Legacy News Research Articles

The Role of Legacy Media and Social Media in Increasing Public Engagement About Violence Against Women in Turkey

Evidence that women have paid the price of what has been labeled the “shadow pandemic” is found in the increase in violence against them. The rates of femicide and lack of trust in the Turkish judicial system of the authoritarian government are worrisome. Protests have been made in the streets and through social media in response. Our goal was to determine the role of legacy news media and social media in bringing awareness of the femicide issue to the public and how affective publics function surrounding a relatively unaddressed societal problem using datasets created by women’s organizations. We conducted a content analysis on 150 sampled femicide cases in Turkey before and during the pandemic taken from online news sources. We investigated the quality of traditional news media coverage and the volume of social media users expressing emotional reactions to individual femicides over time. Results suggest that the journalistic performance of covering the issue of femicide fails to detail essential facts, and awareness and concern for the issue are evident in the Likes, retweets, shares, and expressions of emotional engagement provided to the victims, while online reactions to femicide have increased substantially since 2019, contributing to the formation of affective publics. The study makes a conceptual contribution to the understanding of legacy media and social media’s roles in spurring public engagement about serious social problems in autocratic political contexts while advancing the methodological tools of combining social scientific techniques with computational ones.

The Mediated Engagement of Switzerland with BRI: A Transnational Comparative Framing Analysis

Abstract This paper offers a transnational comparative framing analysis of leading legacy news media in Switzerland (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, abbreviated to NZZ, in German) and China (China Daily in English) in their coverage of Swiss engagement with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017 and 2019. The results implied a clear dominance of both newspapers’ economic and political actors and related frames. By introducing a geopolitical frame into the generic frame categories and adding an economy-driven frame into domestic frame categories based on the current framing pool from Transcultural Comparative Framing Model (TCFM), the study discussed how the two newspapers shared the same focus by frequency but differed from each other in the contextual discourse through argumentation. China Daily preferred to report from a general and positive overview, focusing on bilateral relations between China and Switzerland. In contrast, NZZ intended to cover more about specific Swiss industries and international actors such as the European Union and the United States, presenting a hybrid perspective towards BRI. The study found a clear presence of ideology-driven and political-position-driven frames on both newspapers—NZZ in particular. Given the importance of cultural congruence in framing studies, the study calls for an inclusion of more cultural notions and a general transcultural frame for reporting and researching emerging transnational topics through TCFM. Only when a discursive space is created with respect to different cultural patterns, might resonation in communicative encounters and conceptualization repertoires become possible.

Different stakes, different struggles, and different practices to survive: News organizations and the spectrum of platform dependency

As people access news via digital platforms, existing literature provides foundations for institutional approaches to news organizations’ platform dependency. Yet, platform dependency also exists on a spectrum: size, business model, and market position impact how each news organization strategizes its reliance on digital platforms. I draw on in-depth interviews with 22 South Korean news professionals to delve into different survival strategies in dealing with South Korea’s biggest search portal and news aggregator, Naver. Findings reveal that contrary to the common belief, journalists in legacy news organizations experience more pressure and compromise journalistic values with clickbait headlines. They deem their relationship with the platform more in hierarchical and inevitable terms while journalists from new, emerging organizations are relatively freer from the competition for clicks and strive for more quality journalism. However, the difference stems from the Naver platform’s news organization ranking system and its tiered visibility structure that systematically creates the difference in audience reach and news distribution.

A frame analysis of climate change solutions in legacy news and digital media

A content analysis of legacy news and digital media from March 2015 to December 2018 found modest progress in communicating solutions to combat climate change. However, the mitigation frame continues to overshadow the adaptation frame and less emphasis on preparing for and adjusting to changing climate conditions happening now. Overall, legacy news and digital media still frame climate solutions using familiar terms and visuals that de-emphasize concrete, individual actions to combat climate change.

Getting news from social media influencers and from digital legacy news outlets and print legacy news outlets in seven countries: The “more-and-more” phenomenon and the new opinion leadership

Legacy news consumption was found to be a predictor of getting news from social media influencers (SMIs) among respondents in seven nationally representative samples in Arab countries (N = 5,166). Getting news from SMIs does not seem to be an “alternative” for persons disenchanted with legacy media; SMI news use may, itself, be a form of legacy news consumption. The results provide strong evidence of the more-and-more phenomenon first identified by Lazarsfeld et al.

