The local TV station as an organizational self: Promoting corporate image via Instagram

Television stations are increasingly using social media platforms for a variety of reasons. This study examined more than 4,300 visuals posted to the Instagram sites of 383 local TV stations in the United States. The analysis found that news and promotion were the top themes of the posts. Using Goffman’s (1959) presentation of self as a theoretical foundation, this study found that visuals coded as frontstage received more likes and comments than backstage visuals. Small market stations featured more promotion visuals than large and medium markets. Large market stations featured more lifestyle, community, and news posts than the other market sizes.     

From Facebook to Instagram: Exploring user engagement in an academic library

It is trendy for university libraries to offer services on social media (SM) platforms. As many millennials prefer to use apps of photo-snapping, libraries unavoidably start to use Instagram to connect with users. This study examines the effectiveness of the use of Facebook and Instagram in The University of Hong Kong Libraries (HKUL), by a mixed-method approach to analyze the posts on the two SM sites of HKUL and user feedback collected from interviews on campus. The content analysis surprisingly revealed that both Facebook and Instagram received very low user engagement, and the most frequently posted contents were library operational news and library events. The interviewees opined that they welcomed HKUL's use of Facebook and Instagram, but they urged HKUL to change its uninteresting style on the SM sites and make better use of the SM features to attract users' attention. This study provides insights for librarians for their effective management and adoption of SM, especially for content design and management.     

Examining government cross-platform engagement in social media: Instagram vs Twitter and the big lift project

As governments are increasingly turning to social media as a means of engaging the public, questions remain as to how they are actually using various social media platforms. Do specific platforms engender specific types of messages? If so, what are they, and how do they affect civic engagement, co-participation, and address citizen concerns? In this paper, we compare the use of Instagram and Twitter by ‘The Big Lift’, a bridge re-decking project completed by Halifax Harbour Bridges. Based on a content analysis of Instagram (n = 248) and Twitter (n = 1278) public posts, we found that Instagram was used as a more ‘informal’ narrative platform that promoted a clicktivist type of responses from the audience, whereas Twitter was a more ‘formal’ news platform that supported greater two-way communication between the organization and the audience. We conclude that by building and maintaining their active presence and following base on social media, and especially on Twitter, organizations can develop a capacity to address social concerns during disruptive events or infrastructure projects like ‘The Big Lift’.     

Citizen reactions to municipalities’ Instagram communication

In this paper, we explore how local governments are using Instagram as a communication tool to engage with their citizens, using data from the municipalities of Andalusia (Spain). We seek to identify the determinants of local government use of Instagram, the determinants of activity in this channel and the determinants of citizen reactions in order to understand the influence of media types (picture, video or album) used in municipality posts, and to understand content type (what the post is about). Instaloader, an open source intelligence (OSINT) tool for Instagram, was applied. It made it possible to automatically extract all posts of the analysed municipalities (14,742 posts). These were later automatically analysed using R, an open source software. It was determined that of the 29 Andalusian local governments with the highest populations, only those that maintain an account on Instagram, totalling 17 municipalities (58.62%), would be part of the final analysis. Our findings demonstrate that when local governments have a high level of debt, they do not maintain and actively use Instagram accounts. We also found that quality of posts’ content is more important than quantity of followers, since there is no significant relationship between citizen reactions and the number of inhabitants of a municipality or the number of followers (audience), while there is a significant negative relationship between the number of posts (activity) and reactions. Our results also highlight that the level of reactions can be stimulated by certain media and content types.     

The Strategic Challenge of Continuous Change in Multi-Platform Media Organizations—A Strategy-as-Practice Perspective

This article focuses on the complexities of managing multi-platform strategies in the complex and highly dynamic environments of contemporary media markets. Based on a comparative case study of two Nordic media organizations, the article identifies and articulates two sets of practices through which strategy is managed in the continuously changing print and online environments. While the practices that guide strategy development of print publishing tend to be content driven, brand constrained, commercially steered, and top-down monitored, strategizing for online platforms tends to be more technology driven, brand inspired, interactive, and entrepreneurial. For multi-platform media organizations this type of situation is challenging because the incremental and radical innovations that they pursue are platform specific, instead of aiming at exploitation and exploration on both platforms. To succeed in the market, the article argues, multi-platform media organizations need to develop strategies and organizational practices that allow them to be truly ambidextrous—to pursue both incremental and radical change—on all platforms.     

