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Changing structures to online news have instigated concerns that the electorate may predominantly consume soft news for entertainment purposes while neglecting public affairs information. The Internet in particular brought an increase in outlets, including unconventional low-credibility sources. A 2 x 2 x 2 within-subjects experiment (n = 197) investigated whether delivery format (print vs online) and source type (high vs low credibility) shape the extent to which recipients select different types of news (public affairs news vs soft news). Participants browsed 32 news items, half of them hard news and the other half soft news, either associated with high- or low-credibility sources, and did so online or via print magazine. Results show that greater preference for online news fostered selective exposure to hard news. Greater habitual news use via social media reduced selective exposure to news from high-credibility sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews with bloggers examine the ongoing use of blogs to cope with the persistent community stress New Orleans has experienced post-Hurricane Katrina. Previously, the field of media studies has overlooked blogs’ coping role. Cyber psychology has explored blogs’ role in individual and emotional coping, but not task-oriented efforts to ameliorate sources of community stress. Among other insights, the unique intersection of media studies and cyber psychology explored in this study illuminates the double-edged sword that is the imagined audience. While a positive source of social support, efforts to attract and maintain an audience can impose the perceived pressure to “keep face” and maintain an angry blogging persona beyond its useful cathartic value. Combining perspectives from cyber psychology and media studies, this study contributes a more multifaceted understanding of how residents may use social media to cope with individual and community stress than has been explored in previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One thriving area of research on participatory media revolves around political expression and the creation of political content. This study analyzes the connections between these behaviors, heterogeneous information networks, and ideological extremity while accounting for the role of emotional intelligence. Results from a two-wave-panel survey of US adults show that people who engage in content-expressive behavior are embedded in heterogeneous information networks and that emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between content-expressive behavior and ideological extremity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of survey results from a random sample of women bloggers (N = 298) show three motivations drive women to use social media – information, engagement, and recreation. The recreation motivation outweighs the other two motivations in predicting frequency of social media use. However, when differences between Facebook, Twitter, and other social media were considered, results show women bloggers turn to social media in general for recreation, but to Facebook for engagement and to Twitter for information. Findings also show that psychological needs for affiliation and self-disclosure are related to the engagement motivation, and self-disclosure is associated with the information motivation. The results are discussed in relation to need theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the emerging modes of civic engagement connected to the mobile camera-phone, and the ways in which they require us to rethink what it is to bear witness to brutality in the age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication. I argue that the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing witness, such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and, via wireless global communication networks, effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic testimony in a bid to produce feelings of political solidarity. Critically, the performance of what I elect to call ‘citizen camera-witnessing’, as exemplified by contemporary street opposition movements including those in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria, derives its potency from the ways it reactivates the idea of martyrdom: that is, from its distinct claim to truth in the name of afflicted people who put their bodies on the line to record the injustice of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]