<p><p>I denna uppsats behandlas vetenskapliga kategoriseringar av nyheter, närmare bestämt de två kategorierna hard news och soft news. Utifrån tre akademiska texter presenteras definieringar, värderingar och betänkanden som författarna till dessa texter gjort. Utgångspunkten för problematiseringen av nyhetskategoriseringarna har varit att belysa saken från ett socialkonstruktionistiskt perspektiv. Ett försök till detta har gjorts med dels en relativt allmän genomgång av socialkonstruktionismens grundprinciper, formulerade av Marianne Winther Jørgensen & Louise Philips, och dels med en fördjupning i den socialkonstruktionistiska grenen diskursteori såsom den formuleras av Michel Foucault. Utifrån detta görs en analys av de tre texterna utifrån hur de används för att etablera tolkningsföreträden och rättfärdiga de olika definieringarna, värderingarna och betänkandena som författarna lägger fram. Avslutningsvis förs en diskussion om det forskningsmässiga läget beträffande hard news och soft news.</p></p> / -

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Todd F. Simon / Since the 1990s, much discussion about the rise of the Internet within the People’s Republic of China has focused on the political consequences of the technology on China’s Communist Party. The popularization of Internet access was once regarded as a sign of significant progress in Chinese political democratization. Especially when considering the impact of Internet use on the Chinese younger generation, the importance of political issues spread through Internet should be more amplified. One interesting phenomenon that needs attention is the emergence of political soft news in recent years on the Chinese national social network that never arose before in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Different from any type of solemn formal political news that appeared in Chinese media, the soft news tends to emphasize entertaining aspects of political issues more and engages with high readability. It pays more attention to the gender, personality, and appearance--even the daily life of the leaders who were once the most mysterious and paramount group in Chinese political system. One important trait of this kind of news is that most news items emerged in social networks and websites that young adults are frequently exposed to. Along with the rapid rise of Chinese social media, will the major participants, Chinese young adults be strongly influenced by political soft news spread through the Internet? Will the young adults be attracted by the soft news initially and then try to know some further information about the government’s policies? Or, will they only dwell on the soft news? This research tries to explore and provide answers to these questions and focus on the impact of the soft news on Chinese young adults’ understanding of politics.

This thesis deals with the transformation of the thematic structure of Události, the main news segment of the Czech Television. Apart from the changes in the thematic structure, it deals with formal transformations at the basic level. For the purpose of this work, a research sample, which included one week of broadcasting in 1994, 2005 and 2011, was selected. A total of 27 news segments, which contained 341 reportages, were analyzed in the three research periods. A subsequent comparison of data provided answers to the following questions: How did the ratio of foreign and domestic topics changed? How did the ratio of hard and soft news change within a single news segment? What was the thematic structure like in the three research periods? Was there a change in the thematic structure? How did the duration of the news segment Události change? How did the number of reportages change within a single news segment? How did the duration of actual reportages change? Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Most Americans, whether consciously or unconsciously, associate certain defining traits with the contemporary American press: a broad definition of news, an emphasis on analysis, a skeptical tone, and adherence to a specific definition of objectivity. None of these elements characterized American newspapers in 1960, but all were firmly in place by 1980. Remaking the News examines how that remarkable transformation occurred, and how it influenced politics and society. While focusing mainly on two newspapers—The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—it attempts to analyze the media business as a whole. Chapter 1 describes the rise of interpretive reporting. A response to competition from other news media and to the changing demographic profile of newspaper audiences and staffs, interpretation contributed to the disintegration of the Cold War consensus and to a reappraisal of American journalism’s bedrock principle, objectivity. As Chapters 2 and 3 show, objectivity came under attack simultaneously from the right and the left, launching a debate that has persisted to this day but that, paradoxically, reinforced most news-industry leaders’ faith in the ideal. Chapter 4 examines how newspapers began giving readers what they wanted to know, rather than telling them what (in the editors’ view) they needed to know. This resulted in a greater focus on soft news and service journalism, which helped validate a broader shift in the primary identity of the American public, from citizens to consumers. These changes occurred amid powerful political and social currents in the journalism profession and the country at large. Chapter 5 describes how challenges from minorities and women forced the press to adjust its discriminatory employment practices as well as its dismissive treatment of women and non-whites in news coverage. The social movements and political turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s also led journalists to take a more adversarial approach to news subjects, as Chapter 6 discusses. In addition to providing a novel interpretation of how the press assumed its contemporary form, this dissertation suggests that the evolution of American politics and society since 1960 cannot be understood without considering the evolution of journalism from 1960-1980. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

