scholarly journals ‘Emergent’ media and public communication: Understanding the changing mediascape

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Public Sphere

Scholars and practitioners are widely agreed that media and public communication are undergoing significant change deserving of close attention and, along with widespread popular media discussion, a body of scholarly research on the changing 21st century mediascape is emerging. The term ‘new media’ is widely used in the literature to describe interactive online communication forms including blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, microblogging, and virtual worlds enabled by what is referred to as Web 2.0. A number of studies cite so-called ‘new media’ as the ‘fourth media revolution’ and make effusive predictions concerning their effects ranging from the “end of journalism” to the transformation of the public sphere through the birth of e-democracy. This paper critically reviews changes taking place and provides an overview of implications for public communication. It challenges the term ‘new media’, arguing that it is inaccurate and unhistorical, and attempts to look beyond hype and ‘cyberbole’ that often distort discussion to identify substantive changes taking place. It argues these are located in social and cultural practices rather than technology and explores four foundational shifts which have significant implications for media and all areas of public communication practice including journalism, political communication, advertising, public relations and organisational communication.

scholarly journals Content analysis of new means of communication in contemporary democratic states

2018 ◽  
Vol 325 ◽  
pp. 249-256
Author(s):  
Mihaela Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
New Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Three Dimensional Model ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Web Space ◽  
The Uk

The previous period of United States presidential elections of 1996 has redirected the relevant scientific research to investigate the correlation online communication - political sphere. Consequently were formulated various paradigms and the most discussed was the democratic paradigm, according to which the representation serve as a basic principle of modern democracy. The study of the level of influence of new communication technologies on political sphere became, for a number of scientific investigations carried out in USA, Canada and later in some European countries such as France, Italy, the UK (in 2000 and since 2007 in Romania), an important objective of empirical research. In most cases, the first stage of the investigation of online political communication has been marked by some methodological problems such as: the changeable nature of web space, the necessity to elaborate new indicators able to represent basic aspects of studied reality, the temporal validity of the data. The elaboration of A Model of Cyber –Interactivity by Sally J. McMillan has contributed to overcome these difficulties and has demonstrated the effectiveness of content analysis as research method used for the study of Web Space dynamic reality. Later, the research team from the University of Rochester (Paul Ferber, Frantz Foltz, Rudy Pugliese) have perfected the two-way interactivity model (elaborated by Sally J. McMillan) and have it completed with three-dimensional model of interactivity for the purpose of quantitative investigation of political websites and to argue that these forms of new media correspond to the ideals of cyberdemocracy.

The role and status of communication practice in the USA and Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Swerling ◽  
Kjerstin Thorson ◽  
Ansgar Zerfass
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Social Media Tools ◽  
Use Of Social Media

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore trends in practitioners’ perceptions of their role within organizations as well as their influence among senior management both in the USA and Europe. It analyses practitioners’ beliefs about the status of their work as well as their understandings of the ways the new media environment is shifting their everyday practice. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on data from two surveys of public relations (PR) practitioners, one in the USA and the other in Europe. These data enable comparisons between communication practice in the two geographic areas. The paper focusses the analysis on senior-level practitioners who reported working within the communication department of an organization. Findings – The findings of this study suggest that practitioners in both regions are optimistic about the influence of communications within their broader organizations. However, European practitioners are more likely to adopt a “central but flexible” organizational strategy for managing the need to speak in many voices across media and publics. American respondents report much greater use of social media tools than do their European counterparts. These findings are discussed as they relate to the diverse circumstances characterizing the communication practice in each region. Originality/value – This paper provides a rare comparative look at attitudes and practices within PR and communications in two distinct geographic areas.

Multimodal Mapping of a University’s Formal and Informal Online Brand

2014 ◽  
pp. 120-162
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
University Reputation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
The University

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university’s electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.

CHANGES IN PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGEMENT IN THE ERA OF CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (specjalny) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Anna Adamus-Matuszyńska ◽  
Renata Maćkowska
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Global Epidemic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Practice Models ◽  
The Many ◽  
Delphi Research

The year 2020 is filledby new economic, social and environmental phenomena related to COVID-19 and its consequences. The global coronavirus pandemic affects every industry and all aspects of people’s lives. Therefore, one of the many questions researchers raise, are changes in the methods of communication between organizations and stakeholders resulting from this global epidemic. The first purpose of the presented research is to get knowledge about public relations activities practiced during the crises of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the coronavirus pandemic. The second goal is to test the suitability of James Grunig’s models during the pandemic crisis. The authors accept the thesis that the global crises that characterize the first years of the 21st century and the role of social media make it necessary to use models of PR practice different than those experienced in the 20th century. Hence, the research attempts to answer the following research questions: 1. How has the public relations model been changed in Polish companies during the pandemic? 2. Has crisis management dominated the activities of PR specialists? 3. How does new media hinder or, on the contrary – facilitate the implementation of PR tasks during a pandemic? The Delphi research was used as the research method. The Delphi method aims to aggregate the opinions of a diverse group of experts. It allows to carry out researches without the need to meet respondents directly, which is essential during a pandemic. Experts were selected from the members of the Polish Public Relations Association. The overall conclusion of the analysis emphases that the pandemic has been changing PR practice models as it has forced the online communication that is especially exposed to fake news and hate speech content.

Multimodal Mapping of a University's Formal and Informal Online Brand

2018 ◽  
pp. 1072-1124
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
University Reputation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
The University

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university's electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.

A Diachronic Analysis of Portuguese Digital Campaigning

2017 ◽  
pp. 729-745
Author(s):  
Rui Alexandre Novais ◽  
Álvaro Cúria
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
Multiple Wave ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Wave Nature ◽  
Important Interaction ◽  
Digital Campaigning

Bearing in mind the dearth of inquiry about new media and political campaigns in Portugal, this chapter proposes an unprecedented cross-cutting analysis of the nature of online communication during the period of explosion of the e-campaigns. Such a topography and cartography for Internet communications and political campaigning, comprising distinct elections over time, allows for assessing both the evolution of the campaign online and the most influential contributions of the Internet to those evolving trends. The multiple wave nature of the data involved in the chronological study of the 2000 campaigns in Portugal is further complemented with extensive in-depth interviews conducted with different actors from the limited universe of key respondents with direct involvement in the episodes under analysis. It concludes that the Internet went from a separate operation in previous campaigns to a more central role within all Portuguese campaign divisions. Despite being touted as a revolution and a great communication tool, the core features of the Internet have reinforced the continuity of previous tendencies rather than precipitating a radical break with the past. Moreover, although important interaction flows were created with the voters, those were discontinued once the campaign was over, thus making Websites, online platforms, social networks profiles, and video sharing channels used during campaign as obsolete as old leaflets left on the floor after the rally has ended.

Multimodal Mapping of a University's Formal and Informal Online Brand

2015 ◽  
pp. 586-635
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
University Reputation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
The University

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university's electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.

A Diachronic Analysis of Portuguese Digital Campaigning

2014 ◽  
pp. 210-225
Author(s):  
Rui Alexandre Novais ◽  
Álvaro Cúria
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
Multiple Wave ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Wave Nature ◽  
Important Interaction ◽  
Digital Campaigning

Bearing in mind the dearth of inquiry about new media and political campaigns in Portugal, this chapter proposes an unprecedented cross-cutting analysis of the nature of online communication during the period of explosion of the e-campaigns. Such a topography and cartography for Internet communications and political campaigning, comprising distinct elections over time, allows for assessing both the evolution of the campaign online and the most influential contributions of the Internet to those evolving trends. The multiple wave nature of the data involved in the chronological study of the 2000 campaigns in Portugal is further complemented with extensive in-depth interviews conducted with different actors from the limited universe of key respondents with direct involvement in the episodes under analysis. It concludes that the Internet went from a separate operation in previous campaigns to a more central role within all Portuguese campaign divisions. Despite being touted as a revolution and a great communication tool, the core features of the Internet have reinforced the continuity of previous tendencies rather than precipitating a radical break with the past. Moreover, although important interaction flows were created with the voters, those were discontinued once the campaign was over, thus making Websites, online platforms, social networks profiles, and video sharing channels used during campaign as obsolete as old leaflets left on the floor after the rally has ended.

