Journalism
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Item Women Correspondents in Vietnam: Historical Analysis and Oral Histories(1988) Martin, Christine; Hiebert, Ray; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Although women correspondents have covered wars since the Spanish-American conflict, it was not until the Vietnam War that they achieved full access to the battlefield and equal opportunities to cover all aspects of the conflict. Easily attained army accreditation, the burgeoning women's movement and the unique nature of the Vietnam War - a Third World, essentially, political conflict - combined to offer women reporters unprecedented opportunities to cover the war and to prove themselves as worthy members of journalism's elite crew - war correspondents. More women covered Vietnam than any other war. They focused their coverage primarily on the "human interest" angle and the effects of war on its civilian and military victims. This traditional women's focus took on a new prominence in Vietnam, where an understanding of the social and political underpinnings of Vietnamese culture was essential to the success of the American war effort. As a result, the traditional news definition of war as battlefield was widened and the "women's angle" became central to war correspondence. This study presents an historical analysis of the evolution of the role of the woman war correspondent, from the Spanish- American conflict to Vietnam, and presents the oral histories of 10 women who worked as war correspondents in Vietnam.Item Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement: Case Studies of Jane Cunningham Croly, Helen M. Winslow and Rheta Childe Dorr(1992) Gottlieb, Agnes Hooper; Beasley, Maurine Hoffman; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)While suffragists in the late nineteenth century commanded a high profile in their fight for the vote, other less militant women also advocated a wider sphere for women. These semi-traditional women believed a woman's place was in her home, but defined women's "homes" as the cities in which they lived. Their natural "sphere," therefore, involved "municipal housekeeping" chores, which included helping women and children and rooting out corruption, crime, filth and immorality in the cities. This dissertation uses a case study approach to illustrate the involvement of three women journalists, Jane Cunningham Croly, Helen M. Winslow and Rheta Childe Dorr, in the municipal housekeeping movement. These women were chosen because their careers, taken as a whole, show how writing about municipal housekeeping evolved over time from a plea for women to become more socially responsible into a logical argument for suffrage. Croly, a founder of the women's club movement in the United States in 1868, advocated a more public role for women in her newspaper and magazine work, especially in her magazines for club women, The Woman's Cycle, The Home-Maker, and The New Cycle. Winslow, editor and publisher of The Club Woman, and Dorr, a writer on reform for Hampton's magazine, were affected by Croly's ideas and, in turn, expanded them into publicity for women to assume a wider sphere in public affairs. The work of these women from Croly's articles in the 1860s to Dorr's militant reform writing in the 1900s illustrates how journalists portrayed the municipal housekeeping movement. All three believed in the concept of a separate sphere for women, but they sought to expand its limits. Croly's gentle reminders that women should seek interests outside the home gradually gave way to Winslow's argument in favor of women's involvement in municipal government, which in turn was only a step away from Dorr's advocacy of equal rights, including the vote, for women. Thus, the municipal housekeeping journalism of Croly and Winslow gradually merged into the suffrage journalism of Dorr.Item The Washington, D.C. 1991 Riots in Mount Pleasant: An Analysis of Local Press Coverage(1993) Lima, Christina C.; Gurevitch, Michael; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Studies in the field of communication have found that the U.S.A. mainstream (English-language) news media coverage of minorities is characterized primarily by the portrayal of minorities only in the context of the problems or difficulties that they pose to society. In addition, because of cultural values and customs, the media, when covering minorities, tend to focus on the event itself rather than on the underlying causes of the event. Thus the coverage tends to be stereotypical. In order to address these issues, this thesis analyses the content of coverage of the 1991, Washington, D.C. Mount Pleasant civil disturbances in two English- and two Spanish-language newspapers. A quantitative content analysis was employed in order to determine the extent and type of coverage provided to Latinos two weeks before the disturbances, the week of the disturbances, and the week after the disturbances. For the same period, a thematic content analysis was used to contrast the frameworks used by the English-language press in comparison to the Spanish-language press. The assumption was that by having cultural proximity to and understanding of the Latino Community, the Spanish-language press provided a more thorough coverage of the event. The results, however, show that both presses failed to provide a comprehensive coverage of the event. In fact, the results seem to indicate that both presses followed journalistic news values and patterns more closely than they followed cultural values. The most notable difference between the two presses was that they incorporated the news values and patterns into their own cultural bias.Item EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AND ITS IMPACT ON THE PRODUCTION AND QUALITY OF LOCAL TELEVISION NEWS(2019) scanlon, jason lawrence; steiner, linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Technology