Journalism and Media

This study explores aspects of journalistic quality in complex digital stories. Based on a tailored overview of the potentials of online journalism and digital long form stories for journalistic quality, all available award-winning stories of the subcategory Interactive of the World Press Photo’s Digital Storytelling Contest from 2011 to 2021 (n = 31) are examined according to their structure and journalistic quality criteria using Grounded Theory. The findings add to the long and ongoing research history in journalism and communication studies on the question of what journalistic quality entails and can be used as a basis for further analyses focusing on the technological and structural nature of digital stories and high-quality journalism. The analysis revealed a differentiation between linear stories and chapter stories with linear elements. While a multimedia nature, continuous text and video content prevailed in both forms, they differed in terms of their complexity as well as certain expressions of quality criteria. Gamification and immersion emerged as new yet debatable aspects of journalistic quality in digital stories. Full article

As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this paper, we seek to assess the impact of digital alternative news media (DANM) in relation to mainstream news media (MNM). We examine the range of DANM, especially public Facebook pages, related to two large-scale social movements neighbouring mainland China as case studies of social movement media exerting maximalist effects. The assessment relies on academic sources, archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements. Full article

The paper aims to offer an opportunity to consider intersectionality in the context of digital media. On the basis of empirical research, this paper analyzes the way in which gender, sexuality, color, and religion intersect in online spaces to produce new norms and forms of discrimination, as well as space for agency and for the articulation of different voices. In particular, in adopting an intersectional feminist perspective, this paper explores how Muslim girls produce counter-narratives and new spaces for subjectivation at the intersection of gender, religion, and racialization by actively appropriating digital media. Specifically, the paper analyzes French Muslim girls’ relationships with digital media in relation to political life, in the context of growing Islamophobia and the instrumentalization of women’s bodies by populist discourses on religion. On the basis of online and offline observations and explorative interviews carried out in Paris, this paper shows that the girls developed a number of individual and collective strategies involving both online and offline spaces to cope with racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric and practices in a context which they perceived to be characterized by contemporary processes of racialization and everyday discrimination against Muslim people. Full article

This paper scrutinizes the phenomenon of issue fatigue and its consequences. Issue fatigue results from overexposure to a news topic that has been on the media’s agenda for an extended period of time. Fatigued recipients become annoyed, and no longer wish to be exposed to the topic. Based on the findings of an explorative qualitative study, a quantitative online survey was conducted in Germany, Mexico, and Pakistan (N = 481). Using cluster analysis, we identified an emotional and a cognitive type of issue fatigue, and investigated how these types react. Both types of fatigued recipients avoided further news about the respective issue in traditional news media (= information avoidance). Differences were observed concerning the strategies to handle fatigue (= coping strategies): recipients of the emotional type posted about their fatigue in social media; recipients of the cognitive type turned to information in sources other than the mainstream news. Taking into account country-specific differences, we concluded that, generally, issue fatigue—via information avoidance—results in an uninformed citizenry. This can be a hurdle for the functioning of an established democracy or for the success of democratic transitions. Posting about issue fatigue, which was more frequent in Mexico and Pakistan, might ‘infect’ others, and intensify problems resulting from issue fatigue. Turning to alternative sources can be either beneficial or problematic for the development of a well-informed citizenry, depending on whether alternative sources provide reliable and truthful information. Full article

In a contemporary era, strongly characterized by digital omnipresence, celebrities share, via their social media accounts, experiences related to parenthood or, in other words, adopt sharenting practices. This article focuses on the visual and textual representation of the children of six Portuguese female and male celebrities active on Instagram in 2020. The study aimed to explore whether the narratives and content strategies conveyed by celebrities about their children are integrated into authentic and advertising content, and how these vary according to the celebrity’s gender. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis was carried out, on a corpus of 1116 pieces of content related to children, in the four Instagram formats—Post, Instastory, IGTV, and Reels. The results showed that children are mostly depicted in spontaneous moments of everyday life that are often perceived as intimate and exclusive moments. While content explicitly identifying advertising or partnerships is infrequent, in many of these contents there was some sort of commercial presence, e.g., through brands identified in children’s content. There were also substantial differences in the themes of the content posted by mothers, in contrast to fathers. These differences were especially evident, on the one hand, regarding the categories of the identified brands—male celebrities are associated with outdoor activities and tend to fall into the categories “Leisure” and “Food and Drinks”, while the brand categories most often identified by female celebrities are associated with “Clothing and Footwear” and “Childcare and Health”, categories that are related to the daily care of children. On the other hand, as for the speech, we found that not only the gender but also the celebrity’s persona is relevant when considering the sharenting they do. Generally, the study found that celebrity sharenting is associated with demonstrations of affection towards children, regardless of gender, a fact that highlights the importance of family ties and parental values in a pandemic context. Full article