Selling smoke to Asia: An historical analysis of conflicting US policies on cigarette advertising and promotions

Focused on the liberalization of Asian cigarette markets (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand), this paper aims to provide an historical analysis of this process driven by the US government and US cigarette companies, and discusses changes in cigarette advertising and promotional environments as a result of market liberalization.

Specifically, this paper addresses three major areas: first, it discusses the process and development of cigarette market opening of three Asian countries Japan, Taiwan, and Korea) and the role of the US government in this process. Second, it examines the outcome of this liberalization, including major marketing strategies employed by US cigarette companies in those markets. Third, by comparing Thailand's market opening process separately with three other markets, this paper discusses what other countries can do with the global public health community to protect public health in terms of the regulation of cigarette advertising and marketing activities.     

Historypin and Pinterest for Digital Collections: Measuring the Impact of Image-Based Social Tools on Discovery and Access

ABSTRACT

For the past several years, the adoption of social media platforms has increased significantly as academic libraries have emphasized the importance of finding new ways to promote collections and services. Recently, many libraries have embraced Historypin and Pinterest because of their specific focus on images. This article examines the impact of these platforms on digital libraries and explains how each affects the discovery and access of digital collections.     

Between Discourse and Being The Commodification of Pharmaceuticals in Late Capitalism

A critical exploration of the history and present dynamics of drug advertising in the United States reveals how advertising practices exemplify the extent to which late capitalist market rationality impacts on popular understandings of medicine, well being, and disease. An historical overview of drug advertising and regulation thereof contextualizes a closer analysis of the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry acts to maximize profits through marketing efforts and the creation of diseases as platforms for the expansion of drug product markets. In this way U.S. drug manufacturers operate on a variety of communicative levels to ensure that their promotional messages are among the most widely disseminated. As medical and pharmaceutical technology develops and plays an increasingly pronounced role in everyday life from casual to more profound levels via the mass media, a critical and historical understanding of how and for whom it acts may become a vital focus of future inquiry on social and communicative phenomena and processes.     

Social media communication strategies of government agencies: Twitter use in Korea and the USA

This study examines Twitter use by the central government in Korea and the federal government in the USA by employing the webometric technique to extract their Twitter activity (basic Twitter statistics such as the numbers of followers, followings, and Tweets) and the social network analysis technique to map the relationship between their Twitter accounts and the direction of outlinks in their Tweets. The results of the initial analysis indicate some differences in Twitter strategies between the two governments. For example, Korean ministries were well connected through a dense network, engaged in collective cooperation, and retweeted common content to reinforce their collective agendas regardless of their main administrative functions, whereas US government departments were less collective and more individualistic and retweeted those messages that specifically fit the purpose of each department. In addition, the results for outlinks indicate that US government departments preferred private sources of information, whereas Korean ministries, government sources.     

Visual Propaganda in the Age of Social Media: An Empirical Analysis of Twitter Images During the 2012 Israeli–Hamas Conflict

This study analyzed images posted to Twitter by the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas' Alqassam Brigades during the November 2012 Gaza conflict to understand aspects of visual propaganda in the age of social media and online social networking. Content analysis was conducted to identify themes and frames prominently appearing in a total of 243 Twitter images posted by the two sides during a two-month period. Resistance and unity were the most prominent themes in the images posted by Israel and causalities of civilians and resistance were most prominent in Hamas-posted images. The majority of the Israeli images featured the analytical propaganda frame whereas the emotional propaganda frame was dominant in Hamas images.     

