Journal. Media, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2021) – 7 articles

COVID-19-related online fake news poses a threat to Indian public health. In response, this study seeks to understand the five important features of COVID-19-related social media fake news by analyzing 125 Indian fake news. The analysis produces five major findings based on five research questions. First, the seven themes of fake news are health, religiopolitical, political, crime, entertainment, religious, and miscellaneous. Health-related fake news (67.2%) is on the top of the list that includes medicine, medical and healthcare facilities, viral infection, and doctor-patient issues. Second, the seven types of fake news contents are text, photo, audio, video, text and photo, text and video, and text and photo and video. More fake news takes the form of text and video (47.2%). Third, online media produces more fake news (94.4%) than mainstream media (5.6%). More interestingly, four social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube, produce most of the fake news. Fourth, relatively more fake news has international connections (54.4%) as the COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon. Fifth, most of the COVID-19-related fake news is negative (63.2%) which could be a real threat to public health. These results may contribute to the academic understanding of social media fake news during the present and future health-crisis period. This paper concludes by stating some limitations regarding the data source and results, as well as provides a few suggestions for further research. Full article

Digitization, digital convergence and digitalization are well-known terms that have caused a huge impact on the media landscape in the last two decades. The embedded consequences of the increase of free information online or the lack of stable profits for media companies are present in the day-to-day practices of news companies. However, there is a lack of understanding of how the emergence of new players has modified the logic and rhythm of the media production chain. In this article, we try to identify a theoretical approach to analyze and classify the different roles and actors considered to be disrupting the media stage. Through a systematic literature review of more than 200 articles published in the last twenty years, we identify and define a term to better understand the nature of these new media players: digital intermediaries. Furthermore, we argue that there is a need for a clear taxonomy regarding digital intermediaries, paying special attention to the shifts in the news companies’ definition and delivery of value. Full article

Correlation of different segments of society is a major function of mass media and works by broadening individual’s perspectives and creating common ground between these different segments Little is known about how consensus building works in the networked, digital environment or how it works in Latin America. This study explores the premise on a social media page from a digital-native news organization in Colombia, La Silla Vacía, on the salient issue of Venezuela. It found that the news organization did provide a common ground within its comments, bringing men and women closer together in consensus (r_s = 0.76, n = 10, p < 0.05) of the priorities of topics relating to Venezuela (substantive attributes). The study did not find a significant correlation between the topics prioritized by the posts and the topics prioritized by the comments. Audiences focus on Venezuela in relation to the local Colombian presidential election while the news organization focused on the country in relation to refugees and the political transition happening in Venezuela. Full article

In the past 20 years the world of journalism has been swept by a wave of structural, institutional and technological changes that have shaped the journalism that we experience today. Following conceptualization of hybrid media, the term ‘hybrid journalism’ has been used to define what journalism has become. Many scholars have subjected this label to scrutiny; they consider hybridity to be a vague term that requires a more precise conceptualization. In this paper, we propose that what to date has been called ’hybrid journalism’ has moved from the periphery to the center of the field. Adopting a communicative ecology perspective, we highlight that the changes due to technologies, which too often are regarded as merely disrupting the journalistic field, have now become established and are accepted as core components of the work of journalists today. This reconstruction work is mainly discursive and is explained by considering journalism as a discursive institution. We then explain the implications of studying journalism with acknowledgement that hybrid forms of journalism that are central in the field are hybrid. Full article

Reviews of research have provided insights into the digital media production practices of youth in and out of school. Although such practices hold promise for the language and literacy education of refugee-background youth, no review has yet integrated findings across studies and different digital media production practices to explore this promise. This scoping review summarizes and discusses the key findings from research on varied types of digital media produced specifically by refugee-background youth in and out of school. It situates digital media production practices in the context of this diverse population, which experiences forced migration, and highlights 5 main themes from findings in 42 reviewed articles. Digital media production afforded refugee-background youth: (1) Ownership of representations across time and space; (2) opportunity to expand, strengthen, or maintain social networks; (3) identity work; (4) visibility and engagement with audiences; and (5) communication and embodied learning through multimodal literacies. Full article

In this article, we propose an observational, narrowing-down approach to analysing social media networks and developing research design by the joint use of computational algorithms and researchers’ inductive exploration and interpretive explanations. The Brexit referendum on Twitter study is used to illustrate how we applied this approach in practice. In this study, observation helped us combine the strengths of computational statistical analysis and modelling and of inductive inquiries. Computational algorithms and tools including Elasticsearch, Kibana and Gephi provided us with an “ethnographic field” where we were able to inductively observe the relationships among users and to reduce the amount of data down to a level in which we could intuitively understand these relationships. In traditional observational studies, talking to human subjects and observing their interactions in a research site are important to ethnographers. Likewise, it is useful for social science researchers to dialogue with data, observe human relationships embodied in the data and reconstructed by computational tools, and understand these relationships through closely examining a small batch of meaningful data that is extracted from large-scale data. In this case study, adopting the proposed approach, we found the importance of political disagreement leading to a tale of two politicians, in which pro-Brexit users denounced @David_Cameron but legitimised @Nigel_Farage. Full article

The rise of the TikTok social network has caused the media to confront the younger generation. The platform, which hosts dances, challenges, and funny short videos, has unique features that force a reinvention of social networking strategies. Television has become social and has expanded to new platforms, while young people are abandoning the consumption of traditional television. In this study, we explore—for the first time—the presence of television channels and programmes on TikTok and an analysis of the main strategies shown in the 133 found profiles. The results describe a first exploratory phase that lacks specific strategies in most cases, while examples adapted to the logic of the social network emerge: content with a fun and simple tone, with participation in challenges and trends of the moment, as well as a positioning of the brand to—gradually—approach its future potential audiences. Full article