How Age Affects Journalists’ Adoption of Social Media as an Innovation

American newsrooms are adopting social media as an innovation for greater engagement. However, several organizational and individual factors may affect the extent to which news outlets adopt social media innovations. In particular, there is assumed to be a divide among different age groups of journalists in embracing social media. Utilizing a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, the study seeks to understand how social media culture in newsrooms affects journalists’ strategies of taking social media as an innovation, and how journalists of different age groups differ in the SEM model fit. The analyses indicated Twitter engagement mediates social media culture and journalists’ attitude toward social media. However, that was not the case with Facebook. Additionally, while younger journalists favored Twitter, older journalists embraced Facebook and middle-aged journalists adopted both Facebook and Twitter. The analyses showed the more that middle-aged journalists interacted on Twitter, the more they tended to have a positive attitude toward social media. However, the more that younger and older journalists engaged on Twitter, the more they tended to have a negative attitude toward social media. Journalists from all three age groups tended to hold a negative attitude toward social media if they engaged more on Facebook.     

News Stories on the Facebook Platform: Millennials’ Perceived Credibility of Online News Sponsored by News and Non-News Companies

ABSTRACT

This experimental study examined whether stories presented on Facebook that appeared to be from a news organization were rated as higher in perceived credibility than stories that appeared to be from a non-news organization. One-hundred-and-seven participants took part in the online study. One group saw stories that appeared to be from a news organization and another group saw the same stories that appeared to be from a non-news organization. Both groups rated the stories the same in terms of perceived credibility. The study also found that the higher the participants rated the stories in terms of perceived credibility, the higher they rated the organization’s perceived credibility. These findings point to potential implications for traditional journalistic outlets regarding their ability to be seen as credible, reliable online news sources—particularly through a social media platform like Facebook.     

The Alternative Platform: Kenya’s Television Stations Navigation During the Switch Off of Raila Odinga’s “Swearing-In”

ABSTRACT

The role of communication technologies in Kenyan newsrooms particularly from print media perspective has been investigated. However, how these technologies aid television journalism practice in Kenyan context is understudied. Using the government ban of selected television stations in Kenya during and after the symbolic “swearing-in” of opposition presidential candidate in the 2017 general election, this study investigated the influence of communication technologies by the affected television stations to circumvent government crackdown. Interview was used as the primary method for data collection. The findings of the study revealed that throughout the switch off period the newsrooms remained operational but forced to develop alternative strategies fundamentally buoyed by new media technologies to disseminate contents. Though the strategies produced unintended and unexpected effects as the findings indicated. The main challenge with technology, was news verification, since the stations were using guerrilla tactics to source news which was not easily forthcoming. In addition, there was economic implication, some advertisers demanded for a refund and potential advertisers refused to patronise the stations which according to one of the editors was hinged on fear of being targeted by government.     

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.     

Stabbing News

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime.     

Six Uses of Analytics: Digital Editors’ Perceptions of Audience Analytics in the Newsroom

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how digital news editors perceive the uses and implications of audience analytics in contemporary digital newsrooms. Based on 21 interviews with digital news editors at 11 Belgian news organisations, including 7 national newspapers, one news magazine, one public and one commercial broadcaster, and one digital-born news medium, the study shows how audience analytics have become normalised in these digital newsrooms and how, in the perception of those who use them, tools for capturing audience behaviour data inform and shape their daily work practices and organisational strategies. Combining insights from literature with empirical findings, the study distinguishes six uses of audience analytics: Not only do analytics inform editorial decisions on (1) story placement, (2) story packaging, (3) story planning and (4) story imitation, but they can also serve as instruments for (5) performance evaluation and (6) audience conception. Overall, the digital news editors are convinced that audience analytics support rather than harm their journalism.     

Color,Caste and the Public Sphere

Broadcast network newsrooms are powerful gatekeepers, setting cultural standards and attitudes for America at large via the stories they tell and the images they project. In 1968, the federal Kerner Commission chastised American news media for ignoring race, and seeing through the “white man’s eyes” and speaking from “the white perspective.” Grounded in critical and cultural studies and organizational theory, this study analyzes the experiences of 23 post-Civil Rights generation black journalists working in broadcast newsrooms who continue to struggle against anti-black cultural norms and attitudes at great physical, psychological and financial cost.     

