Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Female journalists worldwide still struggle for adequate representation in leadership positions. This study contributes to the (mainly Western) scholarship on gender barriers in journalism by exploring the mechanism of vertical gender segregation in the journalistic profession in the Czech Republic, a non-Western country with the legacy of a women’s emancipation project sponsored by the former communist regime. Semi-structured interviews (N = 17) with female journalists in leadership positions revealed five main barriers: overall ge ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. There is a deep-seated realization that the uptake of digitization in newsrooms has necessitated the need for an ethical reformation. This article examines ethical issues confronting operations of selected Namibian hybrid media organizations. Using the Namibia Media Holdings and The Namibian as case studies, this article argues that the platformization of news work, ever-changing technological landscape, the immediacy of internet, media sustainability concerns, and the changing nature of public interest have reconfigured ethical dec ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study investigates how pregnancy and motherhood affect women journalists of the past and present. A mixed method approach of oral histories and qualitative interviews highlights how pregnancy and motherhood have affected women journalists over time, from 1950 to 2023. This article argues that because the U.S. newsroom was not conceptualized and built with women in mind, pregnant and new mother-journalists have faced historic and unique challenges. Findings from this mixed method approach present three major themes: the stigma o ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. During COVID-19, Asian Americans were perceived as a threat to the American society, which could have led to heightened media scrutiny and a shift in media portrayals. This study examines this question with a quantitative analysis of crime stories sampled from five newspapers (2019–2021). Our results suggested that large-scale social events such as COVID-19 might have transformed media representations of Asians and other racial groups, with noteworthy variability: (a) When considering all types of crimes, during the pandemic, news a ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Credibility is an ancient, well-studied, complicated construct. Most credibility measurements consider messenger (ethos) and/or message (logos). Aristotle’s definition includes pathos—the speaker’s emotion, important in visual journalism but rarely applied to visual mediums. This experimental research seeks to fill that gap. It analyzed 45 variables representing ethos, logos, and pathos. High correlations among Aristotle’s three concepts suggest the need to consider each when measuring visual journalism credibility. Factor analysis ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The quality of information consumed by citizens remains a crucial aspect of a working democracy. In recent years, fact-checking has emerged as an important safeguard against the spread of false and misleading content. This themed article offers an overview of notable recent studies on this topic published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Included works examine the practices and effects of fact-checking across diverse national contexts ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Given the importance of both family and partisanship in identity formation, these two may be at odds for those in cross-partisan families. Within these households, exposure to cross-partisan media is inevitable, serving to prime partisan identity and even acting as a catalyst for partisan conflict. Although much work has investigated the role of media in affective polarization, and the role of family in partisanship, little work bridges the two. Therefore, this post-test-only experiment (N = 411) investigates the role of family in t ..read more

Journalism &Mass Communication Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Previous studies have identified various individual factors explaining news avoidance, but the understanding of how these factors function within the broader political information environment is limited. This study, leveraging a large-scale cross-national survey, reveals that the relationships between individual news interests, news trust, and news avoidance differ across countries with varying levels of press freedom. In nations where the press is strong and free, personal preferences minimally influence individuals’ active avoidan ..read more