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Purpose – The CSI effect, as it is referenced in mainstream media, is a purported effect on public perceptions caused by the portrayal of forensics and investigations in popular entertainment programming. Despite the obvious popularity of the programs – a common source of blame for such effects and the focus of limited prior research – impacts on perceptions by way of media content must be viewed as a product of multiple internal and external factors, rather than a result of popularity and viewership alone.

Methodology – By examining the portrayal of programming within the context of contemporary news publications, this project focuses on the value and context of presentations of forensics television programming across media genres, highlighting the bidirectional flow of popular media cues through various influential media outlets and outlining the potential for resulting public effects.

Findings – The authors find that an increase in the overall media visibility of entertainment images of forensic science, coupled with news media's tendency to tie such images to real-world forensics on the local and national scenes given an absence of alternative sources for news-oriented stories, speak to the importance of the holistic examination of the role of CSI-related programming in influencing popular perceptions.

This paper examines the treatment of women in Caribbean news media, their visibility in relation to men, the news topics covered and the issues that influence the inclusion or exclusion of women in the news.

The work is based on a quantitative content analysis. Data and analyses focus on the 2015 findings of a regional and global longitudinal study entitled ‘Who Makes the News’, conducted every 5 years since 1995 by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), with active Caribbean participation. It is mainly the results of the 2015 Caribbean content analysis that is presented and considered here against the background of the prior data gathering cycles. On a single day, March 25, 2015, 120 newspapers, radio and television stations, internet and twitter news sites across the Caribbean region and globally were monitored for content and treatment by gender, across seven news topic categories.

The study found a continuing under-representation of women in news coverage, but on a differentiated basis by topic category, among others. Overall, there was a regional average of 28% of women in the news compared with 72% of men. However, while this confirmed a consistent gender disparity throughout the 20-year lifespan of the study, the 2015 results for the Caribbean reflected a three percentage points narrowing of the gap in favour of women when compared to 2010.

The empirical study on which the paper is based is only a snapshot in time and may not reflect the nuances that a broader data gathering timeframe and additional data gathering could provide. It also does not offer qualitative data on the definitive reasons for the results, leaving a basis for informed but nevertheless only conjectural author analyses as to reasons. At the same time, the longitudinal nature of the study allows for well-founded inferences associated with past findings and now predictable trends.

The findings and analyses in this paper disclose a continuing disparity that invites practical measures at the level of news organizations and journalists to redress the imbalance.

The results and analysis lend support to advocacy for greater gender balance in news coverage, more respect for female newsmakers and better newsroom coverage planning and inclusive policy-making.

The study shines a light on an important area of disparity in public life, but does so with the support of multi-country statistical and multi-year longitudinal data. It provides a yardstick by which changes in media overage can be measured and monitored over time.

Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.

National media have always represented the views of prominent national corporate actors, whether they are governments or business groups. Thus, they present a public agenda that has a built-in point of view. For instance, in Britain the conservative tabloids of Murdoch's empire are generally anti-EU, pro-business, and in favor of free market policies. The columnist “Bagehot” (The Economist, September 11–17, 2010, p. 70) argues that British tabloids enjoy political power in several ways. First, “thanks to weak taboos about privacy, they wield the threat of personal exposure of politicians.” And second, “when they are not humiliating individuals, the tabloids shape political debate by the hammer of repetition. They tempt governments into policymaking by headline – a method that prizes speed, simplicity, and emotional satisfaction over sober analysis of costs and benefits.” The author concludes that years of hostile headlines about the EU have made sensible public debate impossible. The recent scandal enveloping the Murdoch media empire in Britain has exposed the extent of its media power.

The challenges of digitalisation on news organisations, future of newspapers and other traditional media present an ongoing struggle. Although there is a general decline in news consumption in all cohorts, youth in specific seems to be ‘tuning out’ of news globally (Mindich, 2005). The Digital News Report (2016) published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reported that news accessed via social media sites was increasing in Europe (average 46%) where Greece and Turkey were high adoption countries with 74% and 73% usage rates, respectively. These numbers dropped in the 2018 report to 66% in Turkey and 71% in Greece. This research offers a qualitative analysis of the factors that influence youth's news consumption behaviour in Greece and in Turkey. The data collection took place in 2017 and 2018 in Athens and in Istanbul with voluntary participation of 40 college students who study in public and private universities.