Online Media Relations as an Information Subsidy: Quality of Fortune 500 Companies' Websites and Relationships to Media Salience

This study probes relationships among corporate financial resources, web-based corporate media relations, and media attention to corporations to determine whether online media relations functions as an effective information subsidy in the agenda-building process. It compares the quality of online press rooms of Fortune 500 companies with the number of news articles about those same companies published by five major news outlets in the United States. A causal model was supported predicting that resource-rich companies have better-operating online newsrooms with more diverse informational and interactive components, which in turn generate more news stories about the companies. This result suggests that the effectiveness of corporate Web activities depends on financial and professional resources and contradicts earlier expectations that the dominance of resource-rich organizations in communication would be undermined by the Internet.     

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.     

Tweeting Facts,Facebooking Lives: The Influence of Language Use and Modality on Online Source Credibility

The present study examines how language use (e.g., personalized vs. depersonalized language) and modality (e.g., tweets vs. Facebook status updates) influence source credibility interdependently. A total of 257 participants read personalized or depersonalized health messages embedded in mock-up tweets or Facebook status updates. The results show that users perceive depersonalized tweets as more credible than depersonalized status updates posted on Facebook. On the other hand, personalized status updates on Facebook generate higher credibility judgments than personalized tweets. The findings are discussed in light of the MAIN model as well as the preconceived user expectations and communication norms of social media.     

THE JOURNALIST IS MARKETING THE NEWS

This study, based on case studies of three online newsrooms, seeks to understand the patterns of how journalists use social media in their news work. Through 150 hours of observations and interviews with 31 journalists, the study found that journalists are normalizing social media while also reworking some of their norms and routines around it, a process of journalistic negotiation. They are balancing editorial autonomy and the other norms that have institutionalized journalism, on one hand, and the increasing influence exerted by the audience—perceived to be the key for journalism's survival—on the other. In doing so, journalists are also seeing a reworking of their traditional gatekeeping role, finding themselves having to also market the news.     

The Role of Engagement in Learning From Active and Incidental News Exposure on Social Media

The growing reliance on social media as news platforms may lead to more passive news consumption but also offers greater potential for engaging in news. This study investigates the role of engagement with news content on Facebook and Twitter between news exposure and current events knowledge. An online survey (N = 400) tests the relationships between social media news seeking, incidental exposure to news on social media, engagement in shared news content, cognitive elaboration, and current events knowledge. The results show that both active seeking of and incidental exposure to news on both sites are linked to engagement, which is linked to greater cognitive elaboration about the content. Furthermore, engagement mediates the relationship between both types of news exposure and cognitive elaboration. However, engagement and elaboration are not related to knowledge. These results indicate that the key role of social media in news content is not knowledge gain but the ability to engage users who may be passively receiving news on these sites. This study extends the cognitive mediation model of learning from the news in the context of current social media, with updated news consumption norms such as engagement with news on these sites, and incidental news exposure.     

Engaging the Social News User

One of the most common formats of audience participation in journalism consists of online reader comments in response to articles, weblogs, or online television and radio broadcasts. While initially the audience only commented on media platforms themselves, Facebook made it possible to outsource commenting to a third-party platform. The options users have, the rules commenters are obliged to follow, and the moderation regime they confront, could influence the quantity and quality of comments. In this study, we explore how news media deal with audience comments on Facebook and their own news site, and how this influences the quality and quantity of comments. We compared comments on news platforms and Facebook of 62 Dutch national and regional newspapers, public and commercial broadcasters, newsweeklies, national news programmes, and online news sites. Subsequently, we analysed the content of the comments with the qualitative text analysis tool MAXQDA. The results indicate that news media prefer outsourcing comments to Facebook although commenting on their own platforms is still possible. By discouraging anonymous responses, the quality of comments improved but above all the quantity of comments decreased after outsourcing comments to Facebook.     

Using Big Data to Examine the Relationship Between Facebook Engagement and Local Newscast Ratings

ABSTRACT

Local TV news stations regularly post to social media, on Facebook in particular, in an effort to engage audiences, but little is known about the effect of this practice on newscast ratings. We examine the relationship between engagement on Facebook and newscast ratings using data from Shareablee and Nielsen respectively in regression analyses. We find that Facebook engagement does not cannibalize TV ratings, rather there is a clear positive relationship between the two. However, further analyses suggest that this relationship may be driven by interest in news events or other market-wide factors that result in both Facebook engagement and viewership increasing or decreasing simultaneously.     

