Constructing a software requirements specification and design for electronic IT news magazine system

Requirements engineering process intends to obtain software services and constraints. This process is essential to meet the customer's needs and expectations. This process includes three main activities in general. These are detecting requirements by interacting with software stakeholders, transferring these requirements into a standard document, and examining that the requirements really define the software that the client needs. Functional requirements are services that the software should deliver to the end-user. In addition, functional requirements describe how the software should respond to specific inputs, and how the software should behave in certain circumstances. This paper aims to develop a software requirements specification document of the electronic IT news magazine system. The electronic magazine provides users to post and view up-to-date IT news. Still, there is a lack in the literature of comprehensive studies about the construction of the electronic magazine software specification and design in conformance with the contemporary software development processes. Moreover, there is a need for a suitable research framework to support the requirements engineering process. The novelty of this paper is the construction of software specification and design of the electronic magazine by following the Al-Msie'deen research framework. All the documents of software requirements specification and design have been constructed to conform to the agile usage-centered design technique and the proposed research framework. A requirements specification and design are suggested and followed for the construction of the electronic magazine software. This study proved that involving users extensively in the process of software requirements specification and design will lead to the creation of dependable and acceptable software systems.

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

This article explores the practices of selecting news images that depict death at a global picture agency, national picture agency and a news magazine. The study is based on ethnographic observations and interviews ( N = 30) from three Western-based news organisations, each representing a link in the complex international news-image circulation process. Further, the organisations form an example of a chain of filters through which most of the news images produced for the global market have to pass before publication. These filters are scrutinised by the empirical case studies that examine the professionals’ ethical reasoning regarding images of violence and death. This research contributes to an understanding of the differences and similarities between media organisations as filters and sheds light on their role in shaping visual coverage. This study concludes that photojournalism professionals’ ethical decision-making is discursively constructed around three frames: (1) shared ethics, (2) relative ethics and (3) distributed ethics. All the organisations share certain similar conceptions of journalism ethics at the level of ideals. On the level of workplace practices and routines, a mixture of practical preconditions, journalism’s self-regulation, business logic and national legislation lead to differences in the image selection practices. It is argued that the ethical decision-making is distributed between – and sometimes even outsourced to – colleagues working in different parts of the filtering chain. Finally, this study suggests that dead or suffering bodies are often invisible in the images of the studied media organisations.

Quality of Information Regarding Abnormal Uterine Bleeding Available Online (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The Internet and electronic devices with Internet access allow for a greater fluidity of information and speed of communication, especially in the field of health. Abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) affects approximately 3 - 30% of women and can negatively impact their health and quality of life. Information regarding AUB that is available on the Internet may not be clear or accurate, rendering it difficult to understand and likely to result in delayed medical evaluation, which subsequently leads to worsening of the AUB. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the quality of the information regarding AUB currently available on the Internet, including information regarding treatments. METHODS The Google Trends website was searched for the most widely used English terms related to AUB. The identified descriptors were searched individually on the Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines. The first 10 results of each search were pre-selected and evaluated for inclusion in this study. Selected websites were categorically divided into two groups (news/magazine and academic) and individually analyzed by three experts using the DISCERN quality criteria (reliability, general quality, and quality of information) and the presence or absence of the Health on the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode®) seal. RESULTS Of the 168 websites included in this study, 60.1% were allocated to the news/magazine group and 39.9% were allocated to the academic group. Over half of the websites (54.2%) did not have the HONcode® quality seal. Websites in the academic group were more likely to include accurate information regarding AUB with greater reliability than websites in the news/magazine group. There were no statistical differences regarding the general quality of the websites. Most websites were rated as either moderate quality (70.8%) or low quality (28.6%). The HONcode® criterion was found to be a confounding factor of the analyses, as the grouping and quality results of websites without this seal were significantly associated. In addition, websites in the news/magazines group were 6.7 times more likely to provide low quality information than websites in the academic group (odds ratio: 6.7; 95% confidence interval: 2.1 - 21.4). CONCLUSIONS The information regarding AUB that is available on the Internet is of low to moderate quality. Academic websites present more reliable information of greater quality. The presence of the HONcode® seal is considered important to determine the quality of the content of a website, especially for news/magazine websites, and may help Internet users identify websites that contain more reliable information. Algorithms and applications that categorize the quality of information and the reliability of health content may be useful tools that can help patients clarify their symptoms for several conditions including AUB.

Hybrid professionalism in journalism: Opportunities and risks of hacker sources

Hackers have a double relevance with regard to the transformation of the journalistic field: first, they have established themselves as journalistic actors, even if their work may sometimes seem unfamiliar. Second, hackers have not only become important sources for information but they are also a topic of public interest in a data-driven society increasingly threatened by surveillance capitalism. This paper critically discusses the role of hackers as news sources by analyzing the “stalkerware” investigation carried out by the online news magazine Motherboard. Drawing from field theory and boundary work, the article sheds light on how hackers exert an increasing influence on journalism, its practices, epistemologies, and ethics, resulting in an increasing hybridization of journalism. Journalism has become a dynamic space, in which hackers are not only becoming relevant actors in the journalism field, but they often represent the only sources journalists have to shed light on wrongdoings. Hence, hackers are increasingly defining the conditions under which journalism is carried out, both in terms of its practices as well as in its normative framework.

WATCHING THE WATCHDOG: ONLINE DISCOURSES ABOUT MEDIA FRAUDS

Media frauds often lead to lively public discussions about journalism’s professional identity and its social mandate. The paper uses the so-called Relotius case as a starting point for a systematic analysis of the responsibility of narrative journalists in an age of “fake news” and post-truth politics – and the question of how they can be held to account in the online realm. Claas Relotius counted as one of the most talented journalistic storytellers in the German-speaking world. In December 2018, however, the news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that he had fabricated many of his texts, either completely or partly. This revelation developed into one of the biggest German media scandals of the recent years and triggered a massive outcry, also in international media. A multi-method research design allows for a differentiated assessment of the Relotius case in particular and web-based media accountability processes in general: A literature review and problem-centered interviews with senior reporters demonstrate that stylistic devices of fiction have a long history in German narrative journalism – also in Spiegel magazine. A discourse analysis focusing on the public debate following the revelation of the scandal points out that many journalistic commenters, including Spiegel’s editorial board, displayed a clear lack of self-criticism in their discussion of the case, while non-professional watchbloggers broadened the scope of the analysis. The paper reflects the empirical results from a normative perspective, in order to illustrate the potentials and shortcomings of professional journalistic self-observation as opposed to external public control in online discourses.

CAUSAL RELATIONS IN ENGLISH NEWS MAGAZINE DISCOURSE: JOURNALISTS’ AGE PERSPECTIVE

This paper reveals how journalists’ age influences the linguistic representation of causal relations in English news magazine articles. Treating cause in a broad sense covering adverbials and clauses of reason, concession, purpose and result, the study finds that causal relations are scarce in the texts of young reporters. Unlike them, middle-aged authors’ articles demonstrate a 17-per-cent-higher frequency of adverbials and clauses of reason, and older journalists’ texts show a 12-per-cent rise in concessive clauses with the temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive relations. To account for these findings, I apply Talmy’s (1985) force dynamics theory viewing cause as an interaction of entities concerning force and energy where one causes another. Given this theory, middle-aged journalists verbalise causal relations grounded in what I call energy transfer model with one moving entity causing another to move, and energy loss model where inactivity of one entity is due to blocking of the other entity. In older authors’ articles, causal relations are represented by concessive clauses introduced by a range of conjunctions specifying concessive meaning: temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive.