Newspaper and Online News 2012 Abstracts
Faculty
Social Media Editors in The Newsroom: A Survey of Roles and Functions • Tim Currie, U. of King’s College • Social media editors are now common in large news organizations. Different from website editors, these journalists focus on creating conversations with the audience. Their place in the newsroom, however, is developing. This paper surveyed 13 social media editors at Canadian news organizations to determine their roles and functions. It concludes that social media editors were challenging the traditional gate-keeping function of news editors by representing audience interests in the newsroom.
Gatekeeping in East Africa: Organizational Structure and Reporter Gender as Potential Influences on Newspaper Content • Steve Collins, University of Central Florida; Tim Brown, University of Central Florida • This content analysis examined two Ugandan newspapers, one owned by the government and the other seen as “the opposition paper.” The results suggest that the independent newspaper includes more voices while the government paper offers more mobilizing information. However, both are thinly sourced and under represent women. The paper also considers the potential influence of reporter gender on content.
Argument quality in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting • David Herrera, University of Missouri • Journalists strive to inform citizens about the way the world is, was, and will be. A test of whether journalists inform citizens is whether the journalists’ reasons and evidence support their conclusions. This paper applies tools from argumentation, informal logic, and critical thinking to conduct such a test on Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting. It finds that the stories frequently presented insufficient evidence for their conclusions, while struggling to justify important assumptions and appeals to authority.
The State of the Weekly Newspaper Industry • Stephen Lacy, Michigan State University; Daniel Riffe, University of North Carolina; David Coulson; Robin Blom, Michigan State University • This study found that the community weekly newspaper industry has changed during the past dozen years. Between 1997 and 2009, the weekly industry became dramatically more suburban and urban as the percentage of weeklies in rural areas declined. The proportion of weeklies that were group owned increased by about half. Roughly two-thirds of the weeklies had websites in 2009, but only about 6% allowed visitors to directly upload articles, and about 6% had paywalls.
Journalists, Technologists, and the Normalization Hypothesis: A Two-Part Case Study of News Innovation Contest Submissions • Seth Lewis, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities; Rodrigo Zamith, University of Minnesota; Nikki Usher; Todd Kominak, George Washington University • This paper examines how journalists and technologists are re-imagining the intersection of news and technology through a qualitative study of 234 idea submissions to a popular news innovation contest. We consider these submissions in light of three distinct concepts: interactivity, the public sphere, and normalization. We find in these submissions a break from the normalization hypothesis—a vision of journalism adapting to technology, rather than technology being configured to suit the legacy patterns of journalism.
Old Dogs, New Tricks: Online News Uses New Tools but Attracts the Same Eyeballs • Kelly Kaufhold, Texas Tech University • Longitudinal analysis of Pew data found that most migration of news consumers online was actually due to existing, older news consumers. Young adults are the most likely to be online; their elders, the most likely to consume news online. The oldest Americans, those over 50, are still the most likely to still follow news in print newspapers and on TV – but are also half-again more likely to follow news online as are adults under 30.
The Online Innovations of Legacy News Media: A Content Analysis of Large-Market Newspaper and Broadcast Station Websites • Amy Schmitz Weiss, San Diego State University; Tim Wulfemeyer, San Diego State University • The state of the digital news media landscape is in a moment of transition as well as opportunity. According to the State of the News Media Report (2012), digital news consumption is rising and the ways news consumers are getting news and information ranges across various media types (broadcast, print, web) and platforms (mobile, web, print). Despite the new players entering the market ranging from Huffington Post to Patch, legacy media (newspapers, local television stations and news radio stations) still have opportunities to innovate and capture new audiences through their digital platform, the website.
Courting Coverage: A Content Analysis of the News Reporting of Supreme Court of Texas Cases • Kenneth Pybus, Abilene Christian University • Although the Supreme Court of Texas is the state’s highest civil judicial body and the final arbiter of Texas law, average Texans may know little about this governmental body. This study researches the reporting of four major Texas newspapers. An analysis of these news stories yields data on political references, topic popularity and subject matter. Texas newspapers generally cover a Supreme Court of Texas decision only if that decision has a significant impact on their broader audiences. It devotes ample resources to those stories, but scant resources and provides limited coverage to the vast number of cases, most of which derive interest from niche audiences.
