Managerial and Economic Factors Affecting Science Journalism in Qatar: Applying the Hierarchy of Influences Model

Introduction

The relationship between science and public understanding is mediated, in large part, through journalism. As societies face complex challenges—from climate change and pandemic preparedness to artificial intelligence governance and biotechnological innovation—the capacity of news organizations to produce accurate, contextually rich, and timely science reporting becomes increasingly consequential. Science journalism operates at the intersection of competing pressures: the technical demands of specialized knowledge domains, the commercial imperatives of media markets, and the editorial logics of news production (Rensberger, 2009; Fahy & Nisbet, 2011).

This article applies the Hierarchy of Influences (HoI) model proposed by Pamela Shoemaker and Steven Reese (1996; 2014) to analyze findings from a 2021-2022 study of science journalism in Qatar. We seek to extend the model by focusing on media management to center attention on stakeholders' corresponding and contradictory interests within and across the five levels of analysis using the model. We believe analysis using the model benefits from consideration of motivations that drive influences. We go beyond applying the HoI descriptively by incorporating situated interests as an intersection of motivations and concerns, drawing on the work of Renninger and Hidi (2015). We examine their interaction across the five interdependent levels of the HoI model: individual, routines, organization, external institutions, and the social system.

The findings indicate editorial decisions about science coverage in Qatar are keyed to two essential pressures: (1) economic constraints caused by declining audiences that account for dwindling advertising and subscription revenues which is a concern more or less everywhere (Picard 2016; Nielsen 2019), and (2) political expectations for news coverage that encourage prioritizing official sources, event-based reporting, and editorial risk-avoidance due to dependency relations with governing authorities. The latter is not unique to Qatar (e.g., Dragomir and Söderström 2022; Hallin and Mancini 2004).

Nguyen and Tran (2019) conducted extensive research on science journalism in the Global South and documented challenges that can be summarized as five recurring constraints: an overreliance on sources in the Global North; the marginal status of domestic science news; reporting that lacks critical analysis and sufficient contextualization; political influences on editorial policies and practices that affect science journalism (and news production more generally); and weak collaboration between scientists and journalists. As financial resources tighten and readership declines, news outlets in many countries increasingly rely on churnalism, the routine of publishing minimally edited press releases as news (Harcup 2004; Davies 2008). The practice reduces costs but erodes journalistic distinctiveness (Jackson and Moloney 2015). Our interviewees in Qatar described churnalism as a default routine for publishing news across genres, including science.

The Qatar press developed late and remains small, with titles typically owned and/or overseen by elites with close ties to the ruling family (Galal 2021). Of the eight newspapers in Qatar, all based in Doha, two are online-only: Al Arab (launched in 1972 then relaunched only online in 2007) and Doha News (established in 2009, English-only). The other six newspapers are three broadsheets with sister editions in Arabic and English: Al Raya and Gulf Times, Al Sharq and The Peninsula, and Al Watan and Qatar Tribune. These titles are linked with members of the royal family (Galal 2021, 137). For our study, we analyzed the six print newspapers—three in English and three in Arabic.

The management structure of Qatar newsrooms is hierarchical. While not unusual, in Qatar the senior editorial roles are reserved for nationals while the majority of journalists are expatriates, largely from the Global South (Kirat 2016). Although formal guarantees of press freedom are codified, legal ambiguity and bureaucratic gatekeeping produce a cautious newsroom culture in which official invitations, events, and press releases underlie the coverage routine. Within this ecosystem, newspaper editors balance audience expectations, advertisers' interests, and the rules and preferences of authorities under conditions that prioritize financial considerations and political sensitivities. This case illuminates macro-level forces in the social system of the HoI model while revealing micro-level tactics that editors and reporters use at the individual level to reconcile self-censorship with professional norms at the organization and routine levels. Here we address three linked questions:

RQ1. How do political and economic considerations shape editorial decision-making about science journalism in Qatar when analyzed through the HoI framework?

RQ2. How do corresponding and contradictory interests manifest across HoI levels, and with what consequences for routines (such as churnalism, the allocation of resources and managing risk)?

RQ3. What empirical evidence supports reconceptualizing news content as multimarket goods in Qatar, and what implications does this have for research in the field of media management and economics?

