No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatewatching
Abstract
"A.J. Liebling once said, 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.' Now, millions do" (Bowman & Willis, 2003: 47; original quote: Liebling, 1960); similarly, while those millions who are now active as part-time news bloggers, citizen journalists, and political commentators do not (yet?) operate their own opinion polling services, there is little to stop them from offering their own interpretations of available polling data, informed by their own experience as 'average' citizens rather than by the accepted wisdom of professional journalists or the political spin of media minders. Indeed, at least in the Australian example, some of the most insightful analyses of polling data are available from blogs such as Poll Bludger or Mumble, operated by student and professional psephologists – scientists specialising in the statistical analysis of voting intentions and election results. Especially in such cases, the expertise of non-journalists in ‘reading’ the mood of the populace clearly exceeds that of journalists and pundits, regardless of who owns the polling services themselves.
... With the explosion of publishing platforms made possible by the Internet, this quote from Liebling rings truer today than it did in the 1960s. The demise of the journalistic watchdog and the rise of the citizen journalists (Bruns, 2008) have created a dynamic that means it is up to the reader to navigate between professional journalism, irresponsible click-bait, opinion blog posts, and agenda driven articles. Grassroots reporting (blog indexes, personal blogs) and the rise of citizen journalism have created an active audience that not only follows the news, but contributes (Bruns, 2008). ...
... The demise of the journalistic watchdog and the rise of the citizen journalists (Bruns, 2008) have created a dynamic that means it is up to the reader to navigate between professional journalism, irresponsible click-bait, opinion blog posts, and agenda driven articles. Grassroots reporting (blog indexes, personal blogs) and the rise of citizen journalism have created an active audience that not only follows the news, but contributes (Bruns, 2008). The journalistic role of gatekeeping, filtering information before publishing, has diminished, transforming the role instead to gate watcher (Bruns, 2008) or scout in the jungle of information (Brüggemann, 2017), leaving journalists to filter information which is already published. ...
... Grassroots reporting (blog indexes, personal blogs) and the rise of citizen journalism have created an active audience that not only follows the news, but contributes (Bruns, 2008). The journalistic role of gatekeeping, filtering information before publishing, has diminished, transforming the role instead to gate watcher (Bruns, 2008) or scout in the jungle of information (Brüggemann, 2017), leaving journalists to filter information which is already published. With no dedicated watchdog, open publishing platforms allow everyone with access to the internet to have a voice. ...
As a crisis sector, marine conservation needs continuous public scrutiny to maintain much needed transparency, accountability, and to secure public trust. Such opportunities for public scrutiny can be ensured through independent, objective and critical journalism (Johns and Jacquet, 2018). However, mainstream media and other journalistic platforms often rely on communication professionals working at marine conservation groups for information and expertise related to marine conservation issues. It is therefore crucial that communication professionals at conservation groups have a professional code of conduct that encourages dissemination of objective truth about conservation efforts and does not prevent journalists from carrying out their duties to serve the public interest.
In this piece, we elaborate on our opinion that a professional ethical guideline for marine
conservation communication is necessary. We also report on discussions from a focus group titled, “Overcoming ethical challenges in marine conservation communication” held at the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC5). Sixteen marine conservation professionals (scientists, practitioners, and communicators) shared their perspective about existing relationships and modes of engagement between media, journalists and conservation groups, urgency of factual and accurate narratives in ocean conservation, prerequisites of independent and transparent reporting while promoting conservation efforts, and the inclusion of local and indigenous voices in conservation narratives. Focus group participants discussed solutions-driven directives that could
be incorporated into a professional code of conduct for conservation communicators and debated the fundamental premises of such a code.
... By importing these theoretical perspectives and research attitudes into the field of journalism studies, the researchers within this body of scholarship were able to argue for a participatory journalism that was possible on digital networks, where the news is produced and consumed by professionals and audiences alike (Bardoel and Deuze 2001;Deuze, Bruns, and Neuberger 2007). The participation of networked audiences in news production blurs the traditional lines between producers and consumers (Bruns 2008). ...
... This traditional opposition is transcended as the two roles merge into the hybrid category of the produsers, the networked actors with the newfound power to shape the public debate (Bruns 2005). Produsers are ordinary citizens; they use the various online platforms, including blogs, forums, and the interactively enhanced journalistic websites, in order to gather, correct, publish, distribute, comment on, and publicly discuss the news (Singer et al. 2011, 15). ...
... The implications of journalistic hybridity are considered to be more radical, as regards to the destabilisation of journalism's institutional status, in the work of scholars who insist on the networked restructuring of the practice. As journalism reforms itself as a network, with the various news organisations functioning as its nodes (Heinrich 2011), it becomes part of an encompassing 'new social news media network' where, in addition to journalists, various other institutional and individual actors partake in news-making (Bruns 2018). This theorisation seems consistent with the real-world practice that Anderson (2013) documents: journalism does not happen exclusively in newsrooms anymore; journalists and their organisations are now part of an 'ecosystem', where nonjournalists, activists and politicians co-produce the news. ...
In my PhD thesis I advance a critical understanding of change and continuity in social media driven professional journalism; one that is grounded on a major discursive contradiction, namely that journalists embrace both the networking logic of social media and the critique of its civic shortcomings, in order to represent journalism as an institution of reformed and civic-minded networked action.
... As a result, different terms and definitions have been used to describe and represent the same or similar concepts: "citizen journalism" indicates the participation of people who previously belonged to an audience (Gillmor, 2004;Rosen, 2006); "produsage" refers to the mixture of production and consumption of information (Bruns, 2007(Bruns, , 2008; and "participatory journalism" emphasizes the idea of collaborative action (Singer et al., 2011). The use of the expression "user-generated content" has gained traction with Web 2.0 and the advent of social platforms, which encompass different types of content and resources that are associated with the notion of collaborators who generate content outside routine and professional platforms (Livingstone, 2004;van Dijck, 2009). ...
... We noticed during our observation that this content comes heavily from social networks. This is in line with Bruns' (2008) findings that highlighted the potential of user content to influence the news agenda. ...
Many scholars have recognized the benefits that user-generated content (UGC) can bring to news publications. In this context, the coverage of the pandemic has undoubtedly forced news outlets around the world to embrace such content to present relevant information during this time. To understand how Latin American outlets are exploring UGC in news reporting, we proposed an exploratory study that includes a devised observation of 80 news websites and their social network channels between April and August 2020. During this period, we conducted a systematic observation to analyze how these outlets open spaces for the public and experiment with integrating user content into their news processes. Our findings suggest that the majority of the observed portals have punctually adopted UGC with minimal engagement. However, the pandemic disrupted interesting experiments regarding the integration of UGC into news creation that generate innovative forms of storytelling.
... You do not know what to avoid and what to listen to, and you do not have the time to sort through it all even if you did, even with the numerous recommendations that come via friends on social network sites such as Facebook and algorithms on music streaming sites such as Spotify. We might speculate that this is where the journalists and critics come back in, in their new web 2.0-created roles as curators, or as Bruns (2008c) terms them, 'gatewatchers'. ...
... First, for the writer to act as some form of cultural filter or curator, a gatekeeper sitting in judgment upon creative work that has already taken place, deciding what is given prominence and what is put to one side, much like an art gallery owner. The next chapter discusses that role in more detail, but the strategy is problematic as it is already possible to use algorithms for the same function, and academics such as Bruns (2008c) have argued that this function of the critic/journalist has already moved on to one of gatewatching. This is form of mediation wherein the curator or critic no longer decides what is allowed through the 'gates' (is brought to the attention of the public) but provides an informed commentary upon what is passing through these 'gates' while simultaneously cataloguing the field. ...
This thesis problematises and investigates the role of the popular music critic in Web 2.0 environments. It does so through an act of metacriticism grounded in my experience as an internationally successful popular music critic for major print publications including NME, Rolling Stone, and Melody Maker. The reflective aspect of the metacriticism is triangulated through interviews with other notable music critics, through a dialectical approach to role definition grounded in the literature, and through the ongoing experiment of Collapse Board, a music blogging site I set up to experience the new environment from the "inside". Popular music critics have customarily been seen as gatekeepers of 'cool' and arbiters of taste. The industrial structure of print allowed critics to earn a living from their craft. The print environment was defined by limited outlets and large readerships with limited access to information. In that environment popular music criticism helped mould the ways popular music was received, consumed, and contextualised. This project asks whether the same holds true in Web 2.0 environments in which audiences have access to the same sources of information through which critics formerly derived their knowledge, authority, and influence. The thesis concludes that there are four major roles of relevance to the critic in the new media environments: bespoke criticism, music critic as fan, music criticism as entertainment, and the music critic as 'firestarter'. I explain those roles and theorise the various strategies they imply. This doctorate addresses a gap in knowledge around the role of the critic in music taste formation for emerging online environments and thus has significance for the fields of music, music criticism, and all creative fields in which the role of criticism has been key to the success of art and artists.
