Media Systems in the Digital Age: An Empirical Comparison of 30 Countries

Media systems have changed significantly as a result of the development of information technologies. However, typologies of media systems that incorporate aspects of digitalization are rare. This study fills this gap by identifying, operationalizing, and measuring indicators of media systems in the digital age. We build on previous work, extend it with new indicators that reflect changing conditions (such as online news use), and include media freedom indicators. We include 30 countries in our study and use cluster analysis to identify three clusters of media systems. Two of these clusters correspond to the media system models described by Hallin and Mancini, namely the democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist model. However, the liberal model as described by Hallin and Mancini has vanished; instead, we find empirical evidence of a new cluster that we call “hybrid”: it is positioned in between the poles of the media-supportive democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist clusters.

Functions of Hybrid Media: How Parties and Their Leaders Use Traditional Media in Their Social Media Campaign Communication

Political campaign communication has become increasingly hybrid and the ability to create synergies between older and newer media is now a prerequisite for running a successful campaign. Nevertheless, beyond establishing that parties and individual politicians use social media to gain visibility in traditional media, not much is known about how political actors use the hybrid media system in their campaign communication. At the same time, the personalization of politics, shown to have increased in the media coverage of politics, has gained little attention in the context of today’s hybrid media environment. In this research we analyze one aspect of hybrid media campaign communication, political actors’ use of traditional media in their social media campaign communication. Through a quantitative content analysis of the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts of Finnish parties and their leaders published during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that much of this hybridized campaign communication was personalized. In addition, we show that parties and their leaders used traditional media for multiple purposes, the most common of which was gaining positive visibility, pointing to strategic considerations. The results have implications for both the scholarship on hybrid media systems and personalization of politics.

Reactive and Asymmetric Communication Flows: Social Media Discourse and Partisan News Framing in the Wake of Mass Shootings

Marked by both deep interconnectedness and polarization, the contemporary media system in the United States features news outlets and social media that are bound together, yet deeply divided along partisan lines. This article formally analyzes communication flows surrounding mass shootings in the hybrid and polarized U.S. media system. We begin by integrating media system literature with agenda setting and news framing theories and then conduct automated text analysis and time series modeling. After accounting for exogenous event characteristics, results show that (a) sympathy and gun control discourses on Twitter preceded news framing of gun policy more than the other way around, and (b) conservatives on Twitter and conservative media reacted to progressive discourse on Twitter, without their progressive counterparts exhibiting a similar reactiveness. Such results shed light on the influence of social media on political communication flows and confirm an asymmetry in the ways partisan media ecosystems respond to social events.

Citizens, Polarization, and the Pandemic in the Italian Hybrid News Media System

Italy was the first Western democracy to experience mass lockdown in response to COVID-19. In the early stages of the pandemic, citizens' trust in the government increased and journalists “indexed” to institutional sources; however, elite polarization was not long in coming, in tandem with an infodemic. Rooted in this context, this longitudinal study investigates Italian citizens' positions on an issue which lies at the very heart of democracy: the balance between public health and individual freedoms. Findings indicate that citizens' opinions did not polarize between extreme communitarian and libertarian stances. On the contrary, a significant majority of citizens expressed strong beliefs in the primacy of public health over their freedoms. Extreme libertarians were only a minority, and their positions were driven by a completely different vision of the news reliability of “older” and “newer” media arenas, different attitudes toward the “official truth,” and different levels of trust in the government to those of extreme communitarians. Implications are discussed in the conclusion.

Social sharing of emotions in social media system: results of the analysis of creepypasta`s comments on Reddit

The relevance of the article is explained by the communicative significance and the functions that the social media system has today. American platform Reddit is not only a platform for world-class communication but also it’s a space for possible implementation of offline interaction models. Currently, both the popularity of Reddit and its influence on the physical world are growing. The object of the study is users’ comments to the highly talked creepypasta “My Sleep Paralysis Demon is Actually A Pretty Chill Guy”. This creepypasta is published in NoSleep community that is the most popular subreddit for sharing horror posts. We use a creepypasta as a convenient material for research due to its communicative nature. This is digital fictional content that is perceived as real (through the internal rules of the NoSleep community) and is not temporal. The article studies the process of social exchange of emotions, their re-experience during the description of the event that caused them. The aim of the study is to find out whether Reddit allows the laws of real social interaction to be transferred to the online space. To solve the problem was used a set of methods, chief among them was the intent analysis. Results. The study has shown that user feedback can be represented by one of three forms (or their certain combination): direct emotional feedback that expresses a certain emotion obtained after reading the creepypasta, commenting on a story that is predominantly a rational expression of thoughts about a story, and a personal experience that is a presentation of information about users commenting on creepypasta. Their calculation showed the existence of common features between offline social sharing of emotions and its digital counterpart. The ratio of different forms of comments depends on the degree of discussion of creepy paste and the specifics of the central topic. Creepypasta is currently actively attracting the attention of scientists around the world, but its formation and formation as a genre of the digital environment is mainly studied. This study focused on the specifics of Creepypasta on Reddit, taking into account the internal rules of the community. For further research, it seems promising to study other genres of the digital environment from the perspective of social sharing of emotions.

