Native News Research Articles

Monetising User Participation, Content and Expertise: Sources of Income for Indonesia’s Digital News Media

The global news media industry is still looking for a sustainable business model. The digitalisation of the media has forced the global press industry to seek compensation for lost revenue traditionally derived from advertising. A similar phenomenon is also occurring in a Global South country, Indonesia. With many social media users and thousands of startups, the opportunity to benefit comes from two channels: monetising user participation and content. What is the current position of conglomerate and digitally native news media on the two options? How are websites and social media used by both media to support these two sources of income? The research applied two methods, website content analysis and social media analysis, to see revenue channels, web functions, user participation on the web, and social media functions. In addition, we interviewed eight informants from eight media. This research finds that digital news media conglomerates and Indonesian startups earn profits through similar channels, such as monetising user participation and content and their expertise. However, slightly different from established digital media, digital native media companies expand their revenue stream by monetising their expertise, for example, by offering market research and data analysis. Digital news media with a niche market of readers will most likely offer their expertise. Keywords: Media business model, digital news media, paywall, user participation, user-generated content.

Improvisation, Economy, and MTV Moves: Online News and Video Production Style

This study uses content analysis to explore the way a news organization's norms and expectations is tied to video production style and extends Rogers's Diffusion of Innovations theory. The study compares the current online video production styles from legacy print, legacy TV, and digital native news organizations based in the United States. Over time, while these organizations have converged into one screen for viewers, their differing organizational histories, traditions, and norms affect the way they produce video news. The analysis found legacy print organizations continue to produce slower-paced videos without scripted narration; TV organizations use scripted narration with one correspondent; and digital natives produce stories with quick pacing and a mix of narrator types. Diffusion of Innovations theory helps to explain why these organizations offer distinct production styles that are not converging in form.

Changes in health communication in the age of COVID-19: A study on the dissemination of preprints to the public.

Preprints have become an important tool for meeting the challenges of health communication in the context of COVID-19. They allow scientists to disseminate their results more quickly due to the absence of a peer review process. Preprints have been well-received by scientists, however, there have been concerns about the exposure of wider public audiences to preprints due in part to this lack of peer review. The aim of this study is to examine the dissemination of preprints on medRxiv and bioRxiv during the COVID-19 pandemic using content analysis and statistical analysis. Our findings show that preprints have played an unprecedented role in disseminating COVID-19-related science results to the public. While the overall media coverage of preprints is unsatisfactory, digital native news media performed better than legacy media in reporting preprints, which means that we could make the most of digital native media to improve health communication. This study contributes to understanding how science communication has evolved in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and provides some practical recommendations.

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Alcohol Use Disorder Narratives in U.S. Digital News Coverage and Engagement on Social Media

ABSTRACT Social media regularly serves as a source of news and health-related information subsequently shaping public opinion and behavior. We examined mainstream digital news narratives about alcohol use disorder (AUD), including coverage of solutions to AUD, and associations between narratives and engagement on social media. AUD-related articles (N = 339) published in top U.S. newspapers and digital native news sources in 2019 were analyzed by trained coders with a structured codebook (κ = 0.75), examining characteristics of stories highlighting specific individuals affected by AUD and solution-framing of AUD. Facebook shares were used as a proxy measure for an article’s potential “reach” on social media. Of articles focused on individuals (72.0%), most (62.7%) depicted individuals affected by AUD as criminals, as opposed to engaging with alcohol treatment or being in recovery (31.1%). These criminal depictions received over eight times as many FB shares, compared to alcohol use treatment or recovery depictions. Law enforcement solutions (63.9%) were depicted most often, followed by AUD-treatment oriented solutions (40.1%), and prevention-oriented solutions (15.8%). Law enforcement solutions received more than five times as much social media engagement than AUD-treatment oriented solutions and over twenty-nine times more engagement than prevention-oriented solutions. There is a need to increase news coverage featuring depictions of individuals who have successfully engaged with alcohol treatment and recovery, reflecting the millions of Americans who have resolved a significant past alcohol problem. News coverage of AUD should also incorporate more depictions of evidence-based prevention-oriented and treatment-oriented solutions to AUD.

The value of podcasts to journalism: analysis of digital native media brands’ offerings, production and publishing in Spain

The growing popularity of podcasting is an opportunity for the news industry to identify new ways of delivering journa­lism and to find solutions to the challenges of digital transformation. Podcasts are tools that help the media adapt to the digital sphere by giving prominence to audio to extend their journalistic influence in the sonosphere. Given its disruptive nature, and since it breaks with the traditional content choices available, the analysis of this article focuses on what is offered in the form of podcasts by digital native media brands in Spain. It looks at the extent to which they are committed to this audio content and the type of journalism-based productions they promote and publish. To do this, a qualitative and quantitative content analysis methodology was used. This included an interpretation of data recorded in the Digital media map 2021 (Mapa de medios digitales 2021), updated as part of the Diginativemedia project (2019-2021). An in-depth study of a corpus –or sample– of 29 titles or series of podcasts published by 7 native news brands is also provided. These brands were selected because they publish podcasts and because, according to the Digital news report Spain 2021, they have the largest weekly reach among Spanish internet users. The results of the research show that only 1 in 4 digital media brands that offer podcasts (925) are native (232), and that it is the specialist native media outlets that are most committed to podcasting (140). Native media brands view podcasts as part of their journalism-based products and services, whose presence is beginning to grow as an exploration of their informative and expressive potential. In addition, it is podcasts that tackle current affairs using conversational formats –both audio and video– through serialised, original productions for the media outlet’s website and to provide a range of platforms.

