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This paper aims at reassessing through quantitative content analysis the role of the factors “personification” and “prominence” in the foreign reporting, using the news coverage of Latin America in the German quality press as a case study. The corpus comprises 3.831 news articles published between January 2000 and December 2014 in market-leading media outlets: the dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the alternative tageszeitung (taz) and, additionally, the weekly Der Spiegel, the most relevant political magazine in the country. The factors have similar importance among the publications, although the FAZ shows the less personified and the most elitist coverage, while Der Spiegel exhibits the most vigorous intensity of personification. Besides, under the analysed types of individuals, the press tends to depict celebrities and politicians, mostly from the executive, in a more personified way. Lastly, countries against the Washington consensus and with a high degree of political coverage are more inclined to present the substantial intensity of both factors. O objetivo desse artigo é reavaliar, por meio da análise quantitativa de conteúdo, o papel dos fatores “personificação” e “proeminência” nas coberturas internacionais, utilizando como estudo de caso a cobertura noticiosa da América Latina na imprensa de qualidade alemã. O corpus engloba 3.831 artigos publicados entre janeiro de 2000 e dezembro de 2014 em periódicos líderes de mercado: o Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), o Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), o alternativo tageszeitung (taz) e, adicionalmente, o semanário Der Spiegel, a revista política mais relevante da Alemanha. Os fatores têm pesos semelhante entre as publicações, embora o FAZ tenha uma cobertura menos personificada e mais elitista, enquanto a Der Spiegel possui uma intensidade de personificação mais marcante. Além disso, em relação aos tipos de indivíduos analisados, a imprensa tende a retratar celebridades e políticos, principalmente do executivo, de uma maneira mais personificada. Por fim, os países contra o consenso de Washington e/ou com um alto grau de cobertura política estão mais inclinados a apresentar uma maior intensidade de ambos os fatores. El objetivo de este trabajo es reevaluar, a través del análisis cuantitativo de contenido, el papel de los factores “personificación” y “prominencia” en la cobertura internacional, utilizando como caso de estudio la cobertura de noticias de América Latina en la prensa alemana de calidad. El corpus comprende 3.831 artículos publicados entre enero de 2000 y diciembre de 2014 en los principales periódicos: Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), el tageszeitung (taz) alternativo y, además, el semanario Der Spiegel, La revista política más relevante de Alemania. Los factores tienen pesos similares en todas las publicaciones, aunque FAZ tiene una cobertura menos personificada y más elitista, mientras que Der Spiegel tiene una intensidad de personificación más marcada. Además, en relación con los tipos de individuos analizados, la prensa tiende a retratar a las celebridades y los políticos, especialmente el ejecutivo, de una manera más personificada. Finalmente, los países en contra del consenso de Washington y / o con un alto grado de cobertura política son más propensos a tener una mayor intensidad de ambos factores.

This article explores the relationship between the implementation of a paywall and the editorial content profile in a local newspaper. The premise of the article is that the content published behind the wall is the content the newspaper values the most, and the article aims to contribute to an understanding of the interplay between strategic and economic decisions regarding news production and the editorial content. The Norwegian newspaper Fædrelandsvennen and its online initiative fevennen.no serve as cases in the study, and the article asks two questions: What are the most prominent news values behind the paywall, and how do they relate to commercial strategies regarding the introduction of the wall?

ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a corpus-based examination of the discourse of eliteness and personalisation news values in the information source. To that end, the study compares digital news in British and Spanish corpora. The results reveal a tendency to quote elites, which are frequently constructed by means of recognised names from politics, inanimate references with broad scope and role labels in apposition. To a lesser extent, prestige is construed through status-indicating modifiers and allusion to place of work. Ordinary sources, however, are usually construed via indication of provenance, reference to family relationship and anaphoric allusions, mostly in British sources. It remains to be clarified whether the construal of these values is in consonance with the editorial stance of the newspaper. KEYWORDS: discourse; eliteness; information source; news values; personalisation. RESUMO:Este artigo propõe um exame, baseado em corpus, do discurso da elite e a personalização dos valores informacionais na fonte de informação. Para isso, o estudo compara as notícias digitais em corpora britânicos e espanhóis. Os resultados revelam uma tendência a citar as elites, que são frequentemente construídas através de nomes políticos reconhecidos, referências inanimadas de grande alcance e etiquetas de papel na aposição. Em menor medida, o prestígio é interpretado através de modificadores que indicam status e alusões ao lugar de trabalho. As fontes comuns, no entanto, são geralmente interpretadas através da indicação de proveniência, referência à relação familiar e alusões anafóricas, especialmente em fontes britânicas. Resta esclarecer se a interpretação destes valores está em consonância com a postura editorial do jornal. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: discurso; elitismo; fonte de informação; valores informacionais; personalização.

