PERSUASION FROM BELOW?

Guided by the belief that anonymity inevitably breeds the kind of uncivil discourse that hurts their readers, many news organizations have chosen to ban anonymous comments sections on their websites in recent years. Unfortunately, little empirical research has been conducted to assess whether exposure to anonymous comments actually does influence people's attitudes. In this paper, we address this oversight by asking: do anonymous comments posted on a newspaper website shape how internet users feel about the media? Using an online experiment to systematically manipulate exposure to anonymous comments attached to a “hard news” report, we find strong evidence that exposure to non-attributed posts—regardless of their tone—leads internet users to feel more negatively towards specific news organizations and the media in general.     

SOURCE CREDIBILITY AND JOURNALISM

The extent to which information sources, that stand behind virtually all the news, are perceived by journalists as credible is a key determinant of the likelihood of their obtaining news access and public voice. The nature of source credibility judgment in journalism, however, is disputed between two major schools: while the “visceral” camp contends that it is highly subjective, intuitive and biased, the “discretional” camp perceives it as a far more reasonable and legitimate journalistic tool. The present study attempts to uncover evidence of both “visceral” and “discretional” judgment by studying the conceptual credibility (trustworthiness ratings) and practical credibility (practices indicating trust or skepticism, such as cross-checking and attribution) and the congruence between the two in a sample of 840 news items based on 1870 news sources. Findings were gleaned in face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine leading Israeli news organizations, who reconstructed, source by source, the processes behind their items, shortly after their publication. Pro-discretional evidence shows that while journalists perceive their own experience as more credible than that of any other human agent, they do tend to stick with sources they perceive as more credible, the majority of which were relied on in the past, granting them more ready acceptance. Pro-visceral evidence, in turn, demonstrates that even the least credible sources receive substantial news space, some without any cross-checking. Furthermore, reporters ranked their sources' credibility even when they had no former record of trustworthiness. The paper suggests interpreting the composite of these findings as discretional logic with islands of visceral judgment.     

How Journalists and Social Media Users Perceive Online Fact-Checking and Verification Services

While services for fact-checking and verification to counter fake news in social media have increased, little research has investigated how journalists and the public perceive such services. This study reflects the outcomes of REVEAL, a three-year European Union research project investigating the use and impact of services for fact-checking and verification. Based on interviews with 32 young journalists and content analysis of social media users’ online conversations, we contribute new knowledge about the ways that journalists and social media users perceive online fact-checking and verification services. The findings suggest that, while young journalists were largely unfamiliar with or ambivalent about such services, they judged them as potentially useful in the investigative journalistic process. Yet, they were unwilling to rely exclusively on these tools for fact-checking and verification. A comparison of journalists’ perceptions with those of social media users reveals social media users are similarly ambivalent. Some accentuated the usefulness of such services, while others expressed strong distrust. However, the journalists displayed a more nuanced perspective, both seeing these services as potentially useful and being reluctant to blindly trust a single service. Design strategies to make online fact-checking and verification services more useful and trustworthy are suggested.     

THE MISCONCEPTION OF ONLINE COMMENT THREADS

Web 2.0 has opened the gates to journalism for online audiences which increasingly participate in the production, dissemination and response processes of news. Comment threads in particular have grown exponentially in recent years as readers have embraced the opportunity to bypass the Letters' Editor and publish their opinions directly to a newspaper website. This rise in participatory journalism has led to new challenges for journalists as they have strived to negotiate the often murky waters of user-generated content. To date, research in this field has been mostly limited to national and international news websites despite local news providers having a close connection and engagement with their communities. This paper therefore seeks to fill this gap partially by analysing the content of comment threads on two British local newspaper websites via a content analysis, while also exploring the experiences of journalists via news room observation and interviews. A contradictory picture emerges whereby journalists accept with some reluctance that comment threads possess a democratic function but one which is potentially damaging to the brand as well as resource intensive. This is juxtaposed by more positive findings that reveal buoyant levels of interactivity between readers in comment threads together with a thirst for engagement in public affairs.     

HAPPIER WORKING FOR THEMSELVES?

