Journalism in Ruins: Interrogating Norms of 'Independent' Journalism
Thematic Issue for Communication, Culture & Critique (2026/27)
Abstract Deadline (500 words): December 15, 2025
Complete Manuscript Deadline (7,000-8,000 words): June 15, 2026
Co-editors: Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths, University of London), Srirupa Roy (University of Göttingen)
Rationale
This thematic issue critically interrogates the normative ideal of an independent journalism that drives contemporary laments for a "journalism in ruins." Normative liberal understandings of news have often declared independent news production as the holy grail of media freedom. A free media is in turn associated with a healthy democracy. Independence of news organizations from government pressure or interference in news production is considered vital to democracy's well-being. Independence of journalism from wealthy sponsors or corporate pressures is seen as key to its integrity. In turn, independent news media are hailed as the ultimate democratic horizon (Fenton, 2025). An entrenched belief of Anglo/Western liberal media systems, the norm of 'independent journalism' also exerts a powerful influence across much of the postcolonial South (Mustvairo et al., 2021).
Yet, the mythology of a 'free' news media sustaining 'liberal' democracy has long since been exposed as exhausted at best, and as absolving of truths at worst. Corruption and compromise have come to the fore as political and commercial interests merge and expand. It is now beyond doubt that a media and tech system that may have many platforms and points of distribution but is dominated by a few, powerful voices and a news media increasingly run to secure financial reward or political influence is highly unlikely to foster greater democratic participation in political culture (Pickard, 2019). Indeed, journalism is arguably now more often subject to fear and favor than without it despite claims to the contrary. As liberal democracy flounders, as legal frameworks fail to deliver journalistic protections, as free expression becomes the preserve of the powerful, as good governance gives way to commercialism at all costs and mechanisms of accountability seek to preserve privilege rather than uphold standards, then the ideal of independent journalism flails too.
So why do many scholars and journalists alike continue to cling to terms that have been hollowed out of all meaning? How has the notion of 'independent journalism' come to stand in for power dependencies that reify liberal ideas of journalism? What exactly is meant by independence, both in normative and also practical terms? How has a stress on 'independent journalism' served to disguise and turn away from power relations that (will always) exist and a geopolitics articulated in terms of liberal values that do no more than perpetuate journalism's complicities, its blind spots and its silences? And why, despite a world scarred by war, climate catastrophe, gross inequalities, the surge of the far-right and global pandemics, do Western concepts and practices of liberal democracy and journalism's role in upholding them, continue to be the organizing premise of much journalism scholarship around the globe?
These concerns are even more pertinent as mainstream news organizations around the world face multiple challenges from both state and commercial forces, resulting in their closure and constriction and as attacks on journalists increase. As calls of fake news, mis/disinformation abound, so public trust in journalism has plummeted in many places. Yet in the face of such existential challenges, the mainstream journalistic vanguard reaches once more for a return to 'core values' aligned with liberalism's promises to expose the truth with little regard for the systemic forces (of commercialism, marketisation, elite capture, and political entanglement) that have evaded such truth-making claims from being realized. As journalism retreats to its safe default space of hegemonic values and claimed conformity of standards such as 'objectivity', 'impartiality' and 'independence' so it fails to acknowledge the structures and practices that ensure these spaces are too often distorted by money, power and privilege and hence are also heavily classed, gendered and racialized. How has this 'high modernism' (Hallin, 2006) of journalism managed to prevail and largely ignore critiques of power relations and geopolitical context and what does it mean for a journalism in ruins?
This Thematic Issue seeks to interrogate these concerns: Crucially, it asks, what if the pilgrimage for journalistic independence is treading the wrong path, directing us away from interrogating power relations that exist and blinkering our visions of what journalism could become? If news and journalism are always situated in relation to and interact with other organizations, institutions, professions and people, would we be better placed to interrogate the relations of power therein and establish the levels of interdependence that exist in order to determine how these interdependencies can be recognized, better understood and managed? How can journalism studies move beyond liberal conceptions of the public sphere beholden to liberal interpretations of democracy to reimagine a journalism fit for what democracy could become?
