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There has been growing interest in research on news-related user comments. Here we conduct the first systematic review of this literature--quantitatively and qualitatively (248 studies)--that covers the entire communication process (content analyses, surveys, experiments). Results indicate a focus on online news articles (vs videos) and little consideration for major social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok). Research often assesses incivility in comments but offers conflicting conclusions on the actual level of incivility in comment threads-- and seldom considers how to effectively combat any incivility. We propose four priorities for future work: more comparative and longitudinal approaches; exploring social media and video content; examining platform design, content moderation and artificial intelligence; and implementing measures to reduce incivility and protect the integrity of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, journalism's own history needs to be reflected upon, both from within and from outside the newsroom. This paper attempts both. From a scientific perspective, we examined the process of the digitalization of journalism and then asked journalists from different generations to reflect on this process. Based on data gathered from these semi-structured interviews with German journalists, our paper presents their evaluation on the evolution from analog to digital journalism—from retired male reporters who wrote most of their articles on typewriters to young female data journalists. The interviews with journalists—including local newspaper reporters, public broadcasting services and news magazines' editors, freelancers and former German Democratic Republic (GDR) journalists—are part of a larger funded research project on German journalism. Their analysis reveals a common problematization of the growing pace of news production and the hybridization of media formats. The qualitative data confirm data from quantitative surveys on journalism and can help international journalism research to get an in-depth understanding on how journalists perceive the changes over the last decades in their trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As elsewhere in the world, Arab news websites depend on revenue streams built on the commercialization of social media platforms. Reliance on these platforms has created a major structural shift in news production, distribution and monetization, which has triggered serious concerns about fake news, misinformation and quality journalism. This paper investigates the extent to which four online-only news websites abide by quality journalism in the context of increasing platformization of digital news production. We use qualitative document analysis to systematically analyse the contents of a representative sample from four news websites from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises questions about the reliability of findings arising from an online publishing environment. Focusing on a case study of the Victorian media's reporting of violence against women, it argues that many studies that are presented as accurate and empirical representations of online media coverage may be questionable. This is because of the increasingly inconsistent and ad hoc nature of the online databases used to collect the content. This raises deep problems surrounding the findings and claims that can be made by media research and the future of empirical media analysis. There are warnings of the inadequacy of standard methods used to collect content and suggestions are made such as, triangulation of different databases and the combination of computational and human methods. However, there is no definitive solution to this problem nor are there set protocols on how to proceed in this area of study. This paper aims to provide the research community with a transparent account of the challenges and decisions made when grappling with the issue of collecting online news content. It is suggested that a more proactive collaboration between newsroom archivists, database services and researchers is needed going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the implementation process of digital audience metrics as a key strategy in Swedish legacy news production during the last three decades. The historical adoption of metrics in the newsroom is not new but has grown fast (from analogue audience measurements in the 1950s and monthly statistics of unique visitors in the 1990s to a wide range of real-time data). This trend is important because Swedish news organisations have invested heavily in data analytics, which involves integrating metrics-driven journalism into a particularly strong and homogenous tradition of professional autonomy. Based on interviews with key senior managers and supported by the analysis of trade publications, as well as published interviews, the findings reveal three chronologically overlapping periods: the naïve stage of 'getting online', the destructive period of 'social media prominence', and the end of the 'paywall hesitation'. This trend has led to a new equilibrium in which audience metrics are perceived as better aligned with the professional values of news selection. More importantly, the industry-wide embrace of metrics as guidance for more relevant and rational news production revolves around two main factors: First, although metrics are tied to organisational targets, they remain under editorial control. Second, the degree of granularity and diversification of metrics allow for wider support of their use for strategic purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques – or 'echo chambers' – that increase societal polarisation. The paper also investigates factors that predict users' interest in partisan content and establishes that the region of residence is the key predictor of selective consumption of pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian partisan news content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent technological advances have significantly impacted news media in the way they provide news to the public, evolving into a digital environment. Therefore, digital media today focuses on generating readers' loyalty to their news websites. In this sense, a multiple linear regression analysis was carried out on a sample of 344 surveys of adult residents in the cities of Mexico and Monterrey. The results show that factors such as familiarity, satisfaction and reputation are positively related to the loyalty of news website users. However, they also show that the importance of the impact of these factors is different when the analysis is carried out in a stratified manner, such as residence, gender or education, which allows us to conclude that digital media can guide their loyalty efforts depending on the profile of their readers and the market they seek to target. To illustrate focusing on stratification by place of residence, the most significant factors for the Mexico City group corresponded to familiarity and satisfaction, wile for the Monterrey group the most significant factors were reputation and familiarity in that order. Results with this type of differences between groups were also obtained when