Dawn Wheatley’s research while affiliated with Dublin City University and other places

For the half-century or so in which the relationship between women and news has been researched, two of the key themes have been the underrepresentation and marginalisation of women as both subjects/sources and journalists. The latest Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) iteration – the largest international collaborative study of women and news, running since 1995 – found the pace of change regarding women’s visibility across the news landscape to be painfully slow. Focusing on the 2020 data from the UK and Ireland, this article asks how visible are women in the news and how has this changed over time? It documents how women remain overshadowed as sources and subjects: for every two women seen or heard, there are five men. While the number of women journalists is gradually increasing, they are still less likely to cover prestigious beats such as politics and have the strongest showing as news anchors and presenters. In this article, we also use news about politics and COVID-19 as vignettes to illustrate how in times of crisis or when authoritative voices are sought, journalists are often drawn to those male sources who are already more present than women in positions of power. This contributes to the marginalisation of women’s voices in the most prominent news stories and undermines their right to full participation in democratic society.

Audiences exist in highly personalised, high-choice media environments built on a hybrid of established traditional brands and informal digital networks. Officials trying to reach the public must navigate such spaces, but public reluctance to consume news coverage is a challenge for health and government officials when trying to communicate with and inform the public during a national health crisis like Covid-19. Based on a representative survey (N=2,031) from the 2021 Reuters Digital News Report , this article focuses on Irish audiences’ information sources during the pandemic; in particular, how government and political sources were used and perceived. The article is a secondary analysis of the data set and focuses on three questions from the survey related to (i) sources of information about Covid-19, (ii) concern about sources of false or misleading information about Covid-19, and (iii) sources of local information about politics and local updates on Covid-19. The article finds that official sources were relatively effective in being heard, and that health agencies like the Health Service Executive and the National Public Health Emergency Team were more salient than politicians, suggesting the pandemic was perhaps apolitical in the eyes of the public, which is often a key strategy for effective crisis communication. Politicians and government actors also succeeded in not being perceived as the main source of concern in terms of false or misleading information, as audiences were more worried about activists. The article also reiterates the importance of health officials reaching out beyond traditional news distribution channels to engage groups who may not access news through traditional channels.

The recognition perspective is a valuable lens through which identity struggles and historical marginalization and abuses can be explored. This study analyzes Ireland’s Justice for Magdalene (JFM) campaign between 2009–2013; JFM was a group that fought for a state apology and redress for women and girls confined to Catholic-run laundries between the 1920s and 1990s. Such institutions formed part of the post-colonial Irish identity and church-state structure, within which many women and girls once suffered. We document the rhetorical dimension of how a resolution was ultimately reached following the campaign’s transformation of women’s individual experiences into the collective voice of an advocacy group with targeted political goals. Focusing on JFM’s public press releases, we consider the media logic and rhetorical strategies of the group, which effectively built a case against the state. At the core of the discussion is the balance between the instrumental and constitutive functions of the organization’s messaging.

Environmental journalists have been at the forefront of news industry changes. Over the past 30 years, they have had to deal with a range of challenges, including increased complexity, greater reliance on data, exposure to online negativity, and co-option into polarised political debates. At the same time, they have been among the most vulnerable to newsroom cutbacks. This exploratory study examines the extent to which environmental journalists can be considered emblematic of challenges facing beat journalism in general. Drawing on rare, on-the-record interviews with environmental reporters in the US, UK, and Ireland, the study finds that, based on environmental journalists’ experiences, specialised environmental beats are becoming the preserve of larger media organisations with dedicated audiences, while at smaller news outlets, specialist reporters have taken on two or more beats, thereby diluting coverage of specific areas overall. Environmental journalists have also had to reconsider traditional roles, such as the conduit function, and long-standing norms, such as objectivity and impartiality. These trends may come to be replicated across other beats as journalists begin to report from a social justice standpoint, or rely more on science and data, as has happened during Covid-19 coverage.

Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and control of temporal news personalisation; and (c) reinforces mobile as the locus of contact between news organisations and audiences. However, push notifications are a relatively under-researched topic. We explore news organisations’ use of alerts, considering whether they attempt to integrate with existing mobile-user behaviour patterns or seek to be a disruptive element, garnering attention when audiences are not typically using devices. Through quantitative content analysis, this study examines the temporality of push notifications (n ¼ 7092) from nine Northwestern European countries, comprising 34 news outlets. These data allow for comparisons at two levels: publisher type and national context. The study shows how the temporal patterns of push notifications’ dissemination align with existing news consumption behaviours; concepts of content-snacking and audiences’ rhythms and rituals are a useful lens through which these immediate, concise texts can be considered. Our findings show that news organisations use the mobile channel for attracting and maintaining users’ attention, with varying interpretations of temporal customizability.

