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The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed “coronablocking”: the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of how and why young news users avoid the news. To explore these questions, we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Belgian news users under the age of 35. We propose that news avoidance practices are fluid, as news avoidance was often preceded by moments of increased news consumption, and inherently connected to the specific spatiotemporal context of users and enacted within their broader media repertoire. In our analysis, we discuss the user-identified characteristics which lead users to a ‘tipping point’, at which point they avoided the news to varying degrees by reconfiguring their media repertoire. Three types of reconfigurations are identified: tuning out news content, regulating the flow of information, and controlling the tone of voice, all of which underline users’ agency in shaping their repertoires to avoid the news.

Social networks have surpassed their intermediary role and become gatekeepers of online content and traffic. This transformation has favored the spread of information disorders. The situation is especially alarming in Spain, where 57% of Spaniards have at some moment believed false news. Since 2016, First Draft has promoted several collaborative verification projects that brought together newsrooms to fact-check false, misleading and confusing claims circulating online during presidential elections in several countries. The main objective of this article is to study the collaboration forged between newsrooms in Spain in order to debunk disinformation contents in 2019 under the name of Comprobado (Verified) and the impact of this initiative. Applying a methodological approach based on non-participant observation, interviews, content analysis of reports, scientific articles, books and media archives, we examine the internal uses of this platform, how journalists verified public discourse, the strategies and internal agreements implemented, and the degree of participation of the 16 media involved. Results show that only half of the initiatives begun were transformed into published reports, and the media impact achieved was limited. Finally, we note that the principal reasons for the frustration of the project were its improvised implementation, due to the date of the election being brought forward, and the scant culture of collaboration in the sector. In Spain at least, cross-media alliances are still an exception.

This article analyzes the media market of Ukraine during the period from 2018 to 2020. The study includes social and political phenomena that had an effect on media consumption in Ukraine. Firstly, at the end of 2018, the presidential election campaign contributed to the mass digitalization of the country. Then at the begging of 2020, news consumption was highly increased due to the situation with coronavirus pandemic. The article provides statistics on the Ukrainization of media content.

Convergence has had a major influence on journalism in the past decade. It is particularly important to understand how convergence continues to change working conditions as well as the journalistic practices, routines, norms, and strategies that shape news production. This phenomenon becomes even more substantial when considering the extent to which technological and economic changes have had a disruptive impact on journalism, altering how news is produced and circulated to increasingly fragmented audiences.

In this article, we examine the correlates of fear of violence in the cross-media landscape. The study draws on the Finnish National Crime Victim Survey ( n = 6,141, respondents aged 15–74 years). First, we examine from what information and media sources respondents receive information on violent crime. We then examine how consumption of different types of media and information sources on violent crime associates with the contemporary experience of fear of street violence, avoidance behavior due to threat of violence, and perceived threat of terrorism to oneself. We also examine whether this association remains when age, gender, education, past victimization, and economic strain are adjusted for.

Research investigating the drivers of consumers’ engagement with brands on social media is proliferating. However, little is known about how advertising outside social media drives engagement with brands on social media. This study aims to explore the relation between advertising spend in different offline media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, out of home), and reach of and engagement with brand pages on Facebook. The study uses a unique real-life data-set containing information about the Facebook pages of 45 brands for approximately three years combined with Nielsen Advertising Spend data. Results showed that while advertising in offline media influenced organic and viral reach, the number of page likes was directly influenced by advertising on Facebook only. It can be concluded that offline advertising is relevant in driving consumers’ online brand engagement; however, there is a unique set of drivers for organic reach, viral reach and likes.

This article explores strategies used by television programme makers in the multi-platform era, principally concerning personal memories of historical events. The availability and use of televisual materials has increased in the current ‘post-scarcity culture’, especially through the digitization of archival collections and production of history-based content for television. The author therefore considers the contemporary role of television in the active experience of (re-)engaging with past events in the present. The analysis focuses on a specific case of historical television documentary, the Dutch cross-media project In Europe, grounded in a textual analysis of the project and the creators' strategies of multi-platform storytelling. These strategies hold opportunities and implications for a specific kind of shared engagement with the past, which can arguably be called a ‘participatory memory’.

For two decades, convergence culture has been an important motivator for change in journalism worldwide. Journalism research has followed these developments, investigating the dimensions of change that define convergence as a cultural shift in the newsroom. Research in the European context has mostly been comprised of national case studies of flagship media outlets whereas comparative, let alone quantitative, studies are scarce. In response to these shortcomings, we present a comparative survey among newspaper journalists in managerial positions on convergence strategies in newsrooms from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Results show that there is still a dominant print culture present in newsrooms across Europe; however, a shift toward convergence journalism is evident in the strategic implementation of editorial routines and practices as well as in the encouragement of journalists to join convergence developments. Furthermore, newsrooms in Mediterranean countries are more advanced than those in North/Central Europe when it comes to embracing convergence culture because of a stronger audio-visual than print news tradition and a higher motivation among journalists. Our study reveals that after two decades of European convergence journalism, cultural change moves slowly but steadily toward a news production that makes use of the possibilities emerging from convergence.