With an important presence in various sectors of activity, Artificial Intelligence has also reached journalism, mostly in the field of natural-language processing, in the detection of informational trends or in the automatic production of texts. The fact that sport is one of the first to test AI is not a coincidence: it is a subject in which there is a lot of information online and where data is essential, so it is simpler to resort to natural language processing to transform them in texts with little or no human intervention; this work sought to understand if Artificial Intelligence is already used in Portuguese sports media, but also in mainstream media sports sections, whether they are newspapers, radios, TVs or online natives. A survey was sent only to decision-makers, that is, editors and coordinators. The study seeks to understand to what extent journalists expect AI to help journalism, what are the greatest difficulties of its use and what threats it represents. We can conclude that Portuguese sports journalism is aware of the potential of AI, although for now it is not used in newsrooms due to economic and professional constraints. Full article

This paper approaches Kremlin disinformation from a theoretical perspective encompassing key tenets of media discourse analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, the Appraisal theory, and research on propaganda and disinformation. On 23 May 2021, the Ryanair flight 4978 flying from Athens to Vilnius was intercepted by a Belarusian warplane and forced to land in Minsk. Afterward, a Belarusian dissident journalist, Roman Protasevich, was detained. This paper aims to contribute to Kremlin disinformation research with insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal theory. The Appraisal theory is used to discern the specific disinformation strategy employed in compromised media publications covering the forced landing. The main disinformation strategy observed in the dataset revolves around deflecting the targets of moral and axiological evaluation and undermining audience’s sense of truthfulness. Full article

The systematic coverage of the coronavirus pandemic by the Greek mass media began in February 2020, specifically, from the time the virus made its appearance in the most significant way in Italy. Until then, news about the virus had been sporadically visible depending mainly on news reports coming from the international media and press agencies. The assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic as an “infodemic” by the World Health Organization (WHO) made obvious the need to study media coverage and map its patterns, along with the unprecedented political and social response and the massive consequences on the global economy. Through a large content analysis, containing 7457 news items from 13 different media outlets, plus a comparative Twitter analysis of 36,317 tweets, we took the present situation as an opportunity to collect real-time data but also as a point of departure for addressing issues connected to journalistic practices and technological changes in the framework of COVID-19. According to our findings, the Greek media faced the crisis “with a view to the world”, emphasizing international coverage, giving priority to the authorities and scientists, and keeping (at least in their majority) hoaxes and conspiracy theories out of the agenda. Full article

Protests today involve more identities and interests and have more complex relationships with the media ecology than previously. Former studies indicate the need to identify framing patterns within the changing media politics of activism. The current study empirically investigates the media framing of a social-media-driven protest in post-Colonial Macau, China. Drawing on the framing theory and content analysis methodology of 243 news coverage articles, reports, and posts published during the protest, this study explores the correlation between multimedia features. The results show that news coverage of the protest exhibits an issue–attention cycle. Media stance can affect the features of protest coverages significantly. Compared with mainstream media, alternative media adopted a more positive tone in reporting the protests, including quotations from news sources and the framing devices of the protest paradigm (show, goals, public attitude, impact) in favorable terms. The result suggests the activists’ alternative media counteracted the mainstream media’s marginalization by using a form of “legitimization paradigm”. Full article

This article deals with Nordic journalism educators’ conceptions of journalism by placing the concept of normativity at the center. The values, norms and ideas concerning journalism and journalistic practice have previously been studied by journalists and journalism students around the world and in the Nordics, while the Nordic journalism educators’ conceptions have remained more or less without attention. Nevertheless, journalism educators play a crucial role in defining what journalism is and what it is not, and thus largely affect future practitioners’ ideas of journalism. Using a questionnaire that has been employed in previous studies, journalism educators within the academic journalism training in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (n = 115) were surveyed in terms of their conceptions. It was found that the journalism educators, of which 35 per cent had a doctoral degree, still largely subscribe to the ideas of the welfare state. In addition, the ideas of slow, investigative, constructive and solutions-based journalism have gained high popularity among the Nordic educators, which, we argue, dovetails well with the pedagogical aims of journalism education. Full article

This article examines the role of source credibility in the sphere of wildlife conservation campaigns. Specifically, it explores how particular messengers can motivate hunters, ranchers, and wildlife managers in California, Utah, and Arizona to voluntarily adopt non-lead ammunition. I analyze two partner websites, each designed to provide the hunting community with accurate information about non-lead ammunition. I then identify key principles regarding source credibility that arose from semi-structured interviews with four individuals closely involved in North American vulture and raptor conservation: representatives of the Ventana Wildlife Society, the Institute for Wildlife Studies, The Peregrine Fund, and Pinnacles National Park. The conclusion identifies lessons about the role of source credibility in wildlife conservation campaigns and situates the findings in the context of existing research on environmental communication and education. Full article

