Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2015 - 20192

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    Trends and Strategies of News on Social Media in the U.S.: A Multimethod Analysis
    (2019) Herd, Maria; Yaros, Ronald; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There is growing interest in how social media and news interact, but much of that information is not widely available because news organizations pay third party analytics services for proprietary data. This study, however, employs a multimethod design to explore the issue. First, a quantitative analysis of audience data and social media trends is based on an aggregate of metrics (Parse.ly) from hundreds of news organizations to identify the most popular news categories on the top social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Reddit). Second, qualitative interviews are conducted with social media strategists at four U.S. news organizations to capture emerging trends of best social media practices within newsrooms, including humanizing content, shifting coverage, training, encouraging subscriptions, third-party tools, and crowdsourcing.
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    TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST IN JOURNALISM: AN EXAMINATION OF VALUES, PRACTICES AND EFFECTS
    (2015) Koliska, Michael; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Journalism scholars and practitioners have repeatedly argued that transparency is crucial to generate trust in the news media, which, over the years, has faced continues decline in public trust. As news organizations have been encouraged to implement transparency in their daily work, transparency has increasingly gained the status of a professional norm in journalism. However, very little is actually known about how journalists think and apply transparency in their everyday practices or how news organizations in the United States implement transparency. Similarly, normative assumptions about the trust-generating effects of transparency have not been consistently shown to exist. This dissertation examined to what extent journalists at 12 national news outlets embraced transparency on a day-to-day basis and how these news organizations implement transparency online at the news item level. Moreover, this dissertation tested whether existing features of transparency (hyperlinks, editorial explanations, corrections, staff biographies etc.) impact audiences’ trust perception of a news story. The results of the mixed method approach showed that transparency in journalism is far from being a professional norm, which guides journalists’ news production processes. An analysis of 27 in-depth interviews found that journalists rarely consider transparency in their work. Journalists agreed that the notion of transparency has value. They repeatedly suggested that the news outlets they work for utilize transparency as a promotional tool to engage audiences and to appear transparent, rather than significantly disclosing information about the inner workings of their news organization. The results of the content analysis supported this claim as the findings show that the transparency features news organizations currently use provide little information for audiences to learn about how journalism is done. Meanwhile, the results of two experiments indicate that participants may not recognize the intended meanings of the varied transparency features, as participants’ trust perception did not vary across different transparency conditions. The findings of this dissertation suggest that transparency in journalism is still a goal rather than reality. News organizations have not opened up to the extent that they may be understood as transparent organizations; instead their efforts to pull back the curtain so that audiences may see the inner workings of newsrooms can be considered translucent at best.