Breaking News Stories Research Articles

News discourse as a source of metaphorical creativity in political cartooning

It is through news reports in the press or on television, radio or the Internet that people learn most of what they know about their environment or the world beyond their daily experiences. This paper raises the question: to what extent can a trending topic in news discourse become the source of metaphorical creativity, and which factors contribute to this fact? It uses the systematic analysis of multimodal metaphors in a corpus of political cartoons. The genre conventions of the political cartoon generate a particular form of engagement with the news, which in turn shapes the metaphors that political cartoonists use in their work. An editorial or political cartoon is a text, especially one in a newspaper or magazine, concerning a topical event and therefore, by definition, plays a crucial role in the reproduction of knowledge. Finding a fresh angle on a breaking news story and using this to create another piece of media content, such as an editorial or political cartoon, is often referred to as news-jacking. The question is not whether topical news stories are reproduced by journalists — it is whether they offer unique opportunities to journalists, influencing their choice of metaphors. A comparative study of cartoons about a range of topics across different cultures would deliver useful insights into how topical news items may shape the metaphors that political cartoonists use to offer expert comment. In so doing, this paper moves beyond the confines of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), presenting fundamental challenges to a theory that was originally developed based on linguistic and artificial data.

A Study on the Effectiveness of Rumor Control via Social Media Networks to Alleviate Public Panic About COVID-19.

The COVID-19 outbreak triggered a massive spread of unverified news on social media and has become a source of rumors. This paper studies the impact of a virtual rumor control center (RCC) on Weibo user behavior. The collected COVID-19 breaking news stories were divided into positive, negative, and neutral categories, while the moderating effect model was used to analyze the influence of anti-rumor on user behavior (forwarding, liking, and commenting). Our research found that rumor refuting does not directly affect user behavior but does have an indirect moderating effect. Rumor refuting has a profound impact on user forwarding behavior in cases of positive and negative news. Specifically, when the epidemic becomes more serious, the role of rumor refuting becomes critical, and vice versa. Refuting rumors reduces user willingness to forward positive or negative news, with more impact on negative news. Time lag analysis shows a significant moderation of unverified news within 72 h of refuting rumors but indicated an apparent weakening trend over time. Furthermore, we discovered non-linear feature and counter-cyclical phenomena in the moderating effect of rumor refutation.

A Semantic Preprocessing Framework for Breaking News Detection to Support Future Drone Journalism Services

Nowadays, news coverage implies the existence of video footage and sound, from which arises the need for fast reflexes by media organizations. Social media and mobile journalists assist in fulfilling this requirement, but quick on-site presence is not always feasible. In the past few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and specifically drones, have evolved to accessible recreational and business tools. Drones could help journalists and news organizations capture and share breaking news stories. Media corporations and individual professionals are waiting for the appropriate flight regulation and data handling framework to enable their usage to become widespread. Drone journalism services upgrade the usage of drones in day-to-day news reporting operations, offering multiple benefits. This paper proposes a system for operating an individual drone or a set of drones, aiming to mediate real-time breaking news coverage. Apart from the definition of the system requirements and the architecture design of the whole system, the current work focuses on data retrieval and the semantics preprocessing framework that will be the basis of the final implementation. The ultimate goal of this project is to implement a whole system that will utilize data retrieved from news media organizations, social media, and mobile journalists to provide alerts, geolocation inference, and flight planning.

User Behaviors in Newsworthy Rumors: A Case Study of Twitter

While Twitter has become an important platform for generating and disseminating breaking news stories, it is also a medium for spreading false rumors. Most research relevant to newsworthy rumors has treated its subject as a homogeneous class without due consideration to the nuances that distinguish rumors from each other. Some studies, for example, have studied rumor propagation as if all rumors follow the same type of distribution. We question this belief and argue that rumors differ in how they engage their audience, how they spread and by whom, what type of users interact with them, and how they evolve over time. In this paper, we study various semantic aspects of false rumors and analyze their spread. We study the characteristics of rumor usage, emphasize the role users play in rumors, their beliefs, and interactions. Finally, we answer several research questions with regards to each of the topics addressed.

