Mato Veiga, Javier (2013) The Spanish media and the Internet: new practices built on traditional values. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University of Sussex.

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Abstract

This research explores the convergence of journalism, an influential and well established profession, and the Internet, a technology that alters the communication
experience. It focuses on how the Net and its associated practices intersects with deep rooted journalistic cultures; asking how this collision affects traditional values, how it
influences new practices appearing in newsrooms, how the involved agents re-define their roles and how new media logics are emerging from this contact.

This investigation has been developed through the prism of Bourdieu's theory of practice, which considers the journalistic profession as a field, where there are shared values, practices and routines, a sense of a group, a common identity, built on each actor's daily experiences. The latter, accumulated as a bodily habitus, operates in relation to the environment. The ethnography, a tool reckoned as well suited to capture
and describe behaviours in newsrooms, is the methodology employed in this work, which combines participant observation and interviews. The studied media are four Spanish journalistic institutions; Diario de Mallorca, a regional print paper; Efe, a news agency, El País and El Mundo, the two biggest national newspapers and its online sites.
This thesis argues that, in the negotiation of their adapted new role, journalists tend to align themselves with their traditional values and habitus. Well aware of the Internet related trends, they claim to keep an open mind to technological features, while filtering
them through the sieve of their most cherished tenets.
They see the gatekeeping role of journalism –as a profession with particular values– as something that can help save the public sphere from powerful and biased agents; the identification of sources and traceability of stories to guarantee its trustfulness, framing
news in wider scenarios or a declared attachment to 'the truth' –all of these ‘news values’ and the practical activities designed to underpin them shape their professional ideology. Negotiating new media, and taking a view on journalistic transformation, they mostly stick to what they do not see as nostalgia (an attachment to values now rendered
redundant in a new media environment), but as values related with, and indeed helping to enable, democracy, fairness, equality and a healthy public sphere.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Schools and Departments:	School of Media, Arts and Humanities > Media and Film
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN4699 Journalism. The periodical press, etc. T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering > TK5101 Telecommunication Including telegraphy, telephone, radio, radar, television > TK5105.5 Computer networks. General works
Depositing User:	Library Cataloguing
Date Deposited:	28 Aug 2013 06:08
Last Modified:	16 Mar 2022 15:37
URI:	http://srodev.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/45914

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