A Corpus-Based and Complex Computing Digital Media System for 3D Animation

In this paper, we design a corpus-based 3D animation digital media system to improve the accuracy of 3D animation generation and realize crossplatform animation display. The corpus module extracts high-precision data through web crawling, web cleaning, Chinese word separation, and text classification steps; the character animation generation module uses the semantic description method to expand the frame information description of the extracted data, calculates the object spatial 3D coordinates, and uses the built-in animation execution script to generate 3D character animation; the improved digital media player module uses the improved digital media player to realize crossplatform display of 3D character animations using the improved digital media player. By constructing multidimensional character relationships and combining multiple visualization methods, the complex and multifaceted social relationship network is made available to users in an intuitive and more acceptable and understandable mode. Through a large number of user surveys, it is proved that the visual analysis method combining real social and virtual social proposed in this paper provides a more adequate and reliable basis for friend recommendation and social network analysis; the combination of multiple character relationships with geographical information and the use of visualization to describe multidimensional historical character relationships provides a new research perspective for the research and exploration of humanistic neighborhoods. The experimental results prove that the designed system can effectively read known contents and extract keywords and generate 3D animation based on keyword features, with a high accuracy rate, fast response time, small frame loss rate, and crossplatform display animation advantages.

COVID-19 in Polish Women’s Press. Preliminary research

Women’s press has been analysed as an element of the Polish media system by representatives of various fields of research. There have been studies of press content, formal features of individual magazines, ownership and definition issues, and internal segmentations, amongst others. This research attempts to fill a gap in the study of women’s press content; it aims to show how the COVID-19 was presented in women’s press. As an introduction to the main research, this article examines a carefully selected study sample with individual sub-segments of women’s press each represented by a leading magazine. Research objectives include determining the ways in which COVID-19 is presented in certain women’s press titles belonging to different sub-segments, analysing the selection and presentation of information to potential readers in regards to their needs, and establishing the functions of COVID-19 guidance in women’s press.

Modelling Economic Effects of the Media Influence as Methodological Basis for Strategizing the Media System

This research focused on the impact of media industry on other sectors of the economy. Advertising is considered as a basic implementation mechanism of media’s economic impact on the economy. The study used the original classification of the effects of economic impact on the market at all levels, developed by the author. It examined the highest level of advertising associated with the shift in market structure and economic interactions of its members and elements. The effects of this type — tertiary ones — include not only changes in the properties of equilibrium due to advertising, but also the emergence of new types of market participants whose economic activity is determined exclusively by advertising-related goals. To describe such effects, models of marketing channels are used — a special kind of production chains that connect the preceding and subsequent units with the help of contracts for advertising and promotional activities, and models of multi-sided markets, complementing the analysis with the study of the behavior of intermediary firms that place advertisements in the media. and linking producers and consumers. Classical models of two-sided markets, considering media as platforms connecting consumers with producers, do not consider the simultaneous consumption of goods and content by the audience and the nature of the producing firms’ problems. Therefore, in this paper, the focus of the study was on the models of a three-sided market, which includes three types of participants (consumers, media firms and industrial firms). It is proposed to put such models of intersectoral relations as the basis for quantitative methods of strategizing the media system, including at the national level. At the level of strategizing of individual media enterprises or holdings, the proposed model makes it possible to predict the long-term strategies of competitors. At the industrial level of strategy development, the proposed methodology makes it possible to build key indicators that determine the strategic priorities of the industry development based on the properties of the three-sided market equilibrium.

Comparing newspapers in mainland China and Hong Kong: The limits of media systems theory

Most comparative studies of media are undertaken between different countries. It is normally assumed that there are considerable commonalities between the media in a given country and it is usually argued that these are sufficient to form a ‘media system’, which can usefully be contrasted with that of another country. It is relatively unusual to find two sets of media within one country that are sufficiently distinct as be considered as different systems. This paper explores one of the exceptions to that general rule: the case of the Hong Kong media as compared with those of mainland China. Given the different historical and current situations of the two locations at the time the research was conducted, it is to be expected that the kinds of journalism practised would be radically dissimilar. The results of a content analysis of five mainland and three Hong Kong papers demonstrate that, at the aggregate level, there are indeed important differences. A more detailed analysis, however, demonstrates that each of the three Hong Kong papers is in fact closer to mainland groupings than they are to each other. One Hong Kong paper, Ta Kung Pao, is closest to the most ‘official’ grouping of mainland papers, while Ming Pao falls in to a grouping with the ‘liberal’ mainland paper. The now defunct Apple Daily, on the other hand, has the closest links with the ‘popular official’ mainland press. Taken together, these findings suggest that the common assumption that different forms of journalism are best compared on a national basis is incorrect and that factors like market position and ideological orientation have an important influence on the kinds of journalism practised across borders.

Media Regionalism as a Historical Feature of Quebec Mass Media

The current issue of information access for different nations within one state is examined. The media of Quebec, the only francophone province of Canada, give us a clear example. However, Russian scholars almost disregard this domain. Therefore, the research is based on the Canadian works (M. Brunet, A. Beaulieu and J. Hamelin, W.H. Kesterton) in French and in English. The Royal Commission on Newspapers Report (1981), which described two separate media systems (French media and English media), was used as well. The focus is on the Franco-Canadian national problem and its influence on Quebec media historic evolution. This process moves from bilingual editions (two first newspapers were published in French and in English simultaneously) to modern monolingual media system. Through comparative analysis, the relationship between media bilingualism and media monolingualism in Quebec of 18-21st centuries is examined. Quebecs modern information politics can be defined as media regionalism (French language and specific Quebec content). Media regionalisms object is to resist federal doctrine one country - one nation with two languages, the base of Official Language Act (1969). As a result, the absence of traditional federal official media bilingualism in Quebec, which tries to save its national heritage by media regionalism, was discovered.