Journalism Communication Research Articles

Understanding Audience Behavior with Digital Traces: Past, Present, and Future

In recent decades, significant transformations in audience characteristics and the media environment have necessitated a reassessment of audience analysis. Communication scholars have increasingly recognized the value of utilizing digital traces as valuable resources to understand audience behaviors. This research presents a comprehensive review of 243 audience analyses that incorporate digital traces, covering the period from 2001 to 2022, as published in 19 prominent communication journals. Our analysis reveals a remarkable expansion in the variety of data sources and a diversification of research contexts within the field. The integration of digital traces has empowered researchers to enhance behavioral concepts and attain deeper insights into audience dynamics. By harnessing the temporal, semantic, and structural information embedded within digital traces, novel audience metrics have been developed. This review identifies noteworthy theoretical and methodological implications for future audience research, emphasizing the necessity to embrace the evolving landscape of digital media. Furthermore, it suggests avenues for further exploration and the refinement of existing methodologies. By capitalizing on the potential of digital traces, communication scholars can continue to advance our understanding of audience characteristics and behaviors in the ever-changing media ecosystem.

A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF SPORTS MARKETING RESEARCH IN COMMUNICATION

Purpose- Sports marketing is defined as "the activities of industrial marketers of goods and services who use sport as a promotional tool" (Argan & Katırcı, 2002, p. 23). Sports marketing plays a vital role in communication by utilizing the influence of sports to connect with global audiences (Ayhan et al., 2017; Fetchko et al., 2013). It enables brands to effectively engage fans, convey messages, and establish strong emotional bonds through the universal language of sports (Baena, 2018; Hunt et al., 1999). Over the past two decades, sports marketing has garnered significant attention from both communication researchers and practitioners (Filo et al., 2015), warranting a comprehensive review that explores the evolution and current state of sports marketing research in the communication discipline. This study aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the development and structure of sports marketing research in the communication. Methodology- In this reseaarch, we conducted a systematic literature review to achieve the study aim. We also used for a domain-focusedhybrid review, focusing on a field-discipline (sport marketing field & communication discipline) hybrid approach (Kraus et al., 2022), and employed bibliometric analysis as an analysis technique (Donthu et al., 2021). The dataset for this study consisted of 528 articles obtained from the Scopus database, encompassing journals within the communication field. Findings- The findings revealed that sports marketing research was published across 150 distinct communication journals from 1979 to 2023. Notably, Communication and Sport emerged as the most prolific journal, with 83 papers, and the USA stood as the leading country in terms of authorship, with 428 authors. Moreover, words such as "social media", "journalism", "content analysis", and “olympic games” are frequently used in the research Conclusion- This study is anticipated to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter by examining the scholarly progression of sports marketing research in the field of communication. Keywords: Sports research, sports marketing, sports communications, bibliometric review JEL Codes: M31, M30, M10

Editorial time management: Peer review dates and other key dates of Spanish Communication journals

AbstractThe main objective of this study was to identify editorial practices related to time management in Spanish Communication journals and determine whether their time management is homogeneous, as well as to evaluate which journals are more agile, discover the differences between general and special issues, and identify practices that could streamline the publication process. To this end, we worked with an exploratory‐type methodology focused on content analysis. The sample analysed included 1,581 articles published in 2021 by the 62 Communication journals included in the Índice Dialnet de Revistas (IDR) 2020, differentiating between those published in general and special issues, with the aim of focusing attention on the time elapsed from when journals receive articles until their final publication. The results reveal little homogeneity in policies regarding information on dates and confirms average times of more than 6 months for the duration of the process, with the publication process for special issues being more agile. The strength of this work lies in the demonstration of the need to work on common policies that enable the publication process to be streamlined while accelerating the availability of research results for the benefit of academia as well as society.

A corpus-based study of the discourse functions of English tense: the co-occurrence of tense and lexical aspect at various textual positions of news reports

This study analyses the discourse functions of tense in the New York Times Corpus under a three-dimensional framework – the three dimensions being tense, verb and textual position. The texts are divided into ten 10 percent sub-sections and the distribution of the tenses along textual positions, the distribution of verb categories along textual positions as well as the distribution of tense-verb construction along textual positions are calculated to examine the features of tense use in news reports. The association between tense and verb categories is calculated using WordSmith log-likelihood statistics. Quantitative distribution analysis of the tenses reveals their distribution patterns. The distribution of the present and the present perfect follows a multi-peaked curve while there is a steady increase of preterit from the beginning to the end. The association between tense and verb shows that different tenses have attractions for different verb categories. The present tense attracts state verbs, the past tense attracts achievement verbs, and the present perfect prefers achievement and activity verbs. Analysis of tense-verb constructions along textual positions reveals that tense-verb constructions have localised functions – within different textual positions, tense-verb constructions take on various features and focus on different functions. All these findings constitute the stylistic use of tenses in news reports and reveal modern news values in the journalistic community.

Posverdad y fake news en revistas científicas de comunicación de Iberoamérica

El artículo presenta un análisis de contenido con enfoque bibliométrico de la posverdad y las noticias falsas para determinar su presencia temática en las revistas científicas de comunicación de Iberoamérica. Se analizan los aportes teóricos, metodológicos y conceptuales de la posverdad y las noticias falsas con una muestra de N = 46 artículos publicados en 17 revistas, especializadas en comunicación (WoS, ESCI y Scopus) entre 2000 y 2019. El país con mayor publicación sobre posverdad y noticias falsas es España, el enfoque de investigación predominante es cuantitativo, estableciendo asociaciones semánticas con el ecosistema mediático, tecnológico e informacional y la desinformación.

Attacks Against Journalists in Brazil: Catalyzing Effects and Resilience During Jair Bolsonaro’s Government

Attacks on journalists have become a growing concern in democracies around the world. Past scholarship suggests that such attacks could lead to a chilling effect of journalists self-censoring their reporting. However, there is limited empirical work that substantiates the effects of attacks on journalists. To empirically test the existence of chilling effects, this mixed-methods study uses the conditions of journalism under Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil as an exploratory case study. We investigate how attacks ( N = 901) and propaganda messages ( N = 518,853) impacted news coverage ( N = 20,998) in the first two years of Bolsonaro’s government, based on time series analysis and in-depth interviews with journalists ( N = 18). Our results suggest that, despite the increase in government attacks, Brazilian journalists do not exhibit chilling effects; instead, they display what we call catalyzing effects. Our time series results showed that an increase in state propaganda leads to an increase in news coverage. Furthermore, our qualitative data affirms the concept of catalyzing effects. Findings from the interviews suggest that catalyzing effects operate as a form of resilience among journalists. Catalyzing effects do not necessarily manifest as more coverage, but as persistent coverage despite ongoing criticisms and threats (both social and physical). Our findings offer a path forward, highlighting the importance of bringing the discussion about violence and attacks against journalists back to the community of journalists experiencing this hostility. Network support, journalists said, has been crucial, which points to the need for a solidarity infrastructure that supports journalists’ constructive role in society.

Editorial

Before we introduce the articles collected in this issue, we want to reflect on practices and publication patterns of the last six years. We thereby take up ongoing debates in our field on gender diversity and inequalities in the representation of women in science (Wang et al., 2021). While female authors were strongly underrepresented in journal publications for several decades (Brosius & Haas, 2009), journals in communication and media research recently have seen a trend towards closing the gender gap, with some now showing an equal distribution of female and male authors (Beck, Domahidi, Eilders, Engelmann, & Pentzold, 2023, pp. 2, 5; Trepte & Loths, 2020). The Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SACM), and with it SComS, appreciates and supports the recently founded “Working Group Publication Diversity”, led by Sabine Trepte and Michael Scharkow (2023). We contribute to this discussion by reporting the distribution of male and female authorship in all SComS publications from 2017 to 2022, i. e., all available issues since SComS is published open access (Table 1).

