Valerie Belair-Gagnon
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Browsing Valerie Belair-Gagnon by Subject "journalism"
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Item 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, NicholasMobile 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.Item Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Journalistic Disruption(Digital Journalism, 2017) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Holton, Avery; Owen, TaylorIn 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.