Policing victims of partner violence during COVID-19: a qualitative content study on Australian grey literature

ABSTRACT Partner violence is a well-documented issue within research, policing practices, newspapers, and awareness campaigns both domestically and internationally. These stories appear in newspapers, breaking news stories, and across different social media platforms. However, little is known about how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced societal understandings of victim and offender dynamics during this challenging time globally, particularly those who have multiple marginalised identities. Within Australia, partner violence is typically framed in a singular way where heterosexual women are the victims of heterosexual males. Policy documents, newspapers, television campaigns and statistical data reporting underpin this perception. A recent study undertaken by the primary author found that partner violence awareness within grey literature (literature produced by different organisations and not specifically research-based) is substantively heteronormative. Therefore, to investigate if these perceptions have changed and become more inclusive, this current study was further undertaken to inquire into police responses and media reporting of partner violence during COVID-19. This study analysed grey literature (newspapers) using qualitative content analysis to determine how police and the media portray victims and offenders’ experiences of violence during the global pandemic of COVID-19, all within the framework of intersectionality.

Creative Theory in Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, Alternative Teaching Model, and a New Breakthrough in Psychiatric Home Care Nursing

Although many resources have been explored and applied in our environment, personal internal and external resources have yet to be adequately exploited. A nursing theory and model for internal and external resources may be developed and discussed deeply (Zauszniewski, 2018) to provide newer vision and direction, while helping face the challenges of caring for patients with psychiatric disorders or mental obstacles. Recently, many breaking news stories have highlighted the hidden worries affecting our society due to patients with psychiatric disorders who live in the community. This has resulted in people, including student nurses, to retain their stigma toward mental illnesses and psychiatric patients and express negative perceptions and fear toward psychiatric patients (Choi et al., 2016). Therefore, it has been a challenge of psychiatric nursing education to develop and use a new and more-acceptable teaching model to help student nurses better understand and hold a more-correct perception toward psychiatric patients. The practice of clinical nursing profession still needs to be focused while we remain committed to psychiatric nursing education. The number of psychiatric patients who need more continuous care in community settings has increased significantly. The needs of psychiatric home care nursing should be particularly emphasized, as the manpower / capabilities necessary for psychiatric nursing are limited in community health nursing practice (Huang & Wang, 2015). More resources and psychiatric practice nursing professionals should be made available to communities for continuous psychiatric care (Wu et al., 2016). Strong and authentic partnerships are very important to acute care, education, evidence-based research, and practical policy development in psychiatric & mental health nursing (McInnis-Perry et al., 2015). In this column, resourcefulness theory is introduced as a new theory that may be applied in the psychiatric and mental health nursing practice; alternative teaching models are recommended for psychiatric nursing education; and finally, the importance of overcoming the difficulties and addressing the needs in community psychiatric home care nursing is also emphasized. It is hoped that this approach will help facilitate the further, positive advance of psychiatric and mental health nursing.

Birds of a feather check together: Leveraging homophily for sequential rumour detection

As breaking news unfolds, social media has become the go-to platform to learn about the latest updates from journalists and eyewitnesses on the ground. The fact that anybody can post content in social media during these breaking news leads to posting and diffusion of unverified rumours, which in turn produces uncertainty and increases anxiety. Given the scale of social media contents, automation is key for effective detection of these rumours. In this paper we introduce a novel approach to rumour detection that learns from the sequential dynamics of reporting during breaking news in social media to detect rumours in new stories. Using five Twitter datasets collected during breaking news stories, we experiment with Conditional Random Fields as a sequential classifier that leverages context learnt during an event for rumour detection, which we compare with the state-of-the-art rumour detection system as well as other baselines. In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying a piece of information to deem it a rumour, but instead we detect rumours from the tweet alone by exploiting context learnt during the event. Further, we experiment with homophily as a predictive feature for detecting rumours, i.e. setting forth the hypothesis that a user will be more likely to post a rumour if they follow users who posted or spread rumours in the past. Our classifier achieves state-of-the-art performance, beating competitive baselines as well as outperforming our best baseline with nearly 40% improvement in terms of F1 score. Our research proves the effectiveness of the consideration of the sequential nature of social media data and the usefulness of homophily as a feature for rumour detection.

