Journal. Media, Volume 7, Issue 3 (September 2026) – 59 articles

As content creators increasingly assume roles once associated with journalism, marketing, and entrepreneurship, generative AI is reshaping the conditions under which professional value is produced and recognized. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with South Korean content creators and influencer-marketing professionals (185–210 min each, conducted between October 2025 and February 2026), this study examines how creators reconstruct professional value across news production, metric-driven brand partnerships, and AI-assisted content work. Reflexive thematic analysis identifies four themes: market-mediated journalistic norms, metric recalibration from reach to conversion, algorithmic expertise as craft knowledge, and generative AI as a labor environment with a negotiated delegation boundary. Participants delegated routine tasks, including drafting and thumbnail selection, to AI while preserving editorial judgment, planning ability, experiential knowledge, and authentic persona as distinctly human forms of expertise. The study introduces Professional Value Recalibration (PVR) as a conceptual framework for understanding how professional worth is redistributed under algorithmic and AI-mediated conditions. It further shows that these negotiations vary by creators’ scale and market position. The findings contribute to scholarship on platform labor, entrepreneurial journalism, and human–machine communication by showing that AI adoption is not only technological adaptation but also a process through which creator professionalism is renegotiated and, in some respects, reinforced. Full article

To understand the current state of affairs in European Union (EU) politics, it is important to consider the role of the media. Local newspapers play a distinctive role in this regard, as they demonstrate both the tangible local relevance and the impact of EU politics. However, critics argue that the EU suffers not only from a democratic deficit but also from deficiencies in legitimacy, communication, and the public sphere. This article presents a theoretical model that shows how local newspapers may influence the top-down and bottom-up dynamics of Europeanization and politicization and thereby help mitigate these deficits. It also reports findings from a qualitative analysis of 34 interviews with journalists, EU correspondents, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) as well as their staff, representatives of civil society and Europe Direct Information Centers (EDICs) from Germany, Austria, France, as well as interviewees based in Brussels. The analysis shows that the availability of EU information that is perceived as overwhelming, combined with a perceived low level of reader interest in EU affairs, hinders the positive effects of the dynamics of Europeanization and politicization. Full article

This article examines the “Boomers vs. Millennials” generational conflict as it is constructed within digital meme cultures on Instagram. Drawing on generational theory, media-generation research, and platform studies, it treats generational identities as socially and culturally produced rather than as purely demographic categories. The study adopts a qualitative and exploratory design based on a multilingual corpus of 60 static Instagram memes collected between May and June 2026 through purposive sampling. Memes are analysed as visual–textual artefacts through a four-stage interpretive procedure addressing visual composition and templates, thematic coding, framing strategies, and discursive registers. Five first-order thematic categories are organised into four higher-order analytical dimensions: digital literacy gaps; economic precarity and material inequality; intergenerational responsibility for structural crises; and identity, recognition, and generational boundary-work. The findings show that memes condense structural inequalities into simplified oppositional narratives and use irony, satire, and expectation reversal to redistribute responsibility between generations. Rather than empirically measuring recommendation systems or algorithmic amplification, the article interprets these patterns within the broader platform environments in which memetic communication circulates. The study concludes that memes contribute to generational othering by reinforcing symbolic boundaries while simultaneously providing a space in which dominant narratives of merit, responsibility, and intergenerational justice can be contested. Full article

Climate diplomacy in Bangladesh may reflect a structural gap between two tiers of media coverage. This qualitative study draws on four focus group discussions with 24 district journalists in Cox’s Bazar, Ukhia, Shatkhira, and Shunamganj from four of the country’s most climate-vulnerable districts and semi-structured interviews with 10 Dhaka-based national journalists (N = 34), conducted between August and December 2024 and analyzed through inductive thematic analysis supplemented by concordance-based coding. National participants engage with international diplomatic forums but report limited operational knowledge of ground-level climate impacts, while district-based participants hold granular, project-level knowledge of climate impacts, financial flows, and displacement yet describe themselves as structurally excluded from diplomatic representation. District participants also raised institutional barriers such as NGO and INGO opacity, restricted access to government information, and mismanagement of disaster relief that were largely absent from the Dhaka data and characterized climate financing as politically routed along lines of power rather than community need. These findings suggest that weak diplomatic representation may reflect an information-pathway failure rather than, or in addition to, a capacity deficit, with implications for media-inclusion research in climate governance. Full article

