Quality in Journalism: Perceptions and Practice in an Indian context

This thesis explores the concept of quality in journalism from an Indian perspective with the aim of identifying its elements and the factors influencing it. It is framed in a mixed methods paradigm and uses ‘surface structures’ and ‘story boxes’ as tools to study the perceptions and practice of quality in Indian journalism. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 Indian newspaper journalists and quantitative content analysis of 108 newspaper pages and 569 news items are used to identify an ideal-practice gap between journalists' perceptions of quality and the evidence of it in news content. The research methods are informed by normative assumptions of quality and based on journalism's democratic role and functions. Findings are derived using the principles of applied thematic analysis to identify core themes and sub-themes in qualitative data and from descriptive statistical analysis of quantitative data. This thesis identifies the core elements of quality, which are closely linked to and influenced by the shared professional values of Indian journalists, such as autonomy, objectivity and public service. The content analysis shows little evidence of idealistic perceptions of quality, with notions of quality at the journalists' level converging with content only in four minor aspects and differing in the six critical aspects of accuracy, balance, context, good writing and the informative and investigative roles of journalism.