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1 – 10 of over 25000News, as one of many forms of newspaper output, has long been synonymous with journalism. The “crisis of journalism” is primarily a crisis of the news as a cultural form. Drawing…
Abstract
News, as one of many forms of newspaper output, has long been synonymous with journalism. The “crisis of journalism” is primarily a crisis of the news as a cultural form. Drawing on Carey (2008), this chapter argues that news has lost its monopoly as a source of global experience and everyday drama, and, thus, has lost its commodity value. The decline of traditional forms of news is transforming journalism, and its democratic function as vehicle of public conversation, toward long-form, long-term, and affective narratives.
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Bahiyah Omar, Hosam Al-Samarraie, Ahmed Ibrahim Alzahrani and Ng See Kee
Most new media research focuses on behavior as a measure of engagement, while the psychological state of being occupied with its content has received little attention. This study…
Abstract
Purpose
Most new media research focuses on behavior as a measure of engagement, while the psychological state of being occupied with its content has received little attention. This study examined news engagement beyond pure action observation by exploring young people’s psychological experiences with the news.
Design/methodology/approach
The study carried out a digital native’s survey on 212 people (18–28 years). The focus of the survey was on understanding individuals’ engagement with online news using affective and cognitive components. The authors compared the influence of each type of engagement on youth consumption of and attitudes toward online news.
Findings
The results of the hierarchical regression analysis showed that affective engagement can be a stronger predictor of online news consumption than cognitive engagement. While affective engagement significantly predicts positive attitudes toward online news, cognitive engagement had no significant effect.
Originality/value
These findings suggest that “engaging the heart” is more influential than “engaging the mind” in drawing young people to the news in today’s information environment. The study thus contributes to the understanding of the cognitive and emotional focus on news content and their importance in shaping young people’s expectations of online news. The findings from this study could have broader implications for future trends in online news consumption.
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Edwin Amenta, Neal Caren and Weijun Yuan
Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of…
Abstract
Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.
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News algorithms not only help the authors to efficiently navigate the sea of available information, but also frame information in ways that influence public discourse and…
Abstract
Purpose
News algorithms not only help the authors to efficiently navigate the sea of available information, but also frame information in ways that influence public discourse and citizenship. Indeed, the likelihood that readers will be exposed to and read given news articles is structured into news algorithms. Thus, ensuring that news algorithms uphold journalistic values is crucial. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to quantify journalistic values to make them readable by algorithms through taking an exploratory approach to a question that has not been previously investigated.
Design/methodology/approach
The author matched the textual indices (extracted from natural language processing/automated content analysis) with human conceptions of journalistic values (derived from survey analysis) by implementing partial least squares path modeling.
Findings
The results suggest that the numbers of words or quotes news articles contain have a strong association with the survey respondent assessments of their balance, diversity, importance and factuality. Linguistic polarization was an inverse indicator of respondents’ perception of balance, diversity and importance. While linguistic intensity was useful for gauging respondents’ perception of sensationalism, it was an ineffective indicator of importance and factuality. The numbers of adverbs and adjectives were useful for estimating respondents’ perceptions of factuality and sensationalism. In addition, the greater numbers of quotes, pair quotes and exclamation/question marks in news headlines were associated with respondents’ perception of lower journalistic values. The author also found that the assessment of journalistic values influences the perception of news credibility.
Research limitations/implications
This study has implications for computational journalism, credibility research and news algorithm development.
Originality/value
It represents the first attempt to quantify human conceptions of journalistic values with textual indices.
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To elaborate the nature of infotainment as a mediating concept between information and entertainment by analysing how the concept of infotainment is approached in diverse domains…
Abstract
Purpose
To elaborate the nature of infotainment as a mediating concept between information and entertainment by analysing how the concept of infotainment is approached in diverse domains such as communication research.
Design/methodology/approach
Conceptual analysis was conducted by focussing on 41 key studies on the topic. First, it was examined how researchers have approached the relationships between informational and entertaining elements of infotainment. Thereafter, attention was directed to the ways in which people make use of infotainment. The conceptual analysis is based on the comparison of the similarities and differences between the characterizations of the above issues.
Findings
Early studies characterized infotainment in terms of soft news which is distinct from hard news offering factual information. Later investigations offer a more nuanced picture by approaching infotainment as phenomenon with diverse dimensions depicting the topics, focus and presentation style. Studies on the use of infotainment offer contradictory evidence of the extent to which infotaining programmes can increase people's interest in social, political and health issues, for example.
