Celebrity news and cyberactivism in the #FreeBritney fandom movement

Public awareness of pop singer Britney Spears's conservatorship has increased as fans have created independent information networks using collaborative platforms. This organization has been able to address real-world civil issues through the deployment of transmedia content strategies from pop culture.

The Effect of Links and Excerpts on Internet News Consumption

Internet news and search sites often excerpt content from and link to competing news outlets. On the one hand, providing outbound links can make the linking site more attractive, even to the point of stealing traffic from the linked sites. Regulatory policy, such as the European Union’s Copyright Directive Article 15 taxing links, is predicated in part on this idea. On the other hand, receiving inbound links can increase a linked site’s audience by informing readers about its news content that day. To explore these opposing perspectives, the authors develop a dynamic learning model and fit it to browsing and link data from celebrity news sites. They then simulate how banning links affects consumer browsing and find that linking increases celebrity news consumption, especially among consumers who browse the least. On average, linking benefits both the linking and linked sites. The authors estimate that exposure to a link increases the likelihood of visiting the linked site by .14%. This increase is approximately three times the commonly reported click-through rate for paid display advertisements.

Indonesian Celebrities Conversion: the Quest for Meaning and Social Environment

Religious conversion has often triggered a heated debate that pushes forward scholarly investigation. This paper is not based on a theological study of conversion, but a psycho-social exploration that aims to examine religious conversion among Indonesian celebrities and seeks factors that influence the conversion. This qualitative study selects five Indonesian celebrities who converted to Islam. All data and information were gathered from YouTube and the websites on entertainment and celebrity news. The study unveils that religious conversion is not a simple one-way process. Instead, it is a long process of search of meaning and identity, shaped by interpersonal relations and social interactions. Before conversion, the converts had made personal and colleague relationship with their Muslim friends and known Islam as it was manifested in everyday life through TV program, the call for Islamic prayer (adhān), neighborhood. The fact that Islam is the majority religion in the country has provided environments that further hastened the quest for the meaning of religion and identity amongst the celebrities.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON CELEBRITY NEWS IN THE ONLINE MEDIA

This research examines online media related to the cases of Indonesian celebrities using critical discourse analysis approach. It aims to explain the textual strategies used by online media upon reporting the cases. The textual strategy focuses on the selection of certain vocabulary and the use of specific grammar. The data are collected through reading and note taking techniques on news texts in the online media, liputan6.com and kapanlagi.com, with certain topics such as: the divorce of Marshanda, Asmirandah interfaith marriage, and the case of celebrity prostitution. The current descriptive qualitative research employs critical discourse analysis proposed by van Dijk which generally believes that media always contains interests and partisanships. Therefore, they tend to provide positive picture of themselves/groups (positive self-presentation) and negative images about others (negative other-presentation).The picture can be analyzed through the way the media use the diction and build certain sentences inside the news. The result shows that media uses the vocabulary such as mothers who have an affair, women who cannot be emulated, presumptuous women, a liar man, no longer Muslim, etc. when reporting on the case of Marshanda’s divorce and Asmirandah’s interfaith marriage. Furthermore, the researcher finds the use of passivation, abstraction, categorization, identification and anonymity strategies in grammar.

Preferensi Informasi dan Perilaku Bermedia Warganet di Akun Instagram Media Informasi Selebritas

The use of social media as a source of information is undeniably important. As it can be used to disseminate specific information, numbers of informational based accounts emerge in various topics, including Instagram accounts which specifically bring out celebrity news as their main information. Using a social informatics perspective approach, this paper aims to capture netizen behavior related to their media habit in accessing it. The results show these accounts emerge as the primary source of information about infotainment issues. However, netizens are unwilling to leave any digital trace related to their activities during accessing these accounts.

Joining the clash or refusing to bash? Bystanders reactions to online celebrity bashing

Researchers, in studies of online news-site commenting, have found a huge number of aggressive comments and have indicated that such comments should be interpreted within the discussion context that other bystanders, such as journalists and other readers, have created. In this study, we aimed to offer insights into bystanders’ reactions to negative news articles and other bystanders’ aggressive comments in the specific context of celebrity news. Therefore, we subjected Flemish celebrity-news articles (N = 69) and the Facebook reactions (N = 5,529) to those articles to a content analysis. First, using a quantitative content analysis, we coded each comment as having a negative, neutral, or positive tone. Next, we conducted a qualitative content analysis, which consisted of a vertical coding phase and a horizontal coding phase, so as to investigate the comments’ content in more depth and to determine which elements resulted in some comments’ negative and even aggressive tone. The results indicate that most readers’ reactions stayed on topic, thus merely contributing to the negative atmosphere that the journalist had already created. However, unlike the journalists, who tended to express their emotions rather subtly, the readers reacted using extreme aggressive language. Furthermore, although these aggressive reader reactions generally seemed to set an aggressive tone for future reactions, some readers broke this aggressive cycle and explicitly disapproved of the aggressive expressions.

Gossip at one’s fingertips: Predictors of celebrity news on Twitter

The present study collected 2223 tweets of news about the Top 100 celebrities from People Magazine’s Twitter account during the year 2016. A combination of content analysis and social network analysis was used to examine celebrity attributes, news features, and the relationships between celebrities and news topics. Results indicated that news agendas and audiences’ responses were highly different. News coverage was primarily determined by news features, yet audiences cared only about big stars. Regular topics centered on the themes of celebrity news. The celebrity-by-topic network was topic-driven rather than human-driven, demonstrating the nature of the celebrity industry as an embodiment of capitalist society.