This survey analysis of women freelance journalists is a first step toward filling a gap in the largely uncharted territory of women in the United States who leave traditional employer-based news jobs for self-employment. The findings show that female respondents were satisfied with their work hours, earnings, and ability to combine their atypical newswork jobs with raising children. However, they were no more satisfied with their work than male respondents who also worked as freelance journalists.     

JOURNALISTS' MORAL JUDGMENT ABOUT CHILDREN

This study used a controlled experiment to examine the ethical decision-making of 99 professional journalists in the United States to see if they held different attitudes, made different decisions, and used different levels of moral judgment when stories involved children than when they involved adults. It found that these journalists were significantly more concerned with protecting children's privacy, keeping them from harm, and ensuring informed consent than they were for adults. But they did not use significantly higher levels of moral judgment for children than adults, nor did they withhold children's photographs significantly more often than adults'. The journalists in this study believed they were protecting children from harm but did not carry through with those beliefs. It is important that the news media treat children well because having children's voices in news stories is vital to understanding their worlds and reporting on injustices against them.     

WHO'S GOT THE POWER?

Over the last decades, media environments have become radically transformed. Among the most significant changes is the rise of interactive media technologies, which raise new questions about how influence over media content has changed. At the same time, changes in media technologies and how they may change the influence over the news should not be understood in isolation from other changes in media environments. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how much influence journalists ascribe to different sets of actors; how they perceive changes over time; and whether journalists working with online publishing differ in these respects from other journalists. Among other things, the study shows that the most influential group is perceived to be journalists, followed by the audience and media owners. The group that is perceived to have increased their influence the most is media owners. All investigated groups—except journalists—are perceived to have increased their influence at least somewhat. The results are discussed in the light of research on how interactive media technologies may reshape the influence over the news.     

Journalists’ Coverage of Online Firestorms in German-Language News Media

When people perceive events that conflict with their expectations they can easily express their agitation and concerns online and likely find others who share their opinion. When large quantities of messages containing negative word-of-mouth suddenly spread in social media we speak of an online firestorm. By covering the outcry, journalists elevate it onto a mainstream communication platform and support the process of scandalization. Content analysis was used to explore how journalists, working for German-language media, cover this phenomenon. Over a period of 16 months, 130 online firestorms were identified and analyzed. Based on a typology of online firestorms, we have found that the majority of cases address events of perceived discrimination and moral misconduct aiming at societal change. Vilification of the organization or person occurred to a much lesser extent. Thus, journalistic coverage of the phenomenon focuses on the rectification attempts of an aroused public. Image-repair responses of the firestorm objects are quoted by journalists in about half of the articles, thereby providing some balanced reporting about the online criticism. This study provides an initial insight into how online firestorms are used as a topic of news coverage by journalists and explores journalists’ contribution to attempts of online scandalization.     

Uses and Gratifications,Journalists’ Twitter Use,and Relational Satisfaction with the Public

This study employed the uses and gratification approach to investigate how journalists perceive relational satisfaction with the public on Twitter, specifically the associations between journalists’ motivations to use Twitter, their Twitter use, and their relational satisfaction with the public. Through a survey of South Korean journalists, this study revealed that journalists’ motivations for Twitter use are positively related to their job-related activities on Twitter (e.g., posting/sharing their news and interacting with audience), which consequently influences perceived relational satisfaction with the public. The findings provide new insight into an increasingly important part of the public’s engagement and news/information flows in the digital media environment. This study expands upon the literature by analyzing how journalists’ motivations for using Twitter and their job-related activities on Twitter are associated with relational satisfaction with the public.     

Engaging the Female Audience: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective on Gendered Responses to News Valence Frames

This experimental study presents an evolutionary psychology explanation for gender differences in responding to television news. It tests the idea that women are drawn to stimuli that are moderately arousing when they are framed positively and avoid negative ones, while men approach negatively framed stimuli more than positive ones. Men and women's affective and cognitive judgments of news messages in different valence frames (positive, negative, and ambiguous) were measured. The 2 groups exhibited different patterns in their reaction to the news message conditions in line with this hypothesis.     

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.     

