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Over the past decade, data journalism has received considerable attention among scholars, pointing to novel forms of investigative reporting as well as new daily practices of news production. This study contributes to existing scholarship by conceptualizing data journalism through distinctions between hard and soft news in relation to service journalism. We analyze news produced by specialized data desks in Swedish public service organizations over a 5-year period (2015–2019) and propose a model for how service journalism attributes can be used as a bridge between the binary categories of hard and soft in data journalism. With this model, we point to how data journalism in public service organizations challenges established notions of soft and hard news and how hybrid production practices open up new research trajectories concerning the societal significance of news in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By engaging with journalists in the networked media environment, audiences can play a role in shaping the epistemologies of journalism: how journalists know what they know, and communicate knowledge claims. While audiences have been offered opportunities to engage in news-production processes, ongoing reciprocal relationships between journalists and audiences online are rare. This study shows how sustained reciprocity takes place in a large-scale WhatsApp group opened by an Israeli journalist/blogger for her audience. Based on an analysis of group conversations, blog posts, and interviews, we demonstrate how a continuous conversation between the journalist and her loyal audience members allows the co-construction of journalistic knowledge across the news-production process. The online space that affords ongoing reciprocal exchanges is termed here a meso news-space, occurring between the private and public realms. This study contributes to understanding how sustained reciprocity can be accomplished and how it can promote shared benefits for journalists and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article analyses Internet users' participation and the ways in which it is framed by journalists, with a particular focus on the Live Blog format. It provides a case study of the online media coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York in May 2011, by the highly respected media Le Monde.fr. A lexicometric (statistical) and discourse (qualitative) analysis of two sets of corpora (Corpus 1 being composed of all the comments submitted by Internet users throughout the live blogging process and Corpus 2 of the few which were finally published on the Live Blog) will highlight the nature and the various forms of audience participation as well as the ways in which they are framed by journalists. The article aims to investigate the representativeness of the published messages and the participative audience profile which journalists foreground within this media space of multiple voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial staff play an essential role as gatekeepers within professional journalism. Citizen journalism has the potential to depart from routine journalistic practices and allow for more democratic posting of unmoderated content. Nonetheless, many citizen journalism web sites do have an editorial staff and no existing research has explored the contributions of editors to citizen journalism web sites. I theorize that the editorial staff on citizen journalism sites serve as legitimating organizational structures within the larger organizational field and, as citizen gatekeepers, who enforce journalistic routines. Using a content analysis of a sample (n = 326) drawn from the largest sampling frame of English-language citizen journalism web sites based in the United States to date (n = 1958), I examine the characteristics of citizen journalism web sites with an editorial model as well as how the presence of an editorial staff is associated with the practice of journalistic routines common in professional journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines ‘participatory journalism’ from the perspective of participants. Through a series of in-depth interviews with 32 participants from two different participatory journalistic environments set up by professional news organizations, we investigated how participants view and evaluate their participation in journalism. We propose that participants views progress through a series of four stages: anticipation, participation, evaluation and reconsideration. A clear breach is observed between the stage of anticipation and evaluation. We propose that this breach could be couched in terms of both a need and a wish for reciprocity, but also a lack of it. The term ‘reciprocity’ is inspired by Lewis et al.’s notion of ‘reciprocal journalism’ and Loosen and Schmidt’s conceptualization of journalism as a ‘social system’. Implications for the study of participatory journalism and journalism practitioners are discussed. [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]

In this study, the results from a content analysis of four Swedish online citizen journalism outlets are presented and discussed. The analysis focuses on new digital venues for news-making in theory and the question of the political relevance of citizen journalism in reality. This broad question is operationalized by asking more specifically how citizen journalists tell the news, according to established distinctions between variations in topic dimensions, focus, and presentational style. Our results show that citizen journalists tend to tell soft news. They rarely report on policy issues, local authorities, or people affected by decisions being made by them. Furthermore, the news focuses on individual relevance and is mostly episodic in nature. The style of writing is predominantly impersonal and unemotional. In sum, our results suggest that citizen journalism in Sweden is not yet at a stage where it can be considered a plausible alternative to traditional journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has been paid to the role of the audience in online news production. However, very little research has addressed how the audience understands this participation. Using the theories of affect and fandom, this paper will investigate the most popular form of online participation – comments. Based on a case study of Australian alternative journalism site, New Matilda, it will argue for a broader understanding of participation online, one that incorporates those who ‘internalise’ their participation and in particular the role emotion plays in audience engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 21 April 2011, violence flared in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol following a police raid on a squat. Media coverage suggested that this riot was a manifestation of the campaign against the opening of a Tesco supermarket in the area. Footage later emerged on YouTube, which appeared to support claims by local residents that the violence was caused by heavy-handed police tactics rather than the anti-Tesco campaign. This study uses a critical thematic analysis to explore the comments left by those who viewed these acts of ‘inverse surveillance’, or sousveillance. Results indicate