Kategoriarkiv: MIJ-uppsats

Masteruppsatser från den ettåriga internationella mastern i journalistik, MIJ.

thumbnail of MGV20_2 Johannes Stenlund

Transcendental Mediation

Transparency has been advanced as a potential remedy for falling trust in journalism. By allowing readers to see more of the production process, journalism is thought to become more trust-worthy. This thesis offers a critical examination of the existing concept of journalistic transparency with the view of providing an alternative conceptualisation.
In the first part, it subjects journalistic transparency to a concept analysis, arguing that
transparency contains contradictory epistemological commitments to mediation.In the second part, it explores journalistic transparency empirically through a case study of UK investigative journalism outlet The Bureau Local. By performing content analysis on a published investigation and three open chatroom discussions and triangulating data with interviews, it
finds that The Bureau Local produces transparency in two epistemologically and ontologically different ways. The findings from the concept analysis and the case study form the basis for a reconceptualised notion of journalistic transparency that splits it into two concepts: analytic and synthetic transparency.

thumbnail of MGV20-1 Declan McCann

Coronavirus and the use of Twitter amongst journalists

The coronavirus pandemic has had an enormous impact on humanity and news media has become dominated by coverage of the virus. This thesis examines the ways in which journalists have used Twitter during this time. Focus was placed on the journalistic roles that
the journalists performed on Twitter. There are relatively few examples of previous research that has examined the performance of journalistic roles on social media, nor their performance during times of crisis. A mixed-methods analysis was undertaken into the Twitter feeds of six British and Swedish political journalists from varying organisations, utilising Hanitzsch and Vos’ (2018) journalistic roles in the domains of political life as a theoretical framework. What was found that whilst a large number of tweets were able to be categorised according to this
framework, there remained a large deal of behaviours unique to crises and the coronavirus pandemic that were unable to be categorised. These were termed ‘Journalism of Patriotism’, ‘Journalism of Hope’, and ‘Journalism of Collective Responsibility’. Moreover, the extent to which the journalists engaged in personalisation on their Twitter feeds was examined, which found a substantial incorporation of personal experiences of the coronavirus pandemic, as well
as the inclusion of humour. In addition, it was found that the unique circumstances lead to increased sociability in the Twitter feeds of the journalists examined. The findings raise questions about the applicability of preconceived journalistic roles to the study of role performance during times of crisis.

thumbnail of MKV19_4 Zinovia Fragkiadaki METHODOLOGY

‘Absurd’ to delete hotel maids from list of heavy and unhealthy jobs

The aim of this paper isto describe the methodology followed within a two-months period investigation conducted by a group of two Master students (Andrea Gómez Bobillo & Zinovia Fragkiadaki) in the context of the Master’s degree project in Investigative Journalism at the University of Gothenburg. The investigation revealed that greek hotel maids were wrongly cut out from the Heavy and Unhealthy Occupations List (KBAE). ’Many reporters assume that because something is in a library, it must be old news. Wrong.’ (Hunter et al., 2012: 12). Knowing that since the latest insurance law came into force in July 2011, Greek hotel Maids are out of KBAE and also being aware of the ‘Las Kellys’ campaign in Spain, where a nationwide group of hotel cleaners fought against the
working conditions causing serious health problems, our team, on Wednesday, April the 3rd, presented to our supervisor, David Crouch, the idea of examining related issues in Greece, where tourism balloons every summer.
The process followed during this investigation is described in detail through this paper, concluding with the reason why the final product qualifies investigative journalism. Specificaly this methodological essay is delivering an overview of the workflow; including details about the information gathering, “cleaning” and analysing and how we did find an interesting story out of this. Furthermore, it focuses on the network building process and how we handled the interviews with unions, experts, hotel directors and hotel workers as well as the text formation. The last section is concluding by outlining a few ethical issues arisen, weak points but also lessons learned.

