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  5. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2023

Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2023

Volume 12, Issue 1

Volume 12, Issue 1, 2023

Language: English
  • Articles

      • You can’t beat the feeling: How emotional responses to exemplars in news stories affect perceptions of expert sources and the message of the news story

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ajms_00048_1

        Journalists include ordinary people as exemplars – also known as case sources – in news stories to illustrate the general issue through their personal accounts. These accounts from exemplars tend to evoke emotions in the audience and carry greater weight than base rate information when people form perceptions or attitudes on the problem at hand. In this study, drawing on a news story in which an expert source and an exemplar provide conflicting information, we explore viewers’ emotional response to the exemplar and their perceptions of the expert source and the main message of the news story. We do this by presenting participants with two versions of a television news story – one with and one without an exemplar. We measure participants’ emotional response through a combination of open-ended and close-ended self-reports and directly through electrodermal activity, and we explore their perception of sources and the message of the story through open-ended questions. We find that viewers experience increased arousal when they watch the personal account of an exemplar, and that they tend to interpret the base rate information in the light of the exemplar’s account. Furthermore, some respondents tend to delegitimize the expert source that contradicts the account of the exemplar. We discuss the implications that these results have for journalists and provide tentative advice on which measures journalists can take to counter such effects.

    • Is Snapchat Discover really a news platform? News snacking from social media and users’ knowledge of current affairs

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajms_00047_1

      The role of the media in informing the public has long been a central topic in journalism studies. Given that social media platforms have become today’s major source of news, it is important to understand the impact of social media use on citizens’ knowledge of current affairs. While people get news from multiple platforms throughout the day, most research treats social media as a single entity or examines only one or two major platforms ignoring newer social media platforms. Drawing on news snacking framework, this study investigates how using some of today’s most popular social media platforms predicts users’ current affairs knowledge, with particular attention to Snapchat and its news section Discover. A survey conducted in the United States (=417) demonstrated that each of the platforms is distinct: Twitter is a strongly positive predictor of knowledge, Facebook a marginally significant negative predictor, Reddit a significantly negative predictor and Instagram not a significant predictor. Overall Snapchat use has no significant association with users’ knowledge of current affairs, whereas Discover use has a negative relationship. Further analysis revealed that mere exposure to Snapchat is positively related to soft-news knowledge and attention to Discover is negatively related to hard-news knowledge.

    • Attitudes to fake news verification: Youth orientations to ‘right click’ authenticate

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajms_00051_1

      This article examines the phenomenon of fake news through a survey of university students in the United Kingdom. The survey, composed through a selection of factual and non-factual content/news and complemented through a validation tool, sought to assess the attitudes of these respondents to items of factual misinformation before and after these were verified with the tool. The findings from the survey present online misinformation as a very complex and unfolding phenomenon in terms of user behaviour, particularly when presented with an authentication tool. The majority of respondents failed in identifying factual from fake news posts. While respondents indicated mistrust in using third-party validation tools, the majority indicated a critical need for a verification tool that would support their quest and increase their trust in what they read online.

    • 9Mobile news SMS entrepreneurship and citizen journalism potentials in Nigeria

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajms_00052_1

      There is increased mobile telecommunications penetration across Nigeria. One of the realities connected to such penetration is the news-text services offered by the country’s 9Mobile mobile telecommunications company. This content analysis and covert non-participant observation research examined news entrepreneurial and citizen journalism potentials of the service. Findings show that news SMS service is encouraging, but issues such as delayed delivery and incomplete replications concurrently hamper entrepreneurial and citizen journalism benefits. The degree of diversity of 9Mobile news SMS contents is also poor. Nevertheless, there was significant use of prominent news stories – as derived from the hardcopies of the sourcing national newspapers. The research notes the need for news SMS copyright and plagiarism checks alongside other professional standards. Overall, it is pertinent to reiterate that irrespective of shortcomings, convergent news deliveries of 9Mobile SMS-MoreNews retain significant potentials for entrepreneurship and citizen journalism.

    • History of university radio broadcasting in Turkey and its struggle for legal existence

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ajms_00060_1

      University radio broadcasting, whose first examples in Turkey date back to the 1940s, made its main leap forward with the emergence of private radio broadcasting in the early 1990s and the increase in the number of communication and broadcasting schools at different levels. Largely unable to exist legally except for a few exceptions, university radio stations have had to deal with many problems from the first examples until today. In this study, we conducted in-depth interviews with the representatives and employees of university radio stations affiliated with 34 universities in Turkey. We found that the lack of a legal basis for university radio stations causes various problems in practice. The most important of these problems include the following: first, the practices of frequency allocation and usage fees by relevant authorities are not conducted in compliance with certain standards. Financial return models are rigid and limited; the production efficiency of a radio station is interrupted when university financial support or station management is irregular or insufficient, as well. As a result, employees experience a loss of motivation in the management and content production stages.

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