comparing by gender and schooling. It is recommended for future research on the subject, to include other cities within the country, with the purpose of contrasting these paper's findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the problem of agenda setting by news media in relation to the political discourse by politicians at the time of local elections. We first evaluate the applicability of the agenda-setting theory against the theory of policy agenda building to determine the possible alternative directions for constructing a political agenda at the time of elections. Namely, we identify a non-linear interaction between news organizations, politicians, and the general public during the electoral campaign. This interaction, in turn, shapes the dynamic evolution of the public discourse concerning politics, and it is characterized by high sensitivity to initial conditions and non-linearity. Then, we attempt to identify the presence of an evolutionary trajectory of the political discourse in Lower Austria at the time of elections by observing whether, as the time of an election approaches, the interaction between news organizations and politicians flattens and becomes more linear without the news or the politicians causing the agenda of the other to be set accordingly. Finally, we provide a new methodology for identifying the topics contained in such an agenda so that empirical verification of the proposed hypothesis becomes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to encourage librarians to teach digital archiving practices to journalists as a way of giving journalists the skills they need to save their work for future use and to facilitate the preservation of journalism for posterity.Design/methodology/approach The author has reviewed the personal digital archiving literature and analyzed how it might be specifically tailored to the unique needs of journalists.Findings Daily journalism has traditionally been preserved by libraries in the form of newspapers and magazines housed in library periodicals departments. Now that nearly all journalism is published online and libraries generally only have access via temporary subscriptions, libraries are prevented from doing any kind of traditional preservation work (e.g. storing copies locally). In the future, this lack of local preservation may lead to a shortage of early twenty-first century primary source material for historians.Research limitations/implications The needs of journalists do vary greatly based on the nature and format of their work and its publication venue, making it difficult to offer a single set of standards or recommendations.Originality/value While personal digital archiving advocates have generally interpreted the word “personal” to be synonymous with “private,” this paper points to the need to expand the concept to include professional activities, particularly in light of the prevalence of telecommuting and freelance work arrangements, and the lack of support and training received by remote workers and independent contractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local news outlets are under threat in the digital era, and many are closing or merging with other news media due to the loss in advertising and audiences. A sustainable business model to replace traditional dependence on advertising has not yet been established. This paper examines one aspect of the business – audience payment – to explore the viability of online news subscription models in the context of local news. An online survey of 2038 news consumers in regional Australia was conducted in 2019 to examine regional news audiences' perception of the value of news as a social good and their willingness to pay for it. The results show that interest in supporting a new online local news outlet was largely determined by community-oriented values such as a sense of belonging, the ability to share the news with others, and the loss of a local news service, rather than the actual content. However, the quality of the journalism content was positively related to the audiences' willingness to pay. Trust in local news and existing local news consumption were important factors in determining both the interest in supporting local news and their willingness to pay for it. These findings highlight the tension between the social and financial value of regional news and the obstacles facing entrepreneurs hoping to address the growing news gaps in regional communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined contemporary daily sports journalism through the lenses of media sociology and new institutional theory. In-depth interviews with 25 sports journalists (reporters and editors) identified the institutionalized norms, values, practices, and routines of American sports journalism; demonstrated how that institutionalization affects story selection; and showed how the profession is changing due to digital and social media. The interviews show that although traditional sports journalism is highly institutionalized, digital sports journalism is far less so. Traditional sports journalism is still centered around a story, and digital sports journalism follows Robinson's journalism-as-process model. The journalists interviewed are expected to perform acts of both traditional and digital journalism during the same workday, which leads to tension in how they do their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Herald of Journalism / Habaršy Žurnalistika Seriâsy is the property of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Facing a decline in public credibility, news organizations have been encouraged to embrace transparency to combat rising public distrust. In this paper, we examine how journalists at six leading news outlets in the United States grapple with the concept of transparency and its implementation in their newsrooms. Our data indicate that news outlets engage in a limited and strategic form of transparency that enable them to appear transparent without offering substantive insights into the journalistic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to discuss the causes of public opinion polarization in digital news ecology and then analyze group polarization’s specific manifestations and carriers. Secondly, it introduces word embedding technology to analyze digital news text, utilizes a multi-head self-attention mechanism to construct a new classification model, and realizes collaborative filtering recommendations of digital news based on users’ interests and news hotspots. Finally, social media is taken as an example to analyze the factors that cause polarization in digital news ecology. The results show that the digital news ecosystem can empower the development of the polarization phenomenon, deeply involve users, and group users by solidifying their identity construction, social endorsement and other directions. It can also provide a space for the polarization phenomenon to be reconciled, but due to the emotional loss of control and the decline of publicity leading to the failure of reconciliation, the similarity of sadness emotion reconciliation is 36.94%. It is suggested that the digital news ecology provides technical support for developing polarization phenomena, enabling them to thrive in digital news.

