Mobile Crowdsourcing of News Content – Participation Preferences and Implications for Design

Citizens participate increasingly in hyperlocal news content creation. In order to make content creation more meaningful to reader reporters and more interesting to a wider audience, it is necessary to examine the factors that influence participation and carrying out mobile assignments. This thesis has been carried out at Tampere University of Technology, Unit of Human-Centered Technology (IHTE) in 2012. The research was carried out as part of the Next Media programme by TIVIT and funded by TEKES. The trial was conducted in co-operation with Sanoma Kaupunkilehdet. The goal of the research was to study participation preferences and motivations of readers participating in news content co-creation process. The study included a five-week mobile crowdsourcing trial with photo assignments using Scoopshot application. The participants in the study were 104 readers of omakaupunki.fi hyperlocal news portal. Information on the factors affecting participation was collected via a web survey open for all participants and interviews of five participants. The results of the study indicate that the participants’ willingness to put effort to carrying out assignments is high and the trial was found a positive experience. Still the degree of activity was low. Many young people were participating and more suitable topics for them were wished for. The activity seems to be pleasant pastime. It is considered as a challenge or a game. Photo assignment was found the most pleasant assignment type. Also video assignments and information acquisition were of interest. Based on the results of this study and the related literature, implications for designing mobile tasks for news content co-creation were formed. They can be adapted to other types of crowdsourcing, too

Who Gets Vocal about Hyperlocal: Neighborhood Involvement and Socioeconomics in the Sharing of Hyperlocal News

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journalism Practice on January 9. 2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2017.1419827.This study examined the characteristics of readers who share hyperlocal news in person, over email, and through social media. A reader survey of 10 hyperlocal news websites that operate in a variety of communities in the United States was conducted (n = 2289). More readers indicated sharing hyperlocal news in person than through email or social media. Higher neighborhood involvement and higher education tended to characterize readers who shared hyperlocal news via each of the three channels. Education moderated the association between neighborhood involvement and sharing news in person and via social media. These results suggested that highly involved readers with little education used social media more than their highly educated neighbors to share news from hyperlocal websites. The study extends the precepts of channel complementarity theory into the domain of online news sharing

Hyperlocal Community Media Audiences: An Ethnographic Study of Local Media Spaces and Their Place in Everyday Life

Hyperlocal media is a form of online, alternative community media created by citizens to service their locality. To date, much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on editorial practice, non-UK contexts, or frames these practices as response to receding mainstream local journalism and concerns of civic engagement. In this study I take a different approach, exploring instead the everyday, functional and social contexts which are established in the audience’s highly participatory use of hyperlocal Facebook Pages. I conceptualise such spaces as fields which are integrated both in the individual user’s media ideology, but also amongst a wider sense of overlapping fields of local information and socialites, both online and offline. This work emerges from ethnographic studies of two hyperlocal communities in the West Midlands, in which information was gathered through participant observation, interview, and via an innovative Community Panel approach. I argue that Facebook Pages play a key role for many people in engaging with their neighbourhoods, but not exclusively so, as I demonstrate their place amongst other sources of information and social life. The Pages benefit from being mediated by their editors to create online spaces that welcome participation partly shaped by the audience’s engagement and contribution, thus creating alternative streams of local information that challenge agendas set out by mainstream media. These become integrated into the everyday practices of the audience, therefore, care must be taken to recognise to what extent the broader experience of the neighbourhood is represented in such online practices, and I argue that certain narratives and discourses of the locality are contributed to and constructed online, and not always helpfully so, as in depictions of crime. Where the audience might challenge such depictions, and hold authority to account (the police, for example), this public sphere ideal is not typically acted through. Whilst this does not bode well for the literature’s hopes for political or civic engagement, this thesis demonstrates that audiences develop such spaces in their own vision, to enact and share a capital of local knowledge and information, sometimes innovating in their own ways using mobile technologies in order to do so. This thesis concludes by saying that such online spaces demonstrate the role of media technologies in everyday life, and the extent to which they are perpetuated and maintained by practitioners and their increasingly capable and enabled audiences

Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

Effect of localized national news on audience value perception

The widespread usage of the internet and online media has changed the relationship between reader and online news publication. Previous studies have found that the greater public is unwilling to pay for online media, especially online news. This study explored how content angle, localized national news or standard national news, impacted audience perceptions of value, willingness to pay for online news, and likelihood to subscribe. A digital questionnaire was administered to 50 participants who were exposed to localized and standard versions of news stories and asked to make personal evaluations of the content and fictional news outlets. The results of this study showed that content angle, localized national versus standard national, has a significant effect on perceived value of news content, but no impact on the perceived value of news outlet. Beyond analyzing content angle' effect on value perceptions, this study measured how content angle and commitment to local community affected willingness to pay and likelihood to subscribe. However, the effect of content angle on willingness to pay and likelihood to subscribe was not statistically significant. Further, the interaction between content angle and individual commitment to local community was also not statistically significant.by Emily Christine RackersIncludes bibliographical reference

