Do old Norms Have a Place in New Media?

Emerging business models for news have the potential to affect the nature of democracy. As the economic foundations of mainstream journalism become increasingly shaky, a new economic model is emerging in the form of news organizations operating as nonprofits. These are mostly run by former newspaper journalists bringing with them traditional journalistic norms they worked under previously; now they are operating under a vastly different economic framework. These organizations are producing a growing amount of public affairs news while mainstream news production shrinks. The research question examined here is whether this emergent form (1) changes but maintains core norms and practices of the journalistic culture from which it arose, or (2) transforms norms and practices into something new. I briefly review norms and practices of traditional journalism to create a framework against which to compare behaviors at one nonprofit news organization, MinnPost, through ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews. My findings indicate that MinnPost values some traditional norms (e.g. loyalty to citizens); other norms are valued but not fulfilled in a traditional way (e.g. comprehensiveness of news coverage); yet others are largely eschewed (e.g. forum provision). This suggests a set of evolving journalistic tenets, which observations indicate are linked to MinnPost's economic structure. It points toward how emerging business models are changing journalism, and by extension could be affecting American democracy. This paper is part of a larger project investigating how nonprofit news organizations are changing the information available in local news environments.     

Engaged Journalism and News Work: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Organizational Dynamics and Professional Challenges

ABSTRACT

Building upon the sociotechnical perspective presented by Lewis and Westlund (2015, “Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-media News Work: A Matrix and a Research Agenda.” Digital Journalism 3 (1): 19–37. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.927986), this study examines organizational dynamics, technological affordances and professional challenges of engaged journalism practices by analyzing how Hearken, one of the most celebrated audience engagement companies, and its tools and services are being implemented in 15 U.S. news organizations. This framework identifies Hearken and organizations like it as important “external actors” providing technological “actants” that are shaping how newsrooms report the news by providing ways for audiences to be brought into producing the news, particularly during the earlier phases of the reporting process. Based on in-depth interviews, we find that nearly every news organization in our sample reports some measure of success by using Hearken for involving audience members throughout the production of news. At the same time, we also identify how this implementation is significantly shaped by organizational imperatives and the models particular organizations create for producing audience-centric news work. Ultimately, this study presents a partial update to the decades-long literature on participatory journalism by suggesting that engaged journalism practices actually create opportunities for meaningful audience involvement.     

Citizen-Centered Journalism and Contested Boundaries

This article explores the existence of a “citizen-centered journalism” that sees citizens as crucial participants in the construction of news and as co-creators of their own worlds. Through qualitative case studies of three news organizations, the article examines the motivation for using a citizen-centered approach, the news routines that are required to do so, the categories of content produced, and the perceived impact of this approach. The results suggest these news organizations are working in partnership with communities and striving to give a voice to historically marginalized communities. The journalists, however, see citizen participation as complementary to professional journalistic routines that favor verifiable information, rather than assigning inherent value to it for its own sake.     

Educate. Empower. Revolt

This analysis examines how citizen journalism in two very resource-poor areas in India is mobilizing communities and sparking movements demanding change. The Video Volunteers and CGNET Swara are two citizen journalism organizations that work in Central India, in areas whose human and development indexes are among the lowest in the country. Citizen journalism has been studied both as a consequence and as an instigator of social revolution. The Arab Spring movement and the case of Mohamed Bouazizi in the 2010 Tunisian uprisings are prominent recent examples. But citizen journalism in these and similar cases usually focus on the framing of martyr narratives where individuals and their protests or reactions against human rights atrocities make them “a symbol of the struggle for justice, dignity and freedom.” Through a content analysis of 400 news stories posted in the year 2015–2016 and qualitative interviews with 30 participants and a focus group of 15 participants, this study analyses how the Video Volunteers and CGNET Swara train citizens to produce news, the kinds of frame that are used to mobilize audiences, and encourage them to articulate outrage against the many human rights atrocities that occur in these areas. Findings show that citizen journalism succeeds because of the culturally resonant frames used and effective frame alignment that resonate with their main audiences and producers. The news produced and disseminated activates connective structures to facilitate collective action among audiences and communities who earlier had little means or recourse to address such issues. This collective action encourages participants to gather offline to fight for their demands and positively transform their communities.     

Opportunity or risk? How news organizations frame social media in their guidelines for journalists

Guided by regulatory focus theory and framing, the present study analyzes how U.S. and British mainstream news organizations (N = 12) frame the current social media environment in their social media guidelines. The results indicate that news organizations dominantly frame the new environment as a risk to guard against, warning of the possible harm to their reputations and journalism norms such as accuracy and objectivity (prevention-focused), rather than as an opportunity to actively take advantage of (promotion-focused).     