Platform Configuration: A Longitudinal Study and Conceptualization of a Legacy News Publisher’s Platform-Related Innovation Practices

Abstract Purpose Publishers are innovating their practices in the face of global platform companies’ growing dominance on journalism. This study examines how publishers innovate their editorially oriented activities vis-à-vis third-party platforms with respect to six stages of news production. In doing so, this article introduces and advances platform configuration as a conceptual framework. Design/methodology/approach This five-year longitudinal case study of a Singaporean legacy news publisher uses a mix-method qualitative approach. It includes in-depth interviews with 35 staff, newsroom observations and close monitoring of the publisher’s website and apps. Findings This study offers three key findings about the publisher’s platform configuration. First, multidirectionality: the publisher simultaneously leveraged on platforms’ capacities (building platform presence), while also reducing dependence on them (platform counterbalancing). Second, specificity: the publisher added, removed and/or modified editorially oriented activities with respect to the six stages of news production. Third, commitment: the publisher calibrated its commitment to specific activities oriented towards either building platform presence and/or platform counterbalancing. Practical implications This article introduces a 2 × 2 platform configuration matrix that classifies and explains how and why publishers engage in platform configuration. Theoretical and social implications Scholars can draw on platform configuration to study and advance theorizing on the evolving publisher-platform interrelationship. Platform configuration is useful for understanding how publishers reconcile their innovation practices and strategize their commitment to news activities in relation to platforms with broader journalistic and financial objectives. Originality/value This is the first study that introduces and advances the concept of platform configuration with regard to publishers’ innovation practices. Both the platform configuration concept and matrix allow researchers to classify and operationalize future longitudinal and short-term studies into the publisher-platform dynamic.

In Service of News Subscribers: Exploring Belgian Journalists’ Perceptions of Stakeholder Relations in the Digital News Ecosystem

This qualitative paper contends that as news media are faced with growing commercial pressures and changing news consumption habits, they need to rethink their relationship with two of their main stakeholders: readers and advertisers. Multi-stakeholder marketing provides a useful conceptual framework for such an exercise, since it invites media practitioners to reconcile the conflicting interests of different stakeholders. This study aims to understand journalists’ levels of multi-stakeholder thinking regarding advertisers and readers. To explore how contemporary journalists see their role with regard to distinct stakeholders in the news ecosystem, we interviewed 14 Belgian journalists working for legacy and digital native news media. The goal of this exploratory study is to examine (1) how journalists perceive and rethink their dependence on readers and advertisers in the digital news ecosystem and (2) how their perception of the digital news ecosystem influences their attitudes towards these stakeholders. Findings indicate that journalists tend to see the value of readers in monetary terms and believe increasing reader revenue will help journalism survive. Other types of reader value (feedback, expertise, and content) are peripheral. This focus on subscribers also seems to coincide with a devaluation of other stakeholders like advertisers and non-paying readers.

Explaining Health Misinformation Belief through News, Social, and Alternative Health Media Use: The Moderating Roles of Need for Cognition and Faith in Intuition

ABSTRACT Explaining the spread and impact of health misinformation has garnered considerable attention with the uptake of social media and group messaging applications. This study contributes to that line of work by investigating how reliance on multiple digital media may help support or suppress misinformation belief, and how individual differences in misinformation susceptibility condition this process. Alternative health outlets (AH media), advocating home/homeopathic remedies over conventional medicine can be important sources of misinformation, yet are largely ignored previously. In this study, we first test how reliance on different platforms predicts health misinformation belief. Drawing from the elaboration likelihood model, we further investigate how need for cognition (NFC) and faith in intuition (FI) moderate the relationship between news reliance and susceptibility to misinformation. We conducted a survey in Singapore, Turkey, and the U.S (N = 3,664) to measure how these proposed relationships explain misinformed beliefs about vaccines, genetically modified foods and alternative medicine. We found reliance on online legacy news was negatively associated with the likelihood of believing health misinformation, while the reverse was true for social media and AH media. Additionally, those with both greater NFC and FI were more susceptible to health misinformation when they relied on social media and AH media more. In contrast, neither NFC nor FI moderated the relationship between reliance on online legacy news and health misinformation belief. These findings, mostly consistent across countries, also show that extensive reliance on social media and AH media for news mostly overwhelms the individual differences in predicting misinformation belief.

