Legacy Media Research Articles

Engagement at the margins: Investigating how marginalized teens use digital media for political participation

This study investigates the information and participatory political practices of marginalized youth via four focus groups with 23 teens (aged 13–17 years) from two geographically distinct regions of the United States to address this limited understanding. The findings indicate that teens encounter political information and news from members of their social networks via digital media more than legacy media outlets, because it enables them to assert agency over social and political issues to which they feel connected. Furthermore, teens identify a tension between viewing adults, specifically teachers and politicians, as authoritative yet untrustworthy information sources, which can lead to their use of digital media to verify or challenge what adults are telling them. Finally, teens must navigate the sociotechnical challenges of digital media, including exposure to unwanted information and the potential social backlash of posting content that could be considered by others to represent slacktivism.

Media usage predicts intention to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 in the US and the UK

There is existing evidence of a relationship between media use and vaccine hesitancy. Four online questionnaires were completed by general population samples from the US and the UK in June 2020 (N = 1198, N = 3890, N = 1663, N = 2237). After controls, all four studies found a positive association between intention to be vaccinated and usage of broadcast and print media. The three studies which operationalised media usage in terms of frequency found no effect for social media. However, the study which operationalised media use in terms of informational reliance found a negative effect for social media.Youth, low household income, female gender, below degree-level of education, and membership of other than white ethnic groups were each also found to be associated with lower intentions to be vaccinated in at least two of the four studies. In all four studies, intention to be vaccinated was positively associated with having voted either for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential elections or for Labour Party candidates in the 2019 UK general election. Neither of the UK studies found an association with having voted for Conservative Party candidates, but both US studies found a negative association between intention to be vaccinated and having voted for Donald Trump.The consistent finding of greater intention to be vaccinated among users of legacy media but not among users of social media suggests that social media do not currently provide an adequate replacement for legacy media, at least in terms of public health communication. The finding of a negative association with social media in the study which measured informational reliance rather than frequency is consistent with the view that uncritical consumption of social media may be acting to promote vaccine hesitancy.

Media labs: Constructing journalism laboratories, innovating the future: How journalism is catalysing its future processes, products and people

Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. In this article, we offer insights into the multiple forms media labs can take, and how innovation in the media field is being organised through labs. As such, we focus on innovation processes and practices rather than innovative outcomes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with media labs around the globe, conducted between 2016 and 2018, this exploratory study explores the multifaceted nature of the media lab concept across academia, legacy media and independent structures. To help better understand the many different manifestations of the media lab construct encountered in our study, this article adopts a purposefully interdisciplinary approach spanning open innovation, institutional and social theories to illuminate and sense-make the global lab phenomena. First, we unpack the media lab construct by detailing the where, what and how of the media labs surveyed in this study. We then suggest that the many forms and functions of labs reveal a complex and nuanced picture of an innovation landscape. We trace this across the ways in which media labs perceive their own roles, and how they relate to wider networks and ecosystems that they engage with, specifically the extent of the openness of their activities. Ultimately, we suggest that media labs are in part shaped by mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphism: media labs are a replicated structure and signifier for innovation but do not exhibit absolute replication: they still retain local variation and mutation, which is influenced by localised factors or influences that are unique to them. They take myriad forms, are located across industry and academia, open, interdisciplinary and, for the main, focus on immediate innovation using user-centred innovation approaches.

Transforming media agency? Approaches to automation in Finnish legacy media

The algorithmic automation of media processes has produced machines that perform in roles that were previously occupied by human beings. Recent research has probed various theoretical approaches to the agency and ethical responsibility of machines and algorithms. However, there is no theoretical consensus concerning many key issues. Rather than setting out with fixed conceptions, this research calls for a closer look at the considerations and attitudes that motivate actual attributions of agency and responsibility. The empirical context of this study is legacy media where the introduction of automation, together with topical considerations of journalistic ethics and responsibility, has given rise to substantial reflection on received conceptions and practices. The results show a continuing resistance to attributions of agency and responsibility to machines. Three lines of thinking that motivate this stance are distinguished, and their potential shortcomings and theoretical implications are considered.

