Abstract
Several factors make Slovakia an interesting place to study participatory journalism: the resurgence of political and economic threats to editorial independence, intense competitive pressures and an unusually strong public appetite to read and discuss the news online. A representative poll commissioned for this book suggests that for commenting on news websites, Slovaks are European leaders. Participation needs to be understood in the context of a media system where the journalism of opinion is the paradigm for the serious press. Smith sets the scene for the later empirical chapters of this book, introducing two Slovak newspapers committed, in different ways, to participation. They are the settings in which this book studies how the current industry standard for participation – comments below articles – works and how it might be reconfigured.
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Notes
- 1.
For comparison with the potential market size, Slovakia’s population is around 5.4 million, and roughly 2 million more Slovak-speakers live abroad.
- 2.
http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2016/further-analysis-2016/ [accessed 9.7.16].
- 3.
The survey I commissioned was a classical door-to-door survey, while the DNR is an online survey using a weighted sample to ensure representativeness with respect to standard demographic and socio-economic indicators. Given the different collection methods it is debatable whether it is best to express my results as percentages of the total sample or the Internet-using part of the sample (approximately 70%). Neither solution is ideal. The former would underestimate the prevalence of online activities in Slovakia, while the latter would overestimate them given that the Slovak online sub-sample is over-educated and younger in comparison with the total population. I have opted to take the conservative position and compare my results for the total population with the percentages reported in the DNR. Even so, the figures for Slovakia are close to the digitally active/participative end of the spectrum, which makes the findings all the more impressive.
- 4.
Respondents were prompted with examples: the UK version of the DNR gave BBC News, Mail Online and the Huffington Post as examples; the Slovak questionnaire gave the four most popular news portals in the country – sme.sk, cas.sk, topky.sk and aktuality.sk.
- 5.
The Brazilian and Turkish samples in the DNR are only representative of urban populations.
- 6.
DNR evidence is actually equivocal here – some countries see continued increases in participation while others have seen a tailing off in recent years.
- 7.
VIP bloggers are accorded greater visibility on the main blog page (and also by the very fact that they can be viewed as a separate list) as well as being allowed to administrate the discussion beneath their own articles.
- 8.
The topic choice was driven by two factors: a sense that it was legitimate and realistic to impose more exigent standards of ‘intelligent debate’; and, crucially, the willingness of science journalists to do the moderation (unlike post-moderated debate, pre-moderation is not usually left to the regular admin team).
- 9.
http://www.sme.sk/diskusie/kodex/ [accessed 8.7.16].
- 10.
Denník means ‘daily newspaper’, and the mysterious letter N could also stand for newspaper (noviny), but is more likely to evoke the Slovak word for independent (nezávislý). The paper is often just called N for short.
- 11.
In January 2016 (after the end of my fieldwork) it switched to a Facebook plugin, largely to reduce the workload of administration.
- 12.
https://dennikn.sk/blog/preco-nie-je-diskusia-pod-vsetkymi-clankami/ [accessed 8.7.16].
- 13.
At N web editors play an important role in the selection of articles for discussion but do not perform administration shifts like they do at SME. The social media editor, however, plays an essential ‘backstop’ role both in monitoring open discussions and in communicating with participants.
- 14.
Soft news is heavily represented in my corpus of discussion threads in which journalists at N actually participated (see Chapter 5): 28% of these articles were classifiable as soft news during the first half of 2015.
- 15.
Given that the pattern of news participation in Slovakia, according to the survey results reported previously, also has a southern European flavour, it is tempting to suggest that we see here a certain adjustment between journalistic discourse and audience behaviour.
- 16.
At several points in Slovakia’s post-communist history, freedom of expression has been perceived as under threat, which is reflected in the country’s oscillating ranking in international indices – in 2004 Reporters sans frontières ranked Slovakia top its World Press Freedom Index, but by 2009 it had slipped as low as 44th place (following new ‘right of reply’ legislation widely seen as punitive), before rising back to 12th in 2016.
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Smith, S. (2017). Contextualising the Research Setting. In: Discussing the News. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52965-3_3
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