Journal. Media, Volume 3, Issue 4 (December 2022) – 14 articles

This essay discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions follow specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms. The acceptance of these proposals remains a matter of contention. One major obstacle involves the current Western Romantic view on art and culture. Having driven a rift between art and craft, Romanticism 2.0 opposes the aforesaid working definitions and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation, and adaptation. Finally, conclusions highlight some caveats foreshadowing resistance also against nudging back Romanticism 2.0 to its pre-Romantic views. Full article

This study examines how news about China is presented, spread and impacts the diversity of opinions in state-owned, commercial, community, and religious media outlets in Zambia. Drawing from the 2012–2021 data, and guided by intermedia agenda-setting theory, we provide evidence of the counter-attitudinal influence of news content on China across the four media categories. While state-owned media emphasized issues of privatization, and government and foreign policies, community and religious media focused on issues of environmental degradation, poor labor conditions, and mining. Commercial media mirrored state-owned media, a trend also reflected in community and religious media outlets across time. These findings suggest that China shapes how the media in Zambia present content about China. As observed, over the years, China is positively presented in the Zambian media. Full article

This case study examines the dramatic change of fortune of the Chinese war epic “The Eight Hundred”. The movie was censored in 2019 during China’s celebration of the country’s 70th anniversary but became the market-saving hero in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production, this study argues that the movie’s changing fate is essentially the change of its political, symbolic and economic capitals, under different field conditions. The subfield of commercial films in China is subject to the control of political and economic forces in the field of power, but is also becoming an economic power itself. Full article

Ordinary people have always been of interest to journalists, and social media has become a common place to find material for new stories. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of Norwegian news articles that are based on social media posts published by ordinary people. The analysis focuses on the topics of the news stories, sources, headlines, lead paragraphs, use of amateur photos, and what news criteria they fulfill. The news articles generated covered a wide variety of topics but were mostly soft news. Social issues, culture, and politics were the largest categories. They were episodic in form and replicated much of the content from the original social media post together with an interview with the person who posted it. There was little use of other sources or follow-up stories. Most of the photos used were amateur photos. The journalistic processing of the material is at a minimum. Compared with Norwegian news in general, the sources in the material were slightly more female and of a wider age range, and they were picked up by journalists because of popularity cues on social media. For journalists, this poses an opportunity and a challenge to develop the stories into something more than mere snapshots of society. For the individuals involved it poses an opportunity to reach a larger audience, but also the challenge of context collapse when the audience shifts from their contacts on social media to the general news audience. Full article

The current paper studies the 2022 parliamentary election campaign, in regards to what extent and quality certain elements of political debate can appear in political actors’ social media communication. During our research, we analyzed 2441 Facebook posts from parties and party leaders prior to the election. According to our results, political actors engage in opinionated discourse on social media and largely focus on public policy issues. They rarely rely on factual reasoning; instead, they tend to use individual phenomena to justify their claims. Ad hominem fallacy also plays a significant role in their Facebook posts when they are making an argument. However, other argumentation errors, so-called fallacies are quite rare in their communication. The main patterns are similar between the actors, but in general, parties and politicians from the opposition are more argumentative compared to the ruling party coalitions. Full article

As more young girls write stories online thanks to the increased amount of publishing platforms, their fiction becomes a means to explore if they are offsetting prescribed practices of patriarchy in their gender constructions. Often, young women interrogate gender and recontextualize their experiences by writing fanfictions. In the age of transmedia storytelling, various online fan communities are rich data sources, as transnational female fans prolifically write fiction featuring icons from music and movies belonging to another country. We examined how young Indian girls frame gender roles and power dynamics in their fanfictions of BTS, the South Korean boyband, on Wattpad. To know if conventional gender frames are upheld or challenged in fanfiction stories revolving around non-Indian celebrities, we performed a textual analysis on forty-four BTS fanfictions. We found that in these fanfictions, existing gendered tropes used to depict masculinity and femininity are mostly normalized, with minor alterations reflecting a power imbalance typical in Indian patriarchal households. A subversion of tropes was found in framing men as emotionally expressive, arguably drawing from the soft masculinity projected in the home country of BTS–South Korea. Grounding these findings in self-categorization theory implores us to situate the construction of gendered identities within the socio-cultural conventions of fanfiction writers. Full article

Research on journalism innovation has become increasingly relevant for science and practice. The literature shows a great variety of innovations in a wide range of media fields. However, the question of what the most important innovations in different media systems are has not been addressed. This article attempts to fill this research gap by providing a theoretical framework that deals with the function of journalism in society as well as with the multifaceted meaning of innovation in a time of constant media change. We identify and analyze the most important journalistic innovations in Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in the last decade. Interviews with 100 experts reveal diverse innovation efforts. From a total of around 1000 mentions, 50 different types of innovations could be identified; from them, 34 made it into the selection of the 20 most relevant innovations in the countries. Different innovations were found to be of varying importance for journalism development in each country. However, some innovations were ranked high everywhere including data journalism, collaborative and investigative networks, audience participation, journalism in social media and the establishment of paywalls. Further comparative analysis of the media policy frameworks, journalism cultures and contexts for the contribution of journalism to democracy is required. Full article