Data-driven news work culture: Reconciling tensions in epistemic values and practices of news journalism

This study investigates the epistemological implications of the appropriation of audience analytics in a data-driven news culture. Focussing on two central aspects of epistemology, epistemic value and epistemic practices, we ask two overall questions (1) How are audience metrics balanced and reconciled in relation to other standards in the justification of news as valuable knowledge? How are different practices of research and presentation, truth-seeking and truth-telling, prioritized in a news organization marked as a data-driven news work culture? The study presents a case study of a Scandinavian legacy news publisher that has pursued the embracing of a data-driven news work culture. It is based on a qualitative multi-method approach. The findings show how metrics are used as a superior standard in deciding on the epistemic value of news. This is expressed in strategies, guidelines and discussions in the newsroom, and put into practice in coaching, evaluations and rewarding of the performance of individual journalists. In the everyday news production, metrics are reconciled in relation to independent standards in journalism, related to the claims of news journalism to provide relevant and verified public knowledge about current events. Moreover, the study shows how the embracement of metrics radicalizes the focus on presentation, packaging and timing in the optimization of news material and in the valuing of professional practices. Efforts in research and truth seeking are more seldom explicitly valued. The work of fulfilling reasonable truth claims is mainly taken for granted.

The Rise of Social Journalism: An Explorative Case Study of a Youth-oriented Instagram News Account

ABSTRACT Social media have become indispensable tools for (legacy) news companies and brands to increase online traffic for their own platforms. A recent trend is the production and dissemination of native news content specifically for and through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This paper uses a mixed methods research design to study the news production and content of @nws.nws.nws, a hugely popular Instagram channel targeting 13–17-year olds in Flanders (Belgium) which is maintained by the newsroom of VRT, the Flemish PSM. The explorative study highlights the differences in journalistic practice when producing news content for online platforms only and the changes it entails for traditional news values, dependency on social media platforms and media regulation.

INDEPENDENCE AND INTERDEPENDENCE: MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF FINNISH YOUTH’S EXPERIENCES OF TRUST IN NEWS ONLINE AND VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

Young people’s relationship with the news has been a cause of concern, especially due to the role of social media as a central component of their lives, often seen as a prominent cause of declining trust in the news. This proposal features some of the results of a multi-method, interdisciplinary study of the University of Helsinki (2019-2021) that examines how Finnish audiences view the power of traditional news media and social media. The project understands trust as a four-dimensional concept: generalized trust in the media, trust in specific sources, trust in terms of specific issues, and trust determined by one’s individual disposition. Based on the results of two general surveys in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020, a survey focused on young people (18-29-year-olds), three focus group interviews, as well as a three-day online discussion of 30 participants of the same age group in Fall 2020, we analyze how young people and experience the trust in news sources online. We also discuss how the pandemic has shaped their experiences. While the most defining characteristic of Finnish audiences is a combination of both basic trust and critical approaches toward news, this is markedly true for young people. At the same time, our findings do not confirm the worst fears of moral panic about growing distrust and news avoidance by young people. Rather, they suggest a combination of independence and interdependence by young people, of both legacy news media and online and social media sources.

Moralizing Campaign Coverage: A Computerized Textual Analysis of New York Times’ Reporting on Clinton and Trump During the 2016 Presidential Election

ABSTRACT The 2016 presidential election marked a new era of political campaign featured by social media-powered professional and citizen journalism. Still, legacy news organizations such as the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post amassed significant influences among voters in both online and offline settings. Against this backdrop, this study examines how NYT covered Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 election. Drawing upon the rich literature in moral psychology, particularly the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME; Tamborini, 2012, “A Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars.” In Media and the Moral Mind, edited by R. Tamborini, 43–74. London, England: Routledge). A computerized textual analysis of over 1,000 socially transmitted NYT stories regarding both candidates was performed. Findings show that the NYT’s election coverage displayed a certain level of coverage neutrality, and the use of moral terms in NYT’s coverage at critical time points might have contributed to Trump’s final victory in 2016.

