Zhao Peng

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Emerson College

Storytelling is a powerful tool for journalists to represent reality and communicate it to the public. With the emergence of digital technology, journalists have begun to take advantage of new media formats, including audio, video, data visualization, graphic animations, virtual/augmented reality, computer algorithms, and games, in their storytelli...

Topic modeling has become an effective tool for communication scholars to explore large amounts of texts. However, empirical studies applying topic modeling often face the critical question of making meaningful theoretical contributions. In this study, we highlighted the importance of theoretical underpinning, the research design, and the methodolo...

The decision to use a particular social media application for news is affected by many factors, but less is understood is how a platform’s technological features promote or impede people’s social media news use. A structural equation model derived from the Unified Theory Acceptance and Use of Technology and Task-Technology Fit models were applied t...

Teachers shape how aspiring journalists collect and evaluate information. The primary method journalists employ to gather this information is through the interviewing method. However, research has yet to be conducted on how this important competency is taught in university settings. This study sought to identify the instructional approaches used by...

Which bystanders will confront racist, misogynist, personal attacks in news comment sections? This article applies sociological concepts of deviance and social control to categorize efforts to moderate online news comments. Three dimensions of social control are theorized: affirming and sanctioning social control, formal and informal social control...

Journalists have engaged in interviewing practices since the nineteenth century to collect information for news stories. Today, it is considered the dominant approach in news-gathering among journalists. We know very little, however, about the theoretical breadth of interviewing and the associated competencies that journalists should possess to be...

The goal of this study was to explore the relationship between customers’ cultural background and their clicking behaviors when shopping online. We studied Internet users’ clicking behavior on a shopping website slightly modified from the Amazon version for the purposes of this study and their reactions to different elements of product-specific sho...