Dramaturgical analysis has been applied by scholars to social media influencers, but how props and settings are used to signal identity is understudied. This study uses a series of in-depth interviews with Latina influencers who live and work in a mid-size city on the U.S./Mexico border and an analysis of corresponding posts to explore how props and settings can be used to signal gender and race while also communicating authenticity. The findings show that influencers have to carefully and strategically navigate the use of props and settings not to appear fake and contrived. They blend the use of frontstage props with calibrated sharing of backstage settings to approximate an authentic online performance of their branded identity that is approachable but also monetizable. When performing their gender, the influencers adopt a having-it-all performance, balancing family, beauty, career success, and health while using backstage settings to create connection. Finally, Latina influencers on the border portray it as a setting that differs from its mainstream representation as a place to avoid. They also strategically deploy Latina identity to market themselves and localize national trends. Full article

We examine the press representation of monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) and their population management in Madrid city. To do this, we analyze mentions of this species in six Spanish newspapers for the case of Madrid. We apply a mixed methodology composed of framing, text analysis, and sentiment analysis. This multi-method approach allows us to further examine the framing and word choice of the newspapers, concluding that the press representation of monk parakeets has been biased and non-ethically led. We discuss this outcome by proposing a media representation guided by non-speciesist ethical framings and avoiding the objectification of nonhuman animals. Full article

The extant research focused on gender understood as a single item to explain wishful identification and parasocial relationships with TV characters. This study focused on gendered personality traits and how they contribute to wishful identification, parasocial relationships with (non-)stereotypical male and female characters of the TV series Modern Family, and the series enjoyment in general. Participants (N = 508) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions with questions about either stereotypical male or female or non-stereotypical male or female characters. Respondents also answered questions about their own gender traits (positive/negative feminine/masculine), wishful identification, parasocial friendship and love for the assigned character, and enjoyment of the series. Different gendered personality traits were associated with wishful identification, parasocial friendship, and love with different types of characters, as well as series enjoyment. Thus, we conclude that media characters should exhibit both stereotypical and non-stereotypical traits to reach a broad and diverse audience. Full article

This study investigates and reflects upon the interpretations of (narco) folk saints on the Texas–Mexico border by analyzing their recent representations in local Texan and national U.S. print media. These articles portray the melding of religion and crime to promote anti-immigration ideas and politics in Texas. To understand the connection between culture and crime on the Texas–Mexico border, this essay first delves into each aspect individually, providing their origins and historical context. An analysis of U.S. and Mexican statistics illustrates that many of the societal issues spurring the creation and devotion of folk saints remain prevalent in borderland culture today, including governmental shortcomings, dissatisfaction with the Church, social conditions, and media prejudice. The ubiquity of these themes in borderland daily life continuously incites more (narco) folk saint devotees, and Texas print media further distort the relationship among religion, culture, and crime until they eventually become inseparably intertwined in popular public opinion. Full article

The aim of this text is to analyze the future of immersive journalism from the perspective of experts now, in a moment when the initial experimental stage seems to have passed given the smaller number of pieces being today produced by leading media. To do this, we conducted two focus groups with 15 international leaders in the field, including both professional and academic points of view. We asked them about the main strengths, weaknesses, challenges and how to overcome them so that immersive journalism has continuity in the future. The results reveal few differences between the views of academics and practitioners, especially regarding the strengths and weaknesses of this new narrative, which is as versatile as it is complex. Most of them agree that immersive journalism is still in its experimentation stage regarding its production, although there is a positive perspective regarding the sustainability of this format in the near future. Both groups agree on the need to continue testing to understand this new narrative language and insist on the need to introduce this knowledge into journalism schools, both theoretically and practically. Full article

As the study of the negatively expressed news on sports constitutes a scientific area that has not received proper attention by researchers yet, the purpose of this study was to investigate the framing of the Greek national men’s basketball team defeats by the Greek press. Articles (n = 178) concerning the Eurobasket championships from 2007 to 2017, published in three political newspapers and one sports newspaper, were analyzed through content analysis. Specifically, the research reflected upon (a) the existence of the primary framework of “attribution of responsibility”, (b) the differences in framing among the newspapers, and (c) where/to whom the Media focused on regarding the defeats. The “attribution of responsibility” framing was found in all newspapers under study, both in the content and in the titles of the articles, primarily the day after the games. Regarding the defeats, the media were centralized around 12 factors and 8 subfactors as components of responsibilities, while a significant number of other frames were also identified as well as the four stages of the framing function. In conclusion, the finding that framing is significantly met in sports reporting contradicts the credited characterization of “cheerleaders” to sports journalists. Full article

Management practices of nonhuman animals in nature (“wildlife”) are globally controversial. In some places, individuals believe it should be up to individual landowners to “manage” wildlife. In others, wildlife is seen as belonging to everyone and should be respected, or least hunted ethically. Wildlife killing contests are legal in most U.S. states. Coyote killing contests take place in many of them and several states have enacted legislation to ban them. In Oregon, efforts have failed three times. This paper is a critical discourse analysis of testimonies in the 2021 Oregon hearings. Opposition to the bill is analyzed according to five psychological rationalizations to unpack the pro-contest arguments as an example of rural resistance. The findings suggest unpacking these as more productive for activist groups when creating strategies to counter pro-killing beliefs. Full article