How Social Media Offers Opportunities for Growth in the Traditional Media Industry

Under threat from social media and interactive Web 2.0, the traditional media industry seeks new models to maintain its viability. This chapter studies both consumers and prospective producers of one genre—travel journalism—to advocate a model that could help arrest the industry's decline and return to growth. It argues that one way forward for traditional media would be a new model of curatorship, in which a professional journalist collaborates with amateur contributors. It suggests that such a hybrid arrangement will be recognisable neither as professional newsroom nor as amateur social media, but a new model with features of both. This offers a way forward so that rather than contributing to the declining fortunes of the traditional media industry, as many journalists fear, social media can instead encourage progress.

Data-Driven Information Consumption

Things are changing dramatically within the publishing industry. However, news media itself isn't on the wane, as many pundits are stating. In this chapter, the author explores how the business model for media organizations is shifting away from print, and away from the “gateway” approach to journalism and content development, in which a few select articles are presented to audience by editors, writers and reporters. In its place, the new digital media model is creating a plethora of content from many different sources, oftentimes first-hand accounts, original sources, or commentary. In the process, rather than resulting in a dearth of news content, audiences have access to an often dizzying, overwhelming and potentially contradictory content. This is creating potentially new roles for news and publishing organizations, serving as sources of validation and aggregation of content. At the same time, the rise of digital media is providing consumers a far wider range of choices pushing media organizations to provide content more tailored to their audiences.

When Journalism Met the Internet

American news organizations have long been criticized for failing to anticipate, appreciate and exploit the Internet as it became a fact of daily life in the mid-1990s. This chapter explores and analyzes the lack of planning that stymied the development of journalism on the Web and cast doubt on the viability of traditional public-service journalism with its enduring values of accuracy, fairness and advocacy. Specifically, the essay documents and analyzes the online debuts of two venerable “old media” news outlets (The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times) and two “new media” Web news outlets (Salon and Slate) in the mid-1990s by exploring the claims they made about their aims, purposes and expectations as they introduced themselves to the public via their salutatory editorials. It is a cautionary tale for a digital world that reconfigures itself in ever-quickening cycles.

The Freedom of Critical Thinking

This study examines how college educators in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Malaysia adopted and adapted lessons gleaned from a news literacy curriculum developed by journalism instructors at Stony Brook University in New York. In doing so, the chapter situates the emerging field of news literacy within parameters of its parent field, media literacy, and current trends in digitization, globalization, and information freedom. Details on how educators in Asia made a pedagogy designed for American citizens relevant to their students and how they negotiated country-specific social, cultural, and political contexts are included. Future directions in research include more in-depth and comparative understandings of the processes at work in localizing media literacy frameworks as well as an exploration of what media literacy educators in the United States and other democracies can learn from their counterparts in countries where accessing, creating, and disseminating information could be considered subversive activities.

Deferring Citizens' “Right to Know” in an Information Age

Namibia is one of the emerging democracies that have not yet enacted the Access to Information legislation. While the country has guaranteed freedom of expression and media in its constitution, it has not provided for Access to Information as a constitutional right. This chapter seeks to examine Namibia's reluctance to adopt an Access to Information legislation. It interrogates views that locate the omission of this fundamental human right in the country's constitutional (legal) and policy frameworks. It underscores the failure by Namibia to reverse the information black-out suffered under the Apartheid dispensation. The chapter starts with a theoretical/philosophical rationale for the right to know to elicit an understanding of this discourse and its relevance to emerging democracies, such as Namibia. It then examines attempts by state and civil society to introduce the legislation in the country. Predicted on praxis, the chapter in conclusion provides some suggestions that may help resolving the impasse in adopting the Access to Information legislation in the county.

Media Ethics and Elections Coverage in Nigeria

This paper examined media ethics in Nigerian using elections coverage as a lens. It focuses on the gender dimension, a fundamental factor in media and election debates; and brought to the fore the socio-political and economic factors affecting the ethical performance of journalists covering elections in Nigeria. It argues that journalist covering elections in Nigeria are operating in challenging socio-political and economic context, but are beginning to rise up to the occasion having improved on the coverage of women politicians. It concludes that despite the challenges, ethical reportage can promote gender balanced coverage of elections in Nigeria. It recommends that the media should provide platforms for engagements and give equal access to parties and candidates (both females and males); and also provide space in which freedom of expression can be exercised and alternative, dissenting, and minority voices heard.

New Communication Technologies

New technologies are changing the way men and women live their lives. As a new communication technology, the Internet can be used to both harm and promote human rights. When it comes to gender relationships, social inequalities might be reflected online, regarding access and the ways technologies are used. Hate speech, porn revenge and other ways to offend women's rights online are discussed, leading to questions related to possible limitations on freedom of expression. This chapter examines legal solutions that have been proposed in Brazil regarding electronic devices and Internet regulation and considers how restrictions on freedom of expression can be addressed in a human rights perspective.

Real-Life and Virtual News Sources Can Be Flat-Out Wrong

Eyewitnesses play a very important role in news coverage. Yet, scholarly research on eyewitness misidentification and memory distortion is virtually absent in scholarly work in journalism and related academic fields. This chapter emphasizes the need for such a research agenda by analyzing the amount of mistakes student journalists made in a news report they wrote during a 20-minute classroom exercise. Each of the stories about a staged bar fight, except for one, contained pieces of misinformation because the students often blindly trusted eyewitnesses and messages on social media accounts. The results indicated that there is a need for more advanced information and media literacy modules in journalism curricula to avoid inaccurate information from eyewitnesses to be disseminated to the public.

The Biased Truth

Consumers of news should expect to consume reports, which are an accurate and unbiased reflection of local, national, and world events. However, due to limitations that affect the packaging and presentation of many news stories today, consumers may not be experiencing a true reflection of those issues. This exploratory study examined three genres of news for objectivity and bias in the reporting of news stores: local news, national news, and satire news. The study found that although local news reporters attempt to report news stories with an objective narrative, it is often the news story's subject that impedes the process of objectivity. National and satire news programs also lose their objectivity based on the narrative presented by the hosts of the program.

Understanding Media During Times of Terrorism

Political violence, including terrorism, can be regarded as a form of (distorted) communication, in which media spectacles play an integral role. Conversely, mass-mediated communication can be regarded as a form of violence, and even terror, in several respects. Media are often propagandistic facilitators to state terror. More broadly, they may help to cultivate a political climate of fear and authoritarianism, contributing to conflict-escalating feedback loops. Even more broadly, beyond media representations, dominant media institutions are arguably embedded in relations of global economic, social, and cultural inequality—constituting a form of structural violence. Notwithstanding its democratic potential, the Internet does not comprise a clear alternative in practice, and neither censorship of terrorist spectacles nor the intensified pursuit of dominant forms of journalistic “objectivity” offer viable ways to reduce the media's imbrication with violence. Three potentially more productive strategies explored in this chapter include reforming the media field from within through the paradigm of Peace Journalism, supporting the development of alternative and community media, and building movements for media reform and democratization.