Cultural News Research Articles

“Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Wept”: Exploring Translations of Language, Practices and Story Forms in IsiZulu Journalism

ABSTRACT In multicultural and multilingual societies like South Africa, newswork, or the practices that underpin the news-making process, is made possible by linguistic and cultural translation. In other words, both linguistic and cultural translation play a significant role in contemporary journalism practices in South Africa. While the linguistic level is concerned about language, the cultural level focuses on para language, especially the practices around news gathering and reporting. This paper seeks to illustrate how translation works in terms of language, practices and forms of journalism in multicultural contexts like South Africa. The country is a multicultural and multilingual country meaning that the English media content in mainstream journalism almost always appears as a translation. When sourcing in a variety of languages and cultural contexts, journalists and other media producers have to translate at both linguistic and practice levels. The practice level is influenced mostly by the cultural contexts. Operating in an environment where journalism is conducted within a specific news culture whose borders are inscribed by the hegemonic English and western journalistic cultures, journalists working for indigenous languages newspapers like Ilanga newspaper, an isiZulu newspaper, undertake numerous “translation” processes in the conduct of their work. Central to the arguments in this paper is the idea that both journalism practice and translation are routine aspects of news-work in multicultural countries.

Study the form of news channels on the Internet (Shahid Latarf) as a model

The research is interested in studying a new form of news reports that falls between the news summary and television news reports. It is a new style that deserves study due to the diversity of its forms and patterns on the Internet, which has become a main nerve for news followers, whether local, regional or international, due to its short time, abundance of news, depth of influence and ease of transmitting news. In this research, we have sought to clarify the most important points that include studying the news summary and the importance of the electronic network in news content makers. The Shahid channel was used for the application to know, in order to understand and study short news content and how to make it on the Internet to be influential so that it can easily reach the largest number of viewers and have an impact on the viewer who follows these channels and others on a daily basis to build a news culture as well as build a cultural background for all those wishing to create similar news content on the Internet that has a strong impact and also includes a practical application of professional academic news content..

Understanding Business Model of Digital Journalism in Indonesia

The transformation in the media landscape in Indonesia is underscored by the emergence of digital-centric media entities and a new mode of news production distinctly divergent from traditional journalism. The purpose of this study is to examine the evolving business model of digital journalism, a sector experiencing rapid growth following the advent of the internet, social media, and the consolidation of online journalism since 2010. Employing a qualitative-descriptive method, this research is designed to capture the digital journalism business model in Indonesia's post-traditional print and broadcast media systems. From 2021 to 2023, the authors meticulously observed the contents and management of selected news media outlets, conducted semi-structured interviews, and gathered pertinent documents. The key question of this study centers on the nature of the business model underpinning journalism on digital platforms and its repercussions for the interest of news production and publication. The study reveals that business models for digital news media remain unstandardized, and the ecosystem of platform-based journalism has yet to achieve a healthy climate. From the perspective of digital news consumption, the prevailing culture of gratuitous (free) news culture and the concern of keeping trusted news media pose significant obstacles for news corporations in sustaining their operations.

Female archetypes in the mythological model of television news culture

This study is aimed at identifying patterns of the embodiment of the female image in the information stories of domestic and foreign TV channels. The subject of this article is a mythological model of constructing reality in modern mass media. The object is television news stories in 2017-2023, in which female archetypes are most clearly revealed. Special attention is paid to the information coverage of the foreign topic of the feminist action MeToo and the domestic criminal case of the Khachaturian sisters. The research is aimed at comparing the mythological structure of the plot with the techniques of television broadcasting and understanding the broadcast of the female image on television screens. Thus, the article puts forward a hypothesis: when covering information topics, the media uses a model of a mythological structure, and as a result, a system of archetypes that forms the viewer's opinion. This work is based on the theory of archetypes developed by the scientist K. Jung, which is visualized in the information topics of the last decade. The analysis is of scientific interest in connection with the growing feminist discourse in society, of which television is becoming one of the key broadcasters. Of particular importance is the study of the symbolization of the female image on the television screen through the concepts of C. Jung and E. Neumann, using the example of the main themes of feminist discourse in recent years. The novelty of the research lies in a new theoretical understanding of the ways in which television content affects the viewer. The main conclusions of the study are the confirmation of a scientific hypothesis: about the use of the media of a mythological structure through which a system of archetypes is broadcast, which in turn leads to a stable formation of public opinion. In addition, the author examines the mythological archetypes of communication, which represent the main ways of transmitting information in the modern world.

