Worlds of Journalism Study
The Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) is an international project founded to regularly assess and compare the state of journalism throughout the world. The primary objective of the study is to generate comparative research aimed at helping journalism researchers, practitioners, media managers, and policy makers to better understand worldviews and changes that are taking place in the professional orientations of journalists, the conditions and limitations under which journalists operate, and the functions of journalism in a changing world. The WJS brings together efforts of researchers from around the world, aspiring to the highest standards of scientific collaboration and collective publishing. The WJS has become a driving force behind the further internationalization of comparative journalism scholarship. This entry provides an overview of the Worlds of Journalism Study, including its history, organizational structure, and key findings.
History
The Worlds of Journalism Study was founded in 2011, growing out of a comparative pilot study of journalists initiated by Thomas Hanitzsch in 2006 and carried out between 2007 and 2011. By its second wave, the project brought together researchers from 67 countries and surveyed more than 27,500 journalists; its third wave, conducted in 2021â2025, includes data from 75 countries. During the second wave of the study, participating researchers interviewed over 27,500 journalists between 2012 and 2016 based on a common methodological framework. The questionnaire elicited views of journalists on several issues journalists and news organizations commonly face, such as journalismâs place in society, professional ethics, editorial autonomy, influences on news making, journalistsâ trust in public institutions, and the transformation of journalism in the broadest sense.
Unprecedented in communication and media research, the 2012â2016 wave studied 67 countries, which together cover almost three quarters of the worldâs population. In terms of country coverage, the study included a vast diversity of geographic contexts, political and media systems, and societies with different levels of socioeconomic development. The WJS has also broken new ground in terms of its comparative design and the way the study is organized, coordinated, and orchestrated.
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The initial pilot project, which later evolved into the WJS, was created in 2006 in response to the important work of other comparative journalism researchers. An important starting point was David Weaverâs 1998 initial collection of journalist surveys from 21 countries and regionsâthe Global Journalist. A key point of criticism of previous studies was related to the absence of a strict comparative design. Up to that point, most researchers compared different populations of journalists at different points in time, using a variety of interview methods and different questionnaires. Sample sizes also varied widely between countries. Weaver later cautioned that cross-national comparisons of journalists were difficult when studies varied substantially in populations, timing, methods, questionnaires, and sample sizes.
Partly inspired by the work of Thomas Patterson and Wolfgang Donsbach in 1996, who did one of the first systematic comparisons of journalists from multiple countries, the WJS received support from the German Research Foundation to carry out a comparative survey of journalists in Brazil, China, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, and Uganda. Over the following 4 years, the project developed into a collaborative effort that ultimately included 21 countries, covering all inhabited continents and a wide array of political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. Covering that many countries was possible after the project received another grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation in 2007.
Since the first publications in 2007, the project has gained significant visibility in comparative journalism studies and beyond. Major findings were published in leading journals of the field, making the study a showcase for collaborative research. In 2011, when it became clear that the project would continue to grow and accommodate an even larger number of countries, the participating researchers officially founded the WJS as a semi-institutional framework with a mission statement, statutes, and a governing body, the WJS Executive Committee.
To a considerable extent, the inception of the WJS was inspired by, and the study itself modeled after, the World Values Survey, a worldwide network of social scientists studying social values in almost 100 countries. Collaborators in the WJS are entitled to receive the full comparative data set in return for contributing data on their own countries.The consolidated dataset remains under embargo for three years after the designated fieldwork period; for WJS3, the files are scheduled to become publicly available on April 17, 2028.
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Organization
The Worlds of Journalism Study is steered by an executive committee consisting of regional coordinators for six world regions: sub-Saharan Africa; Asia; Central and Eastern Europe; Latin America/the Caribbean; Middle East and North Africa; and Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The executive committee was created to provide leadership and strategic planning for the project, recruit new members, organize meetings and workshops, promote publications and dissemination of results, and raise central funding and assist members in their fund-raising efforts. The executive committee is assisted by a scientific advisory committee, which consists of leading scholars in the area of comparative journalism, and a statistical advisory committee, which, since 2015, provides help and support to members of the network in matters related to data analysis and statistical procedures.
To make sure the data collected by and disseminated through the WJS meet the highest standards in terms of quality and integrity, the data management was centralized at the WJS Center (based at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich). As a service to the whole research network, the WJS Center carefully reviewed all country data sets for problems, clarified potential issues with local teams, and turned all data files into a standardized format for dissemination to the whole group.
A strength of the WJS is the democratic legitimacy of the scholars steering the study. The regional coordinators forming the executive committee are voted into office by the members of the network during a General Assembly meeting. During elections, each member country has equal weight in the voting process. By giving all participating researchers a say in all aspects of the study, from the design and planning of research to the publication of results, the WJS tries to avoid any undue impression that it is governed by the strategy that James Halloran famously identified as âresearch imperialismâ. By emphasizing inclusiveness over exclusiveness, the WJS sees theoretical, methodological, and cultural diversity as an advantage rather than a threat.
Comparative Analysis and Key Findings
Besides generating cross-national evidence on the state of journalism around the world, a key value of the Worlds of Journalism Study is that it provides a platform for collaborative and comparative research as well as for the exchange of research skills and expertise across nations. Comparative research can help calibrate our understanding of what journalism is, or could be, through cross-national contextualization. The key findings from the WJS suggest that the universe of newsmaking is populated with different life forms of journalism, which together produce a fascinating multiplicity of journalistic cultures articulated in many different ways across national borders, geographic regions, political systems, levels of socioeconomic development, and cultural value systems. It reminds international scholars that ideas of what constitutes journalism are deeply embedded in the various cultural histories and contextualities, which have led to differential developments in different parts of the world. It follows that the extent to which a given journalistic culture has adverse consequences for society is a question that each society has to answer in its own terms. Ultimately, the WJS challenges a western intellectual imperialism that tends to normalize the journalistic paradigm of the global North, to which journalistic cultures outside the Western core are often fitted in normative, conceptual, and empirical terms.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.