Convergence and de-convergence of Chinese journalistic practice in the digital age

Journalism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 1380-1396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ke Li

The existing literature broadly suggests that newsrooms are adapting to the media convergence world at the cost of traditional quality journalism. However, based on my ethnographic study of the Beijing News, I propose a convergence and de-convergence model of journalistic practice. The model explains how one Chinese newspaper preserves the legacy of critical journalism, on the one hand, while negotiating the challenges of adapting to the converging trends on the other. I argue that a well-established organizational culture and a working routine are crucial in the newspaper’s transformation, which makes it impossible to redesign the newsroom and redefine journalism with technology alone. Moreover, the article calls for a more nuanced understanding of the transformation of legacy media in the digital age, especially considering a non-Western context. I argue that the Chinese newspaper’s response to technological and economic impacts brought by the Internet is in fact mediated by political concerns.

Author(s):  
Konstantin S. Sharov

The paper is concerned with a study of the changing content and style of non-canonical Christian religious preaching in the digital age. Special attention is paid to the analysis of modern rhetoric Christian preachers practice in their Internet channels, forums and blogs. It is shown that the content of the Internet sermon is largely determined by the Internet users themselves and the topics of their appeals. The fundamental characteristics of the content of the Internet sermon are: 1) focus on the individual, their private goals and objectives, not just on theological problems; 2) rethinking the phenomenon of the neighbour; 3) a shift from the Hesychast tradition of preaching the importance of inner spiritual concentration to the preaching of religious interactivity. The observed stylistic features of the digital preaching can be summarised as follows: 1) moving away from simple answers to the rhetoric of new questions addressed to the audience; 2) empathy, co-participation with a person in his/her life conflicts and experiences; 3) desire to share religious information, not to impose it; 4) resorting to various rhetorical techniques to reach different audiences; 5) a tendency to use slang, sometimes even irrespective of the audience’s language preferences and expectations. It should be pointed out that the Orthodox Internet sermon in the Russian Internet space has a dual and contradictory nature. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be regarded as positive for the Orthodox preaching in general, since it is a means of spreading Christian ideas in the social groups that do not constitute a core of parishioners of Orthodox churches, for example, schoolchildren, students, representatives of technical professions, etc. On the other hand, the effectiveness of such preaching is still unclear. Lack of reliable statistics as well as the results of the survey related to the Orthodox Internet preaching gives us no opportunity to judge about effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the phenomenon at this stage of its development.


Author(s):  
Jerry Eades

This chapter examines the relationship between the Internet and sex tourism. It argues that interest in sex tourism in the media erupted in the early 1990s, about the same time that the Internet itself was becoming popular. The relationship between the two was both positive and negative. On the one hand, the Internet has allowed members of sexual subcultures to contact each other and for new forms of sex tourism to be marketed. On the other hand, the Internet also provided a platform for those opposed to sex tourism to raise the profile of the issue, in the process conflating images of sex tourism with those of Internet pornography, pedophilia, and child abuse, particularly in relation to tourism destinations in the Southeast Asian region. It has therefore aided the amplification of moral panics surrounding these issues. This sensational coverage has, however, tended to overshadow other forms of sex tourism, including those in which consenting adults meet together in resorts of clubs for recreational sex with each other. Thus, while the Internet has created moral panics and led to crackdowns in certain sections of the sex tourism market, it has allowed other alternative lifestyles to flourish on an unprecedented scale in an increasingly liberalized environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 226-240
Author(s):  
Лілія Шутяк ◽  

The article examines the concept of literary reportage and the specificity of its functioning in Ukrainian printed and electronic media, with particular emphasis on the differences between traditional and literary reportage. The basis of literary reportage is informativeness (fact). As in the process of preparing traditional reportage, the journalist collects facts, interrogates witnesses, works with documents and archives, examines the situation and the characters of the future text. Analyticality manifests itself here in the understanding of the received information, methods of describing the problem and searching for its solutions, conducting observations both „from the inside” and „from the outside”. In order to be as faithful as possible on the one hand, and to introduce an emotional color – on the other, reporters use literary means; it is the lexical and stylistic features that give the reportage originality. The aforementioned elements appear both in literary and traditional reportage, but in the first case they are more emphasized, and in the second – they are kept within the limits appropriate for news journalism. Thus, literary reportage is the genre that exists on the border of journalism and literature, accumulating the features of both. At the same time, it remains necessary to separate the concept of belles-lettres from literary reportage. In the contemporary Ukrainian media, the genre of literary reportage is just beginning to develop; the Internet and the blogosphere play an important role in this process, where its model realizations can be observed most often. A lot of literary reportages can be found, among others, on the websites of Gazeta.ua, INSIDER and Reporters. In the printed media, literary reportage appears relatively rarely, exceptions include trip stories written in the form of reportage (magazines „MANDRY”, „Ukrainian Week”, „Kraina”) or literary reports found in „Gazeta po Ukraińsku”. The small share of this genre in the Ukrainian media space is related to several reasons. In the case of literary reportage, the length of the texts varies, but most of them are long, which means that they do not always fit in with the traditional formats of the mass media. In addition, the preparation and writing of this type of material requires more time and – when the message quickly becomes outdated – it often turns out that it is no longer worth publishing. The Internet has significantly accelerated the pace of journalistic work, at the same time moving it to a different level of quality. Literary reportage is not an ordinary mass medium, it is journalism with literary elements, and as such it forces a specific type of reading. It requires time that the average Internet user, exposed to distracting temptations (advertising, spam, social messaging), often does not have. All this causes an intense transfer of reportage from the media space to the book space, where the audience is more formed and better prepared to accept this kind of journalistic and literary experiments. And so in Ukraine, since 2017, there has been a publishing house of reportage and documentary literature „Czowen” (Lviv). So far, it has published over 10 books on literary reportage, both by Ukrainian and foreign authors. Particularly noteworthy are the books from the Tempora publishing house, which has been organizing a literary reportage competition since 2012 and presenting the best examples of this genre in anthologies and in the form of individual publications.