Good and bad events: combining network-based event detection with sentiment analysis

The huge volume and velocity of media content published on the Web presents a substantial challenge to human analysts. In prior work, we developed a system (network event detection, NED) to assist analysts by detecting events within high-volume news streams in real time. NED can process a heterogeneous stream of news articles or social media user posts, combining text mining and network analysis to detect breaking news stories and generate an easy-to-understand event summary. In this paper, we expand the NED event detection and summarisation approach in two ways. First, we introduce a new approach to named entity disambiguation for tweets, which contain minimal information due to brevity. Second, we apply sentiment analysis techniques to documents associated with a detected event to characterise the event as either broadly ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ based on media portrayal. Our expansion focuses on Twitter streams since Twitter has become an important news dissemination platform and is often the site where emerging events are first seen. To test the extended methodology, we apply it here to three data sets related to political elections in the UK and the USA. The addition of sentiment analysis to the NED event detection methodology improves the insight gained by the user by allowing quick evaluation of the perceived impact of an event. This approach may have potential applications in domains where public sentiment is relevant to decision-making around events, such as financial markets and politics.

An Interrogation on Newsjacking in Content Marketing

Newsjacking is the workmanship and study of infusing your thoughts into a breaking news story so you and your thoughts get took note. Newsjacking alludes to the act of gaining by the fame of a news story to intensify your deals and promoting achievement. Fundamentally, news is breaking each second in this insane universe of our own, and there's a time when advertisers have a one of a kind chance to ride the fame wave of a breaking story to profit their business somehow or another. Presently, the ubiquity subsides before long - maybe in hours, for the most part in days, in case you're fortunate, in weeks - however the effect of catching the story right on time to profit your business is huge ... particularly contrasted with the exertion you needed to put in to get in on the activity.

The Case of Leslie Satoru Nakashima and His Breaking News Dispatch

The Case of Leslie Satoru Nakashima and His Breaking News Dispatch Crystal Uchino (bio) That the atomic bomb, more than Russia’s entry into the war, compelled Japan to surrender as she did on August 15 instead of waging a showdown battle on the Japanese mainland is a justifiable conclusion drawn after one sees what used to be Hiroshima city. [. . .] I’ve just returned to Tokyo from that city, which was destroyed at one stroke by a single atomic bomb thrown by a super flying fortress on the morning of August 6 [. . .] There’s not a single building standing intact in the city—until recently of 300,000 population. The death toll is expected to reach 100,000 with people continuing to die daily from burns suffered from the bomb’s ultra-violet rays. —Leslie Nakashima, September 27, 1945 On August 27, 1945, Kaua‘i-born Leslie Satoru Nakashima, penned the first eye-witness report of Hiroshima’s devastation to be published in Western media. The article, “Hiroshima as I Saw it,” recounted his observations after arriving in Hiroshima on August 22, sixteen days after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city and several weeks before any foreign war correspondent had been able to enter the city. Few are aware of this and even the historical record in Hiroshima erroneously attributes the first news report to Wilfred Burchett.2 Without the aid of translators or interpreters required by those Western reporters who would break the story after him, Nakashima [End Page 1] encountered the stories of survivors—many of them acquaintances of his from his native land of Hawai‘i, as well as his own mother—who recalled their experiences of survival and loss. Reading Nakashima’s article syndicated in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, his nine siblings living in Hawai‘i must have been shocked and relieved to read about the status of their mother—information that was not available to most Japanese Americans with family or kinship connections to Hiroshima and Nagasaki until months or sometimes even years later. Consequently, because their father was not mentioned in the report, this was also how they learned that he already passed away (since communication between the family had been cut off by the circumstances of war).3 Leslie Nakashima was a well-known, popular, and celebrated journalist in the prewar Japanese American community. Having spent nearly a decade on the staff of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (1924–1934), interrupted only by a brief period (1928–1930), during which time he served as the premier sportswriter for the Nippu Jiji, his reputation was solid. According to the Shin Sekai Asahi Shinbun, Nakashima was known for his “accurate and speedy reporting,” which was “familiar to all American readers.”4 He was referred to by the Rafu Shimpō as a “one-time ‘star’ of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s city staff.” General manager of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Joseph Rider Farrington, described Nakashima’s good standing as follows: Adept at all types of reporting and in the field of government, politics and sports was outstanding for his work. . . . Although of Japanese ancestry, he is an American citizen and is held in high regard by American citizens of many other races in the Territory of Hawaii, both for his work as a newspaper man and his fine character.5 Despite his near-celebrity status in the prewar years, Nakashima’s story, as well as the fact that Japanese Americans had significant material ties to Hiroshima, faded into obscurity behind the tropes of Japanese American loyalty that have dominated post-war themes in Japanese American history. In 1997, historian Yuji Ichioka examined the case of Kazumaro Buddy Uno, a controversial Kibei journalist, who according to him, was “banished into historical oblivion.” In his study, Ichioka brought attention to the marginalization of Japanese American experiences that do not fit neatly into the narrative of Japanese American loyalty [End Page 2] and insisted that Japanese American history must become “inclusive” of the complex histories of its constituents.6 This article examines the case of Leslie Satoru Nakashima and the circumstances of his breaking news story, the first eye-witness report on the aftermath of the...