This article draws on semi-structured interviews with fifteen journalists and editors working for Qatar-based news outlets, mostly newspapers, as part of a broader research project that included content analysis of local news coverage (N=429), a Delphi panel with local scientists, and a series of focus groups with important population segments. We focus on the interviews to analyze how interests manifest across HoI levels and how related dynamics shape science coverage. A more comprehensive treatment of research results has been published elsewhere (Mohsin, Nguyen, and Lowe 2025). Access constraints and the small size of the Qatar market necessitated using a convenience sample and snowballing technique for the interviews.

In our analysis, we found that editor decision-making in Qatar newsrooms reflects the politics and power paradigm for strategic decision making (SDM) that best captures the challenge of balancing between stakeholders with overlapping and contrary interests keyed to variation in motivations (drawing on Eisenhardt and Zbaracki 1992). The task of strategic decision-making is about both the reasoning of choices and how a decision has been negotiated. What is feasible is usually more important than what is optimal. In this paradigm, "individuals may share some goals such as the welfare of the firm, [but] they also have conflicts … that arise from different bets on the shape of the future, biases induced by position within the organization, and clashes in personal ambitions and interests" (23). Every organization is political in practice, if not identity.

The findings generate fresh insight on the nature of news content and shed light on how editors make decisions about news production in a hybrid regime—a term used to describe a state that is autocratic but exhibits variable democratic aspects. Based on our findings, we think the context encourages reconceptualizing the concept of media products as 'dual market goods' which focuses on balancing the interest of audiences and advertisers in commercial media firms to multimarket goods in contexts where authorities act as a third influential stakeholder. In our view, 'multimarket goods' usefully captures the persistent, often complex challenge of balancing the interests of audiences, advertisers, and authorities, which can correspond (e.g., celebrating national R&D achievements) or contradict (e.g., critical coverage of sensitive scientific topics) depending on the issue, timing, and perceived risk.

In the following sections, we explain the theoretical framework, describe the methods and analytic procedures, present findings mapped to HoI levels highlighting cross-level interest dynamics, demonstrate the usefulness of the multimarket goods concept, and conclude with a discussion of implications and limitations.

The Hierarchy of Influences model

Shoemaker and Reese (1996) developed a social constructivist perspective on content production that encourages investigating influences across five interdependent levels of analysis. Many influences are ingrained in individuals via professional socialization in varying sociocultural contexts. We find the HoI model useful for improved understandings of why media makers and managers produce the content they distribute. The initial description of the model had inconsistencies that Shoemaker and Reese addressed in a 2014 update. They initially characterized the levels as a continuum, which does not imply a hierarchical structure. In the 2014 edition of Mediating the Message, they portray the model as an integrated system of levels or layers, with the two terms used interchangeably. Here, we use levels. Reese described the levels "as a set of concentric circles" with the individual at the core (Reese 2019). However described, the essential point has been consistent: "What happens at the lower levels is affected by, even to a large extent determined by, what happens at higher levels" (Shoemaker and Reese 1996, 9).

The shading of levels spans from the individual level at the center (unshaded) to the organization where routines operationalize strategy and tactics, to the external environment where contextual forces and the social system exert pressures on the organization and individual. The dotted lines that separate levels suggest the porous nature of their interactions and dependencies. Corresponding and contradictory interests span the five levels and influence how individual professionals in different roles and positions interpret interests when decision-making has strategic implications. Decisions that court a degree of risk that matters for the firm's and/or the individual's future situation may be considered strategic. The individual has agency that is affected by external actors that the 1996 version described as extra-media and the 2014 version characterizes as institutional structures. We understand these to be 'contextual forces.' Agency and structure are embedded in a social system.

Content production is governed by professional paradigms that vary across genres and social systems understood as sociocultural contexts. Paradigms are operationalized in routines typically treated as norms among practitioners. Routines are instilled through formal training and informal influences in processes of professional socialization; they are structured by the nature and needs of the employer organization and subject to contextual affordances and constraints. Professional paradigms are neither uniform nor stable; they vary across space and time and are continually evolving in a reflexive relationship with contextual forces in a given social system with diverse domestic and international influences.