While much research has examined the effect of media literacy in combatting misinformation, whether and to what extent news media literacy influences misinformation-related behaviors (i.e. misinformation sharing, misinformation correction) and the mediating effect of news media skepticism in the process remain less explored. Moreover, this line of research has extensively focused on a polarized information context (e.g. the USA) with less attention to a context where news information is more regulated and centralized. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors conducted a survey study of 720 Chinese adults.

This study reveals that greater new media literacy predicts higher misinformation correction behaviors, but fails to predict caution in sharing misinformation. Findings further demonstrate a nuanced mediating effect of news media skepticism that challenges previous assertions about its protective role. That is, higher news media literacy is associated with lower news media skepticism; lower skepticism is in turn related to lower misinformation sharing and greater misinformation correction.

The current study integrates news media literacy and news media skepticism in understanding misinformation-related behaviors. Findings generally speak to the tangible benefits of news media literacy in helping motivate corrective actions among the general public. However, this study also strikes a cautious note that future investigations of news media skepticism would benefit from a cultural perspective. Its connections with perceptions and effects on behaviors could vary according to different types of media and political landscapes.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0172

Online collaboration software (OCS), such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, has become widespread among news organizations as these tools help news workers collaborate across different locations and make communication more efficient inside newsrooms. While such technologies are increasingly employed as teamwork productivity boosters, the authors’ knowledge of their potential role in shaping control mechanisms and power dynamics within news work is limited. This paper addresses how different types of control may emerge within virtual newsrooms being operated by OCS. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The paper employs an interview-based qualitative method and provides evidence gathered from 20 interviews with digital journalists and media managers representing 11 online news media in Switzerland.

The findings reveal how OCS could lead to various control mechanisms in the workplace by directing, evaluating and disciplining journalists in specific ways. This study suggests that while OCS can be valuable in boosting collaborations among news staff, it might create a situation where journalists are less able to focus on their work and creative activities. Most importantly, OCS bolsters an “always-on” work culture in news media and removes obstacles for employers and managers to invade journalists' space, time and mind.

By focusing on three aspects of control mechanisms, including direction, evaluation and discipline, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of OCS in shaping control and power dynamics within news media organizations.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy. It provides an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts. The selected bibliography is useful to efficiently keep up with trends in library instruction for busy practitioners, library science students and those wishing to learn about information literacy in other contexts.

This article annotates 424 English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, theses and reports on library instruction and information literacy published in 2021. The sources were selected from the EBSCO platform for Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA), Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Scopus, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, and WorldCat, published in 2021 that included the terms “information literacy,” “library instruction,” or “information fluency” in the title, abstract or keywords. The sources were organized in Zotero. Annotations summarize the source, focusing on the findings or implications. Each source was categorized into one of seven pre-determined categories: K-12 Education, Children and Adolescents; Academic and Professional Programs; Everyday Life, Community, and the Workplace; Libraries and Health Information Literacy; Multiple Library Types; and Other Information Literacy Research and Theory.

The paper provides a brief description of 424 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy within 2021.

In the current media landscape where misinformation circulation becomes a primary threat to public health and society's intellectual well-being, incidental news exposure's role in influencing misperceptions and misinformation engagement remains under-explored. Moreover, less is known regarding how and to what extent personal factors such as personality and media literacy may drive the sharing of misinformation.

Under the theoretical guidance of the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, the authors surveyed 546 college students aged 18 and above to explore the relationship between incidental news exposure and misinformation sharing.

Findings buttressed the hypothesized relationship built on the S-O-R model and revealed a path from incidental online news exposure to misinformation sharing, mediated by misperceptions. The mediated path was further moderated by narcissism and media literacy. Specifically, narcissists have higher misperceptions when they encounter online news more often; higher misperceptions in turn give rise to greater misinformation sharing behaviors. The ability to critically consume new media information only decreases misinformation sharing behavior for narcissists with lower misperceptions.

Guided by the S-O-R framework, this study takes the first step in examining the link between incidental news exposure and misinformation sharing and accounts for the moderating influences of personality and media literacy factors. Findings provide a theoretical foundation and practical implications for future interventions to combat misinformation.

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.