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Through the lens of disruptive innovation, the present study explores a potential model for local journalism—one that has proven particularly successful for sports journalism in The Athletic. The present study reports on in-depth interviews with Athletic employees across all facets of the organization (n = 49), and argues that the key to The Athletic 's success is reflected in its emphasis on implementing a national infrastructure for local reporting, and employing journalists already embedded in local communities. The article concludes with a rudimentary rendering of how this model could be implemented for local news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the psychological impact of viewing user-generated content depicting extreme real-world violence. Eight threads were harvested from a publicly accessible online discussion forum in which people discussed their experiences of witnessing real-world torture, maiming or death online. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to systematically analyse these threads. The themes capture the contradictory ways in which people react to viewing extreme real-world violence online, with some finding it intensely distressing and others using it as a resource for psychological grounding or (perceived) strengthening. Based on this analysis, we highlight pathways that may lead to the cessation or continuation of viewing such content and argue that greater research on this seemingly common but under-studied experience is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Facebook and Twitter have received significant scholarly attention for their role in shaping the journalistic field, Instagram has received sparse attention in comparison. The present study examines how lifestyle journalists (n = 63) from Austria and the United States perceive Instagram influencers operating in relation to the journalistic field. Instagram influencers, empowered by the digital medium, would seem to be in direct competition with lifestyle journalists in terms of content. Through the theoretical lenses of boundary work and field, this study argues that lifestyle journalists—long relegated to the periphery of the journalistic field—discursively leverage the presence of influencers to protect their autonomy within the field while pushing influencers to its boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable flow of information and news stories are being exchanged on social media in several parts of the world. A significant number of news stories are fake and are published to serve certain purposes and ideologies. The present study examines how Arab social media users respond to fake news in Arabic in reference to van Dijk's concept of the ideological square. A dataset of fake news was collected from Twitter, now X platform, comprising tweets on various events. After preprocessing, a topic-modeling algorithm was applied to the dataset to reveal its latent aspects. Instances of the featured topics in the dataset were then analyzed in accordance with the sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis. The findings demonstrate that fake news was leveraged to promote ideological struggle between social groups. Some social media users may interact with misinformation without evaluating its credibility and, therefore, express ideologically loaded beliefs for or against the subject matter of the news story. Fake news stories were also exploited for business and marketing. Misinformation's discourse structure involves ideological polarization, self-identification and goal-description, and violates norms and values. The discursive structure and strategies revolve around the ideological square. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication research is increasingly concerned with the relationship between epistemological fragmentation and polarization. Even so, explanations for why partisans take up fringe beliefs are limited. This article examines the right-wing conspiracy QAnon, which posits that the anonymous poster "Q" is a Trump administration insider who encourages followers ("Bakers") to research hidden truths behind current events. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork on the 8chan imageboard, we position baking as a collective, knowledge-making activity built on the affordances of social media designed to construct specific facts and theories that maintain QAnon's cohesion over time. Bakers demonstrate populist expertise, the rejection of legacy media accounts of current events in favor of the "alternative facts" constructed through their systematic research programs. We emphasize the politically ambivalent nature of participatory culture and argue that baking casts doubt on critical thinking or media literacy as solutions to "post-truth" dilemmas like hyperpartisan media and disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research is a critical analysis of news media reports, political debates, and political and family behaviours to interrogate the centrality of death, corpses, funeral and mortuary rituals in African politics by using the death of Zimbabwe's former President, Robert Mugabe as a case study. At death, it became clear what a polarizing and yet unifying figure Mugabe was. His dead body became a contested political asset. The paper explores how Mugabe's family resisted President Mnangagwa's attempts at gaining control of Mugabe's dead body for political expediency after he disposed of him in a military coup in 2017. The paper concludes that, true to Mugabe's wife's assertions that