Journalism's Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation

Explores media trends, innovation and ethics in journalism, America's changing news habits, and standards for new forms of journalism. Includes recommendations for ensuring the future of journalism as both an ethical profession and a viable business

Nothing But the Truthiness: A History of Television News Parody and its Entry into the Journalistic Field

The relationship between humor and politics has been a frequently discussed issue for communication researchers in the new millennium. The rise and success of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report force a reevaluation of the relationship between journalism and politics. Through archival research of scripts, programs, and surrounding discourses this dissertation looks to the past and historicizes news parody as a distinct genre on American television. Since the 1960s several programs on network and cable parodied mainstream newscasts and newsmakers. More recent examples of this genre circulate within the same discursive field as traditional television news, thereby functioning both as news in their own right and as a corrective to traditional journalism grounded in practices of objectivity. The dissertation utilizes genre, discourse, and textual analyses to establish the attributes of television news parody and to analyze its role in past and contemporary journalism and culture

The Nature of Success and Failure in Television Journalism and the Role of Education

This qualitative study used interviews and participant observations of practicing television journalists. The on-the-job successes and failures were studied in order to understand the divide between educational training and professional practice. The findings of this study should help educators better understand the nature of on-the-job success and failure as articulated by working television journalists. In turn, educators can use that knowledge to develop educational strategies that will better prepare students for entry into the profession. In constructing a definition of success, the informants identified the following elements: success is in all levels; success is relative to a journalist\u27s age; success is never a finale; success is moving forward, working forward; success is being accurate; success is having a positive impact as a professional; and success means avoiding preventable on-air mistakes. Additional individual characteristics were identified. According to the informants, failure means a lack of certain characteristics, such as being factually incorrect or biased, not accomplishing the core purposes of TV news, stubbornness for producers, and not finding the story for reporters and anchors. The informants were ambivalent about their prior education. They felt it was necessary to learn about the theory of journalism in their educational training. However, they did not feel their education prepared them sufficiently for industry expectations. The theoretical framework of organizational socialization was used as a lens to analyze the findings. By clarifying the elements of the socialization process, new graduates may have a better idea what to expect in the early stages of their careers. Educators can find ways to enhance their teaching by introducing students to the tacit practices and conventions of the industry. By doing so, interns and new graduates may be better equipped for the transition points in the socialization phases of news work

Necessitation through Growing Entanglements: Why We “Can’t Live Without” Some Products

Much research has been concerned with what constitute necessities and how they are related to pertinent concepts, such as needs, wants, desires, and luxuries (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003; Duncan 2002; Fraser 1998, Hoyer and MacInnis 2004; Kerin, Hartley and Rudelius 2004; Sheth and Mittal 2004). Using thing-focused approaches, earlier studies are primarily concerned with classification schemes using dichotomies such as need-want and necessity-luxury. Studies that employ a human-focused perspective challenge these divisions and argue that necessities cannot be studied without considering the social and historical contexts (e.g., Buttle 1989; Firat 1987). Notwithstanding the important contributions that these studies have made, they have often explored necessities and necessitation primarily from the perspective of a dominant human subject (i.e., the consumer), where things (i.e., products) primarily serve as vehicles for consumer meaning. The contribution of this research is two-fold. First, a macro narrative that identifies five stages of smartphone necessitation in news consumption is derived from a narrative analysis of consumer texts, in order to better understand how consumers experience product necessitation. These stages are familiarization, transformation, memorialization, (re)integration and reconstruction, and solidification. Necessitation is achieved when consumers come to feel that they cannot live without this product. Second, entanglement theory (Hodder 2012) with its accentuation of dependences is employed. Hodder (2012) argues against the symmetrical nature of relations, suggesting that they are often asymmetrical. This observation translates into the concept of entanglement, which is “the dialectic of dependence and dependency between humans and things” (Hodder 2012, p. 89). Dependence occurs when the use of things is something enabling, while dependency is to be understood as occurring when their use imposes a constraint on humans (Hodder 2012).Tracing the historical increase of entanglements of news consumption leading to the necessitation of the smartphone, this study finds that necessitation emerges as a result of numerous small changes within entanglements over time, which, in turn, produce unexpected problems that need fixing. The solutions further increase entanglements and lead humans and things down the pathway of product necessitation. As the affordances of a product are gradually exploited, they fully entangle with a wide range of humans and things. Eventually a level of entanglements is reached that makes it difficult and expensive to turn back or disentangle, making the product come to be near-universally perceived as necessary

Multilingual journalism, news translation and discourse: converging methods, converging theories

This study explores a methodological and theoretical framework suitable for the investigation of multilingual journalism, news translation and the discourses that these two meaning-making activities promote and transmit to global audiences. Departing from the consideration that journalism as well as translation are multi-layered objects and may conceal power dynamics and struggles within society, I suggest that such complexities can only be addressed and analysed if deconstructed and successively reconstructed through a combination of methods and theoretical perspectives. This study merges different methodological approaches, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics and comparative analysis in order to grasp the complexities and ramifications of different forms of journalism (i.e. broadcasting, online, written and a mix of the three) in different national, supranational and international contexts, (i.e. Italy, the UK, Europe, Australia and the Internet). This combination of methods and theories is termed "convergence" to indicate the convergence of approaches from a variety of fields of studies functional to the investigation of both multilingual news discourse and news translation, and ultimately echoing the increasingly pervasive phenomenon of media convergence. The "convergence" framework allows us to move past the traditional Source Text – Target Text opposition, thus favouring a more flexible and wider concept of translation, one that seems to be more fitting to the reality of language transfer processes in the news. In order to demonstrate the validity of the framework of convergence, this thesis presents a corpus of multilingual audio-visual news transcripts (AVNews Corpus), and four case studies, two employing the AVNews Corpus, one envisaging a more traditional comparative analysis, and finally one making use of a small parallel corpus. The four case studies presented in this thesis aim to showcase the validity of this framework, eventually calling for larger and more systematic studies about language transfer activities in the news

Meeting local needs from a distance: The role of diaspora media outlets as providers of informative humanitarian support across borders - The Case of Syria

In a time shaped by an increased level of globalization and transnationalism, our perception of the immediate ‘local’ and the more distant ‘global’ is becoming more and more challenged by the forging of transnational flows, bonds and networks evolving in a rapid pace across profound distances. The new social, political and economic opportunities deriving from such transnational connections have been harnessed by various sectors of society, out of which media is one of them. With the development of information and communication technology (ICT), transnationalism has opened up new opportunities for media outlets to communicate messages over large distances and across national borders. In the midst of the Syrian civil war (2011 – present), researchers have witnessed an ongoing transformation of the Syrian media landscape, in which emerging transnational networks between media outlets in diaspora and journalists on the ground in Syria have opened up for new opportunities for Syrian independent media to continue their work amid the conflict. The emergence of Syrian diaspora media outlets (DMOs) working in cooperation with citizen journalists on the ground in Syria has allowed for information flows to cross national borders and transcend geographical distances. By operating through places that are located outside existing legislation, this has created a grey area in which journalists are able to push boundaries and circumvent Syrian state control and censorship of independent media. While previous studies have focused on Syrian DMOs’ role in the provision of news between their homeland and the international media community, there is a gap in the research on the reverse influence; namely on what role Syrian DMOs can play in providing their homeland citizens with information which they are lacking from inside their country. Based on an examination of seven independent Syrian DMOs, this study aims to fill the current research gap. The study illuminates the potential of DMOs in a changing and dynamic media environment; particularly by stressing their unique advantage in being able to engage in local issues while operating from a geographical distance. In particular, the study looks closer upon how DMOs are able to work to provide practical and non-political information in the form of informative humanitarian support (IHS) to their homeland citizens. By doing so, the study examines the potential of DMOs in taking on the role as humanitarian actors in the development community

Disciplining news practices in the age of metric power: a networked ethnographic study of everyday newswork in a Spanish media group

This thesis investigates the encounter of journalists with metrics in the quantified newsroom. Drawing on scholarship on news production, the critical political economy of media, the sociology of quantification and the Foucauldian approach to power and resistance, the thesis asks who decides which metrics matter in news production and what is the role of metrics in the newsroom. Drawing on a networked ethnography, the study examines the production and circulation of metrics within the Spanish media group Atresmedia and in particular in the news department of the television station La Sexta. In so doing, the thesis follows the flow of metrics into the newsroom and identifies the nodes that determine the repackaging of metrics. Finally, the thesis interrogates the journalists' consumption, interpretation and use of metrics. Empirically, the thesis is based on a 17-week networked ethnography, including 44 semi-structured interviews with journalists, data analysts and executives. The empirical data are presented in four levels: (1) The data ecosystem, (2) the institutional stage of metrics production, (3) the news team practices in the lights of metrics, and (4) the individual professional consumption of metrics. Drawing on the empirical analysis, the thesis argues that the metrics that arrive at the newsroom are crafted, re-packaged and re-signified to subtly convey disciplinary techniques that permeate the process of news production whilst also engendering resistance, with consequences for news products, news programming, audiences, and journalistic autonomy. Ultimately, the research contributes to understanding of the relationship between journalism and metrics. It also provides insights into the debates about the future of journalism in a challenging economic, social and political climate

When Mediated Poverty Stereotypes align with Public Opinion: A Clear Predictor of Ideology and Party in the U.S.

Attribution Theory observes that people have a compelling need to explain things, and those explanations break down into things internal to the self or to an outside force. This article notes how neatly that theory parallels work by Lakoff that conservatives and Republicans take a stern father approach to issues, finding individual fault for almost any problem, while Democrats and liberals look to external forces. Mediated portrayals of poverty tend to enforce the former view rather than the latter. Through secondary analyses of many polls, the researcher confirms that political ideology and party align at highly significant levels with how respondents answer the question Why are people poor