THE ACCUSED IS ENTERING THE COURTROOM: THE LIVE-TWEETING OF A MURDER TRIAL.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThe use of social media is now widely accepted within journalism as an outlet for news information. Live tweeting of unfolding events is standard practice. In March 2014, Oscar Pistorius went on trial in the Gauteng High Court for murder. Hundreds of journalists present began live-tweeting coverage, an unprecedented combination of international interest, permission to use technology and access which resulted in massive streams of consciousness reports of events as they unfolded. Based on a corpus of Twitter feeds of twenty-four journalists covering the trial, this study analyses the content and strategies of these feeds in order to present an understanding of how microblogging is used as a live reporting tool. This study shows the development of standardised language and strategies in reporting on Twitter, concluding that journalists adopt a narrow range of approaches, with no significant variation in terms of gender, location, or medium. This is in contrast to earlier studies in the field (Awad, 2006, Hedman, 2015; Kothari, 2010; Lariscy, Avery, Sweetser, & Howes, 2009 Lasorsa, 2012; Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2011; Sigal, 1999, Vis, 2013).Peer reviewe

The architectures of media power: editing, the newsroom, and urban public space

This paper considers the relation of the newsroom and the city as a lens into the more general relation of production spaces and mediated publics. Leading theoretically from Lee and LiPuma’s (2002) notion of ‘cultures of circulation’, and drawing on an ethnography of the Toronto Star, the paper focuses on how media forms circulate and are enacted through particular practices and material settings. With its attention to the urban milieus and orientations of media organizations, this paper exhibits both affinities with but also differences to current interests in the urban architectures of media, which describe and theorize how media get ‘built into’ the urban experience more generally. In looking at editing practices situated in the newsroom, an emphasis is placed on the phenomenological appearance of media forms both as objects for material assembly as well as more abstracted subjects of reflexivity, anticipation and purposiveness. Although this is explored with detailed attention to the settings of the newsroom and the city, the paper seeks to also provide insight into the more general question of how publicness is material shaped and sited

Uplifting manhood to wonderful heights? News coverage of the human costs of military conflict from world war I to Gulf war Two

Domestic political support is an important factor constraining the use of American military power around the world. Although the dynamics of war support are thought to reflect a cost-benefit calculus, with costs represented by numbers of friendly war deaths, no previous study has examined how information about friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties is routinely presented to domestic audiences. This paper establishes a baseline measure of historical casualty reporting by examining New York Times coverage of five major wars that occurred over the past century. Despite important between-war differences in the scale of casualties, the use of conscription, the type of warfare, and the use of censorship, the frequency of casualty reporting and the framing of casualty reports has remained fairly consistent over the past 100 years. Casualties are rarely mentioned in American war coverage. When casualties are reported, it is often in ways that minimize or downplay the human costs of war

Reporting through the lens of the past: from Challenger to Columbia

Collective memory, the publicly shared meaning of a common past, can structure both news stories and reporters' search for information within the broader context of journalistic practices. It can also provide reporters with an independent perspective, balancing elite-dominated news frames. Following the space shuttle Columbia's crash, journalists turned repeatedly to the ‘lessons' of the accident that claimed the Challenger shuttle 17 years earlier both in formulating questions at NASA briefings and in reporting Columbia's destruction and the subsequent investigation in print. In many instances, journalists' reliance on these memories is entirely implicit in the finished news stories, making Challenger a ghostly presence that led reporters to focus on NASA's inadequacies rather than on the mechanical causes of Columbia's demise.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The Ethical Implications of an Elite Press

Newspaper publishers are well into the process of bifurcating what once was a single mass-market product. Particularly for larger papers, website versions are taking over the mass-market role, while remaining print products are moving toward targeting a much smaller and more elite readership. This article explores theoretical and ethical issues raised by such a two-tiered newspaper structure and suggests directions for empirical study. Broadly, concerns center on the widening knowledge gap between print and online newspaper readers and its implications for civic discourse and democratic vitality. More narrowly, issues encompass a potential bifurcation of normative standards, including diverging markers of credibility, accuracy, and privacy

News content online: Patterns and norms under convergence dynamics

The article investigates evolutionary trends in online news presentation and delivery in the light of convergence dynamics. The case study of Greece is an example of how convergence ideas are ‘normalised’ in the actual content due to countering forces exercised by the dominant professional culture and organisational models in the news business. The findings provide evidence that the outcomes of this new culture of high interconnectivity that come along with convergence cannot be ignored even in countries with no advanced employment of its potentialities. At the same time, questions on whether, under conditions of scarce resources and a weak journalistic culture, convergence affordances actually create spaces for a more open and inclusive journalism or are used mainly as vehicles for economic survival, smothering any other potential, are raised