Journal. Media, Volume 4, Issue 1 (March 2023) – 26 articles

This study investigates the impact of mobile social networking applications in the organisation of protest movements by examining how protesters documented their participation during the 2020 #EndSARS protests as well as evaluating the themes that emerged from online activists’ tweets during the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protests in Nigeria. Data for this study was obtained from a survey conducted in 2020 during the protests in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria (N = 391), and a qualitative content analysis of tweets and replies (N = 67,691) from the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protest in Nigeria. Results show that there is a substantial relationship between how protesters document their participation and their day of joining the protest. Findings also demonstrate that protesters used social media platforms accessed via mobile phones to display their anger and anguish, imprecate the authorities, and rouse solidarity contagion, which ignited a memorial march for fallen activists in Nigeria. Finally, data illustrate that activists in Nigeria use these successive memorial protests to sustain the #EndSARS protest movements and their demands. Full article

WeChat has become the most popular type of social media among youngsters in China. They use it for various reasons including communicating in intimate relationships. This study aims to investigate the impact of the density of individuals’ social networks on WeChat Usage in Intimate Relationships among Chinese youngsters, guided by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). An online questionnaire was constructed and disseminated to respondents online. In total, 923 undergraduate students from Chinese universities completed the questionnaires. Utilizing Structural Equation Modelling, findings show that the density of individuals’ social networks has a limited impact on WeChat usage. On the other hand, TPB factors such as subjective norms and perceived control bring a substantial impact on WeChat usage, while attitude has a less significant impact. These results indicate that Chinese youngsters exhibit strong attributes of the collective culture. This study also suggests that future social media research should place more emphasis on cultural and social factors. Full article

Obtaining accurate information from social media during a crisis can be difficult, but should all information really be disseminated? Social media platforms actively filter out terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), but how are users themselves counteracting its spread? This paper aims to connect the research on media events with studies currently being conducted in information science and digital media research through a case study of tweets during the Vienna terror attack in late 2020. These tweets were manually coded in accordance with Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. This study shows that during the 2020 Vienna attack, GIFs shared on Twitter served three functions: amplification, personalisation and ethical practice. The paper ends with a discussion on the ways cats may function as a countermeasure against the prevalence of TVEC on social media during terrorist attacks and the implications of such countermeasures. Full article

How are narratives around peace and conflict constructed in radio? This paper offers a detailed discussion of a framework of analysis of media narratives. It examines how perceptions of peacebuilding are constructed and aired in radiophonic debates. It deals with methodological questions and carries out an interpretative analysis of narratives in ‘media talk’, here defined as a broadcast output in the form of ‘talking’. The narrative analysis is composed of four dimensions: thematic, structural, actor and agency levels. What started as an effort to study a political debate in the Central African Republic from a radio station named Ndeke Luka, evolved into an in-depth reflection of how competing, clashing and counter peacebuilding narratives can take form. One particular transcript of a radio programme is hereby used to exemplify and illustrate how this analytical framework is operationalised. It is not intended, though, to offer any generalisation claim as this study is a work in progress. While interrogating the ways peacebuilding narratives in ‘media talk’ can be detected, this paper goes beyond the sharing of a particular case. This model makes it possible to apprehend the nuances of ‘media talk’ as a contesting and disputing space for diverse narratives. As a point of departure, it claims that the ideas of peacebuildings (in plural) relate to experiential practices. Research in ‘media talk’ constitutes a relevant arena for mapping emerging narratives of conflict and peace. Full article

By shining a light on the previously neglected combination of public service media (PSM) and the audience perspective, this paper adds to the debate on (algorithmic) news personalization. While news personalization may offer new opportunities, it can clearly also conflict with the PSM mission of universality of access, reach, and content. This empirical study compares the audience perspective on the news personalization of users and non-users of public service news in Germany, France, and the UK. Overall, the findings of the online survey show that users of public service news in Germany and the UK—in comparison to non-users of these services—perceive more risks such as missing out on certain topics or viewpoints, place greater value on a shared public sphere, and more strongly prefer a news selection primarily made by professional news editors. In France, however, the differences between users and non-users of public service news are rarely significant, which is interpreted against the background of the different media systems and the role of PSM. The findings add to the understanding of what public service news audiences expect PSM organizations to provide while keeping the difficult balance between personalization and universality. Full article

In this study, both performance and polymedia serve as important conceptual lenses to examine how university students in the Global South handle the social media landscape in enacting cultural identity. Based on 17 focus groups with 105 students from Bolivian universities, we argue that in performing their multiplex identities, this group of Bolivian young people navigate social media as polymedia environments, taking advantage of its possibilities and testing its constraints. The research generated three key findings: (1) students mainly reported examples of cosmopolitan and national identity performances; (2) performances of national belonging showed an ambiguous mixture of self-glorification and self-reflexivity; (3) indigenous identities were rarely performed on the platforms used. Full article

