Online News Outlets Research Articles

‘It’s dangerous to put a number on them’. Media coverage of koalas during the 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia

Context The unprecedented scale and severity of the 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia were an environmental disaster, and koalas became the public face of the fires’ toll on wildlife. Aims We investigated the media stories on koalas during the fires to identify what was reported, and how the numbers of koalas killed by the fires were sourced and reported. Methods We searched for media articles published in major Australian print and online news outlets, local sources, press releases and international outlets for the terms ‘koala’, ‘fire’, ‘bushfire’, ‘emergency’, ‘disaster’ and ‘burn’, published between 15 October 2019 and 31 October 2020, and recorded any numbers of koalas given in those reports. This places our methods in a qualitative realm of investigation. Key results We reviewed 371 media articles on the bushfires and koalas in New South Wales (NSW). Almost half included an estimate of the numbers of koalas killed in NSW. Almost a third stated that koalas are going extinct in NSW, however almost two thirds did not mention that koalas were already in decline from threats other than fire. Conclusions We concluded that it was dangerous to put numbers on koalas. Misinformation, half-truths, and neglecting the important role of science and scientists, can erode public trust in the media and in science. Implications The obsession with numbers has left a legacy that can drown out the more considered narrative of science and lead to distortions of policy and management, as well as distract from other critical attributes of koala conservation.

Through The Looking-Glass: The Representation of Jordan and Portugal in Online-Media of Both Countries

Objectives: This article examines the media coverage in Jordan and Portugal about each other over four years (2018-21) to find out what are the subjects that the media of each country focus on, the most published stories, and the sources of these stories. Methods: A descriptive analysis method was used to evaluate 628 stories published in three online news outlets of both countries. Results: The study found that the Jordanian media published more stories about Portugal than the Portuguese media and the Jordanian media focused on sports subjects, especially football. On the other side, the Portuguese media focused on political subjects, but news about the Middle East referred to Jordan more than news related to Jordan, in particular. The dispute within the Jordanian royal family received the attention of the Portuguese press in its coverage of news from inside Jordan. In both countries, news agencies are the first source of stories. Conclusions: The results showed that the Jordanian media focused heavily on sports news related to the Portuguese national team and the player Cristiano Ronaldo, while political, economic, and even health news during the Covid-19 epidemic were few compared to sports. The Portuguese media focused more on political news than others, and the news related to the Middle East referred to Jordan more than the news about Jordan in particular, and this is linked to Jordan’s geographical location as a country located in the Middle East that shares its history and borders with Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

Media Communications as a Context for Imprinting Formation

The author of this article posits that media communications serve as a context for the formation of imprinting — a psychophysiological mechanism whereby impressions or images are etched into the brain, evolving into stable behavioral programs. The identification of these programs is facilitated through the analysis of media texts with a high attention coefficient. The study analyzed 200 media texts across various typological niches within the contemporary media system: online news outlets, social media platforms (VK, Odnoklassniki), and blogs, including the “Zen” platform. The findings indicate that different typological segments of the media system represent distinct behavioral programs. In online news outlets, behavioral programs are explicitly manifested in cognitive actions aimed at understanding processes related to Russia’s economic and political landscape. In social media, the prevailing behavioral program is encapsulated in a sentiment inspired by the phenomenology of serendipity. The “Zen” blog platform reveals imprinting through the categories of “irresponsibility,” “playfulness,” and “hooliganism.” In other blogs featuring high attention indices, imprinting is observed in the contemplation of professional issues related to activities in the digital space. The various typological niches of the media system are geared towards the formation of heterogeneous psychophysiological mechanisms, which transform into an axiological foundation that shapes diverse behavioral programs.