A Delta of Time

In the early modern Low Countries, narrative cartography was a thriving new medium aimed at disseminating information about events concerning the Dutch Revolt. News maps combined spatial and narrative information in order to tell the story of a recent event to a large audience, representing actions, moments, and (spatial) change. They were in essence temporal products. To keep the maps topical, map publishers released new map states by modifying their copperplates and adding the latest news, sometimes multiple times. This article analyses the ‘updated’ map series by the Amsterdam publisher Claes Jansz Visscher that reported on events in the Scheldt river area between Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp (such as the 1631 Battle of the Slaak). The central question is how and why Visscher incorporated temporal information into his news maps. First, it shows the tools and strategies how Visscher, in comparison to other Northern and Southern Netherlandish news map publishers, added temporal information to his maps. Then, the rhythm of mapping and the map narratives are put in the context of real-time events and news culture, and the circulation and use of the maps are interpreted in the context of memory culture and historical consciousness. The article shows how news maps imply specific narratives of events and invite contemporary and later users to engage with and ‘navigate’ the past, present, and future in ways that transcend the limiting idea of time as a linear progress.

The Impact of New Media on Communication and Engagement in the Digital Age

Digital technologies and platforms have altered how people communicate, engage with content, and consume news. So the paper analyzes the impact of new media on communication and engagement in the digital age. This study investigates the intricate relationship between new media attributes, user engagement, and the transformation of news dissemination. Despite progress in research, a gap persists in understanding how attributes like communication, collaboration, convergence, creativity, and community synergize to enhance user engagement, shaping news consumption habits and fostering a socially-driven news culture. The research uses mixed methods to comprehensively explore this connection, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to comprehensively understand the relationship between new media, engagement strategies, and news consumption behaviors. Specifically, a Likert-scale questionnaire is administered to 500 participants across various age groups, educational backgrounds, and professions in the quantitative phase. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews are conducted with selected participants, capturing their experiences, attitudes, and behaviors concerning new media, engagement, and news consumption. The findings demonstrate that new media attributes wield significant influence over user engagement, resulting in transformative changes in news consumption and dissemination. User engagement emerges as a pivotal mediator in this context. Furthermore, the seamless integration of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, with news promotion plays a crucial role in nurturing virtual communities and reshaping news dissemination practices.

Women and Manuscript News Culture in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT: Women’s news reading has often been overlooked by scholars of seventeenth-century news cultures. This article examines the manuscript newsletter collection of Lady Anne Pole, who received hundreds of newsletters in the 1690s and 1710s, to explore how she used her news reading as part of a process of ‘self-fashioning’ and as a form of political participation. It will also compare Pole’s collection to the manuscript newsletters of several other women, demonstrating that women can and should be seen as dedicated news consumers, and that they were able to maintain an active involvement in politics even when living far from London and when excluded from official political spaces and processes.

Grand strategy and public diplomacy: A case study on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its reception in the Australian press

This article examines China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a public diplomacy grand strategy at the macro-level of inter-state relations. It does so from the perspective of Australia, where the Andrews Labor government in the state of Victoria was, for a period, a signatory to the program. Specifically, this study uses content analysis to consider the reception of the BRI in the Australian press and the complex interactions of news values and ideologies that influenced its representation. This study shows that the effectiveness of the BRI as a grand strategy was undermined by the two interacting news cultures dominating media coverage in Australia, one of which stems from the liberal traditions of the press and the other from the conservative ideological proclivities of the Executive Chair of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch. In so doing, this study contributes to research on the different communication strategies mobilized by states in their geopolitical wrangling, as well as how contextual variables can pre-determine the success or failure of specific public diplomacy campaigns.

