EXPRESS: How Does the Adoption of Ad Blockers Affect News Consumption?

Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news publishers that rely on advertising income tend to perceive users' adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the possibility that avoiding ads—which users presumably dislike—may affect users' online news consumption behavior in positive ways. Using 3.1 million visits from 79,856 registered users on a news website, this research finds that ad blocker adoption has robust positive effects on the quantity and variety of articles users consume. Specifically, ad blocker adoption increases the number of articles that users read by 21.5%-43.3%, and it increases the number of content categories that users consume by 13.4%-29.1%. These effects are stronger for less-experienced users. The increase in news consumption stems from increases in repeat visits to the news website, rather than in the number of page impressions per visit. These post-adoption visits tend to start from direct navigation to the news website, rather than from referral sources. The authors discuss how news publishers could benefit from these findings, including exploring revenue models that consider users' desire to avoid ads.

A Speech Acts Analysis of English COVID-19 News Headlines

News headlines are key elements in spreading news. They are unique texts written in a special language which enables readers understand the overall nature and importance of the topic. However, this special language causes difficulty for readers in understanding the headline. To illuminate this difficulty, it is argued that a pragmatic analysis from a speech act theory perspective is a plausible tool for a headline analysis. The main objective of the study is to pragmatically analyze the most frequently employed types of speech acts in the news headlines covering COVID-19 in Aljazeera English website. To this end, Bach and Harnish's (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts has been adopted to analyze the data. Thirty headlines have been collected from Aljazeera English news website. The findings have shown that constatives and directives occur more frequently than commissives. Other types, like acknowledgments, effectives and verdictives are not employed. The study has concluded that to pay a special emphasis on COVID-19 as an issue that preoccupied and endangered the world, headline writers of Aljazeera website uses specific speech acts, constatives and directives, more frequently than others. This makes it clear that using specific speech acts in writing headlines is an effective way for inspiring readers to easily understand the intended message.

INCELS ON REDDIT: A STUDY IN SOCIAL NORMS AND DECENTRALISED MODERATION

The social news website Reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (Gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (Topinka 2017), and violence against women (Massanari 2017). As a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators to self-govern the subreddits (Matias 2016), Reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (Gillespie 2018). Incels—an internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs—grew in visibility when they developed subreddits on Reddit. After ongoing criticism and media attention about harmful behaviour of incels both on and off the platform, Reddit imposed escalating sanctions and ultimately banned the most visible of these subreddits over a period of several years. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between formal rules and social norms in incel and related subreddits. This paper aims to improve understanding about how problematic norms are contested in (partially-) decentralised systems of content moderation. We examine discourse about moderation to better understand the role of moderation teams in maintaining and changing social norms in their communities and to examine the interaction between these norms and both sitewide and subreddit-specific rules. Our analysis suggests that the threat of prohibition alone is unlikely to be sufficient to drive cultural change in problematic subreddits. We argue that content moderation is an insufficient frame to understand the regulation of harmful communities; real change requires addressing the underlying cultural norms rather than focusing on individual pieces of content.

What Can the New Vatican Spokesman Do in the Era of Abuse Crisis?

The Catholic Church (Further referred to as “Church” for shortening) has been facing a number of scandals regarding its priests and religious figures for several decades. Therefore, effective measures, considering legal or pastoral changes, and a working communication strategy are necessary to deal with the sad facts and to regain credibility through means of accountability, transparency, and solidarity. The expectations of what the official Vatican media—which has been undergoing multi-layer reform since 2015—is for are changing quickly and dramatically in the era of abuse crisis, possibly even having a wicked character. Among the initial commitments of the curial Dicastery for Communication included the criteria of paying “special attention to situations of hardship, poverty and difficulty”. We shall necessarily ask whether the employees and servants in Catholic Church communication are aware of all the contemporary risks and possible consequences of being resistant to it. The goal of this contribution is to inquire if and how the character of Vatican communication changed in this direction and whether it reacted to the critique and to the doubts made on the level of credibility and accountability. The time limitation is the second half of 2019—since the appointment of the new Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni in July 2019 to November 2019. The article takes into account the official Vatican News website data source and asks how flexibly Bruni responded to the critical situation.

How is your Toronto neighbourhood portrayed in the news? Check it out using these interactive maps

Concerns about how neighbourhoods are portrayed in the news have surfaced regularly in the Toronto area over the years. But are those concerns valid? Interactive maps produced by the The Local News Research Project (LNRP) at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism are designed to help Toronto residents answer this question. The maps give the public access to data the research project collected on local news coverage by the Toronto Star and the online news website OpenFile.ca. The maps are based on the Toronto Star’s local news coverage published on 21 days between January and August, 2011. Researchers have found that a two-week sample of news is generally representative of news coverage over the course of a year (Riffe, Aust & Lacy, 1993). The data for OpenFile.ca, which suspended publishing in 2012, were collected for every day in 2011 between January and August. Click here to see the maps or continue reading to find out more about news coverage and neighbourhood stereotyping, how the maps work, and the role of open data sources in this project.

How is your Toronto neighbourhood portrayed in the news? Check it out using these interactive maps

Concerns about how neighbourhoods are portrayed in the news have surfaced regularly in the Toronto area over the years. But are those concerns valid? Interactive maps produced by the The Local News Research Project (LNRP) at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism are designed to help Toronto residents answer this question. The maps give the public access to data the research project collected on local news coverage by the Toronto Star and the online news website OpenFile.ca. The maps are based on the Toronto Star’s local news coverage published on 21 days between January and August, 2011. Researchers have found that a two-week sample of news is generally representative of news coverage over the course of a year (Riffe, Aust & Lacy, 1993). The data for OpenFile.ca, which suspended publishing in 2012, were collected for every day in 2011 between January and August. Click here to see the maps or continue reading to find out more about news coverage and neighbourhood stereotyping, how the maps work, and the role of open data sources in this project.