From Participatory Culture to Participatory Fatigue: The Problem With the Public

The Web has changed newswork dramatically. After the turn of the Millennium, the Web 2.0 was welcomed as a unique medium of participation, interaction, and democratization. Due to the increased interactivity of many websites, and the growing prominence of social networking sites such as Facebook that invited the creation and publication of user contributions, many journalism scholars promulgated the potentials of the Web to trigger participation, a new interactivity and, eventually, more transparency, accountability, and responsiveness. In this article, I show how I was equally full of hope that the participatory potential of the Web would become widespread among news organizations. However, recent findings show that most established newsrooms still do not practice what they preach. Even more so, many newsrooms show a participation fatigue, closing user comment sections due to participation inequality or challenging phenomena such as trolls, incivility, or hate-speech. Hence, I do not believe that the majority of legacy news media will further implement accountability practices and strengthen their responsiveness toward their publics. But I still have hope, and this hope comes from entrepreneurial journalism

Exploring the impact of an evolving war and terror blogosphere on traditional media coverage of conflict

This article analyses the evolution of a war and terror blogosphere between 2001 and 2011. It identifies seven areas where blogs and related online genres could provide ‘alternative’ accounts to traditional media narratives of conflict. The article also assesses the challenges and opportunities of blogs in each area from the perspective of the working journalist in order to deepen our understanding of the changing influence of blogs on traditional media narratives of conflict. Parallel accounts and interpretations of conflict will collaborate and compete in a war and terror blogosphere in the future, but it has been significantly influenced by the adoption of blogging by military actors since 2008. The war and terror blogosphere is no longer a relatively unmonitored online space which is having an impact on both the production of ‘alternative’ accounts of conflict and the incorporation of these accounts into traditional journalism

Five Ws and an H: Digital Challenges in Newspaper Newsrooms and Boardrooms

It is no news to anyone involved with the media, from the newsroom to the boardroom to the classroom, that journalism is at a crossroads as an occupation, a business, a content form, and a public good. This is perhaps particularly true of journalism in the traditional news medium of record, the newspaper, where enormous uncertainty surrounds virtually every facet of the enterprise as it adjusts to being part of a digital network. This essay uses a framework familiar to journalists and journalism educators -- the traditional “five Ws and an H” of who, what, when, where, why, and how -- to address some of the significant issues facing corporate and newsroom managers, as well as journalists themselves

\u3ci\u3eSnowedOut Atlanta\u3c/i\u3e: Examining digital emergence on facebook during a crisis

Individuals in emergencies form spontaneous, emergent groups to respond and recover. With the rise of social media use in crises, academics and professionals must be aware of how groups digitally coordinate emergent response efforts. This paper examines digital emergence through the case of SnowedOut Atlanta, a Facebook group formed during the 2014 ice storms in Atlanta. The posts and actions of the group members are in line with those of traditional emergent groups. For example, group members shared informational, material, and emotional support. The findings also provide implications for practitioners and insight into the communication of such groups. In particular, emergency managers have an opportunity to seek out and partner with these types of groups in future similar events

Examining user comments for deliberative democracy: a corpus-driven analysis of the climate change debate online

The public perception of climate change is characterized by heterogeneity, even polarization. Deliberative discussion is regarded by some as key to overcoming polarization and engaging various publics with the complex issue of climate change. In this context, online engagement with news stories is seen as a space for a new “deliberative democratic potential” to emerge. This article examines aspects of deliberation in user comment threads in response to articles on climate change taken from the Guardian. “Deliberation” is understood through the concepts “reciprocity”, “topicality”, and “argumentation”. We demonstrate how corpus analysis can be used to examine the ways in which online debates around climate change may create or deny opportunities for multiple voices and deliberation. Results show that whilst some aspects of online discourse discourage alternative viewpoints and demonstrate “incivility”, user comments also show potential for engaging in dialog, and for high levels of interaction