Abstract A164: Rural and religious differences in online news outlet headlines about HPV and HPV vaccines in Utah

Abstract Purpose: To evaluate the penetration of online HPV vaccine information in Utah, where HPV vaccination and completion rates are low, and uncover potential disparities by religiosity and rurality in the types of language used by news headlines in the social media ecosystem. Methods: We described the language used in local news outlets' headlines about HPV and HPV vaccines. We included headlines posted on Facebook from 23 news outlets within 6 counties (including high and low vaccination, rurality, and religiosity) from 2011-2023 to represent the public online discourse about HPV vaccination. We searched each news outlet’s Facebook page for eligible posts using 11 key terms (e.g., HPV, HPV vaccination) that were identified through literature review and refined with content experts, resulting in N=851 headlines. After removing duplicates, there were a total of n=531 unique headlines for analysis. Area-level (county) measures of rurality (2013 Rural and Urban Continuum Codes) and religiosity (Public Religion Research Institute 2020 Census) were coded for each post title based on the originating news outlet. We analyzed the language used in each headline. Differences in the valence of online discourse about HPV and HPV vaccination by rurality and religiosity were compared using summary statistics and t-tests. Linguistic analyses were conducted using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count and Stata 18. Results: Overall, urban areas were less religious than rural areas (28% unaffiliated in urban areas vs. 13-26% unaffiliated in rural areas, p<0.001). There were more headlines about HPV and HPV vaccination from news outlets in urban than rural areas (69.7% vs. 30.3%). Nearly 70% of HPV and HPV vaccine headlines came from the least religious areas—counties whose religiously unaffiliated populations ranged from 28%-32%. News outlets differed in how they disseminated information about HPV and HPV vaccines by rurality and religiosity. On average, news outlets in urban areas used more positive language than in rural areas (mean 2.04 vs. 1.28 words, p<0.01). Rural news outlets used more emotion-laden terms than those in urban areas (mean 1.2 vs. 0.6 words, p<0.01) and negative emotion was more prevalent among rural than urban headlines (mean 0.73 vs. 0.42 words, p=0.02). These observations were mirrored for areas with higher religiously unaffiliated populations demonstrating titles with more positive words (mean 2.05 vs. 1.27, p<0.01), less emotional words (mean 0.63 vs. 1.17 words, p<0.01), and less negative language (mean 0.42 vs. 0.73 words, p=0.01) compared to headlines in areas with lower proportions of religiously unaffiliated, respectively. Conclusions: The penetration of HPV and HPV vaccine information in rural and religious areas is less positive, more emotionally charged, and uses more negative emotional language than in urban areas. This may, in part, perpetuate the low HPV vaccine uptake in these regions. Citation Format: Echo L. Warner, Ida Tovar, Kaila Christini, Stephen Gubler, Becca Slagle, Jennifer Smith, Michelle Litchman, Wendy Birmingham, Deanna Kepka. Rural and religious differences in online news outlet headlines about HPV and HPV vaccines in Utah [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 17th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2024 Sep 21-24; Los Angeles, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2024;33(9 Suppl):Abstract nr A164.

Weathering Words: A Cross-linguistic Analysis of Metaphorical Frames of Climate Change Discourse in English and German Online News Outlets

Climate change is undeniably a major challenge of the 21st century and those to come. While scientists agree on this, the public does not as opinions range from climate change deniers to those who devote their lives to fighting it. News media play a crucial role in shaping the public’s opinion on climate change and as they have a significant influence on the public discourse. This paper offers a cross-linguistic comparison of conceptual climate change metaphors in online news outlets from four different countries and two languages. Using conceptual metaphor analysis, I identified prevalent source domains to conceptualize the causes, effects, and responses to climate change. Overall, I found three shared metaphorical frames: war, destination, and construction, as well as additional metaphors in each language. The analysis revealed war and destination as most dominant source domains through which effects and responses are framed. This suggests news media emphasize the severity of effects and urgency to respond through creating a threatening image of climate change, which we do have the power to fight. The pervasive use of these two metaphors in both languages suggest a common understanding climate change.

