Upends the traditional media narrative that watchdog (accountability) journalism is in a long, dismaying declineWatchdog reporting has played a critical role in the events of the moment, from the ...2016 election to the developing political situation
Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role-its ability to monitor the work of the government. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power, wasting public funds, and making poor decisions if the press is not shining its light with what is termed "accountability reporting." This need has become especially clear in recent months, as the American press has come under virulent direct attack for carrying out its watchdog duties.
This book presents a study of how this most important form of journalism, watchdog reporting, came of age in the digital era at American newspapers. Based on the first content analysis to focus specifically on accountability journalism nationally,The Watchdog Still Barksexamines the front pages of nine newspapers, located across the United States, for clues on how papers addressed the watchdog role as the advent of the Internet transformed journalism. This portrait of the modern newspaper industry shows how papers of varying sizes and ownership structures around the country marshaled resources for accountability reporting despite significant financial and technological challenges.
Although the American newspaper industry contracted significantly during the 1990s and 2000s, as the digital transformation drove down circulation and print ad revenues, the data collected here shows that papers studied actually held fast to the watchdog role. Although the newspapers studied all endured large budget and staff cuts during the 20 years studied as paid circulation and advertising dropped, the amount of deep watchdog reporting on their front pages generally increased over time.The Watchdog Still Barkscontains original interviews with editors of the newspapers studied, who explain why they are staking their papers' futures on the one thing that American newspapers still do better than any other segment of the media-watchdog and investigative reporting.
Uses empirical methods (content analysis and interviews), where previous studies have generalized from anecdotes (and arrived at the wrong conclusion)
There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within ...this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.
This open access book is a rare example of the ethnographic study of investigative journalism. This book explores entrepreneurial attempts to combine traditional investigative journalism with ...alternative ways of organising this work. It transcends watershed investigative projects in favour of the ways in which new actors (citizens, technologists, bloggers and local reporters, among others) join experienced investigative journalists in experiments with the practices of watchdog journalism in the digital era. Cases include Bristol Cable, Bureau Local and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, as well as Forbidden Stories. The book also includes two chapters on the impact of COVID-19 upon the development of cross-disciplinary work in a traditional newsroom and in the larger media ecosystems of both Norway and China. This is a timely book for journalism students, scholars and investigative reporters, who share a passion for this form of journalism.
We conducted an online experiment to study people’s perception of automated computer-written news. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 design, we varied the article topic (sports, finance; within-subjects) and both ...the articles’ actual and declared source (human-written, computer-written; between-subjects). Nine hundred eighty-six subjects rated two articles on credibility, readability, and journalistic expertise. Varying the declared source had small but consistent effects: subjects rated articles declared as human written always more favorably, regardless of the actual source. Varying the actual source had larger effects: subjects rated computer-written articles as more credible and higher in journalistic expertise but less readable. Across topics, subjects’ perceptions did not differ. The results provide conservative estimates for the favorability of computer-written news, which will further increase over time and endorse prior calls for establishing ethics of computer-written news.
The digitalization has affected all areas of communication, significant changes have occurred in the educational environment. This paper discusses the possibilities of including digital texts in the ...educational process. Digital longform Journalism has recently attracted increased attention among Internet users, including teachers. Сonsequently Digital Longform journalistic works must be considered not only in terms of journalism but also as an effective learning material. Potential of digital technologies is to integrate photographs, videos, information graphics, audios, animation effects into educational text. The transmission of information using different semiotic systems allows us to consider Digital longform Journalism as a multimodal genre. In order to analyze the possibilities of using Digital longform Journalism in learning, educational longform text are described: we have analyzed their structural organization and content, as well as the interaction of verbal and audiovisual components. As a result of the study ways of using Digital longform Journalism in the educational process are proposed: It can be used for the presentation of educational material and as the form of the final student project.
The News Gap Boczkowski, Pablo J; Mitchelstein, Eugenia
11/2013
eBook
The sites of major media organizations -- CNN,USA Today, theGuardian, and others -- provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories ...these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine this gap and consider the implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age.Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture. They show that it narrows in times of heightened political activity (including presidential elections or government crises) as readers feel compelled to inform themselves about public affairs but remains wide during times of normal political activity. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein also find that the gap is not affected by innovations in Web-native forms of storytelling such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Keeping the account of the news gap up to date, in the book's coda they extend the analysis through the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Drawing upon these findings, the authors explore the news gap's troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.
Newswork and Precarity Chadha, Kalyani; Steiner, Linda
2022, 20211230, 2021, 2021-12-30
eBook
This edited collection brings together leading scholars from around the world to discuss the consequences and implications of precarious labor conditions within the modern news industry.
In 14 ...original chapters, contributors address global concerns in journalism across all platforms, based on the assumption that unstable employment conditions affect the extent to which journalists can continue to play their historically crucial role in sustaining democracies. Topics discussed include work conditions for freelancers and entrepreneurial journalists as well as the risks facing conflict reporters, precarity in media start-ups, unionization and other collective efforts, policies regulating journalistic labor around the world, and the impact of hedge fund money on newswork. Drawing on case studies and data from South America, Africa, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe, the book highlights how media outlets are forcing newsworkers to work harder for less money, and few countries are proactive in alleviating the precarity of journalists.
Newswork and Precarity is a valuable addition to an important still-emerging area in journalism studies that will be of interest to both professionals and scholars of journalism, media studies, sociology, and labor history.
This international edited collection brings together the latest research in political journalism, examining the ideological, commercial and technological forces that are transforming the field and ...its evolving relationship with news audiences.
Comprising 40 original chapters written by scholars from around the world, The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism offers fundamental insights from the disciplines of political science, media, communications and journalism. Drawing on interviews, discourse analysis and quantitative statistical methods, the volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on a major theme in the contemporary study of political journalism. Topics covered include far-right media, populism movements and the media, local political journalism practices, public engagement and audience participation in political journalism, agenda setting, and advocacy and activism in journalism. Chapters draw on case studies from the United Kingdom, Hungary, Russia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Italy, Brazil, the United States, Greece and Spain.
The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism is a valuable resource for students and scholars of media studies, journalism studies, political communication and political science.
Americans pay famously close attention to "the market," obsessively watching trends, patterns, and swings and looking for clues in every fluctuation. In Reading the Market, Peter Knight explores the ...Gilded Age origins and development of this peculiar interest. He tracks the historic shift in market operations from local to national while examining how present-day ideas about the nature of markets are tied to past genres of financial representation.Drawing on the late nineteenth-century explosion of art, literature, and media, which sought to dramatize the workings of the stock market for a wide audience, Knight shows how ordinary Americans became both emotionally and financially invested in the market. He analyzes popular investment manuals, brokers’ newsletters, newspaper columns, magazine articles, illustrations, and cartoons. He also introduces readers to fiction featuring financial tricksters, which was characterized by themes of personal trust and insider information. The book reveals how the popular culture of the period shaped the very idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism by making the impersonal abstractions of high finance personal and concrete.From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance—and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now.
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