[Commlist] CfP Special Issue Journalism Studies: Relational Perspectives in Journalism (Studies)

*Special Issue: Journalism Studies*
*Call for Papers: Relational Perspectives in Journalism (Studies)*

*Guest editors*
Julius Reimer, Bernadette Uth, and Sandra Banjac

Relationships have always played a central role in journalism. In 
today’s journalism, the importance of relationships has increased 
further as our “hybrid media environment” (Chadwick, 2017) is shaped by 
social networks and platforms that are built around and simultaneously 
alter connections. As a result, journalism studies is continually 
grappling with the question of how the journalistic field, actors, 
practices, and content are embedded in a network of relationships (Uth 
et al., 2025).

Thus far, studies have mainly focused on the relationship between 
journalism and its audiences, e.g., investigating communities, trust, 
and loyalty through “relational work” (Koliska et al., 2023) or 
“relational labor” (Bossio & Holton, 2021). Other works have shown how 
social relationships in journalism are characterized by mutual 
perceptions and expectations (Heise et al., 2014; Wilhelm et al., 2021) 
and “relationship practices” (Loosen et al., 2025: 6) that are 
constantly evolving with/in a changing media environment. Further, 
scholars have analyzed journalists’ changing relationships to sources 
and how ‘dancing’ this “tango” (Gans, 1979) demands special 
“interactional expertise” (Reich, 2012). A third strand of relationship 
research focuses on journalists’ “boundary work” (Carlson, 2019) in 
relation to peripheral actors (Hanusch & Löhmann, 2023; Maares & 
Hanusch, 2023) that play an increasingly important role in journalism. 
Here, research investigated either the perspectives of journalists (Chua 
& Duffy, 2019) or peripheral actors (Bélair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018; 
Eldridge, 2018; Schapals, 2022, for exceptions see Löhmann et al., 2025 
and Lewis and Usher (2014, 2016) on journalists and programmers).

While there is ample research focusing on how journalists perceive their 
various relationships, this short overview exemplifies a major 
limitation: these relationships are usually explored from the 
perspective of only one of the relationship partners. We argue that this 
results in an incomplete and potentially biased picture as relationships 
can only be fully grasped by taking into account “both sides of the 
story” (Schmidt & Loosen, 2015). Their very character arises from ‘the 
in-between’ (Seyfert, 2019, own translation). In the relationship 
between journalists and peripheral actors, for instance, it is through a 
relational approach—by exploring how the boundary work of both parties 
‘clashes’ and plays out—that we can ascertain the actual outcome of 
boundary work: the extent to which journalists succeed in 
(re-)establishing their profession’s boundaries in the digital realm, 
and the extent to which contesters succeed in challenging and changing 
them. Actual “relationship studies” (Loosen et al., 2025: 22) that 
investigate and compare both journalists’ perspectives and those of 
their relationship partners (e.g., audiences, sources, media managers) 
are still scarce. This is particularly true if we look beyond the 
audience: while a growing amount of scholarship investigates both 
journalists and their recipients (e.g., Abdenour et al., 2021; Banjac & 
Hanusch, 2022; Loosen et al., 2020; Mellado & Gajardo, 2024; Riedl & 
Eberl, 2022), there is much less research on journalists and their 
counterparts in other relationships, for instance, politicians (e.g., 
Fawzi et al., 2026; Hoffjann & Seeber, 2021; Larsen & Naper, 2022; 
Ólafsson, 2024), scientists (e.g., Post, 2015), or media executives 
(e.g., Laor, 2020). Likewise, scholars rarely employ concepts that 
magnify the in-between processes, e.g., boundary objects (Star, 2010) or 
trading zones (Galison, 1997).

Given the relevance of relationships in journalism, we argue that 
explicitly relational approaches are crucial for understanding 
journalism. The proposed special issue provides a space for expanding 
conceptual, empirical, and methodological relational approaches and for 
reflecting on their unique potential. In so doing, the special issue 
consolidates a strand of relational research in journalism studies thus 
advancing the field. To examine the often under-explored quality of 
journalists’ diverse relationships, we can look to the three 
components—trust, satisfaction, and commitment—that have been central to 
understanding different types of relationships—from child-parent to 
customer-brand relationships—across a variety of academic fields and 
disciplines (Athanasopoulou, 2009; Ziegele, 2025). Besides evaluating 
quality itself, submissions could engage with the factors that influence 
it and how it, in turn, affects journalism and its performance. Further, 
we encourage submissions to analyze power relations within journalistic 
relationships, in particular, shifts within those relationships induced 
by the changing, networked media environment.

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

* The exploration of journalism’s diverse relationships from more than 
one perspective, ideally analyzing all sides of these relationships, 
including:

      * relationships between journalism & actors outside newsrooms, 
e.g., audience, other newsrooms, freelancers, service providers, 
peripheral actors (influencers, newsfluencers, alternative media), 
representatives of other fields (e.g., politics, science, PR);

      * (changing) relationships within newsrooms, e.g. to colleagues, 
superiors, programmers, infographic designers, marketing departments;

* relational theoretical and conceptual approaches for journalism 
research centering around such relationship analyses, e.g., relational 
sociology, trading zones and boundary objects, relational work, social 
positioning theory, identity and practices;

* relational method(ologie)s to conduct such studies, e.g., relationship 
studies comparing relational imaginaries and perspectives, relational 
content analyses, innovative and creative methods for relational research.

We explicitly encourage scholars to engage in relationships themselves, 
i.e., to team up and combine data or conceptual knowledge on different 
sides of a relationship, e.g., compare data on journalists’ views on 
media managers and media managers’ view on journalists.

*Link to CfP*
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/relational-perspectives/

*Contact*
j.reimer[at]leibniz-hbi[dot]de

*Submission Instructions*
We invite authors to submit a full draft manuscript of 8,000 words 
(inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, 
endnotes). Full manuscripts must be submitted via ScholarOne, selecting 
this Special Issue (“Relational Perspectives in Journalism (Studies)”) 
on the submission system. The cover letter accompanying the submission 
(max. 400 words) should clearly address the relevance of the proposed 
article to the theme of the special issue. Please follow the 
instructions on the journal homepage for formatting your paper. 
Manuscripts will undergo desk and double-blind peer review. The selected 
articles will be published as they finish the review and publication 
process but will appear as a collection once all articles are completed. 
We expect the special issue to be completed by summer 2027. There are no 
publishing costs for the authors.

*Deadline for submissions*
1 November 2026

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