Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Social Network Analysis

Some mass communications scholars have contended that uses and gratifications is not a rigorous social science theory. In this article, I argue just the opposite, and any attempt to speculate on the future direction of mass communication theory must seriously include the uses and gratifications approach. In this article, I assert that the emergence of computer-mediated communication has revived the significance of uses and gratifications. In fact, uses and gratifications has always provided a cutting-edge theoretical approach in the initial stages of each new mass communications medium: newspapers, radio and television, and now the Internet. Although scientists are likely to continue using traditional tools and typologies to answer questions about media use, we must also be prepared to expand our current theoretical models of uses and gratifications. Contemporary and future models must include concepts such as interactivity, demassification, hypertextuality, and asynchroneity. Researchers must also be willing to explore interpersonal and qualitative aspects of mediated communication in a more holistic methodology.

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Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century

Tracking new topics, ideas, and "memes" across the Web has been an issue of considerable interest. Recent work has developed methods for tracking topic shifts over long time scales, as well as abrupt spikes in the appearance of particular named entities. However, these approaches are less well suited to the identification of content that spreads widely and then fades over time scales on the order of days - the time scale at which we perceive news and events.We develop a framework for tracking short, distinctive phrases that travel relatively intact through on-line text; developing scalable algorithms for clustering textual variants of such phrases, we identify a broad class of memes that exhibit wide spread and rich variation on a daily basis. As our principal domain of study, we show how such a meme-tracking approach can provide a coherent representation of the news cycle - the daily rhythms in the news media that have long been the subject of qualitative interpretation but have never been captured accurately enough to permit actual quantitative analysis. We tracked 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs over a period of three months with the total of 90 million articles and we find a set of novel and persistent temporal patterns in the news cycle. In particular, we observe a typical lag of 2.5 hours between the peaks of attention to a phrase in the news media and in blogs respectively, with divergent behavior around the overall peak and a "heartbeat"-like pattern in the handoff between news and blogs. We also develop and analyze a mathematical model for the kinds of temporal variation that the system exhibits.

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Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle

This article is a contribution to the debate on audience participation in online media with a twofold aim: (1) making conceptual sense of the phenomenon of participatory journalism in the framework of journalism research, and (2) determining the forms that it is taking in eight European countries and the United States. First, participatory journalism is considered in the context of the historical evolution of public communication. A methodological strategy for systematically analysing citizen participation opportunities in the media is then proposed and applied. A sample of 16 online newspapers offers preliminary data that suggest news organisations are interpreting online user participation mainly as an opportunity for their readers to debate current events, while other stages of the news production process are closed to citizen involvement or controlled by professional journalists when participation is allowed. However, different strategies exist among the studied sample, and contextual factors should b...

/pdf/participatory-journalism-practices-in-the-media-and-beyond-3y77wopwiu.pdf

PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM PRACTICES IN THE MEDIA AND BEYOND An international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers

This study explores how the increasingly popular blog format, as adopted by journalists affiliated with mainstream media outlets, affects long-standing journalistic norms and practice. It focuses on nonpartisanship, transparency and the gatekeeping role, using a content analysis of twenty Weblogs dealing with politics or civic affairs. Although expressions of opinion are common, most journalists are seeking to remain gatekeepers even in this highly interactive and participatory format. Political j-bloggers use links extensively – but mostly to other mainstream media sites. At least in their early use, journalists are `normalizing’ the blog as a component, and in some ways an enhancement, of traditional journalistic norms and practices.

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The political j-blogger ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices

Notes on Authors Acknowledgements Authors' Note Chapter 1: Introduction: Sharing the Road Part I: The Impact of Participatory Journalism Chapter 2: Mechanisms of Participation: How audience options shape the conversation (Alfred Hermida) Chapter 3: The Journalist s Relationship with Users: New dimensions to conventional roles (Ari Heinonen) Part II: Managing Change Chapter 4: Inside the Newsroom: Journalists' motivations and organizational structures (Steve Paulussen) Chapter 5: Managing Audience Participation: Practices, workfl ows and strategies (David Domingo) Chapter 6: User Comments: The transformation of participatory space (Zvi Reich) Part III: Issues and Implications Chapter 7: Taking Responsibility: Legal and ethical issues in participatory journalism (Jane B Singer) Chapter 8: Participatory Journalism in the Marketplace: Economic motivations behind the practices (Marina Vujnovic) Chapter 9: Understanding a New Phenomenon: The signifi cance of participatory journalism (Thorsten Quandt) Chapter 10: Fluid Spaces, Fluid Journalism: The role of the "active recipient" in participatory journalism (Alfred Hermida) Appendix: About Our Study Glossary References Index

http://www.isracom.org.il/.upload/Zvi%20Reich.pdf

Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers

This article explores implications of the transition to an environment in which users have become secondary gatekeepers of the content published on media websites. This expanded user role, facilitated by technology and enabled by digital news editors, includes assessment of contributions by other users; communication of the perceived value or quality of user- and journalist-produced content; and selective re-dissemination of that content. The result is a two-step gatekeeping process, in which initial editorial decisions to make an item part of the news product are followed by user decisions to upgrade or downgrade the visibility of that item for a secondary audience. Preliminary empirical evidence indicates these user gatekeeping capabilities are now pervasive on US newspaper sites.

/pdf/user-generated-visibility-secondary-gatekeeping-in-a-shared-scmnsjuo6a.pdf

User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space

The people who claim membership in a profession and delineate its attributes do so at least in part to justify inequality of status, as well as to limit and control access to that status. The key role of the professional can be fulfilled only by people with particular training, skills and judgment, and it is crucial that the distinction between practitioner and layperson be clearly recognized by all parties. This paper suggests that online news workers fundamentally challenge the already-disputed concept of journalists as professionals. It identifies and explores key aspects of that challenge across the cognitive, normative and evaluative dimensions of the sociological construct of professionalism, with the goal of laying the groundwork for empirical investigation into the issues raised.

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Jane B. Singer

Papers

PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM PRACTICES IN THE MEDIA AND BEYOND An international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers

The political j-blogger ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices

Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers

User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space

Who are these guys?: The online challenge to the notion of journalistic professionalism