Category Archives: Uncategorized

AR; How YouTube videos frame the discussions about them

What is the relationship between a video posted to YouTube, and the comments that the video receives? This is the question that Edgerly et al. pose in a recent article. This is an interesting question. On the one hand, there … Continue reading

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AR; Search engines and ontological security

“To be ontologically secure is to possess, on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses,” writes Giddens. What does Google have to do with this? Quite … Continue reading

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The importance of being serendipitous

At a recent seminar (hosted jointly by the Royal School of Library and Information Science and KU’s Centre for Communication and Computing), I had the chance to listen to Lennart Björneborn‘s talk about serendipity. The history of science is full … Continue reading

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AR; Liquid news online

Online news are different: the forms they take, and the contents they deliver, have the capacity of constant change, partly under the influence of readers. There has been a lot of talk about the peculiar nature of online news; Michael … Continue reading

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AR; Wire agencies and PR

Looking at (online) news production from a perspective influenced by theories of political economy, Susan Forde and Jane Johnston show in a recent article “how wire agencies can become the de facto distributor of PR material.” It’s an interesting read … Continue reading

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AR; Candidate winnowing, and what the “Internet” is

Journalists, through their pre-selecting candidates in primaries, are a crucial part in election campaigns: the more they consider a candidate worthy of attention, the easier it will be for this candidate to raise funding. But the more funds a candidate … Continue reading

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AR; Social recommendation of news

Facebook and Twitter are become a “significant source of news for Canadians,” argues a paper very soon to be published in Journalism Studies (it’s already available on the web). This is perhaps not surprising- after all, a lot of news … Continue reading

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AR; Is internet news replacing newspapers?

…and how about TV and radio? According to Benjamin Gaskins and Jennifer Jerit, replacement is an existing phenomenon – but it is not (yet) so widespread as sometimes thought. Their findings are based on a US national sample, representative of … Continue reading

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Journalists on aggregators

What do editors think about news aggregators, such as Google News – or social news websites, e.g. Reddit? If Marina Vujnovic is right, they don’t really have a clue. She wrote about the subject in a chapter of a recent … Continue reading

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Work-in-progress: Social news sites in models of democracy

This table – incomplete and very much under construction – sums up the normative connection between 3 democratic traditions and social news sites, as seen through an analytical framework developed by Peter Dahlgren. Liberal-individualist democracy Communitarian-republican democracy Deliberative democracy Structure … Continue reading

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