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This article examines British newspaper coverage of Muslims during the first wave of the Coronavirus crisis. A well-established trajectory of research shows that Muslims are negativized in mainstream media representation in the UK. However, it became obvious from the outset of the pandemic, that ethnic minority key workers were disproportionately affected by Coronavirus. This, alongside high levels of support for NHS staff, had the potential to challenge and shift established narratives about Muslims as questions of structural discrimination became the subject of news media discourse. This article examines whether these events were able, even momentarily, to disrupt dominant narratives about Muslims in the UK or whether the pandemic provided further opportunity for Othering discourses to be perpetuated. In the context of a tumultuous political landscape, where the politics of immigration have been linked to the politics of austerity, Muslims have been scapegoated as a threat to the nationalist project. In this context, the identifier ‘Muslim’ is only deemed relevant if it signifies ‘difference’, or to distinguish between good versus bad Muslim/immigrant. Hence, in the context of the reporting of Coronavirus, racist discourses have been reshaped as Muslim key workers are distinguished in the reporting from other Muslims. We examine how these representational practices play out through an analysis of four British newspapers (The Sun, Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Mirror) over a months’ coverage at the peak of the crisis (April, 2020).

Software studies is a research field that focuses on the social and cultural implications of the software. They are grounded by interdisciplinarity, borrowing to digital humanities, cultural studies, or new media studies. Their application domains are as heterogeneous as software can be, from interfaces to new digital mediatic forms. This paper examines the relevance of software studies for journalism studies in the context of automated news production, where technological artifacts can also be understood as being shaped by professional values and cultural practices. It also explores methods nourished by software studies’ theories to tackle news automation through a process-oriented approach. The cursor is placed on the materiality of the upstream components of automated news production: the data that feed the systems and the process that will make the news. Automated news production appears as a remixed editorial process nourished by previous editorial experiences that will be standardized through a some-how imitation game where technological and human mediation interplay. This paper addresses the issue of transparency with the flattening of the processes at work, relying on theories and methodological tools based on software studies. Article en ligne uniquement (pour l'instant) = first published info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This study uses three archiving efforts at the New York Times as a means to analyse the newspaper as an archival object. I study the traditional ‘morgue’ of physical clippings and photos, the Times’ joint project with Google Cloud to digitize its photo collection, and the TimesMachine interactive digital archive, which made scanned editions of printed issues from 1851 to 2002 publicly available online. Based on interviews with staff and analysis of documents describing past and present newspaper archiving practices, it is clear that the digital archive is not a comprehensive copy of an analogue original. There are a significant number of documents stored in physical archives that have not been translated to digital, and whose loss would be detrimental to historians and media scholars alike. Moreover, even the documents that have been scanned and made available as digital objects do not perfectly mirror their analogue equivalents, meaning that information loss is inherent to the digitization process. As active producers of the past for contemporary purposes, these online news archives serve as cultural gatekeepers, actively shaping journalistic practice and reframing current events in reference to the past.

Contains fulltext : 235859.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 22 november 2021 20 p.

In this study, 20 journalists who had worked on news about the anniversaries of mass protests in Hong Kong were interviewed. Given that most had been born after the historical events being commemorated, this paper aims to understand how young journalists comprehend and cover such old news. It also uncovers the journalistic processes behind the related anniversary journalism and discusses the role of journalism in constructing collective memory. The study traced how journalists normally do their research and what they consider in the production process. We found that journalists, as with other assignments, generally lack the time to conduct thorough research. Instead of venturing into hard facts or heated debates, most opted to focus on the personal and the emotional. For the personal, they relied on stories told by living witnesses and participants. For the emotional, they tapped into the cultural environment as well as their peers to determine appropriate feelings and moral tones. Professional norms compelled them to find new angles for old news and package the stories in ways that would engage and attract their audience. All of these factors shape how journalists tell the stories about the past; these stories in turn become new resources in the ‘inventory’ of collective memories.

Previous research suggests that a defining characteristic of satirical news shows (e.g. The Daily Show) is discursive integration: a creative blend of genre conventions of regular news and fiction. This study aimed to extend the concept of discursive integration to another popular form of satirical news: written satirical news. We focused on both liberal (e.g. The Onion) and conservative (e.g. The Babylon Bee) online outlets of satire. We collected texts published in 2018 by a total of 36 satirical news, regular news and fiction websites (65,530,647 words). Discursive integration was measured by means of linguistic register, because genres can be effectively identified through patterns of linguistic features. Four linguistic register dimensions were identified. Findings showed that written satirical news is indeed characterised by discursive integration because written satirical news’ register scored in between the registers of written regular news and written fiction. No differences in discursive integration levels were found between liberal and conservative satirical news. This study demonstrates the value of discursive integration for understanding the genre of satirical news across partisan lines.

This study, utilizing 19 in-depth interviews, offers a systematic qualitative investigation of the perceived impact of a newspaper’s closure on community members’ everyday lives and their sense of community. Results demonstrate a negative impact on community members’ sense of community, with participants missing celebrated gatherings and noting increased isolation and diminished pride in their community. Findings also show the impact on residents’ daily lives, with one participant declaring ‘life is harder’ without the newspaper. Overall, these findings present a picture of life in Caroline County, Virginia, following the Caroline Progress’ closure after 99 years of service to the county.