The objective of this study is to conduct a stylistic analysis of the synopses publicized in the end-of-the-year ranking list of 2017 scientific “breakthroughs” from Science Magazine. The article provides a review of literature on science popularization (also known as science accommodation) and presents the typology of news values and rationalization cues that are used by editors to make science-related coverage both newsworthy and credible at the same time. The article lists the possible ways in which scientific findings can be stylistically constructed as “breakthroughs”. The analysis consists in quantifying and illustrating the typical stylistic maneuvers for framing selected science-related issues as “breakthroughs.” The article concludes with the implications of such constructions for the public understanding of science.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-1923 (Dadrian 2003) had a massive international news coverage at the time of the events and in the decades that followed (Peltekian 2013; Elayyadi 2017), but few linguistic studies have examined its news discourse. None, so far, has analysed the letters to the editor commenting on the genocide and on the Armenian question at large. Letters to the editor, intended as specific news discourse, rarely have been targeted by linguistic studies (see Chovanec 2012; Romova and Hetet 2012; Pounds 2005; 2006). A corpus of 186 letters to the editor of The Times, published between 1914 and 1926, was collected to examine the linguistic strategies used to construct the newsworthiness of the Armenian genocide through the news value of timeliness. Timeliness is here intended as the recency in time of the events that are commented in the letters to the editor. The concepts of evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000), of evaluative parameters in media discourse (Bednarek and Caple 2019) and of semantic prosody (Partington 2004; Sinclair 2004) are applied to most recurrent lexical items related to timeliness (recent, new, last), analysing their concordances and collocates, thus combining discourse analysis with a corpus-driven approach (Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Sinclair 1996, 2004). The findings show the linguistic features of the semantic prosody of timeliness in the corpus.

There is a widespread perception that there has been a collapse in court reporting in England and Wales as local legacy media struggles to survive in times of falling revenues and shifting audiences. However, there is little empirical evidence with which to examine the issue. This research aims to fill this knowledge gap by carrying out the first week-long systematic coding of the activity of one England and Wales magistrates' court coupled with a concurrent survey of local media coverage of the courts. While 240 cases were observed during the week-long study, only three stories appeared in the local press and only one case was attended by a journalist. Moreover, the research team identified a significant number of 'newsworthy' cases among the sample – all of which were missing from media coverage. Although small in scale, this research does indicate that, in an average week, the vast majority of cases heard at this level of the criminal justice system is largely invisible to the public, with virtually no independent oversight from journalism. This is at odds with the key principle of open justice. The article ends with some suggestions for regenerating the area by shifting from court reporting to a Justice Reporting model, with the ultimate aim of effectively filling the void in external scrutiny of day-to-day criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion polls form an important part of modern election coverage but might also shape amount and tone of other subsequent coverage about political parties. We propose to use and elaborate on Patterson's generic storylines to help account for different findings in prior research, by pointing to the importance of race context. A manual content analysis (N = 3755) of the 2013 German Bundestag election campaign is used to empirically test our framework, using a multilevel model that separates effects of 36 polls on coverage of five different parties in 11 different outlets. Results show that the amount of party coverage for the front runner party increased after drops in its ratings, and the challenger party received more negative coverage after increases in its poll ratings. Media coverage did not follow a bandwagon trend but played an independent and counteracting role within the election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, which presents the findings of a study carried out at MediaLab CIES-Iscte, we start from the idea of COVID-19 pandemic as a media event and the mediatization as a structuring aspect of the journalistic narrative to propose three models of 'journalistic display windows' - sales, product and diversity - in which the characteristics and criteria of news adopted by each of the analyzed outlets are considered. The analysis encompassed three dimensions: the distribution of content in the newspaper's physical and hierarchical space; the marks, which can be highlighted words in the titles and headlines; and the image resources used. The survey included 90 covers of three Portuguese daily newspapers published during the first 30 days of coverage of the pandemic in Portugal. The covers were divided into three cycles: the first, between the disclosure of the first identified cases of COVID-19 in Portugal (March 3, 2020) and the declaration of a national state of alertness (March 12, 2020); the second, from the closure of schools (March 13) until the eve of the presidential decree authorizing the government to declare a state of emergency (March 18); the third, from the immediate reaction of the presidential decree (March 19) until the eve of the approval of the state of emergency in the Portuguese Parliament (April 1). The study concludes that the narratives identified on the covers of newspapers are different from each other and affected by the models of different 'journalistic display windows' (an analogy to fashion shop windows), which reflect the dichotomy between journalistic and commercial interests. In this context, we question if the model public that guides the construction of the different shop windows is only one, among several possible "robot portraits", to "sell" newspapers, or a clear socio-cultural identifier of the Portuguese press publics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an empirical assessment of determinants of international news, this study tests the theory that human rights abuses elicit media attention commensurate to the violence. To evaluate this proposition, the study draws on two authoritative human rights indices: the Political Terror Scale and the Cingranelli–Richards human rights score. These indices are correlated country by country with a 180-nation database tracking foreign news coverage by the New York Times, Time magazine, and NBC Nightly News. Making a contribution to this field of research, this cross-media study assesses the magnitude of human rights suffering relative to the influence of economic, geographical, and demographic factors that drive media agenda setting. By informing the public