'News with a kick': a model of oppositional reporting

This article explores uses of reporting techniques by de facto journalists operating within alternative media, paying particular attention to the extent to which those who tend to be marginalised by mainstream journalism may be heard via alternative journalism. The article is based on an empirical study of an online provider of alternative local news operating in a UK city. Reflecting on conceptualisations of alternative journalism (Forde, 2011; Atton, 2002), the article proposes a model of 'oppositional' reporting that combines pragmatic use of journalistic skills with an ideological critique of the hegemonic discourses of powerful social groupings and mainstream media alike. Such oppositional reporting speaks up for the powerless and, at times, allows the powerless to speak directly for themselves

The struggle for news value in the digital era

News has long been a contested concept but in the digital era it has become increasingly fractured and multidimensional. This discursive article explores some of the ways in which the news has been disrupted by technological and economic tensions and argues that the social value of news is worth articulating and, where necessary, struggling for. News values have never been universal or unproblematic, and the tension between commercial and social ways of valuing news is intensified today. News values are not fixed and must be open to critique as to how they are meeting citizens’ needs. Societally useful news may be at risk of being marginalized as news organizations struggle to survive, but it is not inevitable that disruption and digitization should undermine journalistic ethics and the social value of news. In arguing that scholars ought to approach news more holistically, to defend it as well as critique it, the article attempts to synthesize what typically appears as discrete approaches to studying news. The article concludes that, if the social value of news is not to suffer further diminution, there is a need to view news through a lens of struggle; a struggle in which journalists, audiences, scholars and, indeed, all citizens have a part to play

Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011

Metaphor and intertextuality in media framings of the (1984-85) British Miners' Strike:a multimodal analysis

The British Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. Media stance toward the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike (Williams 2009a, 2014). Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal BBC report only recently made public shows that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ (Harcup 2014). Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this paper, drawing on Critical Cognitive Linguistics, I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Miners, persisted through the year long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of (de)legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representatio

Euphoric defiance: the role of positive emotions in the British Eurosceptic discourse

Ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union, emotions have dominated the public debate. How negative emotions, such as anger, have impacted the Brexit vote, has been widely researched. Less attention has been focused on the role positive emotions played in debating Britain?s relationship to the EU. Using critical discourse analysis and drawing on appraisal theory to investigate the representation of emotions in six sample texts from a corpus of so-called ?Euromyths? (N=334), this study argues that positive emotions were used to create a myth in Roland Barthes? sense to naturalise a Eurosceptic ideology of British defiance and power

Making one or two more calls: teaching journalism students the value of news

With journalism in a perpetual state of flux, journalism educators are understandably concerned with teaching students about new and emerging technologies, platforms, investigative tools and storytelling techniques. However, while accepting the importance of updating and renewing the curriculum in this way, we ought not lose focus on fundamentals such as the social value of news and of ethical journalism conducted for the public good. This article argues that news is vital for a society’s citizens and that we should not feel embarrassed about emphasising this fact to our students. It will also argue that journalists, journalism educators and indeed journalism students have not always been sufficiently questioning about how news is selected, sourced and produced, nor about the concept of “news values”. To explore these issues, the article draws on research conducted for the monograph What’s the Point of News? A study in Ethical Journalism (Harcup, 2020) and considers how different stories and voices can be included in the news, including more perspectives from below. The article emphasises the importance of allowing journalism students to question industry norms as well as encouraging them to challenge us as journalism educators