Colin Agur
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Item Social Media and Changing Norms in Indian Mainstream Journalism During the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections(Bournemouth University, 2015) Agur, ColinItem ICTs and Education in Developing Countries: The Case Study of India(MIT Press, 2016) Agur, ColinItem Searching for Truth in Fragmented Spaces: Chat Apps and Verification in News Production(Oxford University Press, 2019) Agur, ColinItem Mobile Social Media, Activism, and Social Change: Reflecting on the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong(Routledge, 2021) Agur, ColinItem Disclosure and its Discontents: Protecting Privacy in a Time of Surveillance(2014) Agur, ColinItem Connecting the Dots: Interactions in Internet Rights and Security in India(Annenberg School of Communication, 2014) Agur, ColinItem Security, Internet Rights and Principles: Power Shifts and Implications for Internet Policy-Making in India(Annenberg School of Communication, 2015) Agur, ColinItem Betting Across Borders: Mobile Networks and the Future of Gambling(Digital Asia Hub, 2016) Agur, ColinItem Ways Reporters Have Used Chat Apps to Cover Political Unrest(Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, 2016) Agur, ColinItem On chat apps, journalists need to build relationships(Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, 2016) Agur, ColinItem Exploring the Future of Communication in India and Beyond: ICA's Regional Conference in Mumbai(International Communication Association, 2018) Agur, ColinItem New Frontiers in Newsgathering(Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, 2016) Agur, ColinCoverage of any breaking news event today often includes footage captured by eyewitnesses and uploaded to the social web. This has changed how journalists and news organizations not only report and produce news, but also how they engage with sources and audiences. In addition to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat are a rapidly growing source of information about newsworthy events and an essential link between participants and reporters covering those events. To look at how journalists at major news organizations use chat apps for newsgathering during political unrest, we focus on a case study of foreign correspondents based in Hong Kong and China during and since the 2014 Umbrella Movement Hong Kong protests. Political unrest in Hong Kong and China often centers around civic rights and government corruption. The Umbrella Movement involved large-scale, sit-in street protests, rejecting proposed changes to Hong Kong’s electoral laws and demanding voting rights for all Hong Kong citizens. Through a combination of observation and interviews with foreign correspondents, this report explores technology’s implications for reporting political unrest: how and why the protesters and official sources used chat apps, and the ways foreign reporters used chat apps (which are typically closed platforms) for newsgathering, internal coordination, and information sharing.Item How Foreign Correspondents Use Chat Apps to Cover Political Unrest(Columbia Journalism Review, 2016) Agur, ColinCoverage of any breaking news event today often includes footage captured by eyewitnesses and uploaded to the social web. This has changed how journalists and news organizations not only report and produce news, but also how they engage with sources and audiences. In addition to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat are a rapidly growing source of information about newsworthy events and an essential link between participants and reporters covering those events. To look at how journalists at major news organizations use chat apps for newsgathering during political unrest, we focus on a case study of foreign correspondents based in Hong Kong and China during and since the 2014 Umbrella Movement Hong Kong protests. Political unrest in Hong Kong and China often centers around civic rights and government corruption. The Umbrella Movement involved large-scale, sit-in street protests, rejecting proposed changes to Hong Kong’s electoral laws and demanding voting rights for all Hong Kong citizens. Through a combination of observation and interviews with foreign correspondents, this report explores technology’s implications for reporting political unrest: how and why the protesters and official sources used chat apps, and the ways foreign reporters used chat apps (which are typically closed platforms) for newsgathering, internal coordination, and information sharing.Item Failure to Launch: Competing Institutional Logics, Intrapreneurship, and the Case of Chatbots(2020) Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Lewis, Seth C.; Agur, ColinItem The Bully Pulpit, Social Media, and Public Opinion: A Big Data Approach(Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 2018) Agur, Colin; Michael, GabrielIn this paper, we seek to understand the contemporary power of the presidential “bully pulpit”— the persuasive power of the nation’s highest elected office—in a context of shifting patterns of mediation. We do so by examining a major social media communication platform (Twitter) for evidence of changes in public opinion before and after President Obama’s high-profile statements on net neutrality in November 2014. This study includes novel and comprehensive data on the effects of a presidential announcement on public opinion. With social media playing a growing role in both electoral and policy discourse, this paper offers a methodological foundation for future studies in the changing nature of the presidential bully pulpit and the role of social media as a tool of mediation in political communication.Item Re-Imagining the Indian State: External Forces and the Transformation of Telecommunications Policy, 1947-present(Global Media and Communication, 2018) Agur, ColinThis article examines Indian telecom policy from independence to the present. Dividing this period into three phases – from 1947 to 1984, 1984 to 1991 and 1991 to the present – the article explores the role of the state in India’s dramatic transformation from a telecommunications laggard to one of the world’s largest markets in mobile communication. It draws on a wide range of government documents, institutional surveys (domestic and international) of Indian telephony, memoirs and analyses by policy officials, and interviews with telecom executives. This article makes two arguments. First, it emphasizes the importance of external forces, including economic pressures, obligations to foreign creditors and the arrival of outsiders into key policymaking positions. Second, it provides an alternative to the simplistic argument that the state has ‘left telecommunications to the private sector’. Rather than abandon its role in network building and maintenance, the Indian government has deployed its power in specific and deliberate ways. While much of this policy development was unanticipated and at times accidental, Indian telephony has been transformed from an inward-looking and defensive statist monopoly to an internationalized, technocratic marketplace.Item Mobile Sourcing: A Case Study of Journalistic Norms and Usage of Chat Apps(Mobile Media and Communication, 2017) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Frisch, NicholasSince 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.Item Media Capture with Chinese Characteristics: Changing Patterns in Hong Kong’s News Media System(Journalism, 2018) Agur, Colin; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Frisch, NicholasIn 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.Item 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, NicholasThis 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.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.