In the current cross-media ecosystem, which is characterized by technological disruption, the prominent relationship between public service media (PSM), sport and cultural citizenship is undergoing a profound transformation. Currently, PSM can utilize its myriad platforms, channels and services to transcend the constraints of linear broadcasting, find new ways of advancing diversity and overcome the perception of disability sport as a media ‘blind spot’. Through content analysis, the objective of this research has been to examine the agenda diversity on Twitter offered during the timeframe of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games by 15 PSM corporations in Europe. This comparative analysis of 6072 tweets demonstrated the uneven attention devoted by European PSM to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. In the aggregate, 39.42% (n = 2398) of the messages focused on the event, although significant imbalances can be observed among the different media organizations, both in terms of the volume of coverage and the attention given to the various Paralympic disciplines and protagonists. From a theoretical perspective, the article adds to the existing literature on the nexus between media, sport and cultural citizenship, signaling the need for PSM to reimagine its social media strategies to counteract the limited visibility of different societal groups and to adequately contribute to enhancing cultural citizenship in the digital age. The results can also inform media practitioners. Despite that the conditioning factors and trade-offs linked to the commercial nature of social networking sites cannot be overlooked, PSM should take into account the importance of promoting inclusion and observe audiences’ increasing interest in disability sport. Full article

The article focuses on mobile democracy in connection to the conditional foundations for young Danes’ democratic agency in a digital society. It investigates questions of democratic transformation through a conceptual and empirical triangulation of mobile democracy as a framework for analyzing these conditions. Conceptually, the article draws on research on youth and mobile technologies and on theories of mobility, deliberative democracy, and democratic conversation. Empirically, the article draws on 16 in-depth interviews with 16–24-year-old Danes conducted in 2021. This dataset is supported by findings from a representative survey (2017) and publicly available statistics and surveys. The article analyses three intersecting conditions that frame the concept of mobile democracy through an analysis of young citizens’ democratic participation: 1. Mobile technologies—democratic mobility occurs across the availability of technological mobile platforms and online services. The ‘always on’ status is defining for young citizens’ democratic agency. 2. Mobile information and social media—fragmented publics are increasingly missing societal reference points and ideological coherence, and young people are challenged in their attempt to establish coherent meaningfulness from the fluctuating information stream. 3. Mobile engagement and participation—information mobility affects perceptions of what information, citizenship and democracy are, and how this translates into actualizations of democratic participation. Full article

Mobile media are fundamental to social life in a growing number of ways. Beyond the mundane, the technology has come to play a meaningful role in protests and emergent demonstrations worldwide, including recent cases of political violence among far-right groups in the U.S. Drawing from the folk theory tradition, this study samples Alt-Right supporters to investigate how perceived essence of mobile media, particularly as a tool for collective action, is associated with willingness to engage in racially motivated and extreme political action in offline and online contexts. Findings reveal that perceptions of the mobile phone as a tool for collective action are associated with greater intentions to participate in online and offline activity explicitly in support of White people. Additionally, we find cases where links between essence and intentions are strengthened among those reporting higher levels of micro-coordination, or use of mobile media for coordinating with others in daily life. The findings indicate how everyday life perceptions and practices function and interact in ways that help explain willingness to join racially motivated calls to action among this group. The discussion offers implications for studying mobile media and collective action more broadly, especially in the context of under-researched political groups. Full article

In recent decades, marked by the supposedly universal access to different types of social media, we have seen the emergence of forms of popular feminism embedded in complex dynamics. Often cohabiting in these dynamics are ambivalent ideas and imaginaries that both reject and express feminist issues. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital technologies increased exponentially to overcome mobility constraints, popularizing connective action around feminism and, at the same time, reinforcing normative views of society. This article explores these ambivalences by focusing on TikTok discourses, whose popularity grew intensely during the pandemic. Departing from a feminist constructionist perspective and using content analysis, we examine the 100 most prominent videos on the Portuguese hashtags #feminismo (#feminism) and #antifeminismo (#antifeminism) in the period corresponding to general containment measures in the second phase of the public health crisis. The results are less than encouraging. Over half of the analysed videos contain discursive dynamics conforming to social hierarchization (53%), often reaffirming gender stereotypes. By allowing forms of popular feminism and antifeminism to permeate the shared discourses, the results suggest that the platform gives rise to ideas and discourses that reify unbalanced power relations. Full article