This study examines the determinants of digital engagement during geopolitical crises, using the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on 3 January 2026 as a case study. The aim is to identify which message attributes drive audience interaction and how their effects vary across platforms with distinct communicative architectures. A corpus of 1000 posts collected during the seven days following the event was assembled, evenly distributed between Instagram and X and between Spanish and English, and coded through quantitative content analysis. The effects of news frames, responsibility attribution, message type, format, and source type on likes and comments on both platforms—as well as reposts on X—were estimated using negative binomial regression. Findings reveal that both platforms operate as distinct ecosystems: on X, conflict and legality frames, shock-driven messages, and video amplify interaction, whereas on Instagram, humor emerges as the only robust positive driver. Citizen and influencer accounts substantially outperform institutional sources, explicit responsibility attribution significantly reduces participation—challenging the applicability of Situational Crisis Communication Theory—and Spanish-language posts concentrate higher levels of engagement. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), is influencing journalism and education by transforming professional practices, information production, and media literacy requirements. While generative AI improves efficiency in content creation and educational preparation, it also raises concerns regarding accuracy, credibility, verification, and ethical responsibility. This study examines how generative AI is experienced by journalists and teachers in primary schools in Croatia within the contemporary information ecosystem. Empirical data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten participants, including five professional journalists and five teachers, and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The analysis identified a shared efficiency–verification paradox across both professional groups. Although generative AI reduces the time required for routine cognitive tasks, it simultaneously increases the need for verification, critical evaluation, and ethical judgement. Participants also emphasised the growing importance of AI literacy, critical thinking, and ethical competencies for navigating AI-generated content in professional and educational contexts. The findings suggest that generative AI does not necessarily replace professional expertise but instead redistributes professional responsibilities towards activities requiring human judgement and accountability. This study contributes to a broader understanding of how AI influences interconnected information professions and highlights the need to strengthen competencies required for responsible engagement with AI-generated information. Full article

In South Africa, traditional healing and indigenous knowledge systems are formally recognised. However, persistent epistemological domination by the West is reflected in ambivalent attitudes towards culturally specific beliefs and practices. In South African Nguni languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, the word ukuthwasa refers to a call to do ancestral work or become a traditional healer. Such a call often manifests itself with symptoms that, from a Western perspective, could be interpreted as suggesting neurodivergence. In recent years, mental health attracted increasing public and media attention in South Africa, where up to one in three people is estimated to suffer from mental health issues. The people concerned are understood and represented in terms of either deficit (medical model) or deviation from the norm (social model). More recent and progressive understandings of disability foreground voice and experience as part of an affirmative model. We analyse purposively selected online texts (X, Instagram, and Facebook posts) concerning ukuthwasa. These provide evidence of social media (self) representations sourced from the accounts of traditional healers, hashtags related to specific incidents, and searches using keywords in English or isiXhosa. Through a qualitative content analysis, presented thematically, the present paper contributes with a critical and decolonial exploration of the representation of ukuthwasa as a culture-bound condition in digital media. Full article

Journalism and media studies increasingly describe a communication environment in which news, explanation and public orientation are accessed through search engines, social feeds, notifications, short-form video, platform summaries, podcasts and conversational artificial intelligence. Existing accounts identify attention scarcity, information overload, platform power, news avoidance and AI disruption, yet they do not fully explain why some communicative practices become less sustainable while faster forms of orientation expand under the same conditions. This conceptual paper develops an integrative theoretical synthesis across media practice theory, deep mediatization, platform studies, digital journalism, digital reading research, cognitive load theory, acceleration studies and AI-mediated communication. It proposes latency mismatch as a middle-range mechanism of temporal selection. Latency mismatch occurs when the time a practice requires to generate stable understanding exceeds the continuity intervals that a media environment makes available, rewards or treats as reasonable, especially when lower-latency alternatives provide sufficient orientation. The concept clarifies how platformized journalism and media environments govern not only visibility and attention but also the durations through which information becomes meaningful, trustworthy and actionable. It reframes long-form news reading, investigative engagement and other high-latency practices as structurally vulnerable but socially necessary conditions of public knowledge. Full article

