Modelling News Media Use Westlund, Oscar; Ghersetti, Marina
Journalism studies (London, England),
03/2015, Letnik:
16, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The contemporary mediascape offers a plethora of news media and social media, which people can turn to in everyday life and during a crisis. Generations develop routinized media usage patterns in the ...formative phases of their lives, which they often maintain in their daily habits in everyday life (generation-centric (GC) approach). The characteristics of media vary, providing different logics and affordances, and occupying different niches in time and space (medium-centric (MC) approach). Crisis events in the vicinity, such as gas emissions, terrorist attacks, pandemics and earthquakes, presumably ignite an augmented interest for information and news on the events that may cause a destabilization of established media usage routines. This article aims to conceptualize, describe and explain how four generations envision their media use during such crises. The article posits the GC/MC-model, a 2 × 2 matrix encompassing a generation-centric vis-á-vis a medium-centric approach, from which two hypotheses are derived. Statistical analysis of nationally representative survey data provides evidence that all generations, and both daily and less frequent users of different media, envision themselves turning to these during a crisis. Their envisioned broadening of media use, predominantly involving commanding attention to immediate news media reporting, results in a cross-generational homogenization of media use.
Amid digital developments, data journalism has gained a strong foothold among news publishers and in public discourse. With its authoritative claims and informative visualizations, it can play a ...significant role in the actions of citizens and people in power. This mixed-method case study explores a distinct epistemology developed in an independent form of data journalism in public service media in Scandinavia, not subordinate to traditional news values or investigative journalism. The study investigates its knowledge and truth claims, approach to data, transparency practices, and resources invested to claim reliable knowledge. The epistemology is characterized by innovative practices in the visualizing of essentially prejustified datasets. It claims public value offering general information and audience-friendly explorations of individual perspectives on topics on the public agenda. The approach to data views reality as measurable facts yet indicates epistemic ambiguity regarding figures’ reliability, guided by a principle of reasonableness in the justifications of truth claims.
Big Data and Journalism Lewis, Seth C.; Westlund, Oscar
Digital journalism,
05/2015, Letnik:
3, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Big data is a social, cultural, and technological phenomenon-a complex amalgamation of digital data abundance, emerging analytic techniques, mythology about data-driven insights, and growing critique ...about the overall consequences of big-data practices for democracy and society. While media and communication scholars have begun to examine and theorize about big data in the context of media and public life broadly, what are the particular implications for journalism? This article introduces and applies four conceptual lenses-epistemology, expertise, economics, and ethics-to explore both contemporary and potential applications of big data for the professional logic and industrial production of journalism. These distinct yet inter-related conceptual approaches reveal how journalists and news media organizations are seeking to make sense of, act upon, and derive value from big data during a time of exploration in algorithms, computation, and quantification. In all, the developments of big data potentially have great meaning for journalism's ways of knowing (epistemology) and doing (expertise), as well as its negotiation of value (economics) and values (ethics). Ultimately, this article outlines future directions for journalism studies research in the context of big data.
This study investigates the epistemological implications of the appropriation of audience analytics in a data-driven news culture. Focussing on two central aspects of epistemology, epistemic value ...and epistemic practices, we ask two overall questions (1) How are audience metrics balanced and reconciled in relation to other standards in the justification of news as valuable knowledge? How are different practices of research and presentation, truth-seeking and truth-telling, prioritized in a news organization marked as a data-driven news work culture? The study presents a case study of a Scandinavian legacy news publisher that has pursued the embracing of a data-driven news work culture. It is based on a qualitative multi-method approach. The findings show how metrics are used as a superior standard in deciding on the epistemic value of news. This is expressed in strategies, guidelines and discussions in the newsroom, and put into practice in coaching, evaluations and rewarding of the performance of individual journalists. In the everyday news production, metrics are reconciled in relation to independent standards in journalism, related to the claims of news journalism to provide relevant and verified public knowledge about current events. Moreover, the study shows how the embracement of metrics radicalizes the focus on presentation, packaging and timing in the optimization of news material and in the valuing of professional practices. Efforts in research and truth seeking are more seldom explicitly valued. The work of fulfilling reasonable truth claims is mainly taken for granted.
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