News consumption patterns in Iceland

Abstract News consumption has changed dramatically in the digital age, becoming increasingly complicated and fragmented. In this study, I analyse news consumption patterns in Iceland, drawing on data from a survey conducted in 2017, and compare it with news consumption in other Nordic countries. It is the first such study in Iceland in the digital age. The findings demonstrate that news are widely consumed by the general public, as in general in the Nordic region. Online sites are Icelanders’ most popular main source of news, followed by television and then social media. Legacy media are still most people's primary source of news, even if they are accessed on new platforms. Like in other Nordic countries, a small minority interacts with news online.

Hearing Is Believing

This essay explores music’s power to explicate, exaggerate, and even undermine moving images, examining first the marriage of sound and film through the invention of the Vitaphone and later illustrating the maturation of this marriage through an exegesis of Nicholas Britell’s score for the popular television show Succession. The Vitaphone debuted with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, a film that made Jolson a household name and further popularized the vaudeville tradition of blackface. It is no coincidence that the synchronization of sound and film—a major innovation that would change the way we think of both for decades to come—had such racist origins, as the history of American innovation is also the history of capitalist white supremacy. Succession concerns the Roys, a legacy media family whose scion, Kendall, considers himself an innovator. Through Britell’s instrumentals, which are written to reflect Kendall’s ups and downs, we come to understand the score not as a simple, uncritical accompaniment of Succession’s images (as the Vitaphone was for The Jazz Singer) but as an anticapitalist voice of its own, delivering criticisms of Kendall’s avarice and cultural appropriation while still evincing compassion for him as he plunges deeper into addiction. This essay maintains that sound in film, a technology with troubling origins, is now capable of asserting itself apart from that film and thus delivering a dialectical criticism of those very origins.

South-South humanitarianism: The case of Covid-organics in Tanzania.

Tanzania's President sent a plane to Madagascar in May 2020 to bring a shipment of Covid-Organics, a purported cure and prevention for COVID-19. The herbal remedy was described as a gift to help African countries in need. Drawing on preliminary data in English and Kiswahili from unstructured participant observation, social and legacy media available online and shared through contact channels, and ongoing conversations, we explore the Tanzanian policy response to COVID-19. What can the exemplary case of Covid-Organics in Tanzania help us to understand about South-South humanitarian assistance (SSHA) in times of crisis? We suggest that Covid-Organics has enabled the government to project a link to latent debates about Pan-Africanism and Julius Nyerere's legacy and Madagascar's SSHA has provided an opportunity for a public reflection on Africa's place in the world. For some, the remedy's 'Africanness' is its comparative advantage, even promising a continental renaissance. For others, the lack of scientific evidence or approval by global health authorities like WHO is delegitimizing. These findings suggest that receivers of SSHA make sense of it in both a broad, post-colonial discursive context and in a specific context of local contestation. If the promise of this particular form of aid is its ability to transcend deep divisions between North and South, the case of Covid-Organics suggests that SSHA draws on deep ideologies of Pan-Africanism; is increasingly important in crises that are global; and like other forms of humanitarianism, reflects elite politics and priorities rather than prioritizing the distribution of humanitarian goods and decreasing inequality.

Prospect Theory in Times of a Pandemic: The Effects of Gain versus Loss Framing on Risky Choices and Emotional Responses during the 2020 Coronavirus Outbreak – Evidence from the US and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, governments across the globe relied heavily on the legacy media, not only to inform citizens about fast-paced developments in the midst of a crisis, but also to stimulate compliance with strict interventions. Prospect theory postulates that gain versus loss framing may affect preferences for different interventions. In a conceptual replication of Tversky and Kahneman’s seminal prospect theory, findings from surveys in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1,121) demonstrate that gain frames of the coronavirus promote support for risk-aversive interventions, whereas loss frames result in relatively more support for risk-seeking alternatives. Loss frames elicit stronger negative emotions, such as frustration and powerlessness. The experience of powerlessness, in turn, mediates the effects of loss versus gain frames on support for stricter interventions. Together, these findings indicate that framing the pandemic in terms of gains may be most effective in promoting support for risk-aversive treatments of the pandemic.