News Sources and Follow-up Communication

For sports actors, social media provide the opportunity to bypass sports journalism's gatekeeping function and to disseminate sports-related information to target groups directly. Thus, social media have been conceptualized as a competitor to journalism. We argue that the relation is much more diverse. We differentiate between competitive, integrative, and complementary facets of the relationship between sports journalism and social media. Our study focuses on complementarity and analyzes how far social and mainstream media serve as sources for each other. Therefore, we combine an online survey among 122 German sports journalists, an analysis of the Twitter networks of German sports journalists during the Winter Olympics 2014, and a content analysis of the most popular news items in social media. Results suggest that sports journalists perceive social media accounts of athletes as beneficial news sources, especially to gather inside information. Huge sports events influence the social media activities of sports journalists as they tend to have stronger connections to athletes at these times. Whereas social media appear to be significant sources for sports journalism, sports media content receives little attention in social media. However, our results indicate that sports journalism and social media indeed maintain a complementary relation.     

PHOTOJOURNALISM

Online news readers’ comments have been the subject of intense debates in newsrooms across the United States. Caught unexpectedly as hosts of this new public space, journalists are trapped in a conundrum between upholding traditional ideals of providing a space for dialogue for their public but yet at the same time not wanting to create a space for hate in online news readers’ comments sections. This research examines perspectives of 30 journalists in the United States through in-depth interviews regarding this new online public space. The survey results illuminate the experiences journalists are undergoing in their new roles, how they balance their responsibilities and the vision they hold of the future for this new space as they learn to navigate unguided through this new electronic landscape.     

Normalizing Online Comments

This study sought to understand the role of online comments—particularly uncivil ones—in journalists’ routines. In-depth interviews with 34 journalists reveal they are becoming more comfortable with online comments and often engage with commenters to foster deliberative discussions or quell incivility. However, our data also suggest some journalists feel discomfort with engaging in this way for fear it breaches the journalistic norm of objectivity. Overall, findings suggest journalists are not ceding their gatekeeping role to the public through comments, but rather re-asserting it through moderating objectionable comments and engaging. In addition, findings suggest journalists are participating in “reciprocal journalism” by fostering mutually beneficial connections with the audience.     

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.     

台湾地区新闻从业人员网络素养与网络新闻识读能力之研究

认为1999年因网络原生新闻概念而创立的网络报纸在台湾出现后,网络新闻开始让传统新闻媒体的产制作业产生冲击,新兴媒体时代的新闻产制过程,让新闻工作者无法用原本的媒体素养来因应网络。使用问卷调查法,了解新闻从业人员的网络素养以及具备网络素养的衡量准则。研究结果发现,新闻工作者已大量使用网络,但网络素养却十分匮乏,难以因应媒体科技在新兴媒体时代的变化。     

Audience Engagement,Reciprocity, and the Pursuit of Community Connectedness in Public Media Journalism

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.     

CORRECTING THE RECORD

Contemporary journalists are, on a daily basis, adopting new work practices to remain relevant in the changing media environment. This study examines these changing practices to determine if, and how, they have been accompanied by changes in journalists’ abilities to enact traditional ethical standards in the newsroom. It posits that by examining the performance of ethics by news actors, as opposed to ethical standards themselves, the importance and impact of changing news practices can be realized and addressed. To illustrate these changes, I explore the use of news corrections as a means for maintaining journalistic accountability. The findings suggest that key attributes of the contemporary news environment, including the rapid speed with which online information is transmitted, and the increasing participation of news consumers in the media environment, can help journalists in their quests for accountability. However, other changes associated with the online news environment, such as the ease with which online information can be erased from history, and the continuous evolution of newsroom technologies, highlight the need for journalists’ ongoing pursuit of new techniques to ensure that the standard of accountability is maintained.     

The Moral Judgment of Minority Journalists: Evidence From Asian American,Black, and Hispanic Professional Journalists

This study used three controlled experiments to investigate the effects of a story subject's race on the moral judgment of Asian American, Hispanic, and Black professional journalists by changing only the race of the news subjects in photographs. Contrary to what in-group and identification theories would predict, minority journalists did not show preference to story subjects of their own race, nor did they show bias toward story subjects of other races; instead they treated all races as equals. Empathy was also found to be positively and significantly related to moral judgment in two of the three samples; as compassion, caring, and putting oneself in the role of the other increased, so did moral judgment scores. Expansions to theory and improvements to journalistic practice are discussed.     

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.