Conservative News Cultures and the Future of Journalism History

Political historians have long identified a gap in the literature on US conservatism surrounding that movement’s relationship to journalism and mass media. This essay calls on journalism historians to fill this gap and theorizes why they have thus far failed to do so. It notes the field’s tendency to engage with ahistorical and anachronistic concepts, which make journalism history legible to journalism studies but also subordinates historical work to the imperatives of social science. It uses “conservative news cultures” as a historically rooted theoretical framework for narrating discrete works of journalism history that, when put into conversation, comprise an unrealized subfield. More broadly it advocates for recognizing journalism history as political history and for theorizing new, historically rooted objects of study in need of social scientific analysis.

Besieged from all sides: impediments to science journalism in a developing country and their global implications

Despite high expectations of their normative roles in development processes, Vietnamese science journalists interviewed for this research essay find it extrememly hard to enact such roles, facing an uphill battle to establish science as a legitimate news beat. This results from a diverse set of internal impediments (particularly a science-unfriendly news culture and low ethical standards) and external obstacles, including political control and low cooperation of local scientists. Placing these findings in the wider context, we demonstrate that Vietnam illuminates many troublesome characteristics of science journalism in the Global South and make some recommendations for improving the status quo.

Rosanne M. Baars, Rumours of Revolt. Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598. (Library of the Written Word, Vol. 88.) Leiden, Brill 2021

Article Rosanne M. Baars, Rumours of Revolt. Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598. (Library of the Written Word, Vol. 88.) Leiden, Brill 2021 was published on February 1, 2023 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 316, issue 1).

Novelty, Disinformation and Discrimination in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1559) and Sixteenth-Century French News Culture

Abstract This chapter explores the intersection between two different kinds of nouvelle: on the one hand, a piece of news; and on the other, a literary genre, the novella. Both senses were current in the early sixteenth century when Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the French king François I, wrote the collection of novellas now known as the Heptameron. Developing its model, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Heptameron includes an elaborate frame narrative in which the storytellers debate each story after they hear it. From these discussions, and the stories themselves, emerges a concern with the underlying principles of storytelling: truth, authority, witness and interpretation. These are concerns, this chapter argues, that were also current in sixteenth-century news culture, and in particular the short sensational news pamphlets that became popular during the religious wars of the second half of the century. The chapter examines the claims made in both the Heptameron and in news publications and argues that the Heptameron aspires to provide the analytical tools required to assess any account that claims to be truthful; an aspiration that anticipates later critiques of sensationalist and partisan news. It does this through a practice of discrimination, a careful parsing of a story and its underlying motivations.

Ideology, Polarization, and News Culture: The Secular-Islamist Tension in Turkish Journalism

What role does political ideology play in the production of news in a contentious cultural context? To address this question, this article investigates how Turkish Islamic conservative journalists produced and circulated representations of two dramatic events in 2013: the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the military coup in Egypt. I chose these two cases because the Islamic political bias and activism that shaped the production of news about these two events are symptomatic of the way in which Islamism as a political ideology instrumentalizes news making. Based on newsroom ethnography conducted at an Islamic national mainstream television channel in Turkey between 2011 and 2014, the article demonstrates how Islamism shapes the ways in which Islamic conservative journalists interpreted and articulated the two events in the newsroom, and represented them in news coverage. In this context, journalistic practice gains an ideological character when the journalists utilize journalistic representations as strategic instruments to advance the political agenda of Islamic conservatives against secular forces in Turkey. As the polarization between Islamic and secular groups is based on cultural distinctions, I argue that the political ideology determining journalistic practices is defined not only by party affiliations or socioeconomic class positions but also by the common cultural ways of living and thinking of journalists who work and live as members of a sociocultural group. Islamic ideology serves as a social cement that creates bonds among the IslamicTV journalists as a sociocultural group, and a degree of unity and common purpose in their professional practices.

