scholarly journals From robots to social robots. Trends, representation and Facebook engagement of robot-related news stories published by Italian online news media

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Marco Carradore
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Online News ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
News Stories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
Over Time

In recent decades, robots, social robots and artificial intelligence have increasingly entered daily life, affirming their presence not only in traditional spheres such as industrial production, but also gaining access to social reproduction, expressive functions and domestic activities. Considering the social relevance robots have now acquired, this essay aims at investigating their cultural representations in Italian online news media. More specifically, the study investigates trends of robot-related topics in online newspaper coverage and Facebook engagement over time, and analyzes news topics through text mining techniques. The study relies on a dataset of about 3,000 news stories published between 2014 and 2018 by some 100 different Italian news media. Results show a constant increase in news relating to robots, a major interest in work issues and a thematic shift over time: more recent topics describe the social-reproduction functions of robots. Finally, some suggestions for future research are outlined.

scholarly journals From the Deeming Rule to JUUL—US News Coverage of Electronic Cigarettes, 2015–2018

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1816-1822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia A Wackowski ◽  
Jennah M Sontag ◽  
Binu Singh ◽  
Jessica King ◽  
M Jane Lewis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Electronic Cigarettes ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
High Volume ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online News ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Introduction News media may influence public perceptions and attitudes about electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), which may influence product use and attitudes about their regulation. The purpose of this study is to describe trends in US news coverage of e-cigarettes during a period of evolving regulation, science, and trends in the use of e-cigarettes. Methods We conducted a content analysis of e-cigarette topics and themes covered in US news articles from 2015 to 2018. Online news databases (Access World News, Factiva) were used to obtain US news articles from the top 34 circulating newspapers, four national wire services, and five leading online news sources. Results The number of articles increased by 75.4% between 2015 and 2018 (n = 1609). Most articles focused on policy/regulation (43.5%) as a main topic, followed by health effects (22.3%) and prevalence/trends (17.9%). Discussion about flavor bans quadrupled (6.1% to 24.6%) and discussion of youth e-cigarette use was most prevalent (58.4%) in 2018, coinciding with an increase in coverage about JUUL. JUUL was mentioned in 50.8% of 2018 articles. Across years, articles more frequently mentioned e-cigarette risks (70%) than potential benefits (37.3%). Conclusions E-cigarettes continue to be a newsworthy topic, with coverage both reflecting numerous changes and events over time, and providing repeated opportunities for informing the public and policymakers about these novel products. Future research should continue to track how discourse changes over time and assess its potential influence on e-cigarette perceptions and policy changes. Implications E-cigarette news coverage in the United States increased between 2015 and 2018 and predominantly focused on policy and regulation. Notable spikes in volume were associated with some but not all major e-cigarette events, including the FDA’s deeming rule, Surgeon General’s report, and release of the National Youth Tobacco Survey data in 2018. Coverage of the 2018 National Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Sciences report on the Public Health Consequences of E-cigarettes received minimal news coverage. The high volume in 2018 was driven in large part by coverage of the e-cigarette brand JUUL; over half of news articles in 2018 referenced JUUL specifically.

scholarly journals API AND BEYOND: DETECTING COORDINATED BEHAVIOURS IN FACEBOOK INTERACTIONS AROUND POLITICAL NEWS STORIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giglietto Fabio ◽  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Giada Marino
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
The Social

This proposal is a follow-up of the project “Mapping Italian News Media Political Coverage in the Lead-up to 2018 General Election” (MINE). MINE aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the Italian online news media in the lead-up to 2018 general election. The final report of the project highlighted how the populist narrative dominated the news (both in terms of volume of coverage and Facebook engagement), and pinpointed the diverging patterns of Facebook interactions employed by different partisan communities to amplify the reach of the contents aligned with their worldview by sharing the news stories on social media, while trying to reframe, through comments, the negative coverage of the party they support. These insights led to further questions concerning the nature of the observed diverging patterns of Facebook interactions around political news. In particular, we wondered if the observed patterns were the result of a spontaneous grassroots effort or instead of a strategically organised attempt to manipulate the online news media landscape in order to game platforms algorithms in support of specific viewpoints, candidates and parties. Data originally collected for MINE during 2018 via publically available Facebook API proved useful to identify the patterns, but fall short of providing compelling evidence on the nature of these behaviours. In order to shed some light on this question, we thus requested and obtained access to two additional datasets directly provided by Facebook and made available through the Social Science One (SSO) initiative.

scholarly journals Article 13 on social media and news media: disintermediation and reintermediation on the modern media landscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-157
Author(s):  
José Moreno ◽  
Rita Sepúlveda
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Online News ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Ease Of Access

The former Article 13 (now Article 17) of the European directive on copyright and the internet (Directive EC2019/790) has been under negotiations since 2016 and was finally approved in 2019. In Portugal, however, the issue was mostly absent from public scrutiny and debate until November 2018. In that month, the issue arose to a prominent level, both in news media and in social media, following a wave of alerts issued by various young youtubers, incentivized by YouTube management. In this paper, we engage in the discussion concerning disintermediation, studying the way in which such alerts spread both in news media and social media, and understanding the role played by the users of social media platforms in modelling the social relevance and the social discourse of the issue of copyright and the internet. To do so, we used digital methods, collecting and analysing data from Twitter, YouTube and from online news media, mapping Article 13 discussions and identifying key actors in each field, as well as the connections between them. The results show that the ease of access provided by platforms such as Twitter or YouTube converts some users to prominent influencers and that, in some cases, those influencers are able to shift and model the public discourse about relevant collective issues.

A Downward Spiral? A Panel Study of Misinformation and Media Trust in Chile

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110252
Author(s):  
Sebastián Valenzuela ◽  
Daniel Halpern ◽  
Felipe Araneda
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Panel Survey ◽  
Downward Spiral ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Trust ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Over Time

Despite widespread concern, research on the consequences of misinformation on people's attitudes is surprisingly scant. To fill in this gap, the current study examines the long-term relationship between misinformation and trust in the news media. Based on the reinforcing spirals model, we analyzed data from a three-wave panel survey collected in Chile between 2017 and 2019. We found a weak, over-time relationship between misinformation and media skepticism. Specifically, initial beliefs on factually dubious information were negatively correlated with subsequent levels of trust in the news media. Lower trust in the media, in turn, was related over time to higher levels of misinformation. However, we found no evidence of a reverse, parallel process where media trust shielded users against misinformation, further reinforcing trust in the news media. The lack of evidence of a downward spiral suggests that the corrosive effects of misinformation on attitudes toward the news media are less serious than originally suggested. We close with a discussion of directions for future research.

Remembering the News: Effects of Medium and Message Discrepancy on News Recall over Time

1995 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 666-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Wicks
Keyword(s):  
Associative Memory ◽  
News Media ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Important Variable ◽  
News Stories ◽  
New Information ◽  
News Effects ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Better Than

This article suggests a theoretical explanation of the processes related to recall and learning of media news information. It does so by linking the concepts of schematic thinking and the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) to the variable of time. It argues that learning from the news may be better than many recent studies suggest. Although humans may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire “common knowledge” from the news media. Time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge.

scholarly journals Public Opinion Polls and Experts in Election News

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Guðbjörg Hildur Kolbeins
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Election News ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls

By employing the theoretical framework of framing, the present paper attempts to examine the Icelandic media’s coverage of the 2013 parliamentary election by paying particular attention to coverage of public opinion polls and the policies of the political parties, i.e. the “horse-race” frame and the issue frame, and to examine media’s reliance on experts for interpretation of election news. Seven online news media, two newspapers, two radio stations and two television channels were monitored for 25 days prior to Election Day, i.e. from April 2 to April 26, 2013, - resulting in 1377 election news stories. The findings show, for example, that 29.8% of all the election news stories had public opinion polls as their primary angle while 12% of the stories were primarily issue-oriented. In addition, the media rely on experts for interpretation of the polls; five of the 10 most interviewed or quoted sources on public opinion surveys were political science experts who were affiliated with universities. Finally, news coverage of polls was generally amplified as media outlets had a tendency to report on public opinion polls that were commissioned by other media.