Blocking other users is a common act on Twitter but one which is underexplored from a scholarly perspective, particularly the analysis of mass blocklists. Although traditionally associated with harassment, blocklists are increasingly engaged to create individualised environments that align with users’ personal convictions and exclude apparent transgressors. This study uses a pro-choice blocklist (Repeal Shield) created during the 2018 Irish abortion referendum campaign to explore how users interpret these altered boundaries and blocklists’ influence on the Twitter landscape. A metaphor analysis of more than 2,000 tweets discussing the blocklist highlights the dominant concepts in how users visualise Twitter as both a personal space and a battlefield, in which mental health is a key factor. By drawing on discussions of spatiality, agency, gender and online interactions, we can see how these blocking affordances allow users to exist in spaces in which they construct their own parameters to feel safer, raising questions about how harm, health and risk are understood. The article explores how users make sense of conflicting images like ‘safe spaces’ or ‘echo chambers’, highlighting the apparent policing role held by blocklists. Users are negotiating the type of civic space in which they want to exist as norms of engagement versus avoidance collide; although digital spaces have always accommodated fragmented interests, the technological affordances of blocklists provide more rigid boundaries, highlighting how the evolving architecture of social media allows users to redefine the parameters of their own online spaces.

The opportunity for non-elite actors to share their opinions and experiences is often cited as a key democratic element of the media, developing in recent years alongside a rethinking of the audience as active contributors. Yet, given many of the temporal and resource-related newsroom pressures, the reliance on information subsidies and official or elite voices remains pervasive. This study focuses on coverage of healthcare and health policy, drawing on 14 weeks of news reports (n = 896) from five Irish websites. As well as recording the prevalence of private citizens, a novel methodology allows a deeper understanding of how journalists obtained these contributions, such as through “cannibalising” quotes from other media reports. While private citizens have salience in the news, this may primarily be due to journalists’ reliance on easily accessible information, rather than more fundamental democratic shifts in news reporting practices. Further analysis shows private citizens rarely appear as detached, informed commentators, but typically as victims with direct negative healthcare experiences. The findings and discussion reinforce the idea of news sourcing as a social system that is continually reproduced, steered by structural forces to do with signification, legitimation and available resources.

This study of tweets ( n = 2247) explores discussions about a pro-choice blocklist (@Repeal_Shield) used during the 2018 Irish abortion referendum campaign, capturing conflicting interpretations of engagement and political participation. Although qualitative Twitter studies bring methodological challenges, deep readings were needed to analyse arguments in favour and against the blocklist, and to consider what we can learn about users’ expectations of Twitter. Through deductive and inductive coding, opposing perspectives emerge on whether such lists are useful, democratic or regressive, but both sides share normative aspirations for Twitter to serve as a space for healthy debate, even if there is clear tension in how that is best achieved. Blocklists are traditionally cited as a harassment solution, facilitating participation from otherwise-excluded counterpublics. However, @Repeal_Shield demonstrates how this affordance has evolved towards omitting broad spectrums of undesired content, while using blocklists – and being listed – can be a bold political statement in itself.

This article presents a novel typology for analysing the routinisation of news and daily newsroom practices. Drawing inspiration from the work of Sigal, Tuchman and others, the framework—comprising eight categories—provides a reconceptualisation of routine and non-routine channels of news production to facilitate an exploration of source material, focusing on initial story triggers. One contribution which is particularly useful relates to the subcategorisation of the traditionally singular “routine” channel; although the broad concept of routine source material is familiar, it has generally not been systematically deconstructed in previous analyses. Considering different types of routine news allows for a deeper understanding of how these channels are integrated into contemporary daily news production and the role of internal newsroom and external actor dynamics. This is particularly relevant in an era in which there is a high usage of information subsidies, passive news reporting, cannibalised content, and desk-bound work. As such, the application of this model provides insights into the dominance and subordinate use of various channels in contemporary newsrooms. The discussion also illustrates how such a typology can aid empirical research with reference to the content analysis study from which this framework was developed.