Business News Research Articles

Decolonizing business English: exploring classroom ideologies

Abstract The inherent coloniality of ELT, as both driver and product of Anglophone political power, poses particular challenges for ELT teachers and learners looking to engage with decolonizing agendas. With only scant evidence of these agendas translating into ELT practice, I explored decolonial options, counter-hegemonic actions, with my undergraduate business English learners, adopting a form of practitioner research known as exploratory practice, and centring enquiry on our use of business news articles for a key course component. My learners revealed the potential of decolonial options, and the reflective, exploratory process exposed our language ideologies, with a vocal minority of students resisting any end to the established English-only policy. Suggestions are offered for fellow ELT teachers working in similar settings and who are interested in exploring their own use of authentic materials through a decolonizing lens.

Agenda-Setting for COVID-19: A Study of Large-Scale Economic News Coverage Using Natural Language Processing

Over the past two years, organizations and businesses have been forced to constantly adapt and develop effective responses to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The acuteness, global scale and intense dynamism of the situation make online news and information even more important for making informed management and policy decisions. This paper focuses on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to examine the news media as the main source of information and agenda-setters of public discourse over an eight-month period. The aim of this study is to understand which economic topics news media focused on alongside the dominant health coverage, which topics did not surface, and how these topics influenced each other and evolved over time and space. To this end, we used an extensive open-source dataset of over 350,000 media articles on non-medical aspects of COVID-19 retrieved from over 60 top-tier business blogs and news sites. We referred to the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Intelligence taxonomy to categorize the articles into a variety of topics. In doing so, we found that in the early days of COVID-19, the news media focused predominantly on reporting new cases, which tended to overshadow other topics, such as the economic impact of the virus. Different independent news sources reported on the same topics, showing a herd behavior of the news media during this global health crisis. However, a temporal analysis of news distribution in relation to its geographic focus showed that the rise in COVID-19 cases was associated with an increase in media coverage of relevant socio-economic topics. This research helps prepare for the prevention of social and economic crises when decision-makers closely monitor news coverage of viruses and related topics in other parts of the world. Thus, monitoring the news landscape on a global scale can support decision-making in social and economic crises. Our analyses point to ways in which this monitoring and issues management can be improved to remain alert to social dynamics and market changes.

News-implied linkages and local dependency in the equity market

This paper studies a heterogeneous coefficient spatial factor model that separately addresses both common factor risks (strong cross-sectional dependence) and local dependency (weak cross-sectional dependence) in equity returns. From the asset pricing perspective, we derive the theoretical implications of no asymptotic arbitrage for the heterogeneous spatial factor model, generalizing the work of Kou et al. (2018). We also provide the associated Wald tests for the APT restrictions in the general case when there are both traded and non-traded factors. On the empirical side, it is challenging to measure granular firm-to-firm connectivity for a high-dimensional panel of equity returns. We use extensive business news to construct firms’ links through which local shocks transmit, and we use those news-implied linkages as a proxy for the connectivity among firms. Empirically, we document a considerable degree of local dependency among S&P500 stocks, and the spatial component does a great job in capturing the remaining correlations in the de-factored returns. We find that adding spatial interaction terms to factor models reduces mispricing and boosts model fitting. By comparing the performance of the model estimated using different networks, we show that the news-implied linkages provide a comprehensive and integrated proxy for firm-to-firm connectivity.

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

Media representation of COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on Australian hospitality businesses

ABSTRACT Representation of a phenomenon in media can impact and shape particular public beliefs, and attitudes and can contribute to social change. As the social role of the hospitality industry has become more salient, this study aims to investigate the representation of COVID-19 and its impact on the Australian hospitality businesses in news articles. Those news articles focus on the hospitality industry in Australia published in the outlets, such as Hospitality Directory, The Hotel Conversation, ABC News, Gourmet Traveller, nine News, and Business News Australia. Using corpus linguistics analysis (CL), we revealed that COVID-19 has been mainly represented as a new and current outbreak that threatened community health and caused restrictions, responses and measures that had to be put in place.

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

OBITUARY: Vale Peter Lomas – a checkered journalism legacy

Tributes flowed for the death of New Zealand-born Fiji Sun publisher and chief executive Peter Lomas. He spent much of his life in Fiji and the Pacific and, according to his newspaper, 'He was an industry pioneer and one of the last surviving old school "newspaper men" of the Pacific, someone who lived and breathed the news business and practically lived his life in the newsroom'. He was a former editor of Islands Business, the Fiji Daily Post, and worked as a training consultant on the Samoa Observer, Solomon Star, and Elijah Communications in the Cook Islands. In 2001 became the fulltime media development training coordinator for the Suva-based Pacific Islands News Association (PINA). This obituary by a Fiji-born media consultant offers a more nuanced profile of his Fiji Sun tenure.

