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This paper provides a comparative critical discourse analysis of news discourse on terrorism with respect to the coverage by two Swedish and two UK broadsheet newspapers of the terrorists attacks that took place in Stockholm and in London respectively in the year 2017. The research goal is to investigate the type of discourses mobilized that help enact a 'politics of fear', and to compare the constitutive elements of this rhetoric within the same, and across the two national contexts. The findings point to three major representations as points on a continuum of discourses that emphatically affirm, give rise to, but also resist and counteract, a politics of fear. The paper sheds light on processes of normalization at work in the routine discursive practices of press coverage, but also to the rise of counter-discourses that resist, downplay, or take a critical stance toward the core elements of a politics of fear. It is argued that these latter discursive practices may work in the opposite direction, namely to de-normalize or marginalize a dominant politics of fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at web analytics in newsrooms, journalism studies scholarship has explored the notion of success in using web analytics and metrics in measuring journalist-audience engagement. Scholars have looked at the role of organizational structures, cognition, and emotion in defining success with analytics. This article analyzes how journalists interpret journalist-audience engagement success using web analytics and what this reliance on web analytics might mean for contemporary news production. Using direct observation of newsrooms and interviews with news media workers, this article argues that media workers interpret success in audience engagement using web analytics as a process of cultural matching between web analytics companies, media workers, and audiences. This article shows that analytics in journalism have highlighted some of the shared values and practices across the matchers and revealed the challenges of measuring success in audience-journalist engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent efforts to bring 'solutions journalism' – an approach to news coverage developed in the United States that encourages journalists to propose potential solutions to social problems – to the French regional press. Drawing on interviews and company documents from news organizations, we show that solutions journalism has found support among both management and journalists, though for different reasons. Whereas management see solutions journalism as a way to bolster shrinking audiences, journalists perceive an opportunity to regain relevance in diversified media companies whose emphasis on news has declined over time. Though solutions journalism changes little in terms of journalist's everyday practices, its presence legitimates and valorizes marketing discourses, as journalists use it to describe efforts to grow audiences, boost sales and monetize content. As a result, we suggest that solutions journalism's primary effect on the French regional press may be its operation as a 'Trojan horse' for marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries. We argue that these relationships are shaped by news media’s fear of missing out, the difficulties of evaluating the risk/reward ratios, and a sense of asymmetry. The implication is that news media that developed into an increasingly independent institution in the 20th century—in part enabled by news media organizations’ control over channels of communication—are becoming dependent upon new digital intermediaries that structure the media environment in ways that not only individual citizens but also large, resource-rich, powerful organizations have to adapt to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013 Steubenville, Ohio, rape case featured a sadly familiar story of juvenile acquaintance rape involving star football players; what captured national interest in the case, however, was how the rapists and peer witnesses alike captured video and photos of the sexual assault and disseminated them swiftly and publicly via social media sites. This qualitative textual analysis utilizes framing theory to explore how national news coverage framed new media technology in relation to the Steubenville rape case, particularly how technology was framed as witness, galvanizer, and threat during the rape and its aftermath. Implications of these frames, as well as a lack of broader sexual assault context in the media coverage, are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising the importance of who gets to speak in constructing knowledges about Indigenous peoples, this article examines power relations regarding mainstream news coverage of the Indigenous policy of Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) in Australia. Integrating content and discourse analysis of newspaper and television stories over a 3-year timeframe with interviews with journalists, this article found media coverage of the NTER, commonly known as the Intervention, followed a pattern of decline, with occasional peaks around events that were newsworthy through the lens of conventional news values. Further, analysis of three key discourse moments found ‘official’ discourses, particularly by the government, overpowered those of Indigenous peoples living under the policy. This article demonstrates how particular journalistic practices – news values, ideas of audiences, and use of sources – together with resource limitations and discursive practices of government provided dominant discursive power on the Intervention to government representatives. The article concludes that daily routines of news media and discursive practices of media savvy social actors perceived