Browsing by Subject "journalism"
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Item Actors, actants, audiences, and activities in cross-media news work: A matrix and a research agenda(2014-07-21) Lewis, Seth C.; Westlund, OscarIn contemporary journalism, there is a need for better conceptualizing the changing nature of human actors, nonhuman technological actants, and diverse representations of audiences—and the activities of news production, distribution, and interpretation through which actors, actants, and audiences are inter-related. This article explicates each of these elements—the Four A’s—in the context of cross-media news work, a perspective that lends equal emphasis to editorial, business, and technology as key sites for studying the organizational influences shaping journalism. We argue for developing a sociotechnical emphasis for the study of institutional news production: a holistic framework through which to make sense of and conduct research about the full range of actors, actants, and audiences engaged in cross-media news work activities. This emphasis addresses two shortcomings in the journalism studies literature: a relative neglect about (1) the interplay of humans and technology, or manual and computational modes of orientation and operation, and (2) the interplay of editorial, business, and technology in news organizations. This article’s ultimate contribution is a cross-media news work matrix that illustrates the interconnections among the Four A’s and reveals where opportunities remain for empirical study.Item The Affective Flows of Financial News Media(2016-11) Cormany, DianeAbstract At the start of the 21st century, the financial turn and the affective turn swept through critical cultural studies. The former recognized how society was being shaped by financialization—essentially the expansion of securities markets and market logics to all areas of daily life (Martin 2002). In order to understand the impact of finance capitalism’s incursion into private and social life, scholars including Brian Massumi and Lauren Berlant turned towards affect, which refers to the flow of sensations within and between bodies. At the same time, financial news media shifted to focus primarily on market movement, often replacing contextual analysis in the process. Drawing from media studies, theories and histories of financialization, affect theory, and cultural studies, my dissertation examines the intersection of these sociohistoric and contextual phenomena. I evaluate financial news media across both broadcast and print platforms: The Closing Bell (CNBC), Marketplace (American Public Media), and The Wall Street Journal as case studies for theorizing how financial news media operates as both a reflection of and a technology of financialization. My dissertation does so by situating financial news media within the context of neoliberal regulatory and ideological change that affected both the expansion of finance capital and changes in the media industry. In addition, I undertake close readings to evaluate the genre-specific aesthetics and the definitional forms of each text in order to understand how they interact with market logics. In the process I have discovered a common focus on incremental market movement across my case studies. These aesthetic forms may be considered affective by focusing on movement as productive and change-worthy (Massumi 2002). Likewise, while each of my dissertation texts imagines a different investing audience based upon their responsiveness and involvement in the market, the demographics comprise the educated and financially elite. Therefore, my project evaluates how media communicates engagement with the market as exclusive and hegemonic.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 COVID-19 Contact Tracing News Environment in Minnesota(2021) Pinaula-Toves, Alanalyn N; Adabor, Maame Amma; Korthas, Jennifer M; Kinzer, Hannah TThe uncertain and rapidly evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has much of the world relying on news outlets for the latest public health information. The content of articles published by these news outlets may therefore have widespread and significant implications on public opinions, beliefs, and behaviors. This cross-sectional content analysis examined 630 unique news articles published in Minnesota, comparing message content from mainstream news outlets to that of local "ethnic" news outlets. The results of the study indicate that inclusion of contact tracing information may vary by news outlet type, and that positive framing was significantly higher in local "ethnic" news articles compared to mainstream articles.Item Editorial Judgment in an Age of Data: How Audience Analytics and Metrics are Influencing the Placement of News Products(2015-05) Zamith, RodrigoIn recent years, audience analytics (systems that collect and analyze digital trace data from users) and audience metrics (quantified measures of how content is consumed and interacted with) have gained currency within newsrooms, enabling them to influence editorial newsworkers' constructions of their audiences and, consequently, the shapes that news products take. The extent of that influence, however, remains largely unknown, with few studies examining the direct relationship between metrics and news content. The present work addresses this shortcoming by offering methodological guidance and an empirical assessment of the extent to which one particularly salient metric, page views, influences the prominence and de-selection of news items on the homepages of several news organizations. It demonstrates that algorithms can be leveraged to computationally analyze particular aesthetics of a large volume of homepages; that the�most viewed' list can serve as a useful indicator of the popularity of news items, though such lists are not always comparable across organizations and introduce important limitations; and that the effect of an item's popularity on its subsequent placement on the homepage is fairly muted in the process of selection, though it is greater in the process of de-selection. In short, the present research indicates that the current content-related effects of audience metrics--at least as it pertains to a particular editorial function and metric-- may be overstated in the literature, and offers pathways for further studying similar relationships.Item Effects of Incorporating Citizen-Eyewitness Images