Shadows of the Empire/A New Hope

Online news outlets have published a fair amount of journalism concerning Isabel Fall's 2020 science fiction short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” later retitled “Helicopter Story.” Yet the highly polarized reception the story received has made up the bulk of the discourse. This is a tragic oversight, as the most interesting thing about “Helicopter Story” is not the online reaction to its original title but how the content of the story itself serves as an illustration of a dialectical history of gender in the United States. In Fall's story, gender is partially demystified by acknowledging the eradication of Indigenous cross-gender practices, racially imbricated plasticity, and the fusion of state and medical power that determines and shapes gender. Even so, some mystification remains. Gender is a reified social relation whose origins are an attempt to install binary biological sex. However, this reification does not result in the reinstallation of gender as ineluctable truth. Rather, it provides the opportunity for the expression of utopian desire, as theorized in the queer Marxism of Kevin Floyd or the dialectical literary criticism of Fredric Jameson, both of whom draw heavily from Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse when proposing that the only way out of reification is through. A proposed subgenre of science fiction, “speculative gender fiction,” is a literary form uniquely suited for exploring both the reification of gender and the utopian desire to escape from it.

Public Health Research in the News: An Exploratory Study of Topics, Coverage, and Open Access Status

Objectives: This study aims to identify and analyze the news outlets that reference research published by the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (FSPH). We analyzed the overall patterns of news sources, including the content type and overall coverage, the correlation with open access (OA) status, and the topics that received more attention in online news stories. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of news outlets that disseminate public health information, and the types of public health research referenced most often in the news. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study. The study population consisted of FSPH authors, the exposure was publishing journal articles by FSPH authors, and the outcome was news media attention. We compared the amount of media attention with otherstudies. We also compared open access journals versus commercially produced journals. We searched the Scopus database using an affiliation search to locate and retrieve the journal articles. Then we queried the Altmetric Explorer tool (altmetrics provider) for all the citations resulting from the Scopus search. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of publications from authors affiliated with the school of public health over five years (2015–2019). The searches were conducted in December 2021. We used the identifiers and the titles to compile the online news mention data and identify the titles featured in news outlets. The journal articles with news mentions and the news outlets that reference them were analyzed. The data were combined, cleaned up, and analyzed using Excel, and the subject analysis was produced using the VOSviewer software. Results: For the 2015–2019 time frame, 778 publications were published by the FSPH. A total of 144 (18.5%) were highlighted in 2,079 online news stories from 655 news outlets. We analyzed the overall dataset of news outlets according to the source, content type, subject area, and country of publication. We also determined the attention likelihood of open access articles compared to those with closed access. We performed a co-occurrence analysis of the MeSH terms the articles featured in news outlets. Discussion: Mentions in online news outlets can identify patterns and trends of attention and interest in research beyond academia. This bibliometric analysis helps to clarify the media outlets that distribute information on public health as well as the categories of research that are frequently featured in the media. The findings of this report, will help the library expand its research impact services and support the decision-making of leaders of public health schools for future publication and research strategy development directions.

You still want to have kids, right? Representation of childfree women in Indonesian leading online news outlets

This research aims to explore the childfree discourse constructed by the two leading online news outlets in Indonesia, namely Detik.com and Kompas.com. I argue that online news outlets construct a discourse that aims to discriminate childfree women and the representation of women in the issue of childfree is a media instrument to reproduce the ideology of pronatalism. By using the corpus assisted critical discourse studies method to analyze 137 news articles, this research found that online news outlets produce childfree discourse as a deviation, a source of problems, and a feminist agenda. In these discourses, childfree women are represented as selfish, cold, and incomplete individuals. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that online news outlets in Indonesia do not report the issue of childfree in a neutral and balanced manner. Furthermore, this research discussion seeks to uncover the role of ibuism, as a pronatalist ideology in the Indonesian context, behind the construction of these gendered discourses.

The recommended patient syndrome: Charting new frontiers.