At a time of renewed power struggles among nations, especially with the rise of China and Russia, the UK’s loss of leverage as a key player in the European Union following Brexit makes its relationship with the United States more crucial than ever before. That relationship, which is traditionally conceptualised as being ‘special’, undergirds international relations discourses in media spaces and political and academic communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on news coverage by the New York Times and The Guardian (UK) newspapers, this article explores how the media frame the UK–US relationship against the backdrop of Brexit. The discussion is predicated on the understanding that important sources of information can influence not only people’s perceptions but also how they think about an issue. The study concludes that while a special relationship is still a contested notion, a resilient and abiding alliance between the two countries is alleviating the impact of Brexit. Full article

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020, sparked widespread protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement throughout the summer of 2020. Subsequent news coverage of these protests prominently featured acts of civil disobedience even though almost all protests were peaceful. In turn, protest “violence” was picked up by conservative political elites as evidence to promote legislation to control protests and keep communities safe. Since summer 2020, eight states have passed such legislation with additional bills pending in 21 states, raising concerns that the legislation suppresses political expression. This paper brings together literature on free expression, the protest paradigm, and news framing to provide the basis for a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 379 news stories and editorials covering Florida’s HB1 protest legislation. Results reveal that the most frequent news frame was fighting crime, with relatively less attention to free expression, political strategy, and race frames. In addition, very little attention was paid to the legislation’s potential chilling effects suppressing constitutionally protected speech and assembly. These results indicate news media were deficient in providing the public with a sufficient assessment of the implications of protest legislation. Full article

The present article examines journalism specialized in art and architecture in the print editions of the cultural supplements of three Spanish newspapers with the highest circulation in the country: Babelia (El País), ABC Cultural (ABC), and El Cultural (previously El Mundo, and currently, El Español) covering a twenty-five-year period. All three supplements consolidate visual arts and architecture into a unified section called Art. The main objective of this research is to analyze the Art sections, using the year 2018 as a case study and the twenty-five-year period (1993 to 2018) to investigate the evolution of cultural supplements. To undertake this study, I used the content analysis method. The results show a noticeable reduction in the length of the cultural supplements during the study period. This decline also entails a significant decrease in art content, with architecture severely affected. The conclusions of this study highlight the current precarious state of cultural supplements, the fundamental role of criticism, and the marginalization of architecture in these publications. Full article

In conflict-ridden countries, the news media has a pivotal role to perform as an active advocate of human rights and societal peace, as well as a facilitator of conflict mitigation and resolution through the gathering and dissemination of non-partisan information. While today the world witness armed conflicts in more forms than ever before, some countries are more sensitive to conflict and violence—such as Pakistan. The country is recognized as one of the riskiest places for working journalists by virtue of recurrent political, ethnic, and religious conflicts. The Pakistani journalists work in a climate of fear and risks and with opposing groups seeking to influence the news media, which creates more difficulties for them to report unbiased and accurate news to the public. The practice of ethics has become more challenging for the Pakistani journalists because the country lacks an effective and standardized code of conduct to report on conflict. Therefore, drawing on the theory of the conflict triangle by Galtung, this study seeks the Pakistani journalists’ perspectives about the ethics of conflict sensitive reporting. In doing so, this study uses the quantitative method of survey and the qualitative method of in-depth interviews. The study uses descriptive analysis to present the survey findings in the form of percentage and thematic analysis to present the findings of interview data. Full article

The local press finds its vocation in the community it addresses and in its territory of deployment, taking proximity as the main news value in the choice of events. The war in Ukraine, as an international theme, has imposed itself on the national media agenda, and, as such, we have proposed to evaluate its presence in the regional media agenda. For this case study, we have selected the local daily newspapers Diário As Beiras and Diário de Viseu (located in the center region of Portugal) and analyzed twelve consecutive editions of each newspaper, starting on the first day of the conflict, 24 February 2022. The results point to an appreciation of the event, either from an international perspective or through a regional lens, essentially evident in the coverage of solidarity actions and tributes. The sources used by the newspapers are mostly institutional, which leads us to a “seated journalism” in line with previous studies specific to the local press. This analysis also highlights the emphasis on the information obtained from the prism of sources on the Ukrainian side of the conflict, which, in the case of Diário de Viseu, is underlined by biased discourse and some marks of subjectivity. Full article