Making Sources Visible: Representation of Evidence in News Texts, 2007–2019

ABSTRACT Journalistic work is shifting toward more aggregative and intertextual forms, using published sources more often within their news routines and stories. This study examines that shift through the lens of evidence. It applies the concepts of evidentiary distance and ancillary evidence — that is, evidence about evidence — to news texts to explore their originality and transparency, and it approaches those texts as central sites in which journalists outline the basis for their knowledge claims and make the case for their epistemic authority. A content analysis of news texts from newspapers and digital newsrooms in 2007, 2013, and 2019 shows firsthand evidence is rarely presented. Non-mediated attributed speech is by far the evidence most often presented, but it has become less common over time, with corresponding increases in mediated speech and thirdhand evidence. Ancillary evidence describing evidentiary sources or evidence-gathering processes is also fairly rare. Results suggest that evidence in news stories is becoming intertextual but remains rather opaque, with digital and legacy news organizations becoming more similar over time.

Clickbait news and algorithmic curation: A game theory framework of the relation between journalism, users, and platforms

Algorithmic curation of social media platforms is considered to create a clickbait media environment. Although clickbait practices can be risky especially for legacy news outlets, clickbait is widely applied. We conceptualize clickbait content supply as a revision game with an unknown threshold. Combining supervised machine learning with time series analysis of Facebook posts and Twitter messages of 37 German legacy news outlets over 54 months, we observe outlets’ behavior following algorithm changes. Results reveal (1) an infrequent use of clickbait with few heavier-using outlets and (2) turning points of clickbait performance as clickbait supply and user interaction form a reversed U-shaped relationship. News outlets (3) collectively adjust toward an industry clickbait standard. While we (4) cannot prove that algorithmic curation increases clickbait, (5) Facebook’s regulative intervention to decrease clickbait disperses heterogeneous tendencies in clickbait supply. We contribute to an understanding of editorial decision-making in competitive environments facing platforms’ regulative intervention.

Mainstream Media Recirculation of Trust-Reducing Social Media Messages

Citizens need to trust in the integrity of news reporting for the free press to fulfill its role as a democratic institution that enables citizens to hold representatives accountable. Growing research has shown that increased use of social media erodes trust in legacy news. However, trust-reducing social media messages are not contained to social media platforms; they are widely recirculated by the mainstream media. We argue that mainstream media corporations select social media messages to recirculate precisely because of their trust-reducing features in order to respond to short-term competitive market incentives. We turn to Donald Trump’s Twitter posts as examples of trust-reducing messages and show that the media cites more trust-reducing messages more quickly and more frequently than less trust-reducing messages. These findings implicate mainstream media corporations alongside social media platforms in the systematic and ongoing degradation of trust in legacy news reporting.

Does a Crisis Change News Habits? A Comparative Study of the Effects of COVID-19 on News Media Use in 17 European Countries

Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of ‘need for orientation’ and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both legacy news brands (TV, radio, newspapers) and so-called contemporary news media (Internet-based and social media) during this global health crisis. Our results show an overall rise of news use across countries, but only for some types of news media. We find an increase of TV news consumption, and a higher reliance on social media and the Internet for news and information. This indicates that in times of crises and an unusually strong need for orientation, people mainly turn to news sources that are easily available and offer a more immediate coverage. Furthermore, we find the rise in news use to be mainly present among those who already have a higher level of trust in legacy media and among people that were more concerned about the impact of the pandemic.

