The study used quantitative content analysis to compare the international news content about Africa and the rest of the world in selected daily and weekly newspapers in Malawi and explored the extent to which economic factors, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), influence news flows about Africa into Malawi. The results showed dominance of the categories of war/international conflict and politics. International news agencies were the principal sources of news items for all the four papers. Though there were differences among the newspapers in the amount of space allocated to various categories such differences were minor. The study established that GDP is not a determinant of the amount of coverage a country receives. / Communication Science / M.A. (International Communication)

This comparative study conducted within the framework of world system theory aimed to analyse the international flow of news regarding the 2003 Iraq War in online newspapers representative of centre, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. Two of the newspapers represent centre nations directly involved in the war. Overall, the findings confirmed that the extensive war coverage of the newspapers can in part be attributed to the status of the USA and the UK as centre nations. The findings furthermore indicate the importance of both event and context-related factors as filters in the selection of items for news coverage of the war. Distinct differences emerged in the coverage of newspapers from the three spheres of the world system. These differences can be ascribed to the attitudes of the newspapers towards the war, the use of sources in the war coverage, the propaganda strategies deployed and the framing of the events / Communication Science / M. A. (Internal Communication)

This dissertation examines the flow of economic news in Africa, in order to investigate the potential existence of regional hierarchies in international news flow. The research was based on a framework of theories on international news flow. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of a sample of news articles published in Africa Investor, African Business and Business in Africa during 2007 and 2008 was analysed. The quantitative results showed that South Africa received the highest level of coverage and was covered to a greater extent than any other African country. The qualitative results indicated that there was clear evidence of regional hierarchy in the coverage of African countries: South Africa received extensive coverage probably due to the fact that it is the largest, most advanced and influential economy in the continent. The study showed that inequality in news coverage is not only a global issue, but also a regional one. / Communication Science / M.A. (International Communication)

With over 0.25 billion web pages hosted in the World Wide Web, it is virtually impossible to navigate through the Internet. Many applications try to help users achieve this task. For example, search engines build indexes to make the entire World Wide Web searchable, and news curators allow users to browse topics of interest on different structured sites. One problem that arises for these applications and others with similar goals is identifying documents with similar contents. This helps the applications show users documents with unique contents as well as group various similar documents under similar topics. There has been a lot of effort into algorithms that can achieve that task. Prior research include Yang, Pierce & Carbonell (1998) research where they looked at the problem of identifying news events exploiting chronology order, Nallapati, et al (2004) research who built a dependency model for news events and Shah & Elbahesh (2004) research where they used Jaccard coefficient to generate a flat list of topics. This research will identify training and testing datasets, and it will train and evaluate (Pera & Ng) algorithm. The chosen algorithm is a hierarchical clustering algorithm that incorporates many of the ideas researched earlier. In evaluation phase, error will be measured in the ratio of miss-categorized documents to the total number of documents. The research will show error can be as low as 0.03 with a model built on a single node processing 1000 random distinct documents. In evaluation of the algorithm, the experiments will show that (Pera & Ng)’s fuzzy equivalence algorithm does produce acceptable results when compared to Google News as a reference. The algorithm, however, requires a huge amount of memory to hold the trained model. This renders it not suitable to run on portable devices.

The purpose of this study is to examine in which way two Swedish tabloid newspapers, Aftonbladet and Expressen, most commonly frame gambling in the news coverage on their websites in a time when research reveals that it has become increasingly harder to determine what is journalistic material and what is advertisement. At the same time, gambling companies have taken over a large part of the advertising space at Swedish tabloid websites. There has, in its extent, been done insufficient research within the journalistic field of news coverage when it comes to gambling and this study seeks to fill in some of the investigative blanks. In order to analyze how frames emerge from the news coverage we collected articles from a six-month period, as close to the initiation of the study as possible, by using eight different words or short phrases that led to the total empirical data of 302 news articles. Methodologically the study uses quantitative content analysis mainly based on the theory of framing. Furthermore, we also apply the theoretical aspects of agenda setting and news selection. The result clearly shows that the Swedish tabloid newspapers frame gambling in a positive and non-problematic way and there is a remarkable over representation of articles that are based on what we call “the happy winner frame”. In the conclusion we discuss both social and media related implications of the newspapers way of framing gambling in their online news coverage. We also offer a couple of propositions for future research within this field of medial science.

We report our investigation of how news stories influence the behaviour of tradable financial assets, in particular, equities. We consider the established methods of turning news events into a quantifiable measure and explore the models which connect these measures to financial decision making and risk control. The study of our thesis is built around two practical, as well as, research problems which are determining trading strategies and quantifying trading risk. We have constructed a new measure which takes into consideration (i) the volume of news and (ii) the decaying effect of news sentiment. In this way we derive the impact of aggregated news events for a given asset; we have defined this as the impact score. We also characterise the behaviour of assets using three parameters, which are return, volatility and liquidity, and construct predictive models which incorporate impact scores. The derivation of the impact measure and the characterisation of asset behaviour by introducing liquidity are two innovations reported in this thesis and are claimed to be contributions to knowledge. The impact of news on asset behaviour is explored using two sets of predictive models: the univariate models and the multivariate models. In our univariate predictive models, a universe of 53 assets were considered in order to justify the relationship of news and assets across 9 different sectors. For the multivariate case, we have selected 5 stocks from the financial sector only as this is relevant for the purpose of constructing trading strategies. We have analysed the celebrated Black-Litterman model (1991) and constructed our Bayesian multivariate predictive models such that we can incorporate domain expertise to improve the predictions. Not only does this suggest one of the best ways to choose priors in Bayesian inference for financial models using news sentiment, but it also allows the use of current and synchronised data with market information. This is also a novel aspect of our work and a further contribution to knowledge.

Problem definition and purpose: The media industry is a sphere faced with constant challenges. Technological inventions and economy are changing the rules of how and what media reports. To be able to stay current and make profit the newspapers have to adapt new thinking and evolve. In Sweden the journalistic union have stated that the line between editorial material and advertisement has became thinner. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the state of three local newspapers today and the ten years back. It will examine if the occurence of what can be define as advetorial news – articles made by the newspapers own reporters but which serve and obvious profit for a second part – has increased or decreased. Method and material: To find an answer to the purpose of this thesis a quantitative content analysis have been done on a total of 1005 local news articles from three Swedish local newspapers in 2005 and 2015. Main result: The result of the content analysis shows that news defined as advetorial occur more frequently in two of the three studied news papers 2015 compared to 2005, while news defined as advetorial decreased in one of the news papers. The result also show that the total number of local news articles has decreased from 2005 to 2015.

Toward the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 2000, activists formed a media watchdog group called Palestine Media Watch (PMW) to challenge U.S. news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tired of coverage that blamed the conflict on Palestinian terrorism, PMW monitored news coverage, met with newsworkers, and bombarded news organizations with complaints in an attempt to root the conflict’s cause in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. I study PMW’s efforts to produce change in coverage, and examine its campaigns’ effects. Most critical research examines the news system’s production of “propaganda” and news models suggest that media monitoring is one mechanism through which an entire “ideological air” is supported. “Guardian watchdogs,” like the Israel lobby, guard the ideological boundaries around news content that are erected by others. This study considers PMW’s efforts in terms articulated by the dialogic and dialectical models, which gives agency to dissident movements and requires study of the strategic interactions between media and movements to understand framing struggles. These models suggest that “dissident watchdogs,” like PMW, can affect news coverage. What is not clear is the extent to which dissident watchdogs can affect news content when they can make appeals that resonate with professional journalism but that do not resonate with the country’s ideological air. I examine PMW’s strategies to produce content changes between 2000 and 2004, detail the group’s interactions with newsworkers, and document the outcomes of those interactions to understand the struggle to affect media framing. The watchdog, when it systematically monitored coverage and individually critiqued news staff, produced substantive changes in content and practice but these were limited in number. When the watchdog bombarded news organizations with complaints it was able to produce several superficial changes, but these changes resulted in no meaningful impact on the news frame. These findings indicate that the dominant narrative is incorporative enough to accommodate “journalistically useful” points without resulting in a fundamental or substantive change in the frames that inform newswork. Thus, the emergence of dissident media monitors to “neutralize” guardian monitors is only one step toward affecting the entire “ideological air” that informs newswork of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues. / text

本論文旨在探討以dibutyryl cAMP(dbcAMP)誘發NG108-15神經細胞株分化之過程中 分泌機構的組成份子之個別變化。NG108-15細胞以dbcAMP處理數天後會聚集成堆並 且伸展出長的類神經突起。長期以dbcAMP處理的NG108-15細胞，其分泌機構即逐漸 成熟: 每個細胞的乙醯膽鹼含量，膽鹼水解晦的專一活性，以及N 型與L 型電感性 鈣離子通通的活性都增加。以W-conotoxin 與nifedipine可以區分N 與L 型鈣離子 通道; 我們發現L 型鈣離子通道於未處理dbcAMP之細胞即有作用，而N 型鈣離子通 道則須以dbcAMP處理2-4 天才有表現。 前人的報告指出小G 蛋白可能參與分泌的作用，於是我們也研究dbcAMP對這些小G 蛋白的影響。以[a-32P]GTP結合實驗發現NG108-15細胞之細胞膜上至少有5 種小G 蛋白，而且以dbcAMP處理0-6 天的過程中沒有明顯的變化。以單株抗體M90 與rapl b 的專一性多株抗體在SDS/PAGE系統證明22kDa 的raplb 蛋白存在於NG108-15細胞 。處理dbcAMP後，除了22kDa 的蛋白外，另有一24kDa 的蛋白亦可被M90 辨識。24 kDa 蛋白的出現不受蛋白合成抑制劑cycloheximide 的抑制，此蛋白可能是raplb 蛋白之磷酸化型態。然而，rapl mRNA 的細胞內含量卻因處理dbcAMP而減少。小G 蛋白與NG108-15細胞分化的關係值得更進一步的研究。

本論文共一冊，二萬五千字。全文共分五章十七節 壹、緒論 一、前言 二、研究理論 三、研究假設 貳、方法 一、名詞解釋 二、測驗工具 三、問卷 四、資料收集 五、資料處理 參、基本資料概述 一、個人基本因素 二、人格特質 三、傳播行為 肆、研究發現 一、人格特質因素與使用媒介頻率的關係 二、人格特質因素與使用媒介時間的關係 三、人格特質因素與媒介接觸內容的關係 四、人格特質因素與媒介喜愛次序的關係 伍、結論 一、假設的印證 二、檢討與建議