In the 2014 edition of Mediating the Message, Shoemaker and Reese address three common criticisms of the HoI model. First, it has been criticized for over-simplifying the complexity of relations across levels that are different units of analysis. Critics have also argued that relations between the levels are more reflexive than hierarchical. Shoemaker and Reese acknowledged these issues but observed that every model must simplify to be useful for research and noted that how the model is applied depends on the researcher and purpose. They encouraged further research to "determine the conditions under which certain factors are most determinative and how they interact with one another" (2014, 12).

Concerning the second criticism, the authors acknowledged their model was premised on values that are largely taken for granted in American culture, especially the primacy of individual agency. They further noted that HoI research has mainly focused on Western media contexts, a pattern that has not significantly changed in the past decade (Collins, Kinnally, and Sandoval 2023). Because "media content is fundamentally a social construction" (Shoemaker and Reese 2014, 4), more insight is especially needed on non-Western contexts.

In our literature review, we found a gap in research using the HoI model hinging on lack of published research to improve understanding of the interaction within professional cultures. Therefore, we add a fourth criticism that is especially pertinent to our application of the model: Researchers need to focus some attention on what motivates the influences that are exerted. We tackle this by focusing attention on corresponding and contradictory interests. In the HoI model, an individual makes content and is therefore positioned at the center. Content makers are subject to many and varied influences, both conscious and unconscious, conditioned and situational, that co-determine what is and is not considered newsworthy, as well as how stories are prioritized and reported.

The authors define routines as "patterned, routinized, repeated practices and forms that media workers use to do their jobs" (Shoemaker and Reese 1996, 100). Professional routines both enable and constrain individuals in systemic and systematic ways that encourage predictability of performance. Shoemaker and Reese define the organization as "the social, formal, usually economic entity that employs the media worker in order to produce content" (1996, 138). Organizations have boundaries that establish membership, are goal-oriented, and tend to be bureaucratically structured. The operational context is populated by diverse stakeholders. For newspapers, these especially include subscribers, advertisers, sources, owners, investors, and government entities.

Our interviews with journalists and editors in Qatar indicate clear awareness of Western journalistic norms, professional values, and typical routines, and equal cognizance of local cultural realities that differ and matter greatly in the production of science news as a situated practice. Professional and national cultures interact in ways that can create tensions not only for practice but also for the professional identities and organizational roles of journalists and editors. That is an important reason why "journalism practices identified in Western contexts don't necessarily transfer to other settings" (Collins, Kinnally, and Sandoval 2023, 108).

This was evident in research on political journalism in Egypt that applied the HoI model (Elsheikh, Jackson, and Jebril 2024). Most of the 20 journalists who were interviewed identified the same primary influences to a remarkable degree. There was a shared tendency to produce low risk reports that editors found easy to approve because they did not "annoy anyone" in the political establishment and journalists routinely practiced self-censorship "as a self-precaution to avoid potential problems" (Elsheikh, Jackson, and Jebril 2024, 3360). The authors argue this suggests the social system level is the primary source of influences.

That point addresses a core question for the HoI model that hinges on uncertainty about the relationship between agency and structure: Does the individual or the social system exert the most influence? Shoemaker and Reese (2014) believe that although no level is primary for analytical purposes, the social system establishes constraints and affordances that contextualize what happens at individual and organization levels. They suggest analyzing the social system as the sum of four interdependent subsystems: cultural, ideological, economic, and political.

Interests and Strategic Decision Making

The complex assortment of interacting influences on decisions taken by managers is a characteristic interest of management scholars, as evident for example in Michael Porter's five-forces model (1979), Henry Mintzberg's alternative approaches to formulating strategy (Mintzberg, Lampel, and Ahlstrand 1998), Edgar Schein's research (2016) on organizational change and development, and the work of Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble (2010) on challenges in implementing innovation in organizations, to highlight a few. Within and across levels of the HoI model, the interests of one stakeholder may, to varying degrees, correspond or contradict with the interests of other stakeholders because organizations are internally complex with complicated external interdependencies.

