Participatory Journalism Interest Group
2022 Abstracts
Research Paper • Faculty • Kenzie Burchell, University of Toronto Scarborough; Stephanie Fielding, University of Toronto • I did my best to show their pain: Participatory genres of photojournalistic witnessing • This paper analyzes an emerging genre of participatory reporting by eyewitness image producers turned professional photojournalist stringers of the Syrian conflict. Borrowing the subjective authenticity of UGC and the diaristic war blog, their AFP Correspondent blog posts stand in contrast to traditional international agency content by providing accounts of the embodied, relational, and temporal dimensions of their experience, each central to the practices of witnessing and bearing witness by UGC producers and photojournalists alike.
Research Paper • Faculty • Deborah Chung, University of Kentucky; Hyun Ju Jeong; Yung Soo Kim • Working together? Contributing and Adopting Citizen Visuals From the Lens of Social Media Usage, Perception, and Visual Attributes • We examined how visual professional journalists and citizen journalists use and view Facebook and Twitter and investigate the role of three visual attributes on their tendency to contribute or adopt citizen visuals. Findings reveal citizens adopt Twitter for dissemination and interpretation; professionals use both platforms mainly for interpretation. The visual quality attribute functions as a mediator for citizens primarily on Facebook for soft news. No significant mediating models were found in the visual professionals’ data.
Extended Abstract • Faculty • Jennifer Cox, Salisbury University • Reacting to Black Lives Matter: Facebook Engagement with News Coverage During the Summer 2020 Protests • This study examined 286 posts from the six most-viewed U.S. news outlets on their Facebook feeds about the Black Lives Matter movement and protests following George Floyd’s death by during summer 2020. Users engaged with stories at a high rate, though engagement declined throughout the summer. Users engaged most frequently with posts featuring anti-BLM and pro-police frames using a variety of reactions. Additional analysis will reveal specific ways in which users engaged with posts.
Research Paper • Faculty • Letrell Crittenden, Thomas Jefferson University; Andrea Wenzel, Temple University • “I Think We Are Truly Ignored” – An Assessment of How Small Town Media Serves the Information Needs of BIPOC Residents • Much has been written recently about how emerging news deserts have impacted small towns across America, and how the loss of news coverage has had an impact upon the sense of community in such places. Nevertheless, little effort has been made to detail how BIPOC communities in particular are served by local media. This is an issue, given the changing nature of small towns, which are increasingly becoming more diverse. This study, which uses a Communication Infrastructure Theory framework, assesses how BIPOC residents of a small town in the Mid-Atlantic are served by local media within their community. Through a series of focus groups and a community discussion involving local media, we interrogate how BIPOC members of this town feel about their place in local news coverage, and investigate how they share and receive important information inside of their community through an assessment of the community’s storytelling network. We find that BIPOC residents do not feel represented in local media, and that storytelling networks, which are siloed by racial and language barriers, have also failed to adequately serve BIPOC residents.
Research Paper • Faculty • Muhammad Fahad Humayun, U of Colorado-Boulder; Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado-Boulder • Understanding social media in journalism practice: A typology • While the intersection of social media usage and journalism practice enjoys a prominent place in many scholarly inquiries throughout the field of journalism studies, a comprehensive understanding of this body of literature is lacking. This study attempts to alleviate this problem. Through a systematic analysis of more than 200 studies primarily focusing on how journalists utilize social media in newswork, this paper first classifies social media usage into three broad categories: news construction, news dissemination, and branding. Next, this study introduces a typology that visualizes and explores three dimensions of social media use: motivation (self vs organization), prevalence (sporadic vs prevalent) and disruption (disruptive vs normalization). Our findings illustrate potential future research areas.
Research Paper • Faculty • Avery Holton, University of Utah; Valérie Bélair-Gagnon; Diana Bossio, Swinburne University; Logan Molyneux • “When You’re Out Here On Your Own”: Journalists, Harassment and News Organization Responses • Drawing on interviews with American newsworkers, this study finds that journalists are facing acute, chronic, and escalatory forms of harassment on social media at a time when they are being asked to be more engaged and participatory. Harassment is reported more by journalists self-identifying as women. Journalists also report a lack of resources from news organizations to help prevent and cope with this harassment. Left to address increasing amounts of harassment on their own, journalists report searching for ways to alleviate harassment, including consideration of disengaging from social media and audiences and leaving the profession.
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