Journal. Media, Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2022) – 17 articles

To address the COVID-19 pandemic, as with other infectious diseases, a key intervention is vaccination. Health communications are thus of vital importance for informing the public on the benefits and risks of vaccines. This in turn makes the readability of media content fundamental. Previous studies of COVID-19-related information have found the readability of online information considerably more difficult than recommended. However, studies on the readability of information related to COVID-19 vaccination in Asian contexts have yet to be carried out. Furthermore, especially in the case of the current pandemic, health information is communicated by a variety of information channels, including the internet and mass media. This paper investigates the readability of textual information on COVID-19 vaccination found online and in newspaper articles in parts of Asia where English is one of the main languages, namely Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Readability was assessed using a set of readability tests (Flesch–Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, Coleman–Liau Index, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook Grade level). It was found that a low proportion of URLs scored within recommended readability thresholds, and did so consistently across locations and types of sources. Furthermore, a relatively low proportion of web searches returned information from local sources; most URLs linked to sources outside of Singapore, Hong Kong, or the Philippines. Further, local online and newspaper sources scored similarly poorly on readability on average compared to non-local sources. Understanding of fast-evolving health communications concerning COVID-19 vaccination encompasses information about vaccine development and deployment from other locations, as well as locally. Nevertheless, these findings indicated a fairly low proportion of local sources among the top search results, and relatively low (i.e., difficult-to-read) readability scores for top search results and for local newspapers. An important issue for health communications strategies addressing COVID-19 vaccination will therefore be to consider different types of media sources in order to achieve the right mix of local and non-local sources while also ensuring appropriate readability. Full article

While the sociology of journalism has traditionally granted epistemic privilege to the mainstream news media, professional elites and their dominant meta-discourse, there is a recent trend to research journalism from other points of view. Researchers have investigated alternative and community media, journalists with low visibility or legitimacy in the workplace, as well as heterodox conceptions of professional excellence. These studies shed new light on little studied sub-groups and practices. How can we integrate them into a sustained scientific dialogue between researchers? This paper presents a methodologically original attempt to do so by dialogically re-interrogating material from studies of three situations where journalism absorbs precarious and politicised agents in the field (media activists), new practices and tasks that need doing (online discussion administration) and unusual kinds of professional attributes (experiencing emotionality in crisis reporting). In each case journalism’s pursuit of professional autonomy is at stake, since conditions of production clash with established professional myths and practices or generate incompatibilities with institutionalised expectations. Our three-way exchange using the bridging/sensitising concept of edge focuses on the conversion or convertibility of external forms of capital (legitimacies, resources and experiences) into forms redeemable and tradeable in a professional field. It exhibits how forces external to the journalistic profession are (made) present in each case but refracted differently in each local configuration. We call for a more systematic and relational study of these kinds of localised refractions. Full article

The shape of religious media communication changed dramatically because of the opportunities given by digital media and by the process of the secularization, structural changes in religious organizations, and the challenge enabled by the huge loss of credibility in the eyes of the world. We can observe certain dynamics in the professional approach of official Catholic media, especially those based in the Vatican. Its on-line project Vatican News has provided news service since 2017, now in almost forty languages. In the spirit of continuing the reform of the Roman curia, for which the founding of Secretary for Communication (now dicastery) was the “pilot” area, Pope Francis appointed the first layperson to lead any office of curia in 2018, and journalist Paolo Ruffini became the prefect. A few months later, one of most famous experts on the Vatican, also a lay person, journalist Andrea Tornielli, became editorial chief of the Dicastery for Communication. Other personal changes continued soon. The goal of this article is to analyse the initiative that Ruffini and Tornielli took in their office during six months after their appointment. The quantitative content analysis of both their Twitter accounts, closely connected with the newscast produced by Vatican News, is the scientific method used in this paper. There were detected new journalistic genres in the social media space (e.g., short video, editorial, story), vast popularity of Pope Francis, and success of his own Twitter activity (he obtained even tens of thousands of followers) or, contrarily, the omission and inconsistency when introducing uneasy themes (abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, ecology or economy) to the public. There was also the surprising realization that Ruffini is more popular in the Twitter milieu than Tornielli. Full article