This thesis looks at the economics of mass media from a variety of perspectives. The main aim is to analyse the key factors that influence media reporting behaviour, and in turn the impact of reportage on individual decision-making processes. The first chapter provides a brief summary of the contextual background of this thesis, by presenting the main points tackled in the subsequent chapters as well as a concise overview of the main contributions across various fields of study. The second chapter explores the relationship between advertisers and the media using a simple model of horizontal and vertical product differentiation in a duopolistic setting. In this framework, when a news story is published one firm will benefit in terms of higher consumer demand and profits, while the other will suffer. Firms can influence the media's decision to publish the news story or withhold it via advertising expenditure. The main result shows that in equilibrium when news signals conform to people's prior beliefs, extreme or strong stories will be withheld from publication by the media. This is because strong stories will result in a drastic decline in profits for one firm, thus providing it with an incentive to switch over and change its production process to mimic the other (beneficiary) firm, thereby eliminating vertical product differentiation. Therefore, the beneficiary firm would have an incentive to ensure that the news story is withheld to prevent this increase in competition and the subsequent erosion of its profit margins. The results provide an alternative rationale to explain recent evidence on under-reporting by the U.S. media in relation to various issues like climate change and the nutritional content of food. The third chapter looks at the responsiveness of individual private behaviour to media coverage of a particular news story. Survey data on charitable gift-giving in the U.S. are used in order to analyse the impact of newspaper coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on both the likelihood and magnitude of monetary disbursements towards the relief effort. The identification strategy employed in this paper exploits differences in county-level growth rates of violent crime in order to account for the variation in newspaper coverage of the tsunami, thus circumventing potential endogeneity problems. The results show that media coverage only had a modest effect on people's decision to donate or not, but conversely had a significant and non-trivial impact on the amount of money donated. Furthermore, this impact was larger for young adults within the 25-34 age bracket and individuals who had undertaken some form of voluntary work in the previous year. These results hold even after the implementation of various robustness tests, and serve to highlight the growing influence of the media on people's behaviour. The final chapter analyses the impact of media reports on electoral outcomes, and in particular the extent to which soft or sensationalist news reportage influences voting. Survey data on individual voting behaviour during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election is used, together with a novel dataset on the amount of coverage afforded to the Monica Lewinsky scandal over the period January 17, 1998 to August 31, 2000. We first show that Lewinsky coverage was not driven by the newspapers' political bias, but rather by other factors including tabloid journalism. This independence enables us to focus solely on the impact of media reports on voting, in contrast to the rest of the literature which deals with the electoral influence of politically-biased media outlets. We then look at how newspaper coverage of the Lewinsky scandal influenced voting patterns in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. To account for potential endogeneity issues we use county-level variation in the number of deaths caused by extreme weather events as an instrument for Lewinsky articles. We find that media coverage of the scandal had a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of voting for George W. Bush, and conversely a negative influence on the probability of voting for Al Gore: this pattern is visible among both Democrats and Republicans. The results are robust to various tests, and raise several questions regarding the media's role within the democratic process.