Newspaper Journalists Evaluate the State of the Watchdog Function • Marsha Ducey, The College at Brockport (SUNY) • This study examined the state of the watchdog function at daily newspapers in the United States following the elimination of thousands of journalism jobs and massive changes in the industry. The watchdog function is the ideal that the press should hold those in power, particularly government officials, accountable for their actions. Five hundred journalists from the Top 100 circulation daily newspapers were invited to take an internet survey.
The Impact of Local Newspaper’s Community Capital Perception on Subscription/Readership and Advertising Effects • Gi Woong Yun; David Morin, Bowling Green State University; Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University; Mark Flynn, Bowling Green State University; SangHee Park; Xiao Hu, Bowling Green State University • With the advent of the Internet, once prosperous local papers are now faced with closure as the number of subscriptions decreases and advertising revenue continues to wane. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the perception of a newspaper’s role in the community, conceptualized as community capital, influences subscription and readership of the newspaper and willingness to visit local retailers putting their ads in the newspaper. Results suggested that the higher community capital a newspaper has, the higher its subscription/readership.
Media Credibility and Journalistic Role Consumptions: Views on Citizen and Professional Journalists among Citizen Contributors • Deborah Chung, University of Kentucky; Seungahn Nah • This study identifies citizen journalists’ role conceptions regarding their news contributing activities and their perceptions of professional journalists’ roles. Specifically, media credibility (mainstream and citizen) was assessed to identify predictors of roles. Analyses reveal citizen journalists perceive their roles to be somewhat distinct from professionals. Citizen media credibility predicted all citizen journalists’ roles. Mainstream media credibility predicted the disseminator and interpreter roles for professional journalists but negatively predicted certain citizen journalistic roles (i.e., interpreter, mobilizer).
Social Responsibility Theory and the Digital Nonprofits: Should the Government Aid Online News Startups? • Rebecca Nee, San Diego State University • As the size and scope of metropolitan daily newspapers shrink in the digital age, some veteran journalists are picking up the mantle of socially responsible journalism by establishing nonprofit news sites. Their economic sustainability is tenuous, however. The purpose of this study is to determine how leaders of these civic journalism startups view the government’s role in their survival. Findings show they are not open to direct government subsidies, but are attempting to diversify their revenue sources.
Newspaper Clubs Emerge From Bohemia: Nineteenth Century Press Clubs in Chicago Stop Short of an Interest in Professionalization • Stephen Banning, Bradley University • It has been suggested that professionalization was being attempted in the nineteenth century by newspaper clubs and associations. For instance, the Missouri Press Association has been shown to have had a strong interest in the professionalization of journalism. However, the extent of this interest throughout the breadth of newspaper groups in the nineteenth century has not been previously investigated. There is evidence of a strong bohemian influence in nineteenth century Chicago newspaper clubs.
Sequence of Internet News Browsing: Platform, Content, Presentation and Interface Usage • Lingzi Zhang, National University of Singapore • Discussions on Internet news use have centered on whether the medium allows audiences to have more control in news consumption. This study explores the evolution of platform attendance, content exposure, presentation elements and interface usage over the time of an Internet news browsing session. Responding to the criticism of self-report method, screen video is utilized to extract direct and detailed information about what a user encounters in real-time news browsing.
What Is News? Audiences may have their own ideas • Cory Armstrong, University of Florida; Melinda McAdams, University of Florida; Jason Cain, University of Florida • This study examines what young adults consider to be news, comparing that with traditional news values as espoused by journalists and taught in journalism schools. Employing an online survey, we compared those views with the participants’ assessment of whether 42 headlines are “news.” Findings indicated that traditional values of prominence, impact and controversy were important to participants, but that timeliness and proximity were less so. Opinion also emerged as a value.
Anatomy of a Train Accident: Case Study of News Diffusion Via the Weibo Micro-blogging Service in China • Narayanan Iyer; Yanfang Wu • Micro-blogging applications such as Twitter and Weibo (extensively used in China) have become a key social media tool for information dissemination and networking within the context of social movements. Researchers have examined the role and use of micro-blogging during times of crises arising out of political conflict as well as natural disasters. This paper uses the case study approach to analyze the most retweeted messages sent immediately after the July 23 railway accident in Wenzhou, China.
Newspaper-Owning Corporate Cultures and the Industry-Wide News Slant • Frederick Schiff, University of Houston; David Llanos, University of Houston • This study compares eight theories of news content, using a random stratified sample of 114 newspapers and 6,090 stories. The paper describes 12 newspaper-owning groups as having distinctive ways of treating stories, giving them more or less prominence depending on content characteristics embedded in the stories. The existence of exceptional or distinctive coverage by a few newspaper groups demonstrates the patterns in the rest of the newspaper industry, which we describe an industry-wide “news slant.”
