The state of news: production, consumption, and transformation in the era of digital media.
Zhou, Shuhua
Special time calls for special reflection and special action. This special section of China Media Research invites scholars from diverse perspectives and approaches to reflect upon "The State of News: Production, Consumption, and Transformation in the Era of Digital Media". The rapid development of digital media technologies has profound impacts on the news industry and research on news in general, from its production, consumption to even the definition of news. News is no longer generated by an elite few and news is no longer consumed the way it used to be. The line between traditional, hard news is blurred with entertainment news. This special section aims to examine the latest research on news, from its definition, to its practices, and from its production, representation, to its consumption.
I am glad that we have a quality collection of papers to present to the readers of China Media Research. These papers, each one of them unique in their own approaches, answer the call beautifully. It is unrealistic to expect that a special section can address every possible issue in news and news research today. Quite the contrary, these papers only spotlight a few of the many issues that we face today. But the hope is that they will call attention to the opportunities and challenges of news research in the digital era.
News at any situation and time is a favorite content category of mass audience and it serves multiple functions and has far reaching impact. Its content and production, however, is also influenced by a myriad of factors including medium, culture, society and technology. The dynamics between media, society, and news allow abundant opportunities and challenges in news research. They include the following broad areas of research.
From a production point of view, researchers have always been interested in news gathering and definitions of news. What constitutes news? Conversely, why some information is considered non-news, such as a random tweet, and why some information is considered news? Insider the newsroom, who decides what is news? Who are the gatekeepers? And what are the gatekeeping processes? When considered across cultures, we can see that some news is a result of governmental influence, others have inherent news values, such as importance and deviance.
Lippmann's notion is still valid that there is a discrepancy between the news reality and the real reality and that newspeople somewhat spotlight the real reality to present a news reality. The interesting question is who are these newspeople? What kind of values and beliefs do they have, beyond the usual but important demographic information? The charge of media bias sits squarely on who is making news: their age, education, gender, party affiliation, job aspiration, and career outlook. They are the people who directly affect the messages.
News serves many functions. Beyond the traditional surveillance function, news serves people's appetite for information. By portraying different walks in life, news also play socialization functions via stereotypical or non-stereotypical displays. By covering crimes, news serves as a means of social control by admonishing potential perpetrators of legal consequences of illegal acts and pacifying law-abiding citizens that they are in good hands.
Effects of news has received an abundance of research attention, whether in elections, in health, in public affairs, in sports, or in entertainment. In fact, this is a very inclusive area of research. Many of the better known communication theories, for example, have their roots in news research, be it agenda setting, framing, priming, or social construction of reality. In election coverage, news can be a king maker in the sense that candidates who do not receive news attention invariably fail!
News indeed involves all facets of life, and its research calls for expertise in communication, psychology, history, rhetoric, and many others. This special issues take the new digital environment into account by looking at news and the milieu in which it evolves, functions, and impacts.
It is not a secret anymore that printed newspapers are becoming more and more obsolete in this digital age. Going online becomes a survival strategy in cutting cost and in presenting breaking news in a more timely manner. The first article by Ha & Zhang looked at whether young readers regarded online newspaper as inferior goods compared to their print counterparts. From this US sample, the conclusion was a positive one: they did not perceive online products to the inferior, giving credence to the public goods argument and a new concept of parity readers proposed by the authors. Readers interested in this line of research can also look at other attributes of online newspapers, such as interactivities, feedback, and reader characteristics to further this area of inquiry.
This second article by Lo, Liu, and Pan offered a longitudinal, comparative study of Taiwanese journalists. The profiles delineated by the authors were intriguing and revealing. Perhaps as a tributes to the technological advances and people's insatiable quest for information, news consumers are asking for more quality information, which demands a more informed journalistic workforce. Samples from working journalists in 1994, 2004, and 2014 showed that as time went by, Taiwanese journalists were more educated, more satisfied with their jobs, and more likely to be female. However, they were less likely to stay in the same place. Research on journalists, or people who provided information to the public, be it in the historical past, or in the digital future, remains pertinent and important.
News credibility has been an ongoing concern for news consumers and researchers alike. The paper by Zhang, Zhang and Zhou further explicated the concept of trust. Based on the idea of characteristic-based and process-based trust, the researchers proposed a general question looking at who trusted what media the most to give us profiles of today's news consumers in relation to media trust. Specifically, the hypotheses on media use, in this case, Weibo use, tapped into the concept of process-based trust and offered interesting questions for credibility and social media use. One can only imagine the many opportunities in the future regarding the ever evolving social media and the explosion of information in these platforms.
News content and news portrayal of different walks of life, especially those related to Chinese news content, is probably something readers of China Media Research are interested. The paper by McKenzie and McKenzie used social role theory and rhetorical criticism to look at women as presented in CCTV news, and argued that, in spite of half a century of efforts in promoting women's rights, gender inequality is still pronounced in one of China's main media outlets.
The paper by Meade and Zhou, on the other hand, represents a typical empirical study on news. This study, however, looked at a different types of news presentation on television, namely news crawls, and how they might interact with commercials overlaid with news crawls. The study used information processing theory, in this case, whether news crawls' emotional tone were competing with TV commercial appeals to affect information processing of the commercials. The study used physiological data to infer attention to and memory of the commercial information. The new presentation format and the new research measures offered new ways for us to think about news and researching news.
Finally, I want to thank all contributors, whether whose papers are accepted or not, for their insightful and impactful research. They are certainly a pleasure to work with. And I want to thank all anonymous reviewers for their devotion to this academic endeavor. I even interrupted some of them in their summer vacation to demand a review! I am grateful to all!
Shuhua Zhou, University of Alabama, USA