As a country with a remarkable crude oil deposit, it is a dark irony that Nigeria depends on importation for its petroleum product needs. The devastating impact on Nigeria’s economy of this dependence continues to provoke polemics. Recently, the polemics dominated the text of Nigeria’s leading national newspapers. We see in the texts, manifest and latent ideological status quo thinking about the variant of science Nigerians believe might launch Nigeria into a sustainable competence in petroleum products affordability. Since latent ideological text meanings elude the competence of lay readers, we sampled as data, newspaper texts containing manifest and latent views expressed by Nigerians regarding the version of science of crude oil refining they believe Nigeria needs to enable it to exit its dependence on importation for its petroleum product needs. Leveraging our critical discourse analysis of these diversely sourced data, we raised and answered questions, such as whether the concern expressed by powerful Nigerians against indigenous crude oil refiners results from the patriotic disposition of the powerful or whether their concern is a pushback against anything with a potential to break the monopoly and the illicit gains that accrue from oil subsidy policy that enriches only those at the corridors of power. Our analysis also forayed into why Nigeria’s journalists and Nigeria’s political class see nightmare instead of dreams in the commitment of indigenous crude oil refiners to indigenize the production of petroleum products in Nigeria. Full article

In the last decade, there have been an increasing number of studies on female entrepreneurship and its relationship with communication activity. However, as a worldwide current issue, there are no records in the scientific literature in which a bibliometric analysis has been performed in this field. This article aims to fill this gap by reviewing the present situation of research production and analyzing its evolution and trends. To this end, a systematic review of the existing literature is carried out, as well as the bibliometric analysis of the 1356 records found in the Scopus database and the analysis of bibliometric networks referring to authorship, citation, keywords and main affiliations of researchers with VOSviewer software. Among the results, it is worth noting the close correlation between advances in communication strategies on behalf of women entrepreneurs, mainly related to the digitization of processes and the reduction of gender disparities. Thus, there is a need to raise awareness of the importance of communication in business management and to promote training activities that encourage greater interaction between women entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. Full article

The individual interpretations of purchasing policies weaken fair government purchasing practices. However, this does not fully account for the nature of the media’s coverage of government contracting, taken as a whole. The authors seek to understand better framing in newspaper stories on government procurement, with the government as a force that creates opportunity and fraud. The paper focuses on an area of cognitive uncertainty in understanding portrayals of public procurement in newspaper articles as positive or negative, and, assuming a lack of balance, what interest or group do articles favor in their portrayal of this public function? Sentiment analysis of a corpus of newspaper articles focusing on government contracting was conducted. This analysis suggests that the negative perception of government contracting is reinforced and exacerbated by sensationalized media coverage, a negative impact on the policymaking process and public discourse, and public trust in government results. Full article

During crises, journalists rely on emotional appeals to alert the public. This includes fear appeals, i.e., journalistic depictions of threats and measures against them. Focusing on the coronavirus crisis, this study analyzes the prevalence of fear appeals in journalistic news, differences between outlets, and changes over time. It employs a manual content analysis of UK online news between January and May 2020 (N = 1048). Results indicate that, during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic, journalists relied heavily on fear-inducing messages by emphasizing threats related to COVID-19 and, though to a lesser degree, measures against these threats. Besides differences between tabloids and quality outlets, we find that fear-inducing content decreased before the UK itself became most affected, indicating that coverage served a warning function rather than mirroring national affectedness. Overall, the study illustrates that fear appeals are common in coverage of crises, where they enable journalists to take on the role of public mobilizers and facilitators of crises response strategies, for instance by governments. Full article

TikTok is consolidating its place in the social media landscape. During the first three months of the COVID-19, it was the most downloaded app worldwide, and it gained 500,000 new users in Portugal. Our study sets out to map the practices of Portuguese teenagers (10–16) on TikTok. Using a Uses and Gratifications approach (U&G), we conducted an online survey with a non-probabilistic sample of 347 TikTok users. Our findings show relevant differences between younger (10–12) and older (13–16) teenagers. The youngest are more careful about privacy and enjoy more experimentation as content creators, while the oldest are more focused on building an audience. Entertainment and self-expression are the main motivations for using the platform. About 50% of our sample admits at least one behavior that is indicative of addiction. Full article

This study explores aspects of journalistic quality in complex digital stories. Based on a tailored overview of the potentials of online journalism and digital long form stories for journalistic quality, all available award-winning stories of the subcategory Interactive of the World Press Photo’s Digital Storytelling Contest from 2011 to 2021 (n = 31) are examined according to their structure and journalistic quality criteria using Grounded Theory. The findings add to the long and ongoing research history in journalism and communication studies on the question of what journalistic quality entails and can be used as a basis for further analyses focusing on the technological and structural nature of digital stories and high-quality journalism. The analysis revealed a differentiation between linear stories and chapter stories with linear elements. While a multimedia nature, continuous text and video content prevailed in both forms, they differed in terms of their complexity as well as certain expressions of quality criteria. Gamification and immersion emerged as new yet debatable aspects of journalistic quality in digital stories. Full article