Traditional News Organizations Research Articles

Contextualization: A Path to Chinese Traditional News Media’s Integration Into Social Media

Meyrowitz’s media context theory proposes that new media and their contexts will lead to new behaviors. This article adopts media context theory as a framework and utilizes a textual analysis approach to analyze what Meyrowitz termed middle region behaviors and the contextualization strategies of the traditional Chinese news media (<em>People’s Daily</em>) on the social media platform Weibo. The findings reveal three of <em>People’s Daily</em>’s Weibo news’ innovation strategies: the middle regionalization of news contexts (live news, vlog news, chatbox news); personalized production of important news (Weibo commentary, user-produced news); and equal dialogue with the public (daily greetings, holiday greetings, popularizing science). The study also indicates that traditional news media can utilize social media to consolidate communication effectiveness and reconstruct their credibility while actively participating in social governance. In light of these findings, we think that the “contextualization” strategies employed by <em>People’s Daily</em> on the Weibo platform offer meaningful possibilities for traditional news organizations’ integration into social media, such as exploring innovative approaches to news presentation, emphasizing audience interaction, appropriately providing “non-news content” for the audience, and maintaining a commitment to objectivity and fairness in news reporting.

Countering Fake News in Pakistan: Challenges Faced by Newsrooms and Regulators

Muhammad Nasir Butt, Muhammad Riaz, Abdul Waheed Rabbani Countering Fake News in Pakistan: Challenges Faced by Newsrooms and RegulatorsAbstractThe scourge of ‘Fake News' continues to plague our information environment; governments worldwide are taking various steps to counter this. Since the General Elections 2016 in the US, traditional news organizations have written widely on Fake news Reporting & Even Worldwide a debate started to make strategies to counter fake news after that Many Countries adopted legislative measures to handle this including Pakistan, Recent Researches have investigated damages of Fake News in the Society but they lack of reasons What Challenges Newsroom and Regulators face in Countering Fake news in Pakistan. Therefore this Research aims to study the Issues and Hurdles faced by Newsrooms and Regulators in Pakistan that lead to failure of Combating fake news in Country. The Study Uses Mix Method, Content based on Fake News of Pakistan's Top 4 News Channels Geo News ARY, BOL and Samma will be Analysed Comprehensively for the Period of Six Months and then in-depth interviews with the Director News of the All Channels, Director General Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, Representative of PTA and 4 Victims of the Fake News damages will be Conducted. The Study will conclude with the Challenges faced by Newsroom and Regulatory Authorities with the Suggestions how to combat fake News in Pakistan.

Adam Adadelta Optimization based bidirectional encoder representations from transformers model for fake news detection on social media

Social platform have disseminated the news in rapid speed and has been considered an important news resource for many people over worldwide because of easy access and less cost benefits when compared with the traditional news organizations. Fake news is the news deliberately written by bad writers that manipulates the original contents and this rapid dissemination of fake news may mislead the people in the society. As a result, it is critical to investigate the veracity of the data leaked via social media platforms. Even so, the reliability of information reported via this platform is still doubtful and remains a significant obstacle. As a result, this study proposes a promising technique for identifying fake information in social media called Adam Adadelta Optimization based Deep Long Short-Term Memory (Deep LSTM). The tokenization operation in this case is carried out with the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) approach. The measurement of the features is reduced with the assistance of Kernel Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and the top-N attributes are chosen by employing Renyi joint entropy. Furthermore, the LSTM is applied to identify false information in social media, with Adam Adadelta Optimization, which comprises a combo of Adam Optimization and Adadelta Optimization . The Deep LSTM based on Adam Adadelta Optimization achieved maximum accuracy, sensitivity, specificity of 0.936, 0.942, and 0.925.

Discursive dynamics and local contexts on Twitter: The refugee crisis in Europe

In today’s hybrid media environment, traditional news organizations extend their presence on Online Social Networks (OSNs) and compete with political and civil society organizations, public figures, and other influential digital storytelling individuals. This article examines conversations on Twitter, one of the most widely used OSNs, about Europe’s refugee crisis in 2014 and 2015. We use, in particular, topic modeling techniques to deduce the existence of a complex network of Twitter topics formed in response to coverage of and opinion formation surrounding the European refugee crisis. We collected more than 11 million tweets in six different languages. One of our most significant findings is that while most conversations happen in English, the refugee crisis has had different rhythms in other languages. Our assumption is that this could be evidence that the power of mainstream local media on Twitter to set the agenda is considerable, at least regarding refugee-related conversations in Europe.