The purpose of this research is to determine and analyse the engagement markers used in the comments on the news published in the online papers El País (Spain) and Emol (Chile). The comments were selected from two different contexts: politics and sports. In this study we consider engagement markers as part of interactional metadiscourse, that is, the elements that involve readers to call their attention or to include them as participants of discourse (Hyland, 2005a). In this research, a corpus of 2,400 comments were compiled and tagged manually and with UAM Corpus Tool. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the metadiscoursal strategies used as engagement markers. The results showed that the writers that comment news in Emol and in El País used a similar amount of engagement markers; on the other hand, significative variation was not identified in the use of engagement markers in comments on politics and sports, although these markers were more frequently found in political comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofit digital new organizations, which are proliferating all over the world, are praised for their innovations in audience-focused interventions in journalism. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this case study explores audience engagement practices within nonprofit newsrooms in South-East Europe, in order to elaborate on the impact of professional norms on such engagement in a complex media and political environment. This analysis explains how two nonprofit organizations in Kosovo have reinvented engagement by adopting a digital crowdsourcing platform that facilitates bottom-up storytelling and a public service model that transcends traditional journalistic roles. Unlike previous engagement models observed in societies with traditional professional culture, this study reflects how nonprofits with flexible professional boundaries find ways to expand engagement by also practicing advocacy and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News outlets are increasingly nationalizing their presentation of news stories, framing and presenting local news in a broad national context. We investigate how supply-side and curation-side factors of the news cycle contribute to the nationalization of news coverage. Through the computational analysis of 1.05 million Google news results on four days in July–August 2020, that corresponded to 1,581 news stories published on the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, we examine the relationship between the nationalization of news coverage, stories' search rank in Google News, and the geographic distance between the news event and the stories' reading audience. Further, we explore the role of Google News in curating locally focused news. Our findings help to map the media ecosystem in a digital age, highlighting the influence of algorithmic power in politics and showing that excessive circulation of national news may have a profound negative impact on news diversity and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the fast advancement in digital news, fake news has already caused grave threats to the public's actual judgment and credibility, in specific, with the wide use of social networking platforms, which provide a rich environment for the generation and dissemination of fake news. To cope with these challenges, several techniques were proposed to detect fake news, but still, there is an urgent need to propose an improved detection technique that provides a high level of detection performance in an automatic manner. Therefore, this article proposes a hybrid-improved deep learning model for automatic fake news detection. The proposed model adopts automatic data augmentation method, called Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Networks, to artificially synthesize new fake news samples, and then, hybridize the Convolutional Neural Network with the Recurrent Neural Networks to detect the fake news efficiently. The proposed model shows superior results against the state-of-the-art models as it provides 93.87% accuracy, 10.39% recall, 93.12% precision in detecting the fake news using Buzzfeed, FakeNewsNet and FakeNewsChallenges datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent technological advances have significantly impacted news media in the way they provide news to the public, evolving into a digital environment. Therefore, digital media today focuses on generating readers’ loyalty to their news websites. In this sense, a multiple linear regression analysis was carried out on a sample of 344 surveys of adult residents in the cities of Mexico and Monterrey. The results show that factors such as familiarity, satisfaction and reputation are positively related to the loyalty of news website users. However, they also show that the importance of the impact of these factors is different when the analysis is carried out in a stratified manner, such as residence, gender or education, which allows us to conclude that digital media can guide their loyalty efforts depending on the profile of their readers and the market they seek to target. To illustrate focusing on stratification by place of residence, the most significant factors for the Mexico City group corresponded to familiarity and satisfaction, wile for the Monterrey group the most significant factors were reputation and familiarity in that order. Results with this type of differences between groups were also obtained when comparing by gender and schooling. It is recommended for future research on the subject, to include other cities within the country, with the purpose of contrasting these paper’s findings.