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

Writers’ Awareness of Metadiscourse Features in Malaysian Business News

Metadiscourse is an important linguistic resource in business news because it guides readers throughout the text. Business news is vital to keep people abreast of how the economy affects job opportunities, how high or low interest rates may go, and whether layoffs are imminent in local industries. However, it is the news that people read the least because it is not engaging to them. The study aims to investigate The Star Online and Focus Malaysia business news writers’ awareness on the use of metadiscourse features. Metadiscourse Awareness Test was given to 10 business news writers from The Star Online and Focus Malaysia respectively. The findings showed that sequencers had the lowest mean score (M=2.334) for textual metadiscourse, while certainty markers had the lowest mean score (M=2.667) for interpersonal metadiscourse. Although The Star Online and Focus Malaysia writers exhibited the lowest mean score in identifying sequencers and certainty markers, they still demonstrated a high awareness in identifying all the categories of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse. The findings revealed the importance of metadiscourse features for the business news writers to fully utilise them in the news industry.

Anaphora, Cataphora, and Exophora Found in The Jakarta Post Published in March 2021

Pronouns are words that are used to refer to another word in a text, particularly in newspapers. It can become an issue if students do not grasp how to use a pronoun to refer to a single item in a text since most students focus solely on the meaning of each pronoun that they are familiar with, ignoring the meaning of context from the text. As a result, this research examines the types of pronouns and references that are commonly employed in newspapers. This study employed descriptive quantitative because it analyzes, describes, and counts the three types of references: Anaphora, Cataphora, and Exophora, according to the Jakarta Post's business news from March 2021. There were 31 news sources in this analysis. Anaphora is the most commonly used in this publication, according to the results of the analysis. Cataphora is the second series, and Exophora is the last. As a result, this research can help people better understand the context of a text when pronouns are used as a reference.

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

The Impact of IoT on News Media in the Smart Age

Public progress and people’s well-being need free and honest news media effective for educating the public, holding experienced authors accountable, and recording public debate of public officials on current events. News media’s evolution might be influenced by a variety of variables. Political understanding, economics, education, development corporation, and information technology are vital variables that will offer effective news. Due to the enactment of web and mobile technologies, the media world is now preparing for the next explorations with the Internet of Things (IoT). Because of IoT-based devices, this mix of technologies has already begun to spread. One of the industries most influenced by this next technological revolution will be news media. Internet of Things devices is enabling new methods of creating, disseminating, and consuming journalistic material, ushering the news business into a new paradigm: ubiquitous journalism. In this paper, we collected data from Chinese news organizations to improve security, team collaboration, high-speed network access, and public accessibility. We have used Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption to contextualize IoT adoption inside the framework of technological advancements absorbed by media, and the process can be optimized by using Hybridized Fruitfly Bumblebee Optimization Algorithm (HFBOA). The suggested technique is compared to other existing methods, and its performance is assessed. The proposed method helps in increasing the security of the contents related to news media. The estimated results for our proposed technique are implementation cost (45), latency (40), security level (95), reliability (87), accuracy (89), throughput (6.7), execution time (1.05), and energy consumption (45).

A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS OF KEYWORDS FOUND IN ONLINE BUSINESS NEWS ARTICLES

Business news articles are crucial for Business English students since they provide a rich source for learning vocabulary in their field of study and professional communication. This study investigates lexico-grammatical items specific to a specialised corpus of online business news reports. Its overall aim is twofold: 1) to generate a keywords list extracted from the self-built corpus; and 2) to identify lexical collocations of the first ten keywords. Seven hundred online business news articles from BBC news.com were compiled to build a corpus of business news. The data were analysed by the application of Antconc 3.5.9 developed by Anthony (2020). The results derived from the present study through a corpus-based analysis uncovered a list of keywords which were frequently used in online business news where the majority of the keywords were nouns (63.51%), verbs/nouns (8%), adjectives (7%), adjectives/nouns (4%), adverbs (2%), and verb (1%). From the selected top one hundred keywords, the lexical collocations of each keyword were identified with 3 combination types based on the set framework adapted from Benson et al.’s (2010). The obtained combination types include Adjective+Noun (40%), Noun+Noun (35%), and Noun+Verb (20%), respectively. The pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research were also discussed.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0761/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Political Economy and Media Ecology of Trumpism: A Contribution to the Study of Anti-systemic Politics

Concepts developed in the field of political economy offer a useful framework for explaining, from a western perspective, the phenomenon of Trumpism as an expression of anti-system politics emerging rich democracies in response to the effects of neoliberal growth models and the cartel forms of political parties. While insightful, this theory does not account for the role of media in presumed relationships. The article aims to offer, through exploratory analysis, the theoretical basis for conceptualization of the links between media, anti-system politics, and growth models. Trumpism developed, we argue, under the conditions of destabilization of traditional institutional arrangements of the news business, which enabled and limited the functions of journalism important for the democratization of the „Western“society. The paper contributes to the development of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the media aspect of Trumpism concerning the prevailing corpus of ideas about "post-truth", "false news" and "echo chambers".

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News from the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News From the Field

In Case You Missed It: Business News From the Field

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

The news media industry is a sector that is greatly affected by technology and the rapid speed with which changes are taking place. Industry 4.0 is upon us and promising a smarter production that is digitally networked and built on data-intense models. However, fostering innovation inside the newsroom takes place with as many hindrances and bureaucratic obstacles as possible. To address how news outlets are adopting new approaches to sustain their business, we conducted fourteen (n = 14) in-depth interviews with leading actors of news organizations in Brazil, a leading country within the Global South with a complex national reality. Our study systematically analyzes qualitative data to present technology-driven, innovative business models and technologies that will be major players in the news industry’s future. Results indicated that organizations do not rely on a unique income source but combine different sustainable models of funding. By deploying technological assets in the news business, these outlets are capable of meeting the needs of audiences and better identifying customer segments, which brings a competitive advantage to these organizations. In summary, this research resulted in responsive knowledge sharing about digital journalism’s business model that is being implemented for the next revolution.

Behavioural antecedents to blockchain implementation in agrifood supply chain management: A thematic analysis

Despite its perceived utility, several companies and managers continue to hold reservations about blockchain implementation in supply chain management. To elucidate the causes, we examine the behavioural and organisational antecedents that influence the adoption of blockchain technology in supply chain management. To do this, we undertake thematic analysis on blockchain-related agri-food business news and expert opinions from the Ovid database's Agricola section. Four themes are central to our model: organisational adoption strategies, technical advantages, environmental obstacles, and implementation intention. Using these themes, we build a thematic map and derive three propositions about the role of behavioural antecedents to blockchain implementation intention in supply chains, thus substantiating Behavioural Reasoning Theory (BRT) and Technology Organisation and Environment (TOE) theory's core arguments. Our findings elucidate novel factors influencing blockchain adoption in supply chains. More specifically, we show that managers who consider the technological benefits associated with blockchain capacity are able to provide stakeholders with new opportunities and embrace adoption strategies such as product launch and partnership formation while also considering environmental and contextual barriers such as market fragmentation, scarcity of research, and regulatory restrictions.

Innovation and Business Models for Digital News Industry: a critical approach to part of Brazilian reality

The journalistic industry is facing a crisis since the Internet started to challenge its solid and old business model. The media companies and only them held the spaces for advertisers to reach thousands of people at the same time with their message. Once the monopoly has fallen, the revenues started dropping, the circulation of newspapers decreased deeply and the consumer’s attention moved to other platforms like social media, for example. Taking this into account, we intend to present here a discussion about the news business models, including revenue models, that are being adopted by some Brazilian industry examples. Our work is a didactic research considering business models is still an unsolved issue for this industry. Since there is no paradigm, what we present is a panorama of choices, remixes and customized adaptations. As ours research questions we have: RQ1: What kind of new business/revenue models are being adopted by media?RQ2: What are the differences between Brazilian big publishers and independent media strategies?To bring light and develop this questioning we start discussing innovation in journalistic industries. Also, we follow our discussion here with an outlook on the business models existent and the new ones that are being adopted or created by media companies. To end our work we present a list of strategies that are being used in mainstream firms from Brazil and also the ones that are created or adopted by the new companies that are born in the actual digital context. As our research method, we adopt the non-participant observation of the market and the companies here specified and the use of documents and media articles that present the strategies used by journalistic brands to face the revenue crisis. The main finding of the research isthat most of the companies are adopting the same strategies, in a “wave movement”, where once one companie gives it a try the other go with the flow. Keywords: Business Models, Digital News Industry, Brazilian Reality, digital context

A threat to journalism? How journalists and advertising sales managers in news organizations perceive and cope with native advertising

In the course of digitization, the traditional business model of news organizations has been substantially challenged, making innovative formats necessary to master the business of online news. Native advertising (i.e., sponsored articles) is considered an escape from this dilemma. In adapting to journalistic content, this advertising format is distinct from conventional online advertising and allows advertisers to convey persuasive messages in an unobtrusive manner. However, despite its financial benefits, there are ethical concerns about native advertising, which is inherently and intentionally deceptive to its audience. Moreover, native advertising perforates the normative wall separating journalistic responsibilities from advertisers’ interests. In news organizations, this is reflected in the relationship between journalists and advertising sales managers. The present study therefore explored how individuals in these two roles differ in their perceptions of risks and opportunities related to native advertising and in how they cope with ethical concerns. Exploring the power relations between journalists and sales managers in collaborations on native advertising, this study also sheds light on potential restrictions of journalistic autonomy caused by native advertising.