Concerns about online news consumption have proliferated, with some evidence suggesting a heightened impact of the confirmation bias and social cues online. This paper argues that mobile media may further shape selective exposure to political content. We conducted two online selective exposure experiments to investigate whether browsing political content on smartphones (vs. computers) facilitates selective exposure to attitude-consistent vs. attitude-discrepant articles (confirmation bias) with high vs. low views (impact of social cues). Notably, these studies leveraged novel random assignment techniques and a custom-designed, mobile-compatible news website. Using a student sample, Study 1 (N = 157) revealed weak evidence that the confirmation bias is stronger on smartphones than computers, and the impact of social cues was similar across devices. Study 2 (N = 156) attempted to replicate these findings in a general population sample. The impact of social cues remained similar across devices, but the confirmation bias was not stronger on smartphones than computers. Overall, the confirmation bias (but not the impact of social cues) manifested on smartphones, and neither outcome was consistently stronger on smartphones than computers. Full article

We live in the information age and, ironically, meeting the core function of journalism—i.e., to provide people with access to unbiased information—has never been more difficult. This paper explores deep journalism, our data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) based journalism approach to study how the LinkedIn media could be useful for journalism. Specifically, we apply our deep journalism approach to LinkedIn to automatically extract and analyse big data to provide the public with information about labour markets; people’s skills and education; and businesses and industries from multi-generational perspectives. The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting phenomena coupled with rapidly changing generational attitudes are bringing unprecedented and uncertain changes to labour markets and our economies and societies, and hence the need for journalistic investigations into these topics is highly significant. We combine big data and machine learning to create a whole machine learning pipeline and a software tool for journalism that allows discovering parameters for age dynamics in labour markets using LinkedIn data. We collect a total of 57,000 posts from LinkedIn and use it to discover 15 parameters by Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm (LDA) and group them into 5 macro-parameters, namely Generations-Specific Issues, Skills and Qualifications, Employment Sectors, Consumer Industries, and Employment Issues. The journalism approach used in this paper can automatically discover and make objective, cross-sectional, and multi-perspective information available to all. It can bring rigour to journalism by making it easy to generate information using machine learning, and can make tools and information available so that anyone can uncover information about matters of public importance. This work is novel since no earlier work has reported such an approach and tool and leveraged it to use LinkedIn media for journalism and to discover multigenerational perspectives (parameters) for age dynamics in labour markets. The approach could be extended with additional AI tools and other media. Full article

This study consisted of a content analysis of parenting portrayals in the 40 most popular Portuguese male and female content producers on YouTube and Instagram, on a sample of content published in 2019. Female creators give disproportionately greater attention to parenting and are the ones depicting everyday labor related to it, whereas male creators show themselves as fathers in happy and fun moments. By way of their popularity and visibility on social media platforms, and as supported by the social media platforms and advertising realms, celebrities and influencers are amplifying the traditional division of parenting labor through the mechanisms of a postfeminist, hyper-individualistic discourse emphasized by female influencers and celebrities, and of humoristic content that confirms gender stereotypes without social punishment, deployed by entertainment personalities, both male and female. Full article

Negative, tragic, traumatic and suffering representations continue to dominate the discussions and content on social media in the stories and content related to Syrian refugees. The public, while browsing social media, finds that this representation is the dominant one that dominates the image of refugees. Thus, there is a potential risk that the public’s compassion will be negatively affected after repeated exposure to the dominant representation in light of the inability to put an end to that situation. This study discusses the perspectives of Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Turkey on whether they feel such repeated negative and tragic content about their stories and news on social media could affect the empathy of the audience in hosting communities with them, especially since social media is an open-source platform that all people at any time and from any place can post, re-share, comment and create content by adding texts, photos and videos, not like traditional media, which are controlled more than social media platforms for open participatory content. This study aims to explore how a vulnerable population, such as Syrian refugees in Istanbul and Amman, sees the effect of negative representation on themselves and their image in the hosting communities and does not aim to examine or offer any conclusion as to whether the public in Jordan and Turkey have experienced compassion fatigue. This study provides and extracts some useful insights, but proves no hypotheses or conclusive evidence regarding the occurrence of compassion fatigue in the public; thus, the study opens the door for the debate on the role that social media plays as a source of compassion fatigue among citizens towards refugees, mainly when they are repeatedly exposed to such negative stories and content, as well as calls for an in-depth and extensive study on the topic from the point of view of the public and citizens in the hosting countries, after examining, understanding and analyzing the opinions and their dimensions of the sample of refugees in this study. Full article

More and more university students in China are opting to access, share, and comment on political issues via social media as a result of the rapid expansion of Internet technology. In the western part of China, you can find Western universities. University students there find it challenging to use the Internet and engage in online political activities due to the region’s level of economic development and social conventions. We are unsure whether their political involvement will have an effect on how society functions as a result. This study uses 530 students from Western colleges as a sample to investigate the effects of social media use on online political involvement and the adjustment effect of political efficacy. It combines a correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, and regression multiples with a questionnaire survey. The results showed a strong positive link between Western Chinese university students’ online political participation and their use of social media. Students’ online political engagement in Western colleges greatly increased their political efficacy. Influence was governed by how effectively politics were perceived. This research can increase the political engagement of Western Chinese university students who utilize social media and offer some suggestions for how the government might carry out its daily operations to better control this activity. Full article

