Live-Blogging the Crisis: Determinants of News Coverage of the Syrian Refugee Crisis.

This study employed international news flow theory to test the impact of the determinants of foreign news flow on the comprehensiveness of textual and multimedia coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in the form of a live blog. The live blog is an online news format that allows journalists to inform their audiences about ongoing, most often breaking news events, with live, brief posts. The authors employed a content analysis to investigate the determinants of live blogging about the Syrian refugee crisis in five countries: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The analysis of 195 live blogs showed that deviance of the event was a predictor of the amount of textual coverage, while economic relevance was the best predictor of the comprehensiveness of multimedia live-blog coverage. Furthermore, the analyses supported previous findings that suggested geographic proximity is losing its power in predicting international news flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]