Rumours of Revolt: Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598. By Rosanne M. Baars

<i>Rumours of Revolt: Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598</i>. By Rosanne M. Baars

Book Review: Conservative Political Communication: How Right-Wing Media and Messaging (Re)Made American Politics, by Sharon E. Jarvis (Ed.) and News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures, by Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer (Eds.)

Book Review: <i>Conservative Political Communication: How Right-Wing Media and Messaging (Re)Made American Politics</i>, by Sharon E. Jarvis (Ed.) and <i>News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures</i>, by Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer (Eds.)

Thresh in the news service of Kazakhstan TV channels

The introduction of the most progressive directions of Western television production into the activities of Kazakhstani TV channels contributed to the development of a new, stormy direction. The concept of "trash" has not previously been seen on domestic television. The purpose of the study is to understand the influence of the trash direction on television, including information services, and its impact on society. The idea is to address the issues of trash journalism, focusing on its future, clarifying the best and most unnecessary aspects of the experience of foreign TV channels. The scientific and practical significance lies in the fact that the audience is interested in trash in journalism, so there is a one-sided opinion that channels use rationally. The research methodology is a direction that scientists call "intellectual trash", analyzed in several areas: the reasons for the growing interest of the audience in trash, the compliance of trash materials with moral and ethical standards, the impact on society and the reasons for the attention of the television industry. The results of the study showed that the priority of the trash direction has an impact on changes in the minds of the audience, the formation of public opinion and the development of society as a whole. “Garbage” has been shown to reduce "news value" and "news culture". Value – the research is based on the work of Kazakhstani and foreign scientists. Any new direction in television is a temporary phenomenon, given the fact that over time it will be replaced by something else, and it is worth considering the need to study any work on the air in the national interest. Кeywords: trash, infotainment, edutainment, sensation, stereotype.

Wodrow's News: Correspondence and Politics in Early 18th‐Century Scotland*

AbstractThis article examines the creation and consumption of scribal news by the early 18th‐century Scottish Presbyterian minister Robert Wodrow (1679–1734). It argues that Scottish news culture depended on the interaction of printed newspapers, professionally produced newsletters from London, personal letters and oral communication. For Wodrow, at least, personal letters were the most important source. No widely circulated commercial newsletter was produced in Scotland, and personal letters were vital for communicating information about the Scottish parliament, the church courts and the Westminster parliament after the Anglo–Scottish Union. News provided as a gift, rather than a commodity, served social functions. The article explores two moments at which Wodrow paid particular attention to parliamentary news: the ratification of the Union in 1706–7, and the passage of the Episcopalian Toleration, Patronage and Yule Vacation Acts in 1712.

Rosanne M. Baars, Rumours of Revolt. Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561-1598

Rosanne M. Baars, Rumours of Revolt. Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561-1598

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.

Is Sensationalist Disinformation More Effective? Three Facilitating Factors at the National, Individual, and Situational Level

Throughout the current global health crisis, false and misleading content has proliferated on social media. Previous research indicates that users of social media primarily share information that contains attention-grabbing elements. Because sensationalist elements are prevalent in disinformation, this study examines the role of sensationalism in supporting disinformation. We conducted survey experiments in six countries (N = 7,009), presenting versions of a false claim that differed in their degree of sensationalism. We varied three contextual conditions for disinformation support: whether respondents grew up in a tabloid-oriented national news culture, whether they indicated individual usage preferences for tabloid and alternative media, and how they rated their situational uncertainty during the pandemic. Our results show a weak influence of tabloidized cultures, but people who frequently use tabloid or alternative media are more likely to agree with disinformation. Users who are uncertain about what is true and what is false are also more likely to agree with disinformation, especially when it is presented sensationally. The average user, however, is more likely to agree with disinformation that is presented neutrally. This finding is concerning, as disinformation presented in a sober manner is much harder to detect by those who want to fight the “infodemic.”