Lea Hellmueller
Lea Hellmueller is an assistant professor at the Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston and also worked as a visiting professor at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) in 2017. In fall 2019, she was a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford in the U.K. She currently serves on the editorial board of Journalism Practice and on the editorial advisory board of International Communication Gazette.
Her research in journalism studies encompasses several research projects on digital news innovations from a global perspective; political polarization on digital news platforms; right-wing populist journalism as transnational phenomena; media & terrorism. She is the author of The Washington, DC Media Corps in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor of Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Contexts, and Methods (Routledge, 2017). She is a former Fulbright researcher, recipient of two Swiss NSF fellowships, and her research has been recognized with top paper awards by the International Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) as well as by the Global Communication and Social Change Division at the International Communication Association (ICA) and her dissertation project won best student paper in Intercultural Communication at the World Communication Association conference.
Lea Hellmueller grew up in Switzerland and prior to joining academia, she worked as a journalist in Switzerland, South Africa and the United States.
Supervisors: Dr. Tim P. Vos
Address: leahellmueller@uh.edu
lea.hellmueller@fulbrightmail.org
Her research in journalism studies encompasses several research projects on digital news innovations from a global perspective; political polarization on digital news platforms; right-wing populist journalism as transnational phenomena; media & terrorism. She is the author of The Washington, DC Media Corps in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor of Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Contexts, and Methods (Routledge, 2017). She is a former Fulbright researcher, recipient of two Swiss NSF fellowships, and her research has been recognized with top paper awards by the International Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) as well as by the Global Communication and Social Change Division at the International Communication Association (ICA) and her dissertation project won best student paper in Intercultural Communication at the World Communication Association conference.
Lea Hellmueller grew up in Switzerland and prior to joining academia, she worked as a journalist in Switzerland, South Africa and the United States.
Supervisors: Dr. Tim P. Vos
Address: leahellmueller@uh.edu
lea.hellmueller@fulbrightmail.org
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Papers by Lea Hellmueller
The decline in the number of U.S. mainstream media has led to a sharp growth among special niche media and a significant jump in foreign media now represented in Washington. DC has emerged as a transnational journalism space and an increasing number of journalists from around the globe, carrying with them their journalistic culture, compete for political sources in DC and gather news alongside U.S. journalists. This book provides an empirical answer to the question on how globalization has affected the relationship between sources and reporters in DC, based on data collected in the capital. The book provides new knowledge on the way journalists from around the globe gather news in such transnational spaces in a 21st century, competing for source access, exclusive information, and trust of political sources. It theorizes how evolving journalistic practices in a transnational environment challenge our theoretical assumptions of journalism culture and proposes three elements to provide a theoretical framework for future studies on transnational journalism cultures.
This chapter presents a longitudinal study of CNN’s iReport to examine the adoption of participatory journalism in mainstream media. It investigates in what context audience participation was encouraged and integrated into CNN, and how audience participation may shift the journalist-audience relationship over time. Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (1986), and in particular his concept of cultural capital, is applied to explain the institutionalizing process of participatory journalism in the case of CNN. The chapter departs from a dichotomous classification of journalism as either professional or nonprofessional, a major drawback seen in previous literature that misses the dynamic and hybrid character of a networked journalistic culture (Waisbord, 2013)
This chapter starts with a discussion of the concept journalistic role performance. We then introduce an approach to examine how journalistic role performance can potentially shape the media agenda. To identify media agenda patterns, we draw upon the third level of agenda setting theory, the Network Agenda Setting (NAS) Model (Guo & McCombs, 2011a-b; Guo, 2013), to examine the co-existence of different journalistic roles as reflected in the U.S. and Chilean news coverage.
Meanwhile, freelance journalists’ working conditions are understudied. The rising numbers of entrepreneurial journalism and freelance journalism question the normative roles as well as working conditions that can impact the importance and success of global journalism to build a global community. We combine qualitative methods with quantitative methods to address those questions. Because the changes are multi-faceted, we start with a qualitative approach of the meanings freelance journalists and editors of those foreign starts up assign to their own global roles, global norms and global practices (as proposed by Singer, 2015). Based on our conceptualizing work of global journalism, we examine the practices and stories produced by those same freelancers and editors.
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