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News aggregation is a developing form of professional journalism practice, one uniquely adapted to contemporary communication realities. News companies have always gathered content from a variety of sources when producing their products. However, the sheer volume of information, number of participants and speed of consumption online requires news workers to adopt new routines of collecting and disseminating information. These routines, some argue, fundamentally differ from the beat structure of traditional journalism. As recent ethnographic work has found, online news workers might value a sense of audience and newsworthiness over and above norms like objectivity and getting a good story (Anderson, 2013; Agarwal & Barthel, 2013). As economic pressures continue to strain resources and shrink the number of reporters on staff, news aggregation, both as a practice and a digital filtering tool, is becoming a staple of modern newsrooms. Few researchers have explored the impact of these divergent routines on content. Through a secondary data analysis of the Pew Research Center’s 2012 News Coverage Index, this thesis examines the topics and news-drivers in 12 US news websites. The analysis finds that in-house, so-called “original reporting” tends to rely on institutional actors and hard news topics. When stories are aggregated from a third-party source, soft news topics and celebrity stories are preferred. Finally, different professional practices seem to be favored depending on the type of online news organization. The findings suggest scholars, and those interested in journalism education, think of organizational pressures and professional norms as fluid online, particularly when connecting theories of news work to output in terms of content. / text

This study examines newspaper portrayals of the American insane asylum between 1887 and 1895. The focus is on the way the mental health system was represented to the public in the era of Nellie Bly, the stunt journalist who investigated a Manhattan insane asylum in 1887. The project reveals the ways in which the newspapers aggregated a variety of narratives around the insane asylum which ultimately presented the institution in such a way that served the needs of the press. For those without firsthand knowledge of the insane asylum, the newspaper was the primary source of information. In that medium, there was a system of knowledge created and disseminated, one that integrated and conflated the public answer to mental illness with other sociopolitical issues such as economics, crime, gender, and ethnicity. The content created a meaning in which the deteriorating asylum system was presented contradictorily as an ineffective yet permanent public reality. Furthermore, newspapers reinforced and augmented an existing shame around mental illness. Mental illness evolved from a private/family concern to one of public import over the course of the 19th century. Thus, mental affliction became more than a moral failing or a character flaw; it had been elevated to a social problem to be tended by the government. Therefore, the problem of the mentally ill fell under the jurisdiction of the metro newspaper, which often published articles relaying asylum expenses, investigations into the failing asylums themselves, or speculations as to the cause of a person's sickness.

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Saigon has occupied an important place in the American imagination. Captivated by its French colonial past, a diverse array of American writers romanticized the city's "tree-lined streets" as the "Paris of the East" and the "Pearl of the Orient." as the United States extended its influence in Vietnam over the course of the twentieth Century, culminating during the 1960s, Saigon experienced America's growing presence. Americans composed photographs and writings, both personal and published, to make sense of the changing city and the changing public opinion of the war. The juxtaposition of American-occupied French colonial architecture with the visual manifestations of a city at war (such as overcrowding, military personal, and bombed buildings) runs throughout American representations of Saigon. These representations transformed the romantically remembered boulevards into a dystopian vision of the South Vietnamese capital brimming with corruption, street vendors, sex workers, and bars. In order to convey different ideas about Saigon, many media producers and government officials relied on the bodies of the people in Saigon to convey different meanings. This project argues that American understandings of Saigon often relied on a reciprocal relationship between human bodies and the environment around them. Bodies lent meaning to aspects of the city while the city helped construct meanings around people's bodies. In some cases, the bodies in question were those of Western men, but more often, the bodies of Vietnamese women did the work of creating American meanings for the city.

New Journalism and Direct Cinema reflect a unique conjoined moment in the evolution of nonfiction writing and filmmaking in the United States. I argue that these movements developed as a specific response to the shift from a modern to a postmodern aesthetic, a shift away from faith in a coherent reality at a historical moment, the 1960s. In an attempt to capture reality using new methods that would raise the status of nonfiction, writers and filmmakers in these movements call attention to process and "style." at first glance, these experiments with new styles appear radical; instead, New Journalism and Direct Cinema---in opposition to their "revolutionary" reputations---function to conserve traditional views of reality. Ultimately, I claim, their innovative narrative style and emphasis on process undermine their attempt to reinforce a correspondent relationship between print and film language and the "real" material world. However, the innovative methods of writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote and filmmakers like Robert Drew, Albert and David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin sparked a discussion about genre, language, and representation that established specific expectations about nonfiction that continue to define documentary for readers and viewers into the twenty-first century.

Advances in photography and conceptions of national identity proceeded side by side during the nineteenth century. The introduction of halftone reproductions marks the beginning of an information revolution and is an important moment not only in media history, but in studies of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history and studies of national identity. Visual representation of differences between people and places was one means by which people identified and validated Americans' belonging because photographs were infused with authority: they seemed to be truthful, to provide infallible evidence of events and of people. as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and technological advances made the halftone process quick and inexpensive, men and women of the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Jazz Age, and the Great Depression used photographs for visual storytelling in the pages of newspapers, books, journals, and magazines. Editors embraced the seeming realism of photography in their publications; halftones in print helped Americans see each other in new ways and themselves for the first time on a regular, mass-circulating basis.;"The Spectacle of Citizenship" examines how three publications and their strong-willed editors used halftones to display and distribute their views of nationhood and belonging in a period when the United States was undergoing significant changes as a consequence of industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and international military and economic crisis. Paul Kellogg, editor of "Charities and the Commons," and his brood of social justice progressives used halftones to display and include/exclude immigrants, racial minorities, and workers belying reform-minded middle class Americans claims of sympathy, understanding, and acceptance and instead riddling the journal with images that construct a sense of belonging for white, middle class Americans by explicitly identifying who did and did not belong. Joseph Medill Patterson, blue-blooded founder the "Daily News," took a British idea for photograph-based newspapers aimed at the working class and reinvented it as the nation's first tabloid. The newspaper captured Jazz Age New York City with splashy photographs emphasizing crime, scandal, celebrity, politics, and world events and invented a vision of America rooted in popular culture, patriotism, and American "values". Patterson's newspaper reinforced the hegemony of white, upper and middle class Americans, but it did so with an acceptance of rapidly changing social and cultural values in the country and the recognition of the importance of the urban working class population. C.K. McClatchy, long-time editor and publisher of the "Sacramento Bee," used photographs to reinforce the suffering and make morally-loaded pleas for federal help during the Great Depression, to demonstrate the success of New Deal Programs, and to recast almost all Californians, regardless of their origin, as representative of America and Americans. Yet McClatchy s inclusive vision was problematic: he remained fervently anticommunist; he continued to believe Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americas, could not be assimilated; and he virtually ignored the plight of Mexican Americans in the pages of the "Sacramento Bee" during the Great Depression, despite the fact that they were a significant part of the state's population.;"The Spectacle of Citizenship" is a study of the interplay of technology, society, and culture that offers a new understanding of how notions of national identity were understood, produced, and disseminated and consumed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study analyzes the importance innovative editors placed on visual representations while at the same time demonstrating the necessity of contemporary scholars' understanding those images.