Cet article propose d’observer le fonctionnement de la création transmédiatique d’histoires Star Wars, à travers deux jeux vidéo : Le Pouvoir de la Force (LucasArts, 2008) et Knight of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) avec leurs protagonistes (Starkiller et Revan). Il y est question d’analyser les méthodes de construction de ces productions tout en interrogeant les rapports qu’entretient l’exigeante communauté de fans avec la société officielle. This article propose to observe some transmedia creations about Star Wars stories, using two video games : The Force Unleashed (LucasArts, 2008) and Knight of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) with their main protagonists (Starkiller and Revan). It is about analysing methods to create these narrations while observing the relations between the demanding Star Wars fan community and the official production society.

[EN] The paper intends to investigate current university degree programs in numerous European countries and compare them with offerings in the United States with regard to their suitability to contemporary workplace requirements in the age of convergence. Recent trends in convergence, defined as the merging and growing together of previously distinct industrial branches, professions, devices and skills (Jenkins, 2008) have changed and dramatically transformed the ways people communicate as well as interact with each another. As a consequence, academic and professional representatives are asked to respond to these far-reaching alterations in varying ways. By use of an extensive content analysis, our study intends to analyze to which degree universities in Europe and the United States have started to already offer adequate programs on different educational levels (Bachelor, Master and PhD) in an attempt to provide the kind of media education needed today and in the future. The paper takes a closer look at educational trainings and degree programs offered by post-secondary institutions throughout the world, scrutinizing whether convergence and related terms such as multimedia and cross-media have already managed to gain an (academic) foothold yet

Automatic image annotation is still an important open problem in multimedia and computer vision. The success of media sharing websites has led to the availability of large collections of images tagged with human-provided labels. Many approaches previously proposed in the literature do not accurately capture the intricate dependencies between image content and annotations. We propose a learning procedure based on Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis which finds a mapping between visual and textual words by projecting them into a latent meaning space. The learned mapping is then used to annotate new images using advanced nearest-neighbor voting methods. We evaluate our approach on three popular datasets, and show clear improvements over several approaches relying on more standard representations.

En este artículo se examina la incidencia de las redes sociales en la creación de nuevas formas teatrales, a partir del estudio de dos ejemplos de twittoperas multimediales que toman como origen el drama shakesperiano de Romeo y Julieta: la producción de la Royal Shakespeare Company (Such Sweet Sorrow, 2010) y la de la compañía de teatro Chévere (Amores prohibidos 2.0, 2012). Ambos intentan explicarse desde una posible “Script acts theory”, que pretende abordar este tipo de experiencias desde la tensión entre un guion previo y un alto grado de imprevisibilidad.

The aim of this article is to advance current understandings of cross-media communication in advertising. The study is based on a sample of 80 television commercials and their announced websites, and the article is inspired by recent studies of cross-media advertising effectiveness as well as semiotic perspectives on multimodal analysis. The authors present three dimensions to be considered when examining multimodal connections between television commercials and websites: announcements, participants and address strategy. These dimensions are brought together in an analytical framework that can serve as inspiration for further research on cross-media communication in advertising and possibly in other types of communication.

We present a peer-to-peer version of a cross-media link server that allows users to create and share links between arbitrary forms of digital and physical media. As a specific example, we describe how it could be used to support collaborative forms of annotation of paper and/or digital design documents.

Due to the ever increasing number of different digital media types that we use in our daily work, it is no longer sufficient to manage them in an isolated way but desirable to define associations across the media boundaries. While cross-media information systems allow different forms of media objects to be linked, there is often a lack of support for the flexible authoring and sharing of these links. We present a solution for exchanging cross-media link information in an ad-hoc way among communities of users based on a notion of a cooperative cross-media link server. We describe how the system has been implemented based on an existing cross-media link server (iServer) and peer-to-peer technologies.

As práticas digitais que decorrem da ubiquidade dos media e da sua utilização possibilitaram a combinação de múltiplas plataformas no consumo de notícias. Neste artigo, procurámos identificar repertórios mediáticos (padrões de uso dos media noticiosos) em Portugal, de modo a compreender como são construídas as preferências mediáticas das audiências e de que forma o consumo noticioso integra os seus hábitos quotidianos. Neste sentido, desenvolvemos uma análise a padrões de consumo de media noticiosos a partir de uma abordagem mista de métodos qualitativos e quantitativos baseada na Metodologia Q (Davis & Michelle, 2011), a partir de uma amostra constituída por 36 participantes. A análise dos padrões de consumo de notícias permitiu identificar e analisar sete repertórios mediáticos em função do uso, relevância e utilidade atribuída pelos sujeitos aos media noticiosos. Os resultados revelam perfis híbridos de consumo mediático e uma tendência para consumos de notícias numa lógica móvel e multiplataforma, embora os media tradicionais continuem a desempenhar um papel determinante nos repertórios mediáticos em Portugal., The digital practices that arise from the ubiquity of the media and their use enabled the combination of different platforms within news consumption, in a cross-media logic. In this article we sought to identify media repertoires (patterns of use of news media) in Portugal, in order to understand how do people make sense of their media preferences and how does news consumption integrate the daily habits of the audience. In this sense, we have developed an analysis of news media consumption patterns grounded on a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative methods based on Q-Methodology (Davis & Michelle, 2011), using a sample of 36 participants. The analysis of news consumption patterns allowed the identification and analysis of seven media repertories according to the use, relevance and usefulness attributed by the subjects to the news media. The results show hybrid media consumption profiles and a tendency for the consumption of news in a mobile and multiplatform logic, although traditional media continue to play a determining role in the media repertoires in Portugal., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion