Sara Torsner & Jackie Harrison

Dr Sara Torsner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) which is hosted within the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She works as the coordinator of the UNESCO Chair on Media Freedom, Journalism Safety and the Issue of Impunity. Sara is also the coordinator of the Journalism Safety Research Network which is hosted by CFOM. Sara’s research focuses on understanding risk to journalism via restrictions and attacks on the communicative capacity of journalism and the consequences of such constraints for collective associative civil life. Jackie Harrison is UNESCO Chair in Media Freedom, Journalism Safety and the Issue of Impunity, Professor of Public Communication and Chair and co-founder of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) at the University of Sheffield, UK. She researches and publishes in three inter-related areas. The way the news mediates ‘our’ collective invariant civil concerns of identity, legitimacy and risk and correspondingly how the news provides different and intelligible versions of both civil and anti-civil accounts of these concerns; The civil architecture & culture of the news; the difference between the ideal and normative structures of news and its constituent features, the different cultures of production and ultimately how the news deals with issues of trust and truthfulness, accuracy and sincerity, the use of the objective method and the investigative efforts it makes and the civil diminishment of the factual mass media through violence, intimidation, the use impunity, the creation of spaces of exception and self censorship and attacks on editorial standards and integrity.