Representations of Physician-Patient Communication in Chilean Health Journals

Clear patient-physician communication is considered a critical ability to improve diagnosis, treatment, and patient satisfaction. Nonetheless, this skill is not regularly addressed in Health Communication Journals, to consider it a relevant topic. The present article aims to explore to what extent health and communication-related topics are covered within Health journals indexed in the SciELO database. Furthermore, this research focuses on the patient-physician communication models recurrently reported in Scielo health articles. Results revealed a poor coverageofcommunicationasaresourcefultopicinHealth-relatedJournalsandthe prevalence of the interactional approach as the main model to address the patient-physician interaction.

Analysis of the Fundamentals of UINSU Communication Study Program Journalistic Training in Facing the Digital Age

The journalistic basis of communication is a concept that combines the basic principles of journalism with the elements of communication in the context of journalistic activity. This research aims to understand communication in playing a very important role in journalism. However, to produce a good writing must have the provision of journalistic knowledge. For this reason, training and mentoring writing in journalism communication is considered important to be carried out in order to produce quality speech. The main goals of communication journalism are to increase audience engagement, strengthen relationships between journalists and readers, and expand the reach and impact of news. In an increasingly complex and diverse information environment, communications journalism has become essential to ensure the news delivered can reach and be understood by a wide audience. This research uses qualitative research methods with a descriptive approach The research method used is a qualitative approach. Data collection techniques are carried out by observation, in-depth interviews by conducting interviews with journalists and direct observation of the work process in newspaper newsrooms, and documentation. The collected data was analyzed using content analysis and thematic analysis to identify communication strategies applied by journalists in the news process. From the results of the preparation of research concluded the basis of communication journalism, there are several important elements that need to be considered, namely important to understand the intended audience or reader. Journalists need to adopt appropriate communication strategies to effectively deliver news to them taking into account the preferences and needs of the audience Keywords: training, journalism, communication.

COVID-19 Research in Communication Journals: A Structural Topic Modeling-Assisted Bibliometric Analysis

ABSTRACT This article presents a bibliometric analysis of research on COVID-19 health communication. We reviewed and analyzed 1,851 articles published in 170 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2020 and November 2022, to identify key bibliometric information and major research topics in this rapidly expanding field of research. The distribution of countries indicates that the United States is the most productive country, and researchers from Spain, China and the United Kingdom also play an important role. Health Communication is the most influential journal in terms of research productivity and impact. The analysis of highly cited references demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of this research field. The topics generated by structural topic modeling show that scholars have responded to a variety of issues in COVID-19 communication, encompassing different levels of health communication, the effects of information dissemination, the impact on the general public as well as vulnerable populations, health preventive behaviors and communication technologies. This study aims to enhance researchers’ understanding of the current state of this research field and provide insights for future studies.

From Costly Signals and Competitive Niches to Reciprocity, Memes, and Memory Traces: Evolutionary Psychology and Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT This article gives an overview of the contributions in the special issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication on evolutionary psychology and strategic communication. Forward-looking, it argues that recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made it imperative for our discipline to come to grips with a biologized view of the human mind as an information-processing system that evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. Backward-looking, it tries to explain why evolutionary psychology, which offers such as perspective, has met with so much resistance in the social sciences.

Spanish research on Communication in WoS: thematic, methodological, and intellectual comparison between SSCI and ESCI

This study analyses the thematic and conceptual structure of the Spanish scientific production published in Emerging Sources Citation Index (Web of Science) journals. In this way, the aim is to identify the closest links between concepts and terms based on the co-occurrence of keywords used by the authors of the papers analysed, and also to point out the theoretical foundations that exist in the discipline through the co-citation relationships of articles in the bibliography of the documents in the sample. Finally, these results were compared with those obtained from the analysis of Spanish scientific production in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). To achieve these objectives, a network analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords and co-citation of references in articles published in Communication journals between 2015 and 2021 in ESCI (N = 3,559) and SSCI (N = 1,738) with at least one author linked to a Spanish institution was carried out. The results point to similar structural cohesion values and to a thematic and methodological similarity between both sets observed. There is a marked tendency towards quantitative studies on new technologies. While in SSCI there is an almost absolute dominance of Journalism studies, in ESCI there is a greater diversity of other disciplines such as Audiovisual Communication or Advertising. However, the intellectual structure of the production in SSCI reflects a more specialised character than in ESCI.