A comparison of news media avoidances among young adults across media • Amy Zerba, University of Florida; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida; Hyejoon Rim, University of Florida • The study explores a pivotal step in the Uses and Gratifications process — news media avoidances. News media avoidances are the active choice of choosing not to use a medium. The survey findings showed how print newspaper avoidances are similar to nonuses of traditional media (TV, magazines, radio), but differ for news sites. The findings show avoidance of a medium can impact use of another medium. The study describes nonusers of a medium compared to users.
When Journalism Met the Internet: Old Media and New Media Greet the Online Public • Mike Dillon, Duquesne University • American news organizations have long been criticized for not more effectively anticipating, appreciating and exploiting the Internet as it became a fact of daily life in the mid-1990s. Conventional wisdom holds that a lack of planning stymied the development of journalism on the Web and cast doubt on the viability of traditional public service journalism and its enduring values of accuracy, fairness, advocacy, etc. The diminishment of these values, in turn, endangered democracy itself.
A Wave of Sources: An Examination of Sources used in U. S. and Japanese Newspaper Coverage of the Tsunami in Japan • Maria Fontenot, University of Tennessee-Knoxville; Catherine Luther, University of Tennessee-Knoxville; Ioana Coman • This paper examined the use of sources in two major U. S. newspapers and two major Japanese newspapers in their coverage of the March 11, 2011 tsunami that struck Japan. Results revealed that both the U.S. and Japanese newspapers did not use social media outlets as sources of information. Furthermore, the combined papers from both nations tended to rely equally on non-official and official sources. Differences, however, were observed between newspapers within each nation.
Online News Coverage and Political Knowledge: The Case of the 2010 Health Care Reform Legislation • Kevin Wang, Butler University • This study explores the relationship between online news coverage and political knowledge in the contemporary media environment. Using the health care reform legislation as the backdrop, content analysis was performed on 1,268 stories from 10 online news outlets over a one-month period in 2010, and a survey was conducted with 330 participants to investigate the audience members’ media consumption pattern and their perception of the health care reform issue. Theoretical contribution and implications for future research are discussed.
The press versus the public: What is “good journalism?” • Homero Gil de Zuniga, University of Texas – Austin; Amber Hinsley, Saint Louis University • For several decades, citizens have reported that they trust some news outlets over others largely because they perceive the industry to be biased in its coverage. Research on journalists and their audience has long indicated journalists have a more positive perception of their work than does the public. Even in today’s hyper-digital media landscape, public perception on credibility and believability continue to decline and journalists don’t know how the public rates some of their core professional tasks.
Today’s Main Feature: Disappearing Feature Sections in the Age of Feature Writing • Bret Schulte, University of Arkansas • Research has shown that feature-style writing has gained ground on the inverted pyramid. Through content analysis of feature pages and feature sections in seven major newspapers, this research shows that the state of play for feature writing is far more complicated, with newspapers engaging in increasingly divergent strategies for their back pages.
Framing of the Egyptian Revolution in the Op-Ed sections of the International Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal • Guy J Golan, Syracuse University • The Op-Ed section of the newspaper is unique in that it allows experts to articulate their opinions regarding salient issues without editorial interference. The current study builds upon previous research on the Op-Ed through the analysis of the Op-Ed articles that were published in two European newspapers during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The content analysis focused on the identity of the Op-Ed contributors, their use of sources and their selection of frames as highlighted in their opinion articles.
Conversational Journalism in Practice: A Case Study of The Seattle Times’ 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Breaking News Reporting • Doreen Marchionni, Pacific Lutheran University • This case study built on recent experimental research that sought to measure journalism-as-a-conversation, or co-created news between citizens and journalists, by overlaying it on The Seattle Times’ 2010 Pulitzer-Prize-winning coverage of the slayings of four sheriff’s deputies. Findings suggest the growing power of Web tools that engage online audiences in breaking news and beyond, but also the need for more humanizing efforts, including short, personalized videos of journalists discussing their craft.
