High-quality News Research Articles

“A Hard Road With Personal Costs”: How Digital-First Nonprofit News Founders Navigate Precarity

As the journalism industry descends further into economic collapse, precarity has become an increasingly useful concept in studies of newswork. While a growing body of literature has begun to consider how founders of startup journalism outlets navigate their own precarious self-employment, the existing scholarship pays little attention to journalists working at digital-first nonprofit newsrooms. This study draws on a political economic framework and in-depth interviews with founders of nonprofit news organizations in the United States to understand how these newsworkers experience and navigate various forms of precarity. Findings from this research confirm that precarity is ubiquitous among nonprofit news founders, and that financial precarity is particularly acute. Founders rely heavily on their personal and professional communities for support in navigating their precarious working conditions, and find great satisfaction in providing high-quality news and information to their communities. This study adds to growing calls for a labor turn in journalism studies and contributes to the literature on journalistic precarity by extending the concept to examine nonprofit newsrooms and their founders. Additionally, these findings provide insight into specific ways in which the burden of precarity on founders can be reduced.

Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook

Despite the concern over deteriorating news quality on social media, few studies have empirically examined how much high-quality news is rewarded on social media. Guided by the mediatization literature, we compared the extent to which normative values (i.e. factual reporting and public importance) in news stories as opposed to social media values (i.e. popularity) contribute to actual engagement such as sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook. The normative values and social media values were drawn from survey participants’ evaluations of the news content, recruiting both consumers ( n = 5816) and journalists ( n = 742). Each news post’s engagement metrics were extracted from Facebook. Our analysis shows that consumers’ news judgments are overall consistent with those of journalists. More importantly, the study finds that a social media value dominates news engagement whereas normative values are eminently weak. We discuss the implications of the disproportionally powerful social media logic shaping news engagement in comparison to normative logics for news.

Can AI Models Summarize Your Diary Entries? Investigating Utility of Abstractive Summarization for Autobiographical Text

Journaling is a widely adopted technique, known to improve mental health and well-being by enabling reflection on past events. Large amounts of text in digital journaling applications could hinder the reflection process due to information overload. ive summarization can solve this problem by generating short summaries to quickly glance at and reminisce. In this paper, we present an investigation of the utility of large language models in the context of autobiographical text summarization. We study two approaches to adapt a self-supervised learning (SSL) model to the domain of autobiographical text. One model employs transfer learning using our new autobiographical text summary dataset to fine-tune the SSL model. The second model leverages existing news datasets for high-quality text summarization mixed with our autobiographical summary dataset. We conducted mixed methods research to analyze the performance of these two models. Through objective evaluation using ROUGE and BART scores, we find that both these approaches perform significantly better than the SSL model fine-tuned with only high-quality news datasets, showing the importance of domain adaptation and autobiographical text summary dataset for this task. Secondly, through a subjective evaluation on a crowd-sourcing platform, we evaluated the summaries generated from these models on various quality criteria such as grammar, non-redundancy, structure, and coherence. We found that on all criteria, these summaries score >4 out of 5, and the two models show comparable results. We deployed a proof-of-concept web-based journaling application to assess the practical real-world implications of incorporating abstractive summarization in a digital journaling context. We found that the participants showed a high consensus that the summaries generated by the system captured the main idea of their journal entry (80% of the 75 participants gave a Likert scale rating of out of 7.0, with the overall mean rating of 5.56 ± 1.32) while being factually correct, and they found it to be a useful feature of a journaling application. Finally, we conducted human evaluation studies to compare the quality of the summaries generated from a commercial tool ChatGPT and mixed distribution fine-tuned SSL model, and present insights into these systems in the context of autobiographical abstractive text summarization. We have made our model, dataset, and subjective evaluation questionnaire openly available to the research community.

