How does online news curate linked sources? A content analysis of three online news media

Abstract

This article examines journalists’ curatorial practices with regard to linked and embedded sources on three news media platforms: the online version of a legacy news medium, a native online explanatory news medium, and an online citizen news medium. Our goal is to explore the curatorial practices in online journalism, and the continuity and changes in journalistic gatekeeping in the online environment. Our results demonstrate that established journalistic traditions are still prevalent in online news. Meanwhile, links to digital archives are widely used to contextualize news subjects. Explanatory journalism and citizen journalism do exhibit characteristics of what Herbert Gans calls ‘multiperspectival’ news, which covers a wider variety of social institutions. We discuss differences in the prevalence of the curatorial treatments of various types of linked sources in relation to journalists’ views of their roles, and the online news media’s organizational and technological natures.

Keywords

Curation digital journalism gatekeeping multiperspectival journalism online news

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arant

Meyer

(1998) Public journalism and traditional journalism: A shift in values? Journal of Mass Media Ethics 13: 205–218.

Bantz

(1990) Organizational communication, media industries, and mass communication. In: Anderson

(ed.) Communication Yearbook. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, pp. 502–510.

Bardoel

Deuze

(2001) ‘Network journalism’: Converging competencies of old and new media professionals. Australian Journalism Review 23: 91–103.

Barnhurst

(2011) The problem of modern time in American journalism 1. KronoScope 11: 98–123.

Barnhurst

(2013) Newspapers experiment online: Story content after a decade on the web. Journalism 14: 3–21.

Bercovici

(2014) Why do so many journalists hate Vox? Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/05/12/why-do-so-many-journalists-hate-vox/

Bhargava

(2009) Manifesto for the content curator: The next big social media job of the future? Available at: http://www.rohitbhargava.com/2009/09/manifesto-for-the-content-curator-the-next-big-social-media-job-of-the-future.html

Brabham

(2008) Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases. Convergence 14: 75–90.

Bruno

(2011) Tweet First, Verify Later? How Real-time Information is Changing the Coverage of Worldwide Crisis Events (Reuters Institute fellowship paper). Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

10.

Bruns

(2005) Gatewatching: Collaborative Online New Production. New York: Peter Lang.

11.

Bruns

(2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

12.

Chambers

(2006) Defining the role of the curator. In: Williams

Hawks

(eds) Museum Studies: Perspectives and Innovations. Washington, DC: Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, pp. 47–66.

13.

Chang

Southwell

Lee

. (2012) Jurisdictional protectionism in online news: American journalists and their perceptions of hyperlinks. New Media & Society 14: 684–700.

14.

Coddington

(2014) This week in review: Parsing Ezra Klein’s new project, and a mobile news aggregation rush. Available at: http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/01/this-week-in-review-parsing-ezra-kleins-new-project-and-a-mobile-news-aggregation-rush/

15.

Columbia University (1984) Office of Public Information Press Release. New York, NY: Columbia University.

16.

Corrêa

Bertocchi

(2012) The cybercultural scene in contemporary journalism: Semantic web, algorithms, applications and curation. MATRIZes 2012: 123–144.

17.

De Maeyer

(2012) The journalistic hyperlink: Prescriptive discourses about linking in online news. Journalism Practice 6: 692–701.

18.

De Maeyer

Holton

(2015) Why linking matters: A metajournalistic discourse analysis. Journalism. DOI: 10.1177/1464884915579330.

19.

Denham

(2014) Intermedia attribute agenda setting in the New York Times: The case of animal abuse in US horse racing. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 91: 17–37.

20.

Dimitrova

(2006) Episodic frames dominate early coverage of Iraq War in the NYTimes.com. Newspaper Research Journal 27: 79–83.

21.

Duh

Hirao

Kimura

. (2012) Creating stories: Social curation of Twitter messages. In: The sixth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media. Dublin, 4–7 June. Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 447–450.

22.

e Silva

(2016) Beyond links: Understanding meaning and control in political blogs. New Media & Society 18: 82–98.

23.

Fink

Schudson

(2014) The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s–2000s. Journalism 15: 3–20.

24.

Forde

(2007) Discovering the explanatory report in American newspapers. Journalism Practice 1: 227–244.

25.

Gandy

(1982) Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.

26.

Gans

(1979) Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

27.

Gans

(2011) Multiperspectival news revisited: Journalism and representative democracy. Journalism 12: 3–13.

28.

Gillespie

(2014) ‘FiveThirtyEight’, ‘The Upshot’ and Vox bet big on explanatory journalism. Available at: http://mashable.com/2014/03/25/data-journalism/

29.

Golan

(2006) Inter-media agenda setting and global news coverage: Assessing the influence of the New York Times on three network television evening news programs. Journalism Studies 7: 323–333.

30.

Guerrini

(2013) Newsroom Curators & Independent Storytellers: Content Curation as a New Form of Journalism. Oxford, UK: University of Oxford.

31.

Herman

Chomsky

(2008) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Random House.

32.

Herther

(2012) