Changing Media Landscape Research Articles

“One might tweet just for money”: Organisational and institutional incentives for researchers’ social media communication and public engagement practices

The changing media landscape and proliferation of social media potentially increase agency amongst researchers to communicate individually. It also points to a need for studying science communication at an organisational level to understand how science communication activities can be collectively organised to have a substantial impact. Despite these changes, there are ongoing questions regarding the perceived value of science communication and the ways in which it can receive institutional support in credit-driven academic cultures. Therefore, this study set out to explore how incentives relate to researchers’ communication activity and how these can be influenced by digital communication contexts. This article presents a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 researchers and 15 communication professionals in Finland. Results indicate that academic leaders are in the key position to support organisational science communication culture, and their acknowledgement for science communication can be more effective than encouragement from in-house communication staff. This suggests that there may be a key gap vis-à-vis training in science communication and engagement which is targeted towards scientific and organisational leaders. The results also imply there is enduring value in communication activities featuring in periodical performance evaluation and that analytic data from digital media endeavours can form an intrinsic reward.

BSkyB and the 1991 World Student Games: The Transformation of Live Sports Television Acquisition and Coverage in the UK in the Early 1990s

In 1991, Sheffield was the host city for the XVI Summer Universiade, better known as the World Student Games (WSG). Studies of the 1991 WSG commonly assert that it received little to no television coverage. This article intervenes to demonstrate that the WSG did receive substantial television coverage on Sky Sports and across the ITV network. The article draws on new archival sources to provide perspectives on the negotiations and interactions between the WSG organizers and the broadcasters, focusing on BSkyB. The article serves as an instrumental case study on how newly available television archival collections can be used to reframe perspectives of television history. In particular, the article considers the early history of Sky Sports, its approach to sports acquisition, its relationship with public service broadcasters, and the impact of satellite television on live-sports coverage and a rapidly changing media landscape in the UK in the early 1990s.

Populist media diets

AbstractObjectiveThe changing media landscape highlights the need to understand the dynamic nature of Americans’ news consumption patterns. Research to date has focused on understanding how media diets vary across partisanship, while other, cross‐cutting cleavages remain underexplored. We focus on the relationship between populism and where Americans get their news and how they assess news media credibility.MethodsUsing an original, national survey of Americans (N = 1009) fielded in March 2020, we explore the news media diets of populists, controlling for partisanship, ideology, and relevant covariates.ResultsAnalyses demonstrate that two primary dimensions of populism—anti‐elitism and distrust of experts—relate to media diets in complex ways.ConclusionThose who distrust experts have a more ideologically extreme media diet and put trust in fringe outlets and social media, whereas those with anti‐elite attitudes do not shy away from mainstream outlets and hold positive views of journalists and mainstream media.

Populaarimusiikkia kulttuuriperinnön kierrevirrassa

Riding the current of cultural heritage Hymy’s Olavi Virta monument scheme (1975–1984) as a popular music heritage process
 The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of academic literature on the expanding heritagization of popular music. Despite this international academic interest, the theoretical underpinnings of cultural heritage studies have been underused in the study of Finnish popular music cultures. 
 This article presents a case study of a popular music heritage process in Finland. It examines an early monument scheme honouring one of the most renowned Finnish singers of the 20th century, Olavi Virta (1915–1972). In the article, the monument project – initiated by the tabloid magazine Hymy (engl. smile) in 1975 and completed in 1984 – is retraced as a chain of events in which Olavi Virta’s memory and oeuvre were reinterpreted and repurposed as national popular music heritage. Newspaper and magazine articles covering the monument scheme are analysed through the conceptual framework of cultural heritage identity work: historisation, monumentalisation and participation. 
 The article argues that the interviews, memoires and retrospective texts that Hymy published on Virta constituted a historicizing practice that paved the way for the artist’s later monumentalisation. The abstract-constructivist realisation of the monument, critiqued by some as inconsistent with the scheme’s popular objective, is interpreted as a visual parallel to the rehabilitative rhetoric with which Hymy covered the scheme. However, the monument may also be conceived of as the magazine’s assimilation of the beloved artist’s memory at a time when Hymy was struggling to establish a new editorial line in a changing media landscape. While the sculpture’s standing as the first public monument to celebrate Finnish popular music is in question, the article maintains that the Virta monument may nonetheless be regarded as an important forerunner to the mounting public memorialisation of popular music in Finland.