Democratic accountability in journalism has depended on a recoverable attribution chain: a named journalist who gathered information from identified sources and whose editorial choices can be traced, challenged, and corrected. This article reframes that chain as a communicative ritual rather than a mere transmission mechanism. Drawing on the ritual model of communication, Durkheimian ritual theory, and the literature on media rituals and mediatization, it argues that source-crediting practices—bylines, citations, disclosures—are ceremonial forms through which an epistemic community renews its shared commitment to accountable authorship. Specifying the problem of many hands for journalism’s attribution chain, it theorizes attribution diffusion: the progressive indetermination of authorship and responsibility as AI tools, platform intermediaries, and distributed workflows disaggregate the once-unified author role. Four dissolution mechanisms (AI generation opacity, platform republication chains, editorial chain fragmentation, and algorithmic rewriting) are advanced as hypothesized modes of ritual rupture that degrade the attribution order of online media, and are illustrated with documented cases. Existing responses (disclosure norms, content provenance standards, and legal frameworks—assessed here across both US and EU instruments) are found to preserve the form of the attribution ritual while dissolving its accountability substance. The article proposes a three-study empirical agenda, sketches a provisional structural intervention—an editorial-ratification production trail—derived from the ritual account, and specifies what restoring the attribution ritual in platformized, AI-mediated journalism would require. Full article

This paper analyzes the systemic threat of election-related Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) across recent Latin American electoral cycles in Guatemala (2023), Ecuador (2025), and Honduras (2025). Integrating the FIMI behavioral taxonomy with the DISARM framework and systems dynamics, we compare the transition from traditional digital propaganda to industrialized “algorithmic campaigns” driven by deepfakes, voice cloning, and media impersonation. Methodologically, we audit a database of documented media impersonations alongside international electoral observation reports. Our comparative analysis suggests that even if synthetic content cannot be shown to directly alter individual votes, it appears to reshape the emotional and symbolic climate of elections, which appears to exacerbate affective polarization and institutional distrust. We contextualize these dynamics within the slop economy—a structural digital divide in information quality between digital elites and digital commoners. Arguing that top-down regulations are insufficient against these decentralized threats, we propose a decentralized democratic defense model based on Jean Cloutier’s émirec concept, introducing cognitive friction into digital consumption to foster bottom-up epistemic resilience. Full article

If, ten years ago, someone had told me it would be possible to access news through digital influencers, I might have had some difficulty believing it and could even have thought I was facing some sort of dystopia in the media landscape [...] Full article

Post-industrial Pennsylvania faces a wave of AI data center development, arriving in communities whose capacity for local news has sharply diminished. This article examines how a reconfigured news ecology renders data center development, and its attachment to AI, sensible as a political concern. Through critical analysis of news coverage produced by local legacy outlets and statewide nonprofit and public media newsrooms, it shows how reporting constitutes data center development differently depending on venue, scale, and genre. Municipal meeting coverage renders data centers a matter of zoning procedure, while state-level reporting constitutes them as a matter of legislative and electoral contest, tracking resistance as a political variable. Long-form features situate economic promise and environmental cost within the life of a community, giving voice to residents’ lived experience and resistance to development. Across coverage, reporting makes legible the procedural, legislative, cultural, and economic constraints within which resistance to AI data centers operates. The article concludes that, within this corpus, journalism’s representational authority—the capacity to set the scale of a controversy, legitimate actors and grievances, name the political options available, and delimit plausible outcomes—has narrowed in range, but still retains capacity to render data center development legible as a matter of politics and procedure. Full article

Mainstream journalism has encountered multiple crises in recent decades, such as declining trust, the collapse of revenue models, and competition for audiences across a fractured digital media ecosystem. Concurrently, social media has emerged as a platform for audience-driven news agendas that are now shaped outside of the mainstream news media ecosystem. This study proposes a five-factor framework of inter-audience agenda setting to better understand the digital audience influence dynamics at play when news audiences share and critique journalism on social media. Using thematic analysis, this research analysed commonalities in 75 studies from the adjacent literature on social media agenda setting, digital marketing, digital publics research, intermedia agenda setting and two-step flow theories. From this, the five factors identified and proposed to underpin the inter-audience agenda-setting process are: replication of object/agenda, affirmation of judgement, validation of perspectives, need to align with the majority, and trust in one’s peers. Greater understanding of inter-audience agenda-setting processes on social media is proposed as another potential mechanism for journalism to stem declining audience trust and increase audience engagement in a fractured digital media sphere. Full article

This article presents and analyses an interview with Cristóbal Balenciaga published in ¡Hola! in 1954, previously absent from the academic corpus on the Spanish couturier. The interview constitutes a significant discovery that substantially expands the documentation available on the designer, who has traditionally been described as reluctant to engage with the media. The study situates the interview within a dual context: first, the business and geopolitical environment of postwar haute couture, shaped by tensions between Paris, Spain, and the American market; and second, the editorial context of ¡Hola! during the 1950s, marked by its rapid expansion and transnational circulation. Through a qualitative analysis combining historically grounded approaches based on primary sources, studies on the journalistic interview genre, and close textual reading, the article examines the narrative strategies employed by journalist José A. Irurozqui, the strategic choice of publication, and the content of Balenciaga’s statements. The findings demonstrate that the prominence given to the designer’s first-person voice, the journalist’s narrative framing, and ¡Hola!’s editorial positioning all contributed to consolidating a public image of the couturier and of his brands in Paris and Spain. Full article

The news media in Gulf countries are among the most important institutions shaping the public’s understanding of climate action. This study aims to explore the longitudinal developments, thematic framing, and sentiment tones of Omani English-language newspapers’ sustainability discourse during the period 2015–2025. The study applied a multi-stage computational method to analyze a deduplicated corpus of 709 news articles from two English-language dailies of Oman: Times of Oman and Oman Daily Observer for a time period from 2015 to 2025. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was used to group topics into five types of macro frames. Results show that the focus of the Omani media is very localized, and the dominant frames are “Corporate ESG, Business & Green Investment” and “Clean Energy Policy, Research & Institutional Governance”. Furthermore, a sentiment analysis of headlines using VADER showed clearly defined sentiment polarity; domestic economic transition headlines were characterized by high positive polarity, while global climate crisis headlines had a higher negative polarity. The study concludes that the press in Oman is in a strategic process of “nationalizing” the climate change issue, moving from the conventional disaster discourse to making sustainability a local opportunity for economic diversification, technological modernization, and national resilience. Full article

After major disasters, news media selectively construct the public record of what has been lost. This study examines that pattern by comparing an independently derived satellite-based inventory of damaged cultural heritage in Hatay, Türkiye, with a corpus of 79 Turkish-language online news reports published between February 2023 and February 2024. Under the primary retrieval protocol, only 16 of the 86 ARIA-export assets appeared directly in the coverage; with six further off-export or proximity-based cases, 22 reported assets entered the news in total. A targeted asset-name search then located 15 further reports, containing 17 additional direct references to damaged assets. Even on the most inclusive reading, in which every one of these references is treated as a previously uncounted and non-overlapping asset, at least 53 of the 86 assets (61.6%) remained outside the news record. The analysis also covers attribute salience, temporal patterns, and outlet concentration in the coverage. Drawing on first- and second-level agenda-setting theory, and treating gatekeeping and media-system conditions as contextual mechanisms, it defines visibility deficit as the measurable gap between independently documented damage and the damage that enters a defined news corpus. This gap need not imply deliberate suppression. It may follow from editorial priorities, limited access to sites, the availability of visual material, or the limited capacity of newsrooms to work with geospatial data. By attending to what stays outside the news agenda rather than only to differences in salience among covered items, the study identifies a structural boundary of agenda setting and extends agenda-setting research into measurable non-coverage after disaster. Full article

To better understand how journalists represent sources, it is necessary to systematically study the use of reported speech in news coverage. This paper presents a method for LLM-assisted content analysis to identify and classify reported speech in Dutch newspapers automatically. The study evaluates a three-step procedure utilising role-based instructions to prompt the model as a professional journalist. First, a codebook for identifying citation structures and source types was developed with LLM support and then manually verified. Second, inter-coder reliability between human coders and the LLM was assessed on a representative sample of Dutch news articles using a human-in-the-loop validation approach. Third, the prompt-engineered LLM was used to code a large corpus spanning seven decades (1950–2024). Manual verification of 16,689 citations shows a weighted F1-score of 0.75, which aligns with recent benchmarks for high-capacity models performing complex journalistic coding. While human oversight remains the benchmark for reliability, due to issues such as repeated citations that were given as examples in the used prompts and representational bias, LLM-based systems perform sufficiently well for large-scale analyses of journalistic source use. The paper concludes that hybrid human–AI workflows provide a practical bridge between traditional rule-based approaches and new generative models, offering scalable and cost-effective methods for studying source representation in journalism. Full article

Recent journalism and media research increasingly uses embeddings, transformer-based models, and large language models, yet the methodological functions remain unevenly conceptualized. This article examines how vector-based and semantically oriented methods are incorporated into journalism and media studies and proposes a theory-informed framework of four recurrent methodological functions: semantic mapping, interpretive assistance, cross-scale articulation, and reflexive auditing. We conducted a structured review of English-language journal articles and review articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science between 2022 and April 2026. The review combined database retrieval, conservative LLM-assisted metadata screening, full-text analytical extraction, expert manual validation, descriptive analysis, exploratory association tests, and an embedding-based map built from article-level analytical profiles. The final corpus comprised 43 articles. Empirical studies of news texts predominated, and semantic mapping was the most frequent primary methodological function. The profile-based map identified four moderately differentiated and overlapping communities centered on reception and circulation, semantic mapping of news content, affective and evaluative discourse analysis, and methodological infrastructure-building. Community membership aligned more strongly with media domain than with study type or primary methodological function, although these patterns are interpreted heuristically given the small corpus and low expected cell counts. The findings show that these methods are best understood as components of hybrid research designs combining semantic formalization, interpretation, validation, and scale-sensitive analysis. Full article

This article examines how Nigerian newspapers frame Shell’s sustainability claims and asks whether that framing enables or challenges greenwashing by proxy: a pattern in which a corporation’s environmental claims gain the credibility of independent journalism through a news outlet’s editorial choices rather than paid advertising. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyze 96 news reports, investigations, and opinion columns published between 2020 and 2024 in five Nigerian dailies, Premium Times, The Guardian Nigeria, ThisDay, Vanguard, and Punch, selected for addressing Shell’s environmental or sustainability claims. I identify three recurring mechanisms: uncritical reproduction of corporate press releases, reliance on corporate and government sources with little independent verification, and framing that foregrounds favorable claims while omitting the contrary environmental record. These mechanisms are more pronounced in ThisDay, Vanguard, and Punch, while Premium Times and The Guardian Nigeria more often contextualize or contest Shell’s claims. Full article

Non-human animals are systematically excluded from public narratives, rarely recognized as sentient subjects, and instead framed within anthropocentric narratives of production and consumption; efforts to challenge this pattern and make the more-than-human world visible often encounter editorial resistance and structural constraints. This study examines how anti-speciesist journalists in Spanish written media navigate such resistance to make non-human animals legitimate subjects of news. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nine self-identified anti-speciesist journalists, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies strategies organized across four non-mutually exclusive categories, namely, discursive, relational, framing, and structural, ranging from self-censorship and strategic language use to coalition-building and the creation of independent platforms. Findings reveal a key distinction between visibility strategies, which succeed in securing publication, and root-level strategies, which challenge the carnist and anthropocentric assumptions structuring newsworthiness itself. These practices reveal the pragmatism, creativity, and resilience of journalists working under structural, ideological, and normative constraints, while also highlighting the limits of anti-speciesist reporting within mainstream media. The study contributes to Critical Animal Media Studies, environmental communication, and journalism research by illuminating the intersection of ethical advocacy, professional strategy, and counter-hegemonic practice and offers recommendations for expanding coverage of the more-than-human world across ideological, editorial, and structural divides. Full article

This essay applies close textual analysis to news reports covering the 20 November 2025 fire at the United Nations COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil, to demonstrate how allegory can manifest in journalistic reporting of real-world events. It argues that allegory can, intentionally or unintentionally, occur in reports given specific circumstances, existing themes in the journalistic record, and other contexts. Analysis identifies and demonstrates the recurrence of two prominent allegorical themes across reports of the COP30 fire: one attending to victims, harm, and panic and another attending to disruption and failure. Discussion highlights how such incidental allegory—different from deliberately crafted or fully accidental allegory—guides audiences to conceptualize literal events within a web of literary and conceptual contexts and, thus, holds the capacity to frame understandings and future discourse related to climate action. Full article