Expanding Boundaries in Indigenous News: Guardian Australia, 2018–2020

ABSTRACT Guardian Australia has made a strong commitment to covering Indigenous affairs, offering an alternative approach to other mainstream Australian news media since its establishment in 2013. In this article, the concepts of boundary work and boundary-drawing power provide a framework for analysing how Guardian Australia negotiates, extends, and concedes its professional journalistic ground in ways that support more diversity in news-making in the space of Indigenous affairs. In doing so, the article looks beyond Guardian Australia’s award-winning journalism to its “everyday” coverage of Indigenous affairs. Through a content analysis of 1048 items published between March 2018 and February 2020, it identifies and discusses who contributes or produces the content, the types of content and the range of stories that are covered, and how Guardian Australia itself categorises these stories. Our analysis finds that Guardian Australia’s Indigenous affairs coverage presents more sustained and diverse reporting than previous studies of legacy media have found, and its content expands journalistic boundaries by embracing the affordances of digital networked media and the contributions of diverse First Nations writers.

Location-based services – the market: success factors and emerging trends from an exploratory approach

ABSTRACT By measuring the possibilities of enterprises linking location-based services (LBS) to regional and local content of interest, research found a tremendous lack of knowledge, how media enterprises – as well as content providers – in- and outside legacy media can use innovative LBS. One could presume that the absence of fulfiling market-information about current LBS proves to be a decisive factor causing a poor implementation of LBS in content-related services especially for media outlets. This contribution aims to fill this gap by providing an innovative, new kind of market exploration method for creating a general overview of current applications and, with that, the entire market for LBS, based on specific mentions of LBS in tech-related newsletters. The resulting category system (focusing on providers, areas of application, functions and technologies) enables the identification of success factors concerning which services are well established, and how this is linked to the type of application, technology, business models and other characteristics. The findings reveal the application of location analytics to enhance the user experience to be a particularly promising opportunity for current LBS implementation. With its completely new method, the study provides a much-needed new framework for further market explorations in this field.

A semiotic comparison of mass media representations of the swine flu and Covid-19 pandemics: Observing Narcissus Narcosis

This paper compares the coverage of the H1N1 and Covid-19 pandemics in ten prominent US daily newspapers. We selected articles that reference disease-specific keywords, published in the period between the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization and the first peak in laboratory- confirmed cases in the USA (20550 articles on Covid-19 and 1705 articles on H1N1). We analyzed the dataset via topic models and semantic networks, which, in a semiotic approach, are understood as iconic models. As the Covid-19 virus produced the first global pandemic in the age of social media, this comparative analysis illustrates how the news media changed the mediasphere in general. During the H1N1 pandemic (2009-2010), newly emerging social media were not mainstream, having a limited impact compared to 2020 at the outbreak of Covid-19. By 2020, social media have definingly changed the mediasphere. Given their affordance for the virulent transmission of media products, the rise of social media stirred the relativization of knowledge and mistrust towards traditional authority and legacy media. Paradoxically, this both democratizes public debate and opens opportunities for misinformation. In this context, the Covid-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a global infodemic, with adverse impact on global health. While the two pandemics are very different, comparing media representations in their early stages, when the viral spread was unpredictable, offers an insight into how the emergence of social media impacted traditional newspapers’ approach to events of global concern. The analysis reveals that ideological commitments are expressed through the same correlation of topics in both corpora but that, overall, the discourses have different structures. We argue that the remarkable stability of ideological discourses displays what McLuhan termed Narcissus narcosis, namely the numbness experienced socially during media changes.

Encyclopaedic journalism: legacy media as a credibility vector in the production of breaking news on Wikipedia

Encyclopaedic journalism: legacy media as a credibility vector in the production of breaking news on Wikipedia

Teaching Media Entrepreneurship: How a start-up simulation can increase students' knowledge and encourage them to work in entrepreneurial contexts

