Which candidates do the public discuss online in an election campaign?: The use of social media by 2012 presidential candidates and its impact on candidate salience

The effects of new communication technologies on election campaigns, and the effectiveness of media-centered campaign strategies more broadly, remain ongoing subjects for debate in political science. This study provides some of the first empirical evidence about the potential impact of social media on the 2012 U.S. presidential elections, by testing the association between “candidate salience” and the candidates' level of engagement in online social media sphere. We define “candidate salience” as the extent to which candidates are discussed online by the public in an election campaign, and have selected the number of mentions presidential candidates receive on the social media site, Twitter, as means of quantifying their salience. This strategy allows us to examine whether social media, which is widely recognized as disruptive in the broader economic and social domains, has the potential to change the traditional dynamics of U.S. election campaigns. We find that while social media does substantially expand the possible modes and methods of election campaigning, high levels of social media activity on the part of presidential candidates have, as of yet, resulted in minimal effects on the amount of public attention they receive online.     

Metacoverage and Mediatization in US Presidential Elections

This article develops a theoretical model consisting of three mechanisms that link metacoverage, a type of election campaign news, to mediatization, a meta-process in which media organizations influence politics. The mechanisms hinge on the point that metacoverage—consisting of both topics and frames—constitutes a rich set of process-oriented cues that influence how campaign organizations adjust to the media logic in the course of performing functions associated with the office-seeking political campaign logic. A case study of 2012 US presidential election news was conducted to illustrate how metacoverage influences campaign strategies.     

‘Civilized city’: how embedded civil society networks frame the debate on urban green space in Hanoi,Vietnam

This article explores the framing mechanisms used by an embedded civil society network of urban planners, architects, and journalists in the burgeoning city of Hanoi, Vietnam, to structure the terms of debate in a controversy over the use of public space in Reunification Park. The network drew on the values of collectivism, modernization, and nationalism propagated under the socialist government’s ‘civilized city’ campaign in order to pressure the city government to preserve green space in its largest park and cease development plans for a hotel. By analyzing the content of the investigative reporting on the SAS hotel investment controversy in Reunification Park covered by the online journal of the Vietnam Urban Planning and Development Association, this article demonstrates how this embedded civil society network used methods of ‘rightful resistance’ in framing the issue, pressuring the government to be accountable to its own purported values. It shows that there are social movements both associated with, and outside of, the Vietnamese state that are competing in the construction of meaning around the debate of citizen rights to public green space in the city.     

Conceptual,Empirical, and Practical Issues in Developing Valid Measures of Public Communication Campaign Exposure

The ability to validly measure campaign exposure is central to claims of public communication campaign effectiveness. Surprisingly, scholars have paid remarkably little attention to questions about the validity of various ways to measure campaign exposure. This paper begins to address this gap by outlining conceptual, empirical, and practical issues in developing valid measures of campaign exposure. First, I offer a brief definition of measurement validity and describe a variety of measurement options utilized in recent, large–scale health communication campaign evaluations. Next, I outline conceptual and empirical assumptions behind these various measurement strategies. I continue with a review of research that has applied validation criteria to specific measures of campaign exposure. I conclude by offering a series of guidelines for exposure measurement and validation practices based on the evidence to date, which I caveat by describing tensions and emergent issues that researchers will need to consider in future work.     

#MeToo as Connective Action: A Study of the Anti-Sexual Violence and Anti-Sexual Harassment Campaign on Chinese Social Media in 2018

ABSTRACT

In January, 2018, the global anti-sexual violence and anti-sexual harassment movement – popularly known as #MeToo – had its Chinese nascence. This study drew upon the theory of connective actions to investigate how digital technologies shift the way in which feminist activism takes place. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed to systematically analyse over 36,000 online articles related to the campaign. The study identified 48 cases of sexual violence and harassment allegations. Findings from time series analysis show that China's #MeToo campaign first emerged within educational institutions before gradually spreading to other sectors of society. Based on qualitative findings from the ten most controversial cases, this paper identifies a series of counter-censorship strategies. The study of how the #MeToo movement in China emerged, adapted, and grew within an authoritarian context reveals unique insights into how connective actions traverse various platforms and cultural contexts. Methodologically, this study demonstrates how mixed methods can be utilised to study connective actions on social media in China.     

