘coal face’ of contemporary newsmaking, to provide an original study and useful text for students and professionals. Framed around a multi-level approach to the factors shaping news cultures and journalism practices in the early 21^st century, Making the News bridges the frequently-encountered divide between journalism studies on the one hand, and media or political communication studies, on the other.

For more information on Making the News : Click on the Links Below

.i)   Distinctive ‘multi-level’ approach of Making the News
.ii)   Informed by original, multi-country empirical studies
.iii)   Outline and Contents of Chapters

 

© Paschal Preston, 2008