Among an increasingly remote workforce due to COVID-19 pandemic, sharing photographs as part of internal communication has become something of a paradigm. In this article, exchanging primarily photographs and other quick visual artifacts, such as animated images and short videos, is considered a form of visual discussion among the work community. With a vast and diverse range of official and unofficial internal communication channels, this article focuses on three organizations, their internal communication channels and the visual discussions occurring therein. The semi-structured group interviews and qualitative thematic analysis we conducted shed light on the functions of photographs in different workplaces. The results demonstrate how visual discussions are heavily dependent on the context and nature of the work in question. In official channels, the most important functions of shared photographs are task-related and relevant to such issues as instructing, teaching, safety at work and emphasizing the message to be communicated. Photographs can also have a feeling-driven aspect that includes goals such as raising team spirit and employee commitment. Moreover, photographs are also shared in somewhat obscure unofficial channels with functions related to humour and concerning a common interest or hobby. Full article

In this article, we reflect on how practices of children’s consumer culture interfere with the exercise of rights by children who are consumers and producers of content on digital platforms. It is our aim to offer a communicational perspective to a broader discussion on the processes of child socialization within the scope of digital culture. So, this article intends to highlight some of the challenges for the exercise of children’s digital citizenship based on the Brazilian experience. It also aims to insert Brazilian research in the international debate on children’s rights on the internet. To carry out this discussion, we mobilize theoretical and empirical studies produced in Brazil and map national legal framework that supports the notion of digital citizenship for children. The theoretical effort of this work has pointed out at least two dynamics that explain the way in which the logics of consumption permeate the exercise of the rights of active children on social network platforms: the appropriation of the right to freedom of speech in order to enable child labor, and the conversion of the right to information into processes of publicizing brands in children’s daily lives. We conclude that although Brazil offers a set of legal systems that guarantee the right of children to communication, the exercise of digital citizenship faces a series of challenges. In this sense, public policies which target children in the online ecosystem are needed so that they can participate in this environment without losing their protection guarantees. Full article

The use of virtual reality (VR) storytelling in cultural communication is increasing and has found its way into the journalism, tourism, museum, and exhibition industries. Earlier studies have examined VR storytelling to improve user experience (UX). However, there is still insufficient research on UX and communication effectiveness in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) in storytelling involving different sentiments. In this study, participants watched positive and negative news stories in three IVEs: 2D video, 360-degree video via mobile devices, and 360-degree video with a VR headset. The predictor variables of enjoyment and the impact of presence, flow, understanding, empathy, credibility, and enjoyment across the stories in IVEs were analyzed. Two models were constructed based on positive and negative stories. The findings show that predictor variables make different contributions to VR storytelling with different sentiments. The conclusions support IVE production in journalism based on sentiment to further improve UX and enhance communication effectiveness. Full article

To create an illusion of improving country conditions with respect to gang violence, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele relies on rhetorical strategies that include asserting his power and aptitude to accomplish what no other leader before him has done, undercutting the credibility of his critics, and selectively revealing and concealing national data. In this paper, I offer a fantasy-theme rhetorical analysis to demonstrate the strategic digital mediation of one key instance of Bukele’s wielding of the power of public diplomacy to detract attention from El Salvador’s continuing legacy of violence and democratic decline. Delivered in the midst of a government-sanctioned state of emergency following a rash of gang violence in early 2022, Bukele’s third annual Address to the Nation speech accomplishes the twin goals of proclaiming imminent victory over El Salvador’s infamous and pervasive gangs and defending himself against the critical global gaze directed at the country. Full article

Subscription-based news platforms (such as “Apple News+” or “Readly”) that bundle content from different publishers into one comprehensive package and offer it to media users at a fixed monthly rate are a new way of accessing and consuming digital journalism. These services have received little attention in journalism studies, although they differ greatly from traditional media products and distribution channels. This article empirically investigates the perception of journalism platforms based on eight qualitative focus group discussions with 55 German news consumers. Results show that the central characteristics these platforms should fulfill in order to attract users are strikingly similar to the characteristics of media platforms from the music and video industries, in particular regarding price points, contract features, and modes of usage. Against this background, the potential and perspectives of a subscription-based news platform for journalism’s societal role are discussed. Full article