Edson Tandoc

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

New communication technologies have allowed not only new ways in which the audience interacts with the news but also new ways in which journalists can monitor online audience behavior. Through new audience information systems, such as web analytics, the influence of the audience on the news construction process is increasing. This occurs as the jou...

It is not—unless it triggers feelings of envy. This study uses the framework of social rank theory of depression and conceptualizes Facebook envy as a possible link between Facebook surveillance use and depression among college students. Using a survey of 736 college students, we found that the effect of surveillance use of Facebook on depression i...

The study of journalistic role conceptions rests on the assumption that these conceptions shape the news stories that journalists create. However, limited empirical evidence exists to support this assumed linear relationship between role conception and role enactment. This exploratory study compared role conceptions deduced from survey data of 56 j...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of social cues in self-presentations and the congruence of other-generated comments with the self-presentation in people's evaluations of a profile owner. A 2 (level of social cues: high vs. low) × 2 (congruent vs. incongruent) × 2 (order) × 2 (multiple messages) mixed-subject experiment was cond...

U.S. journalists work in a digital environment in which they actively promote their news stories – and themselves – via social media. Prior research has identified an emergent marketing function, albeit one that journalists seemed hesitant to embrace in normative terms. This study seeks to understand how the legitimacy of this marketing function ha...

News-finds-me (NFM) perception is a belief that, in the era of social media, individuals can remain adequately well-informed about current events even if they do not actively seek news. While it has been examined in the context of general and political news, NFM perception has not been explored in the context of other genres of news. Through an onl...

O uso da automatização na produção de artigos noticiosos confronta o jornalismo com ameaças, oportunidades e ambiguidades. A automatização no jornalismo tem, assim, atraído muita atenção por parte dos académicos, desde a perspetiva dos jornalistas (humanos) à forma como as audiências processam os artigos noticiosos escritos com algoritmos. Estas pe...

Videoconferencing has become an essential communication tool for employees to engage in virtual meetings with their colleagues and complete work tasks remotely. However, there have been reports of a phenomenon termed videoconference fatigue. Concurrently, there has been an increase in work-family conflict among individuals working from home, due to...

This study examines the impact of message length and audience’s perceived information overload on the effectiveness of a fact-check in reducing belief in fake news within the COVID-19 vaccination context. Through an online experiment (N = 374) conducted in Singapore, we found an interaction effect between one’s level of information overload and the...

Although physical isolation measures can stem the spread of COVID-19, they can also heighten individuals’ perceived isolation and feeling of loneliness, resulting in problematic internet use (PIU). However, studies have rarely investigated both the effects of physical and perceived isolation on PIU. Given the widespread availability and accessibili...

Millions of people around the world were subjected into nationwide or community wide lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists also predict that as we enter into a new normal, another pandemic is not impossible, and that lockdowns may be implemented again. Therefore, examining factors affecting lockdown preparedness (LDP) is import...

Guided by the transactional theory of stress and coping, this study documents and examines how journalists in Singapore experienced covering the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an interview with 22 journalists, this study finds a variation in how journalists experienced covering the crisis, and how changes in their work routines shaped such experiences....

Despite widespread concerns that misinformation is rampant on social media, little systematic and empirical research has been conducted on whether and how news consumption via social media affects people's accurate knowledge about COVID-19. Against this background, this study examines the causal effects of social media use on COVID-19 knowledge (i....

As Southeast Asia faces the energy challenge, environmental groups are key in facilitating discussions on energy use. However, limited research on the communication strategies of environmental groups in the region has hampered evaluation of the efficacy of extant communication efforts. We conducted online focus group discussions with 26 environment...

This study investigates the flow of energy-related information, which plays a vital role in promoting the public understanding and support for various energy sources. Through 12 focus group discussions with the public and energy experts, this study found that energy information flows from scientists to the public through both direct (e.g., roadshow...

While some argue the term “fake news” has lost its meaning and should be discarded from academic lexicon, others say the term has conceptual utility and one that the public understands. This study revisits these arguments and compares how individuals respond to the term “fake news” with how they respond to other related terms, such as “misinformati...

Despite being a densely populated international travel hub in Southeast Asia, Singapore ranks at the top globally as the country with the lowest COVID-19 case fatality ratio as of February 2021. This chapter provides key insights into Singapore’s COVID-19 experience, focusing on the role of Singapore’s government, businesses, and non-governmental o...

Conversations about power can be difficult and uncomfortable but also very important, for they must also accompany reflections about responsibility. As individuals who do not fit into traditional definitions of a ‘journalist’ gain more power over their own news consumption as well as those of other audiences, and as traditional journalists continue...

Traditionally reliant on fossil fuels, Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore – plan to introduce cleaner energy (e.g., renewable energy) into their energy mix. To gauge public support, an understanding of their risk and benefit perceptions of energy technologies is necessary. In the absence of technical knowledge, lay peopl...