Spreading the word? European Union agencies and social media attention

Public agencies need to distribute information to their manifold audience quickly and directly. The emergence of social media platforms has sparked positive projections about future government-public interactions via the internet and almost every EU agency has created social media presences on the leading social media platforms. However, social media accounts of agencies receive strongly varying amounts of public attention and therefore display varying degrees of usefulness to connect with the public. This research examines which factors influence how much long-standing and temporal attention social media accounts of EU agencies receive. Using an extensive Twitter dataset of EU agencies and a new methodology that employs supervised text classification through the novel BERT language model to classify agency tweets, possible explanations of social media attention are tested. Results show that long-standing social media attention (i.e., size of the followership) is mostly explained by salience in traditional news, account age, and tweeting frequency, whilst a more interactive communication style tends to yield more temporal attention (i.e., number of retweets). The findings underline previous assumptions that employing a more interactive communication style maximizes public organizations' potential to connect with their audiences on social media.     

Awareness,Reporting, and Branding: Exploring Influences on Brazilian Journalists’ Social Media Use across Platforms

ABSTRACT

This study examines the individual and organizational level factors shaping Brazilian journalists’ use of social media. Results from a survey of 774 reporters show that individual factors influence awareness and reporting uses, while organizational factors are associated with branding. Results suggest no difference between groups of journalists, when it comes to incorporating social media for reporting; but online reporters engage in branding and use social media as an awareness system more than their counterparts. Findings also reveal that journalists have not fully embraced the participatory potential of social media, as only trust in information posted by other journalists relates to adoption.     

Children's media use in Indonesia

This article explores how Indonesian children have integrated media into their daily lives: media ownership at home, media uses, and gratifications sought, are discussed, as is the way in which gender and social-status influence the children–media relationship. Survey data of Jakarta-based children aged 9–15 (N=589) reveal that Indonesian children live in a media saturated environment, with high availability of media platforms in their homes and bedrooms. Similar to children in the US and Europe, children in Jakarta spend considerable amounts of time on a wealth of media platforms and experience multiple gratifications from using multiple media. Gender differences persist in that boys tend to be more into gaming, while girls focus more on communication aspects. High social-status children tend to have more media at their disposal in their bedroom, especially electronic games, computers, and Internet connections. Television is still prominent in the media menu of today, but mobile phones are ready to take its place in the near future.     

Explaining Privacy Control on Instagram and Twitter: The Roles of Narcissism and Self-Esteem

A growing body of research examines the relationships between psychological traits and privacy behaviors on Social Networking Sites (SNSs) to understand why users control information about themselves. This study investigates how narcissism and self-esteem can explain tendencies to control privacy on two widely used platforms: Instagram and Twitter. Data from an online survey (n = 510) are analyzed using linear mixed models. The exhibitionism component of narcissism tends to be associated with less privacy control on SNSs, i.e., profiles that are publicly accessible. Conversely, the superiority component of narcissism and self-esteem are associated with more privacy control. Across platforms, as self-esteem increases, the likelihood of having public settings on Instagram is significantly lower than on Twitter. The findings are discussed in the context of the different affordances that the two platforms present users with. The results indicate that privacy behaviors may be tied to relatively stable personality traits, suggesting that even as technologies and social norms with regard to privacy change, behaviors that limit the number of people to which individuals disclose personal information may remain the same.     

News audience fragmentation in the Japanese Twittersphere

ABSTRACT

Although computational approaches to ideology-based audience fragmentation are promising, they are not without limitations. First, most existing studies have focused on the US, and the cross-national validity of their results has rarely been tested. Second, previous studies that rely solely on behavioral data from social media tend to make strong analytical assumptions such as that Twitter users prefer to follow media and politicians whose ideological positions are similar to their own, and that the ideologies of political elites can be extrapolated to infer the ideologies of ordinary users. We aim to address these limitations. First, we focus on Japan to test the generalizability of US findings in an Asian context. Second, we do not rely solely on behavioral measurement but combine survey and social media data to infer the ideologies of Twitter users. Results indicate that our classifier built based on these self-reported ideologies produces more valid estimates than naïve extrapolation from views of the elites. Based on these improved estimates of Twitter users’ ideologies, we demonstrate that the ideological distributions of those who follow major Japanese media accounts on Twitter largely overlap, suggesting an absence of ideology-based audience fragmentation.     

