Cogitatio Press (E-Journals)
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Automation in Sports Reporting: Strategies of Data Providers, Software Providers, and Media Outlets
Get PDFThis study examines how algorithmic processing affects structures and practices in sports journalism in Germany. A multi-level perspective is used to determine which strategies data providers, software providers, and media outlets use to develop automated reporting, which compiles perspectives across the entire line of news production. The results of 11 in-depth interviews show that non-journalistic actors are vital partners in the news production process, as all actors work together in data handling, training, and software development. Moreover, automation can generate additional content such as match and historical coverage to help address shortfalls in capacity. However, given the business case for automation, amateur football (soccer) is currently the only viable candidate for its use. Many actors involved in the process argue that automated content is an added value for their readers, but claim that content quality has to be put before quantity. This means that some media outlets edit automated articles to increase the quality of their sports journalism, but that this is done only on a small scale. Media outlets do not perceive their roles to be changing, but see automation as a helpful tool that complements their work; a few use automatically created articles as a baseline for in-depth reporting. Moreover, the so-called ‘meta-writer’ has not become a reality yet, as data-processing and news writing are still kept separate. This article sheds new light on the use of automation in the sports beat, highlighting the growing role of non-journalistic actors in the news production process
Does Scientific Uncertainty in News Articles Affect Readers’ Trust and Decision-Making?
Get PDFEven though a main goal of science is to reduce the uncertainty in scientific results by applying ever-improving research methods, epistemic uncertainty is an integral part of science. As such, while uncertainty might be communicated in news articles about climate science, climate skeptics have also exploited this uncertainty to cast doubt on science itself. We performed two studies to assess whether scientific uncertainty affects laypeople’s assessments of issue uncertainty, the credibility of the information, their trust in scientists and climate science, and impacts their decision-making. In addition, we addressed how these effects are influenced by further information on relevant scientific processes, because knowing that uncertainty goes along with scientific research could ease laypeople’s interpretations of uncertainty around evidence and may even protect against negative impacts of such uncertainty on trust. Unexpectedly, in study 1, after participants read both a text about research methods and a news article that included scientific uncertainty, they had lower trust in the scientists’ assertions than when they read the uncertain news article alone (but this did not impact trust in climate science or decision-making). In study 2, we tested whether these results occurred due to participants overestimating the scientific uncertainty at hand. Hence, we varied the framing of uncertainty in the text on scientific processes. We found that exaggerating the scientific uncertainty produced by scientific processes (vs. framing the uncertainty as something to be expected) did not negatively affect participants’ trust ratings. However, the degree to which participants preferred effortful reasoning on problems (intellective epistemic style) correlated with ratings of trust in scientists and climate science and with their decision-making. In sum, there was only little evidence that the introduction of uncertainty in news articles would affect participants’ ratings of trust and their decision-making, but their preferred style of reasoning did
“On Social Media Science Seems to Be More Human”: Exploring Researchers as Digital Science Communicators
Get PDFIn contemporary media discourses, researchers may be perceived to communicate something they do not intend to, such as coldness or irrelevance. However, researchers are facing new responsibilities concerning how popular formats used to present science will impact science’s cultural authority (Bucchi, 2017). Currently, there is limited research on the microlevel practices of digital science communication involving researchers as actors. Therefore, this qualitative study explores how digital academic discourse practices develop, using the tweeting and blogging of researchers involved in a multidisciplinary renewable energy research project as a case. The results of a thematic analysis of interviews with researchers (n = 17) suggests that the researchers’ perceptions form a scale ranging from traditional to progressively adjusted practices, which are labelled ‘informing,’ ‘anchoring,’ ‘luring,’ and ‘maneuvering.’ These imply an attempt to diminish the gap between science and the public. The interviewees acknowledge that scientific facts may not be interesting and that they need captivating means that are common in the use of new media, such as buzzwords and clickbait. It appears that trials and experimentation with hybrid genres helped the researchers to distinguish the contours of digital academic discourses. The implications support suggestions to broaden the trajectories of expertise and communication, including issues of culture and identity, trust, and the relevance of science. It is argued that scientists’ embrace of new media channels will refine some articulations of the mediatization processes, and these findings support recent suggestions that mediatization could also be conceptualized as a strategic resource