of human suffering, media potentially provide a crucial link to political response and public policy. How well do the US media studied perform this role? Not very well. Results indicate that human rights abuse is a weak predictor of media attention; military and economic factors predominate international news coverage. With human rights ranked 7th of 16 news determinants, the study suggests that greater media attention can – and should – be given to victims in dire distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the large array of research dedicated to examining the concepts of news values and newsworthiness, journalism studies barely attempt to deal with the idea of editorial-worthiness at the theoretical level. This article proposes a conceptual foundation to reflect on the elements influencing how news organizations build their editorial positions. Studying the idea of editorial-worthiness is essential to catalog the characteristics guiding newspapers' editorial decisions and production processes, as well as to understand the differences between professional rules and cultures shaping opinionated practices in contemporary journalism. By employing an approach based on a review of the literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of criteria of editorial-worthiness consisting of (1) editorial factors and (2) editorial values, further divided into 25 items. The proposal allows journalism research to acknowledge how the gatekeeping function plays out on editorial pages by categorizing the elements influencing editorial production routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gamification redefines news reading activity by turning it into a playful experience. The shift from a reading mode to a playing mode marks a shift in news semogenesis strategies that need to be investigated to provide a better understanding of the emerging genres of news gamification and to build some reflections on the ongoing changes in journalistic practices and news values. This article takes a case study of the Al Jazeera gamified news, #Hacked-Syria's Electronic Armies. The article aims to account for the semogenic resources employed by #Hacked and the resulting aesthetic and immersive experience of interactivity. It is found that #Hacked makes sense through the medium of aesthetics of interactivity. Studied through the lens of systemic functional linguistics, aesthetics in the context of the current study is not reduced to a mere attention to style; rather it describes a different and unique digital process of meaning making based on the participant's immersive interactivity and choices. It is the semogenic power of choice and the immersive aesthetics of interactivity that mainly create #Hacked news value. The analysis yields that #Hacked reconfigures traditional notions of readers, news, and news values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequities in China are reflected within state-run media coverage due to its specific role "guiding public opinion," and with our study we contribute to the geographic turn in the Chinese context with regard to media and journalism. As a subject of a spatial study, China is unique due to several factors: geographic diversity, authoritarian control, and centralized media. By analyzing text from 53,000 articles published in People's Daily (rénmín rìbào, ...) from January 2016 to August 2020, we examine how the amount of news coverage varies by region within China, how topics and sentiments manifest in different places, and how coverage varies with regard to foreign countries. Automated methods were used to detect place names from the articles and geoparse them to specific locations, combining spatial analysis, topic modeling and sentiment analysis to identify geographic biases in news coverage in an authoritarian context. We found remarkably uniform and positive coverage domestically, but substantial differences towards coverage of different foreign countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‚News values‘ is an established term for factors that determine the selection of topics and events into the news coverage. A primary method of the German tradition of news values research, the quantitative content analysis, requires construction of a robust codebook based on catalogs of news values. There are lists elaborated for general (political) news reporting, but their application to sports journalism carries the risk of distortion. The qualitative interviews conducted previously with editors of Czech sports media suggest how to modify the existing lists. This pilot research proves the legitimacy of these modifications, especially in the process of evaluation of positivity and negativity, ethnocentrism and status of the sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide has long been a major category of news, but conceptions of newsworthiness and ethical approaches to coverage of suicide have changed dramatically over the past century. This interpretive textual analysis of journalism textbooks published from 1894 to 2016 traces how discourse on suicide coverage shifted with professional practice and social conceptions over the 20th century. Suicide was a popular genre of sensational human-interest story featured in early journalism textbooks, but many contemporary texts barely acknowledge suicide, portraying it as a generally private matter requiring characteristics of prominence, impact, or unusualness to make news. Findings suggest that the discursive pendulum has swung too far from the exploitative coverage promoted at the turn of the 20th century to the present-day marginalization of a significant social and public health issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Académique des Études Sociales et Humaines is the property of Hassif Benbouali University of Chlef and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Social media have become one of the most important news delivery channels due to their interactivity and large audiences. The content published by news organizations on social networking sites is of particular value to sociologists, because it allows measurement of users’ attitude to certain events. However, we understand that the media choose which events become news in accordance with certain criteria, such as news values. In this study, we decided to examine how news values determine the public’s response as expressed by likes, reposts, and comments. To analyze the characteristics of different media and their audiences, we selected four popular newsgroups on the social networking site Vkontakte: TASS and Russia Today, representing the state media, alongside RBC and Meduza, representing the private media. The posts of the selected newsgroups were coded and analyzed by means of Harcup and O’Neill taxonomy of values (2016). The study showed that news organizations tend to have preferences for some news values rather than others. Regression analysis revealed positive relationships between 1) the sharing of likes and good and entertaining content, 2) the sharing of comments and the presence of celebrities or conflicts in news, 3) the sharing of reposts and comments and significant events. An unexpected discovery was a negative dependency between the number of comments and the presence of exclusive content.