Author(s):  
Francisco Leslie Lopez-del-Castillo-Wilderbeek

This research has carried out a systematized bibliographic review to analyze how the return on investment (ROI) in communication, and specifically in public relations, has been theoretically treated. The financial measurement of communication outcomes represents a topic of great interest for the academic community because organizations need to know the real results of their communication efforts. At the same time, economic measurement turns out to be a variable that can be understood by the management of the organizations and allows them to know where the money is being spent. However, despite more than forty years of theoretical work, a homogeneous nor globally accepted solution has not yet been achieved. The bibliographical study of the return on investment in communication, and especially in public relations, shows the difficulty of turning the success of the activity of public relations professionals into money. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the ROI is directly related to financial data; on the other hand, in communication it is usual to introduce non-economic values to evaluate the results achieved. The bibliographical results indicate in the first instance that, on a quantitative level, the economic aspect is predominant in the calculation of the ROI (96.3%). In this context measurement by equivalence in advertising (AVE) is an economic model as used by professionals as it is rejected by researchers. It is based on comparing the cost of a presence in the media with the equivalent cost if it were advertising. Nevertheless, this model is criticized for the differences between advertising (a completely controlled message) and publicity (a message that is altered by the media). However, taking the previous works about the subject, it can be said that the evaluation of public relations actions can be dealt with from the perspective of opportunity cost: the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. In this way, the evaluation of the cost of a traditional advertising action can be compared with the cost of other options available to public relations professionals. For example, native advertising is a resource of public relations teams whose cost can easily be compared to traditional advertising. Native advertising is a paid promotion that matches the audience's consumption and contains information of interest to the advertiser. Hence opinions that reject the advertising equivalence measurement (AVE) are not justified when the product generated by public relations has the characteristics of native advertising because in both cases (advertising vs. native advertising) the professional can exactly compare the investment made with one instead of the other.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 10-28
Author(s):  
Divina Frau-Meigs

This paper analyses the major modifications created by the “social turn” i.e. the emergence of social media. It presents the drastic change of ecosystem created by the three “continents” of the Internet. This sets up the context of deployment for “information disorders” such as radicalisation and disinformation. The analysis then considers the risks and opportunities for Media and Information Literacy: on the one hand, the rise of fact-checking and the increasing interference of social media platforms; on the other hand, the augmentation of the Media and Information Literacy epistemology and the Media and Information Literacy paradigm shift entailed by information disorders. It concludes on an agenda for Media and Information Literacy in 21st century.


Author(s):  
Jerry Eades

This chapter examines the relationship between the Internet and sex tourism. It argues that interest in sex tourism in the media erupted in the early 1990s, about the same time that the Internet itself was becoming popular. The relationship between the two was both positive and negative. On the one hand, the Internet has allowed members of sexual subcultures to contact each other and for new forms of sex tourism to be marketed. On the other hand, the Internet also provided a platform for those opposed to sex tourism to raise the profile of the issue, in the process conflating images of sex tourism with those of Internet pornography, pedophilia, and child abuse, particularly in relation to tourism destinations in the Southeast Asian region. It has therefore aided the amplification of moral panics surrounding these issues. This sensational coverage has, however, tended to overshadow other forms of sex tourism, including those in which consenting adults meet together in resorts of clubs for recreational sex with each other. Thus, while the Internet has created moral panics and led to crackdowns in certain sections of the sex tourism market, it has allowed other alternative lifestyles to flourish on an unprecedented scale in an increasingly liberalized environment.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgir Guðmundsson ◽  
Sigurður Kristinsson

