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This study examines how media system differences in the form of news change or stay the same as newspapers in the United States (liberal), Denmark (democratic corporatist), and France (polarized pluralist) move from print to online. Internet technological affordances are posited to move online news toward more advertising and information (liberal m...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... of the U.S. print advertisements are high prominence (above the fold), versus just 12.9% in Denmark, and 25.0% in France. Online, however, the majority of advertisements appear prominently (in the ''first screen capture''): 58.4% for the United States, 69.8% for Denmark, and 57.9% for France (Table 2). ...
Citations
... This study distinguishes between legacy online and print news articles because there are contradictory results regarding the differences in news content between these two news platforms in the literature. Although multiple studies found content homogeneity across online and print articles (Ghersetti 2014), other studies suggested that the digital channels of a newspaper are more likely to publish followup items (Burggraaff and Trilling 2020), tend to publish softer and more sensational content than legacy print outlets (Benson et al. 2012) and rely more on news agencies and press releases, with a substantial amount of content being verbatim agency copy, involving little or no editing (Boumans et al. 2018). Figure 1 confirms the manifestation of a media storm in legacy news media defined by Boydstun, Hardy, and Walgrave (2014). ...
In today’s hybrid media system, amplified news events rage not
only in “older” media such as legacy media but also on “newer”
digital platforms such as online alternative news media outlets
and social media. However, the role of both legacy news media
and digital platforms in constructing events has been little
explored. This study examines a hybrid media storm surrounding
a Belgian political scandal in 2021. Based on a quantitative
content analysis of 1,436 print and online articles from six
Flemish newspapers and the public broadcaster’s website, 204
articles from three right-leaning alternative media, and 801
tweets between 1 February and 31 October 2021, the study
reveals that digital platforms allow actors with little or no voice in
legacy news media to influence the narrative of events on those
platforms by actively promoting specific frames. Right-leaning
alternative media’s coverage, although less pluralistic than legacy
media, still offers a broader frame repertoire than Twitter where
the framing is one-sided. The case study shows that right-leaning
alternative media and Twitter do not necessarily broaden the
range of views, but are often a crucial factor in the amplification
of specific frames at the expense of others.
... Opinion and commentary cost a lot less than commissioning expensive journalism investigations (Meltzer 2019: 50-51). To fill the 24-hour news cycle, media outlets have increased the amount of opinion and commentary (Benson et al. 2012). To target particular advertising audiences some news organizations have opted to become more partisan in their editorial positions, which can have a polarizing effect on political discourse (Levendusky 2013;McKnight 2010). ...
Impartiality has been a core ideal of traditional journalism, and one that audiences say they want the news media to uphold. However, generational shifts in news consumption and attitudes towards news, combined with evolving media technologies, are changing audience expectations around the traditional separation of impartial news from opinion. Drawing on the Digital News Report: Australia 2022 , this article finds audiences generally prefer journalists to stick to reporting while on social media and refrain from expressing their opinions. However, there are significant differences based on age, education, political orientation, news motivation and if they pay for news. The data shows that under 35s, well-educated, left leaning and paying news consumers are the most supportive of journalists expressing their personal views while on social media. Through the lens of Expectancy Violation Theory this article highlights the impact of growing up with digital technologies on audience expectations of normative journalistic practice and the tensions this creates for the news industry which is facing ongoing economic pressures.
... The study by Benson et al. (2012) looked at how media system differences in the form of news either change or remain the same as the press switches from print to digital format in all three systems. By doing so, the study concluded that there was a tendency towards more advertising and information in the liberal model, and towards more opinion and deliberation in the polarised pluralist model. ...
... The study by Benson et al. (2012) looked at how media system differences in the form of news either change or remain the same as the press switches from print to digital format in all three systems. By doing so, the study concluded that there was a tendency towards more advertising and information in the liberal model, and towards more opinion and deliberation in the polarised pluralist model. ...