This study investigates people’s attitudes towards news media’s role as gatekeepers during the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, this concerns news media’s quality control and the selection of the most important news about the pandemic, as well as the provision of useful information and knowledge about the virus and its implications. Challenging research that has questioned the very idea of journalistic gatekeeping in hybrid media systems, we set out to explore people’s attitudes towards news media’s gatekeeper functions during a crisis, when the need for reliable and relevant information is extraordinarily high and the information environment is flooded with disinformation. In this situation, news media gatekeepers could serve as safekeepers that protect the population. Based on a national survey in Norway (N = 1024), a country characterized by high levels of trust in social institutions, including the national press, the study finds that people were generally supportive of news media’s gatekeeper functions amid the pandemic. However, there were noteworthy demographic differences. Older people, women, and those who were more highly educated showed more positive attitudes towards news media’s gatekeeping. Moreover, we found lower support for news media’s gatekeeping in the group who trusted alternative, right-wing news media. Full article

Media work is a culture-making activity affecting the ways people understand the world and, therefore, workers in the media industries have a critical role in shaping collective memories, traditions, and belief systems. While studies regarding the characteristics impacting the nature of work in the media industries have significantly been increasing over the last years, the literature in this area remains highly fragmented. This paper begins to address that shortcoming by conducting an in-depth review of 36 scholarly papers in influential journals published from 2006 to 2020 to provide a comprehensive view of the literature and its approaches. This study elaborates on the concept of media work by organizing previous efforts into five subthemes, including commonalities, contested terrain, gendered profession, emerging practices, and influencing factors. Previous research has emphasized that media workers’ subjective experiences need to be explored further and more in-depth; however, if we wish to depict a more holistic but realistic picture, those experiences should be contextualized and thus linked with the specific organizational configurations and macro structures in which media work is embedded. The present review depicts how work in the media may take different meanings when addressing it through various theoretical frameworks. Our study can enrich future studies regarding the nature of media work by providing a fine-grained foundation in which researchers could understand how their given research problem(s) would be connected with the other issues that potentially impact their studies. Full article

Electoral contests around the world are suffering from an increasing distrust triggered by the dissemination of conspiracy theories. Extant research on political communication has largely studied this phenomenon, but, in some cases, it has neglected the relationship between social and legacy media in the breakthrough of a radicalized populism. Based on a wide literature review of liberal democracy and the roots of populism, this study addresses the right-wing populist communicative actions as one of the causes of the fragmentation of the democratic system, defining a journalistic and fact-checking standard to promote a well-informed society. Specifically, our research focus is to illustrate the impact of populist rhetoric on the traditional media system through a multiple-case study applied in European countries affected by right-wing populist discourse following the last United States elections (2020). The results show a connection among the strategies (game frames) used on Twitter, being less clear in the number of retweets and the presence on the front pages of newspapers. These data serve as a guide to build a journalistic indicator, arguing that high-quality information could be the key for democratic systems to minimize populist rhetoric and tackle the disinformation that endangers their future. Full article

The web publishing strategy of media organizations is a very important factor in their success. The aim of the strategy is to cover their audience’s news article consumption needs, but is this valid? In order to address this question, this paper compares data from two studies, namely a study that explored the publishing patterns of the top 22 Greek media websites and a second study that focused on web news article consumption habits. The results indicate that there are various deviations between the compared data, and thus the study concludes that Greek media organization publishing strategy is not aligned with the audience consumption needs. The identified discrepancies have to do with the published news articles after 14:00 during weekdays as well as the news articles that are available during weekends. Additionally, it seems that media organizations publish a very limited number of articles on specific thematic categories that the audience is interested in reading. Specific actions were also proposed in order to alleviate those deviations and thus improve the readability of the media organizations. Full article

Colombia is marked by high levels of gender-based violence. In 2020, 630 women were murdered because of their gender. The number of these feminicides increased under the coronavirus lockdown that began in March 2020. Although the news media play a crucial role in shaping the public’s notion of feminicides, empirical studies on the media’s portrayal of feminicides in Colombia are scarce. The present study involved a quantitative content analysis of articles published in four Colombian newspapers to determine how they reported on feminicides from August 2019 to July 2020 (sample size: 139 articles, comprising 1798 paragraphs). The period under investigation allowed for a comparison of news coverage before and during the lockdown. By means of hierarchical cluster analysis, we identified four frames: “gender-based inequalities and discrimination against women”, “perpetrators in front of the court”, “prehistory and course of events of the feminicide”, and “reactions of neighbors, eyewitnesses, and villagers to the feminicide”. Our findings suggest that the four newspapers under investigation paint rather similar pictures of feminicides. We also found that the date an article was published in relation to the COVID-19 quarantine had little influence on the frequency at which the clusters appeared. Full article

Beginning with the premise that the media participates in the manufacturing of the societal consent that enables and perpetuates the systematized exploitation of nonhuman animals, this article explores how media coverage of such nonhuman animals (and of wildlife in particular) during the COVID-19 crisis may influence our consumption of popular entertainment in a way that centralizes the discussion on the implications of established speciesist practices. I specifically focus on the impact of the first season of Netflix’s successful docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, which was released in March 2020, a key moment in the worldwide management of the pandemic. Tiger King has generated significant controversy because of its languid commitment to a solid conservationist message and to the paradigm of animal advocacy documentaries. However, understanding how and why nonhuman animals were considered newsworthy by COVID-19 media provides us with some interpretative keys through which to reapproach the significance of the show. Analyzing the series’ main themes and motifs in light of the media’s narratives on lockdown, wildlife, and human interference over nature allows us to continue exploring methodologies through which to question the multiple anthropocentric discourses that structure and order societal consent to the existence of zoos. Full article

This qualitative paper contends that as news media are faced with growing commercial pressures and changing news consumption habits, they need to rethink their relationship with two of their main stakeholders: readers and advertisers. Multi-stakeholder marketing provides a useful conceptual framework for such an exercise, since it invites media practitioners to reconcile the conflicting interests of different stakeholders. This study aims to understand journalists’ levels of multi-stakeholder thinking regarding advertisers and readers. To explore how contemporary journalists see their role with regard to distinct stakeholders in the news ecosystem, we interviewed 14 Belgian journalists working for legacy and digital native news media. The goal of this exploratory study is to examine (1) how journalists perceive and rethink their dependence on readers and advertisers in the digital news ecosystem and (2) how their perception of the digital news ecosystem influences their attitudes towards these stakeholders. Findings indicate that journalists tend to see the value of readers in monetary terms and believe increasing reader revenue will help journalism survive. Other types of reader value (feedback, expertise, and content) are peripheral. This focus on subscribers also seems to coincide with a devaluation of other stakeholders like advertisers and non-paying readers. Full article

A key parameter in the strategy of news organizations remains the exploitation of factors (such as post time and post type) that enhance the engagement level within online communities on social media. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between post time and post type in correlation with audience response in the Twitter digital platform. Specifically, the study aims to ascertain how the two specific variables affect user engagement with its Twitter posts and how they shape the effectiveness of communication on social networks. The analysis includes 7.122 tweets of the Greek National Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) over four months. Moreover, the study analyzes the tone of user comments on the Twitter posts of the specific public media organizations to understand in-depth how the users communicate their views publicly. The collection of comments lasted seven weeks and they numbered 265 in 2639 tweets. Regarding the post time variable, the study came to important findings on user behavior during the 24 h, as the number of Retweets appears to increase in the morning compared to the afternoon. It was also found that as time goes on, the user is interested in leaving his personal opinion. Regarding the correlation of post type with user engagement, it was found that the accompaniment of a tweet with audiovisual material has a tempting effect on users. Full article

Orchestrated manipulations spread lies and can create an environment of uncertainty in society, leading to concerns from politicians, scholars, educators, and journalists, among others. In this paper we explore what the emergence of fake news (understood as false news) represents for journalists, trying to answer the following question: Does false news pose a threat to the credibility of good journalism, causing a disruption of the traditional work? To answer it, we interviewed a sample of journalists from various media organizations in Portugal and Brazil. Among the main findings, journalists are aware that fake news is a problem to be faced, as the blame for the dissemination of false news erroneously lies with the profession. They are conscious that something must be done and agree that the best way to fight against fake news is to invest in media literacy. Most of the journalists of our sample think they must be also more cautious to check sources for veracity and for political motivations. The results show that there is a resolve to reinforce the role of journalism in society. Full article

The media convergence model presents an environment in which everyone produces information without intermediates or filters. A subsequent insight shows that users (prosumers) —gathered in networked communities—also shape messages’ flow. Social media play a substantial role. This information is loaded with public values and ideologies that shape a normative world: social media has become a fundamental platform where users interact and promote public values. Memetics facilitates this phenomenon. Memes have three main characteristics: (1) Diffuse at the micro-level but shape the macrostructure of society; (2) Are based on popular culture; (3) Travel through competition and selection. In this context, this paper examineshow citizens from Ecuador and the United States reappropriate memes during a public discussion? The investigation is based on multimodal analysis and compares the most popular memes among the United States and Ecuador produced during the candidate debate (Trump vs. Biden [2020] and Lasso vs. Arauz [2021]). The findings suggest that, during a public discussion, it is common to use humor based on popular culture to question authority. Furthermore, a message becomes a meme when it evidences the gap between reality and expectations (normativity). Normativity depends on the context: Americans complain about the expectations of a debate; Ecuadorians, about discourtesy and violence. Full article

This article, which integrates broader research, aims to identify the fake news patterns propagated in the process of disinformation about COVID-19 that were evaluated by the Brazilian fact-checking agencies Fato or Fake and Lupa. Aiming at this goal, we considered the strategies for spreading false information about the disease from January to September 2020. As a methodology, we used part of the procedures associated with media framing, focusing on the themes and labels of the checked information. Politics and death were the two main issues in misinformation assessed by the agencies, closely followed by themes related to cure and prevention. Personalities were particularly relevant at Lupa. The high frequency of the political issue reveals the ideological polarization that Brazil is experiencing, leading to global health crises such as the new coronavirus pandemic. Full article

In recent years, news media has been greatly disrupted by the potential of technologically driven approaches in the creation, production, and distribution of news products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from the realm of science fiction and has become a very real tool that can aid society in addressing many issues, including the challenges faced by the news industry. The ubiquity of computing has become apparent and has demonstrated the different approaches that can be achieved using AI. We analyzed the news industry’s AI adoption based on the seven subfields of AI: (i) machine learning; (ii) computer vision (CV); (iii) speech recognition; (iv) natural language processing (NLP); (v) planning, scheduling, and optimization; (vi) expert systems; and (vii) robotics. Our findings suggest that three subfields are being developed more in the news media: machine learning, computer vision, and planning, scheduling, and optimization. Other areas have not been fully deployed in the journalistic field. Most AI news projects rely on funds from tech companies such as Google. This limits AI’s potential to a small number of players in the news industry. We made conclusions by providing examples of how these subfields are being developed in journalism and presented an agenda for future research. Full article

Disinformation and the proliferation of fake news are global problems that affect the stability of democracies throughout the world. The capacity of distorted information to interfere in election processes or in political agendas has led different actors to create verification initiatives, which operate in partnership with the mass media. Recently, during the 2020 health crisis, false information has proved to have damaging power not only at the levels of politics or communication, but also at a health level. Therefore, the social need to access reliable and quality information, as well as verified information aimed at eradicating hoaxes, becomes evident. This paper focuses on the European context, analyzing the relationship between active verifiers and television stations that are members of the CIRCOM Network, considering their strategies and verification programs. Using a qualitative methodology an exploratory study has been carried out, mapping initiatives and stations by assessing their contribution of verified information to society. Full article