Recent concerns about disinformation have increasingly centered on AI-generated synthetic media like deepfakes. This study uses online experiments to examine how individuals process and evaluate political deepfake news, which characteristics predict their susceptibility, and the potential cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral effects after exposure. The findings reveal that embedding political deepfake videos in social media newsfeeds can easily deceive or cause uncertainty among news audiences. Political orientation, confirmation bias, and news literacy significantly affect audiences’ skepticism toward social media information, their perceived credibility of deepfake news, and their intention to engage with it. Moreover, familiarity with news issues fully mediates the relationship between news literacy and engagement with deepfake news. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed to highlight the critical issues posed by AI-generated disinformation, which has increasingly affected the creation, distribution, and consumption of media content. Full article

Across Latin America, digital technologies helped cushion some of the pandemic’s worst effects, creating new opportunities that were not equally distributed between men and women. This study analyzed three waves of Latinobarometer data across 17 countries before, during, and after the pandemic to examine gender differences in labor perceptions and digital skills. The findings indicate that women consistently reported higher levels of perceived poverty and greater concern about unemployment than men. To assess the digital labor divide, the study developed a Digital Dexterity Index (DDI) based on social media use and educational attainment. Results indicate that the pandemic accelerated digital skill development for both genders, with statistically significant changes over time. Although women generally scored slightly higher than men on the DDI, patterns varied across countries. The study highlights a paradox: higher digital dexterity among women did not translate into greater confidence or security in the future of work. Despite their stronger digital skills, women expressed greater anxiety about their future labor-market prospects than men. Full article

Over the last few years, TikTok has become one of the most notable social networking apps, allowing users to upload videos with the possibility of gaining popularity. This has given rise to the emergence of influencers native to the platform. While Global North–focused TikTok studies have empirically examined the media economics of this platform in various capacities, emerging markets have experienced a research dearth in this regard. To understand the strategies they employ to monetize, as well as the challenges they face in generating revenue, this study interviewed 23 Nigerian TikTok influencers between the ages of 19 and 26. We find that Nigerian TikTok influencers rely on a mixture of brand partnerships, sponsored promotions, referral systems, cross-platform visibility, collaborative growth strategies, and account-region bypass to generate income within a platform environment that offers limited direct monetization opportunities to creators. The findings further show that influencer labour in the Nigerian context is shaped by unstable payment systems, algorithmic dependence, brand distrust, and the constant pressure to remain visible and relevant. Beyond economic concerns, the study reveals that creators experience emotional strain arising from online harassment, body shaming, and the psychological demands of continuous self-presentation. Full article

This systematic review investigates the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in journalism and media practice from 2020 to 2026. Following PRISMA guidelines, we analysed 121 peer-reviewed articles from Scopus and Web of Science using a multi-method approach that combined qualitative thematic analysis, structural topic modelling (STM), and bibliometric network analysis. Four primary research domains emerged: news production and automation (38.0%), audience perception and content analysis (24.8%), ethical and legal considerations (19.8%), and meta-research and implementation studies (17.4%). Publication output accelerated sharply from 2023 onward, driven by the emergence of large language models and generative AI. The STM analysis confirmed the four-domain structure and revealed that legal-regulatory vocabulary pervades the literature across all categories, indicating a field-wide preoccupation with the institutional implications of AI. Key findings demonstrate that successful AI adoption depends on workflow redesign and human–machine collaboration rather than full automation; that audience evaluations of AI-generated content vary significantly across cultural contexts, with the machine heuristic—originating from Sundar’s MAIN model—playing a central mediating role; and that copyright frameworks for AI-generated news remain contested across jurisdictions. This study develops an integrated theoretical framework that maps directional relationships among the four research domains, identifies cultural context and disclosure practices as key moderators, and generates testable propositions for future investigation. Full article

The rapid proliferation of social media has transformed political communication, public diplomacy, and citizens’ digital attitudes across the MENA region—a context marked by hybrid political systems, intensive disinformation, and accelerating digital transformation. This study examines how social media use and media literacy are associated with five key constructs—institutional trust, trust in media and digital sources, attitudes toward political narratives, attitudes toward digital diplomacy, and security and disinformation perceptions—among 250 citizens of Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Kuwait, alongside generational and educational differences across all constructs. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected via an online questionnaire between January and March 2025 and analyzed through simple linear regression (H₁–H₁₀) and Kruskal–Wallis tests (H₁₁–H₂₄). Twenty-one of twenty-four hypotheses were confirmed. Social media use was a strong negative predictor of institutional trust (β = −0.750, R² = 0.562) and a strong positive predictor of political narrative awareness, digital diplomacy attitudes, and security perceptions; media literacy showed a parallel pattern. Educational level was the strongest differentiating factor in media literacy competencies (χ² = 175.874), far exceeding generational effects. Notably, trust in media and digital sources showed no significant association with either predictor or demographic variable across four independent tests, suggesting that—unlike the other constructs examined—media trust in the MENA region is shaped less by individual competencies or behaviors and more by structural and political factors. These findings support extending formal, curriculum-based media literacy education and point to the need for media trust research grounded in non-Western political contexts. Full article