Notes from the Neighborhood: Who is writing, what, when, where, how and why

textClosure of many mainstream media outlets in towns across the United States have left many neighborhoods bereft of any news about their community. In a number of such areas, former journalists and/or community members have started online news sites that provide news and information to the community. As these outlets focus on a small geographic location, ranging from a neighborhood to a city, they are called hyperlocal news sites. The questions that logically arise then are how are these outlets reporting the news? Are they similar to their mainstream media counterparts or is their approach to news and information different? Most importantly, how do the people who start, or work at these sites, adopt the new all-in-one roles, where they are not only the reporter but also the ad sales manager and the publisher? This dissertation, through a two-method approach, examines these questions and tries to provide answers. An online survey of the people who started and or work for hyperlocal sites, provides data that those working for hyperlocal media have the same demographics as those who work in American mainstream media. The survey results also showed that most of respondents follow the same journalistic behaviors and gatekeeping practices as their mainstream counterparts. From a role identity perspective, the study shows that in the absence of role-models, the journalists-turned-entrepreneurs are in the process of carving a niche for themselves within journalism. In-depth interviews with the respondents reveal that while they identify themselves as journalists, their active role in revenue generation requires them to frame their work identity and present a holistic, positive image of their work. What this study does is capture the dynamism of the journalists’ changing roles. It explains why journalists who start news media sites are unable to monetize their product; they lack role models/exemplars/prototypes that can provide them a blueprint for modeling their behaviors in these new roles as well as the direction in which they take their sites. This research and more in the area can be seen as building blocks towards the creation of a roadmap for them.Journalis

Building civic architecture in cyberspace: digital civic spaces and the people who create them

At the same time as we are seeing ever increasing numbers of people actively using social networking sites, and growing evidence of increased participation in campaigning and digital activism, we are seeing a decline in democratic participation in the UK at both a national and local level. This thesis examines these two contrasting effects within the context of Local Government in the UK and explores what the impact might be at the neighbourhood level. The work discusses the influence of place based online activity on democratic decision-making Local Government and the ways in which traditional processes of decision-making, democratic participation and community engagement practice may need to change to reflect the upward pressure that is being exerted by citizen use of new technologies and adjust the way in which Local Government facilitates citizen participation in decision-making. The work develops the concept of Digital civic space as an alternative to eParticipation platforms and discusses how such spaces are being used to connect online activity with democratic processes at present and how present experience may be used to inform future developments. Employing an Action Research method, the research analyses three projects in order to examine the nature of the pre-existing participation online and the impact of creating online civic spaces to connect the participants both to each other and to local decision-makers. Design criteria are proposed which describe the necessary qualities of public-ness, openness, co-production, definition of place and identity and the thesis reaches conclusions as to how these criteria might better connect local resident with the democratic decision-making processes for their communities

“On the margins”: a qualitative analysis of independent hyperlocal news through a subcultural lens

This thesis adopts a little used subcultural lens for a qualitative investigation of selective UK independent hyperlocal publishers. Drawing on the biographical tradition of Robert Park of the Chicago School and the subsequent work on subcultures, it gives voice to 27 independent operators whose narrative of their everyday publishing activities evidences a variety of themes. These include the emergence of independent hyperlocal publishing as a result of a crisis in mainstream local newspapers. This crisis was the result of a combination of factors: the disruption of the internet, centralisation strategies which distanced local newspapers from communities and finally the effects of the economic downturn. The thesis considers how independent publishers, operating on the margins of the local news ecosystem, have retrieved and repurposed aspects of the mainstream and put them to good use; frequently reinventing working practices discarded by the ‘parent culture’. Changes to the research field during the study period are also included to show a sector both organising and professionalising itself, while re-negotiating its relationship with mainstream organisations. This is in line with the notion that subcultures can ‘travel’ (Hebdige, 2014: 9) as they evolve. To contextualise narratives, three further interviews were included with representatives of philanthropic organisations which have helped independent publishing gain a foothold in the local news ecosystem. The thesis includes a high degree of autobiographical inscription by acknowledging the journalistic background of the author. The overall research strategy is a subjective, inductive approach based on the feminist tradition of open-ended, one-to-one interviews. The methodological approach is Grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Corbin and Strauss, 2015; Birks and Mills, 2015)