Is Automated Journalistic Writing Less Biased? An Experimental Test of Auto-Written and Human-Written News Stories

ABSTRACT

By administering an online experiment, this study examined how source and journalistic domains affect the perceived objectivity, message credibility, medium credibility, bias, and overall journalistic quality of news stories among an adult sample (N?=?370) recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service. Within the framework of the cognitive authority theory, the study found auto-written news stories were rated as more objective, credible (both message and medium credibility), and less biased. However, significant difference was found between a combined assessment condition (news stories with source and author information) and a message only assessment condition (news stories without source and author information) in the ratings of objectivity and credibility, but not bias. Moreover, significant differences were found in the objectivity and credibility ratings of auto-written and human-written news stories in the journalistic domains of politics, finance and sports news stories. In auto-written news stories, sports news stories were rated more objective and credible, while financial news stories were rated as more biased. In human-written stories, financial news stories were rated as more objective and credible. However, political news stories were rated as more biased among human-written news stories, and in cases where auto-written and human-written stories were combined.     

Complexity,Uncertainty and Change in News Organizations

ABSTRACT

Media managers and journalists have responded to digitalization over time by implementing online journalism and by converging and de-converging print and online newsrooms. Drawing on complexity and uncertainty theories, this article develops a cycle model, which furthers the understanding of why and how news organizations change. Qualitative and quantitative findings in two European legacy media companies indicate that managers are constantly striving to minimize their own complexity and uncertainty, which, in turn, drives change in news organizations through different stages that are characterized by economization and integration or investment and specialization. More specifically, under lower external and internal complexity and uncertainty, managers are pushing news organizations toward more economization and integration. However, they invest and specialize if either their external or their internal complexity and uncertainty increase. Moreover, the findings reveal the mechanism through which the internal complexity and uncertainty arise, and they show differences depending on the ownership structure of a news organization.     

Does Audience Participation on Facebook Influence the News Agenda? A Case Study of The Rachel Maddow Show

Social media have been theorized as being able to break the press' monopoly on agenda-setting, giving the public greater influence over which stories are covered in the news. This study uses a cross-lagged panel analysis to determine to what extent audience conversations on The Rachel Maddow Show's Facebook Page may have influenced the selection of issues covered in the TV broadcast. Results show a positive correlation between stories discussed on Facebook and the subsequent airing of similar stories on TV. The evidence also suggests that social media may enable many factors that influence both the media and the public agendas.     

The former broadcast employee: A report from the APBE‐NAB employment study

Today, when most Americans get most of their news from the broadcast media, we tend to forget just how recent a development this has been. Broadcast journalism is far from celebrating its 50th anniversary as a major source of news, since it did not develop until the mid‐1930s. The early relationships between the older print media and the newer medium of radio were not friendly, and the fledgling broadcast journalists needed considerable diplomatic skill in dealing with the wire services and their own employers, as well as pastepot and scissors to deal with the day's events. The story of how broadcast journalism became strong enough to cover so effectively the stories of World War II is inexorably tied to the “war” between promoters and detractors of news broadcasting during the 1930s.

George Lott. has studied at William and Mary and Michigan State University, where he is working on a Ph.D. in speech. He presently is assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Speech at the College of William and Mary.     

Assessing the Role of Information-Processing Strategies in Learning From Local News Media About Sources of Social Capital

This study examines the mediating effects of information-processing strategies on the relationship between use of local news media, informational use of the Internet, and sources of social capital: interpersonal trust, reciprocity, and associational membership. Analyses of a telephone survey data (n = 546) of American adults show that even though local news media were influential, information-processing strategies were more powerful than attention in explaining learning from local news media about social norms at the individual level. These findings support the usefulness of the cognitive mediation model of information-processing behaviors in examining learning from local news media about social norms. Of the two strategies, elaborative processing played a more important role than active reflection in the mediating process. Informational use of the Internet had a significant and independent effect on associational membership, after demographic, structural anchoring, local media use, and information-processing measures were statistically controlled.     

Him Too? Cristiano Ronaldo and the News Coverage of a Rape Case Allegation

ABSTRACT

This paper uses critical thematic analysis to explore the news media coverage of a rape allegation case against the football player Cristiano Ronaldo. After providing the context of the case, we examine the literature on how rape cases are represented by the news media. We then proceed to a critical thematic analysis of a purposive sample of Portuguese national newspapers, first identifying ten sub-themes in a total of 140 news stories and opinion columns and then considering the patterns of three critical themes that tended to dismiss the allegations, highlight the seriousness of the allegations and neutralize sexual victimization. Each of these considers prevailing ideologies, news values and journalistic practices.