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Aiming to explore how audience consume and produce media events in the digital, distributed and social era we live in, the paper analyzes the viewing patterns of video news items during a media event (the week of Donald Trump's presidential visit to Israel, the first to a country outside the US), compared to a parallel comparable “ordinary” period (two weeks later, in which no inordinacy events occurred). The comparison focused on simultaneous activities of audiences engaged with the event, with either related (i.e. second screening) or unrelated (i.e. media multitasking).

The research is a diary study based on a dedicated mobile app in which respondents reported their news-related behavior during two periods: a media event period and comparable “ordinary” period.

Participants reported watching significantly more news video items in the first day of the media event week compared to the first day of the “ordinary” week. More than half of the viewing reports of the media event were not on TV. In the media event week, there were significantly higher percentages of viewing reports on smartphones/computers and significantly higher percentages of second-screening reports.

This is the first study that empirically explores the viewing patterns of video news items during a media event, compared to an “ordinary” period, focusing on media second screening of audiences engaged with the event. This comparison may reveal whether (1) media events still retain their centrality in a multi-screen era and (2) the role of the internet and online social media in the experience of media events.

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

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.

Social media (SM) platforms have become major sources for generating, sharing and gathering political and election news. Although there appears to be an assumption that reliance on SM for political news consumption will continue to gain in popularity, there are reasons to believe that many Americans are retreating from using SM for political news. The purpose of this study is to examine if Americans are reducing reliance on SM for political news and to analyze why retreat may be happening.

Using longitudinal panel data from Pew’s American Trends Panel study, the authors tracked 993 respondents from February of 2016 to November of 2019 to monitor their reliance on SM for political news leading up to the 2020 US presidential election.

The results of this study indicate that a sizeable percentage of people (about a third) are retreating from SM platforms for political news consumption and some are abandoning it altogether – people we refer to as new SM “nones.” The authors find that retreat from SM is associated with increased distrust of the information found on the platforms. Concerns about fake news, incivility on SM and information overload were unrelated to retreat from use of SM for political news consumption.

The findings of this study are novel and suggest that reliance on SM for political news by the public may have waxed, seen its zenith and may now be waning largely because of distrust in the information found on SM platforms.

This paper aims to examine the effect of carbon emissions on audit fees. The authors hypothesize that firms in cities with higher carbon emission levels have lower reporting transparency, higher return volatility or are subject to higher reputation risk, causing them to be charged higher audit fees for auditing services.

The authors use panel data of 25,960 firm-year observations from a sample of Chinese firms. The carbon emission data for each Chinese city are obtained from the China Emission Accounts and Datasets for Emerging Economies. This paper adopts a multiple regression model to study the impact of carbon emissions on audit fees.

The authors find that firms located in cities with higher carbon emission levels and firms with more carbon emissions are charged, on average, a higher audit fee. This audit fee effect of carbon risk is transmitted by lessened information transparency and elevated financial risk within these firms. This paper shows that auditors consider carbon risk in their audit fee decisions and other factors that could influence audit risk and effort.

This study draws a connection between carbon emissions and audit fees. It is especially relevant due to the increasing importance of environmental factors in the audit risk assessment. In addition, the findings suggest that a firm implementing a proactive environmental strategy benefits the economy and decreases the costs to the firm for services such as auditing.