Credibility of online news media is facing important challenges: the levelling effect of the digital environment, the changing habits of consumption, polarization of discourses... This scenario makes it relevant to address what features of news brands and news content shape the credibility of contemporary journalism. This article tests a set of items, including journalistic standards, reputation and citizen participation, in order to build predictors involved in credibility judgments. The authors carried on a quantitative survey (n=416), representative of the Spanish online population. Results identified currency of information, inclusion of analysis and context, citation of sources and inclusion of links to primary sources as the most significant predictors of credibility judgements; it also showed that engaged respondents rely on news brand reputation and individual journalists´ reputation and do not take into account ideological affinity with editorial lines of media. Participation in the media did not prove to be relevant in shaping aggregated judgments of credibility.

The paper aims to characterise a mass media text from the point of view of news values that are constructed in it and are important for framing purposes. Current studies in philology reflect ongoing search for methods to do mass media discourse analysis. One of the approaches is discursive news values analysis (DNVA) developed by M. Bednarek and H. Caple and used in a number of studies abroad. On the one hand, this paper is the first work in Russian to employ DNVA for studying popular science genre and, on the other hand, for using a two-step procedure to examine the structural elements of a mass media text meant for attracting the reader and having the potential to frame an issue. The paper analyses the first mass media text on editing the genomes of human embryos using CRISPR that was published in the American science magazine ‘MIT Technology Review’. The first stage of the analysis revealed the most frequent news values and sources of the statements in which they were constructed. The second stage showed which sources are cited by the journalist, as well as which news values are constructed in sources’ statements and non-sourced ones. The most significant results are as follows: 1) news values that are constructed in the headline turn out to be the most frequently constructed in the rest of the analysed elements; 2) one of the ways of representing contrary opinions is constructing opposite news values in cited speech. Thus, DNVA makes it possible to determine which aspects of events are highlighted and to reveal trends in increasing newsworthiness

This themed issue provides a comprehensive overview of journalism scholarship that variously builds on, develops, and re-examines the conceptual and methodological framework of "news values" research in the digital age. As such, it purports to demonstrate, explore and reflect on its distinctive merits and limitations, both actual and potential, as a distinctive approach to understanding ideas, practices, and experiences of "newsworthiness", and indeed "news", in the contemporary media environment and society, where the vectors of change affecting "news" production, circulation and use have been manifold. In doing so, the special issue brings together contemporary conceptual, methodological and/or empirical studies that variously contribute to the outlined research agenda. It does so by presenting scholarly work (1) situated across the constituent dimensions of news values analysis, articulating interactions between material, cognitive, social, and discursive perspectives; (2) considering the diversity of news actors and normative conceptions that make up the fragmented field of journalism; (3) crossing disciplinary boundaries within the heterogenous domain of journalism studies by integrating theoretical perspectives and exploring multi-method approaches; and/or (4) engaging digital media(technologies) or tools either as an object of study or a methodological approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores a mediated variety of right-wing populist discourse in the digital context, given the populists' inclination to bypass legacy media to connect directly to the citizens to garner political support. It analyzes a sample of the Tea Party's newsfeed headlines posted in the spring of 2019. A corpus of 308 headlines collected according to a "constructed week" formula has been coded first according to selected news values parameters (Bednarek and Caple 2017), and then with respect to stylistic devices operationalized in terms of "casual," "colloquial" and "commonsensical" expressions. Methodologically, the study aims to combine the perspectives of newsworthiness and stylistics in order to offer a protocol for the analysis of (right-wing) populist styles regarding the genre of party newsfeeds that use headlines to cultivate prospective supporters. The conducted exploratory analysis finds that, notwithstanding the high incidence of Proximity and Personalization characteristic of popular media appeals, the construction of newsworthiness is mainly done through Negativity, Eliteness, Unexpectedness and Impact. Moreover, populist outlets strive for the stylistic alignment with the target audience's assumed affective and cognitive preferences for news representation though manufacture of informality, authenticity and entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News value research assumes that news factors may shift and diversify over time. Despite the technological and economic transformations of the media over the past decades, however, there has been little conceptual work on how journalistic news factors might be changing. This paper addresses how broader developments, such as digitization, datafication, and audience fragmentation, lead to changing news practices. One characteristic of the digital age is that attention is not only scarce and increasingly contested but also continuously measured and compared, leading to a heightened value around everything that seems to draw an exceptional response. Therefore, we introduce the news factor "public response" and argue that journalism increasingly covers those issues and actors that (are said to) have received broad or unexpected public attention. Using numerical, linguistic, and visual means, journalists explicitly tell their audience what many people are paying attention to. We demonstrate the significance of this news factor by pursuing two objectives: First, public response is presented conceptually and distinguished from other news factors. Second, we use the case of the 2016 US election campaign coverage to illustrate public response and derive suggestions for future measurements in qualitative and quantitative textual and visual content analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study focuses on the effect of court press releases on media gatekeeping, a field that has remained largely