With the ending of the first four months of field work, the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project completed one of the relevant milestones of its development phase. The transnational initiative – led from Chile by Claudia Mellado, professor from the School of Journalism at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV) – aims to carry out a systematic analysis of how the different journalistic roles and narratives materialize in the news in various organizational, institutional and national contexts.
The study includes 126 international scholars, about 100 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students and it takes place in 59 countries, covering a broad variety of media systems and journalistic cultures. During this stage, the teams have begun the systematic collection of thousands of news samples, and their further analysis, which will allow the construction of a large- scale comparative database about the concrete ways in which journalism is carried out in different parts of the world.
In this context, one of the first milestones of the project will be an international pre-conference in Cape Town, South Africa, within the framework of the annual conference of the International Communication Association –ICA–, one of the more relevant academic meetings worldwide in the field of communications. The activity will be held in June and will be organized by the South African team of the JRP project, gathering around 50 scholars of different nationalities, who will share their research progress, discuss methodological challenges and reflect on the comparative development of the study and other initiatives inspired by this conceptual framework.
Professor Claudia Mellado will be the keynote speaker, addressing the main contribution of the project to understand the diversity of journalistic cultures and the transformations of contemporary journalism at a global scale.
“To this date, we have samples for almost all countries involved through field work. There is an important mobilization of hundreds of scholars, students, doctoral students and researchers all over the world and we will begin with the cleaning of data and its analysis once field work is finished in March of 2027”, Claudia Mellado explained.
Research addresses one of the central tensions of contemporary journalism: the gap between professional ideals and real practices that are observed on informative content. Its impact is seen both in the academic area – with numerous publications in high impact journals – and its social relevance, by contributing to a better understanding of the role of journalism in current democracies.
The scholar indicated that one of the main contributions of the project is to make visible the plurality of journalisms existing in the world, showing how the profession adapts, transforms and evolves around specific historical, political and cultural contexts.
“This is a disruptive project because it advances theoretically and methodologically by better connecting the theory of journalism with the real diversity of contemporary media systems and not only with idealized normative models”, Mellado stated.
Looking into the future, the research might become the most ambitious comparative study on journalistic practices at a global scale, combining methodological continuity with thematic innovation, in a scenario marked by technological changes, audience transformation and media credibility challenges.
By Erika Schubert
Strategic Communication Department