... Nevertheless, other research has argued that the audience-journalist relationship might be slowly changing, and with it, the gatekeeping function of journalism (Gillmor, 2004;Lowrey, 2006;Singer, 2008;Bruns, 2008). This is partly attributed to the growing importance of social media in journalism, which has become an important channel of news distribution and also a new tool for journalists to engage with the audience day-to-day in their work (Hermida, 2013). ...
... For Bruns (2008) the gatekeeping function of journalists is shifting to a new practice of 'gatewatching': ' a form of reporting and commenting on the news which does not operate from a position of authority … but works by harnessing the collective intelligence and knowledge of dedicated communities to filter the newsflow and to highlight and debate salient topics of importance to the community' (Bruns, 2008: 176-77). What these debates suggest is that audiences might slowly be reconfiguring the autonomy and authority of journalists, which might eventually lead to a more collaborative relationship between journalists and their publics. ...
As organisations ‘native’ to the digital environment, sites like 'BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox' and 'The Huffington Post' have been well placed to take advantage of new technologies and pioneer new approaches to creating and distributing media. Despite this, they remain conspicuous by their absence in contemporary media scholarship. This article will focus on two North American digital-native media organisations: 'BuzzFeed' and 'Vice'. As two of the largest and most popular digital natives in the world, these organisations merit closer critical attention. Little remains known, for instance, about the types of content these organisations produce, or the routines, cultures, and practices that undergird their sites of content production. Given their expanding role in the contemporary information ecosystem, it is vital that scholarship does more to take these social actors into account. In the interest of advancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of virality in media, this paper examines the extent to which news production at 'BuzzFeed' and 'Vice' is impacted by the ‘quantified’ audience, and the normative implications of these findings with regards to journalistic autonomy. The findings of this research are based on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with 22 journalists from 'BuzzFeed' and 'Vice', in the US and UK.
... Many researchers explore the ways technological change has contributed to the present state of journalism (Ahlers, 2006;Boczkowski & Ferris, 2005;Bruns, 2008;Larsson, 2009;O'Sullivan & Heinonen, 2008). They highlight how the emergence of the internet has played a part in changes to the operations of newsrooms and, correspondingly, the labour of journalists, who hold novel responsibilities and use a range of new digital tools to do their work (Deuze, 2007;Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2009;Redden & Witschge, 2009;Singer, 2010;Spyridou, Matsiola, Veglis, Kalliris, & Dimoulas, 2013). ...
... Other researchers are concerned about the increasingly mobile and fragmented news audience, who can access journalistic content for a fraction of the cost of traditional print or cable subscriptions, and from a widening array of distribution channels (Mythen, 2008;O'Sullivan & Heinonen, 2008). A few suggest traditional news firms are relying on outdated business models predicated on an industrial logic that no longer applies in the digital age (Bruns, 2008). ...
Background There is a broad recognition that journalism is facing difficult times in Canada and internationally.
Analysis This article reviews the literature on the state of journalism and then focuses on one element of the perceived crisis of journalism in the Canadian context: claims that the number of employed journalists has fallen sharply in recent years. Using data from Statistics Canada and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors find that, unlike the United States, the number of journalists employed in Canada has risen slightly in absolute terms over the past two decades.
Conclusions and implications These findings have important implications for how researchers, politicians and the public think about the state of journalism in Canada and what types of policy prescriptions might be more or less appropriate to deal with the real but not necessarily calamitous changes that are taking place.
... Thus, consumers are no longer passive receivers-those who receive information in one way-but active users who aim to participate in the creation and dissemination of content [27,31]. In this sense, a new form of understanding journalism has strongly emerged, suggesting that journalists should transfer the control of information to become professional managers of participation [32]. Therefore, interaction is the main characteristic to be exploited, either in specific sections under the label of civic journalism or similar ideas, or as a structural principle to apply to the content disseminated by the online media organization. ...
... However, only a few users show maturity in relation to communicative interaction, which describes the creation of content by users [28]. Accordingly, two types of users can be identified: passive users, whose consumption practices appear to be related to those of o✏ine media audiences, and active users, who are also called producer-consumer users [32] or producer users [19,26]. In spite of the existence of these conceptual labels, the fact is that active users seek to intensify, in a multidirectional way, their interaction with media. ...
Interactivity is a factor on which cyber journalism is based and summarizes participation options between a user and the medium, a user with other users, and a user with editors. In this study, we focus on the latter in three countries-Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador-, which have been identified owing to their technological gap and the emerging importance of online communication for their respective societies. Through 35 in-depth interviews with journalists from these countries, we analyzed the concept of interactivity of these professionals and their relationship with users. The results revealed that the journalists positively valued civic contributions as a space for diagnosis, although they do not perceive its informational value, as they relate them to the context of opinions. These results verify the prevalence of journalism as strongly influenced by conventional o✏ine production routines.
... A promise is implied here, that in the future there will be ongoing dialectical conversations, in the context of continuous holistic campaigns. These cultural relationships progressively develop between brands, products, opinion leaders and relevant communities where open source marketing, Wikinomics (Tapscott, William, 2008), brand communities and consumer tribes (Bruns, 2008) are leading the way (McNair, 2006). Gatewatchers share all these new roles thus potentially turning to gatejumpers or at least alternating the nature of the gates, precisely because of the influence of technology on culture and the cultural dimension of gatekeeping (Bruns, 2008;Cossiavelou, Bantimaroudis, 2009). ...
... These cultural relationships progressively develop between brands, products, opinion leaders and relevant communities where open source marketing, Wikinomics (Tapscott, William, 2008), brand communities and consumer tribes (Bruns, 2008) are leading the way (McNair, 2006). Gatewatchers share all these new roles thus potentially turning to gatejumpers or at least alternating the nature of the gates, precisely because of the influence of technology on culture and the cultural dimension of gatekeeping (Bruns, 2008;Cossiavelou, Bantimaroudis, 2009). Half of the earth's population now shares this "participatory culture" (Jenkins, 2006, pp. 1). ...
This chapter examines the brand manager's point of view on content marketing and brand management in the social media. Using the filters of media gatekeeping, the authors study Greek executives' views and practices in local and multinational firms and agencies. Findings indicate that gatekeeping still prevails. The dipole between control and security on the one hand, and openness and dialog on the other, determines all decision-making processes. A standardization of practices is observed, especially around brand communities and content publishing, as well as a need for control and risk avoidance. Global brands rely on headquarter-provided content requesting approvals for any modification. Local brands tend to outsource and monitor content calendars. Most brands consider what to release rather than what not to. They maintain a narrow, campaign-oriented mindset that reflects traditional practices and have not embraced the requirements for transparency and openness that prevail in the social media environment.
... Such gatekeeping processes can be distinguished at three different stages of the journalistic process: input, output, and response (BRUNS, 2005). At the input stage, journalists themselves pre-select those news stories which they believe to be worthy of investigation and coverage -that is, which they assume have a reasonable chance of being selected for publication once the articles are written or the TV reports produced. ...
... Further Indymedia Websites in locations around the world -numbering several hundred at the height of the movement -soon GATEKEEPING, GATEWATCHING, REAL-TIME FEEDBACK followed. Indymedia pursued a model which was inherently antithetical to the closed gatekeeping approach of mainstream journalism: where in that model, gatekeeping is practiced at each stage of the news publication process, here gatekeeping was entirely absent -any user could contribute their own stories at the input stage; all stories were immediately progressed to the output stage; and the platform provided ample opportunity for unedited user commentary at the response stage.While such total openness came with its own problems (several Indymedia Websites have suffered from persistent spamming and other contributions of inappropriate or undesirable material, which were duly automatically published along with more legitimate submissions), subsequent citizen journalism initiatives pursued similar models, but strengthened the collaborative curatorial aspects of their news production processes -for example by enabling their user communities to rate or vote on the quality of user-submitted content, in order to determine which submissions were ready for publication, or even by instituting collaborative 'open editing' models which enabled community members to become involved in fine-tuning story submissions from other users.Yet other sites maintained a limited degree of staff gatekeeping at the output stage -instituting a group of dedicated (but often volunteer) editors to exclude at least the most inappropriate submissions (seeBRUNS, 2005, for a detailed discussion of these various models). ...