Very important person (VIP) syndrome, or recommended patient syndrome (RPS), is a phenomenon in healthcare where well-intentioned efforts to enhance care inadvertently result in harm. Celebrities, physicians, and political leaders often receive preferential treatment, leading to potentially unnecessary interventions. This review delves into its causes, manifestations, consequences, real-life instances, prevention, and management, considering the shifting paradigm of recent advances in the medical field. We conducted a qualitative and critical review by searching databases such as PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar, as well as online news outlets, exploring available data and literature, including journal articles and news articles published at any time on VIP syndrome. Twenty articles were found relevant and analyzed. Manifestations of VIP syndrome range from over- to under-treatment, disrupting established healthcare systems. Consequences encompass increased costs, heightened risks, and diminished satisfaction for patients and healthcare teams. Real-life instances, exemplified by Michael Jackson's case, highlight unintended complications. Prevention strategies advocate transparent resource allocation and adherence to established guidelines. A written VIP patient management plan, involving the hospital's command center, security, and press spokesperson, is crucial. Proposed directives underscore the importance of valuing medical skills, teamwork, effective communication, and resisting external pressures. This short communication underscores the necessity of systematically addressing VIP syndrome to ensure fair, ethical, and optimal healthcare delivery. By addressing this issue in an organized way, healthcare providers can work towards treating all patients equally, following ethical guidelines, and providing the best possible care to everyone, regardless of their status or influence. Future research should focus on developing standardized protocols for managing VIP patients, incorporating ethical considerations and evidence-based practices.

News in Motion: A Quantitative Analysis of Incremental News Updates by Flemish Online News Outlets

ABSTRACT Online news has rapidly claimed its place in the media landscape, and with it came the practice of incremental news updates being integrated in existing content. Yet, considering this fluid news production, researchers have been struggling with freezing the news flow and capturing the different article versions, implying that incremental news updates form an understudied phenomenon. Therefore, we conduct a large-scale study on the usage of online news updates by applying regular interval content capturing. Using in-house developed software, all 291,666 articles and 197,979 associated updates written by six leading Flemish news outlets in a period of two years (2019–2021) are collected. It is examined how commonly and in what ways updates are applied. Furthermore, a subset of 11,293 articles is manually analyzed to examine the reason(s) for applying updates. Results indicate that updates are commonly applied across all news outlets and topics. 35% of the articles are updated at least once and an updated article is updated 1.94 times on average. Approximately 4.2% of textual changes are made to correct objective or subjective errors, typically without any communication towards the reader. Therefore, we argue that transparency regarding news updates should be enhanced.

Transcending information delivery: how Malaysian online news portals report on COVID-19 crisis response

Malaysia has experienced its most significant socio-economic setback since the outbreak of COVID-19. Amid this unprecedented health and humanitarian crisis, various stakeholders, including the government, businesses, and community members, generously provided livelihood assistance in various forms to help affected Malaysians, alleviating issues such as hunger, food insecurity, and cash flow constraints. However, the impact of these efforts would not have been as profound without the media’s coverage. During the pandemic lockdown, over 80% of Malaysians turned to smartphones and online news to stay abreast of COVID-19 updates. Online news outlets evidently played a pivotal role in safeguarding livelihoods. Drawing upon crisis-response reporting and framing theory, this study examined COVID-19 response reporting in leading Malaysian online news portals. The researchers content analyzed a total of 860 news articles from 2020 through 2021. The findings indicate that these portals not only provided timely information on livelihood relief efforts but also vigorously advocated for more mature pandemic-response policies. Additionally, practical analyses were featured to inspire better-informed decision making during challenging times. However, several limitations were linked to the lack of more balanced and “softer” news coverage. The findings are poised to enrich the literature on little-explored crisis-response reporting.

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE FACE OF COVID-19: AN OVERVIEW

This study aims to understand the relationship between the various disciplines of social sciences and their application with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a known fact that Covid-19 has driven the education sector in particular towards an uncharted territory, one which urges the educational institutions of the world to resort to the method of online learning as an alternative. In observing the implications and importance of social sciences specifically, in reference to the pandemic, the study seeks to investigate the implementation of such social studies within the landscape of a global health crisis. The methods by which the study is conducted include the reading of various materials from online sources, such as online news outlets, educational websites, and government websites, as well as the analysis of journal articles and books which relate to the fields that had been specified. There are 12 programs under the direct supervision of The National University of Malaysia Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities however, for the purpose of the study, four programs were chosen for the study to revolve around, namely Psychology, Political Science, Social Work, Anthropology, and Sociology. The author found that there exists a recurring theme among these various Social Sciences programmes, which is the presence of real-world applications, especially as a direct answer to Covid-19. This proves that Social Sciences are not merely conceptual in nature, but are also utilized in a more hands-on, realistic term. The study highlights these applications as concrete proof that Social Sciences are fundamental in a civilized, healthy, and functional society.

Identification of Positive and Negative Tweets

Abstract: With the development of the Internet, people can obtain and share information almost instantly from a wide array of sources, for example, online news outlets and fast-growing social networks. Over the past few decades, the explosive growth of textual data far outpaces human beings’ speed of understanding its content. Indeed, we have seen the emergence of new types of textual data that reflect social interactions in online settings. The production of this socially-generated content is accelerated by the wide adoption of social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! Answers, and Reddit. Text summarization helps in reducing the size of a text while preserving its information content. Text Summarization can be derived as shortening the source text into a version that it’s information content and overall meaning is preserved. It is very difficult for human beings to manually summarize large documents of text. Sentiment analysis on the other hand is the process of computationally identifying and categorizing opinions expressed in text to clarify someone’s’ attitude towards a topic is positive or else negative or even neutral. In this paper we will discuss the use Extractive summarization for the text summarization followed by SVM-algorithm for sentiment analysis.

Femicide in Mexico. Who Are the Slain Women According to News Media? A Quantitative Study of Social Representations of Victims and Perpetrators.

Research on femicide news revealed discriminatory narratives against the victims in specific cases and social contexts. This article uses a quantitative approach to analyze the news content that serves to create social representations of victims and perpetrators. We propose a methodology based on examining independent elements in the descriptions, identifying extratextual patterns, and providing the data to compare the social representations of intimate partner violence (IPV), familiar, and non-IPV femicides. Three online news outlets were analyzed from July 2014 to December 2017, creating a corpus of 2,527 articles. The results revealed that it is more common to create negative representations of victims than negative representations of the perpetrators.

Lexical borrowing in journalism in a time of political crisis

ABSTRACT This article examines lexical borrowing from Russian that takes the form of loanwords and loan translations, often in connection with an explanation of the concept, in Finnish journalistic writing. The material consists of news articles that were published in three major Finnish online news outlets in the three-month period (one month per news outlet) that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. During that time, with interest in Russian foreign politics growing and political tensions rising, news reporting on Russia also increased. The present study focuses on what was borrowed from Russian during that time and the kinds of translation strategies that were used by journalists to convey the meanings of Russian concepts to Finnish readers. Loanwords and loan translations are analyzed qualitatively and discussed from the point of view of the context of their use from December 2021 – February 2022. The results show that loanwords were not numerous and often did not appear to aim to emphasize the foreign aspect.

Ketika Fakta Bukanlah Kebenaran: Peran Media Daring dalam Amplifikasi Misinformasi Kesehatan di Era Pandemi Covid-19

During the Covid-19 epidemic, people must not only escape getting infected with the virus, but also avoid being targeted by hoaxes. In cyberspace, there are several topics of misinformation ranging from conspiracy theories to claims of finding anti-corona medications. Various studies have discovered that during a pandemic, social media is the mechanism through which health misinformation begins and spreads. However, there is a lack of data on misinformation disseminated by other media, particularly verified media. This study intends to bridge a research gap by investigating more into how claims of traditional medicine healing Covid-19 are publicized by Indonesian online news outlets. This study did a content analysis of 14 media articles from various online media about anti-corona herbal remedies affiliated to the 'Covid-19 Herbal Research Team for the Nation.' The study's findings suggest that in reporting on anti-corona medications, the majority of the media have abandoned the discipline of verification in the news production process. The media has amplified the lies of the 'Covid-19 Herbal Research Team for the Nation' through misleading headlines and reports that only feature sole claims.

