Popular News Websites Research Articles

Representation of Victim and Perpetrator in Adelina Lisao’s Abuse Case in Malaysian Online News Articles

This research analyses the representation of victim and perpetrator as social actors and its argumentation strategies from Malaysian online news articles surrounding the tragic case of Adelina Lisao, an Indonesian domestic worker who lost her life in Malaysia due to abuse by her employer. Employing a qualitative research approach, the data is systematically collected with keywords to identify relevant news articles pertinent to the case: "Adelina Lisao” and “Ambika Shan”. This research utilises the Social Actor’s Network (SAN) and the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework, specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), to examine 39 online news articles about the case from the most popular Malaysian news website in 2023, Malaysiakini. The findings revealed that Adelina Lisao was mostly represented as a passive receiver of the abuse, while Ambika Shan’s role as a perpetrator was mostly backgrounded. The findings contribute to a better understanding of how social actors are portrayed on online websites and the argumentation strategies within the context of domestic worker abuse cases in Malaysia. Thus, it acknowledges the importance of language in online news discourse in shaping public perceptions, particularly regarding domestic workers in Malaysia as evidenced by the representation of victim-perpetrator dynamics in such cases.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Influence Elections: Analyzing the Large Language Models (LLMs) Political Bias

Abstract The rise of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini has raised concerns about their potential political biases and the implications for information dissemination and user influence. This study aims to measure the degree of political bias inherent in major LLMs by analyzing their responses to a standardized set of questions rating the quality and bias of popular news websites. Employing a systematic methodology, we queried both free and paid versions of ChatGPT and Gemini to rate news outlets on criteria such as authority, credibility, and objectivity. Results revealed that while all LLMs displayed a tendency to score left-leaning news sources higher, there was a notable difference between free and premium models in their assessment of subjectivity and bias. Furthermore, a comparison between the models indicated that premium versions offered more nuanced responses, suggesting a greater awareness of bias. The findings suggest that LLMs, despite their objective façade, are influenced by biases that can shape public opinion, underlining the necessity for efforts to mitigate these biases. This research highlights the importance of transparency and the potential impact of LLMs on the political landscape.

Time bomb or gold mine? Policy, sustainability and media representations of tropical peatlands in Malaysia

Tropical peatlands represent an acute site of contested development on the front line of global climate change and action. Media analysis reveals how and why these ecosystems are understood in the context of local and national discourse, and the implications of these representations for peatland policy-making. In this study, we provide an instructive account of media representations of tropical peatlands in Malaysia – a country home to 6% of the world’s tropical peat by area and 12% by magnitude of the peat carbon pool. Set against an examination of the policy context for peatland media representations, we analyse how this critical ecosystem is framed in Malaysian media, and explore how these representations cast light on current sustainability-related policy and management debates. Drawing on media framing methodology, we analysed three English language newspapers (News Straits Times, The Star and Borneo Post) and one popular news website (Malaysiakini) from 1995 to 2018. From a sample of 1359 news articles, we found four dominant frames: development, conservation/protection, sustainable development and fire/haze. Within these frames, a number of key themes emerged including ecological benefits, community livelihoods, threats to peatland, integrated management approaches, and the value of peatland research. Our findings also reveal a polarising representation present across the study period – peatlands portrayed as a ‘time-bomb’ of ecological destruction and as a ‘gold mine’ in terms of their opportunities for development. We argue that contrasting interpretations of the sustainable development of peatlands may serve to obfuscate rather than facilitate current peatland policy discourses. Finally, we conclude that the fate of Malaysian peatlands hinges on recognising the localised challenges faced by peatland communities. We urge policy makers to consider food systems transformation approaches to move beyond a vision that relies entirely on drainage-based development.