Rebuilding Trust in Broken Systems? Populist Party Success and Citizens’ Trust in Democratic Institutions
Get PDFWhat effect does the recent rise of populist parties harnessing an anti-system rhetoric have on political trust? Will citizens become disenchanted with and lose trust in the political system, or could populist party success even stimulate a growth of political trust? Arguing that populist parties may well be conceived as a corrective force giving voice to and addressing citizen concerns about the established political system, this contribution hypothesizes that populist party success will increase political trust among the general public, especially in countries lacking democratic quality, with weak corruption control, and meagre government performance. Empirically, it combines ParlGov data with survey data from the European Social Survey (2002–2016) as well as aggregate data from the Varieties-of-Democracy project and the World Development Indicators to investigate how political trust has changed in relation to the growing success of populist parties and how democratic quality, corruption control, and government performance have moderated this relationship in 23 European democracies. Its main findings indicate that, at least in the short run, political trust increases rather than decreases following populist party success and that this increase in trust is most pronounced in political systems that lack democratic quality, struggle with corruption, and deliver only meager government performance
Solidarity in the Public Sphere: A Discourse Network Analysis of German Newspapers (2008–2017)
Get PDFMultiple crises in the EU have sparked a renaissance of the concept of solidarity. However, discursive approaches to solidarity and the public understanding of solidarity have hardly received scholarly attention. Empirical research on solidarity is rather centered on welfare institutions as well as on individual attitudes and behavior. To shed new light on solidarity in public discourse, we investigate in which policy fields the term is most often used, which actors refer to it and how different types of solidarity are covered in the German public discourse. We investigate the coverage of solidarity in four German newspapers (Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Tageszeitung) from 2008 to 2017. By deploying the discourse network methodology with 306 claims in 230 news articles, we analyze the co-occurrence of actors and issues over time. Our results indicate a varying set of issues in which solidarity occurs, a rather stable actor visibility, across time and a context-dependent use of different types of solidarity. Government actors, civil society actors as well as citizens drive the solidarity discourse showing that institutional as well as non-institutional actors make use of solidarity in their public actions regarding political protest, financial issues and migration. The study provides novel insights into the interdependence of actor and issue visibility and sheds new light on solidarity in media discourses
Incumbents’ Strategies in Media Coverage: A Case of the Czech Coal Policy
Get PDFTransitioning to a decarbonized economy is a crucial part of climate change mitigation, with the phasing-out of coal, as the most significant source of carbon dioxide emissions, being the centerpiece of this effort. In the European context, the increasing pressures exerted especially on the basis of the European Union’s energy and climate policy, coupled with the inherent uncertainty of the transition process, encourage various struggles among the involved policy actors over the setting of specific transition pathways. One site of such contestation is media discourse, which may facilitate or limit policy change through agenda-setting, framing, and other processes. Importantly, discursive struggles also include industry incumbents, who have a vested interest in preserving the existing sociotechnical regime. This article focuses on the position of incumbents in terms of their relationship with governing political parties and the discursive strategies they employ. It explores the policy debate on coal mining expansion which took place in 2015 in the Czech Republic, a post-communist country with a coal-dependent economy, a skeptical position on energy transition, and a powerful energy industry. The research employs discourse network analysis to examine a corpus compiled from daily newspapers and applies block modeling techniques to analyze patterns of relationships within and between actor groups. The results show that incumbents successfully prevented policy change in the direction of rapid coal phase-out by exploiting discourse alignment with governing parties and efficiently employing discursive strategies based primarily on securitization of socioeconomic issues
Housing and Ageing: Let’s Get Serious—“How Do You Plan for the Future while Addressing Immediate Chaos?”
