Public sphere as a specific sphere, domain, an imagined space of communicatively mediated social life, or a discursively constructed social space between the state and civil (initially bourgeois) society represents the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse. It is taken for granted that no specific social norms (e.g., privacy, ownership) and regulatory rules (e.g., formal membership) limit citizens' access to the public sphere, and no specific knowledge and competences are needed to make them able to participate in it. A public sphere could either be (1) the sphere of publicity, i.e., communication spaces created and maintained by the media, which involve relations of power and dominance ("public space") or (2) the sphere of the public/s consisting of free and equal citizens participating in public reasoning. In either case, the principle of publicness represents the very heart of the concept of the public sphere. In empirical terms, the public sphere is often conceived of as a kind of "compromise" of these two "ideal types." The concept of the public sphere largely refers to the role of the media and public opinion in modern representative democracies; the normative conceptualization of the media comes to the forefront in the idea of public service media.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33308765
Chapter emphasizes that the last two decades have been awash with interpretations of the changes brought about by digital technologies and online social media. These developments, however, are often narrowly presented as only empowering for the users as though they are merely providing possibilities for participation, global connectivity and content-generation. The chapter suggest an alternative, critical approach to user participation, in which user participation and media interactivity are connected to new forms of digital labour, exploitation and reproduction of social inequality.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33675101
This study explores the notion of the "tyranny of the empty frame" within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for "any image", online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a symbolic photograph to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33335389
The main goal of this article is to research how the protection of journalists' confidential sources is defined in the normative documents of the Council of Europe and the European Union, what is the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and what is the normative regulation of source protection in Slovenia. The authors state that in the European legal arena it is allowed to demand that a journalist reveal a secret source only exceptionally, when there is intense public interest, and they suggest changes in the Slovenian legislation. Analysis of the relevant legal documents and case law is combined with the method of semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists. The interviewees have different views on whether revealing a confidential source is admissible; the prevalent one is that the promise of confidentiality should be respected unless the circumstances are exceptional.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33471837
The book presents key theoretical debates on news framing and the specifics of the visual framing of news, which are reconsidered within the norms and conventions of the specific cultural apparatus within which photography is put to work – journalism. The book provides a tentative typology of visual framing and outlines the general trend of the visual framing of news as a move towards a more iconic and symbolic representation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282782464