On Optimality of Long Document Classification using Deep Learning

Document classification is effective with elegant models of word numerical distributions. The word embeddings are one of the categories of numerical distributions of words from the WordNet. The modern machine learning algorithms yearn on classifying documents based on the categorical data. The context of interest on the categorical data is posed with weights and the sense and quality of the sentences is estimated for sensible classification of documents. The focus of the current work is on legal and criminal documents extracted from the popular news channels, particularly on classification of long length legal and criminal documents. Optimization is the essential instrument to bring the quality inputs to the document classification model. The existing models are studied and a feasible model for the efficient document classification is proposed. The experiments are carried out with meticulous filtering and extraction of legal and criminal records from the popular news web sites and preprocessed with WordNet and Text Processing contingencies for efficient inward for the learning framework.

Automatic Web Page Classification System with Improved Accuracy

Nowadays, the Internet contain s a wide variety of online documents, making finding useful information about a given subject impossible, as well as retrieving irrelevant pages. Web document and page recognition software is useful in a variety of fields, including news, medicine, and fitness, research, and information technology. To enhance search capability, a large number of web page classification methods have been proposed, especially for news web pages. Furthermore existing classification approaches seek to distinguish news web pages while still reducing the high dimensionality of features derived from these pages. Due to the lack of automated classification methods, this paper focuses on the classification of news web pages based on their scarcity and importance. This work will establish different models for the identification and classification of the web pages. The data sets used in this paper were collected from popular news websites. In the research work we have used BBC dataset that has five predefined categories. Initially the input source can be preprocessed and the errors can be eliminated. Then the features can be extracted depend upon the web page reviews using Term frequency-inverse document frequency vectorization. In the work 2225 documents are represented with the 15286 features, which represents the tf-idf score for different unigrams and bigrams. This type of the representation is not only used for classification task also helpful to analyze the dataset. Feature selection is done by using the chi-squared test which will be in the task of finding the terms that are most correlated with each of the categories. Then the pointed features can be selected using chi-squared test. Finally depend upon the classifier the web page can be classified. The results showed that list has obtained the highest percentage, which reflect its effectiveness on the classification of web pages.

Paradoxes of the Media Sphere during COVID-19 Epidemic

Life has offered humanity a unique experiment of experience a real threat and an unprecedented reaction to in the form of self-isolation. Media communication has a crucial role in this situation. The research focuses on the analysis of the media sphere dynamics during COVID-19 pandemic on the example of popular local news website. Data on publication activity, views and comments were collected from January 22 to July 19. An unexpected and paradoxical scene is observed. As the epidemiologic situation worsens, journalists write less about COVID-19 and users demonstrate less interest and emotions in this topic too. It was revealed that user reactions are mostly caused by messages about lockdown, bans and restrictive measures rather than on the epidemiologic reports and details. The article discusses two periods which are characterized by different behavior if users and journalists. At first, the unique uncertainty situation generates great interest and emotional response to information about coronavirus. So, users and authors are guided by news about pandemic from Europe and China. Later understanding of possible risks displaces interest in the topic and reduce the degree of emotions. Moscow context becomes a guide in perception of pandemic as a stressful situation. In none of these periods the local epidemiological situation didn`t play a crucial role in determining of the reaction of the media sphere. Qualitative analysis of comments revealed high user aggression, especially during the first months of coronavirus pandemic. Also, three groups of commentators were identified which differ in their attitudes towards the problem of coronavirus.

Επίδοξος ληστής, ιδιοκτήτης κοσμηματοπωλείου και δεύτερο άτομο: Αναπαραστάσεις δρώντων σε άρθρα ειδησεογραφικών σάιτ για τον θάνατο του Ζακ Κωστόπουλου

This paper aims at analyzing the representations of Zak Kostopoulos and the two main persons accused of his death in the centre of Athens in September 2018. The data includes all relevant articles published in the first five days after Kostopoulos’ death in five popular news websites. Following van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework, the findings suggest that different strategies are followed for the social actors involved, suggesting a lack of balance, despite individual differences.

Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries

Migration is one of the most pressing, divisive issues in global politics today, and media play a crucial role in how communities understand and respond. This study examines how UK newspapers ( n = 974) and popular news websites ( n = 1044) reported on asylum seekers throughout 2017. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by examining the ‘new normal’ of daily news coverage in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. Second, by looking at how asylum seekers from different regions are represented. The content analysis finds significant variations in how asylum seekers are reported, including terminology use and topics they are associated with. The article also identifies important commonalities in how all asylum seekers are represented – most notably, the dominance of political elites as sources across all media content. It argues that Entman’s ‘cascade network model’ can help to explain this, with elites in one country able to influence transnational reports.

The Emergence of a News Website Ecosystem: An Exploratory Study of Hespress

ABSTRACT This paper examines the emergence of a news ecosystem, focusing on Hespress, Morocco’s first, largest, and most popular news website and its current economic success. My analysis investigates Hespress’s emergence and growth into a significant source for news content, reaching an unprecedented number of readers in Morocco and abroad. This paper argues that the success of Hespress’s business model is grounded in a particularly well-developed understanding of social media, the changing habits of digital readers, and a strategic combination of investigative reporting and curated user-generated content. My findings, then, show how Hespress used a strategy that can serve as a sustainable revenue model which was diversified to include other sources of revenue such as e-commerce, branded events, and native advertising, combined with distribution strategies that rely heavily on social and other digital platforms.

User comments across platforms and journalistic genres

ABSTRACTThis study introduces a comparative approach to study user comments on the same news content across online platforms while distinguishing between soft and hard news genres. Empirical analysis focuses on Israel’s popular news website Ynet. Using automated tools, we scraped 17,347 comments to analyze differences in the quantity, length, and topics of comments that were posted through Ynet’s comments section, Facebook Comment Plugin, and Facebook page. Our findings reveal that commenting patterns vary greatly across platforms and news genres. Specifically, the number of comments posted on Ynet’s Facebook page is significantly higher than the two other commenting platforms (for both hard and soft news), but these comments are shorter and more emotional. We discuss these findings in relation to the notion of ‘context collapse’ in social media, and argue that one of the outcomes of the convergence between news content and social media is the augmentation of consensual national sentiment.

Lateral Surveillance in Singapore

With the high Internet penetration rate, and the dense saturation of audio-visual-capturing mobile smartphones among its citizens, Singapore provides a ripe technological infrastructure for a surveillance society. Its citizens have been serendipitously capturing, on photo or video, socially undesirable and controversial incidents of daily living. Widespread adoption and use of social media have enhanced the viewership of these behaviours captured, and provided a platform for responses of criticisms.Panopticism, in the modern day context, is used as a metaphor to describe the effect of surveillance by authorities that shapes and manipulates social behaviour. Lateral surveillance is an opposite of panopticism, which portrays the impact of surveillance of the few, by the unseen many. This study explored the perception and impact of these activities on citizens’ social behaviours. Respondents were questioned on their awareness of surveillance in different milieu of their daily lives, such as commuting, driving, interactions in public spaces, and checking into, or uploading of photos onto social media, and its impacts on their social behaviours in those public spaces.This study recruited a sample of 223 university students, aged between 19 and 24 years, comprising of both genders, to undergo an online survey. These students were directed to an online survey, which did not capture identifiable information, by the authors who have access to the students at their university.Data collected provided descriptive statistics of the awareness and impact of panopticism, and lateral surveillance, by media-rich and media-savvy young citizens. Comparisons were made between panopticism versus lateral surveillance’s effect on social behavior. This study found that lateral surveillance had a more powerful effect on social behaviours, contributed significantly by the presence and usage of publicity channels such as FaceBook, and other local popular news websites.

Homophily, Close Friendship, and Life Satisfaction among Gay, Lesbian, Heterosexual, and Bisexual Men and Women

Friends play important roles throughout our lives by providing expressive, instrumental, and companionate support. We examined sexual orientation, gender, and age differences in the number of friends people can rely on for expressive, instrumental, and companionate support. Additionally, we examined the extent to which people relied on same-gender versus cross-gender friends for these types of support. Participants (N = 25,185) completed a survey via a popular news website. Sexual orientation differences in number of same-gender and cross-gender friends were generally small or non-existent, and satisfaction with friends was equally important to overall life satisfaction for all groups. However, the extent to which people’s friendship patterns demonstrated gender-based homophily varied by sexual orientation, gender, and age. Young adult gay and bisexual men, and to some extent bisexual women and older bisexual men, did not conform to gendered expectations that people affiliate primarily with their own gender.

