Browsing by Author "Belair-Gagnon, Valerie"

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The Changing Physical and Social Environment of Newsgathering: A Case Study of Foreign Correspondents Using Chat Apps During Unrest
(Social Media + Society, 2017-03) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Agur, Colin; Frisch, Nicholas
Mobile chat apps have shaped multiple forms of communication in everyday life, including education, family, business, and health communication. In journalism, chat apps have taken on a heightened significance in reporting political unrest, particularly in terms of audience/reporter distinctions, sourcing of information, and community formation. Mobile phones are now essential components in reporters’ everyday communication, and particularly during political unrest. In East Asia, the latest trends point toward private networking apps, such as WeChat and WhatsApp, as the most important digital tools for journalists to interact with sources and audiences in news production. These apps provide a set of private (and, increasingly, encrypted) alternatives to open, public-facing social media platforms. This article is the first to examine foreign correspondents’ usage of chat apps for newsgathering during political unrest in China and Hong Kong since the 2014 “Umbrella Movement,” a time when the use of chat apps in newsgathering became widespread. This article identifies and critically examines the salient features of these apps. It then discusses the ways these journalistic interactions on chat apps perpetuate, disrupt, and affect “social” newsgathering. This article argues that chat apps do not represent one interactive space; rather they are hybrid interactions of news production embedded in social practices rather than pre-existing physical/digital spaces. This research is significant as the emergence of chat apps as tools in foreign correspondents’ reporting has implications for journalistic practices in information gathering, storage, security, and interpretation and for the informational cultures of journalism.
Citizen media and journalism
(The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, 2015) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Anderson, C.W.
Citizen media is defined as a form of journalism that provides an alternative to traditional journalism. It is now an integral part of journalism input, production, dissemination, and consumption. The citizen media that emerged at the end of the twenty-first century is associated with the rapid rise of the Internet and Web 2.0. as a source of broadcasting and public information.
Failure to Launch: Competing Institutional Logics, Intrapreneurship, and the Case of Chatbots
(2020) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Lewis, Seth C.; Agur, Colin
The impact of charity and tax law/regulation on not-for-profit news organizations
(The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford and the Information Society Project, Yale Law School, 2016) Picard, Robert; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Ranchordás, Sofia
Interactions and Policy-Making: Civil Society Perspectives on the Multistakeholder Internet Governance Process in India
(Internet Policy Observatory, 2015) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Subramanian, Ramesh
This paper examines India’s experience in developing national Internet policy by focusing on interactions among stakeholders in the Internet governance process. The paper begins by tracing the history of telecom policies in India along with the development of its IT sector as well as its civil society. It identifies the tensions, opportunities and threats that India has experienced in its Internet policy-making. It then reviews India’s legislative and policy history from the IT Act of 2000 onward, noting the intentions and limitations of India’s framework of Internet governance. A notable aspect of the paper involves a series of interviews with civil society stakeholders involved in India’s Internet governance debates. These interviews are used to identify patterns of interaction among different stakeholders, and to understand the underlying power dynamics in India’s policy-making process.
International News Production and Globalization
(Global Media Journal -- Canadian Edition, 2011) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie
Media Capture with Chinese Characteristics: Changing Patterns in Hong Kong’s News Media System
(Journalism, 2018) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Frisch, Nicholas
In the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, a former British territory in southern China returned to the People’s Republic as a semi-autonomous enclave in 1997, media capture has distinct characteristics. On one hand, Hong Kong offers a case of media capture in an uncensored media sector and open market economy similar to those of Western industrialized democracies. Yet Hong Kong’s comparatively small size, close proximity, and broad economic exposure to the authoritarian markets and politics of neighboring Mainland China, which practices strict censorship, place unique pressures on Hong Kong’s nominally free press. Building on the literature on media and politics in Hong Kong post-handover and drawing on interviews with journalists in Hong Kong, this article examines the dynamics of media capture in Hong Kong. It highlights how corporate-owned legacy media outlets are increasingly deferential to the Beijing government’s news agenda, while social media is fostering alternative spaces for more skeptical and aggressive voices. This article develops a scholarly vocabulary to describe media capture from the perspective of local journalists and from the academic literature on media and power in Hong Kong and China since 1997.
