A Topic Modelling of Journalism Ethics Research

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Yoonmo Sang, whose focus is on journalism ethics research over the past decades. Such research is critical especially in an increasingly challenged news media landscape. The present study examined some 1,170 journalism ethics studies published from 2013 to 2022 in Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, and Journalism Studies, drawing on LDA topic modelling to identify the underlying themes in these articles.

The annual volume of articles on journalism ethics grew substantially over this time. Early on, professional practices were a key theme; trust emerged as a key term towards the end of the period. Overall major themes were news-making practices, journalistic role changes, audience perceptions of news, news industry and professional journalism, and others. Predictably, these were unevenly distributed across journals included in the study, given those journals’ diverging areas of focus.