as ‘official’ or ‘expert’ by media professionals form a ‘vicious cycle’ of two-way dependence which is hard to break for potential sources with less official status, such as representatives of various Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the rise of the UK Independence Party in Britain, and how this ‘revolution’ has been reported by mainstream news organisations. As a case study of the media and populism, UK Independence Party’s rise tends to confound rather than confirm some of the patterns and trends found in previous studies. There is little evidence that ‘media logic’ has worked to the party’s advantage and the recent increase in the intensity of media coverage of UK Independence Party is principally explained by the ‘political logic’ of its continued electoral advances, changes in communication policy, and a reorientation in the public relations strategies of the party and its opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports media offer a unique discourse site because the nationalistic nature of reporting is often radicalized and in most cases ‘the national flag is waved with eternal enthusiasm’. Therefore, this study examined changes in the coverage of the Israeli national soccer team between 1949 and 2006 through an exploration of the identity of the journalistic narratives’ storytellers and protagonists. Our findings illuminate a complex picture: whereas during the Israel’s formative era sports reporters pursued a patriotic narrative that praised the players for their fighting spirit and contribution to national prestige, in recent decades the sports sections echo a new variety of local, professional, and gender voices that challenge the supposedly natural hegemony of national identity. These changes can be explained by factors rooted in the fields of journalism, sports, and the politics of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the challenges facing the Catalan press in a context marked by the digitization and by a political process that demands independence. The media landscape in Catalonia is populated by media produced at Spanish level and at Catalan level, and this applies to the press, radio and television. Mainstream paid-for newspapers, available to the citizens of Catalonia produced at a national, regional, local or state level, whether written in Catalan or Spanish merit discussion. This kind of press is the most influential in the shaping of Catalonian public opinion and therefore plays a central role in the political debate on independence. In this context, newspapers in Catalonia are facing the crisis of the print-only business model and falling revenues from a declining readership base and the subsequent fall of advertising revenue. To face this problem, newspaper publishers are throwing themselves into digital strategies (web, tablet, mobile phones). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe and the United States saw the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 as an important moment in history, with several nations sending press correspondents and military observers to East Asia to extract lessons from the war. However, the influence of Orientalism, particularly among British war correspondents, hindered this objective. Attempting to explain the results of the war in cultural terms, these correspondents revealed in their post-war accounts a sense that Japan, Russia, and the war itself were alien in nature and therefore offered cultural and military lessons incompatible with British needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New communication technologies have allowed not only new ways in which the audience interacts with the news but also new ways in which journalists can monitor online audience behavior. Through new audience information systems, such as web analytics, the influence of the audience on the news construction process is increasing. This occurs as the journalistic field tries to survive a shrinking audience for news. In this study, I argue that how journalists conceive of the audience as a form of capital influences the extent to which journalists integrate audience feedback from web analytics in their news work. I developed this theoretical framework through case studies of three online newsrooms that included a total of 150 hours of observations and 30 respondent interviews. The findings showed the extent of influence of web analytics on traditional gatekeeping processes and on a new gatekeeping practice online, which I call the process of de-selection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary news media operate in an increasingly competitive environment with fast-changing technologies facilitating more immediate forms of communication. In doing so, the logic of ‘old’ news formats is being challenged. On television, for example, viewers no longer have to wait for morning or evening bulletins, since rolling news channels deliver an instant fix. This study carries out a content analysis of the major news bulletins in the US, UK and Norway, asking whether the wider culture of journalism has impacted on the format and style of coverage. The study finds that certain journalistic interventions – which inject a sense of immediacy (reporting live), of pace (constant updates) or extend geographic space (on location) – routinely appear on fixed time television bulletins to different degrees cross-nationally. The authors suggest this represents an adoption of rolling news logic – with bulletins incorporating the urgency and liveness displayed in national news cultures – delivering a more interpretive and instant form of communication than pre-edited or scripted news packages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

News media are increasingly using Facebook as a platform for distribution and user interaction. This article focuses on how Dutch media use Facebook and how audiences participate. By using Facebook, media outsource part of their distribution to a third party platform, avoiding maintenance costs while also hoping for additional revenues because of the increased website traffic. Results indicate that offline and online presence of legacy media do not predict their footprint on Facebook. Media do not seem to have a clear strategy on using Facebook, which leads to an underperformance on the social media platform with low participation and minimal interaction. As users ‘like’ media and ‘share’ stories, ‘audience distribution’ would be a better term to describe these practices than ‘audience participation’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on 3 May 2007 from a holiday apartment in Portugal. Over five years and multiple investigations that failed to solve this abducted child case, Madeleine and her parents were subject to a process of relentless ‘intermediatization’. Across 24–7 news coverage, websites, documentaries, films, YouTube videos, books, magazines, music and artworks, Madeleine was a mediagenic image of innocence and a lucrative story. In contrast to Madeleine’s media sacralization, the representation of her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, fluctuated between periods of vociferous support and prolonged and libellous ‘trial by media’. This article analyses how the global intermediatization of the ‘Maddie Mystery’ fed into and fuelled the ‘trial by media’ of Kate and Gerry McCann in the UK press. Our theorization of ‘trial by media’ is developed and refined through considering its legal limitations in an era of ‘attack journalism’ and unprecedented official UK inquiries into press misconduct and criminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies media coverage of the ‘921’ Earthquake in Taiwan during two periods in 2009, ten years after the disaster, which occurred on 21 September 1999 (the date which provided the event with its compressed identifier). First it looks at coverage in the wake of another major disaster (Typhoon Morakot) that occurred just before the tenth anniversary of the earthquake, and then during the regular tenth anniversary commemorations of the earthquake. Using narrative analysis, this article notes that during the first period, journalists responded to a disaster event with an historical precedent by adopting the 921 Earthquake as a benchmark, ‘villain’, and moral allegory to explain the current disaster and forecast future closure. During the second period, this study shows how journalists used regular commemorative features on the 921 Earthquake to describe that event based on survivor testimony and present commemorative events. By portraying two interpretations of a single past event back to back, this study demonstrates how news media selectively employ the ‘usable past,’ and the implications of this for the formation of collective memories of past events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the link between the social media website Twitter and journalism and the role of Twitter in citizen journalism. Arguments and counter-arguments reveal contradictory views on the true value of the social media site to its users. The author says that despite its large user base and accessible interface, majority of Americans and Europeans have yet to become proficient in the medium. According to the author, professional news media should become more open to using tweets for gathering breaking news.

The empirical analysis of protest events and other expressions of social conflict is one of the core tasks of the discipline of comparative sociology. The numerous international data sets and empirical country comparisons that rely exclusively on reporting in English-language newspapers such as The New York Times in surveying protest events nevertheless suffer from considerable distortions. Using the example of some 1800 protest events in Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay in the year 2006, the present study shows that there are remarkable differences between national and international (English-language) newspapers when it comes to frequency of reporting. On the one hand, a mere 5.3 percent of all protest events that are reported nationally also attract the attention of the international press. On the other hand, the percentage of international reporting depends considerably and to a statistically significant extent on the country in which the protest takes place. Besides, these country differences persist when additional protest characteristics (e.g. the number of participants, the participation of renowned personalities and the escalation of the protest into rioting) are controlled by means of multivariate logistic regressions. The measurement error that results when surveying protest events on the strength of coverage in the English-language international press is therefore not constant across countries. The frequently used data sets like the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators or the Cross-National Time Series Data Archive launched by Arthur Banks are thus proving to be highly questionable sources for international comparisons in protest and conflict research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to accomplish more multi-dimensional analyses of media logic one needs to study how journalists grapple with news issues in their expanding development, such as the revolutionary development of the climate issue in the news. The present analysis is based on interviews with 14 Swedish environmental journalists from various news media, who have been part of editorial concentrations on climate news. The results consist of three ways of conceptualizing the climate issue among the journalists: as inside, outside, and beyond media logic. These conceptualizations give rise to three conflicting types of journalistic creativity, more precisely, the ability to effectively insert the climate issue ‘into’ media logic; the ability to go as far ‘outside’ media logic as possible while remaining credible by arraying the climate issue in ‘scientific language’; and finally, the ability to think beyond the media-logic ‘box’ and do something about it (to change journalism). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

