The aim of our project is to explore the role performance of journalists. Journalistshave ideals in form of role conceptions: They see themselves, for instance, either as neutral disseminators, investigators, analysts, promoters or entertainers. However, they are likely to make compromises in their everyday work due to personal, financial, political or other restrictions. As a consequence of these restrictions, role conceptions do not necessarily unfold in media content. Thus, in order to investigate role performance, we connect journalists’ output back to their role conceptions. Therefore a content analysis of newspapers has been performed, based on operationalization models
recently developed in journalism studies, in order to reveal references to particular role conceptions in news content. At the same time a standardized online survey has been conducted among the authors of the analyzed articles in order to investigate their own conceptions of their professional role and of their level of autonomy. This combination of methods allows comparisons between the role conceptions as seen by the journalists and the conceptions which are traceable in their articles, i.e. in their role performance.
The project concentrates on journalists and their work in Switzerland but is part of a bigger international project (see http://www.journalisticperformance.org). Researchers in 20 other countries around the globe are in the process of conducting equivalent analyses of their national print media, using the same codebook and questionnaire. Findings from the Swiss study can thus be discussed along with the results from the other participating countries in publications dealing with the international comparison of journalistic role performance. The special situation of Switzerland as a multilingual and multicultural country offers the opportunity for more in-depth analyses about common grounds and differences of journalistic role performance in different cultural entities within the same political system.