News Aggregation using Web Scraping News Portals

In today's fast-paced world, staying informed through reliable and high-quality news is important. However, with an overwhelming number of online publishers and platforms, accessing information from multiple sources can be time-consuming and challenging. To simplify this process, news aggregators have emerged as a solution. These platforms allow users to customize their news consumption by selecting preferred websites and receiving curated articles from those sources in one centralized location. This saves valuable time and effort but also streamlines information gathering in our daily routines. To develop an influential online news aggregator, web scraping for data structuring is crucial. Web scraping involves analyzing a website's HTML structure to extract the desired data. By understanding the underlying structure of web pages, developers can fetch relevant information such as article titles, summaries, authors, and publication dates. People often struggle to find valuable news sources amid the vast sea of information available online. News aggregators address this issue by providing personalized news feeds based on individual interests. Users serve as valuable resources for knowledge tailored to specific preferences. While news aggregators are widely recognized for their popularity and utility, there is still room for improvement in their role in software development. Enhancements could include refining algorithms for more accurate content curation. In addition, Users could include implementing better user interfaces for enhanced user experiences and exploring innovative features like sentiment analysis and topic clustering. By continually iterating and improving upon existing news aggregator platforms, developers can ensure users have access to timely, relevant, and trustworthy news conveniently and efficiently.

A Study of the Value of Network Media in Covering the COVID-19 Epidemic

The relevance of the article lies in the study of the value aspect of the functioning of online media, which played an important role in overcoming the COVID-19 epidemic. The object of the study is the network media Weibo, TikTok and the network platform “Gosuslugi. Let’s decide together.” Scientifi c novelty is manifested in the analysis of the little-studied problem of the value of network media as sources of information in overcoming the real diffi culty of communication in an epidemic. The value of online media is expressed in educating the audience and jointly overcoming the consequences of the pandemic. The following methods were used: mass media monitoring, comparative analysis method, study of documents. A comparative analysis of the functioning of traditional and online media led to the conclusion that during the study period (from December 31, 2019 to July 15, 2020), traditional media did not pay due attention to organizing feedback from the audience, studying its opinion, as well as its emotional state. Traditional media have focused exclusively on factual messages, unlike online media, which are interested in: 1) engaging the audience in the exchange of information; 2) articulating its information needs and 3) expressing its emotions about the pandemic. A critical analysis of the literature has shown that the value of online media increases signifi cantly in emergency situations, such as an epidemic, since these information platforms are able to overcome time and space barriers in real time, distributing high-quality news and realizing the vital interests of the audience. The study of documents and reports of international health organizations confi rmed this thesis: the activities of the media lead to changes in public opinion and behavior and can affect the general psychological state of society. In the article, the value of network media is considered in three aspects: 1) social value is expressed in bringing the voices of ordinary people to everyone’s attention, satisfying their need to express emotions; 2) the value of communication ‒ in removing restrictions in intersocial and internatio nal dialogue and information exchange; 3) the value of propaganda lies in uniting peoples and promoting social cooperation in overcoming global dangers. In the future, it seems necessary to study the value of network media in the scientifi c discourse in the dissemination of information and organization of communication in emergency situations.

News for life: improving the quality of journalistic news reporting to prevent suicides

AbstractDespite much theorizing on the quality of journalism, there is limited actual empirical evidence for the effects of improved news quality on societal outcomes. This study provides such evidence for suicide reporting. News quality especially matters in this domain, as low-quality reporting can elicit “copycat” suicides (Werther effect). We developed and disseminated a web-based campaign promoting high-quality suicide reporting, targeting newsrooms in Germany. Twenty-two newsrooms participated. A content analysis (N = 4,015 articles) provided supporting evidence for an increase in high-quality reporting (Study 1). Interrupted time series analyses offered tentative evidence for a reduction in actual suicides (Study 2). Acknowledging limitations in terms of causal interpretations, the findings support the claim that high-quality news can save lives. Similar newsroom interventions run elsewhere may contribute to preventing suicides globally. We discuss the implications, including those of a theoretically meaningful discovery related to the suicide-protective effect’s underlying mechanism, termed the dampening-the-spikes hypothesis.

Business Models of Local and Hyperlocal Media During Local Mass Media Reforms in Ukraine

The research relies on the world trends in the development of local and hyperlocal media and their business models to analyse the experience of Ukrainian local mass media in their search for sustainable funding. The financial sustainability of local and hyperlocal media projects is the key to expanding citizens’ access to high-quality news and information. The choice of a business model determines the media’s financial sustainability and efficiency, its philosophy, content and ways of content delivery. Crowdfunding and its types (membership model, club model, gift-crowdfunding) is considered one of the most effective business models for hyperlocal media. These models presuppose engaging audiences (communities) in media financing. The research into the key services, resources, information processes and flows, expenditure structure and revenue sources reveal that an effective business model for Ukrainian media aims to combine business values with consumers’ values and needs. The combination of these factors ensures sustainable development and independence of the editorial policy.