into the News on Audience Trust in News Organizations and News Engagement(2019-06) Kim, JisuRecently, news organizations have actively been requesting and endorsing private citizens’ contributions to the news production through eyewitness images so as to circulate up-to-minute information and draw more audience attention to the news. Despite anecdotal evidence of growing numbers of citizen-eyewitness images in the news, there has been little systematic research on the extent of using citizen-eyewitness images by news organizations and the impact of incorporating citizen-eyewitness images into news content. In order to fill this gap in the research on citizen-eyewitness images, this study aims to examine: (1) the extent to which U.S. newspaper organizations incorporate images captured by private citizens into their news articles, and (2) the effects of incorporating citizen-eyewitness images in the news on audience trust in the news organization and audience engagement with the news. To achieve the goals, this study first conducted a machine-coded content analysis of news images published by 71 U.S. newspaper organizations to calculate the percentage of citizen-eyewitness images out of all news images with identifiable and classifiable sources (Study 1). This study then collected and analyzed user behavioral data on Twitter to compute a proxy measure representing trust in the news organizations using the Trust Scores in Social Media (TSM) algorithm and audience engagement with news (Study 2). The effects of the extent to which a news organization uses citizen-eyewitness images on audience trust in the news organization and audience engagement with news articles published by it were tested. The results showed that U.S. newspapers tended to incorporate a rather small number of citizen-eyewitness images in their news reports, and there were some variations in the degree of using citizen-eyewitness images in news reports among different groups of news organizations. In addition, the findings demonstrated that the extent to which a news organization incorporated citizen-eyewitness images in its news articles was positively related to the level of audience engagement with its news posted on Twitter. In contrast, there was no significant effect of incorporating images captured by private citizens into the news on audience trust in the news organization. This study contributes to advancing the participatory journalism research by providing systematic data depicting the current state of the newsroom practice using citizen-eyewitness images in the U.S. and examining the effects of citizen-eyewitness images in the news on audience trust in news organizations and engagement with news. Additionally, this study offers useful practical implications for news organizations as they develop strategies to deal with audience’s participation in the news production.Item The Institutionalization of Solutions Journalism(2022-05) Steinke, AllisonThis dissertation provides a theoretically driven empirical investigation of the emerging institution of solutions journalism. Solutions journalism is a journalistic approach defined as rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. This project uses a triangulated qualitative methodology comprising 52 in-depth interviews; netnography of solutions journalists, editors, and practitioners’ digital communities; and qualitative content analysis of solutions-oriented journalistic texts. This dissertation presents three major arguments. The first argument is that solutions journalism is a journalistic approach that functions globally as a networked organizational form with a central mission and decentralized hubs and spokes that carry out the practice worldwide. The second argument is that emerging institutions gain legitimacy through shared support for a codified set of rules, norms, and values, as seen in the legitimation of solutions journalism. The third and final argument is that solutions journalism is in a moment between theorization and diffusion worldwide, with various factors contributing to and constraining its success. Drawing from foundational roots in sociological and managerial literature, this dissertation project expands the applicability of new institutional theory to empirical questions about emerging news practices. This dissertation also answers calls for clarity of the theorization and conceptualization of solutions journalism.Item Journalism concerning resource matters : case study examples in contrasting interpretations.(University of Minnesota, 1998-10) Webster, Henry H.Item Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts, and Critiques(Digital Journalism, 2015) Lewis, Seth C.“Journalism in an era of big data” is thus a way of seeing journalism as interpolated through the conceptual and methodological approaches of computation and quantification. It is about both the ideation and implementation of computational and mathematical mindsets and skill sets in newswork—as well as the necessary deconstruction and critique of such approaches. Taking such a wide-angle view of this phenomenon, including both practice and philosophy within this conversation, means attending to the social/cultural dynamics of computation and quantification—such as the grassroots groups that are seeking to bring pro-social “hacking” into journalism (Lewis and Usher 2013, 2014)—as well as the material/technological characteristics of these developments. It means recognizing that algorithms and related computational tools and techniques “are neither entirely material, nor are they entirely human—they are hybrid, composed of both human intentionality and material obduracy” (Anderson 2013, 1016). As such, we need a set of perspectives that highlight the distinct and interrelated roles of social actors and technological actants at this emerging intersection of journalism (Lewis and Westlund 2014a). To trace the broad outline of journalism in an era of big data, we need (1) empirical cases that describe and explain such developments, whether at the micro (local) or macro (institutional) levels of analysis; (2) conceptual frameworks for organizing, interpreting, and ultimately theorizing about such developments; and (3) critical perspectives that call into question taken-for-granted norms and assumptions. This special issue takes up this three-part emphasis on cases, concepts, and critiques.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.