he will rule Zimbabwe from the grave, Mugabe, as a dead man, caused some considerable political tensions between his family and ruling magnifying the coup architects' legitimacy challenges and his power in Zimbabwean politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with YouTube's advertiser-friendly content guidelines – the content rules dedicated to defining what YouTube deems advertiser (un)friendly and that YouTube creators seeking to monetise their content through advertising have to follow. Specifically, this study addresses the textual composition of YouTube's regulations with a focus on occurrences of vagueness. Regarding methods of data analysis, I take a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach to YouTube's texts on advertiser-friendliness. That is, I take a wide-angle view on all concordance lines of 'content' and identify occurrences of different forms of vagueness. Findings suggest that at least 26% of the lines of 'content' detailing YouTube's ad-friendly content guidelines exhibit at least one of eight forms of vagueness. Consequently, content creators – left unsure about the monetisability of particular content – may choose not to push any boundaries but to produce noncontroversial content, which, in turn, may impede content plurality on YouTube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines critical comments hidden behind the humorous topic of self-mockery. Based on a discourse analysis of 51 critical comments identified by GooSeeker of a self-mockery event from Weibo, this paper aims to unpack how the commenters actively exploit the relevancy of a topic to fulfill socio-political functions. Three strategies are found to be key in enabling them to accomplish socio-political functions: immoralizing the peripheral party, deauthorizing privilege and irrationalizing competitiveness, the meanings of which are discursively constructed across the critical comments. In this process, the self-mockery event serves as a weapon of social power to formulate critique and articulate discontent without breaking a consistent performance. The creative (re)appropriation in use is believed to be triggered by the policy of the platform and user's self-motivated interactional practice. These findings are expected to have implications for understanding comments as a social behavior at the nexus of language and social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the widespread misinformation problem in societies across the globe, scholars aiming to combat misinformation wish to change verification behaviors at the individual level. To map what is known about media users' verification behaviors, this study reviewed 52 articles and analyzed how verification research has progressed so far. The results indicate that verification research has been conducted since 2000 but has increased considerably in recent years. However, a clear definition and a standard measure of verification behaviors were missing. Theories and methodologies from different disciplines have been adopted to investigate verification behaviors. The examined variables are diverse, but the overall understanding of the findings is fragmented. Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic boosted the number of studies on media users' verification behaviors and brought changes to the direction of the research. This review calls for a better conceptualization and validated measures of verification behaviors and examinations of verification in more diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study interrogates how protesters learned about and planned the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. Analyses of survey data collected in 2020 during the protests and content analysis of tweets demonstrate that protesters who used Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter to learn about and plan the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria and reported to be 30 years and older are more likely to report joining on the first day of the protest. Data showed a relationship between protesters' perceived ease of use of a social media platform and their use of such platforms during protests. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a special issue, this endeavor serves as a sourcebook and provocation amplifying embryonic but interlinked sites of inquiry: LatinXness in Spain and its vital conversation with US LatinX studies as well as Iberian studies. LatinXs share historical and cultural connections to the Spanish and American empires. The contemporary period marks a significant moment on both sides of the Atlantic, as Spain now houses Europe's largest LatinX population and the shifting ground of LatinXness exceeds the United States as well as a North-South axis of analysis. With an eye toward being wide-ranging, bringing forward fresh insights, and offering a crucial reference for an expanding area of interest—transatlantic LatinX studies—this undertaking provides historical contexts, defining moments, conceptual parameters, and critical approaches that appraise how Spain's sociocultural and intellectual climate has fully entered a LatinX epoch. The exploration faces a cluster of questions: What do current characterizations of Spanishness invigorate when it admits a long ignored—and inseparable—LatinX foundation? What constitutes Spanish national currency when animated by LatinX bodies and imaginations? What is Spain—and what is Europe—to LatinXness and the Global South? What kind of new Spain—and new Europe—emerge from LatinXness and Global Southness? Collected here are original arguments and