Through a Thematic Qualitative Text Analysis and semi-structured interviews with journalists, athletes, and coaches, this thesis investigates the relationship between gender, sports, and media representation of menstruation in Belgian online sports news. This research emphasizes the delicate balance in sports media between normalizing discussing menstruation and avoiding sexist ideologies. One effective approach to breaking the menstrual taboo is to adopt the rationalist discourse of self-instrumentalization, where athletes enhance their performance by the use of science and technology. Given that menstruation is a physiological process connected to maximizing performance, it is vital to normalize its media coverage. There is, nevertheless, a palpable tension between private and public conversation. Journalists tend to concentrate on the personal stories and physical challenges of athletes, yet the coverage of the menstrual influences remains underrepresented. A more nuanced and ethical approach is needed, balancing public interest with athletes' privacy. The thesis advocates that menstruation should be normalized in the sports discourse in order to promote more inclusive media practices that reflect and fairly portray the experiences of female athletes.

New media technology is altering many aspects of mass communication processes. One of the most profound changes, especially in the newspaper industry, lies in the rise of speed-driven journalism, with growing emphasis on what is new or happening now. With more newspapers adopting this speed-driven news practice, the nature of its impact on journalists and audiences necessitates empirical examination, and this dissertation seeks to contribute to the professional and academic literature from a two-part, mixed method approach. Through interviews with journalists, study 1 sought to understand journalists' view of how speed-driven journalism affects their professional norms, routines and output, and how social media factors into the speed-driven online media landscape. The interviewees were also asked to discuss their view on how speed-driven journalism affects news audiences in terms of news credibility, news use, and paying intent. Based on findings from study 1, an experiment on news audiences was conducted in study 2 to assess the impact of speed-driven journalism on news credibility, future use, paying intent, readability and selective scanning. Key findings from both studies include: (1) Whereas most interviewees in study 1 believed that speed harms news credibility but boosts news use, the experiment in study 2 revealed that speed neither harms news credibility nor promotes future use. (2) Speed-driven journalism has no effect on selective scanning or audiences' paying intent. (3) In terms of readability, news stories presented in the live blog-like format are deemed harder to follow when compared to those presented in the traditional format. This dissertation advances the hierarchy of influence model by uncovering the effect of perceptual disconnect on speed-driven news practices at the social institutions level. That is, journalists are wrong at times in their assessment of how audiences engage with and are affected by new media technology, but nonetheless proceed to produce news and content based upon their mistaken judgment. / text

The submitted thesis focuses on describing the media image of the abduction of two Czech women in Pakistan, which occurred in March 2013. It aims to analyze the manner in which the selected Czech media informed about the incident. This thesis consists of three parts: theoretical part, methodological part and analytical part. Theoretical part introduces relevant theoretical concepts and frameworks relevant to the actual analysis, methodological part explains the essentials and methods of research, defines the research sample and the reference period. The final analytical part presents the results of the actual research as well as answers the research questions and hypotheses. In order to increase clarity, the results are shown in graphs and tables. The core of the theses is a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the contents of four Czech news servers for the period from March 2013 to mid-April 2015. The selected media are Blesk.cz, iDnes.cz, Novinky.cz and Reflex.cz, which represent one of the most popular and read news sites in the Czech Republic. The quantitative part focuses on the frequency with which the monitored media informed about the abduction Czech tourists, the information sources that were used, the importance of the topic within the particular articles and other aspects....

The importance of video content in Czech internet news has been steadily rising for almost two decades, media houses are creating and expanding separate video-making departments and investing in equipment needed for their creations. News websites place considerable emphasis on the production of their own audiovisual content, which has become so common that the reader has come to expect it. The work brings a comprehensive description and evaluation of the video content of three major Czech news sites: iDnes.cz, Novinky.cz and Aktuálně.cz. It describes the processes, techniques and tools used in video journalism and gives an overview of the video production of these three news sites and insight into the relevance of video for Czech online news. The practical part draws on a case study of the selected websites, which focuses on the individual editorial environment and their common practice. It includes a quantitative content analysis that answers the research question: "What is the current form of video content on news sites iDnes.cz, Novinky.cz and Aktuálně.cz?" The analysis is accompanied by interviews with experts from the field and my own experience. In my interviews, I asked questions, related to the theoretical part of this work, about the inner workings of editorial teams, their team strategy and source...

Our digital society encompasses nowadays different channels, which includes social media where many users consider it as a platform where they can fetch news or exchange news and information. This leads to a large spread of news exchange in a very fast speed, which involves the global users within social media to be a part of this social interaction. This study is focused on how Twitter affects the usage of the user’s news consumption. By reaching out to our specific target audience, which includes Twitter users in Sweden, we made a web based survey with a content of relevant questions. The study has been conducted through a quantitative survey with qualitative elements. We have used theories of mass communication and Uses and Gratifications to describe the development in the area of Twitter usage and their news consumption. The results show that the users’ news consumption has increased since their registration on Twitter and that their total daily news input comes of a large part from this platform.