Antecedents of Incidental News Exposure: The Role of Media Preference,Use and Trust

ABSTRACT

The online environment has radically changed the way in which users consume, discover and manipulate news. The growing relevance of social media platforms and digital intermediaries for news sharing and consumption increase the likelihood of citizens to be exposed to online news even when they are not seeking it. This digital transformation fundamentally challenges the way online news use and exposure have been conceptualized and measured, affecting also to citizens’ knowledge about public affairs and politics. This article examines the factors that predict the probability to be an “incidentally exposed news user” online. Specifically, based on a representative US sample from the Pew Research Centre, this study analyses the role of media preference, use and trust. Findings indicate that beyond users’ demographics and loyalty, readers’ news preferences, uses and trust, specially of social media platforms, affect their probability to be incidentally exposed to news online. These results have important empirical and theoretical implications for understanding the connection between readers’ news consumption patterns and online exposure, intentional or incidental.     

The gods are drinking milk! Word‐of‐mouth diffusion of a major news event in India

The objective of this study is to explore whether the US media overemphasized recalled Chinese products in 2007 and, if so, how news coverage in the US media differed from that of the Chinese media. By using a framing analysis of the coverage in two US media and two Chinese media, this study pursues answers to these questions. After comparing the news coverage of the recalled Chinese products and a real world indictor, this study found that neither US nor Chinese media mirrored the real world phenomenon as it was. By comparing news coverage of the issue in The New York Times and The Associated Press with China Daily, and The Xinhua News Agency, the study found that news coverage of the recalled issues differed significantly in terms of the sources used, the nationality of the source, the dominant frames employed, and the attribution of responsibility for the problems. In particular, Chinese media more frequently employed government officials as their main sources, which inherently increased the use of thematic frames. By contrast, US media often used episodic frames. Likewise, American media approached the issues using ‘Customers' Worries’ and ‘Broken System’ frames, whereas Chinese media often attempted to defend the quality of Chinese products and criticized Western media for exaggerating the issues. Owing to the news framing process, US audiences might have acquired more negative images of Chinese products and China in general. By contrast, their Chinese counterparts might have experienced increased antipathy and distrust concerning the American media.     

Networking or Not Working?

This paper examines journalists' changing sourcing practices in the context of an emerging media ecology initiated by processes of globalization, digitization, commercialism and concentration. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube provide the means to access a more diverse range of sources, including civil society organizations and ordinary citizens. We developed a quantitative content analysis to examine to what extent Belgian news coverage showed signs of diverse sourcing practices during the 2011 uprisings in three Arab countries. We analysed a total sample of 1121 news items about the street protests in Syria, Egypt and Tunisia, in four Belgian newspapers (two popular and two quality dailies) and two Belgian broadcasters (the public broadcaster VRT and the commercial channel VTM). The analysis shows that ordinary citizens and non-mainstream groups are important news sources and that social media platforms are consulted relatively often compared to everyday foreign news coverage. In terms of inter-media differences, the findings show that broadcasters' dependency on video footage and eyewitness accounts is reflected in their use of ordinary citizen sources and amateur footage. Moreover, the analysis confirms that quality newspapers display more diverse and more innovative sourcing practices than popular newspapers.     

Media Accountability and Journalists: To Whom Do Spanish Professionals Feel Responsible?

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses to whom Spanish journalists feel responsible. To achieve this objective, we sent out a survey to Spanish journalists to ascertain their opinion on this question. The journalists’ point of view was then compared with that of the general public though six focus groups consisting of Spanish citizens from six cities in Spain (Barcelona, Castellón, Madrid, Sevilla, Mondragón and Santiago de Compostela). Lastly, five in-depth interviews were conducted with journalism experts (e.g., directors of professional journalist associations). The main results show that the journalists feel particularly responsible to their conscience, the journalism code of ethics and their sources. The citizens, in contrast, believe that journalists should be responsible to the audience. We contextualised the Spanish finding in the European context by comparing our results with those derived from a study among European journalists.