SI-News: Integrating social information for news recommendation with attention-based graph convolutional network

High-quality news recommendation heavily relies on accurate and timely representations of news documents and user interests. Social information, which usually contains the most recent information about the activities of users and their friends, naturally reflects the dynamics and diversities of user interests. However, existing news recommendation approaches often overlook these dynamic items, and thus lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by embedding users’ interests from their social information by attentional graph convolutional network (GCN). We also improve news representations by jointly optimizing the titles and contents of news via attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our approach effectively improves news recommendation performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines. We also evaluate our model on a real-world dataset and the results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed techniques in industry-level applications.

News Communication Value Evaluation Algorithm Based on Deep Neural Network

The evaluation of the value of news communication is an area that deserves more attention, but there has been a dearth of specific research in this area. We must first determine the positioning of the news dissemination activity in order to study the mechanism for evaluating the effect of news dissemination. Fundamentally, assessing the impact of news dissemination is a dialectical balance of accuracy and effectiveness. I can conduct research from the three dimensions of policy orientation, communication orientation, and audience orientation and scientifically evaluate the effect of news communication on a qualitative and quantitative basis, based on the main body of the publisher. With only a small amount of labelled data, a high-quality news propagation value evaluation can be achieved. The value is rationally searched in the era of algorithm recommendation. The traditional “personalised recommendation algorithm” caters to the audience’s interests in one direction, with the goal of gaining their attention and commercial success. The “personalised recommendation algorithm” primarily uses statistical methods in the processing of news information, such as user’s basic information and behaviour information, and does not investigate the attributes and functions of news facts or the quality of news information itself. The research proposed in this paper suggests attempting to design an algorithm based on “news value.” First, it is based on the premise of a rational and caring “public person” who is concerned about the public interest, as well as professional journalistic news selection criteria. “News value” is a theoretical foundation for algorithm design that considers not only the publicity of news but also the audience’s interests. More importantly, this type of algorithm is designed to judge the quality and value of information based on how well the information is understood and then make a decision, returning to the essence of news facts and information.

Communication, Cohesion, and Corona: The Impact of People’s Use of Different Information Sources on their Sense of Societal Cohesion in Times of Crises

ABSTRACT Solidarity among society is considered crucial to tackle the corona pandemic. With the crisis evoking a high need for orientation, the information people obtain from different sources may shape whether they feel a strong sense of cohesion in the pandemic. To test this assumption, an online two-wave panel survey among a quota sample representing the German population aged 18+ was conducted in March and April 2020. Applying a path model, we show that using high-quality news media for information on the corona crisis (e.g., public broadcasting services) nourished people’s sense of cohesion, while using alternative and hyperpartisan news sites had a detrimental effect. Relying on information from low-quality news media (e.g., tabloids) did not affect people’s sense of cohesion, while talking to private contacts had a limited positive effect. Perceiving the public discourse as constructive vs. dramatized mediated the effects. These insights illustrate how the news media and other information sources in high-choice media environments contribute to a solid vs. polarized community in disruptive times of a crisis.

Fact-Enhanced Synthetic News Generation

The advanced text generation methods have witnessed great success in text summarization, language translation, and synthetic news generation. However, these techniques can be abused to generate disinformation and fake news. To better understand the potential threats of synthetic news, we develop a novel generation method FACTGEN to generate high-quality news content. The majority of existing text generation methods either afford limited supplementary information or lose consistency between the input and output which makes the synthetic news less trustworthy. To address these issues, FACTGEN retrieves external facts to enrich the output and reconstructs the input claim from the generated content to improve the consistency among the input and the output. Experiment results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the generated news contents of FACTGEN are consistent and contain rich facts. We also discuss an effective defending technique to identify these synthetic news pieces if FACTGEN was used to generate fake news.

Defining and Measuring News Media Quality: Comparing the Content Perspective and the Audience Perspective

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal ( N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys ( N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems.

