Complicated shades of contemporary journalism: perception of professional roles of Latvian's journalists

• In Event: Media Impacts on Society

Abstract

Journalists and news organizations in Latvia and around the world are confronted with an unprecedented and multi-faceted crisis. This crisis is seen as constituting a serious threat to journalism’s future existence as a social institution.
The proposed study is a part of third round of global Worlds of Journalism Study, it aims to map levels of risk and uncertainty journalists are facing in Latvia. The concept of risk is used here to refer to an array of existential threats to the viability and sustainability of journalism as an institution that makes a meaningful and vital contribution to social life. Risks primarily emanate from four, partly interrelated sources that influence media: politics, economy, technology, and culture. This project therefore aims to study journalists’ perceptions of these threats and their consequences as well as ways of coping with and adapting to risk. We assess these perceptions in the following domains: editorial autonomy, influences on journalism, journalistic roles, journalistic epistemologies, professional ethics, safety of journalists, and precarity of work.
We have chosen the analysis of perception of journalistic professional roles as the main objective for this conference paper. To complete this aim, we use data of the representative survey of 482 journalists in Latvia (May, 2021).
Latvian journalists choose two main roles that characterize their relations with society, themselves and those in power. Journalists prioritize informative and educative roles, which can be interpreted that journalist perceive themselves, first, a distributors, curators and narrators of information; second, journalists see themselves as educators and, therefore, as mediators and agents of change.

Short Bio

Anda Rožukalne is a professor and Dean at Faculty of Communication, Riga Stradiņš University. Her fields of expertise include the development of journalism values, innovative audience research methods, media literacy, and media regulation. She is the author of the first academic monograph on Latvian media ownership, Latvia’s Media Owners, and numerous publications on journalism quality, media systems, and media regulation in Latvia and the Baltics States. Dr. Rožukalne is an associate editor of Central European Journal of Communication, Latvian team leader for the European Commission project “European Media Pluralism Monitor,” and a member of EC High Level Experts Group on Disinformation and Fake News. ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5474-4222.

Līga Ozoliņa is a researcher and a head of Communication and Media Studies master’s study program at Rīga Stradiņš University. She is also a PhD student in the Communication Management Program at Turiba University. Līga represented Latvia and completed Latvia's journalists survey for the second round of Worlds of Journalism Study (2012 - 2014). Her academic interests cover journalist professional identity, entrepreneurial journalism, media digitalization.

Authors

• Anda Rožukalne, Rīga Stradiņš university

• Līga Ozoliņa, Rīga Stradiņš University