Pressure Groups and Free Press: Downsizing in News Organizations and Future of Traditional Media in Pakistan

Purpose: News media in third world countries remained under social, religious, political and military pressure. Developing countries in presence of pressure groups cannot enjoy the fruits of a democratic setup. So, the purpose of study is to explore factors of downsizing in traditional media organizations and their future in wake of pressure groups, which create hindrance in freedom of expression. Design/ Methodology/ Approach: Qualitative approach was employed to explore the causes behind the undesired downsizing. Researchers chosen 15 respondents working on senior positions in different traditional media organization from different stations of Pakistan including Islamabad, Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur and Karachi based on purposive sampling. Findings: Results revealed the incumbent government changed its stance on freedom of expression and adopted each modus operandi to silence the voices from journalistic corners. The government promoted selective part of freedom of expression by highlighting the anchors speaking in favor of the party. Implications/ Originality/ Value: So, the study concluded traditional media organizations should be reorganized and government should extend its democratic support for protecting freedom of expression. The study recommended the government should remain impartial and provide space to traditional news organizations so that the citizens should be provided with right to know.

How Does an Incumbent News Media Organization Become a Platform? Employing Intra-Firm Synergies to Launch the Platform Business Model in a News Agency

ABSTRACT Digital platforms have disrupted traditional news organizations, with new platform-based models gaining ground. However, the incumbents can defend their positions and reap the benefits of multi-sided market structures by establishing a platform business model themselves. We examine a case study of the Austrian News Agency (APA), which gradually formulated a strategy that resulted in a platform-based business model. Platform features were strategized and innovated over time and in phases, with the intent of creating value for customers on both sides of the platform. We found that APA’s platform transformation was enabled by a visionary value proposition backed by a trusted institution’s legitimacy and a co-operative organizational model that provided added incentives for the participating news media companies. The strategy and the business model emerged on the basis of external developments and internal realizations concerning the feasibility of the new platform strategy. Based on our results, we develop a framework for an incumbent strategy formation process towards a platform business model. This framework demonstrates the incumbent organization’s emergent, as well as deliberate, strategic ability to introduce platform features into its business model, based on unique intra-firm synergies with established parts of the business, and highlighting a potential for “incumbent advantage.”

The Institution of Journalism: Conceptualizing the Press in a Hybrid Media System

This theoretical essay considers how the institution of journalism, now threatened by authoritarian attack and other challenges, has been conceptualized and proposes a refinement on previous definitions: An institution is a complex social structure—formed by an interlocking network of rules and activities, roles, technologies, norms, and collective frames of meaning–which work together to sustain its coherence, endurance, and value. Guided by this general definition, and to better accommodate new institutional forms of journalism specifically in the hybrid media system, I introduce a typology based on two dimensions: level-of-analysis and structural emphasis, that is whether on traditional news organizations or emerging assemblages. In balancing their roles as critic and champion, I argue that academic observers must not take institutional stability, coherence, and value for granted, which previous perspectives have over-stated, but rather take a more explicitly normative assessment of how different structures contribute to those qualities.

Characterizing Information Diets of Social Media Users

With the widespread adoption of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, there has been a shift in the way information is produced and consumed. Earlier, the only producers of information were traditional news organizations, which broadcast the same carefully-edited information to all consumers over mass media channels. Whereas, now, in online social media, any user can be a producer of information, and every user selects which other users she connects to, thereby choosing the information she consumes. Moreover, the personalized recommendations that most social media sites provide also contribute towards the information consumed by individual users. In this work, we define a concept of information diet — which is the topical distribution of a given set of information items (e.g., tweets) — to characterize the information produced and consumed by various types of users in the popular Twitter social media. At a high level, we find that (i) popular users mostly produce very specialized diets focusing on only a few topics; in fact, news organizations (e.g., NYTimes) produce much more focused diets on social media as compared to their mass media diets, (ii) most users' consumption diets are primarily focused towards one or two topics of their interest, and (iii) the personalized recommendations provided by Twitter help to mitigate some of the topical imbalances in the users' consumption diets, by adding information on diverse topics apart from the users' primary topics of interest.

Digitalization of Conflicts: An Analysis of Social Media Coverage of Palestine-Israel Conflict by Traditional News Organizations

Digitalization of Conflicts: An Analysis of Social Media Coverage of Palestine-Israel Conflict by Traditional News Organizations

News Values on Instagram: A Comparative Study of International News

This study employs the news values theory and method in the examination of a large dataset of international news retrieved from Instagram. News values theory itself is subjected to critical examination, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses. Using a mixed method that includes content analysis and topic modeling, the study investigates the major news topics most ‘liked’ by Instagram audiences and compares them with the topics most reported on by news organizations. The findings suggest that Instagram audiences prefer to consume general news, human-interest stories and other stories that are mainly positive in nature, unlike news on politics and other topics on which traditional news organizations tend to focus. Finally, the paper addresses the implications of the above findings.