Changing Media Framings of School Shootings: A Case Study of the Parkland School Shooting

The Parkland school shooting that occurred on February 14, 2018, ranks among the deadliest high school shootings in recorded history with 17 injuries and 17 casualties. Like other mass school shootings, this event garnered extensive media coverage, but little research has been conducted to examine how media framing for this event compares with previous school shootings. This study examines the framing of the Parkland school shooting by location over time using the Social Coping Model, which describes how collectives cope with and heal from traumatic events. Specifically, this study compares frames of front-page news articles from three local news outlets and three national outlets across three time periods in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The results indicate the coverage of the Parkland shooting was similar to previous shootings, but the results also suggest a shift in media coverage. The implications for this shift are explored in the context of a changing media landscape while also noting the importance of the Social Coping Model towards understanding the dynamic process of framing school shootings.

Trends in Swedish and English Reading Comprehension Ability among Swedish Adolescents: A Study of SweSAT Data 2012–2018

ABSTRACT The aim of the study is to investigate trends in academic L1 Swedish and L2 English reading comprehension ability among Swedish adolescents, with a specific focus on 18- to 20-year-olds in the period 2012–2018. The material consists of results from regular tests and anchor tests in the spring administrations of the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test (SweSAT) 2012–2018, allowing an analysis of trends in reading comprehension ability among a subset of the adolescent population. The results show two highly significant but opposite trends, with a substantial decrease in academic Swedish reading comprehension and an equally substantial increase in academic English reading comprehension. The results are discussed from the perspective of a changing media landscape, and related to results of the PISA-studies as well as to research on extramural English in Swedish society.

Multimedia

Multimedia

Transforming tradition: how the iconic Christmas Lectures series is perceived by its audiences

ABSTRACT The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are a landmark in the history of science communication. With today’s changing media landscape, it is important to know who is currently watching, how they are watching, and how they are perceiving the content. This cross-sectional study evaluated perceptions of live audiences, people watching at home via Twitter, and awareness of the Lectures by science-interested audiences. The Lectures are valued by science-enthusiast audiences for performative identity sharing and valued tradition. However, younger generations are shifting away from traditional television to online videos, and the Lectures must adapt to remain relevant to new audiences.

Julian Ochorowicz's experiments with Eusapia Palladino 1894: The temporality of mass media and the crisis of local credibility.

Julian Ochorowicz (1850-1917) belonged to the first generation of psychologists who regarded this discipline as a scientific, positive endeavor. At the same time, he was a representative of psychic sciences, following a strictly positivist attitude to researching psychic phenomena. This article discusses the key event of his career, experiments with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino, in Warsaw, between late 1893 and early 1894. Ochorowicz's séances with Palladino attracted wide local and international attention and improved his standing as an internationally leading psychic researcher. In Warsaw, however, these experiments were fiercely controversial and, as a result, Ochorowicz was discredited and left the city. As I argue, this dissociation of credibilities was the outcome of a changing media landscape in the late nineteenth century. While Ochorowicz's strategy of boundary-work and asserting his credibility aimed at scholarly media, it proved fatal when facing intensive, daily coverage in the popular press.

Das Onlinemagazin Geschichte der Gegenwart

In a rapidly changing media landscape and with the growing importance of social media in the realm of shaping political opinion, the humanities are faced with the challenge of developing new, innovative approaches to public debates. . An example of such innovation is the online magazine Geschichte der Gegenwart, which publishes a longread twice a week. According to its concept, all articles published are supposed to depart from questions and problems of present concern. The magazine is interdisciplinary and combines historical and cultural analytical perspectives.

The temporal nexus of collective memory mediation: print and digital media in Brazil’s Landless Movement 1984-2019

ABSTRACT Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST’s internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984–2014), and its Facebook page (2014–2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil’s landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

Jody C Baumgartner and Amy B Becker (eds), Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape

Jody C Baumgartner and Amy B Becker (eds), <i>Political Humor in a Changing Media Landscape</i>

