Journalists as a transnational interpretative community

Abstract

Based on a comparative research on newspapers from 13 European countries, this paper explores the concept of journalists as a “transnational interpretative community” (Zelizer, 1993; Traquina, 2002). Conducted by the EU Kids Online network, a two-month media analysis (October-November 2007) was focused on news involving children and the internet. This comparison identifies particularities of national coverage, on the one hand, and shared cross-national narratives, on the one hand, these being particularly visible in the news coverage of two international events covered by almost all papers. A shared culture is therefore visible in the ways journalists frame risks and opportunities experienced by children online, not apart from the scarcity of attention to the communicative rights expressed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.