Get PDFThis article presents findings from the Housing and Ageing programme conducted in 2018 that investigated how the housing sector can effectively plan for an ageing population. The project took a transdisciplinary approach to focus on new, critical insights into the process of decision making concerning housing and ageing across Scotland, England and Wales. A ‘Serious Game’ methodology was developed that explored over 200 policy maker, practitioner and service user perspectives. This was used as a framework to capture priorities, decisions, negotiations and processes that indicate how a ‘sense of place’ and ‘place belonging’ can influence the development of suitable housing for older people. Key housing provision challenges identified were tackling inequality, preserving autonomy, in(ter)dependence, empowerment and accessibility. Such challenges need consideration when strategically planning for the future. The findings recommend placing housing at the heart of service integration to support the co-production of decisions that emphasise the importance of working together across boundaries within social policy, service and stakeholder groups. A place-based approach can support the perception that we are all stakeholders in ageing
Home, Housing and Communities: Foundations for Inclusive Society
Get PDFThis issue of Social Inclusion explores the interconnected, but multi-faceted concepts of home, housing and communities as fundamental tenets of an inclusive society. Our editorial introduces our motivation for this topic, outlines the contributions to the collection and highlights some crosscutting themes, which emerge from the articles. The research presented was largely completed in advance of the full impact of the 2020 global coronavirus pandemic. In concluding the editorial, we reflect on the equal centrality of home, housing and communities to surviving the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis and encourage greater commitment to home and housing as a human right to mitigate social and economic inequality and underpin sustainable, inclusive settlements for the future
Social Support for Digital Inclusion: Towards a Typology of Social Support Patterns
Get PDFThis article contributes to a better understanding of patterns of social support in relation to digital inequalities. Based on an extensive qualitative study, the diversity of support networks and supports seeking patterns are unveiled. A typology of six patterns of help-seeking is presented and described: the support-deprived, the community-supported, the supported through substitution, the network-supported, the vicarious learners, and the self-supported. The article also critically engages with the often unnuanced academic literature on social support. The research and the typology reveal that the quality of support, as well as the availability of potential or actual support, is not only influenced by socio-economic factors. Rather, the strength of the relationship and the level of intimacy between individuals is an important predictor of support-seeking. As such, this article shows that mechanisms of in/exclusion are highly social, as they entail a diversity of formal and informal support-seeking patterns, which in turn have an important influence on the adoption and use of digital media. The article argues that understanding such mechanisms is rooted in reconciling micro-level interactions to macro-level patterns of inequalities. To show the specificity of social support within digital inequalities research, and to demarcate the concept from definitions of other academic disciplines, the concept of social support for digital inclusion is introduced. It is defined as the aid (emotional, instrumental, and informational) that an individual receives from his/her network in his/her use of digital technologies
(Re)Building Home and Community in the Social Housing Sector: Lessons from a South Australian Approach
Get PDFAustralia’s social housing sector is under great pressure. Actions to improve social housing sector capacity and responsiveness have occupied the minds and endeavours of many policy makers, practitioners and scholars for some time now. This article focusses on one approach to challenges within the sector recently adopted in a socio-economically disadvantaged area within Adelaide, South Australia: transfer of housing stock from the public to the community housing sector for capacity and community building purposes (the Better Places, Stronger Communities Public Housing Transfer Program). The discussion draws on evaluative research about this northern Adelaide program, which has a deliberate theoretical and practical foundation in community development and place-making as a means for promoting and strengthening social inclusion, complementing its tenancy management and asset growth focuses. Tenants and other stakeholders report valued outcomes from the program’s community development activities—the focus of this article—which have included the coproduction of new and necessary social and physical infrastructures to support community participation and engagement among (vulnerable) tenants and residents, confidence in the social landlord and greater feelings of safety and inclusion among tenants, underpinning an improving sense of home, community and place. Consideration of program outcomes and lessons reminds us of the importance of the ‘social’ in social housing and social landlords. The program provides a model for how social landlords can work with tenants and others to (re)build home and community in places impacted by structural disadvantage, dysfunction, or change. The article adds to the literature on the role of housing, in this case community housing, as a vehicle for place-making and promoting community development and social inclusion