Their floods and Our floods: News values of flood photo galleries of Associated Press and Xinhua News Agency

This study investigates how floods are presented as newsworthy in the photo galleries of Associated Press (AP) and Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua), two news outlets with different cultural and political backgrounds. A distinction is made between international floods, that is, Their floods, and domestic floods, that is, Our floods. The data consists of around 1500 photo-caption complexes. The analysis adopts the framework of Discursive News Values Analysis. The findings show a similar tendency to highlight Negativity, Impact, Personalization and Superlativeness in presenting Their floods by AP and Xinhua, though the two differ in Proximity and Positivity. By contrast, Our floods are presented differently. Negativity, Impact and Personalization are foregrounded in AP’s presentation of floods in the United States, whereas Xinhua’s presentation of floods in China gives prominence to Negativity, Positivity, Personalization and Superlativeness. The study is significant for its attention to cross-cultural comparison and the genre of online photo galleries.

The Images of China and Britain in the Syrian Media

China and Britain have contrasting images in the official and unofficial Syrian media. By analysing relevant news stories, this study reveals that China’s involvement in the Syrian crisis as covered by the Syrian media is usually limited to governmental affairs, while Britain’s involvement covered by the Syrian media, especially the “revolutionary” outlet, figures in a relatively wider range of diverse nongovernmental happenings including activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the media. Most importantly, the study finds that the “revolutionary” outlet Enab Baladi is apt to present Chinese involvement as negative, but presents British involvement as positive, while the government-backed news agency SANA portrays a completely positive image of China and a fundamentally negative image of Britain.

Thematic Analysis on COVID-19 Photojournalism in Indonesia

The spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia is massive in terms of sufferers. This article aims to seek how national photo news agency ANTARA visualized the pandemic as part of contribution to COVID-19 research in the communication field. By utilizing thematic analysis and qualitative approach, the researchers want to identify, analyze, organize, describe, and report particular themes within an extensive data set of 466 photojournalism. The photos collected from www.antarafoto.com, start from 1 May until 12 May 2020. The finding shows that ANTARA visualized the current Indonesian condition of facing COVID-19 in 8 main themes, determined the countless efforts of ANTARA photojournalists working with a new protocol, and simultaneously also face the new resistance from society. The most popular theme produced by ANTARA photojournalists is economics (183 photos), Social (164), and health (80). Discussion on the most popular is divided into specific topics, namely location, subject’s gender, photographic approach, image format, and news photo category. By utilizing visual ethics on the field, photojournalists communicate the symbols and reality of the real world into a frame to change people’s views about COVID-19 amid the increasingly uncontrolled infodemic flow.

TEMPORAL CONDENSATION OF TAMIL NEWS

Since the dawn of the Internet, we have been inundated with an excess of information. The volume of information available on the Internet is expected to grow exponentially. This brings a need for summarization of information. Thus, making summarization one of the most sought-after topics in the domain of natural language processing. It is essential to be informed about the vital happenings, and newspapers have been serving this purpose for a very long time. Sadly, there is a perception among the general public that no news agency today can be unequivocally trusted, the credibility of news articles is uncertain. Therefore, one has to read news articles from various sources to get an unbiased view on topic. When a query related to an event is entered in SEs like google, the search renders an overwhelming number of responses, it is humanly impossible to read all of them. In an effort to address the aforementioned problems, a condensation of news articles covering the Tamilnadu Legislative Assembly election is performed. The news articles were collected from various news sources over a period of two months. The collected articles were translated from Tamil to English. These articles included news about various events, in order to segregate Tamilnadu related news from them k-means clustering was performed on the dataset. The relvant news articles acquired was pre-processed to remove ambiguity and mistakes from translation. These articles were summarized individually using a linear regression model that gave importance to features such as named entities, number of words that were similar to title etc. The acquired individual summaries were summarized using BERT extractive summarizer as it would reduce redundancy. When generated summary was compared with introduction and title of the article in the absence of an introduction a precision of 0.512, recall of 0.25 and f-measure of 0.31 were obtained.