is an integral part of journalism. Journalists use computers, IP-based servers, and digital gear as instruments to gather, process, and distribute news regarding events that impact our lives. Beyond the basic tools of the trade, the use of technology can dramatically influence the process of producing news. This project examines how the use of this technology impacts the collection, analysis, production, and quality of local television news. The study also addresses how technology is redefining the role of newsworkers in local television newsrooms. The methods of data collection include a survey and focus group of journalists with experience at local and national news networks, a content analysis of sixty local newscasts, and interviews with television news workers. The research questions address the impact of technology on the production and quality of local television news. I ask, among other questions, whether the increased number of required daily tasks has affected quality and whether news professionals say they see such effects; how, and to what extent, digital technologies such as IP-based store-and-forward technology, smaller portable newsgathering gear, and cellular-based transmission methods have affected production, and whether journalists say they see negative effects; that the use of network-affiliate and subscription-based news services have changed how local television news is produced. Overall, I conclude that the role of a local television journalist has changed and a new hybrid editorial/technical role has emerged. These hybrid journalists are required to perform more technical tasks, resulting in time diverted away from traditional tasks such as story research, news analysis, and script writing. My research aligns with existing literature in proposing that these changes are contributing to a decline of quality in local television news. This is an indirect result of using newer technology. The use of these tools has made the collection and distribution of content more efficient, but the speed and ease of this technology have resulted in more tasks being performed by individual journalists, which leads to less locally generated content. In addition, the increased need to supply original content to station websites and social media platforms has also negatively affected quality.Item 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.Item The Kent County News: A History and an Era, 1950-1980(1981) Gruenburg, Drew Nathan; Beasley, Maurine; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This thesis focuses first on the history of the Kent County News, and second on how the paper covered the problems and pressures that an urbanized twentieth century brought to a rural Eastern Shore Maryland county from 1950 to 1980. The Kent County News is a weekly newspaper -- the only local paper for the people of Kent County, Maryland. Its roots are in one of the nation's oldest newspapers, the Chestertown Spy, established in 1793. The history of the Kent County News includes long editorial tenures which spanned both generations of families and myriad changes in technology, content and ownership. The past thirty years brought a particularly large number of changes in content and administration to the Kent County News. This study also gives special attention to how the Kent County News covered three issues: the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and other attempts to span the Bay; the advent of zoning regulations in the county; and the possibility of a nuclear power plant being located in the county. Using the complete files of the Kent County News housed in the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland, every issue of the paper from 1950 to 1980 was examined for information on these three issues. Other material used in this study included interviews with editors of the Kent County News, secondary source material on country weeklies and Maryland, and Maryland state publications. This study has shown that over the years the Kent County News has presented an intimate picture of life in Kent County. In the last thirty years, as the county has faced the pressures of increased urbanization and as the paper experienced changes in design, content and ownership, the paper has become a staunch publicist for the values of small-town life. The paper has also been an educator, and an important force in promoting community consciousness and harmony.Item LEARNING TO LOVE THE AUDIENCE: How Journalists and Newsrooms Adjust to Audience Inclusion and Engagement(2019) Assmann, Karin; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how institutional change in the news industry, in particular empowerment and inclusion of the audience, affects journalists. How does minding the audience, interacting with readers or viewers and engaging with them at various stages of the news production process, make journalists feel about their jobs, themselves, their workplace and their audience? How might this outcome affect journalistic output? Answering these questions is a contribution to the discourse about the future of journalism practice in a hostile economic environment. Through in-depth interviews with 131 journalists and newsroom managers in four newsrooms, with 22 audience engagement editors in 20 newsrooms and with 15 consultants and audience analytics providers, as well as through observation in three newsrooms, I offer empirical data exploring the increasingly normalized practice of audience engagement in traditional newsrooms that are trying to find sustainable business models in a news industry marked by increasing corporate ownership and austerity measures. interacting with audience members on social media platforms to in-person events. I find that journalists, tasked by their editors and newsroom management to engage with the audience on social media platforms, often view audience engagement as an exercise solely meant to generate revenue. Poorly articulated and communicated strategies leave many journalists feeling cynical and burdened with labor that they consider to be part of a marketing or promotions department’s responsibility. Women journalists in particular experience the demands of audience engagement as requiring literally dangerous exposure of their private lives to a frequently hostile public. This dynamic is compounded by journalists’ awareness of the precarity of their position, a sentiment that easily slips into resentment toward newsroom management and owners. For all stakeholders involved – journalists, industry consultants, newsrooms and scholars – I recommend seeking clearer definitions of all agents in the journalistic field. Implementing audience engagement strategies without agreement about the definition of “audience” and “engagement,” or about the purpose and desired end of engagement, is counter-productive. Without a better understanding of what the audience means to journalists, editors, newsroom managers, publishers and owners, the search for new business models will not advance.Item THE ROLE OF ACCOUNT FEATURES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS ON PERCEIVED QUALITY OF INFORMATION SHARERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA(2019) Auxier, Brooke Elizabeth; Golbeck, Jennifer; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In today’s complex social media environments, users are inundated with news and information. Due to the affordances of the internet, not all content is created equal and much of what exists online is less-than-quality. However, it is important for online users to locate trustworthy and reliable information. It is also important to understand how social media account features and social network connections may mediate users’ evaluations of quality on social media. This dissertation presents a multifaceted look at how users evaluate the quality (i.e. trustworthiness and reliability) of news and information sharers on social media. This work is comprised of three unique, yet complementary studies, that use several methods including survey, social network analysis and statistical analysis. Each study focuses on different types of information sharers—unknown users, network connections, and news organizations. Taken together they suggest that sharers of information are central to users’ propensity to trust and rely on information itself. At a high level, this dissertation suggests the following: (1) when examining unknown information sharers, U.S. audiences are more likely to trust and rely on accounts that are gender-neutral and share a cultural background; (2) there is no relationship between more connected nodes within a person’s social network and trust in news shared by that connection, and young adult Facebook users report having low levels of trust in news shared by friends; and (3) news consumers look for tangible signals of reliability and trustworthiness, like About descriptions and official website links, when assessing news organization social media profiles. This work shows that beyond the reliability of news content, social media users depend on signals, social ties, and platform features to determine trust and reliability in news sharers. Though users consider many factors when assessing credibility of information on social media (e.g. verification status of the sharer, prior interaction with a sharer) the role and influence of the sharer has not been substantially studied in the evaluative process.Item The American Press and the Sinking of the Lusitania(1986) McDonough, Joseph; Beasley, Maurine; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Purpose of Study: The purpose of the study was to analyze to what degree the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania swayed editorial opinion against Germany in seven representative United States newspapers. Procedures: Seven newspapers were chosen for this study, based on their geographic location and political prominence: the New York Times, Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and the Milwaukee Journal. The historical record of U.S. foreign policy prior to World War I, and the political viewpoint of each newspaper was reviewed by way of introduction. The papers were examined for news and editorial content. Items studied included: the first seven pages of each newspaper, the unsigned editorials expressing the view of the editorial staff, and letters to the editor that dealt with the sinking. Each paper was studied six months prior to the sinking, during the crisis (including the exchange of diplomatic notes between the United States and Germany), and six months after the answer to Wilson's final Lusitania note. Conclusion: The study found that the sinking of the Lusitania did not sway editorial opinion against Germany in the selected newspapers.Item No Place for a Girl? Women as Sports Reporters from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties(2019) Siqueira Paranhos Velloso, Carolina; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines some of the first women to write about sports for print media from 1870 to 1920. It also explains the social, economic and cultural circumstances from which early women sports journalists emerged. The thesis discusses the evolution of reporting as a profession and shows that the birth of this new occupation increased opportunities for women in the newspaper industry; demonstrates how the rise of organized sports, and changing attitudes towards them, affected women’s ability to participate in, be fans of, and write about sports; and introduces three women sportswriters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Maria Morgan, Ella Black and Ina Eloise Young – as well as explains the different strategies and mechanisms they used in order to achieve success in a male-dominated field where their presence was very much contested.