Framing Falun Gong: Xinhua news agency's coverage of the new religious movement in China

Falun Gong caught the eyes of the Beijing leadership when more than 10,000 of its practitioners gathered at the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing on April 25, 1999. It attracted the attention of the world when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started cracking down on the group three months later, claiming this to be the most serious political incident since the student uprising at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Scholars have attempted to contextualize the cultural, political, and economic climate in contemporary China that allowed this group to rise in a relatively short period and to assess the causes of the CCP's nationwide campaign oppressing the group. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to exploring the media's role in supporting the government's cause in this campaign. This study examines journalistic narrative and framing of Falun Gong as a social threat in one news organization's attempt to legitimize the government's crackdown against the group. Although the economic reforms and political relaxation since the 1980s might have expanded the media's latitude, the press, especially state-owned media outlets, still functions as an agent for the Beijing regime in important political and social issues. This paper shows how journalists, through news frames, construct particular parameters within which to assess the ‘reality’ about Falun Gong.     

Engagement@web 2.0 between the government and citizens in Singapore: dialogic communication on Facebook?

Responding to the rapid adoption of new technologies, political parties, both incumbent parties and minor ones, have been quick to leverage web 2.0 technologies for party communication and mobilization. A coterie of work addressed how social media such as Facebook are used as political tools for the promotion of candidate and party campaign platforms. However, a present bias is observed as current literature focus on western democracies. To bridge the gap, this study examines the gradual, yet significant, evolution in technology deployment by the ruling elite in Singapore. This paper traces the developments in e-engagement to bridge the affective gap between the ruling elite and an increasingly IT-savvy population, one which has demonstrated its astuteness in using new media to articulate its disenchantment. Developments in the last five years indicate that the government's earlier endeavor to centralize and streamline its political engagement via a single portal, REACH, is insufficient to say the least. Between the general election in 2006 and the watershed election in May 2011, the repertoire of media tools deployed by the political elite has broadened, with the inclusion of personal blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. In this paper, we apply Kent and Taylor's public relations dialogic communication framework to examine how Facebook fosters greater mutuality, propinquity, and empathy between the government and the electorate. However, problems arising from new technologies themselves inadvertently create risks and challenge the government's ability to commit to dialogic communication.     

Developing Media Literacy in Public Libraries: Learning from Community Media Centers

The rise of digital media labs and spaces for content creation in public libraries has been documented in the scholarly literature. However, fewer studies have investigated the outcomes of media literacy initiatives in community media centers (CMCs) and how they might inform similar programs and services in public libraries. This article reports findings from a study that used qualitative research to investigate the current goals and activities of CMCs across the United States. The findings show that the educational, social, and community benefits of these programs could be useful for public libraries to consider in developing or augmenting their own media literacy initiatives.     

Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice

Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.     

Goodbye,Paley… Hello,Charles!: Marketing a Library Move

How do you prepare a campus for the closure of one main library and the opening of a brand-new building? Temple University Libraries faced this question in 2019. Their marketing team answered the call by creating a campaign that honored their original Paley Library while building excitement for the new Charles Library. As part of this campaign, library staff worked together to create their own “Mean Tweets” video, reading real tweets patrons had posted about Paley over the years. In this column, the team's director reflects on the process and how it changed the tone of their overall campaign.     

Perceptions and practices of media engagement: A global perspective

This study investigates the concept and practice of engagement via media platforms from the perspectives of brands, audience, and media. Under the premise that engagement is a multi-dimensional construct that presents a more complex, qualitative nature different from the traditional, exposure-based quantitative metrics frequently adopted for linear media, this study explores how diverse market sectors and key constituents perceive and apply engagement. In-depth interviews were conducted with 74 subjects from various sectors across 8 countries and textually analyzed using a qualitative data analysis software. Utilizing thematic analysis, the qualitative research addressed the definition, relevancy, and application of audience engagement via media platforms, especially for video content. It was found that promoting engagement is a critical strategy to combat the increasing demand for audience attention. It encompasses all three cognitive–affective–behavioral aspects, but is valued and practiced on a behavioral level most often. Engagement is a thread that links campaign phases together but it is realistically addressed only after more readily available metrics. There are significant challenges in integrating digital and linear media platforms from the perspective of engagement as individual platforms have their own unique characteristics and impacts. In practice, it is also difficult to measure media engagement with metrics that are conceptually meaningful and methodologically accessible.     