Interests are self-defined at the intersection of motivations and concerns (Renninger and Hidi 2015). Research has posited three categories of motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic, and achievement. Intrinsic motivations drive engagement in pursuits one finds personally satisfying. Extrinsic motivations are enacted to obtain rewards or avoid punishments. Achievement motivation drives the pursuit of comparative success in a sociocultural environment, whether organizational or societal. Concerns are determined by one's perception of potentially negative outcomes such as fear of failure, uncertainties that cause anxiety, a decline in well-being, or fear of being considered irrelevant. Motivations are drivers while concerns are perceived risks.

Deciding what to cover and publish is the responsibility of editors. Strategic decision-making (SDM) is necessary when decisions have broad and/or longer-term importance. Eisenhardt and Zbaracki (1992) clarified three paradigms: (1) rationality and bounded rationality, (2) politics and power, and (3) garbage can. The rational paradigm supposes the decision-maker has clear objectives and relevant information needed to decide the best option. The 'garbage can' paradigm describes decisions made in ambiguous situations where and when there is limited or conflicting information. In this article, we find the politics and power paradigm most useful.

SDM happens in an organizational context that blends perspectives, characteristics, and interests of managers with the firm's identity and orientation in relation to the operational environment (Shepherd and Rudd 2014). The senior management team, in this case, editors and owners, decides priorities and parameters that govern decisions about what should and should not be covered, how, and by whom. George Sylvie, Seth Lewis, and Qian Xu (2010) conducted a study that compared editor values and related behaviors in the USA and Nordic region. They found striking differences and urged researchers to adopt a "cultural lens" when studying how editorial decisions are made.

As Ruth Moon observed, many journalists engage in self-censorship, which implies a strategic orientation. Moon described self-censorship as a negotiation process with three strategic options: 1) deciding not to pursue the story, 2) creating buffers for self-protection during the reporting stage, and/or 3) negotiating with managers and sources to guard against potential repercussions upon publication (2023, 121). Moon (2023) noted that journalists tend to "avoid explosive topics" that would endanger their lives or livelihoods, a strategy she characterized as "informed avoidance" (2023, 128).

Taherdoost and Madanchian (2023) proposed four decision types. Our findings make clear that for decisions taken by editors in this study, constructions and evaluations are most common.

• Acceptances: a binary choice between accepting or rejecting an option
• Choices: deciding what is best from a limited set of options
• Constructions: creating the optimal option based on available resources
• Evaluations: decisions based on adhering to principles and commitments

In summary, professional journalists and editors have agency to make decisions about content production that are informed by the norms and standards of the profession and influenced by a combination of personal and professional interests. They enact routines in organizations embedded in social systems and responding to contextual factors. Key stakeholders for newspaper companies include readers, advertisers, and government agencies (here characterized as authorities) within structural arrangements that are legitimated by systemic sociocultural features reflecting ideological dispositions.

Qatar

Qatar is a small, wealthy peninsula state with a highly cosmopolitan population characterized by Mehran Kamrava as "a rentier state par excellence" (2013, 130). In a rentier state, cohesion is maintained by distributing economic benefits, in this case significant income derived mainly from the sale of natural gas. About 13% of 3.1 million people in Qatar are citizens. The rest are expats from at least 150 countries. The population (80%) is concentrated in Doha, the capital city (Worldometer 2025). The political system is a stable monarchy with a popular royal family. We characterize Qatar's government as a 'hybrid regime,' a term that describes a political system with mainly autocratic features blended with some democratic features, for example municipal elections and for the Shura Council (a consultative assembly).

By Western norms, Qatar has a restrictive news environment. The official view (Amiri Diwan 2025) suggests that Qatar "scrapped censorship of the local press" in 1995 and abolished the Ministry of Information in 1998. The 2003 Constitution (Article 48) guarantees freedom of the press. The reality is more ambiguous. In 2024, Qatar was ranked 79th (Doha News Team 2025), which is the highest ranking in the Gulf region. Media law is a legacy of British colonial rule with vague, potentially unlimited prohibitions on public speech. A license is required to publish news and criminal provisions for offenses include libel. The 2014 Cybercrime Prevention Law No 14 of 2014 added fines and potential imprisonment for online offenses.

