Caroline James-Garrod

Caroline James-Garrod (PhD in Philosophy, 2023) ‘Pressed for Time: A Study of Digital Journalists’ Ethical and Temporal Conundrums’

This thesis argues digital print journalists experience social and time ethics pressures due to constant responsibilities to stay connected to mobile work-related online communications. It claims this identifies a social phenomenon – cyber time poverty. It examines its research topic by studying original qualitative data collected from survey questionnaires and interviews of 288 working Australian digital print journalists between 2019 and 2020. It interprets its data using textual and discourse analyses and original concept lenses: its Social Time Ethics Framework (STEF) and its Journalism Applied Ethics Scaffold (JAES).

Findings include almost all working digital print journalists (96.4%; n=243) who contributed to its survey are time poor and about 64.9% of respondents meet the definition of cyber time poverty (n=159). When work mobile-communications demands exceed available time, sufferers use various time-saving strategies, most commonly ‘giving less time to others’ including sources, peers and readers, family, friends, and self (69.8%; n=137). Running late is the next most common time-saving strategy, a tactic used by almost 62% of respondents (61.7%, n=121), while almost 50% block communications with potential or current sources, personal or work peers.

Finally, when lacking sufficient time to do ethically good journalism, they are most likely to breach JAES applied ethics ideals by failing to give sources fair opportunity to reply, and/or avoiding or delaying correcting published errors. I conclude digital journalists do, often, suffer cyber time poverty in quests to be morally responsible public interest news reporters, making it typical that sufferers lack opportunity to do ethical journalism. With significant parts of society mistrusting journalists and online information in general, I propose these critical responses: the need to boost digital news literacy; reform online discourse; close the epistemic gap that harms all cyber time poverty sufferers; and prioritise pursuit of original journalism.

Supervisors: Dr Andrew Alexandra, Associate Professor Christopher Cordner