Does News Platform Matter? Comparing Online Journalistic Role Performance to Newspaper, Radio, and Television

Abstract

The shifting role of journalism in a digital age has affected long-standing journalistic norms across media platforms. This has reinvigorated discussion on how work in online newsrooms compares to other platforms that differ in media affordances and forms. Still, more studies are needed on whether those differences translate into distinct practices, especially when examining cross-national studies. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 stories produced by 365 media organizations from 37 countries, comparing the performance of journalistic roles in online newsrooms to three other types of media—TV, radio, and print. The paper analyzes if journalistic roles present themselves differently across platforms, and if these differences are constant or they vary across countries. Results show that there are measurable differences in role performance in online journalism compared to other platforms. Platform had a significant impact, particularly in terms of service and infotainment orientation, while the implementation of roles oriented toward public service was more similar. Additionally, country differences in the relationship between role performance and platforms mainly emerged for roles that enable political influence on news coverage, with differences in the relationship between online vs. traditional platforms appearing to be distinct features of the specific political system.

Keywords:

• Professional roles
• role performance
• news platforms
• online media
• TV
• radio
• print
• comparative studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. To control for the potential overrepresentation and/or underrepresentation of specific types of media in the sample, resulting from some media including more stories in the sample than others, we weighted the data by medium for each country. In other words, and within each country, each media type—TV, radio, online news, and newspapers—was assigned to have an equivalent weight in the results.

2. More detailed information on the JRP methodology, including the full codebook can be found in Mellado (2021) and in the Appendices in the Methodology section of the JRP website at www.journalisticperformance.org.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been funded in Switzerland by the Institute of Applied Media Studies (IAM) at the Zurich University of Applied Studies (ZHAW); in Spain by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness. Project “Journalism models in the multiplatform context”; in Mexico by the Division of Research and Postgraduate Studies, Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City, Excepcional Standard Grant 2019–2022; in Chile by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso; in Brazil by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development/Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq); in Qatar by Northwestern University in Qatar; in Hungary by the National Research Development and Research Office; in Rwanda by the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences SEED Award, and in Canada by Mitacs, Centre d’études sur les médias, The Journalism Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Toronto Metropolitan University.