Objektivitet anses vara en central del av journalistik i en demokratisk och västerländsk värld, som bör vara ett vägledande ideal för de yrkesverksamma i deras arbete med att samla och presentera information. Deras professionella uppgifter består bland annat av att återge en sann bild av verkligheten, att visa lojalitet mot medborgare samt att vara opartiska och oberoende. Kritik riktas stundtals mot journalisters brister i att presentera nyheter som fullt ut följer objektivitetens principer, med argument om att journalistiken påverkas negativt av ökade kommersiella intressen. Sport är en genre inom nyhetsrapportering som har ett lågt anseende och utesluts från mer prestigefylld journalistik, som detta till trots är populär att konsumera ur ett publikperspektiv. Denna undersökning har haft sportjournalistikens låga status tillsammans med människors förhoppning om att fylla särskilda behov med hjälp av sportkonsumtion, som utgångspunkt för att vidare studera objektivitet inom området. Med detta som bakgrund ämnar studien att klargöra och belysa om publiken har förväntningar på objektivitet i sportjournalistik och i sådant fall vilka förväntningar.   Metoden som tillämpats för att kunna undersöka publikens åsikter kring ämnet är kvalitativ, detta i syfte om att skapa djupare förståelse för publikens attityder och uppfattningar. Fyra fokusgruppsintervjuer har genomförts där de personer som intervjuats har representerat en grupp sportintresserade unga vuxna i åldern 20–30 år, med totalt 24 deltagande, samtliga bosatta i Karlstad, Sverige.   Resultat av studien visar att publiken gör skillnad på vilka krav som kan ställas på att följa journalistiska etiska riktlinjer utifrån; medial kanal, enskilda sportjournalister, public service, kommersiella kanaler och lokal- och nationell nyhetspress. Ett samband kan i denna studie synliggöras mellan publikens uppfattning om sport som en nyhetskälla av lättsam och underhållande natur, som således skapar lägre förväntningar på att objektivitetsidealet efterföljs. Det bör poängteras att olika faktorer inom journalistisk objektivitet, förväntas att uppnås av publiken med väldig variation. Trovärdigheten hos sportjournalister tenderar att bedömas av publiken efter huruvida de uppgifter och resultat som presenteras är korrekta medan ett oberoende mot de som bevakas anses vara mycket svårt och ovanligt att uppfylla.   En annan viktig aspekt som belysts i studien är att sportjournalistik berörs av det geografiska läget för nyhetsredaktionen, där ett prioriterat medialt utrymme för lokala och nationella lag tillsammans med redaktionernas beroende av goda relationer till föreningar och lag, uppfattas som orsaker till bristande objektivitet.

The title of the presented thesis is The Media Image of the Czech Republic in the English-speaking World. The media image of the Czech Republic is analyzed in three different English-written newspapers. The chosen newspapers are USA Today, The Daily Mail and The Australian. The overall goal of the thesis is to compare media images which are constructed by defined periodicals and it is reached by checking of the hypotheses which are defined in the introduction and thanks to the comparison of data gathered during the research. The theoretical part of the thesis anchors the work itself within contemporary theories and academic approaches. The news production with international news flows included are described in the theoretical chapter along with stereotypes and their relation to media images. The whole chapter is ended by subchapter about hard and soft news and subchapter about evaluation in media. The analytical part of the thesis begins with a description of a used research method and a definition of used data. Subsequently, there is a detailed description of used variables. The very last part of the whole paper presents complex results of the research, the hypotheses are proved or falsified and the differences among the media image of the analyzed newspapers are described.

We live in a world where technology and especially digital communications are rapidly evolving, but we rarely think about how or what this development affects. The aim of this bachelor study was to examine whether any differences in news value could be found between the digital and printed versions of a local newspaper, Kristianstadsbladet, as well as the causes for such differences. Using the quantitative method, we coded all 1,230 local news articles (585 printed and 645 digital) from Kristianstadsbladet’s printed paper and website versions, from 2019-11-11 to 2019-11-29, with excluding days of Saturday’s and Sunday’s. Our results showed that our main hypothesis did not quite agree with our results since news value was largely the same on both platforms. Kristianstadsbladet published the same amount of subject categorys in percentage terms, except the subject “Lifestyle” which got more space on their website than in their printed paper. We also concluded that digitalization of mass media is one of the biggest reasons for Kristianstadsbladet to publish the same local news on both their platforms due to modern technology.

The tabloidization of the news is a term used more and more frequently when discussing the general decline of standards in media. And also when talking about the focus on the entertaining side of events or focus on rather simple topics in the news. The goal of the diploma thesis "Tabloidization of Czech television news in the context of its official changes" is to critically reflect the news produced by the Czech television considering the tabloidisation. It is particularly focused on the official changes from the years 2007 and 2012 and it compares the periods before and after the changes to determine what kind of effect they had on the tabloidization indicating elements. These elements are defined in the theoretical part of the diploma thesis which is mainly based on the foreign literature and which is looking closer on the different definitions of tabloidization and methods that are being used when trying to uncover the tabloidization in media content. Then, the essence of public service media is introduced, followed as well by the presentation of the Czech television as an institution. Also, the possible effects of tabloidization on the audience are discussed, considering its influence on the society as a whole. The attention is being paid to particular research questions and variables in the...

In times of crises such as pandemics, wars or natural disasters, the responsibility of the news media increases. Previous research has shown that people in crisis tend to seek information in traditional media and find it the most reliable source. Today's media landscape has faced a new paradigm shift in the form of digitalization that has had an extensive impact on society and information is now more easily available to the public. As a result, this study will examine the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on vaccination, which has received strong media attention in Sweden. The purpose of this study is to contribute with new research by analyzing how Sweden's largest morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the largest evening newspaper Aftonbladet communicated regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. The study's four research questions aim to investigate whether there are any differences or similarities in how Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter communicated through source power, tabloidization, and dimensions from previous research: RQ1. How does Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter use and mention sources in their articles RQ2. How are the articles conducted in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter regarding focus dimensions (societal or individual, episodic or thematic)? RQ3. How are the articles conducted in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter regarding style dimensions (personal or impersonal, emotional or unemotional)? RQ4. Do the articles in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter have tendencies of tabloidization based on the content and headline (positive or negative, match between headline and text)? To answer the four research questions, a quantitative content analysis has been used by analyzing a total of 200 newspaper articles over a six-month period. With assistance of the tool Retriever, 100 articles from each newspaper were retrieved and produced through an unbound random selection. With help of the designed code sheet and the code book the units have been analyzed in SPSS. The theoretical framework is based on the basic principles of journalism, from event to news, agenda-setting, framing, and tabloidization. The data have been analyzed, reflected and discussed with the theoretical framework along with the previous research, the results show that Swedish media has shown a high scale of objectivity however, tendencies of tabloid permeate in both newspapers. The most important finding of the study is the indication that Dagens Nyheter, which according to previous research tends to cover hard news, instead strive against further tabloidized news coverage. / I tider av kriser så som pandemier, krig eller naturkatastrofer ökar nyhetsmedias ansvar. Tidigare forskning har visat att människor i kris tenderar att söka efter information i traditionella medier för att hitta den mest pålitliga källan. Dessutom har dagens medielandskap stött på ett nytt paradigmskifte i form av digitalisering som har haft en vidsträckt påverkan på samhället och information är nu lättare tillgänglig för allmänheten. Som ett resultat kommer denna studie att undersöka den pågående COVID-19-pandemin med fokus på vaccination, som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet i media. Syftet med denna studie är att bidra med ny forskning genom att analysera hur Sveriges största morgontidning Dagens Nyheter och den största kvällstidningen Aftonbladet kommunicerat angående COVID-19-vaccinet. Studiens fyra forskningsfrågor syftar till att undersöka om det finns några skillnader eller likheter i hur Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter kommunicerat genom källkraft, tabloidisering och dimensioner från tidigare forskning: RQ1. Hur använder och nämner Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter källor i sina artiklar? RQ2. Hur är artiklarna i Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter utformade gällande fokusdimensioner (samhällelig eller individuell, episodisk eller tematisk)? RQ3. Hur är artiklarna i Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter utformade gällande stildimensioner (personlig eller opersonlig, känslomässig eller okänslomässig)? RQ4. Har artiklarna i Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter tendenser till tabloidisering baserat på innehåll och rubrik (positiv eller negativ, matchning mellan rubrik och text)? För att svara på de fyra frågorna har en kvantitativ innehållsanalys använts genom att analysera totalt 200 tidningsartiklar under en sexmånadersperiod. Med hjälp av verktyget Retriever har 100 artiklar från varje tidning valts ut genom ett obundet slumpmässigt urval. Med hjälp av det utformade kodschemat och kodboken har enheterna analyserats i SPSS. Det teoretiska ramverket bygger på journalistikens grundläggande principer, från händelse till nyheter, agenda-setting, framing och tabloidisering. Datan har analyserats, reflekteras och diskuteras med hjälp av teoretiska ramen samt tidigare forskning. Resultaten visar att de svenska medierna har kommunicerat med en hög grad av objektivitet, men att tabloidiseringen genomsyrar båda tidningar. Studiens viktigaste resultat visar bland annat att Dagens Nyheter, som enligt tidigare forskning tenderar att rapportera hårda nyheter, istället lutar mot en mer tabloidisering i sin nyhetsrapportering.