ECREA16-Abstract

389

Friday, November 11

1 6 : 0 0 – 1 7 : 3 0

PP 372

The Journalist Turned Brand: How Reporters Build Their Profiles Through Personal Branding

J. Reimer

Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Hamburg, Germany

The Internet and particularly social media offer newmeans for journalists to present themselves and their competencies, products, networks, etc.This trend

towards more visibility of individual reporters is fostered, amongst others, by an increasing competition among journalists for employment and freelance

jobs as well as by media organizations drawing on their employees as‘brand representatives’on social networking sites to strengthen brand awareness and

audience loyalty. Hence, personal branding is heavily discussed among media practitioners and journalism scholars alike (e.g., Hedman, 2014; Hedman &

Djerf-Pierre, 2013; Molyneux & Holton, 2014; Wiik & Hedman 2015). However, our knowledge on journalists’actual branding activities is still limited. This

study focuses on the dimensions that a journalist’s brand consists of and the techniques she/he employs to assume particular positions in these dimensions.

The research is based on a qualitative analysis of, so far, more than 230 contributions to the meta-journalistic discourse around personal branding in jour‑

nalism (e.g., blog posts, media-journalistic articles and interviews, conference talks, how-to guides, etc.). The analysis is guided by a theoretical framework

that combines business scholars’ works on branding (e.g., Aaker, 1996; Keller & Lehmann, 2006) with theories of journalism (e.g., Löffelholz, 2008) and

social psychologists’insights into techniques of impression management (e.g., Leary, 1995). In short, journalists’personal branding activities are considered

convergent practices framed by both journalistic and economic logics. They can be divided into journalistic performance as such (e.g., quality and charac‑

teristics of the journalists’stories) and meta-communication/self-presentation (e.g., blog-posts presenting the journalists’professional attitudes or tweets

promoting new articles). Both types aim at creating potential for distinction, i.e. potential for being perceived as different from and superior to competitors.

The resulting analytical categories are further differentiated and complemented inductively in the still on-going coding process. Preliminary results show

that journalists aim at creating potential for distinction in several dimensions, including: distribution media (print, online, radio, TV); topics of reporting

and related expertise (e.g., politics, business); role conception (e.g., populist disseminator, watchdog); language/tone (e.g., emotional, neutral); forms

of presentation (e.g., interview, feature); socio-political orientation (e.g., liberal, conservative); ‘special skills’ (e.g., newsroom management, coding, data

processing/visualization); networks/informants (e.g., political or business elites); (prestigious) employers (‘brand transfer’). Journalists position them‑

selves by specializing (or not specializing) on particular options in these dimensions. This is reflected in their actual journalistic performance and output.

Additionally, they employ various techniques of self-presentation referring to their positioning, e.g. self-promotion, highlighting competence, displaying

prestigious network contacts. The analysis shows that the position assumed in one dimension (e.g., reporting style) has implications for the options left in

other dimensions (e.g., language/tone) and that different types of journalists (employed journalists; freelancers; entrepreneurial journalists) differ in their

branding opportunities. The findings also demonstrate that branding practices may have inconsistent effects on different target groups (audiences, poten‑

tial employers/clients, advertisers, sources) and entail risks as well as opportunities for the individual journalist, the media organization(s) she/he works for,

and journalism’s role in democratic societies. By November, the study will be completed so that final results can be presented.

PP 373

Understanding Reporters’ Reliance on PR: ‘Heavy PR Users’ and the Impact on News Work

A. Barnoy

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Communication, Beer-Sheve, Israel

The growing reliance of journalism on PR following recent years’ media crisis is an established fact, however, two related aspects remain understudied.

First, the extent to which this growth is boosted by certain reporters that rely on PR more than others. And second, the extent to which heavier reliance on

PR involves lower professional and ethical journalistic standards. While Gandy’s ‘news subsidies’theory provided an instrumental explanation for reporters’

dependency in their sources, which was followed by a long tradition of PR-journalists researches, studies segmenting reporters to empirically examine this

reliance remain scares, and do not include some of the factors that become highly relevant in light of recent years’ technological and economic changes

to journalism. The impact of the reliance on PR remains disputed as well, not whether it is accompanied by inferior news making standards, but how un‑

avoidable this deterioration is. While scholars of ‘Idealist’approach insist that reliance on PR is necessarily casing deterioration of news process, ‘contextual’

scholars claim that reliance on their contribution is not problematic by definition, since PR information is bound to gatekeeping processes and newsworthi‑

ness judgment. The purpose of the study is to map the heavy users of PR in these times of increasing reliance, while examining the professional and ethical

price paid by journalists due to this dependency. In the mapping, we focus on the factors that are becoming highly relevant in light of the current media

crisis: experience, beat-load and medium immediacy. For the second part, we examine the correlations between level of reliance on PR and employment

of epistemic practices, such as communicating multiple sources and cross-checking, as well as gatekeeping judgments. Based on reconstruction interviews

with 108 reporters from different beat and media that recreated the processes behind more than 800 of their published news items we found that heavy

users of PR include three groups of reporters, who rely on PR significantly more than their counterparts. Younger reporters that are assigned to cover multi‑

ple-beats working for updatingmedia (radio and online). Furthermore, reliance on PR is accompanied by looser gatekeeping and lower epistemic standards.

Reliance on PR was found as significantly correlated with the tendency of reports to evaluate their own stories as less "interesting" and less "important"

and with reliance on significantly less cross-checking and fewer sources per item. The combination of increased dependence and lower gatekeeping and

epistemic standards, is of a great professional and ethical concerns, bearing bad news for the public diet of information on public affairs, since reporters that

share the characteristics of the heavy users are a growing segment inWestern newsrooms, following recent media crisis.While it seems‘Contextual’scholars

might be somewhat right, as gatekeeping an epistemic practices are preserved in some cases even when PR is involved, the strong correlations between PR’s

involvement and lower journalistic standards indicate these cases are rare.