How journalists survive challenging reporting environments: The role of journalistic risk culture

Many journalists around the world work in challenging and dangerous environments, and a bourgeoning body of research has focused on how journalists in these environments deal with various kinds of risks. This talk proposes that we can employ the notion of risk culture to conceptualize how journalists develop shared ideas regarding how to identify, assess, manage, and decide whether and when to take how much risks. It uses the case of liberal journalists in contemporary Hong Kong, a city undergoing a process of autocratization since 2020, to illustrate how journalistic risk cultures emerged. It shows how the notion of journalistic risk cultures offers a broader context for understanding more specific media phenomena (such as self-censorship) and helps explain journalistic resilience despite the proliferation of legal and political risks.

Bio: Francis L. F. Lee is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Pro-democracy contention in Hong Kong: Relational dynamics between the Umbrella Movement and anti-extradition protests (SUNY, 2025), Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and processes of collective remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), and Media and protest logics in the digital era (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is currently the Chief Editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and an Elected Fellow of the International Communication Association. 

This event is organized in cooperation with the Graduate School in Asian Studies