Edition 2/2025, Paper

Memorializing women journalists Obituaries on women journalists’ role performance

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By Ella Hackett, Teodora Tavares and Gregory Perreault | Obituaries, though seemingly straightforward, hold deep reflections for the role of women journalists. Through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, this study explores obituaries of women journalists (n=1064) from the United States. The analysis finds that the memorialization of women journalists reflect on their role as advocates in and outside of the newsroom. In doing so, they not only redefine their profession, but work to champion societal advancement and gender equality.

Edition 2/2025, Paper

»I believe that journalism is in urgent need of change« On the relationship between academic journalism training and journalistic practice

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By Gabriele Hooffacker and Nicola Moser | Generative language models and AI tools have become essential tools in journalism – used in data analysis, research, translation, idea generation, and much more. How will the use of tools like ChatGPT impact the shape of journalism as a profession, and its academic teaching? Analysis of these expert interviews shows that ChatGPT and similar AI tools are already playing a role in academic journalism training. But while university teaching assumes that generative language models will not fundamentally change the shape of journalism, but merely expand it, the practicing expert interviewed sees a fundamental shift in the relationship between editorial offices and audiences. He also describes how the use of AI tools has long become common practice in editorial offices.

Edition 1/2025, Paper

Policing the narrative A critical discourse analysis of reporting on the #BlackLivesMatter social media movement

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By Alfred J. Cotton III and Jeffrey Layne Blevins | Protests emerged worldwide during the summer of 2020 in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, who was murdered two months after the Louisville Metro Police Department killed Breonna Taylor. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has trended on social media and reignited a nation-wide social justice movement, all during a global pandemic. Our study is a critical discourse analysis on how news media quote, source, identify and misidentify members of the Black Lives Matter movement as it took shape on social media during June 2020, as reported in four US newspapers.