Pablo Javier Boczkowski

La independencia del periodismo y el pluralismo son componentes fundamentales de la libertad de expresión, invocados de manera frecuente por los medios de comunicación para defender o criticar propuestas de regulación de medios. Sin embargo, la cobertura mediática sobre este tema ha recibido escasa atención por parte de los estudios de política públicas. Este trabajo analiza la evolución de la cobertura sobre regulación de medios en los diarios argentinos Clarín y Página/12 a lo largo de cuatro décadas, para dar cuenta de los cambios y continuidades en el discurso sobre independencia editorial en dos medios. Para ello, se examinan los artículos publicados durante los años 1988, 1998, 2008 y 2018 sobre regulación y proyectos de regulación de medios y telecomunicaciones (n=140). Este trabajo contribuye a la literatura sobre los vínculos entre los ideales y la práctica periodística, identificando la utilización de diferentes estrategias de los dos diarios para defender su posición a lo largo de los años analizados. En las conclusiones, reflexiona sobre la distancia entre el ideal periodístico y la práctica profesional, en una escena mediática concentrada y polarizada.

Research on trust has come to the forefront of communication studies. Beyond the dominant focus on informational trust and its country-specific articulations, trustworthiness evaluations can relate to the materiality of news and its global manifestations. Especially in digital algorithmic environments, understanding news trustworthiness requires a holistic approach, which combines informational and socio-technical aspects while addressing both institutional and interpersonal trust. Drawing on 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States, this article investigates news (dis)trust from the lens of socio-materiality. The six trust-oriented affordances we identified—selectivity, interactivity, customization, searchability, information abundance, and immediacy—reveal important socio-technical commonalities that underlie news trust across countries. These affordances, moreover, point to an interplay of trust and self-agency. Taken together, the findings illuminate the lived experience of news trust as manifested across cultures and offer a broader understanding of trustworthiness within current media ecology.

We analyze how the size and composition of social media repertoires is associated with key sociodemographic variables: age, gender, socioeconomic status, education, and occupation. Specifically, we ask what is the association between these variables and: (a) social media use as a whole, (b) the number of platforms people include in their social media repertoires, (c) the platforms included in such repertoires, and (d) the most prevalent repertoires? To answer these questions, we analyze data from an in-person survey (N = 700) about use of media and communication technologies conducted in 2016 in Argentina by a polling firm. Our findings indicate that: (a) the odds of using social media are higher among younger people, women, those with higher socioeconomic and educational levels, and those employed; (b) whereas an increase in age is associated with a decrease in the size of the repertoire, higher educational attainment is associated with an increase in the number of platforms included in the repertoire; (c) age, gender, education, and occupation are significantly associated with the inclusion of different platforms in the repertoire; and (d) some of these variables are significant for the uptake of different repertoires, but not others. We interpret these findings drawing upon scholarship about digital inequalities and social media repertoires, and we assess and reflect on their implications for research on the digital divide.

This study investigates the persistence of gendered choice and use of media, particularly in Japanese domestic settings. It shows how women’s significant presence in the digital media environment does not necessarily translate into substantial changes in gendered power dynamics in choosing and using particular media for certain purposes at home. This project’s authors, researchers from Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US, analyzed interview data from Japan by drawing on the Foucauldian concept of micro-level power, which is categorized into three main types: personal authority, media affordances, and space-time constellations. Through this process, we interviewed 77 individuals, revealing that persistent gendered media choices and use exist in Japan. The project team also looked for similar cases in other countries for further theoretical implications. As a result of this investigation, we argue that the patriarchy continues to influence women’s choice and use of media at home even in this media-saturated digital age. Our interview data show that “old media” such as radio, television, newspaper, and magazines not only mediate information and entertainment contents at home, but also structure people’s quotidian use of media, both old and new, and sustains existing gendered assumptions and values.

This article comparatively examines news avoidance in a rapidly changing media environment. We utilize findings from a large dataset of 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers, conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US. We aim to make a contribution to the study of news avoidance by providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the drivers, practices, and patterns of news avoidance as they occur in and are shaped by a variety of national contexts. We argue that news avoidance is shaped not only by individual characteristics, but is also manifested and performed as part of specific time frames and socio-cultural factors. We distinguish two drivers of intentional news avoidance: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive drivers are accentuated by distinct country-level contextual factors, whereas the emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts.

How and why do people still get print newspapers in an era dominated by mobile and social media communication? In this article, we answer this question about the permanence of traditional media in a digital media ecosystem by analyzing 488 semi-structured interviews conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States. We focus on three mechanisms of media reception: access, sociality, and ritualization. Our findings show that these mechanisms are decisively shaped by patterns of everyday life that are not captured by the scholarly foci on either content- or technology-influences on media use. Thus, we argue that a non-media centric approach improves descriptive fit and adds heuristic power by bringing a wider lens into crucial mechanisms of media reception in ways that expand the conceptual toolkit that scholars can utilize to analyze the role of media in everyday life.

En este artículo efectuamos un análisis crítico de 132 publicaciones recientes sobre la crisis de la prensa escrita. Encontramos que la discusión sobre el fenómeno se ha organizado principalmente en torno a tres grupos temáticos: la dimensión económica y financiera para entender la crisis, la descripción y el análisis de las dinámicas laborales de los periodistas, y el posible impacto de la crisis en el rol social y los valores de la prensa. Las investigaciones han sido heterogéneas en cuanto a sus enfoques conceptuales y al conjunto de técnicas utilizadas: fundamentalmente estudios de caso y, en menor medida, estudios comparativos. Además, se han centrado principalmente en las dimensiones productivas de la información, dejando mayormente de lado la recepción de las noticias y el consumo de diario en papel. Finalmente, en el artículo esbozamos un marco posible para repensar la crisis, pero también una agenda de investigación futura, desde y en Latinoamérica.