Internet has emerged as an interactive platform. Thus, new communication technologies are challenging the traditional media with interactive devices turning online journalism into a rich media environment. While new information technologies have enabled media organisations to use interactive features in the constructed presentation of news websites, few news websites in the Iraqi Kurdistan region are maximizing such features. Also, this thesis argues that despite the lack of a good infrastructure in the field of communication technology and the Internet in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), online journalism has become a major part of Kurdish media outlets and distinctive from traditional media because of its interactive nature. The study presented in this thesis focus on interactivity in online journalism by examine interactive features of Kurdish news websites of the (IKR) and analyses how news is presented and to what extent these news websites tried to apply the interactive features on their hompages and inside the news pages. The level of interactivity of those Kurdish websites was also measured using several dimensions of interactivity by conducting web-based content analysis. The analysis of the qualitative part based on in-depth interviews with Kurdish reporters, editors, editor in chiefs, media experts and web developers. The findings show that the Kurdish news websites did not fully utilize and enhance interactive features in online journalism.

This dissertation explores deviance, operationalized through news factors, among American community weekly, community daily, large daily, and national daily newspaper websites and social media posts. Computerized quantitative analysis indicates that circulation size makes little to no significant difference concerning the publication of deviant news factors; smaller circulation sizes are significantly related to the publication of news concerning local communities, but not egalitarian news factors generally. Qualitative, structured interviews of community newspaper editors and publishers illustrate a different agenda - a clear focus for news on "regular people and routine events," arguably egalitarianism, over news on "unusual people or extraordinary events," arguably deviance. This indicates a need for further evaluation and development of computerized content analysis, gatekeeping theory, and the community newspaper industry. Results also suggest a need to reconsider and re-evaluate normative deviance as a concept and point to two potential theoretical developments: considering a Deviant-Egalitarian Spectrum and drastically broadening the current fringe focus of deviance research. / text

Despite a rising democratic defict in dominant Canadian media they continue to hold much influce on policy-makers, government officials and citizens. While some scholars argue that recent advancements in communication technology change the dynamics of media production, making it more accessible, others argue that online media reflects what occurs offline. To test which position is correct, this thesis compares dominant and alternative news media websites. Overall, it appears that online media practices are a reflection of offline media. At best, alternative media adopt a hybrid model of production where they chose to selectively incorporate dominant media practices in the aim to meet the goals of alternative media.

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The diploma thesis analyzes posts that are produced by three online Czech news websites - Aktuálně.cz, iDnes.cz and Novinky.cz. The lingustic analysis is based on the five linguistic levels - orthography, syntax, lexicology, morphology and stylistics. The news writing style and its characteristics are described in the theoretical part. It is accompanied by the description of the electronic communication phenomena. The key theoretical knowledge about changes in the Czech language used on the Internet is summarized. Chapter focused on Facebook development and its specific features is also included. The results of the analysis show two main tendencies in Czech language used on Facebook by online news websites. Firstly, language originality was used to capture user attention in Facebook feed. Secondly, the economy of language, shortness and conciseness in Facebook posts were identified. Results reveal the high number of spelling errors, high frequency of elliptical and condensed sentences without redundant phrases. The sentences were often replaced by nominal equivalents or fragments without predicates. Neologisms and colloquial Czech are considerably present in the text. All posts contain a significant graphical section.

The master's thesis is devoted to the analysis of the impact of the dissemination of information and disinformation in media about the disease caused by the COVID-19 virus in the Czech Republic in the period 02/2020-02/2021. The aim of the thesis is to analyse selected news portals and identifying the possible impact of the information on the Internet on public behaviour. The purpose of the theoretical part is a brief definition of the basic concepts, mapping the course of information in the Czech Republic and comparison with similar situations from the past. Subsequently, the theoretical part contains a description of the means of communication used to inform citizens about the event. The aim of the practical part is to show how the course of the spread of the COVID-19 virus influenced the traffic to online news websites, what articles appeared in the Internet environment, and finally I focus on the analysis of whether there was a change in the behaviour of citizens in the Internet environment in the form of traffic to news websites, retail sales and changes in work habits.

As more readers consume news through digital platforms such as computers, mobiles and tablets, it is essential to make these interfaces accessible to as many users as possible, both from an economic and social standpoint. The terms ‘universal accessibility’, ‘inclusive design’ and ‘design-for-all’ refer to the method of designing for users both with and without disabilities, which is a widely debated subject among researchers in the field where some say that it improves the usability for everyone, while others argue that it is impossible to create a design that fits all needs. The aim of this thesis is to investigate this ‘universal design’ method on news sites and answer the question whether a more accessible design can improve the experience for all users regardless of cognitive abilities. In order to do so, five current news sites were evaluated and compared to accessibility guidelines and previous research. Based on the results, two prototypes were developed and tested in a qualitative user study together with the existing sites. The user study consisted of two test groups of students with (Group 1) and without (Group 2) cognitive disabilities, with 5 users in the first group and 9 users in the second. Oral opinions were compared within and between the groups together with results from a hierarchical sorting of sites based on general preference, appearance and credibility. The results showed both differences and similarities between the groups, whereas the greatest common factor was the preference for the “clean” and “calm” design, ranking both prototypes higher than their originals. The conclusion was that it is indeed difficult to design for everybody because of individual needs and preferences, but including disabled users in the design process highlights general problems that could otherwise have been missed, while also making it easier to implement customizable options for disabled users. / När allt fler läsare konsumerar nyheter via digitala plattformar - såsom datorer, mobiler och läsplattor - så behöver dessa gränssnitt vara tillgängliga för så många som möjligt, både ur ett ekonomiskt och socialt perspektiv. Med termerna 'universell design', inkluderande design'och'design-för-alla' menas den designmetod som utgår från användare både med och utan funktionsvariationer. Denna metod är starkt debatterad bland forskare där vissa anser att det förbättrar användarvänligheten för alla, medan andra menar att det är omöjligt att skapa en design som uppfyller alla behov. Målet med denna rapport är att utforska denna 'universella design' på nyhetshemsidor och se om en mer tillgänglig design kan förbättra upplevelsen för alla användare, med fokus på kognitiva funktionsvariationer. För att besvara denna fråga så analyserades och jämfördes fem nyhetshemsidor med riktlinjer för tillgänglighet samt tidigare forskningsstudier. Baserat på resultatet så skapades även två prototyper som utvärderades tillsammans med de existerande hemsidorna i ett kvalitativt användartest. Denna studie bestod av två grupper av studenter med (Grupp 1) och utan (Grupp 2) kognitiva funktionsvariationer, med 5 användare i första gruppen och 9 användare i den andra. Muntliga åsikter jämfördes inom och mellan grupperna tillsammans med resultaten från en hierarkisk sortering av hemsidorna baserad på generella preferenser, utseende samt trovärdighet. Resultatet visade på både skillnader och likheter mellan grupperna, där den största gemensamma nämnaren var preferensen för en "ren" och "lugn" design, vilket placerade båda prototyperna högre än deras originalversioner. Slutsatsen var att det mycket riktigt är svårt att skapa en design för alla på grund av individuella behov och preferenser, men att inkludera användare med funktionsvariationer i designprocessen kan markera generella problem som annars hade kunnat missas, samt att göra det enklare att implementera skräddarsydda inställningar.

Thesis (M.A. (Media Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2020 / This study examined the effect of digital news reporting on professional journalistic practice focusing on fake sport news websites. It evolves from the fact that, despite the progressive benefits of the digital revolution, the rise of fake news websites has become common practice associated with the clickbait that spreads rumours posted on unofficial accounts often with a journalistic pretext. The aim of this study was to examine how fake digital sport news reporting impacts on professional journalistic practice. The objectives of the study were: to describe the nature of internet-based fake sport news stories and websites; to assess the credibility of sport news disseminated through fake news sites, and to determine the implications of fake sport news stories and websites on standard news practice. The descriptive design within the qualitative interpretive paradigm was used to determine the negative effect that fake sport news has on professional journalistic practice. Qualitative content analysis of ten sample news excerpts and in-depth interviews with sixteen expert informants were complementarily used to collect data. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was applied to generate discursive themes which yielded the study outcomes. The data from screenshots and interviews were collected, corroborated and analysed, using content and thematic analysis techniques. After analysing both the screenshots and the interviews, a total of eight themes emerged from the study. The study notes how fake sport news and its associated litany of misinformation and/or disinformation has contributed to the creation of false hypes about sports news to the detriment of professional journalism practice. The study revealed that fake sport news is prominent on social media and poses a major challenge to journalistic integrity and credibility. From the various screenshots, fake headlines were identified as a contributing factor to the rise of fake news stories. It was also found that fake sport news has a negative effect on journalism practice, as it spreads lies, makes people more interested in emotional stories and forces credible news agencies to also use sensational headlines to gain the attention of an audience. The interviews revealed that characteristics of fake sport news stories are exaggerated, misleading, have no source or attributions, no by-lines or unknown authors and misrepresent so-called facts. iv vi The study recommends that research, fact-checking, naming and shaming people/websites that popularize fake sport news should be made known to the public; proper training and assertion of certain rules, regulations and ethics for new reporters and journalists to follow and stick to; there must be thorough research and cross checking of information gained from a secondary source; a governing body to possibly monitor and crack down on serial propagators and spreaders of fake sports news stories; sport journalists should alert readers of fake sport news and fake sport news websites, as these are common in sport due to the popularity of sport news sites; and sport journalists should stay away from reporting/re-writing and sharing fake news in order to maintain credibility and ethics in sport news reporting.

Submitted by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2017-10-09T14:12:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 NOGUEIRA_Rodrigo_2017.pdf: 5427774 bytes, checksum: db8155583bf1bffe3ceb4c01bf26f66f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2017-10-09T14:14:04Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 NOGUEIRA_Rodrigo_2017.pdf: 5427774 bytes, checksum: db8155583bf1bffe3ceb4c01bf26f66f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2017-10-09T14:14:13Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 NOGUEIRA_Rodrigo_2017.pdf: 5427774 bytes, checksum: db8155583bf1bffe3ceb4c01bf26f66f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-10-09T14:14:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 NOGUEIRA_Rodrigo_2017.pdf: 5427774 bytes, checksum: db8155583bf1bffe3ceb4c01bf26f66f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-05-12 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Data and text mining applications managing Web data have been the subject of recent research. In every case, data mining tasks need to work on clean, consistent, and integrated data for obtaining the best results. Thus, Data Warehouse environments are a valuable source of clean, integrated data for data mining applications. Data Warehouse technology has evolved to retrieve and process data from the Web. In particular, news websites are rich sources that can compose a linguistic corpus. By inserting corpus into a Data Warehousing environment, applications can take advantage of the flexibility that a multidimensional model and OLAP operations provide. Among the benefits are the navigation through the data, the selection of the part of the data considered relevant, data analysis at different levels of abstraction, and aggregation, disaggregation, rotation and filtering over any set of data. This paper presents Newsminer, a data warehouse environment, which provides a consistent and clean set of texts in the form of a multidimensional corpus for consumption by external applications and users. The proposal includes an architecture that integrates the gathering of news in real time, a semantic enrichment module as part of the ETL stage, which adds semantic properties to the data such as news category and POS-tagging annotation and the access to data cubes for consumption by applications and users. Two experiments were performed. The first experiment selects the best news classifier for the semantic enrichment module. The statistical analysis of the results indicated that the Perceptron classifier achieved the best results of F-measure, with a good result of computational time. The second experiment collected data to evaluate real-time news preprocessing. For the data set collected, the results indicated that it is possible to achieve online processing time. / As aplicações de mineração de dados e textos oriundos da Internet têm sido alvo de recentes pesquisas. E, em todos os casos, as tarefas de mineração de dados necessitam trabalhar sobre dados limpos, consistentes e integrados para obter os melhores resultados. Sendo assim, ambientes de Data Warehouse são uma valiosa fonte de dados limpos e integrados para as aplicações de mineração. A tecnologia de Data Warehouse tem evoluído no sentido de recuperar e tratar dados provenientes da Web. Em particular, os sites de notícias são fontes ricas em textos, que podem compor um corpus linguístico. Inserindo o corpus em um ambiente de Data Warehouse, as aplicações poderão tirar proveito da flexibilidade que um modelo multidimensional e as operações OLAP fornecem. Dentre as vantagens estão a navegação pelos dados, a seleção da parte dos dados considerados relevantes, a análise dos dados em diferentes níveis de abstração, e a agregação, desagregação, rotação e filtragem sobre qualquer conjunto de dados. Este trabalho apresenta o ambiente de Data Warehouse Newsminer, que fornece um conjunto de textos consistente e limpo, na forma de um corpus multidimensional para consumo por aplicações externas e usuários. A proposta inclui uma arquitetura que integra a coleta textos de notícias em tempo próximo do tempo real, um módulo de enriquecimento semântico como parte da etapa de ETL, que acrescenta propriedades semânticas aos dados coletados tais como a categoria da notícia e a anotação POS-tagging, e a disponibilização de cubos de dados para consumo por aplicações e usuários. Foram executados dois experimentos. O primeiro experimento é relacionado à escolha do melhor classificador de categorias das notícias do módulo de enriquecimento semântico. A análise estatística dos resultados indicou que o classificador Perceptron atingiu os melhores resultados de F-medida, com resultado bom de tempo de processamento. O segundo experimento coletou dados para avaliar o pré-processamento de notícias em tempo real. Para o conjunto de dados coletados, os resultados indicaram que é possível atingir tempo de processamento online. / OB800972