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This study aims to examine how 20 local governments in Canada and the USA operationalize the government–citizen trust relationship through the administration of social media by answering two questions: Can local governments use social media to increase citizen trust? and if local governments can use social media, what can be learned about the administration of social media that results in an increase in citizen trust of government?

Based on a normative belief that increasing the trustworthiness of government is a desired outcome, the working proposition is that social media may offer a low-barrier method for engaging citizens and supporting trust-based relationships, if social media programs are administered in a way that operationalizes this objective. Using content analysis of data collected from interview transcripts and documentary sources, this exploratory, process-oriented study emphasizes the social, organizational and functional contexts of social media and social media as records.

The study found that most cities had extensive programs featuring multiple accounts on a number of common platforms. The cities maintained tight control over content, account creation and employee and audience participation to ensure compliance with federal and provincial or state legislation and to mitigate technology and content-based risks. The cities used social media to broadcast information, respond to service requests and provide issue management. Social media results were measured sporadically on an ad hoc basis for operational purposes and only two cities had dedicated procedures in place for managing social media as records. Contrary to previous research, this study indicates that fiduciary trust relationships do require trust by the agent (i.e. institution) and the principal (i.e. citizen).

To increase generalizability, an effort was made to select cities that were demographically and geographically diverse by selecting a range of population sizes and locations. However, selection was skewed towards cities with well-developed social media programs, and as a result, over half of the cities were national, provincial or state capitals or larger population centres. While these cities experienced economic advantages, the participants in the study identified challenges around resourcing and capacity, and their responses are expected to be of value to cities operating under similar constraints. Additionally, this study represents a point in time, as social media use at the local governments continued to expand and evolve during and after the data collection period.

This paper identifies three scenarios where social media content from local government accounts should be managed as records, including: the documentation of incidents, the on-going collection of city content from high-profile accounts and the “on demand” collection of citizens’ content where cities have asked for citizen input on topics or issues.

This study provides an in-depth characterization of social media administration and use by 20 local governments in Canada and the USA. Considering the progress made by cities in e-government using their websites as a base, cities can develop greater capacity for open government, meaning wider participation by citizens in the decisions that affect them on a daily basis. To achieve goals of transparency, accountability and civic participation, cities will need to develop capacity around social media measurement, reporting and procedures for managing social media as records.

In providing a detailed and complete description of social media use in 20 cities in two countries, this study moves beyond a compliance- and requirement-driven approach to consider the larger question of government–citizen trust and the relevance of records within this relationship.

Focusing on the sociological clarification based on structural pluralism, this study explores the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers use uncivil remarks and words that reflect their moral foundations.

This computer-assisted data collection produces three types of datasets that include numerous social media comments. To explore the association between moral foundations and incivility, both quadratic association procedure (QAP) and multiple regression QAP (MRQAP) are implemented.

The findings suggest that social media users who comment on the news posts of urban-located newspapers tend to use more uncivil words compared to social media users who comment on the news posts of suburban and rural-based newspapers. Individuals who comment on the news posts of urban-based newspapers tend to show a wider range of moral foundation spectrums than those who comment on the posts of rural and suburban newspapers. Lastly, there are significant associations between moral-vice components and incivility in response to urban- and suburban-located newspapers' social media posts.

The employed bag-of-words may not completely capture incivility given that social media users can use nuanced and metaphoric terms instead of explicitly uncivil terms. Even though this study systematically selected local newspapers' social media accounts, the contextual factors of other newspapers in politically slanted communities could be different.

The findings of this study provide meaningful and practical implications for journalists and news reporters. The inherent rudeness and aggressiveness of social media users can drive them to use uncivil and moral-harm words against a particular person or group.

Under the circumstance that fake news and politically slanted news content are widely distributed in the United States, social media users may easily express negative emotions toward news stories or the journalists who post the stories.

Structural pluralism particularly specializes in explaining why and how the contextual factors of news stories differ depending on community complexity. Building on the reasoning of structural pluralism in the social media context, this study investigates the degree to which social media users who comment on the news posts of local newspapers employ uncivil remarks and moral foundation words.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2020-0522.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework of excellence for the development of an online press office at Cardiff Council.

