<p> Microblogging service Twitter has taken the world by storm since its inception in 2006, growing from 340,000 users in July 2007 to 500 million active users in March 2013. At the same time, Twitter and other social media platforms are opening up new possibilities for organizations to engage with and be responsive to their stakeholders and to the public in general.</p><p> Despite the widespread use of social media among nonprofit organizations, very little empirical evidence is available concerning publics' responses to the messages they are sent. This thesis describes how stakeholders respond to different communication practices on Twitter. Focusing on the organizations on the <i>"Nonprofit Times 100"</i> list of 2011 as well as the list of nonprofit organizations with the most Twitter followers, this study combines qualitative and quantitative analyses at both the message level and the organizational level to develop an initial understanding of effective Twitter practices among nonprofit organizations.</p><p> Until recently, nonprofits have not fully taken advantage of the interactive possibilities Twitter has the potential to provide. After analyzing 3,415 tweets by 50 nonprofits, it became clear that it was difficult, if not impossible, to identify the "perfect" tweet - the type of tweet that would be most likely to elicit all types of engagement. This study's results suggest that nonprofits should target specific tweets toward retweeting and favoriting engagement, and others toward conversations - and not expect the same tweet to achieve both.</p>

<p> Newspapers rely on content-based documentary photography to visually communicate current news events. As circulations declined in the mid-1980s, media owners persuaded editors into mixing traditional hard news on their front pages with reader-friendly soft news features. Content-based visual journalism was challenged by the encroachment of visual fluff, altering the character projected to readers.</p><p> Today, newspapers struggle to evolve into online &ldquo;news organizations&rdquo; and visual journalism competes with entertainment, advertising, and marketing to attract viewers. The central question for the future is, will the marketing pressure continue to dilute visual journalism and overload viewers with visual distractions? And, how will design and organization influence the viewers&rsquo; perception of credibility?</p><p> Through a series of elicitation interviews, this research examined how the visual choices that online newspapers make &mdash; their &ldquo;visual character&rdquo; &mdash; influence audience perceptions of news credibility. The responses showed that readers&rsquo; perceptions of credibility are influenced by the visual content on a newspaper Web site. The study participants gauged credibility based on factors like photography use, competing advertising, and design organization. The study also found that linking visual branding to the newspaper print version could add to credibility.</p><p>

<p> What is community? What defines it, and what creates it? What&mdash;or who&mdash;is the gay community? Is the gay community the same as it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago? Those are some of the questions I will be answering as I explore the creation, expansion, and subsequent integration of the physical gay community into one that embraces an online, fragmented community. I will explore the creation and evolution of the gay community, examining its early years and the challenges it faced as a marginalized group. To help define community, I will use the concept of identity theory by incorporating the theory of play and weaving the idea of claiming public space into my argument to show how the physical, economic, social creation of the gay community is dependent upon a geographic and virtual community. Those examples will set up my argument that the idea of community has changed in part to the commonality of technology and social applications. I argue that the idea of the traditional gay and lesbian community, which relied heavily on where you lived, has become fragmented and disjointed because of the reliance of an online, virtual community which, in turn, has led to a lack of interpersonal connections among individuals of this marginalized group.</p>

Twitter and the journalistic field| How the growth of a new(s) medium is transforming journalism