User experience with web browsing on small screens: Experimental investigations of mobile-page interface design and homepage design for news websites

The efficiency of web surfing with a smartphone depends heavily on how well a website is structured. With the goal of understanding the effects of mobile-page and homepage designs on small-screen devices, we conducted two experimental studies to examine how users evaluated interface designs that are widely used on mobile news websites. We found that the designs for mobile news pages and the structures for website homepages can have a significant impact on perceived ease of use, reading time, and the overall reading experience. Based on the evaluation results and the analysis of the current interface design for popular mobile news websites, we developed two important guidelines for mobile news websites: (1) the single-page design is favored over the multi-page and zooming designs for displaying text-based information, and (2) a homepage with a thumbnail design facilitates information processing better than the progressive and list-view designs. Our research provides valuable empirical evaluations that help interface designers understand the potential impact of various interface designs on user experience. We also identified several directions related to interface design for future investigation.

Karmic Cascades

The content ranking system of reddit.com, the English language Internet’s most popular social news website, plays a large but often unnoticed role in shaping what users see and how they think. By pairing informational cascade theory with textual analysis, I argue that the “karma” system elevates particular forms of content over others and generates numerical cues that unconsciously guide users’ judgments about said content and about the world. By drawing on Heidegger’s account of modern technology, I argue that the karma system both symptomatizes and engenders an ontological perspective according to which things in general are taken as available, evaluable, and disposable.

Kickstarting Scholarship: Crowdsourcing as a Historical Tool

Kickstarting Scholarship: Crowdsourcing as a Historical Tool

Red-Hot and Ice-Cold Web Ads: The Influence of Web Ads’ Warm and Cool Colors on Click-Through Rates

A field study compared the click-through rates of box and banner web ads with red and blue color schemes using data from more than 1.5 million ad impressions from 12 months of traffic on a popular news website. For box ads, a red (versus blue) color scheme generated substantially higher click-through rates, but for banner ads the effect of color was less pronounced. Consistent with research on color and attention, ads with a red color scheme elicited a greater number of responses. This finding also suggests, though, that habituation to certain types of ads, such as banner ads, can attenuate the effect of ad attributes.

Building Mobile News Aggregation Application with Yahoo Pipes

With the development of Mobile Internet, more and more people read news through Native App on their mobile equipment. The shortage of Native App news client is that it cant assemble news from different sources. This paper presented mobile application named TopNews, which is built based on Yahoo Pipes. It combines top news from several popular news websites. Building with HTML5 and jQuery mobile, it is no longer necessary for user to install any Native App in order to read news.

Personalized news recommendation via implicit social experts

Personalized news recommendation has become a promising research direction as the Internet provides fast access to real-time information around the world. A variety of news recommender systems based on different strategies have been proposed to provide news personalization services for online news readers. However, little research work has been reported on utilizing the implicit “social” factors (i.e., the potential influential experts in news reading community) among news readers to facilitate news personalization. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of integrating content-based methods, collaborative filtering and information diffusion models by employing probabilistic matrix factorization techniques. We propose PRemiSE, a novel Personalized news Recommendation framework via implicit Social Experts, in which the opinions of potential influencers on virtual social networks extracted from implicit feedbacks are treated as auxiliary resources for recommendation. We evaluate and compare our proposed recommendation method with various baselines on a collection of news articles obtained from multiple popular news websites. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our method, particularly, on handling the so-called cold-start problem.