Hostility toward Sport Commentators in the Online Arena: A Reexamination of Disposition Effects Hypothesis • Po-Lin Pan, Arkansas State University • Very few studies examined the effects of sport commentary on readers’ attitudes toward sport commentators. Approaching disposition effects hypothesis in the context of online readership, the study aimed at examining the effects of the positive/negative sport commentaries and the win/loss of readers’ favorite team on online readers’ hostility toward online sport commentators. A two (the win of the favorite team versus the loss of the favorite team) by two (the positive commentaries versus the negative commentaries) within-subjects repeated measures experiment with emotional responses as one covariate was designed to examine readers’ hostility toward online sport commentators.
Age, Ethnicity, and the Exemplification of Hunger • William Kinnally, University of Central Florida; Ryan Burkett, University of Central Florida; Curry Chandler; Brenton Burkett • This study applies exemplification theory to examine the ways in which editorial intentions behind the design of a news article about hunger in the Orlando Sentinel corresponded to readers’ judgments about the ages and ethnicities of the people receiving emergency hunger services. A sample of 335 college students was randomly assigned to read one of three news articles.
Analyzing Online Coverage of a Possible Cancer Risk From Cell Phones • Ronald Yaros, University of Maryland; Elia Powers, University of Maryland-College Park • This content analysis considers articles from newspapers and online news outlets reporting the World Health Organization’s change in the risk category of brain cancer associated with cell phone use to “possible.” Articles were coded for their portrayed risk assessment, use of sources, and explanation of complex information. Results indicated that nearly 20% of the stories used incorrect terms to describe the risk category.
Student
Social media and the evolution of journalists’ routines • Brian Moritz • With social media platforms growing in popularity, it’s important to look at how they are being used by journalists. This qualitative study examines how social media is becoming a part of journalists’ work routines. Seventeen reporters working at newspapers were during the winter of 2010-2011. This data suggest that reporters are using social media to break news, keep tabs on their beats, share links to their stories and communicate with sources and readers.
How student journalists seek information and evaluate online sources during the newsgathering process • Julia Tylor, Arizona State University • A thorough understanding of how to evaluate website credibility is a crucial tool for journalists. This study examines how journalism students conduct the online newsgathering process and seeks to understand the decisions they make involving credibility assessment. The findings that resulted from a content analysis and interviews suggest that while journalism students exhibit some level of understanding about the importance of verification, they rely strongly on search engines and trust the credibility of search-engine results.
The adoption of smartphones and tablet computers among American journalists: A national survey • Logan Molyneux, University of Texas at Austin • This national survey of working journalists examined the extent to which they have adopted smartphones and tablet computers in their work and how that adoption has changed their routines and practices. Results show that most journalists have smartphones and feel they have improved the quality of their work. Journalists with smartphones are freed from their desks and gather more multimedia information than those without smartphones. Tablets have been adopted to a lesser extent.
Justice and journalism at the Supreme Court: Newspaper coverage of ideology within the Roberts Court • Elizabeth Woolery, UNC-Chapel Hill • This study examined how five newspapers discussed judicial ideologies in their coverage of First Amendment decisions handed down by the Supreme Court in its 2006, ’07, and ’08 terms. Findings indicate that journalists did cover the Supreme Court as an ideologically fueled institution cases with 5-4 decisions. This study builds on previous research and provides a more up-to-date, comprehensive and qualitative look at the issue of news coverage of the Supreme Court.
A Newspaper Strategy for Challenging Access Barriers at Shopping Malls • Jim DeBrosse, Ohio University • In recent years, the growing shift toward private control of the public sphere – from downtowns to malls, from neighborhoods to gated communities, from public records to private contracts — has occupied media and legal scholars who are rightly worried about the eroding foundations of the country’s democratic institutions. This paper will focus more narrowly on how the shift to privately-owned gathering spaces in malls and shopping centers has impacted working reporters.
Herding Reader Comments Into Print: Gatekeeping Across Media Platforms • Kathleen McElroy, University of Texas at Austin • This study examined newspaper features that highlight online reader comments and found that through selection, organization, and editing of comments, journalists juggle the spontaneity of online conversation with such print standards as logic, civility, and readability. A content analysis of printed comments, as well as interviews with journalists who choose them, reveals a gatekeeping process shaping this hybrid site of public discourse, which is similar to but distinct from letters to the editor.
A study of college students’ attitudes toward a paid news content system • Yoonmo Sang, University of Texas at Austin • This study investigated college students’ attitudes toward a paid news content system. It sought to identify factors that may predict such attitudes. To deepen our understanding of news copyright issues, I also analyzed responses to open-ended questions and identified patterns in such responses. Among the predictor variables, perceiving news as a commodity was the only significant predictor of college students’ attitudes toward a paid news model.