Research limitations/implications
As the study concentrates on the analysis of an individual concept, that is, infotainment, the findings cannot be generalized to concern the ways in which informational and entertaining phenomena are related as a whole.
Originality/value
By elaborating the conceptual nature of infotainment, the study contributes to information behaviour research by refining the picture of the relationships between information and entertainment.
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Michael C Porter, Betsy Anderson and Mary Nhotsavang
The purpose of this paper is to take the results of two studies to hypothesize about practice and recommend research/debate on business leaders’ use and perceptions of social…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to take the results of two studies to hypothesize about practice and recommend research/debate on business leaders’ use and perceptions of social media. Data were considered under the umbrella of current senior management practice, with the purpose to make suggestions for better practice, but primarily to theorize about the probable evolution of social media value and credibility for executives.
Design/methodology/approach
The first study presents results from a qualitative content analysis of Fortune and Inc. 500 CEOs’ use of Twitter in terms of: activity and engagement; tweet subject matter; frequency of opinions expressed; and level of formality. The second considers the credibility of social media against traditional media and personal information sources within one quantitative survey.
Findings
Senior executives using social media (Twitter) tend to engage in one-sided conversations in a two-way medium. Further, most CEOs appear to be using more formal language than general Twitter users. These factors, combined with the low credibility and value of social media by senior managers, may indicate the best future hope for social media credibility with executives will be neutral.
Practical implications
In examining a combination of current literature and the data from these separate studies, the authors posit a number of underlying challenges in realizing the potential of the evolving social media environment that may deserve specific research.
Originality/value
Discussion touches on implications for future adoption of social media tools by business leaders, as well as one-way vs two-way communication tendencies. This paper proposes a starting-point for theory development regarding this significant emerging area of communication.
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When the dispute between Rupert Murdoch's News International (NI), publisher of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and Sun newspapers, and the major print unions erupted…
Abstract
When the dispute between Rupert Murdoch's News International (NI), publisher of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and Sun newspapers, and the major print unions erupted into what was almost universally known as ‘the battle’ of Wapping during the opening weeks of 1986, there was widespread concern not only at what appeared to be more evidence of the parlous state of British industrial relations, but that central to the confrontation were apparently wholesale abuses of power which allegedly subverted the concept of the ‘liberty of the Press’. The immediate reactions triggered by events at Wapping, and the ideological references used to try to contextualise those events, were for the most part superficial. Long‐run concerns about the trend of industrial relations, or more meaningful reflections on wider questions of ‘the freedom of the media’, rarely, if ever, entered the agenda. While since 1986–7 these issues have been addressed, they have usually been considered either in isolation from one another or crudely juxtaposed in terms of the effects on the economics of publishing. Moreover, industrial relations in the newspaper industry have not commonly attracted the attention of specialists in the field, and have traditionally been considered too peculiar to have much broader relevance. Yet events at Wapping have been seen as heralding a ‘revolution’ in Fleet Street, invested with far more substantial and broader material and symbolic meaning; for example, Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, recently projected Wapping as marking a decisive break with the discredited past of ‘this failed nation’.
Porismita Borah, Sojung Kim and Ying-Chia (Louise) Hsu
One of the most prolific areas of misinformation research is examining corrective strategies in messaging. The main purposes of the current study are to examine the effects of (1…
Abstract
Purpose
One of the most prolific areas of misinformation research is examining corrective strategies in messaging. The main purposes of the current study are to examine the effects of (1) partisan media (2) credibility perceptions and emotional reactions and (3) theory driven corrective messages on people's misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing behaviors.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a randomized experimental design to test the hypotheses. The data were collected via the survey firm Lucid. The number of participants was 485. The study was conducted using Qualtrics after the research project was exempt by the Institutional Research Board of a large University in the US. The authors conducted an online experiment with four conditions, narrative versus statistics and individual versus collective. The manipulation messages were constructed as screenshots from Facebook.
Findings
The findings of this study show that higher exposure to liberal media was associated with lower misperceptions, whereas higher credibility perceptions of and positive reactions toward the misinformation post and negative emotions toward the correction comment were associated with higher misperceptions. Moreover, the findings showed that participants in the narrative and collective-frame condition had the lowest misperceptions.
Originality/value
The authors tested theory driven misinformation corrective messages to understand the impact of these messages and multiple related variables on misperceptions about COVID-19 mask wearing. This study contributes to the existing misinformation correction literature by investigating the explanatory power of the two well-established media effects theories on misinformation correction messaging and by identifying essential individual characteristics that should be considered when evaluating how misperceptions about the COVID-19 crisis works and gets reduced.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0600
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