This study seeks to understand how online discussion, fact‐checking, and sources of fact‐checks will influence individuals’ risk perceptions toward nuclear energy when they are exposed to fake news. Using a 2 × 3 experimental design, 320 participants were randomly assigned to one of the six experimental conditions. Results showed an interaction eff...

This study sought to examine the potential role of news avoidance in belief in COVID-19 misinformation. Using two-wave panel survey data in Singapore, we found that information overload is associated with news fatigue as well as with difficulty in analyzing information. News fatigue and analysis paralysis also subsequently led to news avoidance, wh...

Introduced and popularized by the news media, cyberchondria refers to excessive online health information searches associated with escalation of health anxiety. It has since received attention from researchers and health professionals. While many studies have focused on investigating the relationship between increased health anxiety and excessive o...

News media can influence citizens' health beliefs about COVID-19 and eventually their vaccination intention. However, existing literature has rarely investigated how such effect is contingent upon a country-level factor: press freedom. Situated in the Health Belief Model, this study draws upon a multi-national survey (N = 3,599), involving 10 major...

Media startups tend to stretch the boundaries of journalism, but are still influenced by values and ideas from legacy journalists. Guided by Bourdieu’s field theory, this study will utilize in-depth interviews to understand Singapore-based media startups, examining the disconnect between these new entrants and legacy newsrooms. This study proposes...

While cancel culture has become a social media buzzword, scholarly understanding of this phenomenon is still at its nascent stage. To contribute to a more nuanced understanding of cancel culture, this study uses a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach by starting with in-depth interviews with social media users ( n = 20) followed by a natio...

WhatsApp, currently the leading messaging application in the world with an estimated 2 billion users, introduced the forwarded tag in July 2018. When WhatsApp users send messages that they received from someone else, a tag appears with the message to indicate it has been forwarded. By alerting receivers that the message was not written by the imme...

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented threat to global human wellbeing, and the proliferation of online misinformation during this critical period amplifies the challenge. This study examines consequences of exposure to online misinformation about COVID-19 preventions. Using a three-wave panel survey involving 1,023 residents in Singapore, t...

On January 20, 2020, the CDC reported its first case of the novel coronavirus in the United States. Almost a year and a half later, efforts to vaccinate individuals in the hopes of achieving herd immunity continue. Despite the amounts of scientific breakthroughs to create and disseminate the vaccines, people continue to express hesitancy. Existing...

This study contributes to the theory of gatekeeping by examining how community media journalists in Sub-Saharan Africa navigate through conflicting information. Using the case of COVID-19, the study examined how journalists from community media in Zambia and Tanzania reported government information that conflicted with what the local communities th...

Most social networking sites today have integrated livestreaming functions into their platforms. Studies have acknowledged how social media use (i.e., social networking) can mitigate the effects of loneliness, but due attention has yet to be given to the consumption of livestream content. Using national survey data in Singapore (N = 1,606), this st...

This study explores the effects of traditional media and social media on different types of knowledge about COVID-19. We also explore how surveillance motivation moderates the relationship between media use and different types of knowledge. Based on cross-national data from Singapore and the United States, we find that news seeking via social media...

A consequence of the digitisation of the media is the rapidly transforming business models of news organisations. While many studies have looked at how news journalists and newspapers deal with the changing relationship between editorial and commerce, less attention has been paid to how this relationship has evolved in lifestyle publications. This...

While technology companies have been blamed for playing a key role in the rise of online falsehoods, it has not always been clear how these companies understand the nature of the problem, which can explain their responses and how these responses evolved over time. Through a qualitative analyses of official press releases and public statements issue...

Through interviews with women journalists in the Philippines, this study documents and examines their experiences with online harassment. Three main themes stand out. First, we find that online harassment against journalists follows a systematic process that starts from the top, is followed through by a network of social media personalities and an...

Falsehoods have always plagued social life, but the digitization of many aspects of social life has also facilitated the easy and quick spread of falsehoods online. Of these different forms of online falsehoods, fake news has taken the spotlight, rising to buzzword status following the 2016 presidential elections in the US that saw large‐scale crea...

An extensive body of work has explored the causal links between social media use, envy, and depression. However, the findings regarding the directional influence among these variables have been equivocal. This current study draws upon a three-wave longitudinal panel (N = 355) and focuses on the link between Facebook use and depression. Results from...

This study examines the impact of fake news discourse on perceptions of news media credibility. If participants are told they have been exposed to fake news, does this lead them to trust information institutions less, including the news media? Study 1 ( n = 188) found that news media credibility decreased when participants were told they saw fake n...

This study investigates how ICT shaped workers’ work from home (WFH) experiences and the impacts on their work efficiency during COVID-19. Through 23 interviews conducted in Singapore, we found that ICT had accelerated the blurring of participants’ professional and personal boundaries of their daily routines, communication, and relationships with c...

