Between Public Expectations and the Structural Challenges Facing Journalism

From 29 June to 3 July 2026, the University of Galway, Ireland, hosted the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), titled Peripheries and Connections: Media, Communication and Transformation.

At the conference, Tjaša Turnšek presented the paper Contesting the Democratic Watchdog Role: The Expectation–Evaluation Gap Between Citizens and Journalists in Slovenia, co-authored with Lori Šramel Čebular and Brankica Petković as part of the European research project MeDeMAP. The paper examines the gap between citizens’ expectations and journalists’ assessments of journalism’s democratic role, analysing how both groups understand the conditions necessary for journalism to fulfil its democratic function.

The paper draws on focus groups with citizens and semi-structured interviews with journalists and editors from a range of Slovenian media outlets. It finds that, despite declining trust in the media, citizens continue to expect journalism to provide independent, reliable and accountable reporting while fulfilling its watchdog role. At the same time, both citizens and journalists identify similar structural obstacles that hinder the fulfilment of these expectations, including media ownership concentration, commercialisation, political pressures and increasingly difficult conditions for producing high-quality journalism.

The findings suggest that the contemporary crisis of journalism should not be understood solely as a crisis of public trust, but also as a crisis of the structural conditions that enable journalism to perform its democratic role. Strengthening journalism’s democratic function therefore requires not only rebuilding public trust, but also ensuring the institutional conditions necessary for independent, high-quality and accountable journalism.