Methods

This study draws on semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists and editors working in Qatar's media industry (Table 1). The selection was a convenience sample. Qatar is a small market with a few news companies. Gaining access was facilitated by the researchers' affiliation with Northwestern University Qatar and funding from the Qatar National Research Fund, both locally respected. We contacted many more professionals than agreed to be interviewed. Those who agreed were promised anonymity. Due to the small sample size and number of outlets, we have not specified who said what in quotes highlighted in the findings other than to describe the respondent as a journalist or an editor.

No.	Gender	Position	Training	Organization at time of interview
R1	M	Senior Producer & freelance science journalist	Master's degree	Private
R2	F	Producer & general news reporter	Media institute	State-linked
R3	M	Staff reporter with beats in education and IT	No info	Private
R4	M	Senior editor	PhD	Private
R5	M	Managing editor	University	Private
R6	F	Researcher & freelance journalist	University	Private
R7	M	Former editor and freelance journalist	University	Private
R8	F	General news reporter	University	Private
R9	M	Desk editor and reporter	Seminars & workshops	State-linked
R10	M	Department director and trainer	No info	State-linked
R11	M	Senior editor	University	Private
R12	F	General news editor	Master's degree	Private
R13a	M	Managing editor	Master's degree	Private
R13b	M	Head of editorial section	Master's degree	Private
R14	F	News and content producer	University	State-linked

The interviews were conducted between April and August 2022. Most required 30-40 minutes. A few lasted more than an hour. Respondents were interviewed in person or via Zoom, according to preference. Four interviews were conducted in Arabic by a bilingual member of the research team. All interviews were recorded with permission. The interview data was transcribed by Intelligence Qatar (IQ), a market research firm in Doha, which also translated Arabic transcripts into English.

While we did not employ a grounded theory methodology, we systematically coded the interview transcripts to identify recurring themes related to journalism practices and the culture of Qatari news production. Coding was conducted collaboratively: team members independently reviewed transcripts, then met to discuss and refine the emerging themes. Through these discussions, we ensured inter-coder reliability and reached consensus on the thematic structure, which was documented in the final project report submitted to the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).

It is important to note that we were not able to access figures on employment and revenue of Qatari news organizations because such data are not publicly available. Kirat (2016) provided a snapshot of the size and composition of the country's journalism workforce. Additionally, our interviews offered qualitative evidence of financial constraints, as respondents frequently referenced limited resources and the challenges of sustaining specialized reporting such as science journalism.

Findings

We discuss findings that illuminate how editors and journalists perceive science journalism and the general practices of journalism in Qatar. We apply the HoI model and highlight corresponding and contradictory interests. Our qualitative analysis revealed patterns that facilitate extending the Hierarchy of Influences model by foregrounding the interplay of corresponding and contradictory interests within and between levels that reflect the interplay of motivations and concerns.

Science news is important but considered commercially non-viable

At the individual level, respondents acknowledged the importance of scientific R&D in Qatar, but at the routine level there is little localization of science news (Mohsin, Nguyen, and Lowe 2025). National investment in scientific R&D exceeded US$1.4 billion up to 2022 (QNA 2022). Respondents reported no dedicated science desk in Qatar's print outlets. Most journalists described themselves as generalists with limited training in science. One said, "I've hardly met any journalists who are that specialized [in science reporting]. It's just not financially viable. As a journalist, when you work in an organization, they expect you to be multi-skilled."

The low prioritization of science journalism was linked to perceptions of low popularity among audiences that discouraged investing in the genre. Few respondents considered science news interesting for most readers. One journalist explained, "It's one of the things that we unfortunately do not cover much because whenever we work on such topics, we realize that some of the audiences are not engaging well with them." An editor said, "For the majority of the audience, science is nothing. There is no widespread interest."

A lot of newspapers and news organizations don't want to invest in science journalism because they don't see an audience for that. I understand from a financial point of view. It's hard to invest in something where you don't see the return on investment. There's just no revenue for it. And we have competing resources because there are other trending things that we have to cover. There's only so many of us in a team… I guess the main thing is what value this will bring to our news company? I think that's what every manager would want to know.

— Journalist

While we found contradictory interests between the organizational and social system levels of the framework, editors and journalists had corresponding interests. Journalists commented on the amount of work required to report on science. One explained, "I can do a piece about history or politics in two to four days. It takes a week to ten days to do a piece on science." Editors described science news as a potential money pit. We found corresponding interests between journalists and editors at the individual level. While motives varied—editors were mainly concerned about financial aspects whereas journalists were primarily preoccupied with the workload and potential for mistakes—all agreed that reporting on science is expensive with uncertain commercial value.