Public health crises like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic appear to be the perfect breeding ground for misinformation. As influential information sources, mainstream news media have a unique opportunity to use their platform to debunk and educate the public about misinformation. Despite evidence lending support to the potential for mainstream news me...

Through a nationally representative survey involving 855 social media users in Singapore, this study proposes and tests a framework to explain why people believe in fake news. Guided by work on dual process models that theorize that individuals engage in either thorough or automatic processing, this study finds that both cognitive ability and polit...

Through a series of 4 studies (focus group discussions involving social media users and 3 nationally representative online surveys) conducted in Singapore, we identify 4 types of competencies in which social media literacy can manifest: technical, social, privacy related, and informational. Using a sequential, exploratory mixed-methods approach, we...

Moral reasoning among media professionals varies. Historically, advertising professionals score lower on the Defining Issues Test (DIT) than their media colleagues in journalism and public relations. However, the extent to which professional identity impacts media professionals’ moral reasoning has yet to be examined. To understand how professional...

Guided by the Uses and Gratifications approach and the concept of affordances, this study sought to understand the phenomenon of news consumption on an emerging messaging platform—Telegram, wherein users consume concise pieces of news spontaneously through mobile devices or web interfaces. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 interviewees, this stu...

Women are more visible than ever in sports media. Yet, extant research has shown that females have endured an array of issues exclusive to their gender. Consistent research updates on gender in sports media is necessary in order to discover whether an increase in numbers has changed the assessment of women in sports media. This study’s objective wa...

Digitalisation has prompted a myriad of changes in the journalism industry. This has affected different aspects of news work, particularly in newsroom production processes. Though such changes have received much scholarly attention, most studies have focused on hard news and less so on magazines and lifestyle journalism. However, magazines and life...

‘Fake news’ has been a topic of controversy during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Much of the scholarship on it to date has focused on the ‘fakeness’ of fake news, illuminating the kinds of deception involved and the motivations of those who deceive. This study looks at the ‘newsness’ of fake news by examining the extent to whic...

This study examined how exposure to government health advisories on face mask-wearing and trust in government influenced people’s compliance with the advisory overtime. We conducted a three-wave panel survey (N = 1,024; T1 in February, T2 in March, T3 in April 2020) in Singapore, where the government initially enforced wearing a face mask condition...

Current literature examining journalism’s boundary work has focused mostly on traditional, hard news journalism, while soft news journalism, such as lifestyle journalism, has largely been overlooked. Guided by the framework of boundary work, this paper examines how traditional fashion journalists and fashion bloggers define their own professionalis...

News values are based in part on journalists’ beliefs about the audience, which were, at least in the past, mostly based on journalists’ own imaginations of the actual audience. Now, with web analytics, journalists’ beliefs about the audience can be informed and influenced by a wealth of accessible and quantifiable audience data. Still, journalists...

In this chapter, Edson C. Tandoc Jr. assesses why people believe in and propagate false information found online. He does so through four components of communication—namely Sender, Message, Channel and Receiver—and examines the different factors that affect each one. Tandoc’s research reveals that an increasing number of people get their news from...

Guided by the frameworks of uncertainty management and sensemaking during crises, this study examined how young adults in Singapore managed uncertainty around the COVID-19 outbreak. Through a series of eight focus group discussions involving 89 young adults, we found that participants experienced uncertainty about the outbreak, especially when it c...

ABSTRACT This study seeks to understand how newsrooms negotiate and navigate their way in adopting and using web analytics within an environment where the influence of the social system interacts with the influences of market forces and journalistic autonomy. Based on interviews with 22 editors and journalists from 13 publications in Singapore, thi...

Beyond Journalistic Norms contests and challenges pre-established assumptions about a dominant type of journalism prevailing in different political, economic, and geographical contexts, to posit the hybrid, fluid and dynamic nature of journalistic roles. The book brings together scholars from Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin Americ...

BACKGROUND: Public health crises like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic appear to be the perfect breeding ground for misinformation. As influential information sources, mainstream news media can correct misinformation in a timely manner. However, characteristics of misinformation reported by the media and how it has been corrected have received scant s...

The public is now routinely exposed to different types of fake news online, from sites pretending to be news platforms to social media and even messaging apps. Fake news refers to a particular type of falsehood: It is partly or entirely based on false accounts; it is intentionally produced to mislead people, either for profit or to advance a partic...

The concept of sustainability has gained in importance since the United Nations made it the main pillar for development in 1992. But while areas like climate change and energy consumption are well known, the concept of sustainable fashion is neither understood nor conceptualized very well. Most research in the field focuses on fashion consumption b...

Guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, one hundred and fifty-three public relations practitioners working in the United States participated in an online experiment that tested how professional identity influences moral reasoning. Professional associations appear to be a valuable resource for socialization as members of PRSA who...

The increasingly assertive position of social media as a news source means that news audiences can no longer depend on traditional journalists for information verification. Instead, they must determine the news credibility on their own. The majority of information credibility studies have considered news audiences’ information evaluation as a purel...

Facing budget constraints, many traditional news organizations are turning their eyes on automation to streamline manpower, cut down on costs, and improve efficiency. But how does automation fit into traditional values of journalism and how does it affect perceptions of credibility, an important currency valued by the journalistic field? This study...

Guided by the framework of reciprocity on social media, the current study investigated antecedents of news sharing. Using a two-wave panel survey involving 868 respondents who took two surveys about one year apart, this study examined the effect of frequency of receiving news on social media on subsequent news-sharing behaviour, while controlling f...

This study examines climate change news attention and sourcing patterns in news publications in China, India, Singapore, and Thailand. Using content analysis of 3781 articles from 1995 to 2017, the study reveals striking similarities in the countries despite their differing media systems. All four countries demonstrate a heavy reliance on governmen...

As both news and audiences are increasingly mobile, this introduction calls for intensified research into mobility as a core characteristic of journalism. This special issue explores the intersection of news with mobility in production, distribution and consumption. News has become mobile in a material sense as it is accessed on portable devices; a...

The increasing influence of actors who might not fit into traditional definitions of a journalist but are taking part in processes that produce journalism has attracted scholarly attention. They have been called interlopers, strangers, new entrants, peripheral, and emergent actors, among others. As journalism scholars grapple with how to refer to t...

As mobile news goes mainstream thanks to the ubiquitous smartphones, this study assesses users’ perceptions of the credibility of news created, packaged and delivered to the mobile screen in four Asian cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei. Results of surveys of 2988 respondents show that respondents in Shanghai and Singapore perceived...

Social media have changed how journalists do journalism. In altering the power dynamics between journalists and their audiences, social media platforms have also affected journalistic practices. For instance, journalists now find themselves having to promote their own work on social media by sharing links or tweeting about their news outputs. They...

This study examines whether professional journalists reason differently about moral problems when primed with their professional identity. This between-subjects experiment (N = 171) used the Defining Issues Test, a much-used and validated instrument that measures moral reasoning. The results show identity priming does not affect how journalists app...

This study proposes the interventionist and the detached orientations to watchdog journalism through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance. Based on a content analysis of 33,640 news stories from sixty-four media outlets in eighteen countries, we measure and compare both orientations across different countries using three performativ...

This article offers a review of scholarly research on the phenomenon of fake news. Most studies have so far focused on three main themes: the definition and the scope of the problem; the potential causes; and the impact of proposed solutions. First, scholarly research has defined fake news as a form of falsehood intended to primarily deceive people...

This exploratory study seeks to understand the diffusion of disinformation by examining how social media users respond to fake news and why. Using a mixed-methods approach in an explanatory-sequential design, this study combines results from a national survey involving 2501 respondents with a series of in-depth interviews with 20 participants from...

While fake news has been widely reviled as an attack on democracy, less has been written about its threat to interpersonal relationships. Social networks have become increasingly popular for sharing news and as a result have also offered fertile ground for the spread of fake news. This paper considers the impact of the latter on the former, particu...

Through interviews with journalists from four top online newsrooms in the Philippines, this study examined the organizational arrangements surrounding social media teams and how these influence social media being incorporated into journalism decisions. Organizations considered audience preferences in their editorial decisions, but they depended on...

In this chapter we ask the basic but fundamental question: Who are the journalists? Our aim is to identify key insights into gender distribution, journalists’ ages and levels of experience, their education, work environment and employment conditions. In this book we ask how do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in s...

This editorial intends to shine a spotlight on diversity in Digital Journalism scholarship. In celebration of International Women’s Day this year, the Digital Journalism editorial team led an initiative involving some of the world’s leading journals in journalism, communication, media studies, and media management, to provide free access to a serie...

This special issue has been initiated and edited by the Digital Journalism editorial team with three ambitious aims: first, to offer a review of research that has been published in this journal since its launch in 2013 to examine the current state of play; second, to introduce a new article format for the journal – the invited conceptual article (W...

Audience measurement refers to the goal‐oriented process of collecting, analyzing, reporting, and interpreting data about the size, composition, behavior, characteristics, and preferences of individuals interacting with particular media brands or products. Traditional tools include focus group interviews, circulation audits, media diaries, surveys,...

As an unprecedented amount of information circulates, contemporary newsrooms are turning to automation to manage the data deluge. Amid claims of journalism in crisis, with falling revenues and newsroom closures, this study uses Bourdieu’s field theory to investigate how automation, as supplied by technological firms entering the journalistic field,...