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The chapter addresses the unique aspects of Brazil’s news agencies and the Brazilian news syndication market. It reveals the pattern of Brazil’s two prevailing business models regarding the wire services industry: that of the State, particularly the federal government, which invested little in a nationwide distributor to peripheral and alternative media; and that of major media conglomerates, which set out their syndication services labeled as “news agencies” in order to multiply profits with no extra labor. In the latter case, an asymmetrical relationship of dependency and circularity ensues between these major conglomerates and regional media groups, who rely on these “news agencies” to perpetuate their dominance in local markets. The chapter also assesses a few causes for this unique model and describes the main players in Brazil’s news agency sector. A concise historical background is presented (Molina, Morais, Saroldi & Moreira) and provides context for the present-day players in the news agency business in Brazil, including the institutional framework they form with their customers, predominantly smaller newspapers. The chapter analyzes attributes of the Brazilian news agency ecology, including the parallel reach of distribution networks belonging to the private and state-owned agencies; the adaptation of conglomerate agencies to challenges entailed by the digital convergence (shrinking newsrooms, multitasking staff); and the prevalence of the interconglomerate model within the Brazilian news syndication industry.

News agencies are important stakeholders for large organizations, since the news they distribute will be adopted by other news outlets, which influence public opinion and hence corporate reputation. The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how corporate earnings press releases are transformed into financial news by investigating whether the frames introduced by companies are adopted or reframed by news agencies.

A content analysis of framing techniques in corporate earnings releases and their corresponding news-agency releases was performed, focussing on the financial figures and benchmarks presented, performance attributions, and the tonality of the texts.

The findings suggest that news agencies reframe earnings releases at the textual-pragmatic level by reducing their length, using fewer financial figures, and changing the position of these figures in the texts; they increase transparency by avoiding adjusted financial figures, qualifying figures, and adding analyst assessments; and they change the tonality by down-toning positive statements and highlighting negative aspects.

This paper makes a contribution to the field of corporate financial communication, which has not shed much light on the transformation of earnings press releases into financial news. In addition, this paper contributes to the stream of research on journalistic transformations of corporate press releases in general, which has ignored the influential role of news agencies as both manufacturers and wholesalers of news.

This paper sets out to encompass a comparative analysis of news reports and official police records of TASER deployments from 2002 to 2005.

The methodology involves a content analysis of all LexisNexis and New York Times articles involving police use of the TASER during the study period (n = 353). Regional (New York Times) and national (LexisNexis) news reports describing police use of the TASER are compared with police reports of all TASER deployments by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the same timeframe (n = 375).

Descriptive statistics and logistic regression are used to compare the data sources with respect to: the circumstances in which the weapon is deployed; the characteristics of the suspects involved in the TASER incidents; and the significant predictors of continued suspect resistance and repeated use of the TASER by an officer.

The paper examines official police records on TASER deployments from one police agency. This limits the ability to generalize the research findings to other police agencies that have adopted different practices and policies regulating the deployment of CEDs. Additionally, the content analysis includes only articles in the mainstream print media.

The paper concludes with a discussion about some myths associated with news reports on police use of the TASER, and their potential impact on both public perception and police practices.

To date, research has not systematically compared media representations of the TASER with official reports on police deployments of the weapon. That is the focus of this paper.

This study aims to investigate patterns of social media posting occurring during the initial post-disaster recovery period. In addition, the study investigates the antecedents of user engagement with Twitter posts or “tweets.”

This study uses Hurricane Harvey as the research focus because of its $125bn in damage and the recovery effort associated with it. Analyzing nearly 38,000 tweets related to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and specifically focuses on rescuers who became to be known as the “Cajun Navy.”

The popularity of the tweet significantly influences social media engagement; disaster relief organizations first should seek out alliances and partnerships with those who already are well-known or influential in social media. In addition, by regularly monitoring and participating in social media, such as encouraging retweets and mentions even when not responding to a disaster, agencies will gain social media followers and influence when these are most needed.

By analyzing patterns of social media posts during and after Hurricane Harvey, this study attempts to quantify social media’s effectiveness during this disaster, in particular with a focus on what characteristics of Harvey-related Twitter posts most influenced user engagement.

Findings underscore the need for agencies to strengthen their social media presence and use it in all three phases of disaster conceptualization. Beyond managing communication with other agencies and the community, which alone is critical for an agency’s impact, social media offers the world as a potential audience for agencies that can deftly leverage it.

Social media has revolutionized not only communication but also inter-connectivity as people have normalized its use. Its ubiquity and efficiency have seen its incorporation into the critical area of emergency management, both during and after disasters. The main objective of this paper is to investigate and evaluate the usefulness of social media in disaster recovery efforts, focusing on its advantages in relation to a recent disaster event.

This chapter is an in-depth description of a change process when a company in the media industry carries out a major reorientation of its business. Its old product-oriented business model has become obsolete and it turns toward a solutions-oriented business. But that turns out to be a much more complicated process than anticipated.

The chapter provides a lively story about this process: Why did it start to begin with, what are the kinds of critical events, which are the turning points, resistance to change, tensions, how are they managed, etc.

The chapter and the story told serves as an illustration and a representative for many other similar processes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role particular new management devices play in the development of the news profession in an organizational setting shifting to new technologies.

This is studied through of observations of work practices in the newsroom and through documentary research and qualitative interviews with managers, editors, and other professionals.

It is shown that management devices such as the news table and the news concept are central to the reorganization of news work, as they realize managers’ strategies, just like they produce new practices and power relationships. It is shown that the devices produce increased collaboration among journalists and interaction between managers and output journalists, that mundane work and power is delegated to technological devices and that news products are increasingly standardized.

The wider implications of these findings seem to be a change in the journalistic profession: TV news journalism is becoming less individualistic and more collective and professionalism becomes a matter of understanding and realizing the news organization’s strategy, rather than following a more individual agenda.

The paper’s originality lies in showing that profession and management are not opposed to each other, but can be seen as a continuum on which journalistic and managerial tasks become intertwined. This is in contrast to previous research on news work. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on devices opens up for conceptualizing power in the newsroom as distributed across a network of people and things, rather executed by managers alone.

With intellectual convergence between the information and communication professions, there is an increasing need to understand the construction and dissemination of news, a product common to both domains. Discusses major approaches to the study of news. Identifies sources useful for the study of news in the context of higher education library and information studies courses. Defines news as product and process as socially constructed, sourced and created within complex organizational frameworks. It is an ongoing professional responsibility for information specialists to investigate news as information made up of fact and opinion, objectivity and bias.