The paper presents an analysis of key issues of public relations theory as they apply to the provision of an online press office. This is supported by a survey of journalists who have used Cardiff's media service and enhanced by assessment of examples of existing best practice across local authorities in the UK.

The result is a suggested framework of nine core elements for excellence, which draws on theory and practice and could be applied by other local authorities. The study shows that provided these guiding principles are followed, a basic site can be as successful as one with all the bells and whistles.

The paper makes a substantial contribution to the evidence base for the implementation of local authority online press offices in the UK.

Local events play a significant role in rebuilding relationships and increasing engagement with local communities in the postpandemic. This study aims to investigate how potential attendees’ usage of local event hashtags facilitates social media engagement, further enhancing their intentions to attend local events.

This study adopted an exploratory sequential mixed approach. The qualitative phase used 12 semistructured in-depth interviews to explore motivations for hashtag usage and developed instruments to measure hashtag usage and social media engagement. The quantitative phase examined the relationship among motivations and behaviors of hashtag usage, social media engagement and behavioral intention through 522 online surveys.

Qualitatively, four themes manifest in hashtag users’ motivations in the context of local events: self-promoting, searching, summarizing and conforming. The quantitative findings show that these motivations influence active and passive hashtag usage differently, leading to different types of social media engagement (i.e. persistent, customized and triggered engagement). All social media engagements can significantly enhance the intention to attend local events.

This study divides active and passive hashtag users, conceptualizes social media engagement through hashtag usage under the affordance approach and develops instruments for these concepts. It emphasizes the importance of hashtag usage that drives social media engagement and provides insights for local event planners.

在后疫情时期, 本地活动在重建关系和增加与当地社区的参与方面发挥着重要作用。本研究调查了潜在参与者对当地活动话题标签的使用如何促进社交媒体的参与, 进一步增强了他们参加当地活动的意愿。

本研究采用了一种探索性的顺序混合方法。定性阶段采用了12次半结构化的深度访谈, 以探讨话题标签使用的动机, 并开发了用于测量话题标签使用和社交媒体参与的量表。定量阶段通过522份在线调查研究了动机与话题标签使用、社交媒体参与和行为意向之间的关系。

在定性研究中, 话题标签用户的动机在当地活动背景下表现为四个主题：自我推广、搜索、总结和顺应。定量研究结果显示, 这些动机以不同方式影响主动和被动话题标签使用, 从而导致不同类型的社交媒体参与（即持续型、定制型和触发型参与）。所有社交媒体参与都能显著增强参加当地活动的意愿。

本研究区分了主动和被动话题标签用户, 通过能力方法构想了话题标签使用下的社交媒体参与, 并为这些概念开发了测量工具。本研究强调了推动社交媒体参与的话题标签使用的重要性, 并为当地活动策划者提供了见解。

This paper aims to investigate the extent of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) through websites and social media in Spanish local government (SLG) and analyze the factors that explain their disclosure.

The study applies content analysis and regression techniques. The ICD is analyzed for Spanish municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and provincial capitals over a period from January 2018 to February 2020.

Findings emphasize that the quantity of disclosed information on intellectual capital (IC) is in the low level, particularly with regard to human capital (HC). Furthermore, the results show that the information provided via social media mainly concerns the relational capital (RC). On the other hand, results obtained indicate that larger municipalities, with lower financial autonomy and whose citizens have a high income level use the online media (both websites and social media) more actively to disclose information about IC. Finally, municipalities led by women and with high level of citizens' education exert a positive influence in the ICD only on websites.

This paper makes a number of key contributions to the existing body of knowledge, focusing on ICD, a neglected area in the public sector accounting literature. It explores and identifies the supply-side and demand-side determinants of information affecting the ICD in local governments. The results of this research could be useful for policymakers, regulators and governments' managers to improve the online information addressing ICD issues.

This paper adopts an innovative perspective by investigating the use of alternative tools for ICD in local government context (websites and social media). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on investigating the determinants of online ICD in local governments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine European citizen engagement for enhancing emergency management and, more specifically, in the context of the terrorist attacks which occurred in Paris, France on November 15, 2015. To do so, two main research questions are raised. First, are there differences in the levels of citizen engagement between the country affected, France, and other European countries? Second, what factors foster a high level of citizen engagement in France?