The question whether journalism constitutes a profession or not has been widely discussed in the literature in recent decades without a definite conclusion. Indeed some suggest that much of the contradictory views on professionalism and the professionalization of journalism may be traced to the unclear meaning of the very term “professionalism” or “professionalization” (Nolan 2008). Thus it is possible to put simultaneously forth plausible arguments suggesting de-professionalization of journalism on the one hand, and further professionalization of journalism on the other, based on different interpretations of the term “professionalism”. The terms “professional” and “professionalism” can refer to different social phenomena in different contexts. Thus an ongoing professionalization of journalism can be taking place in one sense at the same time as de-professionalization in a different sense, and of course, these different trends can also be taking place simultaneously in different parts of the media environment (Nolan, 2008; Hallin&Mancini, 2004; Witschge&Nygren, 2009; Schudson, 2001). In determining an approach to the concept of a profession it is helpful to establish some general criteria, against which journalistic practice may be measured. In finding these criteria, guidelines are given by the discussion of traditional professions – doctors, lawyers – and on that basis some characteristics can been said to signify a profession. To what extent is the work of Icelandic journalists characterised by professionalism, and to what extent do they, as an occupational group, exhibit the features normally associated with professions? The following analysis suggests that Icelandic journalists fulfil many of the key conditions associated with professions and their development in recent decades has been one of increased professionalism.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Maria Ledstam

This article engages with how religion and economy relate to each other in faith-based businesses. It also elaborates on a recurrent idea in theological literature that reflections on different visions of time can advance theological analyses of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. More specifically, this article brings results from an ethnographic study of two faith-based businesses into conversation with the ethicist Luke Bretherton’s presentation of different understandings of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. Using Theodore Schatzki’s theory of timespace, the article examines how time and space are constituted in two small faith-based businesses that are part of the two networks Business as Mission (evangelical) and Economy of Communion (catholic) and how the different timespaces affect the religious-economic configurations in the two cases and with what moral implications. The overall findings suggest that the timespace in the Catholic business was characterized by struggling caused by a tension between certain ideals on how religion and economy should relate to each other on the one hand and how the practice evolved on the other hand. Furthermore, the timespace in the evangelical business was characterized by confidence, caused by the business having a rather distinct and achievable goal when it came to how they wanted to be different and how religion should relate to economy. There are, however, nuances and important resemblances between the cases that cannot be explained by the businesses’ confessional and theological affiliations. Rather, there seems to be something about the phenomenon of tension-filled and confident faith-based businesses that causes a drive in the practices towards the common good. After mapping the results of the empirical study, I discuss some contributions that I argue this study brings to Bretherton’s presentation of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism.


Target ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Iribarren

This article explores translational literary Web 2.0 practices and user-generated cultural creations on the Internet, focusing on video poetry that re-creates canonical poets’ bodies of work. It will be argued that the use of for-profit platforms like YouTube and Vimeo by indie creators and translators of video poetry favours the emergence of new translational attitudes, practices and objects that have positive but also contentious effects. One the one hand, these online mediators explore new poetic expressions and tend to make the most of the potential for dissemination of poetic heritage, providing visibility to non-hegemonic literatures. On the other hand, however, these translational digitally-born practices and creations by voluntary and subaltern mediators might reinforce the hegemonic position of large American Internet corporations at the risk of commodifying cultural capital, consolidating English as a lingua franca and perhaps, in the long run, even fostering a potentially monocultural and internationally homogeneous aesthetics.


Traditio ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Kurt Lewent

Cerveri was decidedly no poetical genius, and often enough he follows the trodden paths of troubadour poetry. However, there is no denying that again and again he tries to escape that poetical routine. In many cases these attempts result in odd and eccentric compositions, where the unusual is reached at the cost of good taste and poetical values. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Cerveri's efforts in this respect were not always futile. His is, e.g. an amusing satire upon bad women. One of his love songs, characteristically called libel by the MS (Sg), assumes the form of a complaint submitted to the king as the supreme earthly judge, in which the defendant is the lady whose charms torture the lover and have made him a prisoner. This poem combines the traditional praise of the beloved and a flattery addressed to the king. Its slightly humoristic tone is also found in a song entitled lo vers del vassayll leyal. Here Cerveri, basing himself on a certain legend connected with St. Mark, gives the king advice in his love affair. Again the poet kills two birds with one stone, flattering the sovereign and pointing, for obvious purposes, to his own poverty. The latter is the only topic of a remarkably personal poem in which the author complains bitterly that, while many of his playmates have become rich in later years, the only wealth he himself did amass were the chans gays and sonetz agradans which he composed for other people to enjoy. Cerveri even tries to renew the traditional genre of the chanson de la mal mariée by adding motifs of—presumably—his own invention. This tendency towards a more independent way of thinking and greater originality in its poetical presentation could not be better illustrated than by the two poems which the MS calls Lo vers de la terra de Preste Johan and Pistola The one puts the poet's moral argumentation against the background of the medieval legend of Prester John, the other, which forms the subject of the present study, sets its teachings in a still more solemn framework, the liturgy of the Mass.


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