Exploring cyber violence against women and girls in the Philippines through Mining Online News

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is not a recent phenomenon. What is new is the additional increasing threats that millions of women and girls face because of the rapid spread of ICTs and the expansion of social media. Cases of VAWG wherein ICT and social media are used as platforms by cybercriminals can be seen in the news media coverage. This study aims to understand and determine the trend and the state of cyber VAWG to raise awareness through mining online news websites. News articles were scraped from popular news websites between 2015 to 2020. The preprocessed articles (N=3,506) were analyzed by year using the Topic Keyword Model (TKM). It was observed that the cyber VAWG articles topic trends are increasing with most of the articles focusing on the topics “Online sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children” and “ICT-related violations of privacy”. Text mining methods may address the limitations of traditional qualitative approaches. Understanding the cyber VAWG issues by mining news articles is a novel approach that could help create programs and policies to address this societal concern. Additional studies should be conducted related to sentiment analysis of news data to verify and measure the influence of cyber VAWG-related topics. La violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas (VCMN) no es un fenómeno nuevo. Lo nuevo son los crecientes peligros a que se enfrentan los millones de mujeres y niñas debido a la difusión de las TIC y redes sociales. Los casos de la VCMN donde se utilizan como plataformas las TIC y las redes sociales se encuentran fácilmente por medio de la cobertura mediática. Este estudio tiene como objetivo la comprensión y la definición de la tendencia y el estado de la ciber-VCMN para crear conciencia por medio del análisis de los sitios web de noticias online. Entre 2015 y 2020, se recopilaron artículos de los principales sitios de noticias. Se utilizó el Modelo de palabras claves temáticas para evaluar los artículos preprocesados (N=3.506) por año. Se señaló que la mayoría de los artículos sobre ciber-VCMN se centraban en temas de «Explotación sexual y abuso sexual de niños en línea» y «Violaciones de la privacidad relacionadas con las TIC». El análisis de los textos ayuda a trascender las limitaciones de las metodologías cualitativas tradicionales. Comprender las preocupaciones de la ciber-VCMN mediante la extracción de artículos de noticias podría ayudar a crear iniciativas y políticas para solucionar este problema. Proponemos que se lleve a cabo una investigación utilizando análisis de sentimiento de los datos de noticias para verificar y cuantificar el impacto de los problemas relacionados con la ciber-VCMN.

The Turkmen-style economic development

The resource-rich and state-led Turkmen economy has grown very fast since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The authorities have produced a number of various programmes and strategies aimed at improving the standard of living of the citizens and achieving sustainable and inclusive development. Officially, nearly 80% of the national budget in Turkmenistan has been annually allocated for social needs. However, instead of creating opportunities and improving access to these opportunities for the citizens, the authoritarian government chose income redistribution and social spending. The paper identifies key features of the economic development in Turkmenistan and was written base on a critical analysis of state-controlled and independent news websites. The main feature of the Turkmen-style economic development is the growing deprivation of ordinary people. Poor citizens are getting poorer while the president’s relatives and patronage networks are getting richer. Huge gaps between the rural and urban population and tribal divisions have been observed in the country. Moreover, the Soviet-style work holidays continue. Despite significant improvements in infrastructure, provision for education and health care still remains poor in Turkmenistan. The government expenditure for social needs means investment in infrastructure, not human capital.

Development of Focused Crawlers for Building Large Punjabi News Corpus

Web crawlers are as old as the Internet and are most commonly used by search engines to visit websites and index them into repositories. They are not limited to search engines but are also widely utilized to build corpora in different domains and languages. This study developed a focused set of web crawlers for three Punjabi news websites. The web crawlers were developed to extract quality text articles and add them to a local repository to be used in further research. The crawlers were implemented using the Python programming language and were utilized to construct a corpus of more than 134,000 news articles in nine different news genres. The crawler code and extracted corpora were made publicly available to the scientific community for research purposes.

A Mensagem Fotográfica do Jornalismo de Viagens: metodologia qualitativa para avaliação de Alternativas Textuais

A produção e disponibilização de recursos de acessibilidade, como textos alternativos (Alt), são aspectos necessários para tornar o jornalismo mais acessível. O objetivo deste artigo é comparar a composição de fotografias jornalísticas de viagem com seus respectivos Alt para verificar se a função e/ou conteúdo fotográficos podem ser transmitidos às pessoas com deficiência visual. Para isso, fez-se uma pesquisa exploratória em cadernos de viagem de sites de jornais brasileiros, na qual apenas o conteúdo da Folha de S. Paulo apresentou o recurso em todas as fotos. Fez-se um levantamento das características de composição de três fotos e, com base no Paradoxo Fotográfico de Barthes, comparouse a mensagem imagética com o Alt. Observa-se que os Alt usados não substituem adequadamente as fotos, comprometendo a compreensão total por parte das pessoas com deficiência visual.The photographic Message of Travel Journalism: qualitative methodology for Alternative Texts evaluationAbstractThe production and availability of accessibility resources, such as alternative texts (Alt), are necessary aspects to make journalism more accessible. This article compares the composition of travel news photographs with their respective Alt to verify whether the photographic function or content is accessible to visually impaired people. Exploratory research was carried out in travel sections of Brazilian news websites, in which only the Folha de S. Paulo presented the resource. Hence, the composition characteristics of three photographs have been assessed and based on the Barthes Photographic Paradox, there was an examination between the photos message and their Alt. As a result, the Alt used does not adequately replace the images. Such inadequacy compromises the understanding on the part of visually impaired people.Keywords: Travel Journalism; accessibility; alternative text; visual impairment.