uninvestigated to date. Using original data on the German Federal Constitutional Court, the study analyzes when court press releases are reported on in the media. Certain news values (e.g., conflict, political power, continuity/familiarity) are assumed to increase the probability that a press release will be reported on in the news. By using an automated content analysis approach, this study assesses whether 584 press releases were reported on in German newspapers over a period of eight years (2010–2018). Only press releases that promote decisions are used as they are the official information subsidies that the Court disseminates to the public through the media. Findings indicate that only 18% of press releases are reported on in the news. Furthermore, the news values of conflict and political power are found to have no influence on the success of a press release, while press releases that promote decisions with an oral hearing are more likely to be picked up by journalists. Hence, issues that are familiar to the public are more likely to be covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that journalism scholars adopt joy as an explicit news value and adjust their epistemological and methodological approaches to news accordingly. Establishing that normative conceptions and practices of news tend toward the negative, the paper upends what journalism should privilege—reorienting the minds of journalists and audiences toward affective characteristics of people and events that evoke well-being, delight, and courage. Naming joy as a news value means recognizing the contingent and constructed nature of existing news values, embracing the "affective turn" foregrounding emotion and feeling in media research, and conceiving joy as a deep and resonant approach to life's challenges—not just a "feel-good" distraction. The paper offers proof-of-concept cases locating journalism along joyful dimensions of perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. It concludes with a methodological proposition that studying an affective value such as joy calls for our own affective engagement with news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) in a case study of national day reporting, focussing on the discursive dimension of news values. The study crosses disciplinary boundaries by bringing together linguistics and journalism studies. More specifically, it examines reporting about "Australia Day"—the official national day of Australia, which is set on a date that is becoming increasingly controversial, as it marks the beginning of colonisation. Importantly, the article utilises digital technologies (computer-based text analysis and visualisation of word co-occurrence) to apply and test these methods for the analysis of news values in English-language reporting. The study findings will thus have broader implications for journalism research. These methods (e.g., word frequency, collocation, concordancing) have been used in corpus linguistics and other areas of the digital humanities, including in the analysis of journalistic texts, but most often with a focus on language practices or discourses. Our study demonstrates that journalism research can profit from the use of free and user-friendly tools such as the ones that are applied in this study. Beyond this methodological innovation, the study will contribute new insights to research on news values in national day reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to complicate notions that research methods in journalism and media communication should necessarily be preceded or driven by research questions, suggesting that researchers who prioritize methods that bring them joy might discover questions they wouldn't otherwise know to ask. The article first explores methodology as a lifestyle choice through the framework of non-representational theory. It then examines literature on postcoding, which suggests that the coding practices found in much qualitative social science are unnecessary holdovers of positivism. The essay shows how spontaneously freestyle, open-ended postcoding analysis enabled the author to discover and intra-act with data in newly rich and authentic ways. Finally, the article examines how this style of research fits with the normative commitments of the discipline of journalism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the predominance of the 'negativity' factor as the primary determinant of news coverage in the German press – Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Tageszeitung and Der Spiegel – of events in Latin America. Based on a sample of 3831 articles published between January 2000 and December 2014, this study finds a general concentration of negative events (43.05%) with regard to 20 Latin American countries. However, since this number does not exceed 50%, the research assumption of a conflict-oriented news reporting has to be relativised. The 'negativity' rate stands out as sectorial depending on specific countries and areas of news coverage. Considerable interest in cultural issues helps to provide a more balanced image. While Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Paraguay exhibit a strong negative balance, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile and Cuba boast a dynamic, positive image. Brazil and Mexico account for two ambivalent cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editor has often been hidden in scholarship under the catch-all term of 'journalist'. Yet the roles of editor and reporter, while overlapping, are distinct. That distinction is essential to make because the editorial function is one of the defining characteristics of news journalism that separates it from 'interloper media' such as blogs, public relations (PR), government missives and citizen journalism. Editors are a marker of quality control which legitimises news journalism. This article scrutinises the editor as one who negotiates among four groups with distinct values: the audience, the organisation, journalism as practice, and society. Editor-centric analysis examines how individuals in editorial systems negotiate diverse elements of a fragmented phenomenon which is routinely unified under the banner of 'journalism'. Clearer assessment of the editor thus allows for richer assessment of what is – and what is not – journalism. It directs discourse rooted in experience and ideology to legitimate journalism as a cultural form, leading consideration of how editor-centric study can be applied empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, two Mancunians who were the first people to fly the Atlantic non-stop, yet are largely neglected as a subject of acclaim or study and even the centenary of their historic flight from Newfoundland to Ireland went by virtually uncelebrated in Britain in 2019. Alcock died six months after their ground-breaking flight and Brown, an understated character, was not comfortable with fame, but their circumstances and disposition do not explain