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Reporting on crime and the courts are among the classic functions of journalism. In the UK, journalists and others must abide by the Contempt of Court Act 1981, the main piece of primary legislation aimed at ensuring coverage of legal matters is fair to the participants. The restrictions are generally tighter in practice than in jurisdictions such as the US, where the media has a much freer hand to engage in pre-trial reporting. This paper argues that media coverage of the arrest of the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper' serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, in 1981 while Parliament was considering the question of contempt, has made the UK regime tougher than it might otherwise have been. Excessive reporting was influenced by an unusually celebratory police news conference. This news coverage coloured the contemporary debate around contempt, and any opportunity for a more relaxed approach to contempt in the UK's jurisdictions was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an important contribution to comparative research by examining data journalism in Spain and Austria. This paper examines the practice of data journalism from a triple perspective: (a) the common features of day-to-day work, (b) the organizational structure and the role of the teams in newsrooms, and (c) the obstacles to and the future of data-driven reporting. Results from content analysis of data-driven news stories in El país and Der standard (N = 136) show differences and similarities in the covered topics, sources, narrative style, visualizations, interactive functions, and levels of transparency. Interestingly, only 36.8% of the analyzed news stories correspond to the normative expectations of transparency by incorporating both sources and methodological details. While the Spanish newspaper shows significantly higher levels of transparency compared with the Austrian newspaper, both newspapers perform very similarly when it comes to providing access to raw data, which was the case in only every fifth news story analyzed. Findings from focused interviews with the heads of data journalism teams deliver interesting insights into specific challenges that each news outlet is facing when creating day-to-day data-driven news stories. This research confirms the relevance that data journalism has achieved in countries such as Spain and demonstrates the effort of journalists in countries without access to information and transparency laws to create data-driven stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines code-switching as a language style of Yoruba newspapers, within the larger context of the day-to-day speech mannerisms of Nigerians. This linguistic mode is a result of culture mix and has encroached on the indigenous languages of the peoples, and the style (of the writings) of indigenous language media. The paper analyses the texts of Alaroye newspaper to demonstrate the phenomenon. Questions raised concerned the purpose of code-switching, as well as its effects on Yoruba language and influence on respondents' interest in reading Alaroye. Survey and content analysis were the research designs used, while purposive sampling was preferred for the selection of seventy-five respondents to the questionnaire and six who were interviewed. Findings show that code-switching simplifies, aids comprehension, increases interest in indigenous language newspapers and accommodates the bilingualism of readers. Respondents agree that code-switching contributes to the linguistic half-caste mode of journalism and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women's pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women's pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces convergence and innovation processes in five local newspapers in the Inland Norway region. It is an explorative bottom-up study of how local legacy newspapers' use of digital technology relates to organisational factors and business models, as well as their journalism. Based on interviews with chief editors and video journalists, the paper shows that these local newspapers adapted in specific ways, sometimes differ from their national counterparts. Each newspaper established a web-edition and later implemented a paywall. This change of business model relates to a change of focus from clicks to subscribers. The change is also reflected in their journalism, focussing on certain topics and more in-depth reporting. While attempts at video reporting turned out to be expensive, streaming local sports became an important element in attracting new subscribers. However, it was easier for those newspapers integrated in larger conglomerates to use these innovations as the parent company provided competence in analysing viewer figures, and because innovations could spread from one local newspaper in the company to the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has attributed media convergence to, among other things, where the news was originally published. That research, however, has struggled to identify causal relationships between a news item's publication in a particular outlet and journalists' perceptions of a story's newsworthiness. This relationship is difficult to identify because of the correlation between publication in a particular outlet and many other factors that also impact newsworthiness. This paper uses an experiment embedded within a survey of over 1,500 U.S. political journalists to test the impact of a news story's previous publication history on journalists' views of the newsworthiness of that news item. Compared with previously unpublished stories, the publication of a news story in a national paper has no significant positive effect on the perceived newsworthiness of a story. The origin of a story in a local outlet, however, causes journalists to perceive that story to be less newsworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can people efficiently navigate the modern communication environment, and if yes, how? We hypothesize that in addition to psychological capacities of epistemic vigilance, which evaluate the epistemic value of communicated information, some social institutions have evolved for the same function. Certain newspapers for instance, implement processes, distributed among several experts and tools, whose function is to curate information. We analyze how information curation is done at the institutional level and what challenges it meets. We also investigate what factors favor the cultural evolution of institutions of epistemic vigilance: these include people's preference for accurate and reliable information and their ability to assess communicated information in view of the source's epistemic authority; but also