Can public service broadcasting survive Silicon Valley? Synthesizing leadership perspectives at the BBC, PBS, NPR, CPB and local U.S. stations

Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) is generally characterized by a remit to provide high-quality news, educational content, cultural enrichment and entertainment as free public goods with as broad a public reach as possible while also filling critical gaps in the media ecosystem (a multifaceted principle called universality). However, in the current online environment, the ability to reach audiences is increasingly intermediated by online platforms managed by powerful technology companies who do not necessarily share the same objectives or values as PSBs. Interviews were conducted with PSB executives and managers working on digital products and strategy in the U.K. and U.S. to examine the challenges and tensions PSB entities face in the context of growing commercial platform power and the strategies emerging in response, such as investing in new platforms and digital infrastructures rooted in traditional public service values. The study also discusses differences in capacities to respond to platform power between the decentralized U.S. PSB system and centralized U.K. system. Finally, the study discusses some theoretical and practical implications, and suggests some ways PSB services might survive and thrive with robust fidelity to democratic needs.

Scilens news platform

We demonstrate the SciLens News Platform, a novel system for evaluating the quality of news articles. The SciLens News Platform automatically collects contextual information about news articles in real-time and provides quality indicators about their validity and trustworthiness. These quality indicators derive from i) social media discussions regarding news articles, showcasing the reach and stance towards these articles, and ii) their content and their referenced sources, showcasing the journalistic foundations of these articles. Furthermore, the platform enables domain-experts to review articles and rate the quality of news sources. This augmented view of news articles, which combines automatically extracted indicators and domain-expert reviews, has provably helped the platform users to have a better consensus about the quality of the underlying articles. The platform is built in a distributed and robust fashion and runs operationally handling daily thousands of news articles. We evaluate the SciLens News Platform on the emerging topic of COVID-19 where we highlight the discrepancies between low and high-quality news outlets based on three axes, namely their newsroom activity, evidence seeking and social engagement. A live demonstration of the platform can be found here: http://scilens.epfl.ch.

State Aid for Independent News Journalism in the Public Interest? A Critical Debate of Government Funding Models and Principles, the Market Failure Paradigm, and Policy Efficacy

This study critically reviews scholarly debates on state aid for independent, professional news journalism in the public interest, its funding models and principles, the market failure paradigm, and policy efficacy. State aid is handed out by government agencies which believe that their support can help independent, professional journalism thrive in the digital, mobile, and platform-dominated future. Government support mainly comes as direct financial grants or indirect tax offsets. It aims at engendering economic opportunity and prosperity, while safeguarding journalistic independence and quality of output. Ideally, this shall foster the production, distribution and consumption of original and high-quality news in the public interest, which, in turn, shall keep people informed, facilitate public debate, and hold power to account. Still, this study finds arguments that government funding models for independent journalism in the public interest are limited by several critical challenges that endanger their principles, do not avert failure in the news media market and prevent effective policy governance. These deficits may even be exacerbated in the digital era.

The Role of Social Media in Providing Crisis Information in China: A Critical Evaluation of the Tianjin Fire Incident

AbstractThis paper focusses on the information asymmetry in crisis news after a serious incident in Tianjin, China, in 2015. The incident caused enormous damage and resulted in societal unrest because of the lack of reliable information from the formal media channels. Social media — micro blogs — played a major role in reporting on crisis situations. We divided netizens (i.e., the citizens of the net) into high and low types according to their information-critical level to the crisis news. The data shows information deterioration on the crisis news, related to the netizens’ information-critical level. For the traditional media there is the opportunity to use information quality distortion to make more marginal profits. This is possible only if the citizens’ information stays under a certain quality level. The result is overprovision of low quality news and high quality news driven out of the market, whereupon adverse selection (i.e., a lack of symmetric information) appears. However, by adopting a process view, we found self-correcting mechanism (i.e., dying out of rumors) of the social media communities in China. We provided a agent-base model and simulation to show that the more media exist in the market, the faster speed of the information deterioration, but also the capacity to ‘discuss’ rumors.