House prices and tourism development in Cyprus: A contemporary perspective

This study investigates the nexus between tourism development and house prices in the Republic of Cyprus over the period spanning from 2005Q1 to 2016Q4. Tourism indicators vis-à-vis tourism arrivals along with other explanatory variables (domestic credit, land area per person, and the consumer price index) are employed in a multivariate Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)-bound test model. The empirical results indicate a significant evidence of cointegration. Indicatively, an observed adjustment of about 44% from short-run to long-run implies that the model is not relatively slow to adjust to disequilibrium. Importantly, a percent increase in tourism arrivals is observed to cause a rise in house price by about 37%. Expectedly, it is statistically observed that as the land area per person decreases, it is accompanied by a hike in house price. Also, the impacts of domestic credit offered to private enterprises and the consumer price index are different from the results in previous studies. As a policy guide, the government of Cyprus and stakeholders in the tourism and housing sectors should outline a strategy that will ensure the social welfare of people such that housing availability is not hampered by tourism activities

Just a guy in pajamas? Framing the blogs in mainstream US newspaper coverage (1999—2005)

When new technologies are introduced to the public, their widespread adoption is dependent, in part, on news coverage (Rogers, 1995).Yet, as weblogs began to play major role in the public spheres of politics and journalism, journalists faced a paradox: how to cover a social phenomenon that was too large to ignore and posed a significant threat to their profession. This article examines how blogs were framed by US newspapers as the public became more aware of the blogging world. A content analysis of blog-related stories in major US newspapers from 1999 to 2005 was conducted. Findings suggest that newspaper coverage framed blogs as more beneficial to individuals and small cohorts than to larger social entities such as politics, business and journalism. Moreover, only in the realm of journalism were blogs framed as more of a threat than a benefit, and rarely were blogs considered an actual form of journalism.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Complementarity Between a Docking and a High-Throughput Screen in Discovering New Cruzain Inhibitors†

Virtual and high-throughput screens (HTS) should have complementary strengths and weaknesses, but studies that prospectively and comprehensively compare them are rare. We undertook a parallel docking and HTS screen of 197861 compounds against cruzain, a thiol protease target for Chagas disease, looking for reversible, competitive inhibitors. On workup, 99 % of the hits were eliminated as false positives, yielding 146 well-behaved, competitive ligands. These fell into five chemotypes: two were prioritized by scoring among the top 0.1 % of the docking-ranked library, two were prioritized by behavior in the HTS and by clustering, and one chemotype was prioritized by both approaches. Determination of an inhibitor/cruzain crystal structure and comparison of the high-scoring docking hits to experiment illuminated the origins of docking false-negatives and false-positives. Prioritizing molecules that are both predicted by docking and are HTS-active yields well-behaved molecules, relatively unobscured by the false-positives to which both techniques are individually prone

Intratumoral Genetic and Functional Heterogeneity in Pediatric Glioblastoma.

Pediatric glioblastoma (pGBM) is a lethal cancer with no effective therapies. To understand the mechanisms of tumor evolution in this cancer, we performed whole-genome sequencing with linked reads on longitudinally resected pGBM samples. Our analyses showed that all diagnostic and recurrent samples were collections of genetically diverse subclones. Clonal composition rapidly evolved at recurrence, with less than 8% of nonsynonymous single-nucleotide variants being shared in diagnostic-recurrent pairs. To track the origins of the mutational events observed in pGBM, we generated whole-genome datasets for two patients and their parents. These trios showed that genetic variants could be (i) somatic, (ii) inherited from a healthy parent, or (iii) de novo in the germlines of pGBM patients. Analysis of variant allele frequencies supported a model of tumor growth involving slow-cycling cancer stem cells that give rise to fast-proliferating progenitor-like cells and to nondividing cells. Interestingly, radiation and antimitotic chemotherapeutics did not increase overall tumor burden upon recurrence. These findings support an important role for slow-cycling stem cell populations in contributing to recurrences, because slow-cycling cell populations are expected to be less prone to genotoxic stress induced by these treatments and therefore would accumulate few mutations. Our results highlight the need for new targeted treatments that account for the complex functional hierarchies and genomic heterogeneity of pGBM. SIGNIFICANCE: This work challenges several assumptions regarding the genetic organization of pediatric GBM and highlights mutagenic programs that start during early prenatal development.Graphical Abstract: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/canres/79/9/2111/F1.large.jpg.Wellcome Trust Royal Societ