Journalism is … what? Audiences weigh in

Journalism is… what?

How people complete this sentence gives us clues about how the public and the media perceives the profession (and practice) of journalism at a time where its future has come into question. 

This simple signal, gauging the words that most easily come to mind when talking about it online, is a natural place to kick off our month-long research effort revolving around journalism, its audiences, and its future, which will span 4 events around the world, a webinar, and seven studies across all Pulsar Group brands (Isentia, Vuelio, and Pulsar).

Journalism is a fundamental building block of our media ecosystem, and a vital function across countries. But over the past few decades, as the Web became embedded in our daily lives and tech platforms came to dominate the distribution of information and how audience attention is focused, the news industry's business model dried up, with all sorts of downstream effects throughout societies. Navigating the shifting media landscape and journalism's role in it is a collective effort, involving audiences, governments and other institutions, as well as our own audience of marketing, communications and research professionals.

That’s why, in this kickoff study, we took the temperature of global perspectives on journalism as a whole, by capturing mentions of the phrase ‘Journalism is’ across 1.2 million social and media posts - a very large conversation showing just how eager online audiences are to chime in on this topic.

While each of our main narratives in the first chart (Death, Crisis, Biased, Necessary) clearly has a constituency amplifying them and attracts a constant base level of conversation, the trend lines in our first chart look quite 'spiky' as viral posts take off distilling that point of view...

Journalism exists to record and communicate world events. And when those events change, so too does journalism more generally - as well the perspectives that attach to it. 

To illustrate this, we can apply an alternative logic to this dataset.

It reveals the impact that the US election cycle is having on global conversations - which increasingly move away from nuance, or even discussion around the relative morality of the journalistic practitioners to focus on absolute terms like ‘crucial’ or ‘dead’. In this context, journalism is either absolutely vital (reflected by the red colours) or else completely and utterly finished (blue).

In other cases, breaking news stories (like the release of Julian Assange), where news media is still able to set the agenda, can influence how people see journalism. This particular example from an online news outlet, sees journalism cited as ‘vital’ within the body text - and reflects a broader positivity towards the practice and profession within ANZ than we see in comparable US or UK conversations.

_{Article in The Real Network News, July 11, 2024. Source: Pulsar TRAC}

There are myriad more ways in which we’ll be looking to explore the problems and possibilities faced by the world of journalism - if you would like to attend our webinar on the topic, and see these discussed in full, you can sign up here.