Food crisis in fast-growing Turkmenistan

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Turkmenistan’s economy has been growing very fast, which has been primarily generated through the extractive sector and construction industry. After the energy price collapse in mid-2014, the country has recorded a shortage of foreign currency. The authoritarian regime passed currency and economic problems onto the society. As a result, the country has experienced the most severe food crisis in its history. The main aim of the paper is to identify the reasons behind the food crisis in Turkmenistan. The paper tries to answer the following question: how did it happen that people in one of the fastest-growing countries in the 21st century have been suffering from food shortages? The study is based on data retrieved from the World Bank Open Data, ILOSTAT, and Observatory of Economic Complexity, as well as a critical review of independent news websites. The food crisis in Turkmenistan was primarily caused by hyperinflation and rationing basic groceries at preferential prices, wage arrears, cutting salaries of state employees to fund construction projects in progress, group layoffs of state employees, growing difficulties in running a private business, and depriving people of the possibility to exchange the currency at the official rate. The end of a free provision of Turkmenistan’s population with electricity, gas, and drinking water has further deepened the crisis.

Audience and Revenue Concentration in Lithuanian Media Markets (2008–2019)

The article examines the change in audience and revenue concentration in the Lithuanian television, radio, internet, and newspaper markets in 2008–2019, as well as discusses the factors that determined the changes in media concentration and market structure. The study revealed that without any special measures to regulate media concentration in Lithuania, all four media revenue markets (television, radio, internet, and newspapers) have become highly concentrated. In terms of audience (circulation) concentration, the concentration of newspaper and television markets was divided between un concentrated and moderately concentrated areas, the radio audience was moderately concentrated, and the audience of internet news websites was highly concentrated. The results of the analysis show a tendency for audience concentration in media markets to be generally lower than income market concentration. Therefore, when legally defining a dominant position in media markets, it is recommended to set a lower value for audience share than for revenue market share.

Hate speech targets in COVID-19 related comments on Ukrainian news websites

The research focuses on hate speech in the comments section of Ukrainian news websites. Restricted to solely COVID-19 related comments, it seeks to analyze the development of hate speech rates throughout the pandemic. Using a semi-automated machine-learning-aided approach, the paper identifies hate speech in the comments and defines its main targets. The research shows that a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic can strengthen existing negative stereotypes and gives rise to new forms of stigmatization against social and ethnic groups.

News, renewed: Towards a sustainable business model for online journalism

<p>The News, Renewed project was established to pursue the following core objectives: 1) To identify the most promising business model for funding online journalism, through academic research. 2) To enable implementation of the most promising monetisation strategy, through the development of a technology enterprise. From March to April 2014, Alex Clark conducted an online survey completed by 416 consumers, assessing willingness to pay for ten online monetisation strategies. Strategies assessed include: payment-per-article, a payment-to-remove advertising, crowdfunding, donations, a mobile application, a ‘freemium’ model (charging only for premium content), a standalone subscription to a single news website, a national package of all news websites in New Zealand, a global package of all news websites in the world, as well as a multimedia package containing news, music, television and movies. Survey data revealed that strategies embracing global bundling were most popular with respondents. While only one respondent (0.24%) said they would ‘definitely’ pay for a standalone subscription at $10 per month (NZD), 23 respondents (5.4%) said they’d definitely pay for a global news package, and 46 (10.8%) said they’d definitely pay for a news and multimedia package. Consumer preference for global bundling remained strong when viewing survey data through other analytical lenses, such as an aggregate of ‘probably’ and ‘definitely’ responses, as well as estimated conversion rates calculated using Predicted Purchase Intent values. Upon completion of the survey, Alex worked with two developers to create PressPass, a platform focused on enabling the implementation of a bundling strategy by the journalism community. Once a prototype had been developed, Alex met with leading news organisations within New Zealand and the USA to share his findings and seek feedback about his proposed solution. In New Zealand, he met with NZME, TVNZ and MediaWorks. In the USA, he met with the New York Times, The Economist and National Geographic. The News, Renewed thesis analyses the qualitative and quantitative findings from Alex’s consumer survey, while also providing qualitative insights from his interviews with industry leaders. The thesis has been submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Advanced Technology Enterprise at Victoria University of Wellington.</p>