Young people are perceived as heavy consumers of social media and less avid consumers of news. That notion, however, deserves nuance: Many factors, such as the national context, media system, trust in news, intentionally or incidentally encountering news from different sources, and interest in politics, influence how young people consume news. This study explores news consumption among Finnish adolescents through a representative survey of 15-19-year-olds. We seek to answer two research questions: What are the news repertoires of Finnish adolescents? And what factors predict different news repertoires? Latent profile analysis reveals three distinct news repertoires: 1) moderate digital traditionalists, the largest group, embracing traditional news in digital form; 2) minimalist social media stumblers, the second-largest group, tending to consume news infrequently through passive social media encounters and lacking credible information; and 3) a quite large number of frequent news omnivores, taking an interest in diverse news forms and actively seeking them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adds to the growing literature on native advertising and journalism by analyzing how seventeen prominent news organizations promote their in-house content studios on their web sites. As public-facing spaces oriented toward attracting clients, these sites are understood as discursive artifacts that provide insight into how news organizations negotiate their allegiance to norms of journalistic autonomy while simultaneously developing the role of creating paid advertising campaigns that sit alongside news content. Our analysis reveals that news organizations simultaneously engage in discourses of integration and separation between native advertising and news content. They signal the integration between news and advertising through the usage of "story" as an umbrella term for digital content while also maintaining separation through nuanced language choices that imply some degree of distance between news and native advertising. These diverging discourses demonstrate how fraught native advertising is for news organizations striving to be recognized as legitimate providers of authoritative news while attempting to bolster revenues in face of the difficulties arising with the digital advertising market. These findings draw on and expand discursive theories in journalism studies by broadening inquiry beyond news content to encompass the complex terrain of content production emerging within the digital space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the internet and social media have established themselves as primary sources of information and have become an integral part of political communication. The speed with which news is published and circulated, and the possibility, especially with mobile devices, of consuming information from anywhere, even while involved in other activities, have caused the internet to become central to many current events. It's increasingly important to question the quality and variety of the information that's available online. This is the topic that's becoming more and more central to political debate because, as is also true for traditional media, making accurate information available is one of the essential conditions not only for being able to choose the best products and services in several markets, but for making informed political choices as well. Therefore, proper functioning of the information market has important externalities which affect both the political system and the proper functioning of many financial sectors. After decades of expansion in information markets, it's clear that a simple quantitative increase in the amount of information available isn't enough to prevent individuals from being insuf- ficiently or poorly informed, and it rather introduces issues regarding the trustworthiness, quality, and relevance of the information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clickstream data recording each click that each individual user makes on a media website has become the currency for evaluating digital platforms in order to maximise advertising and/or subscription revenue. There is a growing recognition, however, that the mere volume of clicks is not adequate for this purpose. We propose a new systematic approach to this problem based on an underlying theory of engagement. Engagement is construed theoretically as user experiences that connect to higher-order personal goals or social values. We show that such experiences can be described qualitatively using survey items that form engagement measurement scales and that these engagement scales, in fact, explain a willingness-to-pay outcome variable. Moreover, these experiences can be translated into surrogate decomposed clickstream variables. We analyse data from three news websites and show that these decomposed clickstream variables predict willingness-to-pay for the sites better than raw, undecomposed clickstream data. Our methodological framework thus provides a new way of using clickstream data to detect engagement with digital content, a method that provides a basis for improving engagement and ultimately outcomes such as the willingness to pay for content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of algorithmically tailored individual news feeds is increasingly viewed as an important strategy for accommodating consumers' information needs by legacy media. However, growing personalization of news distribution also raises normative concerns about the societal function of legacy media, in particular when dealing with personalization of traumatic and polarizing content. To extend the discussion of these concerns beyond the current focus on the role of news personalization in Western democracies, this article offers a conceptual assessment of perspectives for adopting personalization for conflict coverage in Ukraine and Russia, where media systems enjoy a lesser degree of press freedom. Using the coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine as a case study, the article offers a conceptual framework for assessing