Journalism

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Start date: 2010Subject: search.filters.subject.social media

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    NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF HOW WOMEN STUDENT ATHLETES SHARE THEIR STORIES AND LIVED EXPERIENCES ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AGE OF NIL
    (2023) Scovel, Shannon Marie; Oates, Sarah A; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation assesses the self-representation and representation of ten elite collegiate women athletes during the first year of the NCAA’s new ‘name, image and likeness’ policies. Building on theories of representation, gender performance, self-presentation and intersectionality, this study explores how women athletes reproduce notions of feminism, femininity and athleticism on their public TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Each of the women in this study have at least 50,000 followers across their social media accounts, and the content they produced on these platforms over the 12-month period from July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, serves to both reflect and reject hegemonic norms surrounding women in sport. Previous research has demonstrated that women athletes remain marginalized and underrepresented in sports. Scholars have also noted that women athletes typically represent themselves on social media in ways that highlight their personal lives, as opposed to their athletic experiences. This study explores these questions of self-representation through a content analysis of social media posts produced by ten collegiate women and addresses how these women navigated digital storytelling within the neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal U.S. college sports media ecosystem. The ways in which athlete content was reproduced by journalists during this same period was also assessed. Findings show that journalists rarely engaged with women athletes’ posts during the first year of the NCAA’s new NIL policies and presented women’s success in the NIL era as surprising, unexpected and unrelated to athletic achievements. This dissertation adds to the larger body of research on women’s representation and self-representation in sports but adds a new dimension to this subject by exploring such representations in the collegiate environment, an arena in which athletes were previously denied the opportunity to earn money from their digital storytelling and online brands. The ways in which women challenge and reproduce hegemonic norms in their social media content during this period also contributes to the broader understanding of gender tensions in sports.
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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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    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.
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    Early and often: Can real-time intervention by trusted authorities help stop a tsunami of disinformation?
    (2018) Zeitvogel, Karin; Nelson, Deborah; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A tsunami of disinformation is washing over the world, with social media helping it to spread quickly and widely. The purveyors of disinformation use it to press their agenda by adding untruths where previously there were none, fabricating stories, reporting them out of context, or doctoring images to promote their message. In the past, disinformation has been a prelude to and run concurrently with other attacks, including cyber and conventional warfare, and when officials reacted to disinformation, they successfully slowed its flow but did not entirely stop it, and may not have “won” cyber or conventional battles. Researchers say even multiple corrections don’t fully stop disinformation, and sowing skepticism by forewarning of a probable disinformation campaign is the most successful way of staunching the flow. Tools have been developed to help detect disinformation rapidly but officials often don’t have a plan to track, correct or refute it.
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    THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY: A CASE STUDY OF THREE FACEBOOK GROUPS
    (2018) Gachau, James; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    As far back as 1918, John Dewey cautioned that democracy should not be identified with “economic individualism as the essence of freedom of action” (Dewey, 1954). He saw freedom as grounded socially in the human experience of “communicative (not merely economic) exchange through which individuals orient themselves to the world” (Couldry, 2010, p. 133). These communicative exchanges are necessary for people to live an authentically human life. In the widely dispersed societies of the twenty-first century, journalism and mass communication are necessary for this communicative exchange. This dissertation argues that Facebook, through purposefully designed and organized groups, can facilitate such communicative exchanges for social classes that are given short shrift by the mainstream media. I posit that due to their ability to select, control, and filter media content according to their specified needs and concerns, rather than have media fare dictated to them by the dominant classes, social media users in general, and Facebook groups composed of subordinate classes in particular, have the capacity to cultivate and nurture discourses that challenge the views and opinions of the dominant publics in which these groups are located. Using counterpublic theory à la Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, and Michael Warner, this dissertation analyzes the media content that members of three Facebook groups shared on their groups’ Facebook walls, and how this content helped them articulate oppositional voices and identities. Based in Kenya, the first group, Freethinkers Initiative Kenya (FIKA), identifies with freethought and atheism in a society that is predominantly Christian. The second group, Pan-African Network (PAN) promotes the interests of Africans across the globe, campaigning for the advancement of a proud black identity in a world increasingly perceived as hostile to Blacks and people of African descent. The third group, Women Without Religion (WWR), espouses a feminist atheist identity that opposes “white male supremacy,” and speaks against the perceived oppression of women occasioned by the patriarchal religions of the Judeo-Christian heritage.
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    THE EMOTIONS SOCIAL MEDIA BRING TO NEWS: THE EMERGENCE OF EMPATHY AND COMPASSION AS ELEMENTS IN NEWS MESSAGES
    (2012) Chong, EunRyung; Newhagen, John E; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study is an experiment examining qualitative differences of social media as an emerging news platform from traditional main stream media. The study argued a need of the reinterpretation of Marshall McLuhan's notion, "media is the message" in terms of an interaction between news content and media platforms. The study proposed a new concept of users' proximity to news, called "locality," which has been matured by user driven social media environments. For the study, a laboratory experiment was conducted. A total of 83 college students in a large mid-Atlantic university participated in the laboratory experiment as a representative of young adult news consumers. A main stream media news website and Facebook were assigned as news platforms, while negative and positive news content was provided as news content to subjects. Subjects' responses to news content which was laden in the same directional valence of a platform (negative news on a negative main stream media news website) and an opposite directional platform (negative news on positive social media) were observed. Subjects' reaction time and accuracy of memory of news content were measured by psychological software. Subjects also reported their emotions such as valence, intensity, compassion and empathy on negative and positive news content. Results exhibited an effect of coactivation between news content and media platform. When the valence of news contents and its platform were contradicted, the effect of coactivation such as users' hesitation of decision making was found. The results implicated that users' preoccupied expectation for specific news platform may filter their attention to news stories on a specific platform. The ambivalent responses of both empathy and compassion on identical negative news contents supported the proposed concept of "locality." It was revealed that media users manipulate their psychological proximity to news within securing safe distances from negative situations in recent user driven communication environments. Based on the examination, implication of the study for the practice of journalism against confronting challenges was discussed.
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    SOCIAL MEDIA INSTRUCTION IN JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATIONS HIGHER EDUCATION
    (2012) Auxier, Brooke Elizabeth; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this research is to examine how university-level journalism programs throughout the country are teaching, utilizing, and confronting the new and developing topic of social media. Examined in this research is how journalism programs incorporate social media instruction into their curriculum, how they put it to practice on their program's website, and how and if their tracks or sequences have changed in name and content to reflect an industry shift towards digital, interactive and social media. The questions this thesis will answer are (1) how are journalism schools throughout the country are teaching social media, teaching with social media, and teaching about social media; (2) do social and new media have a place in journalism curricula; and (3) how do changes in the media industry and journalism school curricula coincide.