How bloggers and other independent online commentators criticise, correct, and otherwise challenge conventional journalism has been known for years, but has yet to be fully accepted by journalists; hostilities between the media establishment and the new generation of citizen journalists continue to flare up from time to time. The old gatekeeping monopoly of the mass media has been challenged by the new practice of gatewatching: by individual bloggers and by communities of commentators which may not report the news first-hand, but curate and evaluate the news and other information provided by official sources, and thus provide an important service. And this now takes place ever more rapidly, almost in real time: using the latest social networks, which disseminate, share, comment, question, and debunk news reports within minutes, and using additional platforms that enable fast and effective ad hoc collaboration between users. When hundreds of volunteers can prove within a few days that a German minister has been guilty of serious plagiarism, when the world first learns of earthquakes and tsunamis via Twitter – how does journalism manage to keep up?
... Emergency gatewatching is a specific gatewatching practice because it combines the identification and sharing of important information material as soon as it becomes available, with the communication of emotions, Fig. 5.5 The gatewatching of emergencies. Source: Reworking starting Bruns's scheme (Bruns, 2008) opinions, and sentiments. Thus, it is not only a practice of participation in the publication of news and monitoring of them, but it merges within this practice that of sharing feelings, indispensable for those who face an enemy. ...
This chapter examines the reactions of Italian, Spanish, French and German
citizens through the comments left on Twitter. Italy, Spain, France and
Germany were the first four European nations to be affected by the virus and to
implement measures to contain the contagion such as the lockdown. Through
the merged method of Emotional text mining, citizens’ reactions are clustered
and sentiment analysis is carried out on them. The tweets reveal a concern for
the crisis that is not only health, but also economic, political and social.
... Currently, the 'camp' of researchers is divided into those who believe that the gatekeeping is an outdated concept, in view of the fact that in the Internet era every reader can function as a gatekeeper by commenting on online news or by reposting it, and those who see the potential in the concept and try to revamp it to reflect audience's possibilities in news construction enabled by the Internet. (e.g.,Bruns, 2008;Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). ...
Sociological translations at Inter Press Service (IPS) This interdisciplinary project investigates the extents and limits of alternative news translation in the era of globalization and virtualization and is guided by the insights drawn from actor-network theory, material semiotics, ethnomethodology, anthropology, news sociology, and the philosophy of translation. It visually represents the semiotic, sociological and material components of news translation as well as describes the patterned and concerted actions of human and non-human actors that go into making news stories in the context of IPS, a global news agency. A contribution is made to both theoretical knowledge and the development of the conceptual research method, which is given scarce attention in translation studies as compared to prevailing empirical research. A meta-semiotic concept of sociological translation that I formulate helps bridge the gap between tackling 'translation' in terms of Jakobson's triadic classification as either an intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic phenomenon, and the recurrent metaphorical usage of 'translation' in the humanities, social sciences and beyond. The concept is informed by the networked ontology of actor-network theory and embodies the idea that meanings and translation are created by means of social interactions rather than by language alone. It is suggested that sociological translation stands for any linguistic, material-semiotic transformations and social articulations, which are all enmeshed with IPS journalistic and interlingual translation practices. On the other hand, in view of the absence of methodological tools for studying non-language-based translation in translation studies, I have assembled my own methodology drawing on the traditions of the wider humanities and the social sciences. My case study adopts Law's ideas on method assemblage and Latour's elaborations on infra-reflexivity which are well-suited for conveying the serendipity and messiness of 'real-life' research. It incorporates traditional iii ethnography, virtual ethnography and digital methods. Visualizing a network of sociological translations at different junctures as well outlining a holistic map of the concept allows one to observe the practices of journalist-editor-translators from both micro-and macro-perspectives. Finally, the studied phenomenon reflects modern conditions of life: non-stopping globalization and virtualization and is transdisciplinary in nature. Delineating and comparing the articulations of sociological translation in a wider connected and virtual context illuminates the concept's mechanisms and contributes to the scholarly awareness of the complexity of news translation in a digital age. In conclusion, the thesis offers a new conceptual space within TS-translational sociology-which would strike up a conversation between TS and other disciplines in the social sciences with the goal of cross-fertilization of knowledge and finding better-informed interdisciplinary solutions to the shared problems including their linguistic, discursive and cultural aspects. iv Résumé: Traductions sociologiques à Inter Press Service (IPS) Ce projet interdisciplinaire étudie l'étendue et les limites de la traduction alternative des
... The author presented the gatekeeper as one of the most powerful individuals in the newsroom with the power to determine what is allowed in, and what is allowed to leave, the mainstream news. This perspective of a gatekeeper chronicles a series of studies that took two approaches among scholars -one that perceived the gatekeeper as an impediment to the smooth running of the newsroom (Bakker 2014;Bruns 2008;Ferrucci 2017;Mabweazara 2015), and one that perceived the gatekeeper as an advocate for order within the newsroom (Hanitzsch et al. 2010;Reese and Shoemaker 2016;Shoemaker and Vos 2009). The two opposing approaches underscore the debates about the role of the gatekeeper. ...
This article reports on a study that contributes to the literature on gatekeeping, gatewatching and crowdsourcing in African contexts. It does so by significantly expanding the scope, and theoretically incorporating the value of information and message content, through which the study revealed how citizen journalists only participate in the already existing media agenda. Citizen journalists are not professional journalists, instead they transmit information using social media platforms. By analysing a total of 2 418 stories from social media users and conducting surveys among 314 journalists, the study was able to demonstrate that journalists and the political elites are the main creators of news media agenda. The findings also suggest that journalists do not crowdsource to obtain a diversity of opinions, but rather to validate their already made agenda. These findings, although consistent with the extant literature, present an important topic to the so far understudied area of Africa.
... In the history of news production, news publishers faithfully assumed that their content reached large audiences (Williams and Carpini 2011). The development of online journalism, however, has altered the dynamics of how audiences consume news, giving them increased control and choice over what and how they consume news (Bruns 2008;Napoli 2011). Due to greater audience autonomy, news consumption is no longer concentrated in a few outlets but increasingly fragmented across an abundance of news outlets that all have to compete among another (Trilling and Schoenbach 2013;Webster and Ksiazek 2012). ...
The contemporary high-choice media environment, characterized by information abundance, makes it increasingly difficult for media outlets to capture audience attention. This concern is particularly pressing for social media, and more specifically for Facebook. Because user engagement is a crucial input factor for the algorithm, fears have risen that journalistic content on digital news media and especially on social media is becoming softer to help adjust to news consumer’s interests. A content analysis was conducted on four consecutive weeks of all news items published online by five market-leading Belgian media outlets (N = 10,579) in order to analyse whether the news supply is adapted to “what the metrics say” and, subsequently, to what extent that metric data is used to promote a “softer” supply of news on Facebook. To measure audience engagement, we used unique metrics provided by the news organizations themselves. The results show that audience metrics support and enhance news softening on the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets.
... Como resultado, se utilizaron diferentes términos y definiciones para describir y representar conceptos iguales o similares: "periodismo ciudadano" indica la participación de las personas, quienes eran previamente identificadas como audiencia (Gillmor, 2004;Rosen, 2006); "produsage", se refiere a la combinación de información de producción y consumo (Bruns, 2007(Bruns, , 2008; y el "periodismo participativo" enfatiza la idea de acción colaborativa (Singer et al., 2011). El uso de la expresión "contenido generado por el usuario" va obteniendo espacio con la Web 2.0 y la llegada de las plataformas sociales, que engloban diferentes tipos de contenidos y recursos, asociados a la noción de colaboradores que generan contenido fuera de las plataformas rutinarias y profesionales (Livingstone, 2004;van Dijck, 2009). ...
ABSTRACT – Many scholars have recognized the benefits that user-generated content (UGC) can bring to news publications. In this context, the coverage of the pandemic has undoubtedly forced news outlets around the world to embrace such content to present relevant information during this time. To understand how Latin American outlets are exploring UGC in news reporting, we proposed an exploratory study that includes a devised observation of 80 news websites and their social network channels between April and August 2020. During this period, we conducted a systematic observation to analyze how these outlets open spaces for the public and experiment with integrating user content into their news processes. Our findings suggest that the majority of the observed portals have punctually adopted UGC with minimal engagement. However, the pandemic disrupted interesting experiments regarding the integration of UGC into news creation that generate innovative forms of storytelling.
RESUMO – Muitos acadêmicos têm reconhecido os benefícios que o conteúdo gerado pelo usuário (CGU) pode trazer para as notícias. Nesse contexto, a cobertura da pandemia, sem dúvida, forçou os meios de comunicação de todo o mundo a adotar esse tipo de conteúdo para apresentar informações relevantes durante esse período. Para entender como os veículos latino-americanos estão explorando o CGU em reportagens, propusemos um estudo exploratório que inclui uma observação planejada de 80 sites de notícias e seus canais de rede social entre abril e agosto de 2020. Durante esse período, conduzimos uma observação sistemática para analisar como esses veículos abrem espaços para o público e experimentam integrar o conteúdo do usuário em seus processos de notícias. Nossos resultados sugerem que a maioria dos portais observados adotou CGU pontualmente com envolvimento mínimo. No entanto, a pandemia promoveu experimentos interessantes sobre a integração de CGU na criação de notícias que resultaram em formas inovadoras de storytelling.