the impact of personalization on the distribution of conflict-related news in a non-Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Collaborative Software (OCS), most notably the platform Slack, have become embedded in the infrastructure of modern newsrooms affording a flexible and innovative way for newsrooms to coordinate their workflows and communicate across geographical distance. More recently, several media outlets have experimented with how the platform can be opened up to their audiences in an effort to build community and provide transparency in their newsmaking. This article utilizes a case study of one newsroom's such experimentation with Slack in order to explore the normative assumptions behind newsmakers attempts to build consumer trust and the extent to which technological interventions like Slack can help achieve aims of greater trust. Analysis points towards several emergent trends, namely the limitations of pursuing trust through enhanced transparency, the ways in which relational trust can assist newsmakers attempting to grow their outlets and how the use of external technological platforms structures relationships within virtual spaces of newsmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous studies have found a clear gap between users' news preferences and editors' news choices, whether a similar user–editor gap exists when it comes to news quality evaluations remains an open question. We therefore conducted a nation-wide survey of 7810 South Korean users, collected online social indicators from a digital news platform, and asked users and editors to evaluate the quality of 1500 news articles and rank-order these articles' editorial importance, respectively. Even after controlling for users' news preferences and news genres, we found that users distinguished news articles quality in a manner comparable to that of editors. Our analysis also showed that users with higher issue involvement, issue knowledge, or ideological strength tended to rate news quality similar to editors. Moreover, we found that ideological strength served as an alternative cognitive schema for issue knowledge for individuals who lacked sufficient knowledge to assess news quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the problem of agenda setting by news media in relation to the political discourse by politicians at the time of local elections. We first evaluate the applicability of the agenda-setting theory against the theory of policy agenda building to determine the possible alternative directions for constructing a political agenda at the time of elections. Namely, we identify a non-linear interaction between news organizations, politicians, and the general public during the electoral campaign. This interaction, in turn, shapes the dynamic evolution of the public discourse concerning politics, and it is characterized by high sensitivity to initial conditions and non-linearity. Then, we attempt to identify the presence of an evolutionary trajectory of the political discourse in Lower Austria at the time of elections by observing whether, as the time of an election approaches, the interaction between news organizations and politicians flattens and becomes more linear without the news or the politicians causing the agenda of the other to be set accordingly. Finally, we provide a new methodology for identifying the topics contained in such an agenda so that empirical verification of the proposed hypothesis becomes possible.

The protest paradigm, which describes the unequitable reciprocity of the media-social movement relationship, creates a double-bind for social movements. Mainstream news media in the United States emphasize emotion, drama, and irrationality while excluding the grievances, agendas, and substance behind a protest, contributing to negative narratives that can hinder public support for a movement. This analysis of Facebook news posts of protests by mainstream U.S. news organizations contributes to our understanding of how social media's engagement affordances work in cohort with journalists' use of emotional appeals to legitimize some protests and delegitimize others. Results show posts encourage the mobilization of some protests more than others, and media frames and emotional linguistic devices might contribute to a spectrum of delegitimizing framing effects. Legitimizing features significantly decrease emotional reactions from audiences, leading to more neutral but potentially less engaging audience reception and response. Findings advance our understanding protest paradigm framing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subscription fees are an increasingly prominent revenue source for news organizations, challenging advertising as the primary business model for news. But when most online news remains available for free, how do publishers convince readers to pay? We examined how the 55 most-read US newspapers frame their value proposition when they ask readers to subscribe. Using the Meyer-Allen organizational commitment framework, we analyzed the informational, social, and normative elements mentioned in 'subscribe now' webpages. Every subscription offer referred to the informational value in a regular relationship with the newspaper, yet 62 percent also mentioned affective and community-based benefits in subscription, and 33 percent evoked normative and value-based benefits. Our data show that newspaper subscriptions are often promoted as a relationship with social and normative dimensions, rather than merely an information-based transaction – with some differences in the language used by newspapers of different sizes, ownership types, US regions, and local political orientations ('red'/'blue' state). This work demonstrates the merit in analyzing promotional materials produced by news organizations to better understand both their strategies and their relationships with the communities they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out the emergent challenges and opportunities for developing effective and 'future proof' policy for regulating media plurality. This analysis is carried out against