Digital public sphere and Palestine-Israel conflict: A conceptual analysis of news coverage

The news coverage of conflicts has transformed with the introduction of digital media and social media platforms. The available literature on media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict is mainly focused on traditional news coverage or social media dimension of the conflict information. There exists a literature gap on social media coverage of Palestine-Israel conflict by the traditional news organizations. This study explores the changing pattern of traditional media’s coverage of the longstanding conflict in the wake of new communication technologies through appraisal of the existing literature. The analysis revealed that the traditional news organizations have adopted social networking platforms as a business model to cover the Palestine-Israel conflict. It was found that the traditional news outlets use the new media because it is cost-effective and have instantaneous outreach to maximum number of netizens. The new tools of communication offer multimedia platforms where conflict-related text, videos and images can be posted simultaneously. The study proposes to conduct future research on media-conflict relationship by focusing the use of new communication tools by the traditional media

Transparency in the News: The Impact of Self-Disclosure and Process Disclosure on the Perceived Credibility of the Journalist, the Story, and the Organization

ABSTRACT An experimental study was conducted to see what impact varying the level of self-disclosure by a journalist, as well as providing information about why and how a story is being covered, has on the perceived credibility of the journalist, the story, and the organization for which the journalist works. A study was conducted that included 885 participants from the United States. Results indicate the group that saw a picture of the journalist, a low level of disclosure regarding the journalist, and information about why and how the story was being covered rated the journalist, story, and organization highest in terms of perceived credibility. These findings indicate that traditional news organizations, when it comes to building audience credibility, should consider including at least some information about the journalist, and perhaps, more importantly, information about why and how the story is being covered.

Journalist, Advertiser or Both: Reevaluating Legal Distinctions Between Journalistic and Commercial Speech in the Networked Era

As traditional news organizations have struggled to adapt their content and financial models to networked information environments, and community journalism startups have begun to test a variety of new business and organization models, the line between journalistic and commercial expression has become opaque. This article examines the challenges emerging, twenty-first-century media organizations pose to how the courts have historically understood press and commercial-related speech protections. The article analyzes how the Supreme Court of the United States has rationalized its standards for press and commercial safeguards and considers how the Court has decided in recent cases involving citizen publishers who claimed protections historically reserved for traditional journalists. Ultimately, the article draws the building blocks from these ideas to propose how courts can separate the two types of communication in the twenty-first century. In doing so, the article also proposes ways in which such fledgling organizations can ensure they remain journalistic in nature.

Adopting a mojo mindset: Training newspaper reporters in mobile journalism

Due to the visual turn in journalism and the emergence of mobile journalism, many newspaper journalists have had to change the way they work and learn to use new tools. To face these changes, traditional news organizations apply different strategies to increase staff competencies in using new production tools and creating innovative content in new formats. In this paper, we investigate how a specific training arrangement was experienced by a group of 40 print editors and journalists in a German regional publishing house. The journalists were introduced to audio-visual storytelling and reporting with smartphones in a 2-week training course. The training arrangements were studied using participant observation and in-depth interviews, followed by a thematic analysis of the data. The study indicates that for print journalists and editors, the transition from the print to the mojo mindset depends on three dimensions: (i) mastering mojo skills, (ii) adopting visual thinking and (iii) integrating ethical and legal awareness.

Media and Armed Conflicts: An Overview

Being newsworthy, conflicts attract much of the media attention. The interaction between the media (print or electronic) and the armed conflicts has taken multiple forms in history, and different journalists or news organizations have approached different armed conflicts differently. In the backdrop of the constant debate over morality and objectivity in journalism, this study investigates the evolving academic debate around the relationship of media and armed conflicts, especially with the advent of new communication platforms. The digital platforms that allow the sharing of multimedia content, including social networking and microblogging websites, facilitate disseminating the news content and serve as essential tools for newsgathering. The instantaneous nature of these platforms and unlimited outreach make them attractive tools to be used by traditional news organizations. They gain even more importance in the conflict zones — where it is difficult for them to have their correspondents on the ground. Therefore, the present paper outlines new technologies by the traditional news organizations that have reshaped the relationship between conflict and media. It also discusses the role of news media in shaping public opinion and policy.

