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doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1691031pmid: N/A
AbstractFact-checking has gained importance in recent years, as so-called “fake news” has started to spread on social media. News outlets and independent organizations engage in debunking to combat the massive spread of disinformation. However, several authors have argued that fact checkers can only be successful if they win the trust of the audience - by making their practices transparent. This article analyzes the degree of source transparency provided by eight fact checkers from different countries (the US, the UK, Germany, and Austria). The findings show major differences among the outlets studied which can be attributed to varying levels of journalistic professionalism as well as to organizational differences. Implications for the success of fact-checking and solutions to combat online disinformation are discussed.
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1653207pmid: N/A
AbstractOver the last several years, numerous journalists and news organizations have reported incidents in which their communications have been hacked, intercepted, or retrieved. In 2014, Google security experts found that 21 of the world’s 25 most popular media outlets were targets of state-sponsored hacking attempts, and many journalists have watched helplessly as hackers took control of their social media accounts, targeting confidential information in their internal servers. When journalists’ digital accounts are vulnerable to hacks or surveillance, news organizations, journalists, and their sources are at risk, and journalists’ ability to carry out their newsmaking function is reduced. Yet, some journalists do not believe that hacking and surveillance are significant threats, and they are not adopting information security measures to protect their data, themselves, or their sources. This research study includes 19 interviews with journalists, developers, and digital security trainers to shed light on journalists’ perceptions of information security technologies, including motivations to adopt and barriers to adoption. The findings show that motivations to adopt information security technologies hinge on the idea of protection: protection of self, story, and the journalist’s role—more so than the protection of the source, contrary to contemporary discourse about why journalists need to adopt such technologies.
Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Zamith, Rodrigo; Holton, Avery E.
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1709521pmid: N/A
AbstractThis survey of journalists, editors, and managers working for news organizations in the United States explores the perceived importance of citizen and consumer role orientations among newsworkers. It then examines how useful these professionals perceive particular audience metrics to be in fulfilling those roles orientations. This examination takes into account the contextual factors that may influence those perceptions at the individual and organizational levels. We find that newsworkers perceive some audience metrics more useful than others and generally perceive them to be more useful for helping them enact a consumer role orientation that has been historically deemed to be of lesser import. However, these perceptions vary across organizational contexts, and particularly according to the newsworker’s position within an editorial hierarchy. These findings contribute to the literatures that argue that quantified audiences are an important part of role orientation formation.
Ferrucci, Patrick; Taylor, Ross; Alaimo, Kathleen I.
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2020.1732830pmid: N/A
ABSRACTIn the wake of fewer and fewer professionals populating photojournalism, this study utilizes in-depth interviews with 21 professional photojournalists to better understand how they construct their identity. With a framework of social identity theory, this research found photojournalists consider clear role conception, adherence to normative journalism ethics and organizational backing as key components of their in-group. They consider professionalism as service, a lack of professional processes, and advocacy key parts of the out-group. These results are then interpreted for their effects on professionalism.
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1709982pmid: N/A
AbstractThis article conducts a qualitative textual analysis of the New York Times’ 360-degree news reports that focus on international human rights issues, posing the following research questions: (1) How do the form and content of the New York Times’ 360-degree videos potentially help to construct the vividness and interactivity that virtual reality scholars say will contribute to a greater sense of telepresence? (2) In what ways do the form and content of the New York Times’ 360-degree video news reports reflect the tension between traditional notions of journalistic authority on the one hand, and the need to engage—on both ethical and economic levels—with news audiences on the other hand? The article will show that the news industry’s deep ambivalence toward giving up control of the journalistic narrative in the digital age is coded into the visual and aural structures of the videos, raising questions about the celebratory discourse on agency and interpersonal engagement with distant suffering.
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1598882pmid: N/A
AbstractThis article explores the potential added value of online news media in reporting European Union (EU) politics. Precisely, it examines the extent to which online reporting could generate more prominent, more pluralistic and less ethnocentric coverage of EU politics. The above issue is scrutinised in the Cypriot context. A context where the economic crisis has negatively affected both the working conditions in newsroom and the public opinion on EU. The study is based on a corpus of news reports delivered by online news media that vary regarding their journalistic culture, political identity, organisational structure and volume and degree of establishment. Drawing on a multi-method research design, this article argues that online news media in Cyprus do not make effective use of online medium in favour of more prominent, comprehensive and pluralistic reporting. Instead, they exploit the online potential for decreasing their investment in both personnel and time for the coverage of “not so important” topics as EU politics. The article highlights how journalistic processes of news production and journalism culture in synergy with digitalisation processes contribute to the persistence of narrow coverage and ethnocentric framing of EU news.
Kaiser, Jonas; Rauchfleisch, Adrian; Bourassa, Nikki
doi: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1682629pmid: N/A
AbstractThe 2016 US election and the victory of Donald Trump are closely connected to a perceived rise of the far-right in the United States. We build upon public sphere and alternative media theory to discuss the relevance of alternative media for the US (far-)right and whether the election period and the candidate Trump allowed far-right alternative media to establish themselves in the (far-) right networked public sphere. We investigate whether it has come to a convergence of topics between the right and the extreme far-right. We analyze the topics nine right-wing outlets, ranging from Fox News to the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, covered in 2015/2016 during the US presidential election. We show through topic modeling of 21,919 articles how Breitbart established itself as a media outlet between the extreme far-right and mainstream right by both covering more extreme and more classic conservative topics. We show through time series clustering how Breitbart and Fox News converged in their coverage of Islam and immigration. Finally, we show through hyperlink analysis that the connection between the far-right and the mainstream right is mostly one-sided; while the alternative outlets link to more established ones, the established outlets mostly ignore the outlets from the far-right.
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