Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in a changing Media Landscape

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term “cultural journalism and cultural critique.” In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to frame the study of cultural journalism and cultural critique more generally and the eight articles of this special issue more specifically: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of “journalism” and “critique”; (2) the dialectic of globalisation’s cultural homogenisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique.     

Social Media References in Newspapers

Social media are increasingly being used as sources in mainstream news coverage. Yet, while the research so far has focused mainly on the use of social media in particular situations, such as breaking news coverage, during crisis news events or in times of elections, little attention is paid to journalists' routine, day-to-day monitoring of social media platforms. The aim of this study is to examine the use and selection of social media as sources in routine newspaper coverage. First, it presents a quantitative overview of all the articles published between January 2006 and December 2013 in the print editions of two Flemish (north Belgian) quality newspapers, De Standaard and De Morgen, that explicitly refer to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Next, a content analysis is conducted of a sample of newspaper articles published in 2013 that explicitly mention Facebook, Twitter or YouTube as sources of information. The goal of this content analysis is to examine the different appearances and functions of social media references in the news. The study thus provides a first insight into Belgian newspaper journalists' regular sourcing routines in relation to social media.     

Citizen Media Practices at the Digital Startup Mvslim

Belgium-based Mvslim.com is a citizen media platform that aims to create a space for Muslims and non-Muslims to contribute content dedicated to challenging stereotypical portrayals of Muslims in legacy media. Launched in 2015, this non-profit digital media startup claims to reach over 10 million unique visitors per month worldwide and is one example of a successful grassroots citizen media initiative that attracts and appeals to a global community. Based on a combination of content analysis and in-depth interviews with the platform’s editors and contributors, this paper examines the citizen media practices used by the editorial team at Mvslim to foster participatory engagement amongst contributors and connect Muslims and non-Muslims. Theoretically, the study takes the practice approach proposed by Stephansen, which enables us to understand “what citizen media do” not only as news-making practices, but also as “public-making practices”. We argue that digitally native citizen media platforms like Mvslim are blurring the boundaries of journalism, as they can fulfil democratic functions once limited to legacy media.     

调查性报道特性探析

本文认为,调查性报道的特性主要表现在五个方面:揭示性、相对独立性、科学性、艰危性和显著性。在五个特性中,揭示性和相对独立性最重要,它们是调查性报道最基本的形象识别标志。     

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.     

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.     

数字时代的媒介仪式:解读建党一百周年全媒体传播实践

本文立足于媒介仪式的概念体系,以建党一百周年全媒体传播为个案,尝试探讨数字媒体环境下社会文化生态被编织和塑造的基本规律和实践方式。研究认为,社会整合是媒介仪式的基本功能,展演是媒介仪式的基本实践方式,而诉诸情感则是媒介仪式的基本传播逻辑。数字技术的发展在总体上强化而非弱化了媒介仪式的上述特征,媒介逻辑在社会变迁中的重要性得以提升,受到权威性力量更高程度的重视。本文据此得出结论:数字媒介仪式是一种用户广泛参与和深度介入的仪式;媒介仪式的传播有赖于对中心化和层级式的媒介逻辑的延续;数字媒体文化理论的发展要立足于对“网络化实践”的解释。     

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.     

从对调查性报道的相关调查看中国调查性报道的影响力

2008年9月,"中国调查性报道研究"课题组在1100名人群中主要针对调查性报道的关注度和影响力进行调查.调查显示,在中国,调查性报道已经成为了一种重要的报道方式,但是,其关注度和受众的满意度有待进一步提高.     

刍议调查性报道伦理“向善性”保障

由于调查性报道在采写过程中体现的独立性、原创性和复杂性,导致调查性报道如果控制不当,极易出现一些违背伦理准则的现象和行为.同时,调查性报道中更存在一些难以明确界定是非的伦理冲突行为.因此,本文尝试提出一些伦理规范方案,以保持调查性报道的向善性.     