why they have been forgotten. This article will try to explain why by examining the coverage of three newspapers, one provincial and two national, through the lens of news values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News decisions of social media editors shape the news supply on social media channels such as Facebook. This study assesses based on qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey of social media editors in two social-media-savvy European countries, Finland and Switzerland, how Facebook's News Feed algorithm, Facebook users, journalistic standards, and the news brand determine social media news making. Results show that social media editors evaluate the news factors emotions and surprise as more important for Facebook news than for online news. Social media editors accentuate emotional and surprising story elements in a post to comply with user preferences and the logic of the News Feed algorithm. Thus, news values and news editing have become more user engagement driven. Yet traditional journalistic standards and the news brand characteristics set boundaries to a heavy user engagement orientation. Social media editors estimate that their outlet's news supply on Facebook is higher for entertaining news and lower for foreign politics and economic news stories. But they strive for a 'good mix' of news adhering to both the Facebook logic and professional journalistic standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ECCOM: Educação, Cultura e Comunicação is the property of ECCOM: Educacao, Cultura e Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

'Fake news' has been a topic of controversy during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Much of the scholarship on it to date has focused on the 'fakeness' of fake news, illuminating the kinds of deception involved and the motivations of those who deceive. This study looks at the 'newsness' of fake news by examining the extent to which it imitates the characteristics and conventions of traditional journalism. Through a content analysis of 886 fake news articles, we find that in terms of news values, topic, and formats, articles published by fake news sites look very much like traditional-- and real--news. Most of their articles included the news values of timeliness, negativity, and prominence; were about government and politics; and were written in an inverted pyramid format. However, one point of departure is in terms of objectivity, operationalized as the absence of the author's personal opinion. The analysis found that the majority of articles analyzed included the opinion of their author or authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National online media outlets employ domestication practices of foreign news to render global news meaningful for local audiences. This paper investigates discursive features of news items published in three of the largest Romanian online news outlets when reporting on foreign news. The research is content-oriented and aims to identify which are the recurrent discursive patterns that are used to construct the news value of proximity; which are the main discursive domestication practices by which local relevance is constructed; and which are the local political languages that intersect with and frame global issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet and Web 2.0 have changed the communication and information systems. Social media has emerged as an alternative or a developed version of traditional media. In this respect, journalism is obliged to keep up with the new technology. Social media has become an effective platform for information and news sharing. Traditional understanding of news values and newsworthiness has been reconstructed within this period. Concepts such as share, like, comment, etc. have become significant for news values and newsworthiness in digital age. In this context, this study aims to find out how news values have changed on social media by focusing on Instagram. To this end, three newspapers, which have highest circulations in Turkey were sampled over a one-month period. Content analysis was selected as research technique. Based on research questions, three-step analysis was conducted. The findings were discussed in the conclusion. A new term - insta-worthiness - is suggested in this study to clarify the main components of news values on Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the types of environmental issues represented in Malaysian newspapers and Environmental Non-Government Organisation (ENGO) newsletters and examines the factors in the selection of stories by both social actors. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 2050 environmental articles in The Star and Utusan Malaysia newspapers, together with the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) and Malaysian Nature Society's (MNS) newsletters from 2012-2014. A total of 13 people from The Star and Utusan Malaysia, and 11 from the WWF and MNS were chosen for in-depth interview sessions. The study showed that the methods of choosing environmental information for newspapers and newsletters were slightly different. The ENGOs gave more attention to environmental effort topics like sustainable living while the media focused on more environmental problems like floods. The study also found that the Malaysian media and ENGOs shared some criteria for selecting environmental issues, especially proximity, timeliness and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how news factors in press releases influence journalists' decisions and the journalistic treatment of press release information after its initial selection for the news agenda: These journalists can transform press releases into a news story, which involves little journalistic capital investment, or use these releases for a unique news production, which requires significant journalistic capital investment. The data elicited from the content analysis show that the more profound the presence of certain news factors in press releases, the higher the chance that journalists will choose to invest their journalistic capital in these press releases. This result means that journalists will only invest journalistic capital in press releases that contain specific news factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at analysing the main developments in foreign reporting of Latin America by the German press. The paper provides a content analysis of 3.831 articles published in quality German publications (SZ, FAZ, Der Spiegel, and taz) between 2000 and 2014. The most common news factors related to the continent are found to be “magnitude,” “power status,” “economic proximity”, and “personification.” Additionally, we identified a decrease in hard news over the years (6 pp within Politics and 8 pp amidst Economy). Despite depoliticisation, a tendency towards tabloidisation was not confirmed since factors such as personification and crisis remained constant.

