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ABSTRACT
The trend toward softer news is often explained by macro-developments such as commercialization. Based on the assumption that media content is also affected by the characteristics of individual journalists, this paper investigates the impact of journalistic role conceptions on hard and soft news coverage. Drawing upon a multi-dimensional understanding of the concept of hard and soft news, we conducted an online survey with simulated decision scenarios among German newspaper journalists to assess the impact of these aspects on hard and soft news coverage. The findings indicate that journalists were more likely to resort to soft news coverage if they adhered to an entertainment role conception. When looking at individual hard and soft news dimensions, we partially found a gap between role conception and enactment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Further aspects are role perception and role performance. Perceptions describe a society’s expectation of what journalism should provide. Performance comprises the collective journalistic outcome of newsrooms that can be found as news content in the news media (Mellado, Hellmueller, and Donsbach Citation2017a). Both are not of interest for the paper at hand since we focus on the influence of individual role conceptions on individual journalistic decision-making in form of secondary HSN decisions which is not – yet – the collective outcome of newsrooms.
2 Recently, scholars have questioned to which extent role conceptions are mirrored in news content, describing a gap between conceptions and their actual materialization in content (e.g., Mellado, Hellmueller, and Donsbach Citation2017b; Tandoc, Hellmueller, and Vos Citation2013). In contrast to the current study, however, they focused on already published news content and not the journalistic decision-making process that leads to it.
3 Here we also include literature that focuses on role performance by assessing the collective outcome of a news room in form of media content due to the lack of studies specifically assessing the role enactment of individual journalists and of the – so far – conceptual accuracy (Carpenter, Boehmer, and Fico Citation2015; Hanitzsch and Vos Citation2017).
4 We recruited news consumers (at least three days per week; online or print) for the pretest by inviting communication students of a German university and users of an online platform where participation was rewarded with virtual points that enhanced the importance of one’s own study on this platform. We decided for a non-journalistic sample for the pretest since journalists are difficult to motivate to participation.
5 We centered all dependent and control variables at their means.
6 We excluded 10 participants from the total of 193 due to answer patterns.
7 Since we were not interested in the differences between the two topical conditions, e.g., the framing decisions for the topical conditions of unemployment and neglected pets separately, we assessed the secondary HSN decisions for framing and relevance for both topics in one model, adding the topic of the text snippets as independent variables in the models. We did so due to the previously described results of the analysis for the combined HSN reporting decision, which revealed a significant influence of the topic.