contingent historical factors that make it worth – or not – to contribute to the maintenance of institutions of epistemic vigilance. We conclude the paper by considering the challenges and vulnerabilities of these institutions in the Digital Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the prevailing conflict framings of national (El País and El Mundo) and Catalan (La Vanguardia and El Periódico de Cataluña) newspapers in response to the management of the regional independence conflict (2010-2014). For this, a new conflict framing typology was developed, based on level of substantivity. The study has verified that territorial origin affects, but does not determine, the media's definition of the conflict and its preference for specific territorial models. The alignment between parties and the media appears to be the variable that best explains the orientation (pro-independence, constitutionalist, or federalist) of each newspaper. We have also verified the media's action as a polarizing agent based on territorial model preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the prevailing conflict framings of national (El País and El Mundo) and Catalan (La Vanguardia and El Periódico de Cataluña) newspapers in response to the management of the regional independence conflict (2010-2014). For this, a new conflict framing typology was developed, based on level of substantivity. The study has verified that territorial origin affects, but does not determine, the media's definition of the conflict and its preference for specific territorial models. The alignment between parties and the media appears to be the variable that best explains the orientation (pro-independence, constitutionalist, or federalist) of each newspaper. We have also verified the media's action as a polarizing agent based on territorial model preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the data visualizations incorporated in the online versions of the main hybrid newspapers in Spain and the United States to find out their features and the role they play in the articles. In addition to this objective, the aim is to determine whether there are significant differences in the use of visualizations in the practice of data journalism in national and foreign newspapers. Through a content analysis, the articles published during the year 2021 in the web versions of El País, El Mundo, The New York Times and The Washington Post were analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the information that was disseminated in the Netherlands and Spain—and other territories connected to the latter such as Portugal and Flanders under Habsburg rule—about the taking by the Dutch of the city of San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, and his subsequent recovery by a Spanish-Portuguese expedition (1624–1625). Despite the different communicative structures, these national journalisms shared professional strategies to inform about the conflicts that occurred in the distant Brazilian lands. Given the difficulty of informing promptly and truthfully, the discourse of the Dutch and Spanish newspapers about their colonies alternates between the information explosion and silence, depending on the alternation between victories and defeats in American territory. News was as connected as were the empires that controlled vast territories in Europe and America, despite the ideological and religious differences of the era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Sorush newspaper published in Istanbul as a case of Iranian journalism in exile, this paper seeks to shed light on one aspect of Persian journalism in the constitutional period. On the eve of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, Persian journalism entered into a critical phase that flourished outside the country. Istanbul, Calcutta, Cairo and London were the centres where Iranian intellectuals developed their critical ideas through this modern media. Inspired by these ideas, the Constitutional Revolution prepared an unprecedented situation for Iranian journalists to develop their flourishing career inside the country. It was in this period that a distinguished constitutionalist and intellectual Ali Akbar Dehkhoda began his journalistic career. Together with Mirza Jahangir Khan Shirazi, he began to publish Sur-e Esrafil, which presented a straightforwardly critical voice against Qajar despotism. Yet the passing flame of political freedom died out by the restoration of despotism and forced Dehkhoda and some of his colleagues to leave their homeland. He first went to Switzerland and then to Istanbul, where he continued his career in exile and published a new Persian-language newspaper by the name of Sorush. An analysis of this short-lived newspaper allows us to identify three pivotal concerns in its pages: advocacy of constitutionalism, opposition to imperialism and defending Iran's independence and territorial integrity, and the last but not the least, reflecting on Iran's first experience in constitutionalism. Indeed, for Dehkhoda and his colleagues in Sorush of İstanbul, securing an independent and well-integrated Iran was the most critical issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1875 and 1950, Bernard Shaw sent frequent letters to British newspapers about a staggering range of topics—everything from international affairs to the metric system. Those letters entertained and enlightened (and sometimes shocked) the British public, who soon learned to look forward to an encounter with the fabled GBS when they sat down with their morning paper. Researchers already know that Shaw's letters are a treasure trove of resource material. In this article, the author suggests another use for them—as a tool for learning more about the language issues that hold so much interest for postmodern philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a response to a research paper which analyses how US newspapers represent young people and parents in their response to climate crisis, this commentary observes that the newspapers achieve some advantage in selecting frames, which privilege adult behaviour at the expense of actions taken by young people. It suggests that one effect of newspapers' choice to frame teens' awareness and activities surrounding climate change in disparaging terms may be to increase any eco‐anxiety by devaluing it. It argues that this is done to benefit the newspapers by supporting rather than challenging the schema of their adult readers, following a commercial rather than societal agenda. A subsidiary effect may be to drive younger people away from mainstream media, which fails to represent their viewpoint and towards misinformation and disinformation from unreliable sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]