Desde por lo menos 2014, una campaña feminista está desafiando la desigualdad de género en las universidades irlandesas. Siete demandas judiciales empezadas por profesoras contra la National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway) incluyeron, con éxito, el tema en la agenda pública y culminaron en la transformación de las políticas nacionales para la enseñanza superior. Este artículo considera los valores notícia movilizados para relatar la campaña. El objetivo es investigar como las historias fueron seleccionadas y enmarcadas por la media hegemónica. Las noticias fueron recolectadas con palabras clave que eran los nombres de las litigantes en los archivos digitales de los dos más grandes diarios irlandeses (Irish Independent e Irish Times), también de un semanario local (Connacht Tribune). La muestra de 111 publicaciones se analizó con base en la tipología de valores noticia desarrollada por Gislaine Silva. Los resultados indican que los valores noticia con más incidencia fueron conflicto, colectividad y celebridad, desvelando que la realización de eventos mediáticos es crucial para romper la exclusión o condena de la agenda feminista en los discursos periodísticos. La pesquisa empírica ofrece un terreno fértil para reflexionar sobre la representación mediática de los feminismos contemporáneos, además de pensar la política de la memoria relativa al movimiento sufragista.

Abstract During March, April and May 2007 the local newspaper for the island of La Réunion, “Le Journal de L’Ile de La Réunion” (JIR), published 427 articles relating to natural hazards, with hazard-related articles occupying a total paper area of 21.94 m2 and appearing in all but four of the 90 editions of the newspaper. This high level of coverage was due to the passage of two cyclones in March, the largest historical eruption of Piton de la Fournaise in April, and a major rock fall event in May. The high level of coverage may also be due to the fact that JIR is a tabloid that follows tabloid news values. Cyclones, volcanic eruptions and rock falls fit the news values of a tabloid well, especially when the stories involve the power elite, feature stories of human interest, include surprise elements and rescues, and are of high impact, especially to the local population. Disasters also provide spectacular imagery and the opportunity for eye-catching headlines, which is another element of the tabloid format. These key parameters thus all flag stories about natural hazards and, in particular, volcanic eruptions as being newsworthy for a tabloid. Of the page space devoted to natural hazards, 9.24 m2 (42%) were set aside to reporting of volcanic activity, specifically the April 2007 eruption of Piton de la Fournaise. We completed a content analysis of these reports to understand the quality of information disseminated to the readership and to extract data regarding the impact of the eruption on local communities. We found the information to be of extremely high quality, with lava reporting being the most important issue covered by page area, mostly due to its photogenic nature. If we consider text-dominated reports, and exclude photo-montages, then the order of importance in terms of space set aside to reporting of a particular theme becomes: (i) general eruption details; (ii) summit collapse; (iii) lava flows; (iv) evacuation; (v) gas; (vi) ocean-entry; (v) air fall; (vi) vegetation fires (lit by lava contact); and (vii) volcano-seismicity. As the eruption and the nature of the hazard evolved (from lava flow through air-fall and gas, to summit collapse and ocean-entry) so too did the focus of the reporting. Once the eruption had finished, emphasis shifted from the hardships of the impacted community to sightseeing and tourism. We found that the quality of the reporting resulted from the use of journalists who were specialized in their reporting areas and who therefore knew the background and the correct sources to seek out for information. This shows that a well-informed journalist can be (i) a means to disseminate information and educate an impacted population, and (ii) a source of information for the volcanologist regarding societal impacts of, and population responses to, natural hazards.

