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While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the attendant risks and opportunities so that they may offer counsel and render appropriate advice. To this end, through interviews with 36 Singaporean male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study explores how these youths utilise participatory media in their peer interaction. The findings indicate that for this vulnerable youth population, participatory media such as social networking sites can become a platform through which they are unwittingly drawn into criminal behaviour and post-rehabilitation, participatory media may offer an insidious route to recidivism. Participatory media complicates peer interaction by presenting risk factors such as network transparency, negative peer modelling, network seepage and network persistence, all of which have implications for these youths sliding further into delinquency and criminal activity. This article concludes with recommendations on the strategies which youths-at-risk can employ to avoid the risks of participatory media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pandemics challenge conventional assumptions about health promotion, message development, community engagement, and the role of news media. To understand the use of press releases in news coverage of pandemics, this study traces the development of framing devices from a government public health agency's press releases to news stories about the 2009 H1N1 A influenza pandemic. The communication management of the H1N1 pandemic, an international news event with local implications, by the Singapore government is a rich locus for understanding the dynamics of public relations, health communication, and journalism. A content analysis shows that the evolution of information from press release to news is marked by significant changes in media frames, including the expansion and diversification in dominant frames and emotion appeals, stronger thematic framing, more sources of information, conversion of loss frames into gain frames, and amplification of positive tone favoring the public health agency's position. Contrary to previous research that suggests that government information subsidies passed almost unchanged through media gatekeepers, the news coverage of the pandemic reflects journalists’ selectivity in disseminating the government press releases and in mediating the information flow and frames from the press releases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the increasing amount of new information that is emerging about COVID-19, traditional and web-based information sources are commonly used to spread and seek information. This study compared differences in information seeking, trust of information sources, and use of protective behaviors (e.g., mask wearing) among individuals in the US and China during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 722 valid responses in the US and 493 valid responses in China were collected via online surveys in May 2020. Pearson's Chi-square tests, independent samples t-tests, and multiple linear regressions were used to conduct the analyses. Results showed that US respondents accessed significantly fewer COVID-19 information sources, rated significantly lower levels of trust in these sources, and reported significantly lower levels of protective behaviors than the Chinese respondents. In both countries, trust in newspapers, radio/community broadcasting, and news portals were significantly positively correlated with protective behaviors. While trust of TV was significant in both populations, in China it was positively correlated, whereas in the US was negatively correlated, with protective behaviors. Findings from this study showed that coordinated and consistent messages from governmental officials, health authorities, and media platforms are important to promote and encourage protective behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]