•As a pervasive historical construct that is both foreign and familiar, the USA has a looming presence in Swedish media discourse. Swedish journalists’ views of the USA can best be described as ambivalent — critical of a unilateral or too passive US foreign policy, while at the same time being heavily influenced by many aspects of the American economic model and culture. This article presents the results of an analysis of Swedish editorials, debate, commentary and cultural articles about the USA in time periods between 1984 and 2009. During these three decades USA actions are broadly framed against the backdrop of Cold War, globalization and cultural contestation paradigms respectively. The USA is seen as a formidable power, one that should be checked by others on the international stage. Cultural symbols based on historical European narratives about the US are called upon to illustrate reckless unilateralism (‘Space Cowboy’ Reagan) or the future-oriented entrepreneur as a role model for Sweden (during the Clinton years). The final decade under the cultural contestation paradigm is also ambivalent — the role of religion in the USA appears foreign to Swedish eyes, whereas the USA’s cultural misunderstandings with others appear familiar. • [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, an expanded version of an oral presentation in 1999, uses corpus methodology as a research tool to investigate how social actors are classified in the public discourse of the media, with lexis as our point of entry. Our main focus is the nature of the labels which provide categorization, especially of gender relations. Our main claim is that uses of premodification associated with the two types of newspapers in Britain and their lexical choices produce differential judgmental stances that have social effects. In the first of two complementary studies, we discuss the adjective lexicon of the tabloid press in comparison with quality newspapers, with curvy, hunky and kinky as exemplars with respect to sexualization and the construction of gender. In our second study, we discuss adjectival premodification of man, woman, girl and boy in tabloids and broadsheets: our findings show that the media categorizes people through very specific points of view and values not always apparent to a non-critical reader. Collocational patterns undoubtedly reveal societal and sociolectal attitudes, especially in terms of stereotypes of gender, sexualization, age and behaviour. Our main aim, therefore, is to show that corpus studies can help to deconstruct hidden meanings and the asymmetrical ways people are represented in the press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case study of the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, this article explores the role of news images in moving collectives through contested and potentially traumatic events. It examines the coverage of the disengagement process in the three major Israeli daily newspapers, and argues that the Israeli press took upon itself the role of healing the potential collective trauma as the events themselves were unfolding. Drawing on a modified version of Judith Herman's model for treating trauma patients, the article identifies a range of discursive strategies employed by the press to move the Israeli collective from trauma to recovery. It suggests that these strategies enabled the press to assert the existence of traumatic elements in the disengagement process, while simultaneously constructing the alleged trauma as curable, liberating in the long run, and demonstrating the strength and morality of Israeli society. Visual elements played a central role in this complicated process by enabling the mourning and the bearing witness act, providing the necessary material environment to establish safety and a healing relationship, connecting the events effectively to certain parts of the cultural mythology, and pushing the future collective memory of the events in specific directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Irish Times, the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman characterized the Zinedine ZidanefMarco Materazzi head-butt incident, which took place during the 2006 FIFA World Cup final held in Berlin, Germany. In extra time, following a verbal exchange, Zidane head-butted Materazzi in the chest, sending the Italian defender to the ground in dramatic fashion. Zidane, one of the most prominent players in the history of French soccer, received a red card for his aggressive act and Italy went on to win the World Cup. Given the history of soccer in the three countries whose media reports we examine, in addition to broader socio-political factors, we expected to observe differences in how newspapers from the three nations covered the initial story and how they portrayed both Zidane and Materazzi in the aftermath. Consistent with these expectations, English newspapers appeared comparatively harsh toward Zidane, with newspapers in Ireland and Scotland publishing fewer reports and appearing slightly less critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese press, instead of acting purely as a state propaganda instrument, now functions as ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ — that is, a quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate the Party mandate by promoting its image on