The churnalism routine

Churnalism describes the routine of publishing press releases as news stories (Harcup 2004; Davies 2008). Respondents agreed this is common in Qatar's newsrooms. One journalist lamented, "This is one of the big problems in Qatar in general. News journalists will just take the [release] as it is and report it that way." Another journalist said that stories in Qatar are "generally based on press releases… our job here is just to do editing." Respondents said churnalism is practiced in most genres of reporting, including science.

Both contradictory and corresponding interests are evident in findings that pertain to the churnalism routine. Opinions were divided as to whether such practice is appropriate for professional standards. While some editors were concerned about the professionalism of PR journalism, it was generally justified as an approach needed to manage scarce resources. At the organization level, financial constraints were augmented by political considerations that encouraged editors to prioritize other types of coverage, typically stories involving Qatar's leaders and events of presumed broad public interest.

Journalists also struggle to collect Arabic language information about scientific research, and with challenges involved with translating scientific terminology into Arabic. One journalist provided a succinct overview: "In Arabic, it is a nightmare to find credible information that is scientific… [and] it's so hard to translate terms. Sometimes we have to come up with a translation because there isn't a certified one in Arabic." The problem is compounded in Qatar's highly cosmopolitan social system where most journalists are expats from non-Arabic countries.

Navigating political realities

The data indicate significant influences from contextual forces at the social system level on the individual and organization levels. This confirms the 2014 view of Shoemaker and Reese. Political influences are at least as important as financial ones. Policies and structures affect what gets reported and how. This is not unique to Qatar. This tension is a thematic aspect of comparative models of journalism (e.g., Hallin and Mancini 2004; Christians et al. 2009) and has been treated in research on state intervention in public sector media (Dragomir and Söderström 2022).

In Qatar, newspaper company senior editors are political appointees. As one journalist explained, "All editors-in-chief are political positions. They are appointed under certain conditions and according to a specific mechanism." Another said, "The whole system is stacked in such a way that there's an editor-in-chief who has to be a [Qatari] national, then there are managing editors who are expats." In Qatar, political influences are not opaque. Newspapers tend to be pro-government even when privately owned.

A tension between professional interests to maintain journalistic independence versus organizational interests to not run afoul of authorities is evident in the data. For sensitive topics, deciding what to publish was described as a negotiation that is often informal, although not always. An extended quote from an editor illustrates the complexity involved with navigating influences across levels of the HoI model:

There is always a conflict between pleasing the reader and pleasing the authorities. It is difficult to join them together. There should be a constant balance. In any situation we lean towards the reader or citizen. At the same time, we are careful not to adopt the readers' side just for empathy. There should be facts and evidence. So, we often reach an agreement with the governmental entity. We have strong ties with governmental entities… [But] if the issue is public, we publish because this is a general issue and there has to be someone who takes action. The government usually responds. I would say more than ninety per cent of cases get resolved… Sometimes our role is like a mediator and sometimes we are social reformers. Sometimes we publish and there is a clash between us and the government. This is the press. We must take action.

— Editor

We found contradiction between journalists seeking greater independence who felt constrained by editors acting on behalf of their organizations and were motivated by political sensitivity to contextual forces in the social system. This complexity was further indicated in journalist experiences collecting information from scientists in universities. Bureaucratic routines serve a gate-keeping function. Speaking of institutions more generally, a journalist explained, "Some are closed and afraid of statements. I mean, sometimes there is a kind of hesitation… There is a blackout on them by the minister's office or by the state. Or their statements must go through a filter before they can be delivered." This is another factor explaining the high degree of reported churnalism.

Discussion and Limitations

We analyzed influences affecting the practice of science journalism in Qatar from a perspective centered on managerial and economic aspects. The analysis generated useful answers for the three research questions. Regarding RQ1, we found political and economic influences on editorial decision-making in the production of science news operate together rather than separately, with editors reconciling audience, advertiser, and authority interests under conditions that reward feasibility over optimality.