Discourse-aware rumour stance classification in social media using sequential classifiers

Rumour stance classification, defined as classifying the stance of specific social media posts into one of supporting, denying, querying or commenting on an earlier post, is becoming of increasing interest to researchers. While most previous work has focused on using individual tweets as classifier inputs, here we report on the performance of sequential classifiers that exploit the discourse features inherent in social media interactions or ‘conversational threads’. Testing the effectiveness of four sequential classifiers – Hawkes Processes, Linear-Chain Conditional Random Fields (Linear CRF), Tree-Structured Conditional Random Fields (Tree CRF) and Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM) – on eight datasets associated with breaking news stories, and looking at different types of local and contextual features, our work sheds new light on the development of accurate stance classifiers. We show that sequential classifiers that exploit the use of discourse properties in social media conversations while using only local features, outperform non-sequential classifiers. Furthermore, we show that LSTM using a reduced set of features can outperform the other sequential classifiers; this performance is consistent across datasets and across types of stances. To conclude, our work also analyses the different features under study, identifying those that best help characterise and distinguish between stances, such as supporting tweets being more likely to be accompanied by evidence than denying tweets. We also set forth a number of directions for future research.

Law, Love, and Marriage: Television News and the Production of Publicity in North India

Journalism’s mandate is a paradoxical one: to publicize stories of social injustice and sustain their visibility in the public domain, while battling the decay of publicity that is inherent in the very genre of information that is daily news. In this article, I argue that the legitimacy and credibility that Hindi crime journalists create for stories relies on their keen understanding of a complex terrain of institutional scripts and social actions from which the news stories themselves emerge. Analyzing a breaking news story on Hindi channels in 2011, featuring a secret marriage, kinship role inversion, and a woman’s public plea for protection from family intimidation, the article explores the complex interpenetration of journalistic, institutional, and social scripts that make up the fraught terrain of “love marriage” in North India. I show, first, how journalists remediate the authority of photographic images through the news image to secure credibility for the story; second, how they locate the story within local and global discourses of criminality and “honor” that fits it into recognizable journalistic storylines. I conclude by suggesting that the production of publicity in television news, in which industrial constraints and the pressure for ratings plays a substantial role, nevertheless relies on existing institutional discourses and social norms with respect to the framing of love, marriage, and criminality. To understand how 24-hour news cycles generate sensationalism, we cannot ignore the sociological ground from which the news stories emerge and through which they circulate to reinforce or reinvent normative cultural scripts.

Breaking news: How push notifications alter the fourth estate

In the face of media mistrust and increasing scrutiny over fake news, the fourth estate traditional power-check functions, as well as its esteem, are in jeopardy. Changes in news reporting and dissemination, including social media and new technologies have greatly reshaped the information environments of an informed electorate within American democracy. While much scholarly progress has been made in studying the socio-political impact of social media, similar critical attention has not been given to some of the technological changes in news dissemination. Research has begun to analyze attitudinal changes, as well as documented general information-saturation culture and online civility. It is not clear if these are related within the context of breaking news, raising distinct research questions, including: How have objectivity and sentiment changed in media representations over time? How have push notifications, as an increasingly popular and exemplar technological change in news dissemination, influenced these representations? This paper addresses these questions by exploring a case comparison between representations of two historically parallel breaking news stories, U.S. President Nixon firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973 and President Trump firing FBI Director James Comey in 2017, through computational textual analysis. While headlines and push notifications vary significantly by news providers, push notifications are similar across platforms in distinguishing characteristics such as emotionally loaded and subjective language. Both of these are defining elements of fake and deceptive news and may potentially account for some media distrust recently.