scholarly journals Potential Youth’s Civic Engagement on Virtual Public Sphere in Developing World

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Khamis Juma Abdalla
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Communicative Actions ◽  
Multiple Clusters

The emergence of new media with multiple platforms has abundantly adjusted the socio-political perspectives in such a way that our everyday conducts and professionalism point of views are entrenched over technological diffusion. The young people remain the potential users on the social media, considering their primary bases for daily accomplishments, owing to the novel features and realistic methods available. As an entry point, this paper intends to draw the conception of the public sphere, whereby the notion of publics is vital on abstracting the sphere of the internet, in which abundant spheres meant for the multiple clusters embark on political communication for their ways distinctly. It’s the ideal realm which converges the peripheral spheres into the inclusive domain through communicative actions. In the developing countries, the youths along with minorities’ engagement and reliance on the internet has been ominously mounting, comprehensive for political identities and rationalizing their civic opinions. Polling discussion on running candidates and political parties’ manifestations are common during the general election and some diaspora communities and further foreign activists play a part in political affairs of the countries. Thus, this article aims at tracing the potential civil integrity for youths with political information efficacy fostered on digital public spheres, by which traditional media are politically run-downed, remoted by draconian legal framework and commercial determinants. Besides, this paper argues about the offline publics which are ideally distant, thus far implies to the narrow unitary sphere theorization owing to the technology division which so far entails partial civic life.

scholarly journals Editorial

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jim Macnamara ◽  
Robert Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
The University

Welcome to the first issue of Public Communication Review. Borrowing an approach from journalism, it is appropriate in this first issue to briefly explain the who, what, where, when, why and how of this publication. Who and where? Public Communication Review is published by the Australian Centre for Public Communication (ACPC) at the University of Technology Sydney. Why? The Centre was established in 2002 to facilitate research in the field of public communication and to engage with industry and the professions through the dissemination of research and stimulation of debate on important issues, encouraging innovation, and promoting ethical practice. The ACPC is very much a result of UTS’ vision and goal to integrate theory and practice. Along with undertaking partnership and contract research, hosting seminars on key issues, and conducting short courses, the Centre decided that a quality journal is a key channel for achieving its objectives. When we asked the question ‘why launch another journal’, the members and the Advisory Board of the Australian Centre for Public Communication agreed that integration of theory and practice and our holistic view of the field of public communication fill a gap in the field. What? While recognising and respecting the specialist disciplinary fields of public relations, advertising, journalism and media studies, we use the title ‘public communication’ to draw focus to the interrelated and inter-dependent nature of a range of public communication practices. We define public communication as comprising advertising, public relations, organisational and corporate communication, and political communication including campaigns and engagement in the public sphere, as well as media communication generally. These practices are also closely inter-connected with journalism – albeit, sometimes in a tensioned relationship. We believe that this holistic view brings a new perspective and vantage point for exploring public communication. It recognises convergence and an increasing blurring of boundaries between practices of production, practices of distribution, and practices of consumption in the ‘Second Media Age’, and it facilitates discussion of common concerns and interests across practices of public communication. When? We intend to publish two issues a year. How? We have decided that Public Communication Review will be an e-journal as this allows research to be distributed more quickly than print publications and it enables the journal to respond to topical issues. Furthermore, it reflects the practices of the digital media age which are a focus of this journal. On behalf of the Centre and the University of Technology Sydney, I thank the distinguished scholars who have agreed to be members of the Editorial Board and welcome you to Public Communication Review.

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