Multimedia journalism fever: An examination of the spread of adoption of digital reporting techniques • Matthew Haught, University of South Carolina; Jack Karlis, University of South Carolina • Since the rise of the Internet age, newspapers and television news operations have migrated their content from their traditional platforms to online distribution. Convergence spread through the newsroom starting with a small group and then spreading to others, as explained by the diffusion of innovation theory. Using network analysis research methods, this paper explores how multimedia practices diffuse through a social network in a newspaper newsroom.
The Viewing Room: How Journalists Prepare for and Respond to Witnessing Executions • Kenna Griffin, University of Oklahoma • This series of interviews with journalists who witnessed executions in 2010 explains how they emotionally prepared for and responded to the traumatic events. Findings show that newsroom managers do not offer journalists emotional assistance. However, the journalists were aware formal counseling services existed and chose not to use them. Instead, journalists relied on their professionalism as a barrier, denying trauma symptoms. The research supports the need for training within news organizations about job-related trauma.
Will Social Media “Save” Newspapers? Examining the Effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as News Platforms • Alice Ju, University of Texas at Austin; Sun Ho Jeong, University of Texas at Austin; H. Iris Chyi, University of Texas at Austin • In response to the popularity of social media, most newspapers are distributing content through Facebook and Twitter. Yet, the role of social media in these newspapers’ overall business models remains unclear. Analyzing the top 66 U.S. newspapers’ social media presence, this study empirically examines the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms.
Creating Frames, Contextualizing Frames: Elite versus Non-Elite Press Coverage of the 2008 Recession • Josephine Lukito, State University of New York at Geneseo; Atsushi Tajima, State University of New York at Geneseo • This paper analyzes newspapers coverage of the 2008 recession in the United States, through the New York Times as an elite press and USA Today as a non-elite press. Economics is a technically complex social-science. Thus, the press must present economic stories comprehensively. While the elite press maintains complexity, the non-elite press simplifies stories. In addition, the former consistently covers events prior to the latter. This time lag considerably characterizes how each constructs its stories.
The Natural Framing of Military Conflict News: The 2008 Russian Invasion of Georgia in Resonance, Izvestia and The New York Times • Robert McKeever, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ekaterina Basilaia, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University; Donald Shaw, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Historically, news organizations located in the heart of conflict zones have been an important player in informing the public and shaping its understanding on particular issues. This study utilized quantitative content analysis to examine how Georgian, Russian, and American media framed the 2008 war in Georgia. By examining coverage in Izvestia and Resonance as well as The New York Times – this paper elucidates cross-national differences in the frames emphasized by media during conflict coverage.
When the War on Drugs is Fought on the Field: Exploring Newspaper Coverage of Drug and Alcohol Deviance of College Athletes from 1970 to 2010 • Natalie Brown, University of Alabama; Shuhua Zhou, University of Alabama • This study is the first to use deviance theory to examine newspaper coverage of drug and alcohol arrests of college athletes and how that coverage has changed over time. This paper analyzed 121 newspaper articles published from 1970 to 2010. This “War on Drugs” that dominated headlines over the past forty years represent the perfect combination of characteristics that maximized newsworthiness: deviance, social issues, and sport.
The Sporting News: A Study on Sports Teams and the News that Writes about Them • Ben Miller • This study examined the relationships between source credibility, reputation, athletic identity and self-efficacy. One hundred and thirty-five participants read an article about the Louisiana State University (LSU) football’s 2010 victory over the University of Alabama from one of four different online news sources. The sources represented perspectives of national (ESPN.com), local (2theadvocate.com), school-produced (LSUsports.net), and opponent (BamaOnLine.com) sources. The participants were then asked questions about their LSU athletic identity and self-efficacy after viewing one of the four conditions.
New media, old sources: An examination of source diversity of online news in China • Na Liu, City University of Hong Kong; Fen Lin • This study develops a two-dimensional source diversity of online news, containing both typological diversity and geographical diversity. Typological source can indicate the influence of new media technologies on the types of media; while geographical diversity can further offer deep economic and media power relationship behind news production on the Internet. A content analysis of most user-searched news on Baidu.com during 112 days shows that new media technologies didn’t bring substantial changes to the old news sources production in China.
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