Entrepreneurship and start-up activities are seen as a key response to recent upheavals in the media industry: Newly founded ventures can act as important drivers for industry transformation and renewal, pioneering new products, business models, and organizational designs (e.g. Achtenhagen, 2017; Buschow & Laugemann, 2020). In principle, media students represent a crucial population of nascent entrepreneurs: individuals who will likely become founders of start-ups (Casero-Ripolles et al., 2016). However, their willingness to start a new business is generally considered to be rather low (Goyanes, 2015), and for journalism students, the idea of innovation tends to be conservative, following traditional norms and professional standards (Singer & Broersma, 2020). In a sample of Spanish journalism students, Lopez-Meri et al. (2020) found that one of the main barriers to entrepreneurial intentions is that students feel they lack knowledge and training in entrepreneurship. In the last 10 years, a wide variety of entrepreneurship education courses have been set up in media departments of colleges and universities worldwide. These programs have been designed to sensitize and prepare communications, media and journalism students to think and act entrepreneurially (e.g. Caplan et al., 2020; Ferrier, 2013; Ferrier & Mays, 2017; Hunter & Nel, 2011). Entrepreneurial competencies and practices not only play a crucial role for start-ups, but, in imes of digital transformation, are increasingly sought after by legacy media companies as well (Kung, 2015). At the Department of Journalism and Communication Research, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, Germany, we have been addressing these developments with the “Media Entrepreneurship” program. The course, established in 2013, aims to provide fundamental knowledge of entrepreneurship, as well as promoting students‘ entrepreneurial thinking and behavior. This article presents the pedagogical approach of the program and investigates learning outcomes. By outlining and evaluating the Media Entrepreneurship program, this article aims to promote good practices of entrepreneurship education in communications, media and journalism, and to reflect on the limitations of such programs.

Bounded or Boundless: A Case Study of Foreign Correspondents’ Use of Twitter During the 2019 Hong Kong Protests

This study advances the understanding of journalists’ social media practices by examining the Twitter feeds of foreign correspondents working for Western legacy media during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong. We found that these correspondents were more likely to use Twitter to report facts than to express their opinions and that they tended to interact with each other on Twitter far more frequently than with those outside their professional circle. Furthermore, the expression of personal opinions by the correspondents on Twitter appeared to encourage audience engagement. Finally, these personal opinions tended to be sympathetic to the protesters and critical of the handling of the protests by the authorities, especially the police. We argue that news media outlets have a moral obligation to free their journalists from constraints on the exercise of free speech on social media because doing so protects the freedom of the press on both the institutional and individual levels.

Algorithmic meta-capital: Bourdieusian analysis of social power through algorithms in media consumption

ABSTRACT Algorithms make highly consequential decisions and, thereby, exercise considerable power. In this study, I investigate how social power through algorithms is exercised in media consumption, particularly through curation algorithms. This conceptual paper then contributes to the understanding of social power through algorithms by suggesting the concept of algorithmic meta-capital. The concept derives from Bourdieu’s theory on meta-capital which has also been applied to legacy media. I then argue that this algorithmic meta-capital is an extension of the power traditionally held by the state and legacy media. The study also contributes to the understanding of meta-capital as it proposes how the meta-capital possessed by digital intermediaries functions. It does so by legitimating representations of the world and by creating a necessity for algorithmic visibility across different fields, thereby shaping habitus. This Bourdieusian approach enables researchers to take a balanced view on the power of algorithms on the structure/agency continuum.

Media Exposure and Health Behavior during Pandemics: The Mediating Effect of Perceived Knowledge and Fear on Compliance with COVID-19 Prevention Measures

ABSTRACT Emerging research has examined the role of media coverage of diseases in influencing people’s health behavior, particularly their compliance with prevention measures. This study examines whether increased media exposure to COVID-19 news and interpersonal communication about the disease positively relate to people’s abidance by prevention measures, and whether perceived knowledge and fear mediate this relationship. The study focuses on Lebanon, whose government and media responses led to a successful containment of COVID-19 in its first phase, although the country was experiencing a severe economic crisis, widespread political unrest, and a massive influx of refugees. It examines both legacy media (Television) and social media, as well as interpersonal communication, through a cross-sectional researcher-administered phone survey of 1,536 adults and a nationally representative probability sample. The fieldwork was conducted between March 27 and April 23, 2020, and resulted in a 51.6% response rate. The findings support the hypotheses that increased media exposure to COVID-19 news positively relates to people’s abidance by prevention measures and that perceived knowledge and fear mediate this relationship. However, the same hypotheses for interpersonal communication were not supported.