Nurturing Authority

When considering the role of local journalism in a networked media environment, it is crucial to examine how audiences attribute news with the power to define social knowledge. In particular, television news programs need to appeal to audiences by reinforcing a sense of local journalistic authority to assert the parameters of who and what is worthy of coverage. This article presents the findings from interviews with a range of commercial television news viewers in Sydney, Australia. It positions viewership in the context of people’s wider engagement with news, and in relation to their interpersonal and digital social interactions. The paper argues that local audiences have conflicting attitudes to the role of television news, both contesting and re-inscribing the programs with the power to demarcate social, political, and cultural knowledge. It traces how local audiences challenge the ability of news to convey boundaries within the community through processes of exclusion, connecting the contestations to the lived experiences of the individuals. It identifies that television news programs nurture journalistic authority in terms of their local relevance, and it contributes insights on the significance of local news by engaging with the means by which audiences themselves attach social power to journalism.     

Fake News as a Critical Incident in Journalism

This study examines how American newspapers made sense of the issue of fake news. By analysing newspaper editorials and considering the problem of fake news as a critical incident confronting journalism, this study found that news organizations in the US recognize fake news as a social problem while acknowledging the challenge in defining it. They generally considered fake news as a social media phenomenon thriving on political polarization driven by mostly ideological, but sometimes also financial, motivations. Therefore, they assigned blame for the rise of fake news to the current political environment, to technological platforms Google and Facebook, and to audiences.     

The Changing Role of the Local News Media in Enabling Citizens to Engage in Local Democracies

Using Leeds City Council in the United Kingdom as a case study, we analyse comparatively the changing role of local journalism in the public communications and engagement strategies of local government. Drawing on over 20 semi-structured interviews with elected politicians, Council strategists, mainstream journalists, and citizen journalists, the article explores perceptions of the mainstream news media's role versus new modes of communication in engaging and communicating with citizens. We evaluate the Council's perceptions of its online and offline practices of engagement with different publics, and focus in particular on their interactions with journalists, the news media, and citizen journalists. The article considers how moves towards digital modes of engagement are changing perceptions of the professional role orientations of journalists in mediating between the Council and the general public.     

And Deliver Us to Segmentation

Non-profit news publishers, a small but growing piece of the news media environment, often explicitly attempt to build strong ties with their audiences. Many assume this approach differs from that of legacy newsrooms, which have historically kept the audience at arm’s length. In this article, I argue that this distinction has blurred. In-depth interviews with reporters and editors at a daily newspaper (The Chicago Tribune) and a local news non-profit (City Bureau) reveal that: (1) both organizations are pursuing a more collaborative relationship with their audiences; and (2) this pursuit is ill-suited for the traditional mass audience approach to news production. I conclude that journalists aspiring to work more closely with the audience find greater success when that audience is narrow to begin with.     

娱乐新闻中的媒体责任边缘化及其纠正

当前的一些娱乐新闻报道由于过度放大娱乐功能,出现了热衷炒作猎奇,格调内容低俗,侵蚀主流文化,偏离主流舆论,误导新闻受众等媒体责任边缘化现象.要尽快扭转娱乐新闻报道责任偏移的不良倾向,必须遏止新闻消费主义影响,严把内容关,坚持正确的舆论导向,大力倡导主流文化,提升娱乐新闻品位.     

Revising Legacy Media Practices to Serve Hyperlocal Information Needs of Marginalized Populations

ABSTRACT

This study explores how two nonprofit media organizations–PublicSource and Philadelphia Community Access Media (PhillyCAM)–have transformed their legacy practices to better connect within and serve marginalized populations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, PA. As traditional newsrooms have been depleted by dire financial realities, new journalism outcroppings have heeded the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009) report and, consequently, revised their approaches to community engagement. Adjacent to these reformed legacy newsrooms are community media organizations that operate a municipality’s public, educational, or government (PEG) access media production facilities. Although PEG access media’s legacy has no clear genealogical ties with traditional journalism, an increasing amount of PEG operations over the past ten years have started to intentionally test editorialized forms of community news reporting. The data collected and assessed in this study has indicated that news organizations like PublicSource have an explicit need to do more relational community engagement work that will enable it to fill hyperlocal information gaps and better serve marginalized populations. Community media organizations like PhillyCAM have extensive experience engaging diverse publics; however, as this study reveals, they could benefit from employing formalized news production methods that are guided by journalistic standards.     