Broadcast meteorology and the supply of weather forecasts: an exploration

Advertising imperfectly translates viewer preferences into demand for programming, and evaluating the quality of news products is difficult for consumers. Consequently the ability of market forces to supply high quality news is a subject of continuing debate. This paper offers new evidence on the supply of news by examining the investments by television stations in weather coverage. Weather forecasts meet the classic economic definition of a public good, yet television stations across the U.S. undertake extensive efforts to provide viewers with weather forecasts. Stations in markets with a higher incidence of severe weather, particularly a higher tornado rate, make significantly greater investments in their own Doppler weather radars and weathercasters certified by the American Meteorological Society. Since television weather can help save lives during severe weather, the supply of TV weather coverage is at least approximately efficient.

Is the Internet Bad News? The Online News Era and the Market for High-Quality News

We review and model the impact of the internet on the production and uptake of high-quality news. Our review of trends in the market for news suggests three stylized facts: i) particular quality news markets are dominated by merely a few providers, ii) demand for quality news appears stable, but provision of news has become specialized; mainstream news is decoupled from quality news, and iii) the dominant business model of internet news mirrors that of radio, television, and newspapers in that costs of news production are recouped via advertising. We build a stylized model that rationalizes these facts. Our model captures three conflicting effects: (1) economies of scale in the production of news lead to monopolies on particular markets, (2) easy access to information on the internet makes it cheaper to provide high-quality news and to disseminate it via the web, which increases the production of such news; and (3) the existence of bloggers and news aggregators who recycle the stories of news-providers reduces the effective property rights of high-quality news producers, thus forcing the business model of the internet to be advertising-based. For the most likely cases, our model would imply that the internet does not constitute bad news for the provision and uptake of quality news.

Reading the Tea Leaves—Did Citigroup Risk Their Reputation During 2004–2005? Presented at ICAA's Second International Conference Globalization – The Good Corporation June 26–28, 2007 Baruch College, New York City

In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom that high-quality news reports of questionable corporate business practices will stimulate various marketplace negative responses, which in turn, will pressure management to undertake actions designed to protect the organization's reputation. Analysis is confined to a relatively brief period of bad news relating to Citigroup, Inc. We conclude that while none of the expected negative marketplace responses are evident in widely available news sources, the CEO did exhibit significant concern and instituted a targeted reputation risk management program. In the absence of a concerned CEO, analysts should not, we suggest, expect a management team to respond with reputation-enhancing corrective action solely as a reaction to negative publicity regarding questionable business practices.

Message from the Publisher

The Board of Directors has voted unanimously that the Bulletin will be distributed in an electronic-only format later this year. This will not eliminate the substantive association-related communication from ASIS&T that members receive. Instead it will offer members the same high quality news and articles in a format that offers greater flexibility for delivering increased content and more in-depth coverage. The Board has been considering this action for several years, and the decision was neither precipitous nor lightly made. It was necessary because the Bulletin has a net cost of around $60,000 per year. While that amount is not now critical, it is a significant level of expenditure that requires careful stewardship by the Board. In Board planning activities, it was seen as financially inevitable that the Bulletin would have to eventually become electronic-only. As our members are well aware, the information environment is rapidly changing. A format change for the Bulletin reflects the Society's willingness to embrace this change. No advantage was seen in delaying the decision. We have every intention of maintaining the Bulletin's current editorial and production quality. In fact, it is expected that some of the possible savings will be consumed by additional editorial and production expenses as articles become longer and/or more numerous. We have every expectation that current editorial content and production quality will remain. This change has substantive benefits for members. The e-only format can enable expanded coverage of subject matter by removing the hard page limit, can allow more, and more in-depth articles, and offers the potential for the addition of supporting material as well as links and expanded or enhanced graphics and illustrations. This new format also offers new ways to interact with readers. For example, if appropriate and desired/requested by readers, we could include blogs so that discussion can take place around the articles with the authors. Every Bulletin editor has bemoaned the lack of Letters to the Editor. The e-only format can facilitate reader input if the readers and authors so desire. We envision creating a new e-mail list that will be strictly controlled for ASIS&T announcements only (e.g., meeting and publication announcements). You will be notified when new content to the Bulletin has been added. Such a list necessitates that we have a working e-mail address for all, but we will be working to achieve that anyway to facilitate electronic voting in ASIS&T elections as was approved in the latest bylaws amendment. Please feel free to write to me at rhill@asis.org with your comments, concerns and suggestions. We hope that you agree that creating an electronic-only Bulletin will take a high quality ASIS&T tradition into the new environment. It is a sound business decision as well as a move that fits with the mission of our organization.