Marketing the Academic Library

Abstract

Academic libraries do not often launch public relations campaigns. However, recent changes and enhancements at the Geoffrey R. Weller Library at the University of Northern British Columbia prompted librarians to embark on a public awareness campaign built upon the “@ your library” framework. The campaign featured multiple strategies, including posters, displays, brochures, newspaper ads, and giveaways. The goal of the campaign was to break away from the stereotypical image of the library as a research necessity, and show it instead as the beating heart of the University. The campaign is evaluated and the continued need for marketing and promotion of academic library services is examined.     

Journals of the Century in Psychology

SUMMARY

Electronic resources are one of the last collections in a public library to receive attention for usage and for promotions. Oftentimes their statistics go unnoticed as well. An effort is needed to consciously study, track, and evaluate the usage of these resources. Then a library can focus on educating the staff and patrons regarding the existence and use of these resources. This paper details the steps involved in initiating, conducting, and financing a marketing campaign for education and promotion of electronic resources for a public library.     

The role played by government communication on the level of public fear in social media: An investigation into the Covid-19 crisis in Italy

In situations of crisis, governments must acknowledge that communication is a major weapon in their armoury, and can be used to convince the public to accept sometimes stringent measures, while preventing a worsening of the situation by curbing any spread of panic. Theoretically, during a pandemic, fear can be contained at reasonable levels by governments counterbalancing uncertainty with information. However, there is no empirical evidence on how the flow of information during a crisis can influence emotional states among the population. In this process, social media appears to be a valuable tool for governments to observe emotional response in a population. In the light of this and within the context of the Italian government's social media campaign #iorestoacasa (‘I'm staying at home’) launched during the Covid-19 crisis, the current study utilises text analytics to explore the relationship between government and press communication, and the level of fear expressed by citizens through more than 200 thousand #iorestoacasa tweets. The results highlight how the content of the messages evolved in the early part of the outbreak and during the social media campaign. They suggest that in Italy the discussion regarding the efforts made by the European Council to find common solutions for dealing with the emergency has prompted a positive influence on public mood. Conversely, messages about people's individual vulnerability and the associated sense of an external locus of control correlated positively with levels of fear. This study opens new ways to support government communication during a crisis by monitoring public emotional response through social media.     

Politics of representation in the digital media environment: presentation of the female candidate between news coverage and the website in the 2007 Korean presidential primary

This study analyzes how a female candidate was presented in the news media and on her campaign website, in order to compare the politics of gender representation in news coverage and campaign communication. Content analysis of news coverage of a Korean female candidate and the candidate's website shows that the female candidate was differently portrayed in the two media in presentations of personal trait frames, the linkage between issues and personal traits, and other gender-related characteristics, although the quantity of issue frames did not differ significantly. The findings suggest that although the news coverage still tends to reinforce gender stereotypes regarding a female candidate, the candidate used or articulated gender identities in her campaign website to oppose framing stereotypes in the traditional news media.     

Phases of Mediatization

As election campaigns changed substantially in Western countries, it is generally hypothesized that this change in campaign communication is rooted in a revolution in communications, with the media rejecting its former role as mere transmitters and becoming a major actor in the campaigning process. Regarding the analysis of the “mediatization of politics”, Strömbäck presented a four phases model which offers a way to explore such a process in an explicit and systematic fashion. The resulting struggle between political parties and the media over who shall control the agendas of campaigns forces politicians to adapt to and, finally, to adopt media logic. By operationalizing these four phases in order to allow for empirical research, we investigated the roles of the news media and the political parties in Austrian campaign communication in the last four decades. Taking the agenda-setting power as an indicator for changes in this relationship, our study is based on the concepts of agenda-building and policy agenda-setting as extensions of the agenda-setting model. To establish party and media agendas, a content analysis was conducted on news releases of all Austrian parliamentary parties, the main evening newscasts of all Austrian broadcasters, as well as the political coverage of two quality papers and two major tabloids during the “hot phase” of the campaign. For examining the “struggle over agendas”, a time-series cross-section design (including data on 20 different policy dimensions) was applied. First results are based on the analysis of five election campaigns in 1970, 1983, 1990, 1999, and 2008.     

