新冠肺炎疫情报道中数据新闻的“工具化”衍变

在抗击新型冠状病毒疫情的众多新闻报道之中,数据新闻作品及数据可视化产品表现抢眼,效果独特,影响广泛,充分体现出数据新闻在新闻事件统计、分析、研判上的独特优势.大数据工具的介入,更让数据新闻从之前的“可视化”阶段衍变进入“工具化”阶段,成为此次公共卫生报道中值得研究的新形态.     

Metadata as a machine for feeling in Germaine Greer’s archive

ABSTRACT

What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.

This article argues that sentiment analysis offers a new and highly productive method of interrogating archival metadata, and that, as a method which privileges emotive understandings of content, it is particularly appropriate to the study of feminist archives like Greer’s. It also argues that these kinds of detailed finding aids are new datasets that reward analysis in their own right, and particularly when considered in dialogue with—rather than simply used as straightforward navigational tools for—the ‘original’ archival content.     

Deep Participation in Underserved Communities: A Quantitative Analysis of Hearken’s Model for Engagement Journalism

ABSTRACT

Hearken is a proprietary news engagement platform growing in popularity. Under the Hearken approach, audience members are invited to participate in the newsmaking process. Hearken strives to assist news organizations in providing local and hyperlocal content that meets audience needs and demands while preserving elements of the journalist’s role as gatekeeper. Hearken has also worked to help news organizations reach underrepresented populations with mixed results per its own anecdotal analyses. This study employs a quantitative content analysis comparing one year’s worth of coverage at four different local NPR affiliates in the United States to provide a breakdown of Hearken content versus traditional reporter-driven content in the following four categories: emphasis on hyperlocal coverage, story topic prevalence within local and hyperlocal coverage, emphasis on coverage of underrepresented communities, and story topic prevalence within coverage of underrepresented communities. Findings reveal listener-driven Hearken content favors hyperlocal news on lifestyle issues while reporter-driven stories emphasize state-level governance and politics as well as local crime. These indicate a stark contrast between the content audiences want and that which journalists tend to report. The nuanced normative implications, possibilities and limitations of Hearken’s model of “deep participation” are addressed in some detail.     

‘Real Pictures of Current Events’

Objectivity has been regarded as a central ideal of American journalism in the early twentieth century. The concurrent emergence of photography in the press is rarely associated with this development. The article explores the photographic legacy of journalistic objectivity by discussing a crucial phase in the development of reproduction media for images, the transition from wood engravings to halftones. The former was the dominant mode of ‘illustrated journalism’, the latter became the dominant mode of reproducing photojournalism in print in the twentieth century. The halftone process introduced an equivalence between photographs and their reproductions, obliterating the mediation that had taken place in a code of reproduction that was almost imperceptible. In the contested adoption of the halftone process, it is argued, a shifting valuation of photographs can be observed that prefigures the formulation of objectivity as a transparent code of mediation in journalism.     

Journalism in Disguise: Standpoint Theory and the Ethics of Günter Wallraff’s Undercover Immersion

ABSTRACT

Deception is a key element of immersive undercover journalism, achieved through the omission of information, the perpetuation of misconceptions, or possibly the assumption of a false identity. Usually when proponents defend going undercover, they use the-ends-justify-the-means arguments; that despite the journalist’s duplicity, public benefit outweighs the dishonesty that lies at the heart of the practice. Yet, such statements are usually made in the absence of in-depth theoretical analysis. This paper seeks to redress this by applying Standpoint Theory, testing it against the work of Günter Wallraff, Germany’s lauded but controversial undercover journalist who uses disguises to report on that country’s marginalized and disadvantaged. While the authors applaud Wallraff’s exposure of the deplorable illegal and immoral dealings he uncovers, and do not seek to dismiss the significant results he has achieved, this paper uses the case study of his work to test the applicability of Standpoint Theory to undercover journalism, concluding that even under this accommodating theory, there may be ethical limits to journalism’s most ethically contentious practice.     

ONLINE FEATURE JOURNALISM

Although online journalism is still dominated by breaking news coverage, new genres are emerging that differentiate it more and more from old media journalism. This article explores the emergence of feature journalism in online newspapers. Through comparative qualitative text analysis of feature journalism in the US online newspaper palmbeachpost.com and the Norwegian online newspaper dagbladet.no, two widely different approaches to the production of feature journalism on the Web are uncovered and a critical perspective on the remediation of journalistic genres in online newspapers is elaborated. The analysis shows that both these approaches display a clash between discourses of traditional feature journalism and discourses of online communication. It further reveals that genre development in online journalism is a complex process marked by contradictions and inconsistencies and that online newsrooms are struggling to find solutions on how to differentiate online journalism from old media journalism.