Care-based community communication, capacity, and agency during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the Complexo da Maré Favela, Brazil

Scholars and officials have argued that the strengthening of communities and community-led development constitute an important policy goal in the fight against emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, most strategies to address such crises fail to consider the significance of community-driven solutions, community-level knowledge, and actors. At the same time, researchers have recognized that communication, such as through local newspapers, promotes community development by increasing communities’ social capital and cohesion. But the role of community communication in the encouragement and exercise of other levels of agency and in the development of community capacity, including to address emergencies, remains underexplored. This article investigates whether and how community journalists in a Rio de Janeiro favela have expressed and sought to develop favela residents’ individual and collective agency during the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by analyzing thematically the COVID-19 virus-related articles that appeared in a community-based newspaper, Maré Online, between March and September 2020. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with Maré Online reporters to augment our analysis and supplemented that data with participant observation of relevant virtual community-led organizing meetings and events. Our study shows how community-based journalists revealed and promoted individual and collective agency through what we term a “care-based, participatory solutions journalism,” which supported favela residents’ “communicative freedom” as conceptualized by Benhabib (2013). This analysis stresses the connection between communicative freedom and community capacity. It illustrates the importance of community-produced communication in development of and in community, especially when those populations are pejoratively framed in the media, public policy, and often also, research.

Morality in social media: A scoping review

Social media platforms have been adopted rapidly into our current culture and affect nearly all areas of our everyday lives. Their prevalence has raised questions about the influence of new communication technologies on moral reasoning, judgments, and behaviors. The present scoping review identified 80 articles providing an overview of scholarly work conducted on morality in social media. Screening for research that explicitly addressed moral questions, the authors found that research in this area tends to be atheoretical, US-based, quantitative, cross-sectional survey research in business, psychology, and communication journals. Findings suggested a need for increased theoretical contributions. The authors identified new developments in research analysis, including text scraping and machine coding, which may contribute to theory development. In addition, diversity across disciplines allows for a broad picture in this research domain, but more interdisciplinarity might be needed to foster creative approaches to this study area.

How open is communication science? Open-science principles in the field

ABSTRACT Open-science principles, such as open data, shared materials, and pre-registration, are expected to encourage a culture of replication in scientific research. Yet, with its topical and methodological heterogeneity, communication science has been described to fall short of such principles. We analyze the extent to which open-science principles were used in publications from 20 leading communication journals between 2010 and 2020, and compare the results to benchmarks from psychology. Results show that open-science principles were little used in communication science with some variation across methods, but were more consistently used in psychology papers. There was no relationship with scientific impact. This suggests a need for greater attention to open-science principles in communication science, while considering their appropriateness for different study designs.

Name-based demographic inference and the unequal distribution of misrecognition.

Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize the race/ethnicity of authors, distributing erroneous ascriptions unevenly among other demographic traits. Because of the empirical and ethical consequences of these errors, scholars need to be cautious with the use of demographic imputation. We recommend five principles for the responsible use of name-based demographic inference.

Understanding Trends in Health Communication and Appropriate Design for Outstanding Research Outcome in Nigeria

This study evaluated the frequency of health communication issues published in Journal of Communication and Media Research (JCMR) as a percentage of the total publications, the dominant themes on health communication in the JCMR and the dominant research designs used in the studies on health communication in the JCMR. A qualitative research design was employed in this study with survey of literature in the JCMR. The study found that the average coverage of health communication by health communication scholars in JCMR. was the predominant thematic area of health communication covered by JCMR. It established that the theme of assessment and evaluation of health interventions and campaigns and the theme of Doctor-Patient Communication is the lowest area of attention. This can be justified by the fact that it is relatively a new area of health communication research in Nigeria. It was discovered that majority of researchers did not specify the research design employed in the various articles in JCMR while case study research was the dominant design that scholars used in JCMR.