Drawing from the ‘bank of credibility’: perspectives of health officials and the public on media handling of the H1N1 pandemic

The H1N1 global pandemic of 2009–10 was moderate in its severity, which led many members of the public to denounce news organizations for ‘hyping’ the threat posed by the virus. This outcome was troubling as it portended a potentially cynical public audience in the event of a future emerging infectious disease. As we face a new Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with COVID-19, public trust in public health information and mediated messaging is more important than ever. Health authorities aim to inform the public through various avenues, particularly by engaging news media as a bridge to deliver pertinent information. We draw on the Trust, Confidence, and Cooperation (TCC) Model to examine how citizens and health officers evaluated news coverage of the H1N1 pandemic in Canada and the impact it had on public trust in public health recommendations. Following the H1N1 pandemic, we conducted interviews (n = 28) with senior health officials in Canadian federal and provincial jurisdictions and focus groups with general population Canadians (n = 130) in three provinces. Findings showed that many health officials and members of the public considered that the pandemic H1N1 was hyped in news coverage and that the immunization campaign was portrayed as chaotic, potentially affecting trust in pandemic messaging and response activities. Our results highlight the key role of news coverage in pandemic communication. Further, we recommend that health authorities complement their media engagement with direct communication with citizens; and increased training for public health officers to engage with news media and promote public trust. The lessons of this study remain crucially relevant given that legacy news media continue to be important sources of health information as the world fights to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

Delegitimizing the media?

Abstract A growing literature on the impact of “fake news“ accusations on legacy news outlets suggests that the use of this term is part of a much larger trend of increased and delegitimizing media criticism by political actors. However, so far, there is very little empirical evidence on how prevailing politicians’ delegitimizing media criticism really is and under which conditions it occurs. To fill these gaps, we present results of a content analysis of media-related Facebook postings by Austrian and German politicians in 2017 (N = 2,921). The results suggest that media criticism, in general, is actually rare and that about half of it can be described as delegitimizing (i.e., characterized by incivility or absence of argumentation). Most often, media criticism is used by populist politicians, who accuse “the media” in general of bias and falsehoods.

Media Business Development in the Context of Global Digitalization

In the context of global changes in the media market under the influence of Internet technologies, it becomes necessary to identify the main trends of its development, so the characteristic of the market trends, the integration process of entrepreneurial structures in the media industry, aimed at increasing their competitiveness at the present stage of development of the market economy. In the context of an ever-changing, competitive digital ecosystem and against the background of General cuts in advertising budgets in the print press, radio, and television, advertising investments in the digital environment are increasing starting in 2019. Revenues of legacy news media organizations (also called old or traditional media organizations) are constantly declining due to the high degree of audience participation in new media due to the use of user-generated content, media automation, and new digital media organizations. Using mathematical-statistical and logical research methods, the article identifies specific features of the media business sphere, which include audience fragmentation, culture of creative destruction, and hypercompetition in the media market. In addition, key issues and current changes in the media industry in the context of global digitalization are highlighted, reflecting the introduction of innovative technologies that affect the media industry, and the decline in traditional methods of delivery and media consumption. Global digitalization has affected the growth of media platforms, resulting in an increase in the supply of content itself, as well as significant changes in its consumption by the advertising market.

The Multidimensionality of Trust: Assessing Finnish Audiences’ Views on the Trustworthiness of Digital News

Finland provides an interesting case study on trust in the media in the digital era. The country is known to exhibit the greatest levels of trust in the political establishment and the government, as well as the media. In the Finnish “digital welfare state,” the news is an inseparable part of the mechanism, producing a high level of social trust within the welfare state system, and Finland features the highest level of media freedom and literacy in Europe. This multimethod study examines different understandings of trust by studying in what ways Finnish audiences experience trust in news, especially when consuming news on digital platforms, and what factors explain trust in different news sources. Our basic premise is that trust can be understood in three ways: as dispositions of individual actors, as the social organization and the relationship between different social nodes and the system, and as a constantly negotiated property of social relations. We apply this three-dimensional framework in two sets of audience survey research data (2019, 2020) and reflect the findings with a focus group and expert interviews as well as with two similar surveys a decade prior. Our results depict relatively high levels of trust in the media in Finland and surprisingly little change in audiences’ perceptions of trustworthiness compared to the earlier surveys. The most defining characteristic of Finnish audiences is critical trust. Audiences are aware of the impacts of digitization, especially the dangers of social media bubbles and disinformation. They also recognize market-driven imperatives of journalism yet appreciate legacy news media in its different digital forms. Our study indicates that a balance between skepticism and reliance on news outlets can exist in audiences’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of digital news.