The Journalistic Role Performance Project (JRP) is a cross-national, theory-driven endeavor established in 2013 to systematically analyze the state of journalistic cultures in the new media landscape across the world.
The main goals of our Project are twofold. On the one hand, we aim to explain how different dimensions of professional roles materialize in the news in different organizational, institutional and social settings. On the other hand, our study aims to deeply address the disconnection between professional and/or normative ideals and journalistic practices, explaining the gap between the importance that journalists and the media give to different professional roles, and journalistic role performance.
Under that umbrella, our project will provide scientific knowledge and empirical information to researchers, students, practitioners, the media as well as international institutions, to understand the complexities of the profession, as well as the influence that different internal and external factors have on the practice of journalism worldwide.
Thanks to the effort of different high-quality scholars from 18 countries, the first wave of our JRP project (2013-2018) analyzed the performance of professional roles in print media. Likewise, the project studied the existing gap between the journalists’ attitudes and their professional practice.
Taking advantage of the foregoing version of the study, the Second Wave of the Project (2019-2023) compares the presence of different journalistic roles in the news content of television, radio, print and online media, understanding the influence that different platforms have on the performance of different journalistic functions across different media systems, as well as the influence that characteristics and attitudes of journalists have on the practice of journalism.
Our consolidated current network, includes 37 countries from America, Asia, Europe, The Middle East, Africa and Oceania.
This second wave addresses multiple limitations from the first wave of the study. That is related to (1) the expanded range of media systems included (2) the expansion of the study from newspapers to other media platforms, (3) and the expansion of the study from political news exclusively to the whole range of news beats. In addition, the project makes use of the extensive body of data our sample provides on COVID-19, exploring the changes in role performance associated with the pandemic.
Our work is organized into different levels of analysis: news stories, journalists, news media organizations, and countries. We analyzed the data separately and also using multi-level techniques due to the nested structure of the data.
Our project defends and encourages truly scientific collaboration and collective publishing. The study is hosted at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). Funding is provided by the respective national research councils, universities and/or local organizations of the participating countries.
