Picture: SH-60B helicopter flies over Sendai by United States Navy, public domain

ARTICLE: Western newspapers used a cultural framework when reporting the Great East Japan Disaster

The Great East Japan Disaster of 2011 provides an important case study through which to evaluate how the western media cover Japan. Besides the nuclear crisis, limited attention has been paid to news reporting across the multiple overlapping disaster. Jamie Matthews of Bournemouth University did a critical discourse analysis of coverage of the disaster in … Continued

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Published: 22 May 2018
Picture: North America satellite orthographic by NASA, public domain, cropped and modified

ARTICLE: The US news system as “polarized liberal”

While many of the changes in United States’ media are discussed in relation to the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s presidency, “they are the symptoms of broader systemic dynamics that have been fermenting years before Trump first announced his bid”, a new study by Efrat Nechushtai of Columbia University, argues. The article uses Hallin and … Continued

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Published: 9 May 2018
Picture: Abstract fluid art by Lurm, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Data journalism producing abstract categories

The world around us is not naturally organized into categories for statistical analysis. For the purposes of data journalism, discrete, unique incidents, events, and people must be rendered as similar, so that abstract categories may be created and compared, a new study states. Wilson Lowrey and Jue Hou, of the University of Alabama, studied data … Continued

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Published: 7 May 2018
Picture: Polar bear by Andy Brunner, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: Framing of climate change news has only limited effects to selective exposure

Framing of the stories plays only a limited role in driving exposure to climate change news, a new study finds. Lauren Feldman of Rutgers University and P. Sol Hart of the University of Michigan, conducted two news browsing experiments, testing six different climate change frames. The experiments were done with national samples of adults in … Continued

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Published: 3 May 2018

ARTICLE: Social media affects the journalistic process on “all levels”

How does social media affect contemporary journalism? Patrick Ferrucci, of University of Colorado-Boulder, put the question to 53 American digital journalists and interviewed them over their use of social media. The author analysed the answers through the hierarchy of influences model, coined by Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese (1996). The hierarchy of influences consists of … Continued

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Published: 29 Mar 2018

ARTICLE: Harassment of female journalists receives attention only when validated by men

How does feminist discourse penetrate the mainstream media in a “post-feminist” era? Dunja Antunovic, of Bradley University, investigated the question through a case study of the #MoreThanMean campaign. #MoreThanMean was a campaign launched in 2016 to highlight the abuse female sports journalists had to suffer on social media. At the campaign’s center was a video … Continued

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Published: 23 Mar 2018
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ARTICLE: Combining investigative journalism with stand-up comedy can improve public engagement

“Dirty Little Secrets” was a project from 2015 bringing together New Jersey news organizations, comedians, two universities, and a national investigative journalism organization CIR. The project turned investigative news material about New Jersey’s toxic contamination areas into stand-up comedy routines. Caty Borum Chattoo of American University and Lindsay Green-Barber of The Impact Architects, examined this … Continued

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Published: 22 Mar 2018
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ARTICLE: News organizations should consider legal liability as they develop automated journalism

Could algorithms produce libelous news content? Seth C. Lewis of the University of Oregon, Amy Kristin Sanders of Northwestern University in Qatar, and Casey Carmody of the University of Minnesota, state that news organizations must seriously consider legal liability as they develop newswriting bots. They review the issue in the context of the United States’s … Continued

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Published: 15 Mar 2018