RESUMEN – Los estudios académicos han reconocido los beneficios que el contenido generado por el usuario (CGU) puede aportar a las noticias. En este contexto, la cobertura de la pandemia sin duda ha obligado a los medios de todo el mundo a adoptar este tipo de contenido para brindar información relevante durante este tiempo. Para comprender cómo los medios latinoamericanos están explorando el CGU en la cobertura de noticias, proponemos un estudio exploratorio que incluye la observación de 80 sitios web de noticias y sus redes sociales entre abril y agosto de 2020. A lo largo de este período, hicimos una observación sistemática para analizar cómo estos medios abren espacios para el público y experimentan la integración del contenido del usuario en sus procesos de noticias. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren que la mayoría de los portales observados adoptan puntualmente el CGU con un compromiso mínimo. Por otro lado, la pandemia ha disrumpido algunos experimentos interesantes de integración del CGU en la creación de noticias que generaron formas innovadoras de storytelling.
... À luz da source credibility theory e face aos resultados apresentados sobre questões do rigor e isenção e com base nos contributos de Self (2009), pode-se afirmar que a CCA é tida como uma fonte credível porque os públicos percebem que a mensagem transmitida é verdadeira. Sublinha-se, ainda, a responsabilidade assumida pelos públicos na determinação da credibilidade da informação disponibilizada online, atendendo a que a sua seleção não é feita por profissionais (os gatekeepers); os públicos são os gatewatchers, na aceção de Bruns (2008) ou secondary gatekeepers, como lhe chama Singer (2014), e cabe-lhes atribuir relevância e utilidade à informação que selecionam e consomem (Jenkins et al., 2013;Westerman, et al., 2014 Quando a CCA atinge novos marcos em relação ao número de patreons é divulgada uma publicação de agradecimento nas redes sociais digitais. A 30 de janeiro, a CCA agradeceu aos seus 210 patronos (o que representa um acréscimo de 100 patronos desde junho de 2020). ...
O capitalismo informacional e a ubiquidade tecnológica conduzem ao aumento de fontes de informação que criam diversidade de escolhas para o indivíduo para a satisfação das suas necessidades e desejos. Este é um estudo de caso da plataforma digital Comunidade Cultura e Arte, autodefinida como uma plataforma de distribuição e/ou de acesso de conteúdos de cariz informativo. Neste sentido, efetua-se a observação direta e a análise de conteúdo a todas as publicações da plataforma no mês de janeiro de 2020, e aplica-se um inquérito por questionário aos seus leitores (n=1525), procurando compreender o que motiva os leitores a utilizar esta plataforma como fonte de informação. Os resultados destacam elementos do processo de produção e difusão de conteúdos, que contribuem para a experiência dos leitores, entre outros: a unicidade do projeto editorial, com uma diversidade de conteúdos culturais e artísticos, a presença em plataformas de redes sociais online e a linguagem utilizada.
... During the recent decades, media production has often been analyzed through the lens of citizen participation. The idea of users' active engagement in the context of mainstream media was initially accompanied by promises of enhancing democratization and strengthening bonds with the community [24,25]. However, the empirical reality of user participation was different from the expectations, as there is lots of dark participation, with examples ranging from misinformation and hate campaigns to individual trolling and cyberbullying; a large variety of participation behaviors are evil, malevolent, and destructive [22]. ...
Social media services make it possible for an increasing number of people to express their opinion publicly. In this context, large amounts of hateful comments are published daily. The PHARM project aims at monitoring and modeling hate speech against refugees and migrants in Greece, Italy, and Spain. In this direction, a web interface for the creation and the query of a multi-source database containing hate speech-related content is implemented and evaluated. The selected sources include Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook comments and posts, as well as comments and articles from a selected list of websites. The interface allows users to search in the existing database, scrape social media using keywords, annotate records through a dedicated platform and contribute new content to the database. Furthermore, the functionality for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis of texts is provided, making use of novel methods and machine learning models. The interface can be accessed online with a graphical user interface compatible with modern internet browsers. For the evaluation of the interface, a multifactor questionnaire was formulated, targeting to record the users’ opinions about the web interface and the corresponding functionality.
... 39 Citirani postulati iz pomenute Konvencije svakako su značajni i Savetu za štampu 40 i njegovoj Komisiji za žalbe, koji se direktno pozivaju na Kodeks novinara Srbije. Analizirajući sadržaje iz onlajn baze ovog bitnog tela za 38 Tako je nastao hibridni Brunsov (Axel Bruns) pojam produser, koji predstavlja kombinaciju reči proizvođač (producer) i korisnik (user), a u značenju je stapanja funkcije produkcije i konzumacije medijskih sadržaja u jednoj osobi (Bruns, 2008 samoregulaciju novinarske profesije, u ovom radu će biti izdvojeni neki od karakterističnih primera kršenja Kodeksa novinara Srbije, odnosno pojava govora mržnje u medijskoj praksi. Važno je da se naglasi i da predmet žalbe može biti u nadležnosti Saveta za štampu pod uslovom da nije prošlo više od tri meseca od objavljivanja spornog sadržaja i da je žalbu podnela osoba koja je lično pogođena objavljivanjem (ili ovlašćeni predstavnik). ...
Sažetak: Analizom govora mržnje u štampi i onlajn medijima u Srbiji autori tragaju za regulatornim, komunikološkim i sociokulturnim kontekstom izveštavanja u polju javne komunikacije. U fokusu je primena etičkog kodeksa, kada je reč o govoru mržnje, kroz primere iz prakse Saveta za štampu. Nejasna granica između politički nekorektnog i propagandnog uticanja zasnovanog na mržnji, verbalnom nasilju i diskriminaciji proizvela je stanje agresivnosti i netolerantnosti prema drugačijim stavovima i idejama, polarizujući javnost do tačke usijanja. Intenzitet ovako ekstremnog izražavanja proporcionalan je rastu komunikacije u tabloidima i na društvenim mrežama, jer se prelivanjem u elektronsku medijsku sferu pretvara u konfliktni rezervoar sa produbljenim i prikrivenim tenzijama. Društveni ambijent u Srbiji kreiraju i tiražni tabloidi u kojima se forsira senzacionalnost, površnost i agresivnost, dok se potcenjuje opasnost koja se širi javnim prostorom na taj način. Takvom stanju doprinosi i retorika političkih elita koje generišu ideološku ostrašćenost i neskrivenu mržnju prema drugima. Pravni okvir je zadovoljavajući, ali se u praksi sankcije skoro i ne primenjuju. Savet za štampu i druga slična regulatorna tela deklarativno osuđuju određene postupke novinara i redakcija, ali nema mehanizama koji bi doveli do konkretnijih posledica po one koji se ponašaju neodgovorno i neetično, a što bi doprinelo povratku poverenja u nekada uglednu profesiju.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract: The focus of this paper is on journalistic ethics and standards, with the focus on hate speech, through examples from the practice of the Press Council. The blurred line between the propaganda and politically incorrect influence based on hatred, verbal violence, and discrimination has produced a state of aggression and intolerance towards different attitudes and ideas, thus strongly polarizing the public. The intensity of such an extreme expression is proportional to the increase of communication in tabloids and on social networks. The social environment in Serbia is also created by high-circulation tabloids, the work of which is marked by sensationalism, superficiality, and aggression, while the danger that is spreads in public space in this way is underestimated. The rhetoric of political elites, which generate ideological fervor and undisguised hatred towards others, also contributes to this situation. The legal framework in Serbia is satisfactory, but in practice, sanctions are almost never applied. The Press Council and similar regulatory bodies declaratively condemn certain actions of journalists and media, but there are no mechanisms that would lead to more concrete consequences for those who behave irresponsibly and unethically, which would contribute to the return of trust in the once respectable profession.
... The User in the Center "Do you help us make the news?" is the question that opens our exploration into the uses of User-Generated Content in Latin America, and it also makes it necessary that we grapple with the intricacies of the appropriations of users' content by journalism. The public has been gaining an unprecedented role in communication, and many expressions were coined to refer to users taking part in the news process in the age of the Internet, smartphones, and social networks, with media outlets finding themselves needing to offer their readers their own space- Rosen (2008) refers to "the people formerly known as the audience"; "produsage" refers to the blending of the production and consumption information (Bruns 2007(Bruns , 2008; and "participatory journalism" stresses the idea of collaborative action (Singer et al. 2011). For the purpose of this chapter, we adopt User-Generated Content. ...
Latin American journalism is currently experiencing some important transformations, with potential changes to how news is produced, shared, financed and consumed. This book provides a comprehensive overview of current journalism in Latin America, contextualized by global literature and regional empirical evidence. It is an important addition to our understanding of digital journalism and a must-read for those interested in journalism in Latin America.”
Dr. Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce, Texas State University, USA
This book explores innovative approaches to digital and data journalism in Latin America, brought by both legacy media and newcomers to the industry, with the purpose of examining this changing media landscape. As part of the Global South, Latin America has shown significant influence in the promotion of data and digital technologies applied to journalism in recent years. In this region, news entrepreneurs are becoming an essential source of innovation in news production, circulation, and distribution. The book considers news media, particularly in Latin America, as an open set of practices intertwined in the evolution of technology. It discusses the transformation of the Latin American news media ecosystem and considers how it has shaped the industry despite local differences. The study fills a significant gap in academic scholarship by addressing the multiple external factors, mainly political and economic, which have contributed to the relative lack of studies on the patterns of journalism in this region.
Ramón Salaverría is Associate Dean of Research at the School of Communication, University of Navarra, Spain, where he heads the Digital News Media Research Group. Author of over 200 scholarly publications, his research focuses on digital journalism and media convergence, both in national and international comparative studies.
Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos is a researcher at the University of Navarra, Spain, under the JOLT project, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Network funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020. Previously, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He researches changing journalistic practice with a particular focus on business models, data, and novel technologies.
... Additionally, more people are retrieving news from social media sites: 68% of American adults occasionally getting news from social media, 20% saying that they do so often [32]. Social media sites allow users to curate their social network, which has seen news consumption become increasingly self-selected [33,34]. While selectively engaging with certain outlets, users filter the newsfeed of others by 'sharing' stories to their social network. ...
Recent studies have documented a shift from moderate political attitudes to more extreme attitudes at the ends of the political spectrum. This can be seen in Political Correctness (PC) on the left, and white identitarian (WI) attitudes on the ‘Alt-Right’ (AR). While highly covered in mainstream media, limited academic research has investigated their possible antecedents and psychological correlates. The current study investigated the prevalence and psychological predictors of these attitudes. Utilising a quota-based sample of 512 U.S. participants, we found that extreme political attitudes were associated with various personality traits, social media use, and upbringing. PC attitudes were associated with agreeableness, black-white thinking, social-media use, and perceived overprotective parenting. WI attitudes were associated with low agreeableness and openness, and high black-white thinking. Our results show that extreme left and right attitudes are separated by individual differences, and that authoritarianism can be seen on both the left and the right.
... Overall, participation agitates not only the well-known notions of news production and consumption, but also traditional work practices as well. Gatekeeping turns to gatewatching [7] or even gateopening [6] and journalists do not define, but observe the information flow stemming from a variety of sources, receive UGC and construct a final product. It can thus be considered that users' involvement in fact-checking supports the core value of participatory journalism. ...
... In both cases, only when performed responsibly, can communal closure be said to constitute communal knowledge (Simon, 2010a). In contrast, the L.A. Times experiment of enabling readers to revise its daily editorials wikistyle did not give rise to communal closure entailing knowledge, due to an inadequate relationship between the news corporation and its readers, who were not seen as authentic partners within a community of knowledge-seekers (Bruns, 2008). ...
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
... Although the idea of mediated participation is part of the long-standing debate between cyberoptimists and cyber-pessimists (Spyridou, 2018), it is accepted that the current new media era has seen a proliferation of user-generated content (UGC) and an increasing participation by Internet users in public communication, impelling newsrooms to integrate non-professional contributions into ordinary news practice (Tong, 2015). In the light of changing roles, users become prosumers (Deuze, 2003), while gatekeeping turns to gatewatching, as journalists do not define, but observe the information flow stemming from a variety of sources, receive UGC and construct a final product (Bruns, 2008). In a similar vein, Boczkowski (2005) refers to gateopening, when users actively codevelop website content and traditional work routines are questioned. ...
Our special issue discusses how to redefine the way we communicate, innovate and protect via social media tools and practices. How can technical innovation (semantic technologies, Digital Forensics, social media) ‘protect us’ and bring us together. The articles discuss how we can better connect, collaborate, and innovate to avoid misinformation and cultural loss. In this special issue, we present five different articles to address the issue above. Two are from the field of New Media/Innovation and three refer to Cultural Communication, Traditions and National Promotion.
... Years after the first suggesting on the demise of the gatekeeper, Bruns (2011) confirms that journalists have "irretrievably lost" their role as gatekeepers of information and news media outlets (print, broadcast or online) are no longer "the central spaces for the coverage of and engagement with the news" (p.132). We are now talking of 'gatewatching' by citizens rather than gatekeeping by mainstream media in relationships between the two that are "adversarial, parasitic, or symbiotic" (Bruns, 2008). However there is what Bruns calls "central hybrid space" and warns that "industrial journalism which continues to ignore or denigrate citizen efforts is increasingly left behind public sentiment, but citizen journalism which shows scant regard for journalistic ethics or professional conduct similarly undermines its own position as a credible alternative (ibid.). ...
This dissertation examines how the digital curation of online news articles is being carried out on social network sites (SNS). The focus of the study is an observation of patterns of this digital curation within the context of the rise of the Internet which, in turn, has led to a process of transformation of the mass media and the creation of significant amount of online content by users, empowered by online tools such as blogs, video sharing sites and social network sites, collectively known as social media.
The primary evidence of this study is derived from a case study of how online news articles published by The Times of Malta, the newspaper of record in Malta, are curated on Facebook, the most popular social network site in Malta and internationally. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, the study presents a methodology for comparing the frontpage content of the print edition of The Times of Malta, with news articles presented on the newspaper’s website at www.timesofmalta.com and the curation of these articles on Facebook, both on the official Facebook Page of the newspaper and on personal feeds of users.
The data gathered and analysed in this study confirms that the newspaper of record in Malta is facing the challenges posed by the digital age, especially pressures created by decreasing print sales and increasing online readership, which have led the newspaper to introduce a paid subscription service on some of its premier-rated online news content. The case study reveals that the introduction of this online paywall has been negatively received by readers, who manifest different news value criteria in their readership patterns to the newspaper’s editorial policy.
News content is curated on Facebook as part of the engagement process between the news website and the online news consumer. Facebook provides three engagement tools, namely liking news content, sharing news content and commenting on news content, with sharing being the second most popular after liking.
Maltese Facebook users are prod-users and prosumers just like Facebook users in other countries. Homophilous behaviour can be observed but to a limited degree. Digital curation behaviour indicates strong gatekeeping from mainstream media in their online outlets for editorial and financial reasons, as in the case of The Times of Malta, but Facebook users manifest gatewatching activity. An echo-chamber effect is observed but this is lessened by the fact that news content highlighted by mainstream media is neither the same as the most popular content with news website readers nor the content Facebook users engage with most.
... Therefore, in new media environments, the gates are now located not only with the information providers but also with the information consumers, who are acting as their own gatekeepers (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999). This change has created a shift from the traditional notion of "gatekeeping" to what Bruns (2008) has referred to as "gatewatching." Gatewatchers are unable to control the gates through which information passes, but instead keep a constant eye on the gates, and pass what flows through those gates into others who then make the choice about the topic relevance and usefulness. ...
Learning how to communicate effectively is an essential skill for any career nowadays. Surprisingly, almost all organizations strive day in and out to assist their employees, especially the frontline staff, to learn how to communicate effectively. They even institute coaching or develop training and development programs on how to continuously improve their communication with fellow workers, department heads and clienteles. The main objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the communication network of Columban College, Inc. in Olongapo City, Philippines. It utilized the descriptive design of research using all the frontline staff as the respondents. The researcher used a survey-questionnaire to generate relevant responses from the respondents, while observations and interviews were conducted to offer supplementary resources. Coordination/ Knowledge sharing, the effectiveness of communication and reliability revealed very strong agreement among the communication dimensions, while strong agreement on communication flow, barriers to effective communication, timeliness and media effectiveness was disclosed. On communicating company news and updates, the communication tools were generally rated as somewhat effective, whereas very effective for communicating information.
... La razón es que no «tendría el valor-noticia o criterio de noticiabilidad» adoptado por la edición del noticioso o por el profesional. Lo que se recomienda aquí es que a partir de un proceso de «gatewatching (vigilancia) colaborativo» se trabaje juntamente con los ciudadanos en la perspectiva de desarrollar una comprensión compartida de la noticia (BRUNS, 2008). ...
Este artículo presenta los resultados de la aplicación de JCollab, una herramienta de creación y gestión de telediarios por comunidades virtuales, probada con éxito en la formación de periodistas en la Universidad Federal de Paraíba (Brasil). El objetivo es estructurar el desarrollo de un proceso interactivo de producción de periodismo televisivo colaborativo, en el que participa, además de alumnos y el profesor, al ciudadano de a pie. Este tipo de aprendizaje facilitó la comunicación entre los miembros y el estímulo del trabajo en equipo, lo cual tuvo como resultado un proceso efectivamente colectivo y colaborativo.
... Moreover, trust issues in public health occur against a backdrop of increased access to powerful tools for spreading disinformation and eroding public trust [32][33][34][35]. In an era in which community "gate watchers" and "social proof" are at least as important as traditional gatekeepers or credentialing as arbiters of expertise, signals of trustworthiness such as transparency and a willingness to seek out and engage with diverse points of view may become even more salient [36,37]. In this setting, a commitment to truth telling that is responsive to public interests is especially critical. ...
Research suggests that many people in the US are misinformed about the relative harms of various tobacco and nicotine products. Concerns about public misinformation have often been framed as relevant only to the degree that public health institutions agree to prioritize conventional approaches to tobacco harm reduction. We argue that while the information priorities of public health professionals are important, ethical and credible information sharing also requires consideration of broader issues related to public trust. To promote trust, public health institutions must develop truth telling relationships with the communities they serve and be genuinely responsive to what people themselves want to know about tobacco and nicotine products.
... Thus, the BBC UGC Hub successfully promoted the idea of user-generated content as another source for the corporation's journalists, rather than a different (and potentially challenging) form of journalism altogether. The Hub's journalists had evolved to act as effective 'gatewatchers' (Bruns, 2008) and gatekeepers, both requesting content, via the 'Have Your Say' form, and choosing it, when there was breaking news. By setting up the Hub, the BBC was taking ownership of user-generated content, and the corporation's journalists mostly experienced UGC through the medium of the Hub. ...
... Ne manje važno, zbog limita od 140 znakova, pojedinačni tvitovi korisnika nužno imaju fragmente novinarske aktivnosti jer pun smisao imaju samo u kombinaciji i u kontekstu aktivnosti drugih učesnika. Uz to, procesi pokrivanja događaja vestima i diskusijama na Twitteru, čak i više nego promenama u vestima i političkoj blogosferi ili između blogova i mainstream novinarstva, odgovaraju položaju Twittera kao platforme za produkcije vesti (Bruns, 2008a), tj., postepeni i kolaborativni razvoj vesti i komentara od strane korisnika doprinosi celini, pre nego orkestrirana proizvodnja vesti i mišljenja od strane malih timova posvećenih profesionalaca. ...
Apstrakt: Proliferacija mogućih kanala za news sadržaje i rastuća nesigurnost za povećanje njihove finansijske baze, kombinovane predstavljaju korporativne pritiske na nezavisno novinarstvo. S jedne strane, to znači da svega nekoliko novinarskih organizacija može sebi dugoročno da priušti stabilnost, planiranje, intenzivne resurse, istraživačko novinarstvo i izbegne da postane poligon za komercijalna i vladina saopštenja. Tendencije da većina nema luksuz nezavisnosti smanjuje prosečan kvalitet novinarskih publikacija i emisija, i time dodatno podriva privlačnost novinarskog proizvoda, što, opet, dovodi do nastavka pada interesovanja kod publike. S druge strane, izjava A.J. Liebling da je „sloboda štampe zagarantovana samo onima koji je
imaju“ je otkrila: komercijalnost i dalje predstavlja glavnu motivaciju za posedovanje i operativnost novina ili stanica vesti a, s posedovanjem štampe, organizacija dolazi u priliku da se slobodno bavi političkim lobiranjem (pritiscima) u korist političkih ili korporativnih ciljeva vlasnika. Uticajne novine verovatno nikada neće ponovo biti u mogućnosti da finansiraju svoje sopstvene operacije od prodaje i reklamiranja, već su unakrsno subvencionirane od strane drugih, unosnijih grana konglomerata koji ih poseduju, i oni otplaćuju to ulaganje u valuti političkog uticaja. To, međutim, znači da uređivački
komentar (barem), kao i novinarski sadržaj (često), mora biti upućen
ka ciljevima finansijera jer ‐ sloboda štampe mora biti garantovana, ali sloboda individualnog novinara ne.
Ovaj rad bavi se alternativnim putevima slobode novinarskog izražavanja, bazirajući se na fenomenu društvenih mreža kao prostora slobode informisanja, komentarisanja, deljenja sadržaja i, uopšte, istraživanja konteksta vesti koji tradicionalni mediji uglavnom nemaju.
Ključne reči: sloboda, mediji, twitter, društvene mreže, građansko novinarstvo.
... In her study on renegotiating the journalism profession in the era of social media, Jaana Hujanen concludes that ideals and practices governing journalism are being revisited by journalism students in terms of the challenges and opportunities that social media and citizen journalism offer [42]. Similarly, the Project for Excellence in Journalism study found that both the journalists and their publics are prepared to accept a new different vision of journalism [4] in which the key function of gatekeeping of traditional mainstream journalism is no longer exist [43]. ...
Social media are growing drastically representing a further step in the ongoing deterioration of journalism profession and ethics. The lines between professional journalists and amateurs have been blurred; consequently, the structure of news media has substantially changed affecting the core traits of the profession and its ethics. This phenomenon has challenged the already disputed concepts of journalism as profession and journalists as professionals. While this challenge is tremendous, research on its implications to journalism identity and ethics is scant. The existing literature focuses on new or digital media usage, newsgathering, production, dissemination, and consumption, with little emphasis on journalism ethics or the profession itself. This chapter seeks to examine how social media contribute to the ethical dilemmas off and online journalism encounter and how this transformation puts the profession at risk.
The article full text link
http://mts.intechopen.com/articles/show/title/social-media-a-turning-point-into-global-journalism-identity-and-ethics
... In other words, not only reporters and editors but also online readers are (potentially) active actors in the process of what becomes news. To Bruns (2008), this shift in the process of news production and distribution signals that gatekeeping has been transformed into gatewatching: Online readers gatewatch news sources, compile and share reporters, and thus publicize news instead of publishing it. Gatewatching is a continuous collaborative effort as users weigh in by critiquing and expanding the initial report. ...
Gatekeeping involves a human or technological process used to control information flow. An initial conceptualization of gatekeeping was journalism‐based and focused on the process of selecting what becomes news, with reporters and editors playing the role of human filters. Subsequent theory development saw gatekeeping as the process that includes not only selection but also the way news stories are shaped and presented. The digital environment created a variety of new ways to perform gatekeeping and prompted the reconceptualization of the framework to acknowledge the role of the gated, those who are affected by gatekeepers' decisions.
... Civil journalist is considered as a benchmark of professional journalism in sharing information and motivating political participation, as well as participation journalism (Halse et al., 2017;Hermida and Thurman, 2008), and it has been reported in previous literature to provide a revolutionary capacity for information production hierarchies (Bruns, 2008;Dan, 2004;Tilley and Cokley, 2008). Previous literature reported that news media enable the mobilization of information to motivate political participation and to respond on policy (Eveland and William, 2004;Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2010). ...
Purpose
Government social media profiles (GSPs) are increasingly used by government agencies during social crises, and the success of GSPs is highly dependent on netizens’ participation behavior (NPB). Drawing upon the social support theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model to examine the determinants and outcomes of NPB during a social crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the research model, a field survey was conducted in the context of Tianjin 2015 explosions in China. The authors adopted a two-step approach to test the models. First, the authors conducted exploratory factor analysis to evaluate the measurement properties of the reflective latent constructs. Then, the authors performed a structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The results show that information support and emotional support are significant determinants of NPB and persona involvement moderates the relationships between them. Additionally, this study reveals that information source preference and increasing enthusiasm for becoming a civil journalist are two critical and significant outcomes of NPB.
Research limitations/implications
There are some limitations in this paper that must be taken into account when interpreting its findings. First, the study is designed on a single profile and concerns a single social crisis. Additionally, future research might consider incorporating factors beyond the individual level, e.g., community social capital (Putnam, 1993). Finally, with the emergence of various IT platforms, such as a government’s own website and online forms, future research can investigate how their characteristics can facilitate other social media platforms’ participation.
Practical implications
This paper offers a number of crucial research implications to the literature of social media in crisis management, thereby contributing to the explanation of NPB on GSPs in the management of social crises. Considering social support as a factor affecting NPB on GSPs, the authors also add personal involvement to the research on the functions of NPB on GSPs and include encouraging civil journalist and making GSPs the principal source of political information.
