ARTICLE: When a company is in a crisis, journalists’ attention shifts away from the CEO

A company’s chief executive officer (CEO) is usually its most visible public representative. However, in a time of crisis, journalists’ attention moves towards the company’s board members, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz researchers Nora Denner, Thomas Koch and Stephanie Senger discovered. The authors set out to investigate how personalized crisis coverage is – in other words, … Continued


ARTICLE: Donald Trump’s rise to power changed how news talk about ‘the border’

News discourse on the American-Mexican border region of Rio Grande Valley changed noticeably over 2015 – 2017. K. Jill Fleuriet, of the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Mari Castellano collected all Rio Grande Valley related news stories from nine national news outlets from that time and analysed how ‘the border’ was depicted in … Continued


ARTICLE: Newsrooms still don’t use Twitter’s potential to the fullest

How did different television networks use Twitter in covering the 2016 Orlando mass shooting? Lourdes Cárdenas, of San Francisco State University, with Celeste González de Bustamante and Jessica Retis, both of the University of Arizona, approached the question through a qualitative content analysis. The Orlando attack had targeted a gay night club on a “Latin … Continued


ARTICLE: Newspapers chasing quick profits are most negative on terrorism

Newspapers’ profit orientation influences how negative their news on terrorism are, Aaron M. Hoffman, of Simon Fraser University Canada, and Dwaine H. A. Jengelley, of Purdue University, write. They analysed the terrorism coverage of United States’ 20 largest newspapers between 1997 and 2014. Authors measured the news articles’ tone by comparing the proportions of negative … Continued


Picture: untitled by Sora Sagano, license CC0 1.0

ARTICLE: The first year of reporting #MeToo in Indian English language press focused on celebrity stories

A new research article by Suman Mishra of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, examines the phenomenon of news domestication and shows how hashtag activism originating in one country can have very different resonance in another. Mishra did a textual analysis of 641 news articles from five prominent English language newspapers: The Hindustan Times, The Times of … Continued


ARTICLE: Swedish newspapers depict single mothers as reluctant heroes

How are single mothers represented in Sweden’s leading newspapers? Disa Bergnehr, of University of Borås, and Helena Wahlström Henriksson, of Uppsala University, tackled the question through content analysis. They investigated four Swedish newspapers’ output from three years (2015-2017) and analysed the articles that made mention of single motherhood. In the end, single mothers or single … Continued


ARTICLE: How does China Daily represent Chinese Muslims?

The state-aligned newspaper China Daily covers Chinese Muslims in a paternalistic manner, Meng Ye, of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Peter Thomas, of University of Leicester, write. They studied the paper’s coverage of Muslims between 2001 and 2015 through corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The total sample included 747 articles, most of them news stories. Topics deemed … Continued


ARTICLE: What news do Islamists consume?

Radicalized Islamists consume regular, mainstream news media – but almost always filtered by Islamist propagandists. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich researchers Philip Baugut and Katharina Neumann interviewed 34 Islamists serving prison sentences and 9 so-called “scene leavers”, i.e. former radical Islamists. Most importantly, Islamist propagandists instructed their followers to avoid “Western” news media, claiming it … Continued


ARTICLE: Western Afro-pessimism seeps into African media

African news on Africa are largely negative and thus follow Western notions of the continent, Michael Yao Wodui Serwornoo, of University of Cape Coast, writes. He analysed over 13 000 news stories on other African countries published by four Ghanaian newspapers. The newspapers’ coverage is highly dependent on international sources, Serwornoo found. The BBC World … Continued


ARTICLE: News about child sexual exploitation have gotten worse

British newspapers’ coverage of child sexual exploitation (CSE) was better in late 1990’s than in mid-2010’s, Katie Elliott, of London Metropolitan University writes. She analysed the framing of 390 articles on CSE, comparing two time periods: 1997-1999 and 2014-2015. The articles came from three newspapers, The Times, Daily Mail and Mirror. Articles in the first … Continued