#AidToo: Social Media Spaces and the Transformation of the Reporting of Aid Scandals in 2018

ABSTRACT In 2018, sexual abuse scandals concerning Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK, which had been known about for some years in the industry, finally received widespread coverage. Applying Greer and McLaughlin’s [Greer, C., and E. McLaughlin. 2017. “Theorizing Institutional Scandal and the Regulatory State.” Theoretical Criminology 21 (2): 112–132. doi:10.1177/1362480616645648] scandal model and building on Langer and Gruber’s [Langer, A. I., and J. B. Gruber. 2020. “Political Agenda Setting in the Hybrid Media System: Why Legacy Media Still Matter a Great Deal.” The International Journal of Press/Politics. doi:10.1177/1940161220925023] work on agenda setting in a hybrid media system this paper uses in-depth interviews with whistleblowers, legacy media journalists, and those who created alternative media spacesto analyse changing aid-journalism relationships. The findings suggest the scandals were previously kept out of the public domain for several reasons: aid agencies’ use of deflective media strategies and legal threats; fears by whistleblowers that such stories could assist the conservative media’s anti-aid agenda; and unsuccessful approaches to liberal media outlets. The move from latency to amplification came about because of investigations by legacy media journalists, but also media spaces such as WhatsApp and the Fifty Shades of Aid Facebook group. These spaces allowed women to share stories and form connections and. The paper examines the transformative the interplay of legacy and social media in a hybrid system and argues for the consideration of closed as well as open social media spaces when considering the process of scandalisation.

Social media before domestic courts in Europe: An analysis of free speech cases

Social media arose as a way to communicate with friends, but it evolved to become a significant medium through which individuals exercise their right to free speech. At the same time, social media has raised a variety of challenges for fundamental rights. Whereas national and supranational legislators play a key role in terms of governing social media, court decisions are a test-bed for the protection of fundamental rights in a social media context. This article seeks to shed light on the social media jurisprudence of constitutional and supreme courts in a selected set of EU Member States. It examines in particular the contribution of national judiciaries to the protection of freedom of expression online and its balancing with other rights and interests in a social media setting. The focus is on cases that concern political speech, cases that examine the application of safeguards for the press on social media, and cases that reflect upon the impact of social media on legacy media regulation, that is, regulation for the mass media from the pre-digital age. The analysis identifies key trends in domestic judicial reasoning and shows the importance of fundamental rights as an interpretative tool for judicial decision-making on social media standards.

What Is Digital Journalism? Defining the Practice and Role of the Digital Journalist

Through the lens of theories of field and normalization process, this research seeks to understand technology’s current role in how self-identifying digital journalists define the field. The definitions of digital journalism/journalists and what constitutes digital journalism practices are essential–they shape a range of crucial activities including how journalists prioritize sources to how journalists shape their content for audience consumption. Built on long-form interviews with 68 U.S.-based self-identifying digital journalists, this article argues that the digital turn in the industry has emboldened new entrants to the field and required dominantly placed legacy media journalists to reconsider their definition of journalism as well as their practices. Rather than seeing digital journalism as a sub-field within journalism, participants saw digital journalism as business-as-usual throughout the journalistic field.

The “Animal-Based Food Taboo.” Climate Change Denial and Deontological Codes in Journalism

In spite of the well-documented links between global warming and the animal-based diet, human dietary choices have been only timidly problematized by legacy media in the recent decades. Research on news reporting of the connection between the animal-based diet and climate change shows a clear coverage deficit in traditional journalism. In order to reflect on the reasons for this failure, this paper discusses moral anthropocentrism as the human-supremacist moral stance at the roots of mainstream ethics and the climate crisis. Accordingly, the animal-based food taboo is defined here as our reluctance not only to change but to even discuss changing our food habits, a strong evidence that moral anthropocentrism is not addressed as a problem, which amounts to a type of denial. Through a literature review conducted on the most relevant comparative studies of deontological codes, this paper shows that codes of journalism do not escape moral anthropocentrism, and thus contribute to prevent journalists from stressing the relevant role diet plays in our ethics and sustainability efforts. The paper ends by suggesting ways to expand and update media ethics and deontological codes in journalism to dismantle both the taboo and the moral anthropocentric stance it is based on.