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This study examined whether the headlines of newspapers in South Korea and the New York Times differed in terms of the semantic function – that is, summarizing news stories and the pragmatic function – that is, attracting readers' attention. The New York Times is regarded as one of the news organizations that practices quality journalism, yet it also faces the pressure of market-driven journalism that focuses more on financial interests than the public interest. News organizations, popular as well as quality newspapers, have become unprecedentedly competitive in the new media context, pressured to increase audience attention, possibly influencing quality papers to emphasize the pragmatic function of attracting audiences by employing more sensational headlines. A content analysis of 749 news articles, which compared 10 newspapers in South Korea with the New York Times in the United States, showed that newspapers in South Korea more frequently employed headlines that highlighted the pragmatic function. Specifically, this study operationalized the semantic function to include headlines with factual information – that is, Who, When, Where, What, Why, and How – while the pragmatic function measured the extent to which headlines included four attracting devices – metaphors, adverbs, direct quotations, and questions. Findings of this study showed that only 4.9 percent of the headlines included more than four items of factual information among the Who, When, Where, What, Why, and How, whereas 74.9 percent of the headlines included more than one attracting device. Compared to the New York Times, the Korean newspapers were more likely to employ adverbs and direct quotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term tabloidization describes the spillover of tabloid journalism's characteristics – which aim to attract recipients' attention – to other media types, particularly elite media. The validity of the common assumption that tabloidization has increased over the last decades is unknown since long-term studies are widely lacking. Applying a most similar systems design, the current study pursues several goals: On the macro-level, it aims to clarify whether campaign coverage of seven German and Austrian elite newspapers has become more tabloidized over six decades (1949–2009) and whether the long-term developments are related to three structural drivers of tabloidization – tabloid newspapers, commercial television, and the Internet. On the meso-level, the study investigates among outlet differences in tabloidization. Tabloidization is conceptualized as multidimensional, considering the topic, focus, and style dimension. The results show that tabloidization in general and in the single newspapers has increased, but only slightly and only in a few respects. While some of the hypothesized structural influences on tabloidization are confirmed, other, more situative drivers of tabloidization seem to account for short-term ups and downs in levels of tabloidization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 30 years, a large body of research on what is often called ‘hard’ and ‘soft news’ has accumulated in communication studies. However, there is no consensus about what hard and soft news exactly is, or how it should be defined or measured. Moreover, the concept has not been clearly differentiated from or systematically related to concepts addressing very similar phenomena – tabloidization and ‘infotainment’. Consequently, the results of various studies are hard to compare and different scientific discourses on related issues remain unconnected. Against this backdrop, this article offers a conceptual analysis of the concept based on studies in English and other languages. We identify key dimensions of the concept and make suggestions for a standardized definition and multi-dimensional measurement of harder and softer news. In doing so, we propose to distinguish thematic, focus and style features as basic dimensions that – in their combination – make up harder and softer types of news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discussing newspapers in the 21st century commonly entails a narrative of impending extinction arising from technological, demographic, and cultural change. This article reports on research into three Australian newspapers (two broadsheet, one tabloid) that is concerned, in the first instance, with the concept of ‘tabloidization’, and the proposition that identifiable tabloid properties, such as the simplification and spectacularization of news, are increasingly characteristic of contemporary newspapers. Adaptive changes to newspaper design, style, and content in the interests of survival and renewal are addressed through quantitative content analysis in tracking formal changes to newspapers, and qualitative research through interviews with journalists in exploring their everyday negotiation of the role and trajectory of newspapers. These questions of industrial context, textual form, occupational practice, professional ideology, and politico-cultural judgment are raised in seeking to understand the dynamics of the shifting forms and contested readings of contemporary newspapers through a critically reflexive analysis of tabloidization discourse and process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In relation to journalism, the concept of ‘emotion’ is consistently undertheorized. Employed with commonsensical discernment, it is conflated with tabloid practices, sensationalism, bias, commercialization, and the like. Consequently, when discussed, emotion is often treated dismissively; a marker of unprincipled and flawed journalism. Yet hard, self-styled objective, ‘just the facts’ journalism is not unemotional, just as soft, so-called tabloid news is not irrational. For authors who study the sociology of emotions note, emotion has a social component and can more broadly be conceptualized as the experience of involvement. This article utilizes this understanding to interrogate traditional news dichotomies before applying this perspective to consider non-valorized news alternatives. One significant change over the past few decades is not that the news has become emotional (indeed, it has always been); rather, the diversity of emotional styles, the acceptability of journalistic involvement, and attempts to involve the audience have become more explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a brief review and critique of the main scholarly approaches to thinking about popular forms of news in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly in regards to broadcast television. Rather than advocating the merits of either popular or 'hard' news, it discusses the possibility of finding (or revisiting) a critical approach to popular news and current affairs journalism that charts a suitable middle ground: one that can accommodate the emergence of popular informational programs (e.g. The Awful Truth, The Daily Show) and one that moves away from the sometimes too simplistic binary discourses that have tended to become characteristic of recent debates over 'tabloidization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the changes that since the mid-1990s have transformed journalistic practices in Brazil's most powerful media institution. More especially, the aim is to investigate the transformation of TV Globo's News Division and situate this process in relation to the democratization of Brazilian politics and society. Based on content analysis of Jornal Nacional, TV Globo's main newscast, and on in-depth interviews with four senior journalists of the network, the article stresses how the new conditions brought by political and social democratization help explain these changes. In particular, the deepening of democracy in Brazil created new constraints that forced TV Globo to overcome a tradition of more explicit political biases and to minimize the initial trend toward tabloidization with an increase of hard news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The supposed 'emotionalization' of the public sphere has recently been the target of much hostile commentary, both lay and academic. In the news media, there certainly seems to be a growing interest in emotion, as more and more space is devoted to the representations of mourning in the coverage of major disasters or extraordinary deaths. In this study I look at the news coverage of the display of public grief in the Finnish newspapers following the murders of Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden in 1986, and Anna Lindh, the Foreign Minister of Sweden in 2003. The similarities between the Palme and Lindh cases give an opportunity to examine how the representation of mourning has changed over time. The second aim of this article is to explore how gender is constructed in the portrayals of grief: are we witnessing a change regarding the persistent stereotypes about the emotional woman and the unemotional man in the representations of grief or just a new deal in gendered emotions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]