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ARTICLE: Folk theories help to explain how “news avoiders” get information

Growing numbers of people access information in other ways than by reading newspapers or accessing a news organization’s website. There’s been a shift towards so-called ‘distributed discovery’, where people find information via a range of digital intermediaries and platforms. Benjamin Toff of the University of Minnesota, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of the University of Oxford, … Continued


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PAPER: The relation between foreign news coverage and web search activity

If a country gets major media attention from other countries, does it also come up in people’s searches? Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Joni Salminen, Soon-Gyo Jung and Bernard J. Jansen, all of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar, studied media attention and public interest towards different topics. Researchers collected one hundred most popular topics daily for … Continued


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REPORT: High level of distrust in news in Turkey

People’s trust and mistrust in news media Turkey indicate a very polarised society and news media, a new report by Servet Yanatma of the University of Oxford, shows. The report is supplementary to the Digital News Report 2017 by Oxford’s RISJ Institute, and is based on the survey done for the report. Television is the … Continued


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ARTICLE: Colombian media shapes people’s perceptions of income inequality

David Coppini of the University of Denver, and German Alvarez and Hernando Rojas, both of the University of Wisconsin, studied the relationship between media exposure, perceptions of inequality, and political outcomes. They did a survey for a representative sample of the Colombian adult population (n = 1 031). News consumption had a negative relationship with perceptions … Continued


ARTICLE: Generation C uses all available sources to receive local news

Generation C has always been a challenging group for news organizations. New research identified Generation C’s local news repertoires, and build an integrated model of multiplatform news consumption. According to a the study, Generation C (also Millennials, born between 1982 and 1996) is willing to use all available sources to receive local news: traditional local news … Continued


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ARTICLE: News audiences are not fragmented in the Japanese Twittersphere

Existing studies on ideological selective exposure have several limitations, state Tetsuro Kobayashi of City University Hong Kong, Yuki Ogawa of Ritsumeikan University, Takahisa Suzuki of Tsuda University, and Hitoshi Yamamoto of Rissho University. The authors examined selective exposure and news audience fragmentation in the Japanese Twittersphere. Researchers tested the generalizability of US findings in the … Continued


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ARTICLE: How online harassment influences the work of female journalists

Female journalists face rampant online harassment, across different cultures, new study states. Researchers interviewed 75 female journalists who have worked in Germany, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Engaging with audiences online through comment sections or social media, is often a job requirement for journalists. The harassment disrupts the reciprocity between journalists … Continued


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ARTICLE: Analytics tools rationalize journalistic work while creating a compelling user experience

How do analytics rationalize journalistic work? Rutgers University researcher Caitlin Petre spent six months at the newsroom analytics company Chartbeat doing ethnographic observation and interviews. The author looked at discursive strategies and design elements used by the company to influence journalists’ views on the issue. The newsroom analytics dashboard differs from a “Taylorist” stopwatch in … Continued


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ARTICLE: The Guardian articles written by women and people of color received a disproportionate amount of abusive comments

Compared to men, articles written by women attracted a higher percentage of inappropriate comments, new study finds. Becky Gardiner of Goldsmiths, University of London, studied blocked comments on The Guardian website. In 2006, The Guardian opened most of its articles to reader comments. While the articles were commented frequently, at the same time many journalists … Continued


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ARTICLE: People navigate news on social media based on ‘generalised scepticism’

As news are read more often via social media, the selection of what news people see is based increasingly on algorithms, instead of editorial selection. Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen of Oxford University, studied how people navigate news on social media, focusing on how they perceive news selection. The authors did a two-part study. … Continued