Breaking news implies that something urgent, important and newsworthy happened, assuming that viewers will be more curious about this event. As the mass media have continued to develop, the form of breaking news also keeps on changing. Today, the internet plays a primary role as a platform of breaking news. With online news services providing a plethora of real-time breaking news to audiences, there is a concern that online breaking news has little news value. Some scholars warned that the increase in the number of breaking news would finally impoverish the quality of journalism. Thus, this study tried to ascertain the credibility of online breaking news. This study conducted a 2 (news with/without breaking label) ⅹ 2 (high and low news value) factorial-designed experiment. The result of the experiment suggested that neither breaking news label nor newsworthiness would not increase or decrease the credibility rating. It would be possible to assume that there was no effect of such two components because audiences have already grown accustomed to the prevalence of the label breaking news and continual update of the headline of online news. Journalists might arbitrarily label specific news as breaking news, but they would keep in mind that calling something “breaking news” neither helps nor hurts. / text

Tagging has become one of the key activities in next generation websites which allow users selecting short labels to annotate, manage, and share multimedia information such as photos, videos and bookmarks. Tagging does not require users any prior training before participating in the annotation activities as they can freely choose any terms which best represent the semantic of contents without worrying about any formal structure or ontology. However, the practice of free-form tagging can lead to several problems, such as synonymy, polysemy and ambiguity, which potentially increase the complexity of managing the tags and retrieving information. To solve these problems, this research aims to construct a lightweight indexing scheme to structure tags by identifying and disambiguating the meaning of terms and construct a knowledge base or dictionary. News has been chosen as the primary domain of application to demonstrate the benefits of using structured tags for managing the rapidly changing and dynamic nature of news information. One of the main outcomes of this work is an automatically constructed vocabulary that defines the meaning of each named entity tag, which can be extracted from a news article (including person, location and organisation), based on experts suggestions from major search engines and the knowledge from public database such as Wikipedia. To demonstrate the potential applications of the vocabulary, we have used it to provide more functionalities in an online news website, including topic-based news reading, intuitive tagging, clipping and sharing of interesting news, as well as news filtering or searching based on named entity tags. The evaluation results on the impact of disambiguating tags have shown that the vocabulary can help to significantly improve news searching performance. The preliminary results from our user study have demonstrated that users can benefit from the additional functionalities on the news websites as they are able to retrieve more relevant news, clip and share news with friends and families effectively.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Don Heider. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D)--Ohio State University, 1984. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-189). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

This thesis is about television news. I conducted a qualitative study of the decoding of television news on an opportunistic sample of 38 participants with whom I watched news programmes and then conducted individual or paired focused discussions about their thoughts and feelings as they watched. While problems of representativity and scale preclude our making demographic statements as to the prevalence of decoding practices, this database enables me to perform a critical interrogation of two seperate strands of scholarship relating to TV news. I am concerned to interpose a series of caveats as to the complexity and subtlety of interpretive practice which intervenes between the news and any ideological effect it might exert. Secondly I wish to indicate some problems in that genre of empirical studies concerned with 'learning from news' and 'information gain', which do not exhaustively capture the decoding process. I look at how we might study reasoning and inference in relation to the news, and what happens when people confess themselves unable to remember or understand, since these are areas which are not fully probed by information gain studies. I focus on the resources of meaning and reasoning strategies employed in understanding news. I also extend attention to some areas not normally considered in news audience studies, namely the expression of emotions in relation to news, particularly news about South Africa; and ludic or playful decoding. Memory is the crucial structuring construct of most mainstream research on the television news audience. I begin to problematise the nature of memory by indicating how memories are mutually produced, rather than originating entirely in internal psychic storage. I am also trying to develop ideas of social cognition and how they might be applicable to the business of decoding and the meanings which are developed between people rather than the conventional focus on decodings which are produced by individual viewers as finished products, I also try to develop a reflexive conception of how the conduct of the discussions might construct the thinking and behaviour of the particpants, particularly by reference to their apologies and the expectations they seemed to entertain about the research situation.