The open conclusions with which Hallin and Mancini (2004, 2011) approached their comparative study of Western media systems, initiated in 1998, retain their empirical, revisionist, and prospective value—even from critical perspectives—after a quarter of a century of profound historical, social, and technological changes. The names given to the three traditional media models in those authors’ first publication are used in this article to compare the evolution of funding, audience shares, governance, structure, and political intervention in European countries’ public service media on the one hand, and to contrast the operational hypothesis that politicisation persists and is increasing in European public service media in their adaptation to the digital society, on the other hand. Based on the variables from Hallin and Mancini’s empirical model, five crucial questions about the evolution of public service media in the EU are addressed: intervention and development of regulation by states and by the European Commission in the area of shared powers; a comparative analysis of the funding systems and consumer audiences of each European country’s public service media; the changes in the governance and management structures of said public service media; the variation in the professional culture and the rational-legal authority of their organisations; and the evolution and legitimation of public service media’s public value in the internet society, as well as the persistence or mutability of the national media systems’ fit within Hallin and Mancini’s three original models.
... With the rise of digital journalism and fake news concerns, scholars recognized the need to consider the impact of Internet-led changes on classic media systems typology (Benson et al., 2012;Hallin & Mancini, 2017). The widespread use of social media platforms provides individuals with greater opportunities to engage with public issues and express their views across multiple platforms, which inevitably intersect with the media systems to which they are exposed on a daily basis (Mattoni & Ceccobelli, 2018). ...
... Empirical research has indicated that digital technologies can facilitate both diverse and liberal information dissemination, as well as increased polarization. For example, new economies may encourage more sensationalistic and light news in countries with high journalistic professionalism and political parallelism, such as Denmark, but enable more polarization in polarized pluralist systems with low political parallelism and strong state intervention, such as France (Benson et al., 2012). Powers and Benson (2014) also found that country-level media systems influence online media. ...
Amid the proliferation of multiplatform use and fake news, the ongoing debate about social media’s impact on news engagement and selective exposure remains inconclusive. Drawing on a representative sample of 17 countries (N = 34,633), the present study examined the association of country-level media systems, individual- level fake news concerns, and multiplatform news use with news engagement and selective exposure. The multilevel analyses revealed (a) an overall positive association between multiplatform social media use and news engagement, (b) the role of fake news concerns on the formation of echo chambers, and (c) the role of state intervention in mitigating individuals’ news engagement in a multiplatform landscape.
... Typically, this conceptual framework is employed in studies that set out to identify (a) the factors that shape distinct media systems throughout the world (Hallin & Mancini, 2004 and (b) the impact of these factors on news coverage or news consumption within these distinct media systems (Benson et al., 2012;Umbricht & Esser, 2016). To be clear, our study does not attempt to demonstrate a causal relationship between people's media systems and their folk theories of journalism. ...
span id="docs-internal-guid-c76c70fc-7fff-57e7-76ea-4562d4897bc3">Trust in news is declining globally and has been for some time a phenomenon that has been amplified in the context of a global pandemic, the rise in anti-media populism, and social and political unrest. Overall, public trust in journalism remains low (44% globally), according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 . Building on a growing body of research on predictors of (dis)trust among news audiences, this study examines survey data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 to explore distrust profiles—comparative profiles of users based on their relative distrust in news in general, news they consume, and news accessed through digital intermediaries like social and search—across distinct news environments: India, South Korea, and the US. We conclude that, across all three countries, there are large segments who either trust everything or distrust everything, suggesting a trust polarization phenomenon. Moreover, the results identify segments of swing trusters, users who trust some news and distrust other types but do not indicate a blanket tendency to trust or distrust everything. Normative expectations about the institution of journalism (i.e., folk theories) seem to be the most powerful factors in explaining the relative likelihood of membership in all profiles, where expectations regarding impartiality, concern about fake news, and fair coverage were important indicators of (dis)trust, with varying degrees depending on the media, political, and technological contexts in which they are situated. These findings suggest that to regain trust, journalists should consider how they can change people’s folk theories when it comes to news by comprehensively taking into account the unique trajectory of a given country’s media system.</span
... There is significant concern about current transformations in the media industry, such as a greater polarization of the media, an exacerbated race for audiences and scoops (particularly through digital social networks), the impact of anti-elitism and populism in public spaces, a lack of interest in political subjects, and an increase in demand for "soft" news. The growth of online news (Benson, Blach-Ørsten, Powers, Willig, & Vera-Zambrano, 2012) and changing market strategies (Brüggemann, Engesser, Büchel, Humprecht, & Castro, 2014;Büchel, Humprech, Castro-Herrero, Engesser, & Brüggemann, 2016;Humprecht, Castro, Blassnig, Brüggemann, & Engesser, 2022) has led to a hybridization of the models. However, current research is divided on the impact of the increasing commercialization of media. ...
... While studies attempt to refine and discuss the models, sometimes finding a redefined third system (Humprecht et al., 2022) or a fourth system (Brüggemann et al., 2014;Büchel et al., 2016), it appears that the current liberalization trend has shifted less familiar models toward a more central model (Hallin & Mancini, 2017). A consensus is emerging that traditional media content in these systems is relatively unaffected by their respective evolution (Benson et al., 2012). Nevertheless, it appears that the economic weakness of the media in the polarized pluralist model (France) makes it more permeable to the logic of commercialization (Amiel & Powers, 2019). ...
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed journalistic practices and media roles in France and Germany.
Analysis: As part of the Journalistic Role Performance Project (JRP), 9,438 articles published in France and Germany in 2020 were analyzed to determine trends in journalistic sources and the presence of six professional roles (watchdog, loyal facilitator, interventionist disseminator, service, infotainment, and civic) in news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conclusions and implications: Professional roles in French and German media production are similar despite the countries having distinct media systems. However, notable differences exist in terms of journalistic practices. German media are characterized by the use of sources to justify institutional decisions. In contrast, French journalistic content is less politicized with a focus on “health” sources.
... Platforms possess unique features, often referred to as affordances, "and they are the physical and structural possibilities of media technologies, which may shape the conditions and potentiality of their uses" (Mellado et al. 2021, 361). The affordances of different platforms impact the structure of news content (Benson et al. 2012), how the content reaches people, as well as the speed with which it gets to them (Mellado 2015). ...
... The deep learning methods with Transformer [4-6, 45, 61] have become the mainstream in the task of event extraction. Modern news media exhibits a trend towards multimedia transformation [2], where images and text present the same event in different ways. Several studies have investigated the use of external data from complementary modalities to enhance the understanding of events in the given uni-modal data. ...
Contemporary news reporting increasingly features multimedia content, motivating research on multimedia event extraction. However, the task lacks annotated multimodal training data and artificially generated training data suffer from the distribution shift from the real-world data. In this paper, we propose Cross-modality Augmented Multimedia Event Learning (CAMEL), which successfully utilizes artificially generated multimodal training data and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Conditioned on unimodal training data, we generate multimodal training data using off-the-shelf image generators like Stable Diffusion and image captioners like BLIP. In order to learn robust features that are effective across domains, we devise an iterative and gradual annealing training strategy. Substantial experiments show that CAMEL surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on the M2E2 benchmark. On multimedia events in particular, we outperform the prior SOTA by 4.2\% F1 on event mention identification and by 9.8\% F1 on argument identification, which demonstrates that CAMEL learns synergistic representations from the two modalities.
... From the perspective of journalists, early work on online media role conceptions found digital journalists in the Netherlands focused more on interactive relationships with audiences, rather than democratic role fulfillment (Deuze and Dimoudi 2002). Benson et al. (2012) aimed to identify changes in content and the structure of the news in the united States, Denmark, and France when moving from the print to the digital version and found that digital media had softer content and were more sensationalist than their print counterparts. The results of a comparison of role performance in the news between Chilean print and digital platforms provide only partial support to the expectations of differences arising from distinct features of the media platforms. ...
The shifting role of journalism in a digital age has affected long-standing journalistic norms across media platforms. This has reinvigorated discussion on how work in online newsrooms compares to other platforms that differ in media affordances and forms. Still, more studies are needed on whether those differences translate into distinct practices, especially when examining cross-national studies. Based on a content analysis of 148,474 stories produced by 365 media organizations from 37 countries, this article compares the performance of journalistic roles in online newsrooms to three other types of media—TV, radio, and print. The paper analyzes if journalistic roles present themselves differently across platforms, and if these differences are constant or they vary across countries. Results show that there are measurable differences in role performance in online journalism compared to other platforms. Platform had a significant impact, particularly in terms of service and infotainment orientation, while the implementation of roles oriented toward public service was more similar. Additionally, country differences in the relationship between role performance and platforms mainly emerged for roles that enable political influence on news coverage, with differences in the relationship between online vs. traditional platforms appearing to be distinct features of the specific political system.
