Julia Sonnevend

• Professor (Associate) at New School

On the 8th of September, 2022, the world paused as the BBC announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II. After 70 years on the throne, the longest-reigning British monarch had died aged 96. The Queen’s death immediately became a global media event that would eventually culminate in the state funeral broadcasted live and followed online worldwide. Whil...

Attention-seeking personal profiles on social media increasingly define successful political communication. But Angela Merkel, during her 16-year chancellorship, has come to stand for the opposite. The first woman to ever fill the office, she built a reputation for rational, evidence-based decision-making and predictable performances. Based on a vi...

Populist leaders are often described as “strongmen,” receiving a somewhat two-dimensional Western press coverage that cannot explain their local popularity. Based on visual and textual analysis of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Facebook, we argue that he has a more complex social media persona. Orbán’s Facebook shows him as (1) a fighter a...

Pluralism has become the defining characteristic of modern societies. Individuals with differing values clamor for equality. Organizations and groups assert particular interests. Social movements flourish and fade. Some see in this clash of principles and aims the potential for a more just human community, while others fear a cultural erosion. Yet...

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic is puzzling from a visual point of view. There are millions of photographs published about the crisis every day, yet we can see the key actor, the virus, only in artistic representations. Most of us also have very restricted access to central sites of the crisis, as intensive care units, nursing homes, meat packing pla...

This paper focuses on the “charm offensive” of the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal negotiations with the United States. Charm offensives are strategic public relations campaigns that political leaders use to shift their countries’ reputation swiftly and temporarily in the global arena. Based on vis...

This paper focuses on what has come to be known as a ‘charm offensive,’ a diplomatic technique countries may use to shift their international image through strategic public relations campaigns utilizing personal magnetism. The charm of the selected representative is meant to appeal to a broad international audience with the hope of improving the co...

The election of Donald Trump and the great disruption in the news and social media. Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States came as something of a surprise—to many analysts, journalists, and voters. The New York Times's The Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning the White House even as the returns beg...

“Media event” seems like a concept that has been around forever, but it is a relatively new invention in media research. Its origins can be found in Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s canonical book titled Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The event that inspired Dayan and Katz was the visit o...

This essay analyzes the power, charm and limitations of Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard, 1992). It argues that the book presented a uniquely compelling and alluring concept, but has three limitations: Media Events has a present-centric view of events, a constrained understanding of conflicting...

Introduction to the Special Section on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.

The article makes a case for foregrounding ‘event’ as a key concept within journalism studies before, during, and after the digital age. The article’s first part presents an overview of the existing research on events in philosophy, sociology, historiography, and journalism studies, arguing that the concept of ‘event’ has not received sufficient at...

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom and pose practical questions for students, educators, and administrators. Today, the capabilities of social media are influencing lear...

This chapter examines the possibilities of hybrid models in education that combine traditional models of teacher-student interaction with one-to-many and many-to-many digital models. In hybrid models of education, many tasks formerly performed by a single teacher — lecturing, leading discussions, supervising work, answering questions, grading — can...

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influenci...

How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn, and the very foundations of education? What controversies surround the integration of social media in students’ lives? The past decade has brought increased access to new media, and with this new opportunities and challenges...

In a journal article entitled ‘No More Peace!': How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events (2007), Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes offered a substantial revision of Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Katz and Liebes included “dark” events in the “media events” concept, distinguishing unexpected, disruptive...

This article unites theories of framing, collective memory and a sociological concept of icons in order to examine how icons can represent a frame of a historic event over time in journalism. Focusing on the central Hungarian communist daily Népszabadság's 30 years of coverage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union, the article a...

Images are fellow travelers in time: they are permanent residents in our lives. We look at images in our homes, we see them on the surfaces of urban environments, and we encounter them in old and new media spheres. When we look at images, we “meet” them and engage in a complex game of distance and closeness. We search for familiarity and for differ...