The thesis attempts to develop the field of audience research, by adapting recently developed theoretical approaches to an empirical study of the television audience. The thesis begins by examining two general theoretical areas that provide a framework for the research - semiology and theories of ideology. The work of Louis Aithusser is analysed in a movement towards a semiological theory of ideology. The thesis then examines work on the media that has developed out of this broad tradition - notably cultural studies, textual analysis, discourse analysis and the semiotics of film and T. V. Detailed attention is paid to the theory of encoding and decoding, and, in particular, the work of David Morley. The objective of this examination is to set up the encoding/decoding model within a semiological framework for use in practical research on the T. V. audience. The audience research itself is based upon an exhaustive analysis of fifty in-depth interviews with viewers following a screening of a pre-recorded News at Ten. The aim of the research was not to investigate the views of the fifty decoders, but to establish how and why readings of television programmes are constructed - the process of decoding. The research is presented in three stages. The readings of one item (about British Leyland) are scrutinised in order to establish an appropriate set of variables for understanding the decoding process. These variables are then used to systematically analyse the readings of another single item (about troubles in the West Bank). The points raised during this analysis are then developed in relation to readings of the whole programme. The research reveals a number of problems in the form and character of television news. The thesis therefore ends with a set of recommendations for overcoming these problems.

The term "young adults" is often used loosely without a clear definition of who this demographic is. This study defines young adults by examining generational differences, their beliefs, uses and nonuses of media, news interests, wants, values for following the news, and expectations and reading experiences of news stories. The uses and gratifications approach and expectancy-value theory provided a framework for this study. Three methodological approaches were used: a secondary data analysis of three national surveys, focus groups and an experiment. The secondary data analysis findings showed the youngest age group (18-24) is leading the new news routine online with news aggregator sites, major and local news sites. The two youngest age groups (18-24 and 25-29) differ from each other and older age groups in their worries, goals, perspectives, beliefs, news interests, media uses, nonuses and political knowledge, and should be studied separately. Stances on social issues and technology are not as clearly defined by age. The findings suggest one's life stage is behind some of the differences. Since no published study to date has conducted focus groups exclusively with nonreaders of print newspapers ages 18-29 to examine their news consumption and nonuses of print newspapers, the present study broke new ground. The findings showed these young adults want searchable, effortless, shorter, more local, accessible anytime news. Both groups (18-24 and 25-29) wanted less negative news, but the younger group justified crime coverage. A few younger group participants expressed a difficult time reading the news and a bias in coverage, especially politics. The experiment used storytelling devices in an attempt to make news writing more digestible, interesting, relevant to young adults' lives, and informative. The findings showed "chunking" text improved perceived comprehension. The device of adding background information, context and a definition improved text recall. The experiment also examined expectations that young adults have prior to reading hard news. For a politics story, experimental group participants expected to understand the story less and have less of an interest than they did. Using these findings, this study suggests ways to get more of this audience (18-29) to tune into the news. / text

The study explores aspects of how British broadsheet news journalists produce news stories. It seeks to understand news texts in terms of their production within the journalistic community so as to develop a critique and investigate alternative ways of writing. Chapter one situates the study against the author's personal concerns as a practising journalist. Chapter two draws on a Foucauldian model of discourse, Etienne Wenger's theorisation of communities of practice and journalists' own understanding of their writing in terms of style to describe the situated knowledge within which news texts are produced. Chapter three places the study historically, arguing that 'modern' news discourse as a mode of practice, writing and understanding the world developed between 1880 and 1930 in Britain. Following chapters analyse this knowledge of writing in a number of ways. Chapter four uses journalists' memoirs and other metatexts to investigate how news texts make sense from within the practice. Chapter five reads the work of students on a postgraduate journalism course to explore what needs to be learnt in order to gain competence in newswriting. Chapters six and seven analyse news texts from British broadsheets in terms of news writing practice. Chapter six suggests that a number of aspects of news texts can be accounted for in terms of journalists' search for capital within their community, and chapter seven that news texts are constructed with only loose coherence. Chapter eight draws these points together in an exploration of the potential of online journalism to offer ways of writing outside or on the edge of this practice.

This research explores the dominant meanings arising from British newspaper reportage of sexual violence directed at children. The research employs a quantitative and qualitative analysis to answer the following questions: What are the dimensions of child sexual abuse that are covered? How do the media cover these (e.g. as straight news, editorials, opinion columns)? How are offenders and victims portrayed? What sources are cited in stories? What explanations are offered about the occurrence of child sexual abuse? The objective is to: (a) describe the content of press reportage about child sexual abuse through quantitative and qualitative content analysis and; (b) explain the nature of that content in terms of better understanding journalism as a producer of meanings, specifically in relation to coverage of child sexual abuse. In simultaneously identifying and comparing news coverage, the research attempts to articulate the political and ideological functions of language in newspaper coverage of child sexual abuse. It also attempts to develop explanations for the discursive representation of child sexual abuse in the British press, linking news discourse on sexual offending against children to the journalistic practices in news production, the profile of the profession as well as broader prevailing socio-political ideologies about the family, offending, childhood and risks faced by children. A close and systematic analysis of news texts is important to understanding the role of the media in the production of meanings about such a social problems.