This study aims to analyze digital transformation in institutions as a structural shift that reshapes the logic of communication, patterns of power, and mechanisms of trust building within organizations. This study is grounded in the assumption that digitalization is no longer limited to the adoption of technical tools but has evolved into an organizational and governance framework driven by algorithms and recommendation platforms, with direct implications for communication practices, levels of transparency, and organizational culture. This study adopts a descriptive–analytical approach based on a critical review of peer-reviewed academic research published from 2019 until the beginning of 2026. To ensure methodological rigor and transparency, the review process follows the PRISMA guidelines. Relevant studies were identified through comprehensive searches of major academic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar), and the final sample contained all scholarly publications that address digital transformation in institutional communication within the specified timeframe. The number of studies that met the conditions amounted to 92 studies and reports. The sample draws on several theoretical frameworks, including technological determinism, communication visibility, diffusion of innovations, and uses and gratifications, thereby enabling a comprehensive examination of the relationship between digital transformation and institutional communication from a closed hierarchical model into an interactive networked system increasingly shaped by algorithmic logics and governance mechanisms that redistribute visibility and influence within institutions. The results suggest that the success of digital transformation is more closely associated with organizational culture and transformational digital leadership than with technical infrastructure alone. Moreover, audiences have become active co-producers of meaning and trust through interaction and user-generated content. In conclusion, digital transparency and organizational communication visibility constitute key foundations of institutional trust, highlighting the need for clear frameworks of digital transformation, particularly in the Arab context. Full article

As violence and professional precarity intensify for journalists, resilience has become a central framework for understanding how journalists continue working under sustained risk. However, journalism studies research has largely conceptualized resilience through hierarchical models that distribute responsibility across bounded levels of authority. This conceptual article offers a critical synthesis of journalism studies research, resilience scholarship, ecological approaches, and public health prevention frameworks to examine how existing models align with contemporary threats toward journalists. We first map prevailing orientations to resilience (e.g., individual, organizational, and institutional) and show how these models can privilege episodic or reactive responses to journalistic harms and obscure gaps in coordinated interventions to mitigate violence. We then advance an ecological reorientation of journalistic resilience grounded in networked ecologies. We propose a three-part framework (individual-in-relation, collective, and networked) that conceptualizes resilience as a relational and cross-institutional capacity. Finally, we introduce public health prevention models as a translational lens for operationalizing ecological resilience as coordinated infrastructure spanning prevention, intervention, and recovery. This framework offers a conceptual foundation for studying and strengthening resilience across contemporary media environments. Full article

The ontological status of journalism in Greece has long been marked by a profound tension between the perception of the field as an innate craft and its institutionalization as an academic discipline. This paper investigates the perceived utility of university-level journalism education and its impact on professional identity within the Greek media landscape. Utilizing a quantitative methodological approach, the study involved the distribution of structured questionnaires to professional journalists in Greece to capture their attitudes toward academic training, press freedom, and contemporary journalistic practices. The findings suggest differentiated perceptions within the professional community, reflecting an ongoing negotiation between practical experience and academic approaches to journalism. Notably, despite the fact that only a small fraction of the surveyed journalists hold academic degrees in journalism, a large proportion of respondents acknowledges the utility of specialized higher education for aspiring professionals entering the field. Furthermore, the study explores how these perceptions correlate with views on press autonomy and ethical challenges, emphasizing consensus on the positive contribution of university education to journalistic practices related to press freedom and editorial independence. However, a persistent “theory-practice gap” remains evident, as respondents identified deficiencies in journalism curricula regarding preparation for practical demands and real-time reporting. Ultimately, the findings reveal strong criticism of the current state of press freedom in Greece, highlighting the need to re-evaluate the role of higher education in strengthening the professional legitimacy and democratic mandate of Greek journalism. Full article