Explaining the ’crisis’ correspondents’ perceived strategies of mediatization

• Autor(a) principal: Senftleben, Eva-Maria
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/7805
• topic: Correspondentes; Jornalismo; Portugal; Crise económica; Correspondents; Journalism; Economic journalism; Crisis

This work analyses how correspondents in Portugal report on the vast thematic field of the economical and financial ’crisis’. Basis of the research is the abundance of scientific literature either on correspon-dents’ work or on economic journalism – but so far no study about the correspondents’ work in the current ’crisis’. Further, there is a lack of scientific approaches that include the correspondents them-selves, by interviewing them, instead of solely analysing the content they produce or stating normative requirements. For this study consequently an approach centred on the mediators themselves was chosen: infor-mation about their demographics, work environment, intentions and self-view, as well as their routines and practices in reporting on topics linked to the ’crisis’ was obtained in a first step with the aid of a questionnaire, followed by semi-directed interviews. The findings suggest that correspondents reporting on the ’crisis’ in Portugal are mostly European or from countries with special cultural links to Portugal. They are generalists, not specialized on economics or other thematic fields. Being long-timers their detailed knowledge about the country could be seen as some sort of specialization. The aspects of the ’crisis’ deemed relevant vary according to the countries of their buyers. Common is a focus on personalized news as an attempt to illustrate. The evaluation of the information obtained from the questionnaire and interviews shows, that these professionals are no specialists and have a need to understand and familiarize themselves in the first place with the current economic situation of Portugal. It could be of future interest in journalism studies to find out how important detailed expert knowledge actually is for correspondents’ reporting or whether insider knowledge on culture, politics and the general functioning of a society might be the more impor-tant ’equipment’ for these professionals. Further this study could be of use for future research on media effects,as it allows to compare the intentions and ideas of the producers to the evaluations of audiences.