Piece Of News Research Articles

The role of expectations on consumer interpretation of new information

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of consumers’ expectations and their antecedents on beliefs, attitude and behavioral intentions when they respond to new corporate social responsibility (CSR) information about a service firm.Design/methodology/approachEmpirically, the authors measure prior beliefs, and then calibrate how those beliefs change in response to a piece of news. The authors develop a conceptual model articulating the nature and antecedents of three types of expectations: would, could and should. The authors use structural equation modeling to test how these expectations influence the consumer evaluation process.FindingsThe results show that the effect of could expectations on the evaluation process is felt via their influence on would expectations; that is, would expectations fully mediate the relationship between could expectations and attitude toward news. Similarly, attitude toward news fully mediates the relationship between would and should expectations and updated beliefs about the firm.Research limitations/implicationsIn the selected service industry, the findings show that expectations are mediated by the new information that consumers receive when they are updating their prior beliefs. The authors demonstrate the ability to understand the antecedents of expectations, which provides a vehicle by which the organization can influence the consumer evaluation process.Practical implicationsIn practice, managers can identify the antecedents of consumer expectations and thus influence the reference points against which those consumers will evaluate news about their product.Social implicationsCSR has important implications for multiple stakeholders and the authors calibrate the determinants of how news about the organization’s performance on it may affect consumer decision processes.Originality/valueThe paper introduces “could” expectations into the services literature, examines the antecedents of the different types of expectations, and studies how their effect is felt through the evaluation process.

Nonlinear Dynamics of Information Diffusion in Social Networks

The recent explosion in the adoption of search engines and new media such as blogs and Twitter have facilitated the faster propagation of news and rumors. How quickly does a piece of news spread over these media? How does its popularity diminish over time? Does the rising and falling pattern follow a simple universal law? In this article, we propose SpikeM, a concise yet flexible analytical model of the rise and fall patterns of information diffusion. Our model has the following advantages. First, unification power: it explains earlier empirical observations and generalizes theoretical models including the SI and SIR models. We provide the threshold of the take-off versus die-out conditions for SpikeM and discuss the generality of our model by applying it to an arbitrary graph topology. Second, practicality: it matches the observed behavior of diverse sets of real data. Third, parsimony: it requires only a handful of parameters. Fourth, usefulness: it makes it possible to perform analytic tasks such as forecasting, spotting anomalies, and interpretation by reverse engineering the system parameters of interest (quality of news, number of interested bloggers, etc.). We also introduce an efficient and effective algorithm for the real-time monitoring of information diffusion, namely SpikeStream, which identifies multiple diffusion patterns in a large collection of online event streams. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that SpikeM accurately and succinctly describes all patterns of the rise and fall spikes in social networks.

Reporting an Alternative Reality to ‘Conveniently Guide’ Public Opinion

During World War II the Portuguese press was under strict control of the dictatorship regime that ruled in the country. While censorship was given the task of preventing many news pieces from reaching the public, newspapers were also forced to give visibility to all propaganda events organized by the regime. In many cases this meant relegating crucial news on the war to the interior pages while the front pages were reserved for national stories. The article combines document research with an analysis of the front pages of the two major Portuguese daily newspapers from the outbreak of the war until the capitulation of France. It demonstrates how the censorship apparatus played a role that went way beyond deciding what could and could not be published by ensuring that the press would report an alternative reality that was created by the regime’s propaganda which aimed to ‘conveniently guide’ public opinion.

Estratégias enunciativas na produção do efeito de imparcialidade em notícias jornalísticas

Resumo Este trabalho investiga como as estratégias enunciativas produzem o efeito de sentido de imparcialidade em notícias jornalísticas. Para isso, utilizando o referencial teórico da semiótica discursiva, analisamos as operações enunciativas de debreagem e embreagem mobilizadas em duas notícias, uma publicada em O Povo e outra no Diário do Nordeste, ambos jornais de Fortaleza - Ceará. Observamos que, ao regularem a presença da enunciação no enunciado, as operações enunciativas criam diferentes graus de isenção ou comprometimento, tanto do enunciador quanto dos actantes do enunciado. Além disso, essas operações colaboram para a construção da identidade discursiva não somente do jornal, mas também dos actantes, que passam a ser vistos em função da imagem resultante da estruturação enunciativa de suas falas.

Franz Cumont, Astrologie

The publication of the fourth volume of the Bibliotheca Cumontiana, containing the minor works on astrology of the Belgian scholar, is certainly a very good piece of news for all the specialists of antiquity, Classicists and Orientalists as well. The interests and the researches of Cumont had in fact so many ramifications in different branches of the history of the ancient world that the present collection certainly will satisfy very many scholars who expected such a useful volume since a lon...

Why has a large Legionnaires’ disease outbreak been absent from public debate?

The Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that hit Portugal in November 2014 was the third largest worldwide and was declared a “great public health emergency”. Nonetheless, the Portuguese outbreak, despite killing 12 people and infecting 375 others did not promote extensive media coverage, nor did it make it into the political debate. We conducted a quantitative analysis of 83 news pieces on Legionella published in four national newspapers, and interviewed the journalists who covered this outbreak. The communication process was controlled by a small group of official sources and the outbreak was pushed away from news lineups due to two political scandals. The production of another news wave made the outbreak’s news wave to break prematurely.

Fake news. A continuation or rejection of the traditional news paradigm?

In the article, I analysed the problem of fake news in the context of the traditional paradigm of a news story. The traditional paradigm posits that, most of all, a piece of information is true. However in contemporary media, there exist pieces of information which are fabricated and untrue. It is not a new phenomenon, yet it has intensified in recent years. News stories are fabricated for entertainment, political, or commercial purposes. They are carriers of propaganda and profit. The essence of fake news is the intentional misleading of the receiver for achieving the above gains. It is difficult to verify their veracity, and identify fake news items due to their similarity to real pieces of news. That is why they are becoming a part of the media landscape in which we will probably have to exist.

THE EFFECTS OF TYPES OF ORAL TEXTS’ GENRES ON THE IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION

This study aims at investigating the effects of types of oral texts’ genres on listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. The participants of the study were 65 male and female EFL students which all of them from Issar institute in Nikshahr and Chabahar. In order to have homogeneous groups and real-intermediate level students, the first part of the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) containing 40 questions was performed. After the sampling procedure, the pretest was performed and then students were randomly assigned to two groups of control and experimental. The experimental group received a course encompassing the instruction of generic features including news with two genres, political and economic, for twenty sessions of instruction. The subjects in the control group listened to some pieces of news (without any specific generic features, mostly reports with ordinary people about routines). The results showed the experimental group had a better performance on the listening comprehension posttest.

Framing Autism: A Content Analysis of Five Major News Frames in U.S.-Based Newspapers

The portrayal of child autism-related news stories has become a serious issue in the United States, yet few studies address this from media framing perspective. To fill this gap in the literature, this study examined the applicability of a media framing scale (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000) for the deductive examination of autism-related news stories in U.S.-based newspapers. Under the theoretical framework of framing theory, a content analysis of news stories (N = 413) was conducted to investigate the presence of the five news frames using an established questionnaire. Differentiating between local and national news outlets, the following five news frames were measured: (a) attribution of responsibility, (b) human interest, (c) conflict, (d) morality, and (e) economic consequences. Findings revealed that news stories about autism most frequently fell within the human interest frame. Furthermore, the study shed light on how local and national newspapers might differ in framing autism-related news pieces and in their placement of the autism-related story within the newspaper (e.g., front page section, community section).

Information Construction of News Discourse Under the Perspective of Intertextuality

Intertextuality refers to the relationship of mutual penetration among texts, no text stands alone but is interlinked with the tradition that came before it and the context in which it is produced. As a genre of media report that conveys information, news discourse is characterized by its documentary, novelty, timeliness, and universality. Some news discourses reveal penetrability with others, causing intertextuality and providing a wider space to interpret them. Meanwhile, intertextuality also makes the narrative space optimization and discourse information complex or polysemy. Therefore, an accurate understanding of a piece of news depends on not only the coherence within a single text, but mutual interpretation among similar discourses. The distribution of news discourse information abides by tree structure, sometimes news understanding is related to human’s cognitive activities.

Media Agenda Setting Regarding Gun Violence before and after a Mass Shooting.

Gun violence is related to substantial morbidity and mortality with surrounding discussions framed and shaped by the media. This study’s objective was to explore national news media’s reporting of gun violence around a mass shooting. National news pieces were coded according to categories of gun violence, media frames, entities held responsible, responses, and reporting of the public heath approach. Individuals were held responsible for gun violence in 63% of pieces before and 32% after the shooting. Lawmakers were held responsible in 30% of pieces before and 66% after. Background checks were a proposed gun violence prevention method in 18% of pieces before and 55% after Sandy Hook, and lethality reduction of firearms was in 9% before and 57% after. Following a mass shooting, the media tended to hold government, not individuals, primarily responsible. The media often misrepresented the real picture of gun violence and key public health roles.

Problem preuzimanja i širenja vesti onlajn medijima u Republici Srpskoj - etički obrasci u periodu ekvivalenata

This paper gives a local view of how the online media in the Republika Srpska (RS) import and disseminate news content. The purpose of the paper was to examine the patterns of ethical conduct of online media in the news dissemination process. In this respect, Aldridge (2007) understanding of the importance of small media in the information age, the time frame that represents the platform paradigm and the research framework, has been used. The online journalism in the RS is in the age of equivalents (Craig, 2010), which basically comprises production of duplicate content and news. In this respect, the topic addresses plagiarism news according to the normative aspect of professional journalism. A piece of news is deemed a new, current media announcement, not necessarily a journalistic genre, which is imported by other online media, within three sections: informative news, entertainment news, and local news. Research design is based on the case study methodology using the content analysis technique and systematic news monitoring supported by Google Analytics. Each piece of news is determined as a unique case within a case study. The news monitoring elements relate to the time of the content posted along with the method and scope of importing media content. News dissemination is defined as the scope and duration of content in the daily media agenda of the main online media in the RS and the so-called unique small portals. Bearing in mind the recent periodic of online journalism, the prolonged duration of the equivalent stage of online journalism at the local level, described as the phenomenon of media lag in this paper, will be discussed.

Fake News in Social Networks

We model the spread of news as a social learning game on a network. Agents can either endorse or oppose a claim made in a piece of news, which itself may be either true or false. Agents base their decision on a private signal and their neighbors' past actions. Given these inputs, agents follow strategies derived via multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and receive utility from acting in accordance with the veracity of claims. Our framework yields strategies with agent utility close to a theoretical, Bayes optimal benchmark, while remaining flexible to model re-specification. Optimized strategies allow agents to correctly identify most false claims, when all agents receive unbiased private signals. However, an adversary's attempt to spread fake news by targeting a subset of agents with a biased private signal can be successful. Even more so when the adversary has information about agents' network position or private signal. When agents are aware of the presence of an adversary they re-optimize their strategies in the training stage and the adversary's attack is less effective. Hence, exposing agents to the possibility of fake news can be an effective way to curtail the spread of fake news in social networks. Our results also highlight that information about the users' private beliefs and their social network structure can be extremely valuable to adversaries and should be well protected.

Sentiment Analysis on Tweets about Diabetes: An Aspect-Level Approach.

In recent years, some methods of sentiment analysis have been developed for the health domain; however, the diabetes domain has not been explored yet. In addition, there is a lack of approaches that analyze the positive or negative orientation of each aspect contained in a document (a review, a piece of news, and a tweet, among others). Based on this understanding, we propose an aspect-level sentiment analysis method based on ontologies in the diabetes domain. The sentiment of the aspects is calculated by considering the words around the aspect which are obtained through N-gram methods (N-gram after, N-gram before, and N-gram around). To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we obtained a corpus from Twitter, which has been manually labelled at aspect level as positive, negative, or neutral. The experimental results show that the best result was obtained through the N-gram around method with a precision of 81.93%, a recall of 81.13%, and an F-measure of 81.24%.

Framing and Identity: How Mainland and Taiwan Media Represent Terrorist Attacks in China?

Loss of identity is a leading cause of terrorism and a common bewilderment of Mainland China and Taiwan. Cutting into the research by the news representation of Chinese terrorism incidents, this paper discusses a special identity issue in a special identity history. This paper adopts mixed methods, which are constructed by content analysis, framing discourses and frequency statistics. 111 pieces of related news are selected and doubly-coded into both “identity package” and “news framing”. The results show that the news representations inter-connect with the coexisting identity and confrontation between Mainland China and Taiwan.

Can More Pictures Bring More Readership?: An Examination of the “Picture Superiority Effect” in the News Consumption Process

Abstract “Picture superiority effect” refers to the notion that viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts. In this paper, the author studied the “Picture superiority effect” in the news consumption process in order to see if pictures have significant impact on the readers when they select news from the Internet. The study will be conducted by analyzing almost 8000 pieces of news from one Chinese news App. The study's academic contribution lies in the influence of “picture superiority effect” in the mass media domain.

Os efeitos de sentido das formas do discurso relatado em notícias

Partindo dos pressupostos de que o discurso e o sujeito são constitutivamente heterogêneos e de que as formas de discurso relatado estejam ligadas a tendências sociais estáveis de interpretação, este trabalho tem como objetivo principal analisar os efeitos de sentido que as diferentes formas do discurso relatado produzem em uma notícia publicada no site da revista Carta Capital e em outra publicada no site da revista Veja. As notícias são sobre o pronunciamento oficial da presidente Dilma Rousseff veiculado na televisão e no rádio no dia 23 de janeiro de 2013. Nesse sentido, ao comparar como o pronunciamento da presidente foi citado nas duas revistas, objetiva-se especificamente investigar e analisar se a seleção de uma forma de discurso relatado nessas notícias decorre da posição ideológica do órgão de imprensa.

"Faça um favor ao Brasil: adote um bandido"- a constituição dos sentidos sobre o sujeito adolescente em conflito com a lei no telejornal "SBT Brasil"

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2016v13n3p1351O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar os resultados de uma pesquisa em andamento sobre o adolescente em conflito com a lei e suas formas de representação nos meios midiáticos, através de uma reportagem transmitida, em fevereiro de 2014, pelo Telejornal “SBT Brasil”. A partir dos conceitos teóricos da Análise de Discurso francesa, especificamente desenvolvidos por Michel Pêcheux (2009), debruçamo-nos sobre a materialidade da língua, as condições de produção da reportagem e a posição discursiva ocupada pelos sujeitos, para desenvolvermos uma reflexão analítica sobre a retomada histórica que sustenta dizeres cristalizados sobre o lugar discursivo do adolescente. É no batimento entre a descrição e a interpretação que chegamos ao resultado conclusivo de que os efeitos de sentidos observados rememoram dizeres já-ditos que valorizam/defendem/legitimam a punição pelo viés do castigo desumanizado, bem como, promove o esquecimento da legislação que norteia as políticas para os adolescentes em conflito com a lei.

AN EXPLORATION OF THE REPRESENTATION OF IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN A SAMPLE FROM THE SPANISH PRESS

The number of women immigrating to Spain in search of a better life has increased in recent years. However, very few news items pay attention to the reasons why they emigrate. A corpus of 30 pieces of news related to immigrant women was collected from February 2012 to April 2013 from the digital version of the main Spanish newspapers El País, El Mundo and ABC. The main hypotheses in this research are: Immigrant women are not very visible in the Spanish press; they are mainly represented as vulnerable and as victims; and they are normally connected to social problems. To confirm or to disprove said hypotheses, this article employs critical discourse analysis, including visual grammar, to analyse the main topics of the pieces of news dealing with immigrant women, and the main linguistic and visual characteristics used to describe them. It transpires that immigrant women are portrayed in the Spanish press as dependent, passive and confined to their homes. Moreover, the majority of the articles on immigrant women associated them with prostitution. The partial representation of immigrant women observed in the corpus of examples does not favour the development of a society established on principles of democracy and equality. In this sense, it is necessary to rethink the depiction of immigrant women in the press, in order to question their role in modern-day migratory movements.

Exploring crucial aspects of diabetes and obesity

Exploring crucial aspects of diabetes and obesity