Can Big Media do "Big Society"?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News

The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model

Journalists in the UK

Based on one of the most comprehensive surveys of UK journalists ever carried out, this report describes journalists’ personal characteristics, employment conditions, and working routines. It also analyses journalists’ opinions on: ethics, influences on their work, the trustworthiness of institutions such as parliament and the police, their role in society, and changes in journalism over time. The report includes findings on UK journalism’s: lack of ethnic diversity and of women in senior positions; modest pay, especially for young journalists; and changing employment patterns and working routines in the digital age. It also reveals how journalists, while believing their profession is changing significantly, remain committed to traditional journalistic values; that although they adhere closely to professional codes and standards, UK journalists push ethical boundaries more than some of their international colleagues; and that rather than living up to the stereotype of the cynical hack, journalists in the UK are relatively trusting

Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union

In May 2018, hundreds of websites located outside the European Union (EU), including USAToday.com, became completely or partially unavailable to EU citizens as a number of publishers decided to comply with an EU data protection regulation (GDPR) by blocking access. Several of the sites that started to exclude EU users continued to do so for months or years, even though some of their competitors, like the New York Times, never adopted a policy of exclusion. These differing strategies allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects of temporary product unavailability and temporary rationing. We find that both temporary product withdrawal and temporary rationing can have long-term effects. In our case, monthly unique visitors in the months and even years after full access was restored were between 44% and 61% lower than they had been before the restrictions were imposed, with a wider market contraction explaining only part of these falls. We also find distinct differences between the effects of temporarily rationing and temporarily withdrawing websites. Although both strategies lead to a long-term loss in visitors, rationing appears to increase a website's desirability for some consumers. After rationing was lifted, USAToday.com's reduced audience consumed the title more deeply and frequently than had been the case before rationing was imposed

Exploring Audience Perceptions of, and Preferences for, Online News Videos

Journalism professionals and media experts have traditionally used normatively formed criteria to evaluate news quality. Although the digital news media environment has enabled journalists to respond at unprecedented speed to audience consumption patterns, little academic research has systematically addressed how audiences themselves perceive and evaluate news, and even less has focused on audio-visual news. To help fill this research gap, we conducted in-depth group interviews with 22 online news video consumers in the UK to explore their perceptions of online news videos—an increasingly popular news format. Thematic analyses suggest audiences evaluate online news videos using a complex and interwoven set of criteria, which we group under four headings: antecedents of perceptions, emotional impacts, news and editorial values and production characteristics. Some of these criteria can be positioned clearly in relation to the literature on news quality in general, while our documentation of the others contributes new, format-specific knowledge. Our findings offer journalists practical insights into how audiences perceive and evaluate a host of characteristics of online news videos, while our conceptual framework provides a foundation for further academic research on audience evaluations of online news videos, and even audio-visual news more generally

Mapping the website and mobile app audiences of Russia’s foreign communication outlets, RT and Sputnik, across 21 countries

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, policymakers worldwide have taken measures to curb the reach of Russia’s foreign communication outlets, RT and Sputnik. Mapping the audiences of these outlets in 21 countries, we show that in the quarter before the invasion, at least via their official websites and mobile apps, neither outlet reached more than 5% of the digital populations of any of these countries each month. Averaged across all countries, both outlets’ website and mobile app reach remained approximately constant between 2019 and 2021, was higher for men, and increased with audiences’ age

Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006-11

A 5-year case study of an established regional newspaper in Britain investigates journalists about their perceptions of convergence in digital technologies. This research is the first ethnographic longitudinal case study of a UK regional newspaper. Although conforming to some trends observed in the wider field of scholarship, the analysis adds to skepticism about any linear or directional views of innovation and adoption: the Northern Echo newspaper journalists were observed to have revised their opinions of optimum Web practices, and sometimes radically reversed policies. Technology is seen in the period as a fluid, amorphous entity. Central corporate authority appeared to diminish in the period as part of a wider reduction in formalism. Questioning functionalist notions of the market, the study suggests cause and effect models of change are often subverted by contradictory perceptions of particular actions. Meanwhile, during technological evolution, the ‘professional imagination’ can be understood as strongly reflecting the parent print culture and its routines, despite pioneering a new convergence partnership with an independent television company