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Undressed Newsroom : The application of visual ethnography in media research

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2014

Abstract

Rapidly changing working conditions in recent years, along with the need to reduce the costs of news production, require journalists to adapt. The initial suggestion of this article was that many of the research methods for analysing journalists' work environments today are no longer sufficient for capturing this ongoing change.

In searching for new approaches to analysis of the journalistic environment, authors decided to apply visual ethnography, a method not yet used in the Czech Republic and not much used in the world beyond. For the pilot study of Czech newsrooms, authors worked with both photographs taken of the journalists involved in our project and photographs taken by our research team (photographs showed both journalists' working conditions and working processes).

They then interviewed the journalists about the photographs and more widely about their working practices and conditions. The article presented the results of the research but also considered the advantages and challenges of the visual ethnographic approach and its implementation in media environments.