First, a comparative content analysis of the Facebook pages of local governments in France and other capital cities of the European Union (EU) was carried. Second, a multivariate regression analysis was performed.

Although the level of online citizen engagement was greater in France than in the other EU cities analyzed, similarities were detected in the messages sent, responses and moment of participation. Moreover, there are certain types of online social behavior that encourage interactive conversations among citizens as well as between citizens and their local governments.

This research enables local governments to understand the similarities and differences between citizens and local governments from the affected country and those from outside it when using social media to engage in emergency management. It also provides further insight for managers of local governments in the country affected with regards to the need to be aware of the influence of online collective behavior that emerges from the information they publish. As a result, the attainment of a high level of citizens’ participation in their social media can differ.

This paper advances in the scarce knowledge of high levels of online engagement (conversational interactions) in emergency situations.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the potential for hyper‐local news websites to support and sustain peripheral rural communities by extending and developing the public sphere(s) in which they engage locally and globally.

Theoretical understandings of communicative spaces, monitorial citizenship and “liquid life” and journalism developed by Jurgen Habermas, Michael Schudson, Zygmunt Bauman and Mark Deuze inform this pilot study of a hyper‐local project undertaken by a UK media corporation. Data sets comprising documentation; news‐website content; interviews with journalists; “knowledge café” exploration of audience interactions and questionnaires are analysed to identify themes and sub‐themes in the production and use of media content.

The hyper‐local project was found to have been put in place without engaging effective involvement of the community concerned and the initial conceptualisation, predicated on assumptions of an inward focus for the community, did not recognise the importance of communicative networks which both supported sustainability within the group and situated that community in wider social, cultural, economic and media dimensions. As such the project tended to reinforce, or at least, not mitigate, the community's geographical isolation.

This is a small‐scale pilot project exploring new forms of media/community engagement and, while the results can be regarded as indicative, further research is needed to investigate hyper‐local developments in a wider contextual field.

The paper addresses an important but little‐researched emergent issue: “hyper‐local”. It explores in detail some of the complexities that are beginning to be theorised in broad terms and extends understandings of local‐level practices and processes.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.

The last number of years has seen a growing importance placed on media relations by police forces throughout the UK. This has resulted in an increased concern with public relations practice and in particular that area focused on media relations. This study centres on Strathclyde Police, the largest force in Scotland and among the largest in the UK. Outside of the Metroplitan Police, Strathclyde, has been throughout the 1990s at the forefront in developing more pro‐active media relations strategies. This paper examines the development of the Spotlight Intiative which attempted to tackle low level, quality of life crime (in some quarters associated with the phrase “zero tolerance”). Central to Spotlight has been the development of a more systematic and structured approach to public relations focused on the role of the media, specifically local and Scottish national newspapers, in communicating with local communities. This research argues that the growing importance of media relations at the Strathclyde force has broader implications for police‐media relations throughout the UK.

Purpose – Movements typically have great difficulty using the mass media to spread their messages to the public, given the media's greater power to impose their frames on movement activities and goals. In this paper, we look at the impact of the political context and media strategies of protesters against the 2009 G-20 meetings in Pittsburgh on media coverage of the protests.

Methodology – We employ field observations, interviews with activists and reporters, and a content analysis of print coverage of the demonstrations by the two local daily newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Findings – We find that protesters were relatively successful in influencing how they were portrayed in local newspaper stories and in developing a sympathetic image of their groups’ members. Specifically, we find that activist frames were present in newspaper coverage and activists were quoted as frequently as city officials.

Research implications – We argue that events such as the G-20 meetings provide protesters with opportunities to gain temporary “standing” with the media. During such times, activists can use tactics and frames to alter the balance of power in relations with the media and the state and to attract positive media coverage, particularly when activists develop strategies that are not exclusively focused on the media. We argue that a combination of political opportunities and activist media strategies enabled protest organizers to position themselves as central figures in the G-20 news story and leverage that position to build media interest, develop relationships with reporters, and influence newspaper coverage.