A New Impetus for the Fight Against Corruption

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Analysis by Jerome Doyon based on:- Ren Zhongyuan, (1) ... (Systematic separation of powers and ensuring autonomous supervision of the anticorruption fight), Xin shiji, 31 December 2012.- Zhang Weiying, (2) ... (Two choices for the fight against corruption), speech during the second session of the Jingjiguangcha Bao annual conference on reforms in China, held on 19 December in Beijing, reported by Xinlang Caijing, 19 December 2012.- Chen Baocheng, (3) ... (New anticorruption dynamics), Xin shiji, 31 December 2012.- Hu Shuli, (4) ... (Ease and difficulties in the anticorruption fight), Xin shiji, 17 December 2012.- Yang Minzhi, (5) ... (Liming powers and then resuming the anticorruption fight), Caijing, 10 December 2012.- Wang Jing, (6) ... (Advances in Guangdong's policy of 'the Party's strict supervision'), Xin shiji, 7 December 2012.The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have opened new chapter in the history of anticorruption struggles in the People's Republic. The dismissal of Li Chuncheng, deputy Party chief of Sichuan, 22 days after his inclusion as an alternate member of the Party's Central Committee illustrates how times have changed. Never in the past ten years has an alternate member been dismissed so quickly. Xi Jinping's new eight rules for rectifying cadres' behaviour - especially the one simplifying the style of official meetings and limiting extravagance in receptions - also symbolise this trend.!7)While corruption is an old phenomenon, Ren Zhongyuan notes new initiatives that came about in 2012. The Party leadership appears increasingly aware of the extent of the problem and the consequences for its own future if nothing is done. Besides, some major cases such as the Bo Xilai affair are particularly highlighted, despite their rarity. Xin Shiji notes that Bo was only the third Politburo member to be dismissed since 1992. The Internet and microblogs have central place in the anticorruption fight, which raises the issue of the use of such information and its interaction with the CCP's internal mechanisms.Leaders' awareness and pressure from the InternetGiven the rising number of cases and steep inflation of sums involved, corruption among cadres constitutes major challenge for the Party's new leadership. According to Yang Minzhi, former head of the Hunan provincial discipline inspection commission, the central commission's report to the 18th Party Congress noted 643,759 corruption cases between November 2007 and June 2012. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Blue Book on Fighting Corruption and Upholding Integrity, national-level supervision organs received as many as 1,345,814 complaints in 2011 alone.Zhang Weiying notes that on the popular news website Baidu Xinwen, the number of articles tackling the anticorruption topic rose from 11,900 in 2003 to 76,200 in 2004 and reached 246,000 articles in 2010. Similar evolution was evident on the People's Daily website.The number of corruption cases, measures to deal with the scourge, and media reports on such affairs has been rising. This coincides with increasing awareness in the top leadership, as confirmed by former General Secretary Hu Jintao at the 18th Party Congress, when he declared that corruption was a matter of life and death for the Party and the country. Zhang Weiying comments ironically on this assessment with popular formula: Inaction will kill the country but the anticorruption campaign will kill the Party. Even though, to him, the country is not in danger, it is time to engage in saving the Party through frontal attack on corruption in its ranks.In Zhang's view, corruption has not only grown exponentially, but its nature has also changed over the past ten years. In the spirit of Kellee Tsai's work, Zhang describes the passage from reforming and value-adding corruption to conservative and counterproductive one. …

Compressions in Ironic Headlines Referring to Politicians of the USA and Lithuania

In the article the scientific model of conceptual blending (developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier) is applied to the analysis of ironic headlines. It is argued that irony’s ability to make use of this mechanism partially accounts for the use of ironic references in news discourse. Irony is used as a means to reveal the compressions created via blending. An ironist employs the rules of blending to present a variety of eye-catching and brief headlines that contain compressions of Time, Space, Part-Whole, Role-Value, Intentionality, and Analogy/Disanalogy that are compressed into Uniqueness. The multiple compressions of an ironic reference do not only enable the ironist to communicate complex ideas and implications at the scale of human understanding but also facilitate the economy of space (i.e. the complex conceptual integration networks operate in a way that brings elements from a variety of mental input spaces into one blend). An overview of the Vital Relations and their compressions is supported by a number of ironic news headlines collected from popular Lithuanian and American online news websites.