Mobile Sourcing: A Case Study of Journalistic Norms and Usage of Chat Apps
(Mobile Media and Communication, 2017) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Frisch, Nicholas
Since 2011, mobile chat apps have gained significant popularity worldwide and the leading chat apps have surpassed social networking sites in user numbers. These apps have become the hosts for everyday communication among a wide variety of users and, thanks to the functionalities of certain apps, have taken on new significance in reporting. Especially in Hong Kong (a high-income, high-tech society in which smartphones are in widespread use) and mainland China (an emerging market with more than 1 billion mobile phone users), journalists have turned to these apps to complement face-to-face interactions to gather news. Drawing on a case study building on in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents based in China and Hong Kong, this article discusses how journalists use chat apps and establish trust with their sources. This article explores journalistic sourcing on apps (e.g., encrypted or not encrypted; open or one-to-one communication), and seeks to understand individual and systemic levels of trust. It finds that there are differences of trust depending on the functionalities of individual chat apps, and that interactions in journalistic sourcing in face-to-face and online environments affect the generation and output of news stories. Chat apps allow reporters to use open or closed networks, and adopt one of several approaches: trust the network, master the network, or abandon the network. These findings suggest that chat apps have an important role in communicating with sources, and should be a part of efforts to theorize journalistic sourcing.
New Frontiers of Newsgathering: How Foreign Correspondents Use Chat Apps to Cover Political Unrest
(Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 2016) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Frisch, Nicholas
This report explores how chat apps alter reportage, allowing journalists to acquire multimedia information, pursue stories, access private networks (particularly in contexts of censorship), and organize news production. Chat apps are becoming a common tool for newsgathering; they allow journalists to sit in on conversations and get in touch with potential sources, particularly in countries such as China where more public social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) are not as commonly used. Today, the most popular chat app, WhatsApp, has more than one billion monthly active users. Young, mobile people have shifted away from public networks to private chat apps because they are easier to use and offer greater privacy under surveillance. The report is a case study of chat apps usage in covering the recent youth protests in Hong Kong.
Reconstructing the Indian public sphere: Newswork and social media in the Delhi gang rape case
(Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 2014) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Mishra, Smeeta; Agur, Colin
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
Reconstructing the Indian Public Sphere: Newswork and Social Media in the Delhi Gang Rape Case
(Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2014) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Mishra, Smeeta; Agur, Colin
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
Revisiting Impartiality: Social Media and Journalism at The BBC
(Symbolic Interaction, 2013) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie
This article contributes to the literature of news production studies by providing a powerful example of how processes of deliberation bring change to journalism. It explores the reconstruction of impartiality using the single case-study of social media in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) international journalism. In this case-study, symbolic interactionism and mesostructure analysis enable us to explore social organizations and social processes, placing them in larger embedded contexts (structural, historical, and mode of action) and extended temporality. Following D. L. Altheide’s (1996) ecology of communication framework, this study on BBC impartiality demonstrates that in the newsroom, techies have responded strategically to the logic of their environment. Techies have joined in the process of the new symbolic architecture of impartiality, which has transformed news agenda-setting. This new logic, ushered in by techies, has shaped editorial decisions at the public broadcaster. This article discusses how social media have contributed to the nature, organization, and consequences of communication activities of the BBC.
Social Media at BBC News: The re-making of crisis reporting
(Routledge, 2015) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie
Since the emergence of social media in the journalistic landscape, the BBC has sought to produce reporting more connected to its audience while retaining its authority as a public broadcaster in crisis reporting. Using empirical analysis of crisis news production at the BBC, this book shows that the emergence of social media at the BBC and the need to manage this kind of material led to a new media logic in which tech-savvy journalists take on a new centrality in the newsroom. In this changed context, the politico-economic and socio-cultural logic have led to a more connected newsroom involving this new breed of journalists and BBC audience. This examination of news production events shows that in the midst of transformations in journalistic practices and norms, including newsgathering, sourcing, distribution and impartiality, the BBC has reasserted its authority as a public broadcaster.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Journalistic Disruption
(Digital Journalism, 2017) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Holton, Avery; Owen, Taylor
In recent years, there has been a surge in research on small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in news production and news audience engagement. Most of this research has focused on legal, ethical, and regulatory implications of UAVs in newsgathering, while paying less attention to the journalists’ perspectives. To fill this gap in the academic literature, this article explores the ethical principles that guide journalists who use UAVs, how they have worked within these ethical principles, and how they can serve as disruptive innovators. Semistructured interviews with 13 UAV early adopters reveal that legal and regulatory restraints on UAVs facilitated the emergence of a new form of norm entrepreneur inside journalistic institutions. These individuals were able to experiment on the fringes of acceptable practice. In so doing, they seeded their organizations with the skill set and institutional capacity to engage constructively with the use of UAVs once constraints were lifted.
#Verdict2014: social media and change in Indian legacy media during the 2014 lok sabha election
(Center for the Study of Journalism at Bornemouth University, 2015) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Agur, Colin; Thorsen, Einar; Sreedharan, Chindu

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