Political News Journalists in Social Media

Social media allow everyone to show off their personalities and to publicly express opinions and engage in discussions on politicised matters, and as political news journalists engage in social media practices, one might ask if all political news journalists will finally end up as self-promoting political pundits. This study examines the way political news journalists use social media and how these practices might challenge journalistic norms related to professional distance and neutrality. The study uses cluster analysis and detects five user types among political news journalists: the sceptics, the networkers, the two-faced, the opiners, and the sparks. The study finds, among other things, a sharp divide between the way political reporters and political commentators use social media. Very few reporters are comfortable sharing political opinions or blurring the boundaries between the personal and the professional, indicating that traditional journalistic norms still stand in political news journalism.     

网络环境下高校图书馆用户教育的思考

网络时代高校图书馆的用户教育应改变过去的传统方式，在教育内容上注重联机检索、光盘检索、网络检索等新的内容，在教育方法上提供与此相适应的教学条件和远程教学等新的手段。     

网络环境下的图书馆导读工作

网络环境对图书馆的导读咨询服务提出了严峻的挑战，面对新的环境、新的问题，导读工作应该采取相应的对策和策略。     

Sharing the Stage

Despite the proliferation of research on social media and journalism, only a few studies have analyzed how journalists in Latin America embrace the affordances of social platforms for journalism practice. Based on a survey of 877 Latin American reporters, this article examines the platforms journalists use and how they use them. The broad finding is that, despite the great popularity of Facebook in the region, Twitter is the most important platform for daily newsgathering and journalistic work. Journalists turn to Twitter to find sources and stories, showing an important openness to participatory journalism. Yet, they mistrust information provided from political sources. Our findings show that different regions in Latin America work with social media in different ways, and local journalistic cultures have an impact on these adoptions, especially in the case of Brazil. Further research and implications for the field are discussed.     

复杂传播环境下网络新闻“把关人”的角色转换

互联网技术的发展，带来了复杂的新闻传播环境，网络新闻“把关人”的角色该如何转换，这是当前急需探讨的新问题。     

Back to the Future

The emergence of “fake news” during the Brexit referendum and Trump election campaign sent news organisations scurrying to establish teams of journalists to debunk deliberately misleading stories and verify facts. This paper examines steps to counter false stories and asks whether normative values of objectivity are about to enjoy a comeback. Typical markers of objectivity (freedom from bias, detachment and fact-based reporting) date back to the nineteenth century and, despite being ingrained in the Anglo-American news culture, have always been subject to challenge. Recently, the growth of partisan and populist media has illustrated deep distrust in traditional news outlets and is questioning whether it is time to jettison objectivity. But are we experiencing a backlash? Through interviews with senior UK-based journalists at legacy news organisations and analysis of editorial policy statements prompted by a UK parliamentary inquiry, the paper explores how fake news is rekindling debate about objectivity and its potential to make quality journalism stand out. It argues that legacy news organisations in the United Kingdom have seized the opportunity to highlight the value of normative practices that draw on familiar components of the objectivity paradigm. But few have the financial strength to bolster the rhetoric with additional editorial resources.     

Emerging Journalistic Verification Practices Concerning Social Media

The verification of social media content and sources are increasingly critical to journalists and news organisations. In this study, we report on findings from qualitative interviews conducted with 24 journalists working with social media in major news organisations in Europe. Our findings contribute to new knowledge on journalists' social media working practices. We find that social media content are often used as the primary news source, and journalists use several different verification strategies to verify social media content and sources. Journalists are also found to have various competences in verifying social media content, in particular visual content. Moreover, our study suggests user requirements for future innovations in tools to support the verification of social media content. To avoid trade-offs between verification and fast-paced publishing, journalists will need efficient and easy-to-use support both in the verification process and in structuring and organising an overwhelming amount of social media content.     

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.     

Are You Talking to Me?

Social media has become a key medium for discussion and dissemination of news stories, fuelled by the low barrier to entry and the ease of interaction. News stories may be propagated through these networks either by official news organisation accounts, by individual journalists or by members of the public, through link sharing, endorsing or commenting. This preliminary research aims to show how computational analysis of large-scale data-sets allows us to investigate the means by which news stories are spread through social media, and how the conversation around them is shaped by journalists and news organisations. Through the capture of more than 11 million tweets relating to 2303 Twitter accounts connected to journalism and news organisations, we are able to analyse the conversation within and around journalism, examining who spreads information about news articles and who interacts in the discussion around them. Capturing the tweets of news organisations and journalists and the replies and retweets of these micro-blogs allows us to build a rich picture of interaction around news media.