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The exploitation of data in the media industry has always played a significant role. This is especially evident today, since data (and in many cases big data) are generated through various activities that relate to the production and also consumption of news. This paper attempts to highlight the importance of big data utilization in the media industry. Specifically, it discusses cases of big data exploitation, such as media content consumption and management, data journalism production, social content utilization, and participatory journalism applications. The study also examines the changes that big data has introduced in all stages of the journalism practice, from news production to news distribution, by utilizing the available tools. Finally, it discusses new developments that relate to semantic web (Web 3.0) technologies, which have already started to be adopted by media organizations around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative news media in Norway have become visible in public debates. Partly because of news sharing on social media. Social media has become an arena for news, information, and public debate, and has also become a place to fight for the news agenda. The present study examines news sharing in social media in Norway and how right-wing alternative news outlets use social media to impact the news agenda. These are small organizations with only a handful of employees, but they have very proactive readers and feature a considerable amount of user-generated content. They are critical of immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, and of the political elite. They mimic traditional media in the way they organize and label their content, but their reporting is more subjective. The present study uses quantitative content analysis to reveal which topics are the most shared on social media, and from which news type of news organizations they come. It also looks at how news sharing differed in the days following a series of terrorist attacks and how the pattern changed during the course of a normal day. This leads to a discussion on participatory journalism and how news sharing can be seen as a part of the public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To grasp the current status of network public opinion (NPO) research and explore the knowledge base and hot trends from a quantitative perspective, we retrieved 1385 related papers and conducted a bibliometric mapping analysis on them. Co-occurrence analysis, cluster analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword burst analysis were performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace software. The results show that the NPO is mainly distributed in the disciplinary fields associated with journalism and communication and public management. There are four main hotspots: analysis of public opinion, analysis of communication channels, technical means and challenges faced. The knowledge base in the field of NPO research includes social media, user influence, and user influence related to opinion dynamic modeling and sentiment analysis. With the advent of the era of big data, big data technology has been widely used in various fields and to some extent can be said to be the research frontier in the field. Transforming big data public opinion into early warning, realizing in-depth analysis and accurate prediction of public opinion as well as improving decision-making ability of public opinion are the future research directions of NPO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the assumption that user-generated content in mass media websites gives audiences greater power over influencing news making. Employing a content analysis of readers' comments in various Greek online mass media, the study examines whether commenters assume any of the core journalistic functions regarding news production, in terms of setting the agenda, providing original information, and airing oppositional views on reported issues. From a public sphere perspective, it also examines the degree of diversity of users' opinions within media outlets. The results suggest that whereas users challenge journalistic viewpoints to some extent, this type of audience participation is not likely to render audiences co-producers of news content in significant ways or offer opportunities for cross-cutting political exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of social media usage such as Twitter during the March and April 2009 apparent flood danger to the Red River Valley, which separates the North Dakota and Minnesota in a region that extends across the U.S.-Canadian border into the province of Manitoba. It also assesses the credibility of public journalism and user-generated media. Further, it mentions that an analysis of tens of thousands of tweets sent during the flood threat period indicates mechanisms for information production, distribution and organization in use in the otherwise unmanageable information space of microblogging.

The article focuses on the relationship between online publishing and citizen participation. The journalistic shift from print to digital publishing, the incidence of high-speed Internet access on user demand for content, and the effect of Web 2.0 technologies on user participation and content creation are noted. Citing researcher Steve Outing's 2005 article "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism," several types of user involvement are considered including reader comments, the journalistic use of blogs, and reader-created content. The author explores how these different levels of user involvement are present in independent online news site Soitu.es.