the other. The accelerated pace of media conglomeration following China's accession to the World Trade Organization has sharpened this trend. This study examines the impact of press ecology in Shenzhen, a national trend-setter for ‘Party Publicity Inc.’, before and after conglomeration. We observe that press conglomeration has (a) engendered a more centralized management structure and operation; (b) replaced duopolistic competition with market monopoly and greater price-fixing abilities; (c) continued to rely on state office subscription; (d) dampened journalists' enthusiasm for political reform in favor of economic interest; (e) developed a two-tier Publicity Inc. to serve both the Party and the market; and (f) provided an opportunity for overseas expansion. Marketization does not trigger political reform, but pre-empts pressure for political change. The Party Publicity Inc. in its conglomerate form represents a complicitous accommodation between power and money engineered by a post-Communist bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses five news articles extracted from three Ethiopian newspapers published in the English language in order to examine the type of knowledge journalists presuppose in news discourse and, in Relevance Theoretic terms, the amount of processing effort that readers are required to invest in accessing and/or activating what has been presupposed. The article also aims to reveal the existence of possible ideological reasons behind journalists' use of ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ presuppositions in their texts. This analysis indicates that some news article writers unfairly presuppose different types of knowledge in news discourses and add an aura of mystification to certain issues which, in turn, might be for political/ideological reasons. It is thus argued that in producing news articles containing unfair presuppositions, journalists obscure certain issues and put their readers in a situation where they have to invest excessive processing efforts to achieve the required cognitive effect of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines, distinguishes and discusses as grounded theory the changes of the past 20 years in the Chinese media system as a result of the economic reforms. While the new media market challenges the current Chinese Party orthodoxy by initiating a redistribution of power and interests, this study argues that the western model of a libertarian press system is hardly a possibility. With a convolution of the Party line and the bottom line, a Chinese media system is moving from totalitarianism to market authoritarianism. Building on the premise that previous western press systems based on the Four Theories and theft updates have failed to fit the unique case of China, the authors propose new theoretical perspectives in studying media systems in transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 4000 media workers in South Korea have lost their jobs since the advent of the Asian financial crisis in late 1997. A number of newspapers and television stations have experienced unprecedented downsizing and restructuration. As a matter of fact, the whole media industry has gone through a process of profound transformation. This article attempts to document the difficulties of the Korean media and newsworkers as they experience the unexpected economic crisis. It presents observations about some notable changes in the practice of news making, describing, for example, whether newsroom organizations have changed and if journalistic independence has been weakened. The article also discusses some fundamental implications of these changes for Korean journalism and its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to show how the thematic and form structures of the news report work to legitimate and naturalize discrimination against the Roma. The syntactic structure of discriminatory discourse offered the readers categories which differed very little: the headline and the lead constructed a closed interpretation of the situation and the rest of the news report strengthened, legitimated and naturalized this interpretation especially with its use of evaluation. In order to create a coherent meaning of the news text, journalists first reduced the definition of the situation to only one event, which presented the majority population in a positive light. To construct only one, natural dominant interpretation of the ethnic discrimination they selectively (mis)used information, used discourse of difference with colonization of common-sense language, and the strategies of denial of discriminatory discourse. The majority population was the dominant group, responsible for the process of doing and saying as actors and sayers. The study of the Slovenia media adheres to the analytic paradigm of critical discourse analysis (CDA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news is one kind of story, and time is a basic element of story. A feature of all kinds of stories is their chronological time structure: events tend to be told in the order in which they happened. Although when is one of the journalist's basic facts, news stories follow a radically different ordering. They begin generally with the most recent event and cycle back through earlier events, giving information in installments. This makes news discourse uncohesive and difficult to understand. Modem news discourse has developed this time structure through a combination of the news values of recency and novelty, the journalistic practices of the deadline and the scoop, and technology which increasingly enables live coverage in 'real' time. One result is that news neglects the why and how because of its concept of when. Comprehension, discourse, narrative, news, time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]