Online news has grown in frequency and popularity as a convenient source of information for several years. A result of this drastic surge is the increased competition for viewer-ship and prolonged relevance of online news websites. Higher demands by internet audiences have led to the use of sensationalism such as ‘clickbait’ articles or ‘fake news’ to attract more viewers. The subsequent shift in the journalistic approach in new media opened new opportunities to study the behaviour and intent behind the news content. As news publications cater their news to a specific target audience, conclusions about said news outlets and their readers can be deduced from the content they wish to broadcast. In order to understand the nature behind the publication’s choice of producing content, this thesis uses automated text categorisation as a means to analyse the words and phrases used by most news outlets. The thesis acts as a case study for approximately 143,000 online news articles from 15 different publications focused on the United States between the years 2016 and 2017. The focus of this thesis is to create a framework that observes how news articles group themselves based on the most relevant terms in their corpora. Similarly, other forms of analyses were performed to find similar insights that may give an idea about the news structure over a certain period of time. For this thesis, a preliminary quantitative analysis was also conducted before data processing, followed by applying K-means clustering to these articles post-cleansing. The overall categorisation approach and visual analysis provided sufficient data to re-use this framework with further adjustments. The cluster groups deduced that the most common news categories or genres for the selected publications were either politics - with special focus on the U.S. presidential elections - or crime-related news within the U.S and around the world. The visual formations of these clusters heavily implied that the above two categories were distributed even within groups containing other genres like finance or infotainment. Moreover, the added factor of churning out multiple articles and stories per day suggest that mainstream online news websites continue to use broadcast journalism as their main form of communication with their audiences

This thesis is a critical analysis of the discourses used in online news headlines to reporttwo events that took place during 2018 Russian Presidential debates (on February 14,2018 and March 14, 2018) and focused on Ksenia Sobchak, the only female presidentialcandidate of the 2018 election. By analyzing 52 headlines published in Russia’s mostpopular and most read online news outlets, the purpose of this study is to investigatewhether there are any gender stereotypes used by the journalists to create a particularrepresentation of Sobchak, and to understand if, through this representation, a particularideology is put forward. The framework used to carry out the research is based onFairclough’s critical discourse analysis method combined with a sociolinguisticapproach influenced by Halliday. The application of this framework resulted in studyingthe three interrelated elements of discourse: sociocultural practices, which explore therole of women in the Russian political arena and put headlines under analysis into animmediate context; discourse practices, which focus on the peculiarities of online newsproduction, particularly headlines; and linguistic analysis of the headlines themselves,in which lexical choice, quotation patterns, and transitivity analyses were performed.The analysis revealed that headlines include hidden gender stereotypes, which alignwith Russia’s patriarchal ideology and which are used to represent Sobchak lessfavourably in comparison to her male opponents.

(in English): This diploma thesis aims to find out whether there is a higher occurrence of vulgarity in discussions where users are anonymous than in non-anonymous discussions. The text of the thesis presents the concept of anonymity and the concept of hate speech and puts them in the context of the Internet environment and online discussions forums. The individual phenomena and their contexts are presented using selected relevant studies. The thesis also deals with the issue of the presence of a conflict topic in the discussions as a potential factor influencing their nature in the matter of civility and vulgarity. Then follows a practical part, which is based on an original research. This part starts with a description of methodology and the preparation of the survey, and then presents the results and their interpretation. The research analyzes a sample of 1,200 discussion comments divided into two groups anonymous and non-anonymous. These are comments on articles on news sites. The results then describe not only the effect of anonymity on the amount of vulgar and uncivil comments in discussion forums but also the influence of the presence of a conflict topic. The interpretation of results also includes a comparison with foreign research (Santana, 2014).

The thesis investigates propaganda in the online news coverage about the media law proposal Lex TVN, committed to the Polish parliament in 2021. The mixed methods approach applied in the research is based on a novel analytical matrix combining the Propaganda Model theory (Herman & Chomsky, 1988) and modalities of propaganda techniques (Da San Martino et al., 2020). The main findings indicate that propaganda in the coverage about the Lex TVN is a cross-platform issue; that it occured in different forms, as: sources, critical content (flak) or expressions of ideological preferences; and that it was created using various propaganda techniques. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that propaganda was used for several reasons: to attract attention of the readers; to increase the firm’s profit and popularity; to express the stance of the media brand towards the bill Lex TVN; and to criticize the current government. The study contributes to the field of Media and Communication Studies by using the novel analytical matrix that tests the applicability of the PM in a new geopolitical context, Poland, and adds to the academically unexplored research area of news propaganda in Polish media. Several topics for further studies are suggested: the analysis of propaganda in the news coverage published by the Polish state media brand TVPInfo; an investigation of the news reception in Poland and the ability of the Polish news readers to identify news propaganda; and lastly, studying potential positive effects of news propaganda in the Polish context.

This paper examines how three prominent news outlets in the United States: specifically CNN, Reuters and Fox News, depict the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran and the protests that would follow. The purpose of this study is to examine whether or not political ideology affects news reporting done by these online news outlets. Subsequently, the aim is to determine how that news reporting affects readers and in turn, influences public opinion and cultural ideology. This is done by employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, a framework used in critical discourse analysis to examine three dimensions within communicative events. To complete this analysis, historical context, political context, and the news genres’ limitations and expectations are taken into account. This paper finds that political ideology does impact the production of news headlines in terms of lexical choices made both to emphasize the focal point of different news sources, as well as where they stem from and what narrative they enforce. Finally, empirical evidence to support these claims is presented and interpreted.