scholarly journals Front Page Challenge: A case study examining what the ethnic media promises and what it delivers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Lindgren
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
News Media ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Local News ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
Ethnic Media ◽  
News Content ◽  
Greater Toronto Area ◽  
Ethnic Newspapers

The editors and publishers of ethnic newspapers acknowledge the importance of reporting local news in helping their readers understand Canadian society. Yet detailed analyses of news content produced by ethnic media organizations often find that information that fosters understanding of life in Canada takes second place to news from the group‟s home country. This study investigates the local news content published about the Greater Toronto Area in the Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao(Toronto-area edition) and identifies a significant imbalance in the mix of local news versus homeland news from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The author argues that newcomers trying to understand their adopted place would benefit from access to more extensive and varied local news and suggests that providing journalists who work in ethnic news media with greater opportunities for professional development would be one way to achieve this goal. Programs could include journalism skills workshops as well as seminars that explore the role of local news in helping immigrants adapt. Professional development sessions would also bring together journalists from different ethnocultural communities to discuss the challenges they face, develop joint projects, and acquaint editors and publishers with the latest research on the role of local news in fostering intercultural understanding.

scholarly journals Are Experts (News)Worthy? Balance, Conflict, and Mass Media Coverage of Expert Consensus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Merkley
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Expert Consensus ◽  
News Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
News Content ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Thematic Context

Overlooked in analyses of why the public often rejects expert consensus is the role of the news media. News coverage of expert consensus on general matters of policy is likely limited as a result of journalists’ emphasis in news production on novelty and drama at the expense of thematic context. News content is also biased towards balance and conflict, which may dilute the persuasiveness of expert consensus. This study presents an automated and manual analysis of over 280,000 news stories on ten issues where there are important elements of agreement among scientists or economists. The analyses show that news content typically emphasizes arguments aligned with positions of expert consensus, rather than providing balance, and only occasionally cites contrarian experts. More troubling is that expert messages related to important areas of agreement are infrequent in news content, and cues signaling the existence of consensus are rarer still.

Citizen Journalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Miller
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Citizen Involvement ◽  
Citizen Journalism ◽  
Content Quality ◽  
The Public ◽  
News Content ◽  
Journalism Studies ◽  
Organizational Ties

The emergence of citizen journalism has prompted the journalism field and scholars to readdress what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. Citizen journalists have disrupted news-media ecosystems by challenging the veracity and representativeness of information flowing from mainstream news-media newsrooms. However, the controversy related to the desired level of citizen involvement in the news process is a historical debate that began before the citizen-journalism phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes. This questioning of citizen involvement in news reemerged as an issue with the citizen journalism phenomenon around the late 1990s. People with no news-media organizational ties have taken advantage of the convenience and low cost of social computing technologies by publishing their own stories and content. These people are referred to as citizen journalists. Scholars have assessed the quality and credibility of citizen-journalism content, finding that citizen journalists have performed well on several standards of traditional news-content quality. Levels of quality differ dependent upon citizen journalists’ goals and motivations, such as serving the public interest, increasing self-status, or expressing their creative selves. As it is an emerging area of study, unarticulated theoretical boundaries of citizen journalism exist. Citizen-journalism publications emphasize community over conflict, advocacy over objectivity, and interpretation over fact-based reporting. In general, citizen journalists have historically acted when existing news-media journalists were not fully meeting their community’s informational needs. Scholars, however, vary in how they label citizen journalists and how they conceptually and empirically define citizen journalism. For example, researchers have shifted their definitional focus on citizen journalists from one of active agents of democratic change to people who create a piece of news content. The mapping of the citizen-journalism literature revealed four types of citizen journalists based on their levels of editorial control and contribution type: (1) participatory, (2) para, (3) news-media watchdog, and (4) community. Taken together, these concepts describe the breadth of citizen-journalist types. For those of us interested in journalism studies, a more targeted approach in the field of citizen journalism can help us build community around scholarship, understand citizen journalists’ contributions to society and practice, and create a more a stable foundation of knowledge concerning people who create and comment on news content.

Toronto-area Ethnic Newspapers and Canada's 2011 Federal Election: An Investigation of Content, Focus and Partisanship

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Lindgren
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Ethnic Media ◽  
Federal Election ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Ethnic Newspapers ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Election News

AbstractCanada's political class is embracing ethnocultural news media with increasing zeal, highlighting the need to understand the role of these news organizations in the political process. This study investigated coverage of Canada's 2011 federal election in five Toronto-area ethnocultural newspapers. The publications, which carried campaign news to varying degrees, provided coverage that was distinct in many ways from mainstream media. Content such as the focus on ingroup candidates had the potential to strengthen community bonds while more general election news equipped readers with information that would facilitate participation in society through informed voting. Analysis of reporting about the Conservative Party of Canada, which pursued an aggressive ethnic media strategy, identified no clear pattern of stories with explicitly biased content. In most newspapers, however, the CPC did enjoy an advantage in that it received more coverage than the competition.

scholarly journals Toronto-Area Ethnic Newspapers and Canada's 2011 Federal Election: An Investigation of Content, Focus and Partisanship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Lindgren
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Ethnic Media ◽  
Federal Election ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Ethnic Newspapers ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Election News

Canada's political class is embracing ethnocultural news media with increasing zeal, highlighting the need to understand the role of these news organizations in the political process. This study investigated coverage of Canada's 2011 federal election in five Toronto-area ethnocultural newspapers. The publications, which carried campaign news to varying degrees, provided coverage that was distinct in many ways from mainstream media. Content such as the focus on ingroup candidates had the potential to strengthen community bonds while more general election news equipped readers with information that would facilitate participation in society through informed voting. Analysis of reporting about the Conservative Party of Canada, which pursued an aggressive ethnic media strategy, identified no clear pattern of stories with explicitly biased content. In most newspapers, however, the CPC did enjoy an advantage in that it received more coverage than the competition.

scholarly journals Toronto-Area Ethnic Newspapers and Canada's 2011 Federal Election: An Investigation of Content, Focus and Partisanship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Lindgren
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Ethnic Media ◽  
Federal Election ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Ethnic Newspapers ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Election News

Canada's political class is embracing ethnocultural news media with increasing zeal, highlighting the need to understand the role of these news organizations in the political process. This study investigated coverage of Canada's 2011 federal election in five Toronto-area ethnocultural newspapers. The publications, which carried campaign news to varying degrees, provided coverage that was distinct in many ways from mainstream media. Content such as the focus on ingroup candidates had the potential to strengthen community bonds while more general election news equipped readers with information that would facilitate participation in society through informed voting. Analysis of reporting about the Conservative Party of Canada, which pursued an aggressive ethnic media strategy, identified no clear pattern of stories with explicitly biased content. In most newspapers, however, the CPC did enjoy an advantage in that it received more coverage than the competition.

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