the backdrop of UK authorities' 2018 public interest test of the proposed merger between 21st Century Fox and Sky, and the latest data on the UK media ownership landscape. That merger review established important precedents for plurality reform, particularly in its acknowledgement that digital intermediaries are not an inherently pluralizing force and that regulatory intervention is needed to prevent concentrations of agenda power, especially at the level of wholesale newsgathering. The article goes on to critically examine the existing regulatory approach to considerations of whether media mergers are in the public interest, especially in the light of mounting evidence of intensifying consolidation within and across news platforms. This article argues that effective plurality reform must start with new legislation that sets out indicative thresholds and detailed guidance on the meaning of plurality sufficiency. This will enable a proper assessment of plurality outside merger activity and could serve as the basis for periodic reviews, enabling regulators to respond effectively to the challenge of new technologies and dynamic market conditions. We also address problems in the plurality measurement framework developed by Ofcom, namely, the inclusion of digital intermediaries as news 'sources' in data collection and analysis. In light of findings from the Fox/Sky merger review, a more effective approach would be to reallocate consumption attributed to major intermediaries based on analysis of the actual news sources consumed via those platforms. Far from privileging intermediaries, this approach will provide a more robust basis on which to bring them into the fold of plurality regulation, namely, through the development of plurality standards for algorithm governance. Such an approach also reflects a new reality in which the interplay of gatekeeping and agenda power between traditional media and intermediaries is not a zero-sum game, amidst growing evidence that major intermediaries are serving to consolidate rather than diversify the news offer in favour of incumbent and mostly legacy publishers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effects of news use motivations and differing native advertising contexts (hard vs. soft news) on the ability to perceive commercialized content, evaluations of native advertising, and ensuing digital news perceptions. Based upon the framework of the persuasion knowledge model, an online experiment was conducted among a sample of U.S. adults (N = 684). Engaging with news for informational motivations conditioned perceptions of advertising as did the contextual effects of hard versus soft news. Furthermore, hard-news approaches to native advertising were perceived more unfavorably by audiences and tarnished the subsequent reporting of actual journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the business of news in the early 21st century through a case study of the US newspaper company MediaNews Group. It examines the company's efforts over the past decade to create sources of revenue while the US newspaper industry faced a growing financial crisis. This article argues it is necessary to rethink the political economy of news to see that power over news consumption is the foundation of the business of news. The concepts of an attention economy and audience labor are used to reframe the process of capitalizing on news as, fundamentally, a process of gaining power over attention in order to treat it as an exploitable form of audience labor and thereby generate revenue from news consumers or advertisers. This article then presents a study of the strategies for generating revenue used by MediaNews Group from 2006 to 2016, focusing on its clusters of newspapers in California. Ownership consolidation was the company's key strategy until its debt and the industry's crisis forced it into bankruptcy. The company then pursued a series of digital strategies: digital advertising, paywalls, mobile distribution, citizen journalism, copyright infringement lawsuits, and Google Consumer Surveys. None proved profitable enough, and in 2016, the company returned to ownership consolidation. MediaNews Group's efforts over the past decade demonstrate the inescapable truth that power over attention is the key to the business of news: Capitalizing on news requires power over news consumption as a form of attention that can be exploited as news audience labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada. Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a 'complex peripheral actor,' a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of digitization and other environmental trends, journalism is changing its forms and arguably also its functions--both in fundamental ways. While 'legacy' news media continue to be easily distinguishable by set characteristics, new content providers operating in an increasingly dense, chaotic, interactive, and participatory information environment still remain somewhat understudied. However, at a time when non-traditional formats account for an ever-growing portion of journalistic or para-journalistic work, there is an urgent need to better understand these new peripheral actors and the ways they may be transforming the journalistic field. While journalism scholarship has begun to examine peripheral actors' motivations and conceptualizations of their roles, our understanding is still fairly limited. This relates particularly to comparative studies of peripheral actors, of which there have been very few, despite peripheral journalism being a global phenomenon. This study aims to address this gap by presenting evidence from 18 in-depth interviews with journalists in Australia, Germany, and the UK. In particular, it examines how novel journalistic actors working for a range of organisations discursively contrast their work from that of others. The findings indicate that journalists' motivations to engage in journalism in spite of the rise of precarious labour were profoundly altruistic: Indeed, journalists pledged allegiance to an ideology of journalism still rooted in a pre-crisis era--one