Merry Laughter and Angry Curses reveals how the late-Qing-era tabloid press became the voice of the people. As periodical publishing reached a fever pitch, tabloids had free rein to criticize ...officials, mock the elite, and scandalize readers. Tabloid writers produced a massive amount of anti-establishment literature, whose distinctive humour and satirical style were both potent and popular. This book shows the tabloid community to be both a producer of meanings and a participant in the social and cultural dialogue that would shake the foundations of imperial China and lead to the 1911 Republican Revolution.
Around the world, tabloid newspapers are routinely surrounded by a moral and cultural panic. They are criticised for lowering standards of journalism and privileging sensation above substance, ...diverting readers from serious news to entertainment, or foregoing ethical principles. However, scholarship about tabloids have also highlighted the ways in which these papers are frequently better attuned to their readers’ everyday lived experience. In South Africa, tabloid newspapers have also received much criticism in the past for their perceived superficial treatment of important news. This article examines South African tabloid newspapers’ coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, focussing specifically on a case study of the national newspaper the Daily Sun. The national Daily Sun newspaper boasts the country’s largest circulation figures. Through a quantitative content analysis of 1050 online news stories in the Daily Sun, we found that unlike mainstream front-page news reporting which was largely episodic, negative and alarmist, the majority of Daily Sun coverage was thematic and neutral. Daily Sun news coverage countered Covid-19 related misinformation and provided contextual coverage, with a large focus on the social impacts of Covid-19. The analysis concludes that despite the popular discourse of the reporting, Daily Sun reporting on Covid-19 provided readers with access to information and a focus on the micro aspects of the pandemic versus broader political issues and the views of political or scientific elites.
How a virtual journalist in the virtual world of online gaming landed on the real-world front page of the New York Times and how his virtual newspaper chronicled the emergence of the next generation ...of the World Wide Web.
This paper addresses the subject of letters to the editor as one of the longest standing forums for public discussion and debate by ordinary citizens. To show how the voice of ordinary citizens is ...presented in letters to the editor during national election campaigns over a period of ten years (2008, 2013 & 2017), we are focusing on the Austrian Kronen Zeitung: A newspaper with an exceptionally high market share of up to 40% during the examination period, a heavy focus on the letters section with three pages per day, and a self-declared willingness to take a stance, especially during election periods. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 530 letters to the editor and 525 articles in the politics section as well as survey data from the Austrian national election study on the political positions of the Kronen Zeitung's readers, we find that letters to the editor in the Kronen Zeitung do not reflect, but complement the articles in the politics section. The tone of the letters is more negative than that of news articles, but the letters closely reflect the readers' political positions, therefore offering identification with the paper.
Structural linguistic characteristics are an important aspect of written communication. Previous research shows that linguistic complexity plays an important role in how people process information. ...With increasing popularity and readership of citizen journalism, questions of how structurally different this medium is from its professional counterparts and how this difference potentially affects readers become salient. Using automated content analysis methods, the present study investigates the differences in linguistic complexity across various citizen and professional journalism outlets. The analysis shows that the patterns of presenting political information across various media are different. These findings have direct implications for various branches of communication and journalism studies such as the knowledge gap hypothesis, language expectancy theory, and credibility research.
Less than a decade after the advent of democracy in South Africa, tabloid
newspapers have taken the country by storm. One of these papers -- the Daily Sun --
is now the largest in the country, but it ...has generated controversy for its
perceived lack of respect for privacy, brazen sexual content, and unrestrained
truth-stretching. Herman Wasserman examines the success of tabloid journalism in
South Africa at a time when global print media are in decline. He considers the
social significance of the tabloids and how they play a role in integrating readers
and their daily struggles with the political and social sphere of the new democracy.
Wasserman shows how these papers have found an important niche in popular and civic
culture largely ignored by the mainstream media and formal political
channels.
Background: Educating
the public about suicide is an important component of suicide prevention. So far, little is
known about whether common misconceptions of suicide are related to individual ...tabloid
newspaper use. Aims: This study aimed to investigate associations of time spent reading
tabloids with endorsement of suicide myths, suicide-related knowledge, and with stigmatizing
attitudes toward suicidal individuals. Method: In this cross-sectional online survey, we
assessed suicide-related knowledge and stigmatizing attitudes toward suicidal individuals
among 456 study participants in Austria together with their endorsement of five common
suicide myths (e.g., "suicidal individuals do not communicate their intent"). Furthermore,
we assessed participants' time spent reading tabloids. Results: Multivariate analyses
controlling for gender, age, education, and the time spent reading broadsheet newspapers and
watching television indicated that participants' time spent reading tabloids was associated
with higher endorsement of suicide myths as well as with a lower level of suicide-related
knowledge and a higher level of stigmatizing attitudes toward suicidal individuals.
Limitations: Due to the study's cross-sectional design, causality concerning these
associations could not be assessed. Conclusion: The present findings confirm that readers of
tabloids are an important target group for suicide education efforts.
Emotionalization is increasingly used in the daily news. However, communication scholars have only just begun to explore how journalists use emotionalization in coverage of scientific and ...environmental topics. This study contributes to filling this research gap by investigating emotionalization in reporting on honey bee colony losses. The aim of the study is to analyze the amount of emotionalization that took place, as well as to observe changes over time. Emotionalization is assessed in two ways; by analyzing to what extent journalists (1) explicitly mentioned discrete emotions in news stories (joy, hope, fear, anger, etc.) and/or (2) used rhetorical devices to evoke emotions (affective vocabulary, metaphors, colloquial language, superlatives, etc.). Results from a quantitative content analysis of four Austrian newspapers in 2010/2011, 2013/2014, and 2017/2018 show that the coverage is highly emotionalized across all three time periods studied. Emotionalization occurs far more often by using rhetorical devices than by explicitly mentioning positive or negative emotions. Interestingly, the incorporation of emotional elements and scientific expertise in the news items do not exclude one another. Hence, there seems to be no strict dichotomy between rational/objective and emotional reporting.
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