that YouTube provided a space in which alternative views on the Stokes Croft riot were seen and heard but the views of many commentators still appeared to be influenced by the news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Crucial to contemporary debates on political space is a common understanding of changing conditions, not least brought on by developments in communication and media, especially with regards to online activity, that are leading to a spatial ‘shift’ upwards to the global. This article seeks to contribute to the debate on new media technologies and political space by exploring the way in which space comes to matter in the context of alternative user-generated news sites. Drawing especially on the case of OhmyNews International and the difficulties this site has had with moving from a domestic space to a global space of activity, this article makes the case for a much more comprehensive integration of research into online practices into the often parallel debate on the globalization of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparing new media to older media can help identify fundamental uses and perceived effects of communication technology. This study analyzes one soldier’s milblog (military blog) and one Civil War soldier’s letters and diaries to understand how milblogs compare to older forms of soldier correspondence. Despite the overt distinction in technical systems utilized, this analysis demonstrated that the communications through the milblog and letters/diaries share tremendous similarities. In composing their correspondence through these distinct media, each soldier maintained similar anxieties over technological affordances, perceptions of their audience, and motivations for corresponding. Though there were certainly differences in style and content, little that was done or accomplished via the milblog was without direct precedent in the Civil War letters and diaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American community newspapers, as well as larger daily publications, do little to articulate a sense of local identity or place in the banners of their websites, or their newspaper names atop the web page. Instead, newspapers routinely articulate a professional identity above a local one – often omitting the name of the community entirely, and only occasionally offering a major visual expression of the community. This complicates Benedict Anderson’s sense of ‘imagined communities’, which argues that local identity is constructed through clear articulation by print media; if newspaper websites ignore local identity in their banners, then community newspapers today are imaging commodity rather than community. This qualitative analysis of 40 American community newspapers and 80 daily American newspapers divides that local articulation into four categories (absent identity, secondary identity, equal identity and visual identity) and explores implications for the academy and newspaper industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 January 2009, Oscar Grant was shot and killed in a subway station by Bay Area Rail Transit officers. This event was recorded by several passengers on their cellphones and later uploaded to the video-sharing website YouTube. The videos generated significant protests among online and offline communities, and were eventually used as evidence in the ensuing trial. This study employed a critical thematic analysis to examine audience responses to this act of citizen journalism on YouTube. Results indicated that although some viewers critiqued the video quality and the cameraperson’s passivity, several supportive comments praised the cameraperson’s presence of mind and courage. Furthermore, some viewers called for resistance and retaliation, while others advocated a more prudent response. We argue that these findings necessitate a reconceptualization of traditional notions of the guard-dog media and the public sphere to accommodate new media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The presence of a diversity of information offers citizens access to a range of ideas, expertise and topics. In this study, a measure of content diversity was created to determine whether online citizen journalism and online newspaper publications were serving this function in the USA. Based on the findings from a quantitative content analysis (n = 962), online citizen journalism articles were more likely to feature a greater diversity of topics, information from outside sources and multimedia and interactive features. The findings suggest online citizen journalism content adds to the diversity of information available in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to contribute to a critical research agenda for investigating the democratic implications of citizen journalism and social news. The article calls for a broad conception of 'citizen journalism' which is (1) not an exclusively online phenomenon, (2) not confined to explicitly 'alternative' news sources, and (3) includes 'metajournalism' as well as the practices of journalism itself. A case is made for seeing democratic implications not simply in the horizontal or 'peer-to-peer' public sphere of citizen journalism networks, but also in the possibility of a more 'reflexive' culture of news consumption through citizen participation. The article calls for a research agenda that investigates new forms of gatekeeping and agendasetting power within social news and citizen journalism networks and, drawing on the example of three sites, highlights the importance of both formal and informal status differentials and of the software 'code' structuring these new modes of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wikinews is a news website which allows anyone with internet access to publish and edit journalistic content directly on its site without prior authorization or registration. This article examines the way in which Wikinews contributors negotiate its 'neutral point of view' policy, which differs from the traditional sense of journalistic objectivity in the way that it is both defined and implemented. The study encompasses a detailed review of 2332 news articles and their associated 'talk pages', published in the period from November 2004 to July 2005. Close textual analysis is used to conduct a qualitative study of a selection of these Wikinews articles, their documented editorial history and referenced sources, so as to offer a thorough critique of the 'neutral point of view' policy, as assessment is made of the importance of the Wikinews model for online journalism more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called 'grassroots' or 'citizen journalism', which uses the world wide web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organizational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. The article uses qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of nine major British news websites to reveal the debates journalists are having about their changing roles, the challenges of meeting commercial expectations and legal obligations, and the innovations taking place in online newsrooms. It provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in journalism's relationship with its consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]