When Pandemic Stories Become Personal Stories: Community Journalism and the Coverage of Health Inequalities

ABSTRACT Social media’s influence on journalistic norms and practices is a prominent theme in journalism studies. For small news organizations, there is not always a clear line between their public image and the online identities of their journalists. Focusing on such ambiguity, this article examines the integration of social media use and journalistic practice at The Local, an independent online news magazine based in Toronto, Canada, as well as its potential implications for community journalism. A qualitative thematic analysis of 300 tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, posted by the magazine’s official account and its two star journalists, revealed a unique journalistic approach that prioritized hyper-local, data-informed, and affective storytelling over the traditional norm of journalists as detached observers and information providers. This finding sheds light on how journalism practices at The Local and other comparable digital news startups may contribute to the revival of community journalism.

From the Self to the Community

Research Article| April 01 2023 From the Self to the Community: Experiences of a First-Generation Researcher in India Devina Sarwatay Devina Sarwatay Devina Sarwatay is senior research fellow (UGC-NET) and PhD candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, India. She researches young people and social media with Professor Usha Raman. She is also webinar series manager of the Media Education Lab, University of Rhode Island, USA, and research associate, FemLab and CDMC-MICA working on Digital Creativity and Global Kids Online-India. Her latest lead- and co-authored work is published in Information, Communication & Society (won the ICA CAM Best Published Article Award 2023), Media International Australia, Frontiers in Human Dynamics, Journal of Communication, as well as in Routledge and Wiley-Blackwell Handbooks. She regularly presents her work at conferences like ICA, IAMCR, and AoIR. You can reach her at Twitter: @DevinaSarwatay. email: devina.sarwatay@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar email: devina.sarwatay@gmail.com Journal of Autoethnography (2023) 4 (2): 298–304. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2023.4.2.298 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Devina Sarwatay; From the Self to the Community: Experiences of a First-Generation Researcher in India. Journal of Autoethnography 1 April 2023; 4 (2): 298–304. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2023.4.2.298 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search I believe I have been extremely fortunate in my research career so far: being at the right place at the right time and finding the right people to guide me into the right opportunities or helping me to create them. As far as I know, I am a first-generation researcher who happened to have the best time of my life during my master’s when I was introduced to research. My contributions in the first practical rural immersion research project and the final master’s dissertation were received well by expert examiners, giving me the confidence needed to go through the selection process for an MPhil. I imagined this second exclusively research-oriented master’s degree would act as a trial run before I signed up for a longer commitment of a PhD. In the meantime, I also cleared a competitive national examination1 that would fund my PhD. As I am writing this... You do not currently have access to this content.

Influence of Great Britain on Turkish Policy in the Transcaucasia and the Middle East

The study explores the Turkish-British partnership. The author verifies the thesis, which gained popularity after the beginning of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war in the Russian expert and journalistic community, that the United Kingdom had a significant impact on Türkiye’s foreign policy in order to destabilize the South Caucasus and oust Russia from the region. Some experts hypothesize that London is trying to implement the “Great Turan” project in the post-Soviet space through the hands of Ankara to the detriment of Russian interests. One of the main arguments that Türkiye’s foreign policy is managed from London is the appointment of former ambassador R. Moore, who has close contacts with Turkish President R.T. Erdogan, to the post of head of British Foreign Intelligence, MI6. To test this hypothesis, the author of the article analyzes the trade, financial, political relations between Great Britain and Türkiye, as well as the degree of similarity in their positions regarding the conflicts in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. The author comes to the conclusion that Great Britain and Türkiye are indeed close allies. This is confirmed by the fact that the British government lobbied Türkiye to join the EU, refrained from interfering in internal affairs, supported R.T. Erdogan during the coup attempt in 2016, and did not criticize Ankara’s pro-Azerbaijani position during the Karabakh conflict. At the same time, the lack of a high level of financial and economic interdependence, Türkiye’s desire to play an independent role in the Middle East and Transcaucasia bypassing NATO, Ankara’s close cooperation with London’s geopolitical adversary Moscow, as well as differences in approaches to the Syrian conflict allow the author to refute the thesis that that Türkiye acts as a “conduit for the interests of Great Britain.”