Social implications
The research provides participating netizens on GSPs with some suggestions about generating more cost-effective and useful interventions to improve netizen participation levels on GSPs. The findings highlight that governmental social media profiles must focus on continuous development, such as trying best to satisfy the habits of netizens, to motivate netizens to create dependence of information acquisition on the GSPs, called information source preference. On the other hand, the study reminds netizens of the importance of NPB on GSPs during crises and encourages them to act as civil journalist.
Originality/value
First, the study investigated the outcome effect of NPB on GSPs on netizens’ information source preference and civil journalist. Second, this study identifies the determinants of NBPs on GSPs from both the informational and the emotional support perspectives. Third, this study investigates the moderating effects of personal involvement on the relationships between determinants from social support and NPB on GSPs.
... In the context of journalism, recent scholarship has pointed to a vast array of new platforms, tools and techniques to produce, publish, access and engage with news, and how this has re- positioned some of the underlying assumptions derived from more traditional notions of journalism. For example, scholars outline how journalism's relationship with an active and participatory audience is transforming the classic role allocation of creators and (relatively passive) recipients of news (Allan & Thorsen, 2009;Borger et al., 2013;Bruns, 2007Bruns, , 2008bRosen, 2006;Zamith, 2015). Others highlight how journalists are faced with significant changes in skills and demands (Willnat & Weaver, 2014) due to multi-platform production expectations (Lim, 2012), trends of media convergence (García Avilés et al., 2009;Jenkins, 2008;Robinson, 2011), as well as 24/7 news cycles and deadlines that have shifted from 'once a day' to 'NOW!' (Usher, 2014, p. 11). ...
Political journalists are some of Twitter’s most enthusiastic users and the platform has become one of the key social media tools in the news industry. While a growing body of research has addressed journalists’ observable tweeting practices, we know little about the considerations and strategies that underpin their activities on the platform, how these manifest themselves in their engagement, and which benefits they yield. This thesis examines US political journalists and the process of their Twitter engagement via an integrated conceptual framework that is organised by macro, meso and micro levels of investigation. On the macro level, it conceptualises the influence of organisational factors via a management of media innovation perspective. On the meso level, it uses the concepts of technology affordances and appropriation to analyse the role of journalistic routines and practices. On the micro level, it employs the uses and gratifications framework to examine individual-based motivations that drive Twitter engagement. The thesis further investigates how different socio-political environments and the type of news medium, that is, broadsheet and broadcast, moderate the factors located on each level as they impinge on journalists’ Twitter engagement. The empirical part of the study uses a mixed methods approach that combines expert interviews as the primary method with quantitative content analysis as the secondary method of (1) the Twitter profile pages of 120 political journalists and (2) 2,400 of their tweets, published during a mundane news period and the US Midterm elections in 2014. Findings indicate that journalists experience organisational influences on their Twitter engagement most prominently when their employer is in an advanced stage of innovation implementation and Twitter use has been formalised on an institutional level. The empirical analysis further demonstrates that practices and routines are especially sensitive to changing news climates, and it is here where the perceived benefits of Twitter use are most clearly articulated. Findings on the individual level indicate high degrees of individualisation and personalisation that shape journalists’ Twitter presence. Overall, the relationships and interactions between macro-, meso- and micro-level factors can create mutually beneficial outcomes for the employer, news product and journalist, but equally so, generate fields of tensions and significant conflicts of interest. The empirical analysis and its novel integration of independent macro-, meso- and microlevel concepts into a combined framework provide a basis for advancing a theoretical understanding of the interplay of factors that motivate, shape and moderate political journalists’ engagement with Twitter. This allows us to position and understand tweeting journalists, on the one hand, as employees bound by contractual agreements and occupational demands, and on the other, as autonomous agents who are not fully controlled by managerial strategies, organisational logics and professional workflows.
... 여행소비자 구매의사결정에 영향 을 미치는 가장 중요한 채널 중 하나는 친구나 친척을 통한 구전이며 (Bieger & Laesser, 2004;Litvin, Goldsmith & Pan, 2008), 사회관계 구조 중 강한 연대, 즉 가까운 사람들로부터 추천 혹 은 정보를 받는 구전활동이 약한 연대의 사람들로부터 받는 정보보다 훨씬 중요하고 유용한 영향을 미 치는 것으로 나타났다 (Duhan, Johnson, Wilcox, & Harrell, 1997 (Granovetter, 1983;Rogers, 1995), 공공적 성격의 정보 (Uzzi & Lancaster, 2003)나 기술관 련 정보들의 흐름 (Constant, Sproull, & Kiesler, 1996) (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999). 뉴미디어를 대표하는 SNS에서는 정보에 대한 신뢰성이나 적절성에 대해 판단해 주는 감시자(gatekeeper)가 없기 때문에, 정보 제공자뿐만 아니라 정보 소비자가 직접 그 역할을 하 게 되었으며 gatekeeper 대신 gatewatcher가 그와 유사한 역할을 할 수 있다 (Bruns, 2008 (Levin & Cross, 2004;Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998). Tsai and Ghoshal(1998) (Ellison et al., 2007;Fliaster & Spies, 2007;Williams, 2006), Williams(2006) (Brown & Reingen, 1987;Czepiel, 1974) ...
This study aims to investigate the structural relationship among social ties, trust, adoption, and intention in sharing travel information in social network sites (SNS). Four hypotheses were developed based on social capital theory in order to examine the travel information sharing model, which emphasizes structural social capital - bonding and bridging social capital - on SNS. The hypotheses were tested with a sample of 448 travelers who had used SNS for trip plans or sharing travel information. Partial least square (PLS) path modeling was employed to analyze collected data. The results suggested that bonding social capital (strong ties) positively affected all four trust factors while bridging social capital (weak ties) positively affected three trust factors, with the exception of integrity. Only two trust factors, competence and predictability, positively affected information adoption and intention to share travel information on SNS. The theoretical and practical implications for social media marketing are
discussed.
... The recommendation is that, via a process of "collaborative gatewatching", one can work together with citizens so as to develop a shared understanding of the news (BRUNS, 2008). ...
This essay presents the results of the application of JCollab for journalists´ education. JCollab is a system developed for automating the management of the production of television news programs, organizing the interactive process of producing a collaborative news program that involves, in addition to students and teachers, ordinary people. The system was successfully tested with journalism students at the Federal University of Paraíba (Brazil). In evaluations which made use of JCollab, it was noted that this teaching approach facilitated communication between the community of users’ members and stimulated teamwork, resulting in a truly collective and collaborative process.
... There is presently a large and growing array of content delivery platforms, resulting in the disaggregation of content and the diffusion of audience attention (Napoli 2011). Audiences now have considerably more control over how they consume media and can produce their own content at marginal costs, giving them greater autonomy and more choices (Bruns 2008). These shifts have created significant challenges for traditional audience information systems-the "data gathering and feedback mechanisms used … to measure audience exposure to media content … predict content preferences … target content … and gather information on audiences' reactions" (Napoli 2011, 10)-since they struggle to capture such dispersed and empowered audiences. ...
A number of social, technological, and economic shifts over the past two decades have led to the proliferation of audience analytics and metrics in journalism. This article contends that we are witnessing a third wave toward the rationalization of audience understanding and distinguishes between audience analytics (systems that capture information) and audience metrics (quantified measures output by those systems). The body of literature on analytics and metrics in the context of news production is then synthesized across the ABCDE of news production: attitudes, behaviors, content, discourse, and ethics. That synthesis leads to an overarching conclusion that while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantified audiences, both audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in the past. Scholars and practitioners have also become less pessimistic about analytics and metrics over time, recognizing more nuanced effects and prosocial possibilities. Finally, important gaps in the literature are identified and new research directions proposed to help address them.
This article provides a discussion of some of the recent research on media trust focusing on arguments for why media trust matters. What are the arguments for why trust is important? Are there reasons to accept these arguments? We identify three distinct arguments in the literature. First, that it is important for media organizations and for the media as an industry. Secondly, that media trust is essential for democratic citizenship and for bringing forth informed individuals with the capacity for political engagement. Lastly, that media trust is similar to other forms of (social) trust and connected to a wider existential discussion on ontological security. None of these arguments are totally convincing when inspected more closely and in light of empirical research. The article thus concludes that there is a lack of strong arguments for why falling levels of trust in the news media are legitimately described as a crisis or a problem. A supposed “trust crisis” mainly exists when viewed from what must be described as a rather narrow ideological and normative perspective.