From Depths of Addiction to Triumph of Recovery

From Depths of Addiction to Triumph of Recovery

Storying leaks for sharing: The case of leaking the “Moscovici draft” on Twitter

This article proposes a discourse-narrative approach to news making online as a networked practice of storying and sharing. This approach is illustrated in the examination of the release of a draft Eurogroup statement via journalist Paul Mason’s Facebook, Scribd and Twitter accounts on the 16th February 2015. The analysis draws on small story insights (Georgakopoulou, 2015a,b,c) and the empirical framework of sharing (Androutsopoulos, 2014). It shows how the release of this leak event on Twitter is storied as a breaking news story unfolding moment-by-moment as it happens, at the same time as making up an incipient record of the event as it happened. It is argued that breaking news (micro)stories are shared as moments of narrative stancetaking, featuring a concise, portable storyline and cumulative evaluation(s) that foreground the relevance of the leak for the ongoing discussions on the Greek bailout negotiations as well as the continued importance of the journalist as the mediator of the leak. In this case of sharing a leaked document with networked participants, narrativity is drawn upon as a key resource for producing and circulating alternative stances on the Greek crisis, creating a range of networked participation positions. This article contributes to the study of news sharing online and digital storytelling based on the qualitative analysis of ‘small’ data.

Breaking news production processes in US metropolitan newspapers: Immediacy and journalistic authority

Incremental updates to breaking news stories online have become embedded in newspapers in the 24/7 online era. This article reviews four US metropolitan newspapers, using field observations and interviews to examine how journalists choose breaking news stories and their rationale for these continuous updates. Specifically, the article explores the connection between temporality and authority, positing that journalists use these updates to retain their role as authoritative truth-tellers in relation to audiences, the competition, and their own position in the profession. As newspaper coverage becomes more like local TV, these metropolitan newspaper journalists worry that a breaking news strategy, while potentially necessary, is also questionable and even potentially harmful, but nonetheless pursue it.

Public Anthropology in 2015:Charlie Hebdo, Black Lives Matter, Migrants, and More

In this review essay, I focus on how anthropologists have addressed salient public issues such as the European refugee and migrant crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the attack on the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Public anthropology relies on slow ethnography and fast responses to breaking news stories. It is theoretically informed but reaches out to audiences beyond the academy. Drawing on proliferating anthropological contributions to news media and blogs, as well as scholarly articles and books, I explore how anthropologists today counter grand narratives such as the “clash of civilizations”; how they grapple with risky popular misconceptions of culture, difference, and suffering; and how they surface less visible forms of compassion, care, and solidarity that have long sustained our species. The challenges of this era of growing polarization and anti-intellectualism appear to have energized rather than quieted public anthropology. [public anthropology, Charlie Hebdo,Black Lives Matter, migrants, year in review]

A study of print and computer-based reading to measure and compare rates of comprehension and retention

Purpose – This paper aims to observe, measure and record comparative cognitive processes in print and online to explain the differences, if any, in the readers’ information-gathering processes and their subsequent comprehension and retention of information. It also examined the strategies that readers adopt that differ from print when reading online. Standardized reading comprehension scores were also collected. The results indicated that the participants demonstrated functional equivalency in both media, but they had a preference for print. The linear individualistic mentality learned through print gave the study group participants the skills to successfully navigate through the dense web of information that constitutes the Internet. Story presentation and hierarchy, key elements of the print design process, are less evident or absent online. As a consequence, as previous research has demonstrated, online readers are more poorly informed than print readers – but not in this case. The research from this s...

Dynamics of memory: Commemorating the 2005 London bombings in British television news

This article seeks to examine coverage of the 2005 London bombings’ first year anniversary commemorations vis-à-vis reportage of the attacks as a breaking news story. Adopting a multimodal discourse analysis approach, informed by both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study explores the thematic relationship between the two sets of coverage. Although our results show a number of dynamic processes at work, a key finding is the strong tendency for new themes to appear in the commemorative story. Our analyses also highlight the cathartic function that the event’s anniversary itself seemingly fulfils. Such empirical insights have important implications for the ways in which (catastrophic) past events are commemorated through the mass media, especially through the medium of television.

A chronicle of chaos

The extraordinary breaking news story of Hurricane Katrina offered an opportunity to document how multimedia and interactive features interfere with the carefully crafted news story of a newspaper. Scholarship on news narratives and medium theory informed this case study, a textual analysis of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina coverage in The Times-Picayune and its web partner Nola.com. The main finding was that the New Orleans' newspaper tale of a mythic Flood in an American city transformed into a chronicle about people's personal experiences in cyberspace. In the process, audiences joined with journalists and reshaped the news narrative, which took on unique cyber-temporal and cyber-spatial qualities.