which sees journalism as serving a public good by providing an interpretative, sense-making role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To determine how undergraduate students engage with digital news, researchers at Davidson College surveyed 511 incoming first-year students on their news consumption habits and asked them to evaluate screenshots of news stories. The researchers found that a high percentage of the students were accessing news through social media platforms and that syndication and fake URLs posed challenges for them in making accurate evaluations. Additionally, students indicated they would share a tweet containing an impostor URL at higher rates than they would share the other news story examples. The findings have implications for how educators teach students to evaluate misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Al-Frahids Arts is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This qualitative study based on interviews at 10 digital news startups in India fills multiple gaps in entrepreneurial journalism literature by exploring how social identities of founders shape innovation and financing at their ventures. In line with extant managerial literature, this study showed founders can be classified according to a typology: Darwinian, Communitarian, Missionary, and Guardian, the last being a new identity specific to entrepreneurial journalists, and perhaps, India. Findings suggest social identity is tied to understandings of innovation, financing, experimentation, audience interactions, and mission. Results also indicate founders' concepts of entrepreneur and journalist are not necessarily related to social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incidental consumption of news on social media has risen in recent years, particularly among young people. Previous studies have characterized what the main dimensions and effects of this phenomenon are. In this article, we complement that literature by looking at how this phenomenon unfolds. Inspired by practice theory, we aim to answer two questions: (1) what are the practices that subtend incidental news consumption on social media among young people? and (2) What are the social consequences of these practices? We draw upon 50 in-depth interviews with respondents aged 18-29 years from Argentina. Our findings show the existence of (1) strong connections between technology and content, "anywhere and anytime" coordinates, derivative information routines, and increasingly mediated sociability and (2) fragmentary reading patterns, loss of hierarchy of the news, and coexistence of editorial, algorithmic, and social filtering. We conclude by elaborating on the empirical and theoretical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in previous research: a statistical test to filter out non-significant overlap between sites; and a thresholding approach to identify the core of the audience network. We explain why our approach is better than previous approaches using two data sets: one tracks digital news consumption during the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. We show that our filtering technique produces a completely different ranking of top sites, uncovering structural properties in the audience network that would go unnoticed otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examined a news episode in a single market as a case study aimed at teasing out elements associated with journalism and audience convergence. This study found four conditions present when the audience converged. The conditions were a spark, or ignition event, that has the potential to arouse dialogue, journalism that makes the broader public aware of such an event, a sufficient mass of audience commentary to create debate, and a channel through which the debate can occur. This process represents a convergence of different public spheres, where audiences overlap and interact across platforms, taking with them bits and pieces from other public spheres to create a new one, a converged conversation. Further, this study found that audience convergence stayed within the confines of the journalism channels that offered initial coverage of the event, suggesting journalism as a key element in the creation of such a space, but, once created, journalism is no longer the curator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine the predictive capabilities of online investor sentiment for the returns and volatility of MSCI U.S. Equity Sector Indices by including exogenous variables in the mean and volatility specifications of a Markov-switching model. As predicted by the semistrong efficient market hypothesis, they find that the Thomson Reuters Marketpsych Indices (TRMI) predict volatility to a greater extent than they do returns. The TRMI derived from equity specific digital news are better predictors than similar sentiment from social media. In the two-regime setting, there is evidence supporting the hypothesis of emotions playing a more important role during stressed markets compared to calm periods. The authors also find differences in sentiment sensitivity between different industries: it is greatest for financials, whereas the energy and information technology sectors are scarcely affected by sentiment. Results are obtained with the R programming language. Code is available from the authors upon request. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hyperlinks are considered vital to both the Web and to digital journalism. This study utilizes a longitudinal content analysis of hyperlinking practices in Swedish online news from 2007 to 2013 to see how hyperlinking evolves over time. It also compares if and to what extent publishing tradition shapes journalistic practice. The findings primarily show that the overall impact of hyperlinks remains largely unchanged over time but that internal links, while still being most common, decrease in relative importance while external links increase. The general conclusion is that hyperlinks, so far, are not an important aspect of online journalism practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]