Temporal affordances in the news

Journalism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt ◽  
Motti Neiger
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Online News ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Preparation Time ◽  
News Production ◽  
Stability And Change ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

This article develops the concept of temporal affordances as a framework for understanding and evaluating the relationship between news technologies and journalistic storytelling practices. Accordingly, temporal affordances are defined as the potential ways in which the time-related possibilities and constraints associated with the material conditions and technological aspects of news production are manifested in the temporal characteristics of news narratives. After identifying six such affordances – immediacy, liveness, preparation time, transience, fixation in time, and extended retrievability – we examine manifestations of temporal affordances in different journalistic cultures over time, based on a content analysis of Israeli and US news narratives in different technological eras (from 1950 to 2013). The findings point to a consistent pattern of inter-media differences, in accordance with the distinct affordances of print and online news, alongside cross-cultural and cross-organizational variations in the use of these affordances. In addition, we detect complex patterns of stability and change in the use of temporal affordances in print media over time. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Sacrificing Credibility for Sleaze

2016 ◽  
pp. 1267-1282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenn Burleson Mackay ◽  
Erica Bailey
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Source Credibility ◽  
Online News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Soft News ◽  
Credibility Scale ◽  
Act Utilitarianism ◽  
Traditional Stories

This chapter uses an experiment to analyze how mainstream journalists' use of sensationalized or tabloid-style writing techniques affect the credibility of online news. Participants read four news stories and rated their credibility using McCroskey's Source Credibility Scale. Participants found stories written with a tabloid style less credible than more traditional stories. Soft news stories written with a tabloidized style were rated more credible than hard news stories that also had a tabloidized style. Results suggest that online news media may damage their credibility by using tabloidized writing techniques to increase readership. Furthermore, participants were less likely to enjoy stories written in a tabloidized style. The authors conclude by utilizing act utilitarianism to argue that tabloidized writing is an unethical journalistic technique.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Right ◽  
Over Time

This chapter gives introduces the gilet jaunes. The gilets jaunes, a group of French protesters named after their iconic yellow vests donned during demonstrations, have formed a new type of social movement. The gilets jaunes have been variously interpreted since they began their occupation of French roundabouts. They were at first received with enthusiasm on the right of the French political establishment, and with caution on the left. The fourth weekend saw scenes of violence erupt on the Champs Élysées, notably around and within the Arc de Triomphe, which towers over the first roundabout built in France. The headlines of newspapers and stories of the news media became almost exclusively focused on the violence of the protests. Images of state violence became ever-present on Twitter and independent media outlets, making it clear that it was the use of disproportionate force by police units that was at the centre of the events. The chapter explains that the aim of the book is to show that the use of violence is not the only tale to be told about the role of the protesters in the contemporary French context. Their contribution to the political landscape of France is quite different. They have provided a fundamental challenge to the social contract in France, the implicit pact between the governed and their political leaders. The movement has seen the numbers of participants diminish over time, but the underlying tension between the haves and the have-nots, the winners of globalization and those at risk of déclassement [social downgrading], are enduring and persistent.

scholarly journals The Production of Information in an Online World

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (5) ◽  
pp. 2126-2164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Cagé ◽  
Nicolas Hervé ◽  
Marie-Luce Viaud
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
High Reactivity ◽  
Online News ◽  
News Production ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Commercial Viability ◽  
Incentive Problem ◽  
News Event

Abstract News production requires investment, and competitors’ ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media’s incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In this article, we build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news event, trace the timeline of each story, and study news propagation. We provide new evidence on online news production. First, we document high reactivity of online media: one quarter of the news stories are reproduced online in under 4 min. We show that this is accompanied by substantial copying, both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, which may constitute a severe threat to the commercial viability of the news media. Next, we estimate the returns to originality in online news production. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with article-level social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

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