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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

The article offers information on a number of activities that the journal "Public Understanding of Science" will launch in 2012 to mark its 20th anniversary. It plans to increase its publication cycle from six to eight issues annually. The year will also mark the development of blogs that would create commentary and stimulate discussion of topics raised by papers in the journal.