Crafting News Narratives on Social Media

Thai news organizations are developing innovative cross-media news strategies and several of these strategies revolve around social media, which are fast becoming a hub for repurposing and extending traditional content. This paper reports on an empirical study conducted by using in-depth interviews with journalists from the social-media teams of three news organizations in Thailand – PPTV HD36, Nation Multimedia Group and Thairath – to analyse storytelling strategies. The key finding shows that cross-media content can extend news coverage to different aspects of a story, to inform and explain issues, and engaging audiences. This study suggests the objective use and design of content by dividing it into four types, based on functions: repurposing, engaging, cross-promoting and extending exclusive content to new-media platforms, so that it is designed with narrative styles that will carry a story across multiple platforms while ensuring that the different aspects and presentations remain connected to the main issue. A clear understanding of the function to be served by content can help newsrooms to plan suitable narrative styles and the sequence in which long-tail journalism is distributed across platforms to ensure that the quality of journalism is upheld in respect of providing a well-rounded coverage of diverse issues.     

Negotiating Genre and New Media for STEM News

ABSTRACT

This article—co-authored by a transdisciplinary team of social scientists and journalists in the United States—traces changes to the news landscape in recent decades, and asks: How are legacy media producers grappling with these new realities? As part of a four-year collaboration on young adult news consumption, we take a participatory action research approach to this question, tacking back and forth between newsroom concepts and anthropological ones in pursuit of a synthesis that strengthens both. Starting from anthropological frameworks of participation, the authors argue that broadcast videos typically position their audiences as overhearers rather than interlocutors, while the reverse is true for social media, and that these tendencies shape audience expectations. We find that many audiences have what we call poetic motivations: they are drawn to stories that exemplify their genre. For example, the participatory nature of social media genres translates well to a more candid style that can incorporate live questions and other direct participation. The study reported here focuses on STEM news, but many of the findings apply to news production in general. Our reflective methods can also be applied more widely in the field of journalism to synthesize perspectives from theory and practice.     

COLLABORATION,CONSENSUS, AND CONFLICT

Wikinews began in November 2004 as a collaborative online journalism project and sister project of Wikipedia, the well-known collaborative online encyclopedia. This article explores how Wikinews members have defined “news” and the ramifications of that definition for how they have been able to produce news collaboratively. One of the defining characteristics of Wikinews is a dedication to the neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which was adopted from Wikipedia. NPOV serves as a structuring device for defining news, but also conducts a great deal of organizational work and is in turn structured by the discourses and debates of NPOV in stories. Further, a commitment to an organizational culture of consensus and collaboration, although not without handicaps in a news production environment, is a laudable achievement among Wikinews participants and could be a precursor to the way that citizen journalists will become more involved in news production in a sustainable way.     

Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.     

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.     

新闻构架、符码与制造同意的艺术——美国媒体“十六大”报道综合分析

本文运用西方新闻学研究的框架和符码理论对美国媒体有关中共“十六大”的报道进行定性和定量分析 ,旨在揭示美国媒体与主流意识形态间的互动关系 ,加深我们对美国媒体国际新闻报道运作规律的认识     

Quality,Innovation, and Financial Sustainability

Entrepreneurial, independent digital media sites arose in response to disruption in the journalism industry brought on by emerging technologies. This study explores this trend in Latin America from the perspective of audiences. Based on surveys of readers of entrepreneurial digital news sites in Guatemala and Nicaragua, this mixed-methods study offers a snapshot of who these readers are and what they are interested in. Results showed readers of the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan news sites valued equally quality journalism and innovation, but differed when it came to the importance they placed on the sites’ business models. This study also illuminated a new dimension of innovation, one from the readers’ perspective. While some respondents associated innovation with use of new technologies, in general readers defined innovation as unique (to the region) and alternative (to mainstream media) ways of doing journalism; their definition, unlike that of journalists, was not necessarily technologically driven.     

Bouncing off the Paywall – Understanding Misalignments Between Local Newspaper Value Propositions and Audience Responses

ABSTRACT

Declining advertising revenue and print copy sales have propelled extensive paywall experiments in local newspapers to generate new revenue and fund local journalism. The success of these experiments is ultimately depending on whether or not they deliver the value that customers require. This article studies local newspapers’ potential to build successful paywalls by conducting a two-sided analysis of paywall value propositions and local news audiences’ responses to these value propositions. Drawing on mixed methods – in-depth interviews with 20 newspaper managers and a national survey (N = 1586) among local newspaper audiences – our study identifies a major gap between intended value of paywalls and customer value perception and behavior. These are misalignments between the intended attractiveness of paywalled content and audience attitude toward this content, and misalignments between access to paywalled content and use. Local newspapers’ offerings are particularly misaligned with younger, lower income and lower news interest customers. When these groups hit a paywall, they most likely bounce off.