MEDIA REPORTING ON THE TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY ‘MAKING A MURDERER’

Purpose: The media is an important actor when it comes to shaping the public’s view on the criminal justice system. It can be argued that when more true crime news is consumed, the more the misunderstanding on crime and the criminal justice system increases. This thesis will investigate the construction of crime news
surrounding one true crime documentary, with a focus on the role of the media in societal discussions. Recent true crime documentaries have enticed much
discussion and therefore it is of interest to see the role the mainstream media takes on when reporting on the story in the documentary.
Theory: This thesis makes use of the framing theory and investigates frames used by the media for the documentary Making a Murderer. Furthermore, it will investigate the news value of reporting on the documentary.
Method: A qualitative content analysis is conducted to investigate reporting on the documentary by two different newspapers, the New York Post and the
Washington Post.
Result: To a limited extent the media uses the documentary Making a Murderer to frame broader societal issues. The themes that emerged from the analysis are mostly the same themes that occurred in the documentary: wrongful convictions, false
confessions and criminal justice. However, there are also some broader perspectives on the societal issues that the media reports on.

thumbnail of MGV19_2 Sadettin Demirel

THE EFFECTS OF OPEN SOURCE’S DUALITY ON DATA JOURNALISM

The purpose of this study is to find out how open source community influences the data journalism practices, and to what extent it contributes to solving the challenges that hinder the integration of data-driven journalism into newsrooms. The study approached the subject by drawing from the previous work of Lewis and Usher (2013) which proposes applying the duality of open source which constitutes of open-source culture (values, principles, ethics) and
open-source materiality (software, coding libraries, etc.) on journalism to reconsider possible innovations. For the first time this study concerns with the effect of open source’s duality only on data journalism and its problems. To find out the effects of open source community’s binary structure on data journalism and its potential contributions to tackle with the constraints of data journalism a qualitative approach was preferred and in-depth interviews with 10 data journalists and data journalism scholars were conducted. The main findings reflect that majority of
participants seem to be motivated to follow along with transparent and open way of practicing data journalism while the content of datasets, the license of data sources, newsrooms’ policies and fear of having competitors, lack of time to working and documenting the data analysis are viewed as barriers for this way of practices. Similarly, although many of the participants acknowledge that duality of open source community has a great deal of influence in the
emergence of data journalism, the half of participants do not see open source mindset as a necessity to do data journalism but only a plus. More importantly, it is mentioned that sharing datasets and codes for open and transparent data journalism may not be aligned with some of the journalistic norms and rules. The main arguments of this idea are the closed source culture of journalism, journalistic autonomy, journalistic credibility, journalism’s business mindset, ethical and legal issues of publishing datasets while other half argues that these tensions will disappear as the news reporting digitalizes, the needs of audience changes or that overlook these
tensions and saw open source as a driven force to improve data journalism further. Lastly, the majority agreed on the benefits of open source’s duality to integrate data journalism practices into newsrooms and solve related challenges facing this integration.

thumbnail of MGV19_1NinaMueller

The Audience as Investigator

Journalism, a discipline traditionally formed by a variety of disruptions, currently faces a disruption with global dimension: The digitalisation represents a democratisation of content, which allows various kinds of new actors to enter the journalistic stage. Thus, the internet heralded an era of fake news and post-truth, which left journalism almost voiceless. Yet,the up- and-coming phenomenon of open-source in journalism lead by nonjournalistic actors like Airwars, Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture use these new
developments for investigations on a universal scale. With novel methods and tools they show how the audience – which before was handled as a passive mass – could be integrated in their reporting and be transformed in active participators. This shift towards a news, image and investigative literate public represents a chance especially for investigative journalism. The open-source investigators transform the traditional role of the
journalist as “controller” and “gatekeeper” into an enabler of free collaboration and they open its “gates” towards new spaces, here called auditoriums, to find their voice and to address new audiences.

thumbnail of MGV18_3 Metoduppsats Weaver

Navigating deepest, darkest Peru: A seven-week investigation

This investigation began when curiosity was piqued in early January, after reading a Guardian article regarding the murder of an environmental defender of the Chaparri reserve. The headline included a new term, “Land Trafficking”, and skimmed over issues that left me wanting to learn more: an irrigation project was mentioned; a reserve was under threat; and it stated that the murderers are known to the community. Although this tragic event had already happened, surely there would be more detail and context to the story.

Thinking it possible to follow up on this article for the final project at MIJ, I contacted a few of the names mentioned in the Guardian piece – they replied quickly and furnished me with documents and unpublished details, the start of which was a research paper on “Land Trafficking” by the one of its authors, Noga Shanee (who would become my first contact in Peru), along with links to news, press releases and other useful contacts.

I kept contact with these sources over winter, and, recalling a tactic learned through previous projects, created a series of Google alerts to keep abreast of developments in news regarding the subject, region and murder investigation.