Following the 2017 killing of Maxwell Adam Mahama by a lynch mob in Ghana, this article engages with the subject of lynching in Ghana through a content analysis of newsmedia items relating to the practice. While reactions to Mahama's killing invite optimism that lynching as a form of instant (in)justice is being problematized in Ghana, this study leads to a less optimistic position. State, media and public responses to Mahama's killing were compared vis-à-vis similar killings of two police officers – Jerry Wornoo and Richard Owusu-Sekyere – in 1998. Drawing on the relevant literature, this study concluded that a number of factors combined to make Mahama, Wornoo and Owusu-Sekyere 'newsworthy victims'. In contrast, victims in several lynching cases reported by Ghanaian media between 1999 and May 2017 were not deemed newsworthy, thus attracting less attention. Consequently, there have been missed opportunities following the Wornoo and Owusu-Sekyere killings to make critical systemic interventions in Ghana to prevent lynching. Hence, it is argued, the mere sensationalization of Mahama's lynching may not trigger the requisite systemic social change. Recommendations are made to harness the momentum from Mahama's killing to address instant (in)justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper reports on the findings of a diachronic investigation into ideological patterns of representation around the master signifier Muslim (and its lexical variants) during 70 years of TIME Magazine journalism. Manual analysis, of 1,573 concordance lines, showed that across the twentieth century the dominant master signifier transmuted, in both content and form. Three signifiers were used across the twentieth century to refer to Muslims. The signifier Mohammedan/Muhammadan was used in neutral constructions to reference religious and cultural themes. The signifier Moslem was predominantly used in neutral constructions but displayed a greater propensity to reference negatively constructed political. The signifier Muslim was largely used to negatively reference the narrow issue of conflict. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research. • We analysed representations of Muslims in the TIME Magazine Corpus across the 20th Century. • We used the concepts of ideological quilting and news values to analyse the data. • The master signifiers of Mohammedan, Moslem, and Muslim quilted with different themes. • Representations of Muslims shifted from a neutral focus on religio-cultural issues to a negative focus on political issues. • We frequently found (neo)orientalist representations throughout the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses 'Positivity' as a news value in a corpus of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. Crime reports, as the typical form of 'negative' news in Western news discourse analysis, have been chosen in order to find out if and how Positivity is constructed discursively in such reports. The context of 'Iranian' newspaper journalism and the field of 'crime and misbehaviour' are both among under-researched areas, especially from a discourse analysis perspective. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data showed that Positivity is constructed regularly in the Iranian crime corpus. Qualitative analysis of the crime reports showed that Positivity is constructed through the headline and lead to the rest of the news report and is usually construed via positive assessments of the police force and their actions. In addition, there are various terms referring to 'forgiveness' and 'mercy' which construe Positivity in such news reports. Generally, the abundance of Positivity in Iranian crime reports lends support to the proposition of this news value as a separate category. Also, its construction in the Iranian crime corpus seems to be highly influenced by the institutional power (i.e. police here) and the 'cultural' norms of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the social scientific epistemology that has dominated journalism for the past half-century has devalued the moral implications of public affairs and deprived citizens of the ethical tools necessary to make humane political decisions. Reviewing the contingent history of the integration of journalistic and social scientific methods leading to journalism's computational turn, the essay calls for a humanistic reconceptualization away from journalists' role as political interpreters toward a comparable role as moral interpreters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A by-product of today's hybrid media system is that genres—once uniformly defined and enforced—are now murky and contested. We develop the concept of news-ness, defined as the extent to which audiences characterize specific content as news, to capture how audiences understand and process media messages. In this article, we (a) ground the concept of news-ness within research on media genres, journalism practices, and audience studies, (b) develop a theoretical model that identifies the factors that influence news-ness and its outcomes, and (c) situate news-ness within discussions about fake news, partisan motivated reasoning, and comparative studies of media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article urges a jolt in journalism theory commensurate with the urgent state of planetary affairs—including catastrophic climate change and spreading authoritarianism—that journalism's weaknesses have helped to precipitate and that its strengths might help to contain. The article explores three conceptual frameworks offering alternative approaches to conceiving news that might disrupt the stasis of our polarized societies: "existential journalism," or a call to radical independence; Buddhist news values, based on ontological and ethical commitments favoring interdependence and compassion; and nonrepresentational news, inspired by an epistemologically expansive style of social research privileging affect, immanence, and wide-eyed attention. Attending to journalisms of engagement, compassion, and everyday joys might disrupt the heuristic partisanship and protective avoidance that characterize citizens' contemporary relations with news, opening possibilities for more generative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]