Primitive or empowered: representations of Native Americans and COVID-19 in news media

ABSTRACT Historically, representations of Native Americans in media have tended toward a narrative of a people who are savage at worst, primitive and helpless at best. During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Native Americans were often featured in news coverage about the viral outbreak. Using close textual analysis, this study differentiates between COVID-19 themed news stories featuring Native Americans as told by Native media sources and those offered by non-Native media sources. Though the representations of Native people offered in the reports from non-Native news agencies were generally sympathetic, they upheld longstanding and negative visual tropes of primitiveness and helplessness. Native news sources, however, portrayed Native people as empowered and community oriented. We conclude that when Native people construct their own stories, even in the midst of a devastating pandemic, their narratives further efforts toward Native self-determination and rearticulate the archetypal framing of Native identity in US news coverage.

How News Organizations Sell Native Advertising: Discourses of Integration and Separation on In-House Content Studio Web Sites

ABSTRACT This study adds to the growing literature on native advertising and journalism by analyzing how seventeen prominent news organizations promote their in-house content studios on their web sites. As public-facing spaces oriented toward attracting clients, these sites are understood as discursive artifacts that provide insight into how news organizations negotiate their allegiance to norms of journalistic autonomy while simultaneously developing the role of creating paid advertising campaigns that sit alongside news content. Our analysis reveals that news organizations simultaneously engage in discourses of integration and separation between native advertising and news content. They signal the integration between news and advertising through the usage of “story” as an umbrella term for digital content while also maintaining separation through nuanced language choices that imply some degree of distance between news and native advertising. These diverging discourses demonstrate how fraught native advertising is for news organizations striving to be recognized as legitimate providers of authoritative news while attempting to bolster revenues in face of the difficulties arising with the digital advertising market. These findings draw on and expand discursive theories in journalism studies by broadening inquiry beyond news content to encompass the complex terrain of content production emerging within the digital space.

Counted out or taken in: mapping out diversity of journalists in three Indian digital native English newsrooms

ABSTRACT Digital news media aim to seize the opportunity of the growing market of the Internet use in India. While the rise of digital start-ups or digital native news websites in the news industry is remarkable, it has not heralded significant changes in newsroom diversity. It has been established that media in India, as elsewhere, is largely dominated by male journalists and that the narratives are created by those from upper class and caste. This invites questions over the institution’s ideology toward having representations from religious minorities, dalits, adivasis, women, LGBT, disabled etc. that could result in producing pluralistic discourses. This study explored newsroom diversity and its manifestations in three Indian digital native newsrooms. Data were collected through participant observation and interviews from founders, editors and journalists in the three newsrooms. The study revealed that all three newsrooms are reasonably diverse on the basis of gender but less diverse in terms of religion and caste.

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.

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.

Solving Egypt’s Economic Crisis: The Strategic Role of Chinese, Russian, and Egyptian Media Narratives

ABSTRACT This study examined Chinese, Russian, and Egyptian news articles from December 2014 to December 2019 on 18 different native language news sites to determine how countries with close media-state relationships use Egypt’s economic crisis to build narrative alliances and boost national identity. Using a ratio-oriented approach to strategic crisis narratives, this article shows that Scene-driven ratios are instrumental for crisis-ridden countries to rhetorically rebuild their economic order for national audiences and for other countries to forge alliances and boost their national economic identities. Similarities in narrative ratios and shifts between Chinese and Egyptian national media suggest a dual strategy by which China exploits Egypt’s economic crisis to enhance its national identity and depict Egypt as an economic partner in its Road and Belt initiative. Russia’s narrative ratios and shifts highlight Russia’s economic and military actors as the dominant drivers influencing Russian-Egyptian relations, indicating more short-term and self-centered narrative strategies. This article advances ideas about strategic crisis narratives by introducing a framework for theorizing relationships between the (in)consistency of ratios and international actors’ ability to narrate crisis resolutions and elevate their crisis identities and interests for national audiences.

INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY IN NEW ECONOMIC JOURNALISTIC ARRANGEMENTS IN SANTA CATARINA

This paper investigates 20 digital native news arrangements in Santa Catarina. The exploratory research aims to find elements on how these arrangements perceive themselves as innovative or not, and how this is strained by the ways in which these initiatives are financed. Results show that part of the researched arrangements can be considered innovative as they are settled down in news deserts and, therefore, meet an information shortage for local populations. On the other hand, economic weaknesses can limit and jeopardize the useful life of these organizations.

Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.

This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.

What cancer research makes the news? A quantitative analysis of online news stories that mention cancer studies.

Journalists' health and science reporting aid the public's direct access to research through the inclusion of hyperlinks leading to original studies in peer-reviewed journals. While this effort supports the US-government mandate that research be made widely available, little is known about what research journalists share with the public. This cross-sectional exploratory study characterises US-government-funded research on cancer that appeared most frequently in news coverage and how that coverage varied by cancer type, disease incidence and mortality rates. The subject of analysis was 11436 research articles (published in 2016) on cancer funded by the US government and 642 news stories mentioning at least one of these articles. Based on Altmetric data, researchers identified articles via PubMed and characterised each based on the news media attention received online. Only 1.88% (n = 213) of research articles mentioning US government-funded cancer research included at least one mention in an online news publication. This is in contrast to previous research that found 16.8% (n = 1925) of articles received mention by online mass media publications. Of the 13 most common cancers in the US, 12 were the subject of at least one news mention; only urinary and bladder cancer received no mention. Traditional news sources included significantly more mentions of research on common cancers than digital native news sources. However, a general discrepancy exists between cancers prominent in news sources and those with the highest mortality rate. For instance, lung cancer accounted for the most deaths annually, while melanoma led to 56% less annual deaths; however, journalists cited research regarding these cancers nearly equally. Additionally, breast cancer received the greatest coverage per estimated annual death, while pancreatic cancer received the least coverage per death. Findings demonstrated a continued misalignment between prevalent cancers and cancers mentioned in online news media. Additionally, cancer control and prevention received less coverage from journalists than other cancer continuum stages, highlighting a continued underrepresentation of prevention-focused research. Results revealed a need for further scholarship regarding the role of journalists in research dissemination.

Accepting the Digital Challenge: Business Models and Audience Participation in Online Native Media

Since the mid-1990s, many journalistic initiatives have entered the online environment, either as a continuation of brands already consolidated in conventional formats or as native projects of the new medium. In Spain, the online media scene has just completed its first quarter century of life. This said, the aim of this proposal is to present the evolution of the digital native media in Spain in order to compare their current situation with European success stories. For that purpose, we have conducted a comparative case study between three highlighted Spanish digital native news outlets and three from other European countries. The results show a progressive shift towards a member-funded model, while news outlets try to reduce their dependence on advertising. However, the three European natives seem to be more advanced compared to the Spanish cases as these remain still dependent on advertising revenues to stand upright. Furthermore, two models of participation stand out: the user community and, in particular, the model of collaboration networks. Nevertheless, the study reveals how the analyzed European news outlets are changing the role of the reader through innovative forms of participatory interactivity.

Behind the Comments Section: The Ethics of Digital Native News Discussions

Behind the Comments Section: The Ethics of Digital Native News Discussions

The Enduring Popularity of Legacy Journalism: An Analysis of Online Audience Data

As news publishers continue to lose subscribers and advertising revenue, journalism practitioners and researchers have looked to newcomers to the field for ideas of how to adapt and succeed in a much more saturated and unstable media environment. Many have specifically looked to digital native news organizations to understand the ways that journalism is attempting to reinvent itself for a media landscape that is very different from the previous one. Yet what often gets lost in this focus on the newest news organizations is the resilience of many of journalism’s older ones. In this study, I analyze a year’s worth of U.S.-based<strong> </strong>online news consumption data to show that, even in a media environment increasingly saturated with digital native news outlets, legacy news brands continue to comprise a majority of the most popular news sites. Drawing on audience studies literature, I argue that these findings likely reflect audience preferences for familiar, established brands, as well as structural advantages these brands maintain due to their size and capital. I conclude that the fate of digital news organizations is not just a question of their innovativeness or nimbleness. It is also a question of their ability to combat a combination of powerful, stubborn forces: the habits of the people they hope to reach, and the deep pockets of their competitors.

Native Media and Business Models: Comparative Study of 14 Successful Experiences in Latin America

From its onset on the 1990s, both digital native (with sister headings on the analog platform) as digital native news media have experienced a constant transformation process. The accelerated technological evolution linked to the changing information consumption habits of the users demanded a constant reinvention capability. Furthermore, the need for profit and the drop in advertisement sales have pushed the media to redefine their structure, content and social media presence. The Ibero-American scene has experienced a sprout of a mixture of digital native news media. They are journalistic projects, conceived from and on the Internet, which have reached considerable renown and becoming reference media on the information level. Internet prompted a reduction of the costs related to the creation of media outlets. However, the establishment of a sustainable business model is one of the main challenges. The research presented looks at the business models of Ibero-American digital native news media based on a comparative analysis of 14 case studies, alongside interviews with their founders. The findings include, among other things, a tendency for business models based on diverse and hyper-specialized content targeted at micro-audiences. This research found an interest in horizontality, participation and user engagement, and noticed the need for these media to diversify their income sources.