How do various actors use digital media to influence the flows of political communication and what are the social consequences of their practices? Treating media as a space of actions and building on network theories, this dissertation argues that public attention and opinion on social media can be understood and analyzed through networks of social interactions among social actors. Ultimately, this approach traces the multifaceted flows of attention and opinion to the sources of their origins in an increasingly complex media system and holds the potential of revealing patterns of interactions between networks of social actors, and between social networks and institutional networks like news media. Results show that embedded in networks of online affinity relations (i.e., following relationships), social actors within a Twitter "flock" exhibit homogenous attention and opinion patterns, and that such flocks interact with each other and can influence news media coverage. Moderate and center-left news media network still possesses significant power in driving the attention and setting the agenda for partisan news media networks and Twitter flocks, though there are some bottom-up flows of communication from Twitter flocks to news media networks. Also, the interaction between partisan news media networks and partisan/activist Twitter flocks gives rise to partisan media ecosystems, with the conservative and progressive media ecosystems reacting to each other differently. Furthermore, activism discourses on Twitter can originate from vastly different Twitter flocks situated in networks of communications and exhibit varying attention dynamics. These results speak to the continuing splintering of the public into passionate and engaged networked publics. Such networks aggregate attention and synthesize opinions, exerting direct influence on powerful legacy news media via networked visibility and power. However, homogenous networks on social media and the oppositional reactiveness between the partisan ecosystems reflect a deepening partisan divide in the digital media system. If the fundamental battle about the definition of the norms of society, and the application of these norms in everyday life, revolves around the shaping of the human mind, communication is central to this battle. … [The] process of communication operates according to the structure, culture, organization, and technology of communication in a given society. The communication process decisively mediates the way in which power relationships are constructed and challenged in every domain of social practice.-Manuel Castells, Communication Power Shaping the human mind and underlying power and counterpower, communication is central to any society (Castells, 2013). For social actors who strive to maintain or challenge power, their success hinges on the ability to communicate ideas to the public effectively, including attracting public attention and molding public opinion and ultimately driving communication flows. As those actors influence the process of communication in society, they can challenge those in power and thereby alter existing power relationships. At the same time, actors and processes of communication are shaped by existing power structures, particularly the media system that enables and constrains actors and their communications. While existing studies have examined the media system in the early decades of the 21st century by focusing on shifts in its structures, norms, cultures, and audiences (e.g., Benkler, 2006; Chadwick, 2017; Prior, 2007; Stroud, 2010), there is yet a systematic framework for understanding and tracing communication flows to reveal the dynamics of the media system and power relations. Treating media as a space of actions (Couldry, 2012), I examine how social actors use social media to signal attention and express opinion, and how their practices are related to communication flows in the larger media system. Building on network theories (Castells, 2013; McPherson et al., 2001; Latour, 2012), I propose a network approach that positions social actors on social media in the networked space of social interactions and places social interactions on social media in the networked space of social actors. I apply computational methods, including network sampling and analysis (Chen, Zhang, & Rohe, 2019) to detecting networks of social actors and interactions so as to track public attention and opinion expression; employ time series modeling (Wells et al., 2019) to formally analyze their interaction with news media; and use natural language processing to map out the patterns of public opinion and media content. Results provide empirical support for the network approach and reveal complex patterns
This chapter proposes a qualitative and exploratory look at User-Generated Content (UGC) in news sites from Latin America. The discussion focuses on the integration of these contents into storytelling. We selected four websites from each Latin American country during two stages, totaling 80 news sites, in which we searched for examples that fit our criteria. We located a diverse type of contributors and different profiles of contributions that allowed us to make inferences about the use of UGC by Latin American outlets. We understand that multiple factors influence the adoption of these contents by newsrooms, which include journalistic values, ethics, and the capacity to verify it. When UGC is used in journalism, there is always a process of mediation, implied and active, that varies over three levels: minimal, medium, and maximal. In the end, each news organization deals with UGC differently, and how successful they are in including the public in the news process is up to them; though there are interesting cases of application of UGC in the storytelling in Latin America, most news organizations apply a discourse of participation, but do not actually open the spaces for the public beyond the basic, such as comment sections.
The practice of aggregating news content—repurposing content created by other news organizations—raises questions about credibility. This experimental study suggests that news organizations can boost credibility of aggregated content by more clearly identifying originating sources than by increasing or decreasing the use of aggregation. Relationships between levels of aggregation and credibility showed little or no significance, while relationships between credibility and receivers’ confidence in identifying originating sources were significant.
The shift toward digital distribution has led newspapers to adopt data collection and sharing practices with unexplored ethical consequences. Analysis of the privacy policies of the 15 largest U.S. newspapers reveals what is permitted with regard to the capture of newsreader data and the sharing of such data with advertisers, affiliated companies, and social media. These practices and the related news metrics and analytics are critiqued in light of journalism’s democratic role and traditional support of citizenship. The conclusion offers six recommendations to begin to address these ethical dilemmas through greater transparency and more reader control over data handling.
Climate journalism is a moving target. Driven by its changing technological and economic contexts, challenged by the complex subject matter of climate change, and immersed in a polarized and politicized debate, climate journalism has shifted and diversified in recent decades. These transformations hint at the emergence of a more interpretive, sometimes advocacy-oriented journalism that explores new roles beyond that of the detached conduit of elite voices. At the same time, different patterns of doing climate journalism have evolved, because climate journalists are not a homogeneous group. Among the diversity of journalists covering the issue, a small group of expert science and environmental reporters stand out as opinion leaders and sources for other journalists covering climate change only occasionally. The former group's expertise and specialization allow them to develop a more investigative and critical attitude toward both the deniers of anthropogenic climate change and toward climate science.
The previous decade has seen rapid change in political journalism in Australia and the United States, with legacy and emerging news organisations under pressure from interconnected global and local economic, technological and political trends. At the same time, professional journalists’ traditional democratic role providing political news and analysis is challenged by competing sources of political information and new spaces for political discussion. This article traces the ways political journalists in Australia and the US talk about internal and external sources of competition in an age of “information abundance”. It explores how they reclaim authority in the face of the fluid boundaries of journalism itself. The article analyses in-depth interviews with political journalists in Australia and the US, conducted in the second half of 2017. Through the analytical lenses of “boundary work” and “paradigm repair”, it examines the identity discourses through which political journalists seek to place limits on who and what belongs within the professional community of journalists, and defend the core values and practices of that community even while adapting to and in some instances, incorporating elements of, the practices of competitors.
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists (N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news they see on the platform, potentially causing them to dismiss information that many of their colleagues identify as newsworthy. Our results also indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment – for journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications, such as pack journalism, but we also see positives, as Twitter may conduit a wider array of voices into the mainstream news agenda. Twitter plays a key role in journalistic practices including, as we demonstrate here, influencing journalists’ news judgment. Twitter’s growing centrality in the news process warrants greater scrutiny from journalists and scholars.
The participatory nature of the contemporary news ecosystem makes it increasingly important to examine how digital news users are active participants in selecting, authenticating, contextualizing, and distributing digital news content, redefining our understanding of news gathering and gatekeeping as being user-oriented activities in this digital order. This qualitative study provides insight into the motivations, perceptions, and attitudes of millennials regarding their digital news practices, while highlighting their roles as distributive news gatherers and reciprocal gatekeepers.
This chapter employs an ethnographic approach in interrogating how journalists in Nigerian print newsrooms appropriate new media technologies and ‘alternative’ media content in their everyday newsmaking practices. Situated within the theoretical field of the sociology of journalism, the chapter argues that a sociological approach remains useful for exploring the processes of appropriating new media technologies in Nigerian print newsrooms. It provides a brief discussion of the media liberalisation process in Nigeria and offers a justification for the continued relevance of ethnographic newsrooms studies. Focusing on four privately owned newspapers, the chapter finds that although journalists in these newsrooms appropriate new media technologies and ‘alternative’ media content in their newsmaking practices, these approaches remain fraught with a number of contradictions. While the (disruptive) impact of these technologies on the newsmaking practices of Nigerian print journalists cannot necessarily be ignored, this chapter finds that several contextual factors impact on how these appropriations take place.
This paper explores methodologies for using the IssueCrawler research tool to map the
interconnections of individual blogs in sections of the blogosphere. It uses the case of
Australian-born Guantanamo detainee David Hicks as a case study, mapping the distributed
discussions of this case in that part of the Australian blogosphere which is concerned with debating news and politics. Its findings indicate the presence of a strong and sustained engagement with this case by Australian political bloggers, and point to a tendency for discussions to cluster around a handful of sites which are defined by their political orintation. The network maps also suggest a lack of sustained coverage of the case by bloggers outside of Australia, and indicate only limited engagement between bloggers and the mainstream media.