Man vs. Machine? The Impact of Algorithm Authorship on News Credibility

Facing budget constraints, many traditional news organizations are turning their eyes on automation to streamline manpower, cut down on costs, and improve efficiency. But how does automation fit into traditional values of journalism and how does it affect perceptions of credibility, an important currency valued by the journalistic field? This study explores this question using a 3 (declared author: human vs. machine vs. combined) × 2 (objectivity: objective vs. not objective) between-subjects experimental design involving 420 participants drawn from the national population of Singapore. The analysis found no main differences in perceived source credibility between algorithm, human, and mixed authors. Similarly, news articles attributed to an algorithm, a human journalist, and a combination of both showed no differences in message credibility. However, the study found an interaction effect between type of declared author and news objectivity. When the article is presented to be written by a human journalist, source and message credibility remain stable regardless of whether the article was objective or not objective. However, when the article is presented to be written by an algorithm, source and message credibility are higher when the article is objective than when the article is not objective. Findings for combined authorship are split: there were no differences between objective and non-objective articles when it comes to message credibility. However, combined authorship is rated higher in source credibility when the article is not objective than when the article is objective.

Examining TMZ: What traditional digital journalism can learn from celebrity news

TMZ remains one of the most popular destinations for people searching for news on the Web. Even though the site publishes celebrity news, traditional news organizations may be able to learn something from how TMZ caters to its audience. This study, using textual analysis, examines all stories published on the site during a one-month period (N = 1,002). We illustrate the types of content the site publishes (paparazzi-based content; document-based reporting; sports-themed material; and reader polls), and the results are interpreted through the lens of market theory for news production.

Spreading Ebola Panic: Newspaper and Social Media Coverage of the 2014 Ebola Health Crisis

ABSTRACTDuring times of hot crises, traditional news organizations have historically contributed to public fear and panic by emphasizing risks and uncertainties. The degree to which digital and social media platforms contribute to this panic is essential to consider in the new media landscape. This research examines news coverage of the 2014 Ebola crisis, exploring differences in presentation between newspaper coverage and news shared on the social news platform Reddit. Results suggest that news shared on Reddit amplified panic and uncertainty surrounding Ebola, while traditional newspaper coverage was significantly less likely to produce panic-inducing coverage.

The Challenge of Internet and Social Media on Shield Law Legislation: The Four Dimensions of Reporter's Privilege

In spite of commonly shared understanding of the benefits of shield laws as a vital part of journalism’s watch dog function in democratic societies, there is a great deal of variation on how shield laws are regulated in different countries, states and territories. The scope of shield law, the persons covered, interpretation power of judges, and the exceptions for the main rule vary considerably among jurisdictions. The differences reflect not only details of stipulation but also fundamental principles behind the objectives of legislature. One of the main dividing factors is the outlook on Internet based contents like blogs, podcasts or websites like WikiLeaks. It is not at all clear anymore who is a journalist and what kind of action can be defined as journalism. The objective of this paper is to present an analytic classification of existing shield law legislations based on international comparison. Classification is based on analysis of the contents of shield law/reporter’s privilege legislations in Australia and its territories, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA (states). There are plenty of analyses of shield laws at national level but international comparisons – especially over language barriers – are rare. The research frame and the results of this study are unique. This classification helps to identify the key differences in the legislations and hopefully promotes the discussions about the limits and the possibilities of different approaches correspondingly. As a result of the comparison the approaches of different jurisdictions on shield law are divided here in four categories: affiliation approach, function approach, intention approach, and universal approach. The main characteristics of the categories are as follows. Affiliation approach limits the realm of privilege to professional journalists working in traditional news organizations (print, radio, television). In function approach the focus is not on one’s affiliation with the media organization but on whether the person functions as a journalist. This extends the reporter’s privilege to freelancers and non-traditional media like web sites. Like function approach, the intent approach has been applied in cases where the realm of shield law has been extended outside the journalists of traditional news media. Intent approach asks whether the person had the intent to disseminate to the public the information she/he has obtained through investigation. Finally, universal approach refers to a shield law legislation which guarantees the right to protect the confidentiality of the information sources to everyone who has drawn up a message or delivered it to the public, personal blogs included. There are examples of all these approaches in the legislations analyzed for this study.

Here’s What BuzzFeed Journalists Think of Their Journalism

This study seeks to compare BuzzFeed, a new entrant to the journalistic field, with traditional news organizations, from the perspective of BuzzFeed’s own journalists. Through in-depth interviews, this study finds that BuzzFeed’s journalists think they are more attentive to audiences and more willing to experiment than those working in traditional news organizations. But at the same time, they also value the same ethical standards in journalism. Thus, BuzzFeed seems to engage in both differentiation and de-differentiation.