Local associative media in Tunisia and the value of voice

ABSTRACT Since 2011, tens of new small-scale associative media organisations have sprung up in different towns and regions of Tunisia. Their proliferation has allowed for new voices to emerge both on a local and a national (collective) level. They have also come to represent a coherent third sector in the Tunisian media sphere alongside public and private media. This paper aims to investigate how these new actors position themselves within Tunisia’s changing media landscape. What roles do they espouse for themselves, and what practices and values structure their work? By using Nick Couldry’s notion of voice (2010), as both a value and a concrete process, we analyse how these roles and practices are performed in the Tunisian context. Firstly, by mapping the openings and closures in the Tunisian system that are straddled and negotiated by these actors, namely: regulatory reform, changes in the structure of the media and regional inequalities. Secondly, by analysing their practices and strategies, including their limitations, at both a national and local level. We argue that associative media’s collective work at the national level, through sectoral-representative associations, aims at stabilising and entrenching this emerging sector by lobbying and pressuring state organs, organising collective responses to its structural weaknesses, and creating ad-hoc networks of solidarity and mobilisation with other civil society actors. While at a local level, associative media actors attempt to grapple more directly with the challenges of recognising, facilitating, and extending marginalised voices from their communities.

Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of COVID-19: An Investigation into the Use of Preprints by Digital Media Outlets

ABSTRACT In this article, we investigate the surge in use of COVID-19-related preprints by media outlets. Journalists are a main source of reliable public health information during crises and, until recently, journalists have been reluctant to cover preprints because of the associated scientific uncertainty. Yet, uploads of COVID-19 preprints and their uptake by online media have outstripped that of preprints about any other topic. Using an innovative approach combining altmetrics methods with content analysis, we identified a diversity of outlets covering COVID-19-related preprints during the early months of the pandemic, including specialist medical news outlets, traditional news media outlets, and aggregators. We found a ubiquity of hyperlinks as citations and a multiplicity of framing devices for highlighting the scientific uncertainty associated with COVID-19 preprints. These devices were rarely used consistently (e.g., mentioning that the study was a preprint, unreviewed, preliminary, and/or in need of verification). About half of the stories we analyzed contained framing devices emphasizing uncertainty. Outlets in our sample were much less likely to identify the research they mentioned as preprint research, compared to identifying it as simply “research.” This work has significant implications for public health communication within the changing media landscape. While current best practices in public health risk communication promote identifying and promoting trustworthy sources of information, the uptake of preprint research by online media presents new challenges. At the same time, it provides new opportunities for fostering greater awareness of the scientific uncertainty associated with health research findings.

Fotografia i film w praktyce artystycznej oraz propozycjach teoretycznych Davida Hockneya

In his diverse works, David Hockney has used, and still uses, various media, which in some periods of his activity gained leading significance, while in the following they were abandoned or temporarily abandoned. But no matter what medium in the given period was the main form of creativity, the focus of his interest has always been the issue of image and imaging. The article is devoted to the practice and theoretical recognition of photography, which was a kind of introduction to experiments with a moving image. The author refers to the artist's numerous publications on the theory and history of image and imaging (including Secret Knowledge, History of Images, On Photography). Photography led to Hockney's audiovisual realizations. This is a kind of repetition of the natural evolution and developmental progression of the media, also, and perhaps above all, in the technological dimension. The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author presents Hockney as a practitioner and theoretician, in whose activities both these activities are closely intertwined. This is a sign of the times: practice and theory are equally important, awareness of the medium, or artistic and aesthetic self-awareness of artists, is an expression of the spirit of the era in which an intuitive approach to art today seems inefficient, not to say impossible. Hockney appears to be an exemplary artist, who is extremely conceptual in his artistic practice as a consequence of his research on the history of art and a constantly developed set of his own theoretical findings. He is an artist discursively commenting not only on his work as an artist in many media (painting, drawing, graphics, set design, photography, film, computer graphics), but also an art and media theoretician reflecting on the fate of images in a changing media landscape. The second part of the article is devoted to the reconstruction of Hockney's theoretical reflections on photography and the analysis of his photographic projects. First of all, experimental Polaroid compositions created in the early eighties, named by the artist joiners, as well as photographic collages and photographic images realized in the later periods of the British artist's work. The third part considers digital movies, as Hockney calls them, audiovisual realizations referring to both his previous photographic works and experimental video films in which multi-camera systems are used.&#x0D;

Take your partners: Media, government and public participation in the 1930s campaigns against censorship in Australia

Censorship has had a long tradition in Australia, affecting books, films, theatre and artworks. In the 1930s, opposition to it began to be organized: this was initially a reaction to the banning of imported print material on the grounds of ‘indecency’ or sedition, but it was followed by protests against the political interference of radio broadcasts. These campaigns for freedom of expression on the air and in print invoked similar principles, as well as sharing leadership and tactics; while newspapers alerted the public to the issue of censorship, such commentary was also deployed to influence perceptions of the changing media landscape brought about by the development of public broadcasting. This article argues that 1930s activism over censorship prepared the ground for the expectation of impartial news reporting by the public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission. It also demonstrates the advantage of considering diverse forms of media in tandem and sheds additional light on the role of the public in pursuit of the right of Australian citizens to hear opinion free from government interference and proprietorial diktat.