The problem lies with our social and political systems as much as it does with the sorts of media and journalism that too often serve to sustain them (Bishara, 2012). Rather than seeking to patch up systems that have clearly failed we should be reconceptualizing what democracy and democratic media might entail (Roy, 2024; Yesil, 2024). The stakes are high. If we continue to pander to Western normative ideals of journalism then we accept the mainstream media's premise that there is no alternative to perpetual war and environmental disaster. We signal acceptance that societies will be made more secure through militarism and that economic growth will follow from subsidies to arms industries. From the ruins of mainstream journalism what could be reborn?
We invite papers that address this theme through different lenses and in different theoretical, empirical and methodological ways and seek to challenge the reification of what journalism has become and to think through what news and journalism reimagined could be.
Structure • An introductory article by the thematic issue editors: Natalie Fenton and Srirupa Roy
• A set of 8-10 full-length research articles
We invite original articles addressing any of the themes below, of between 7,000 and 8,000 words: • Critiques of settlements and unsettlements of the dominant normative model of journalism and its relationship to liberal notions of democracy in different national and regional contexts (e.g. the role of the state/security requirements in contemporary journalism relating to foreign policy reporting)
• Explications of the norm of independent journalism: what it means, how it has persisted, and where it has been challenged.
• Developments of critical theoretical frameworks able to challenge the reification of dominant hegemonic forms of mainstream journalism and the limits of liberal democratic norms.
• Articles that foreground new and emergent forms of journalism and how they relate to counter-hegemonic conceptualisations of journalism such as solidarity journalism, solutions journalism, peace journalism, participatory journalism, journalism of attachment, radical democratic forms of queer, Black, anti-colonial and feminist journalism, etc.
Abstract Deadline (500 words): December 15, 2025
Complete Manuscript Deadline (7000-8000 words): June 15, 2026
Submission Instructions
Please submit a 500-word abstract as well as a short (2-page) CV by December 15, 2025to the co-editors of the thematic issue at: journalisminruins@gmail.com
Authors whose abstracts are selected will be notified by January 15, 2026 and asked to submit complete manuscripts (7000-8000 words, including notes and references), in Word format, following the 6th APA style, by June 15, 2026.Acceptance of the abstracts does not guarantee publication of the papers, which will be subject to double-blind peer review. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the co-editors at the email address above.
Thematic Issue Editors
Natalie Fenton is a Professor of Media and Communications and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published widely on issues relating to civil society, radical politics, digital media, news and journalism and is particularly interested in issues of political transformation, radical media reform and re-imagining democracy. She was Vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the campaign group Hacked Off for seven years and is a founding member and former Chair of the UK Media Reform Coalition. She is also on the Board of Declassified UK, an investigative journalism website for in-depth analysis on British foreign policy. Her books include New Media: Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age (Sage, 2010); Misunderstanding the Internet 2nd Edition co-authored with James Curran and Des Freedman (Routledge, 2016); Digital, Political, Radical (2016, Polity); Media, Democracy and Social Change: Re-imagining Political Communications co-authored with Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany and Aeron Davis (Sage, 2020), The Media Manifesto co-authored with Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik (Polity, 2020); and Democratic Delusions: How media hollow out democracy and what we can do about it (Polity, 2025).
Srirupa Roy is Professor and Chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen and founding co-director of ICAS:MP, an India-Germany research initiative of the German ministry of education and research (BMBF). Her research and writing is on democratic transformation, nationalism, the global right, and media, and she is particularly interested in the generalized theoretical potentials of research questions that are asked from the empirical contexts of the postcolonial and global South. Her books include The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024), Saffron Republic: Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India (co-edited with Thomas Blom Hansen, Cambridge University Press, 2022), Visualizing Secularism and Religion (co-edited with Alev Cinar and Maha Yahya, University of Michigan Press, 2012), Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2007), Violence and Democracy in India (co-edited with Amrita Basu, Seagull 2006). She has curated and co-produced The Long Emergency, a digital humanities project on media and democracy in India, hosted by the Democracy Archive of ICAS:MP. Her current research is on the civilizationist politics of the global right-a collaborative project with members of The Civilizationalism Project, an international research network that she co-convenes with Thomas Hansen.