Chinese Anti-Westernism on social media

The Chinese Communist Party and its supporters are increasingly using social media platforms to shape China’s public image. This online image is a means of strengthening domestic nationalism and of projecting “soft power” abroad. This paper examines various forms of anti-Westernism that are central to this image-making. It analyzes several recent topics—the Belt and Road Initiative, climate change, the COVID-19 vaccine, the Beijing Olympics, and the conflict in Ukraine—on the r/Sino subreddit page of Reddit and compares them with two online news outlets, the South China Morning Post and China Daily. The paper focuses on how these media frame the contest between a rising China and a failing West, so creating a discourse that competes with the negative portrayals of China outside the country. The paper contrasts the aggressive strengthening of China’s image against the West on social media with more sober accounts of the same topics in China’s official media and in commercial news outlets. The contribution of the paper is to document an emerging online anti-Westernism that is playing an increasing role in the changing geopolitical landscape.

Investment and Risk Management with Online News and Heterogeneous Networks

Stock price movements in financial markets are influenced by large volumes of news from diverse sources on the web, e.g., online news outlets, blogs, social media. Extracting useful information from online news for financial tasks, e.g., forecasting stock returns or risks, is, however, challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratios of such online information. Assessing the relevance of each news article to the price movements of individual stocks is also difficult, even for human experts. In this article, we propose the Guided Global-Local Attention-based Multimodal Heterogeneous Network (GLAM) model, which comprises novel attention-based mechanisms for multimodal sequential and graph encoding, a guided learning strategy, and a multitask training objective. GLAM uses multimodal information, heterogeneous relationships between companies and leverages significant local responses of individual stock prices to online news to extract useful information from diverse global online news relevant to individual stocks for multiple forecasting tasks. Our extensive experiments with multiple datasets show that GLAM outperforms other state-of-the-art models on multiple forecasting tasks and investment and risk management application case-studies.

Plant pest invasions, as seen through news and social media

Invasion by exotic pests into new geographic areas can cause major disturbances in forest and agricultural systems. Early response can greatly improve containment efforts, underscoring the importance of collecting up-to-date information about the locations where pest species are being observed. However, existing invasive species databases have limitations in both extent and rapidity. The spatial extent is limited by costs and there are delays between species establishment, official recording, and consolidation. Local online news outlets have the potential to provide supplemental spatial coverage worldwide and social media has the potential to provide direct observations and denser historical data for modeling. Gathering data from these online sources presents its own challenges and their potential contribution to historical tracking of pest invasions has not previously been tested. To this end, we examine the practical considerations for using three online aggregators, the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT), Google News, and a commercial media listening platform, Brandwatch, to support pest biosurveillance. Using these tools, we investigate the presence and nature of cogent mentions of invasive species in these sources by conducting case studies of online news and Twitter excerpts regarding two invasive plant pests, Spotted Lanternfly and Tuta absoluta. Our results using past data demonstrate that online news and social media may provide valuable data streams to supplement official sources describing pest invasions.

Assessing the COVID-19 infodemic and misinformation among university students in Morocco

The aim of the study was to investigate the implication of university students in Covid-19-related misinformation dissemination in Morocco using an online questionnaire sent out to various faculties and online student groups around the country. A total of 295 university students responded to the questionnaire. The majority of respondents 269/295 (91.2%) claimed to have come across misinformation during the pandemic. The main source of misinformation was online news outlets (77.2%). The most frequent subjects of misinformation had to do with confinement and curfews (24.2%), the politics around the pandemic (17.2%) and the Covid-19 vaccine (16.6%). Some 36.6% of respondents reported having transmitted misinformation at least once. Overall, the difference between medical and non-medical students’ implication in misinformation dissemination did not reach statistical significance (Khi-square = 6.37, p=0.095). Misinformation, in particular, among university students has potentially been an obstacle to satisfactory Covid-19 response. University students should be a focus of interventions aimed at combatting misinformation.