Understanding Fatal Crash Reporting Patterns in Bangladeshi Online Media using Text Mining

Traffic crashes are a major public health concern. In 2016, traffic crashes resulted in over 1.35 million deaths worldwide. In Bangladesh alone, the number of reported traffic fatalities was 2,376 in 2016. However, the World Health Organization estimated that the true number of traffic fatalities in Bangladesh ranges between 20,730 and 29,177. Editorial traffic crash reports in Bangladesh, and the number of crashes that are reported, vary widely among different media outlets. This study employed a Google News Alert to collect fatal crash reports from online English daily newspapers. The current study compiled a database of 419 fatal crash-related reports over a six-month period (November 2018–April 2019). The reports contain a total of 81,019 words. The results of this study reveal that online news coverage of traffic fatalities tends to vary from news agency to news agency. Furthermore, these reports do not usually cover key contributing factors of crash occurrences; the geometric features of crash occurrence sites are rarely reported. The findings demonstrate the importance of deciphering media coverage to develop potential safety risk measures in Bangladesh. The current findings provide strong support for the need for guidelines to help media outlets adequately document fatal crash reports.

COVID-19 news reporting and engaging in the age of social media: Comparing Xinhua News Agency and The Paper

“To follow and to be followed” has become the new normal in news communication in the age of social media. News audience follow news via social media while they are being followed by news anytime anywhere. This new normal has created a pressing need to investigate whether social media have brought any changes to both party-controlled and market-oriented news media in China in reporting crises. Comparing Xinhua News Agency (party-controlled) and The Paper (market-oriented), this study investigated how they reported COVID-19 and how their news consumers engaged with their COVID-19 news stories on Jinri Toutiao, a popular and yet special form of social media. This study found that Xinhua News Agency continued to stay overwhelmingly positive, while The Paper was more neutral in reporting the health crisis. Xinhua News Agency was surprisingly more episodic than The Paper in framing the pandemic. The Paper, however, had a higher level of user engagement than Xinhua News Agency. To cater to the changing news-seeking behaviors and patterns, both party-controlled and market-oriented news media have changed their operations, but not their fundamental orientations.

Author byline (Culture Coverage)

This variable describes the employment basis that the writers of the articles represent. It distinguishes between staff writers, representing in-house newsroom production, and freelancer-based writers, representing outsourced production. It also examines the shares of non-signed and news agency material, as well as material produced by the audience, whenever it is placed on culture pages. These are the major production instances for cultural coverage. Tracing their development across time delivers information on the strategic and economic shifts, reflected in the use of non-specialized writers (journalists from other departments and outsourced production). Field of application/theoretical foundation As debates on the state of cultural journalism and the anatomy of cultural coverage are often centered around the volume of reviews, this variable delivers more detailed information about the production structures of the articles. Commissioning freelancers is specifically characteristic of cultural coverage; in cultural journalism, external authors are used more than in any other form of journalism. Through the variable, it can be examined to which extent the freelancer networks are being used for cultural coverage. Another prevalent question for cultural coverage is the extent of news agency material, or “churnalism” (Kristensen, 2018), which strengthens the ties of cultural coverage to cultural industry and, as an indication of less critical distance, is regarded as non-preferable. References/combination with other methods of data collection In coding the variable, the author name indicated in the byline is recorded. The variable typically needs background research for determining individual authors’ employment contracts, which may also vary from time to time. For distinguishing between specialized staff journalists, general staff journalists, and freelancer journalists, the researcher may utilize newsroom superiors as informants, as well as the authors themselves. When cross-tabulated with other variables, the variable provides useful information on how freelancer production has developed in time with regard to cultural forms, genres, and gender. Sample operationalization The author byline is operationalized as follows: Event type Description Specialized staff journalist Cultural journalist: salary-based staff journalist in the culture department General staff journalist Other journalist: salary-based staff journalist in a department other than culture Freelancer journalist Outsourced production: writer separately commissioned for the text Newsroom signature Byline referring to the newspaper in question, leaving the writer anonymous News agency Name of the news agency (AFP, AP, Reuters, etc.) Member of audience A reader, non-journalist Not recognizable Producer of the text unknown, not signed Example study Jaakkola (2015) Information abour Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Representation of the author bylines according to the work contract of the journalists on culture pages of daily newspapers across time, to expose the production structure Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Author Unit of analysis: Article Values: 1 = specialized staff journalist, 2= general staff journalist, 3 = freelancer journalist, 4 = newsroom signature, 5 = news agency, 6 = member of the audience, 7 = not recognizable Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Jaakkola, M. (2015). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.892727 Kristensen, N.N. (2018). Churnalism, cultural (inter)mediation and sourcing in cultural journalism. Journalism Studies, 19(14), 2168–2186.