EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AND ITS IMPACT ON THE PRODUCTION AND QUALITY OF LOCAL TELEVISION NEWS

Technology is an integral part of journalism. Journalists use computers, IP-based servers, and digital gear as instruments to gather, process, and distribute news regarding events that impact our lives. Beyond the basic tools of the trade, the use of technology can dramatically influence the process of producing news. This project examines how the use of this technology impacts the collection, analysis, production, and quality of local television news. The study also addresses how technology is redefining the role of newsworkers in local television newsrooms. The methods of data collection include a survey and focus group of journalists with experience at local and national news networks, a content analysis of sixty local newscasts, and interviews with television news workers. The research questions address the impact of technology on the production and quality of local television news. I ask, among other questions, whether the increased number of required daily tasks has affected quality and whether news professionals say they see such effects; how, and to what extent, digital technologies such as IP-based store-and-forward technology, smaller portable newsgathering gear, and cellular-based transmission methods have affected production, and whether journalists say they see negative effects; that the use of network-affiliate and subscription-based news services have changed how local television news is produced. Overall, I conclude that the role of a local television journalist has changed and a new hybrid editorial/technical role has emerged. These hybrid journalists are required to perform more technical tasks, resulting in time diverted away from traditional tasks such as story research, news analysis, and script writing. My research aligns with existing literature in proposing that these changes are contributing to a decline of quality in local television news. This is an indirect result of using newer technology. The use of these tools has made the collection and distribution of content more efficient, but the speed and ease of this technology have resulted in more tasks being performed by individual journalists, which leads to less locally generated content. In addition, the increased need to supply original content to station websites and social media platforms has also negatively affected quality

Systematic Analysis of the Factors Contributing to the Variation and Change of the Microbiome

abstract: Understanding changes and trends in biomedical knowledge is crucial for individuals, groups, and institutions as biomedicine improves people’s lives, supports national economies, and facilitates innovation. However, as knowledge changes what evidence illustrates knowledge changes? In the case of microbiome, a multi-dimensional concept from biomedicine, there are significant increases in publications, citations, funding, collaborations, and other explanatory variables or contextual factors. What is observed in the microbiome, or any historical evolution of a scientific field or scientific knowledge, is that these changes are related to changes in knowledge, but what is not understood is how to measure and track changes in knowledge. This investigation highlights how contextual factors from the language and social context of the microbiome are related to changes in the usage, meaning, and scientific knowledge on the microbiome. Two interconnected studies integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence examine the variation and change of the microbiome evidence are presented. First, the concepts microbiome, metagenome, and metabolome are compared to determine the boundaries of the microbiome concept in relation to other concepts where the conceptual boundaries have been cited as overlapping. A collection of publications for each concept or corpus is presented, with a focus on how to create, collect, curate, and analyze large data collections. This study concludes with suggestions on how to analyze biomedical concepts using a hybrid approach that combines results from the larger language context and individual words. Second, the results of a systematic review that describes the variation and change of microbiome research, funding, and knowledge are examined. A corpus of approximately 28,000 articles on the microbiome are characterized, and a spectrum of microbiome interpretations are suggested based on differences related to context. The collective results suggest the microbiome is a separate concept from the metagenome and metabolome, and the variation and change to the microbiome concept was influenced by contextual factors. These results provide insight into how concepts with extensive resources behave within biomedicine and suggest the microbiome is possibly representative of conceptual change or a preview of new dynamics within science that are expected in the future.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biology 201