Kanchan K. Malik and V. Pavarala,Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India. Thousand Oaks,CA: SAGE Publications, 2007

With this Report &; Order, we authorize the licensing of two new classes of FM radio stations-one operating at a maximum power of 100 watts and one at a maximum power of 10 watts. Both types of stations, known as lowpower FM stations (LPFM), will be authorized in a manner that protects existing FM service. They will be operated on a non- commercial educational basis by entities that do not hold an attributable interest in any other broadcast station or other media subject to our ownership rules. Initially, only entities located in the communities the stations serve will be eligible to participate in this service. Even once this eligibility criterion is relaxed, we will grant a significant selection preference to locally based applicants. We believe that the LPFM service authorized in this proceeding will provide opportunities for new voices to be heard and will ensure that we fulfill our statutory obligation to authorize facilities in a manner that best serves the public interest.-Report &; Order, MM Docket 99-25 Creation of Low Power FM Radio Service, January 20,2000,     

Assessing Collaboration in One Media Ecosystem

This case study explores relationships among news organizations in one media ecosystem to determine how willing journalists may be to form a more collaborative information network. A three-step, mixed methodological approach is employed: the ecosystem was “mapped”; an ongoing dialogue with journalists was initiated, and in-depth interviews were conducted with journalists and community storytellers to understand existing news flow in this region. Preliminary findings suggest a willingness to collaborate; however, legacy media may have more reservations about collaboration than journalists at community newspapers, public broadcasting stations, and entrepreneurial startups.     

Good Ol’ Boy Talk versus the Blogosphere in the Case of Former Senator George Allen

The unsuccessful 2006 reelection campaign of then incumbent Republican senator George Allen of Virginia is employed to discuss the emergent role of blogging in political discourse. We analyze reconstructed interactions between weblog and mainstream media coverage to argue that Allen's use of the racial slur “macaca” was successfully mobilized by progressive Virginia bloggers to create a negative narrative about Allen that was then picked up and echoed in many mainstream media outlets. In this case study, blogs were used as an important site of civil discourse that increasingly influences mainstream media coverage. Bloggers took advantage of changing mores that make it unseemly for high-level public officials to employ racially insensitive comments and effectively mobilized long-standing dramatic elements of a campaign narrative to shape discourse surrounding this Senate election.     

“Lots of Questions about ‘Fake News’”: How Public Libraries Have Addressed Media Literacy, 2016–2018

ABSTRACT

This exploratory research investigates how American public libraries have addressed the issue of media literacy in their communities from 2016 to 2018, including programs, partnerships, and other initiatives. The authors selected this period because events, such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election, contributed to an increased national concern about media literacy. This study fills a research gap by providing a broader assessment of public library responses to this issue, as most of the published literature thus far stems from academic libraries. An electronic survey solicited data from both a stratified purposive sample and a self-selecting sample of public libraries throughout the United States (U.S.). Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from sixty-five public libraries revealed several key themes related to media literacy initiatives, including types of initiatives developed, initiatives deemed most successful by staff, community response to initiatives, and reasons for not pursuing initiatives. Findings denote the current state of how public libraries address media literacy and offer practical guidance for those developing media literacy initiatives. Key findings are as follows: lack of staff time is the reason most often cited for not engaging in media literacy initiatives; more effective measurements are needed to assess both community needs and outcomes of library initiatives; “fake news” is a topic of interest in the community and among library staff; and there appears to be a relationship between staff interest in the topic and perceived interest on the part of the public, which may impact efforts to address the issue. Implications for practice resulting from those findings include engaging in initiatives that maximize service while minimizing staff time involvement; measuring and assessing community interests as well as outcomes of initiatives; using trending topics such as “fake news” to increase interest in library services; and continuing to increase staff awareness of and training in issues deemed important by the library community.