After learning that a fellow classmate had received a grant to help fund her final project abroad, I took the opportunity to apply for an MFS grant myself, receiving funding a few weeks later.

Rajmonda Rexhi and I had planned on teaming up for a project (still underway) involving an advanced level of Spanish – she is fluent in the language, and my competence level is low. In March, we decided to put our previous project on hold and, as the situation in Chaparri, we learned from sources, was increasing in intensity, we began to plan for the coming seven to eight weeks ahead.

thumbnail of MGV18_2 Christos Makrogyannis

Andrianos Political Investment

The story is placed in Argolis, a small prefecture of about 97.000 people in the south of Greece. There within a two year period between 2013 and 2014 was planned to take place 26 sports infrastructure projects through the Public Investment Program. This number represents the 30% of the total number of projects included in the Public Investment
Program ranked them first among all the regions. At the same time, Attica region, the seat of the capital Athens and the biggest region in Greece with around 3.8 million people received 17 projects placed second, whereas most of the regions had one or two projects and some even none. Moreover, a budget of about 7.5 million euro, the 13% of the total budget funneled to this small prefecture.
What makes the situation even more interesting was the person responsible for proposing the sports projects for inclusion to the Public Investment Program, the Deputy Minister of Sport at that time Ioannis Andrianos. Andrianos beside his role as a Deputy Minister of Sport was also an MP that is elected in Argolis regional unit. A very interesting and worth investigating coincidence.

Challenges facing the Investigative Journalism in the Arab region

In the past few years, the Arab region has faced a very confused reality, as a result of chaos, conflict and dispersion in many societies, especially after the revolutionary movements that was part of what so-called “The Arab Spring” which refers to the Arabic revolutionary waves, where Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Iraq faced demonstrations, riots, protests, coups and even some of them experienced foreign interventions and civil wars. The political, and social changes in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, have impacted the freedom of journalism. Journalists are looking for the truth and are trying to take advantages of the amount of freedom available to enable them to carry out their journalistic tasks, while most of the authorities in the Arab world still consider this freedom as a threat for their power and control over the country.
This study investigates how the changes in the political situation have influenced the challenges that face the investigative journalism in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The selection of those countries due to that all of them have experience changes in the political situation as part of the Arab Spring revolutionary waves and all of those countries have also experienced an increase in the investigative journalism work after the revolutions, in addition, to that the political history, culture, religion and lingual background are similar in those countries. The study found that the challenges facing the investigative journalism are very similar in those countries and presenting the changes in the challenges that face the investigative journalism in those countries from a regional perspective give a stronger overall view on the topic of this study. The study identified six main challenges that face the investigative journalism in the Arab region, those challenges are connected to freedom, funding, security, law and legislation, access to information, and availability of knowledge, skill, and expertise. Some of these challenges were positively improved, some got worsened, and others stayed unchanged.

thumbnail of MGV17_4 Methodological_Essay_Stoianov

THE MURDER BUSINESS

The subject of my investigation, called “The Murder Business”1, if defined in one word, is corruption. On one hand this corruption depicts the vulnerability of Moldovan legal system to
protect such fundamental rights (as defined by Moldovan Constitution) as private property and
right to life2. On the other hand, the investigation reveals a corrupted way of action those who
normally would be called the victims of the situation.
In fact the investigation tells two interconnected stories. One of them is about a scam organized
by a corrupt policeman who fraudulently deposed a private company of a million-dollar land using his professional position. The scam has been organized with the help of a homeless taxi-driver (who became a proxy owner of the land). The fraud failed and as a result, the policeman killed the taxi-driver in breakout region of Transnistria in order to get rid of all the evidences and tracks towards him.
Another story is about a German retailer Kaufland who indirectly announced its plans to build a
hypermarket on the above-mentioned land without having any legal rights to do so. Based on the
evidences that me and my colleagues succeeded to find, we demonstrated that Kaufland has been
in talks to build a store there for a long time. That happened in conditions when the actual land
owner has been and still is a dead taxi-driver.
The investigation is extremely relevant and actual for Moldova. Not only because Kaufland is about to land on Moldovan retail market3. And not because the scam has been totallyunderreporter in Moldova. This investigation shows exactly how everyone, would it be a police officer, a homeless taxi-driver or a big company coming from European Union – are using
corrupted environment in Moldova for their profit.