The association of adolescents’ television viewing with Body Mass Index percentile, food addiction, and addictive phone use

Television (TV) viewing remain a popular forms of screen time for adolescents. Greater TV viewing is associated with a number of negative consequences for adolescent health. In a changing media landscape, it is important to understand adolescents’ overall and commercial TV exposure, and how TV viewing is linked to health risks (e.g., obesity, food addiction, and phone addiction). The purpose of this study was to: 1) examine differences by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and parental education in overall TV and commercial TV viewing and 2) investigate whether adolescents who watch more overall TV and commercial TV programming were more likely to have a higher BMI percentile, more addictive eating, and more addictive phone use. A sample of 190 adolescents (13–16 years of age) completed Time-Use Diaries (TUDs) in 2015–2017. We found that girls had more overall weekday TV time than males. No other gender differences were detected for weekend TV time or commercial TV time. Higher BMI percentile was not correlated with greater overall or commercial TV viewing. However, we did identify a positive association between overall TV viewing and commercial TV viewing with addictive-eating and addictive phone use. This effect was mainly driven by boys. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate patterns of television viewing and addictive-like eating and addictive phone use. We conclude that adolescents, particularly boys, with higher TV viewing may be more likely to present with problems with addictive eating behavior and phone use. Our findings add to the research on the behavioral health correlates of TV viewing among adolescents.

Ravindra Kumar Vemula and SubbaRao M. Gavaravarapu (editors), Health Communication in the Changing Media Landscape: perspectives from developing countries. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (hb £99.99 – 978 3 319 33538 4; pb £69.99 – 978 3 319 81540 4). 2016, 238 pp.

Ravindra Kumar Vemula and SubbaRao M. Gavaravarapu (editors), Health Communication in the Changing Media Landscape: perspectives from developing countries. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (hb £99.99 – 978 3 319 33538 4; pb £69.99 – 978 3 319 81540 4). 2016, 238 pp. - Volume 90 Issue 4

Journalism from Above: Drones and the Media in Critical Perspective

In the last decade, the development of small, remotely operated multicopters with cameras, so-called drones, has made aerial photography easily available. Consumers and institutions now use drones in a variety of ways, both for personal entertainment and professionally. The application of drones in media production and journalism is of particular interest, as it provides insight into the complex interplay between technology, the economic and legal constraints of the media market, professional cultures and audience preferences. The thematic issue &lt;em&gt;Journalism from Above: Drones, the Media, and the Transformation of Journalistic Practice&lt;/em&gt; presents new research concerning the role of drones in journalism and media production. The issue brings together scholars representing a variety of approaches and perspectives. A broad selection of empirical cases from Finland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US form the basis of an exploration of the changing relations between the media, technology and society. The articles address topics such as: Adaption of drone technology in the newsrooms; audience preferences and reactions in a changing media landscape; the relation between journalists and public authorities who use drones; and attitudes from journalistic practitioners as well as historical and future perspectives.

“We’re Continually Comparing Ourselves to Something”: Navigating Body Image, Media, and Social Media Ideals at the Nexus of Appearance, Health, and Wellness

In modern Western society, women commonly encounter media that conflates appearance and health. However, this phenomenon is seldom explored qualitatively from the perspective of the women who encounter and internalize these messages. The present study describes how a group of women perceive appearance, health, and wellness ideals promoted through media and social media as well as how they attempted to challenge and negotiate these. Qualitative data were collected from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 women (aged 22–72 years) who embraced a holistic health perspective in Perth, Western Australia. Thematic analysis of the data revealed multiple overarching themes, including the women’s recognition of unrealistic ideals in the media, the potential for harmful social comparisons, their desire to achieve the appearance of health and wellness, and the use of various strategies to modify their exposure to such media and uphold a positive body image. Some participants were challenged by media claiming a more “holistic” orientation in which ideals of appearance, health, and wellness are closely intertwined. The findings from our research provide timely guidance on mechanisms to promote positive body image amidst a rapidly changing media landscape, including the use of critical media literacy and social media literacy interventions. Such interventions should encourage critical appraisal of appearance ideals that are promoted under the guise of health and wellness.