contributions—academic articles, think pieces, critical conversations, poetry, and creative nonfiction—orienting us on central thematic concerns that include: new directions and perspectives in transatlantic LatinX studies; the idea of Europe and Europeanness from Spain's southernmost archipelago, the Canary Islands; LatinX nonhuman origins at the Royal Botanical Garden in the Spanish capital; the history, uses, and dissemination of the Panchito/Panchita racial slur; Madrid's twenty-first century LatinX Spanish language, migration, and culture; present-day brown drag performance and practices; Afro-Spanish-Colombian poetry and politics; rurality, depopulation, and LatinX repopulation in Aguaviva, Spain; diasporic bodies and expressions of identity through movement; and movement in translation, X equivalencies across bodies, geographies, and languages. The volume, as a whole, is an entry point into LatinX studies and Iberian studies marshaling ideas and thinking tools that may be veering toward a new field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwe has a tainted media history under Mugabe replete with examples of state orchestrated repression, draconian legislation, harassment of journalists and violation of their work premises. The post-November 2017 coup period is a critical reference point to understand the political economy of alternative media under the so-called 'New Dispensation' of President Mnangagwa with its promises of prodemocracy reforms. Using political economy as a theoretical approach that analyses media systems in a holistic manner by linking them to politics, economy, legislation and technology, this study assesses the extent to which the 'New Dispensation' has implemented political economy reforms that impact alternative media. Drawing from interviews with selected alternative media journalists and proprietors, the findings reveal that alternative media in Zimbabwe remain entrenched in repression and are in a crisis caused by an exacerbation of the same structural factors that existed before. The 'New Dispensation' has instead led to the entrenchment of a new dictatorship by the military junta. Undue political interference, a fragile economy and state orchestrated repression continue to constrain the democratic functions of alternative media. By teasing the continuities and discontinuities of alternative media repression during the Mugabe era and under the 'New Dispensation', the paper contributes to ongoing debates about the consequence of the 2017 coup and the need for genuine democratic reforms in Zimbabwe post-Mugabe epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniques and aesthetics as part of the effort to reinvent journalistic authority in a fragmented media and political sphere. I first discuss some earlier moments in which news coverage of events adopted a media-forensic epistemology and style, and then turn to the formation of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, a group at the leading-edge of this type of journalism today. I provide an analysis of one of the team's investigative reports, a 40-minute account of the January 6 Capitol riot assembled from vernacular video, surveillance footage, police bodycam video, and other non-news source materials. In both its formal aspects and its subject matter, the piece represents an important example for understanding an emerging form of forensic journalism. While the January 6 Capitol riot was not the first time news coverage of a violent event adopted a forensic style and epistemology, the forensic-media coverage of the riot represents a unique conjuncture. A new convergence of media-technological developments and journalist practices shaped how the storming of the Capitol was experienced, investigated, and covered as a media event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by Oduduwa secessionists to construct polarization and otherness on Twitter. Using the socio-cognitive approach to CDA combined with social media CDA, the study illustrates how socio-cultural and spatiotemporal contexts are embedded in digital performances of resistance. Findings show that the secessionists employ four main discursive strategies, namely: (1) vitriolic socio-cognitive labels and coinages; (2) generalization and ethnocentrism; (3) language of threat; and (4) use of Yoruba language to legitimize their resistance, accentuate their ideological stances, construct polarization and otherness, and do social mobilization. These strategies are achieved via discursive, linguistic, and stylo-orthographic resources made available by digital technology. The paper concludes that the discursive strategies employed by the secessionists do not directly reflect polarization but are simply constitutive of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy depends on a vivid public sphere, where ideas disseminate into the public and can be discussed – and challenged - by everyone. Journalism has contributed significantly to this social mediation by reducing complexity, providing information on salient topics and (planned) political solutions. The digital transformation of the public sphere leads to new forms of media provision, distribution, and use. Journalism has struggled to adapt to the new conditions. Journalistic news values, relevant to democracy, are being replaced by ones relevant to social media platforms' attention seeking business model. We plead for a broad public debate about the ongoing platformization and about possible policies to ensure a media system that serves and strengthens democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]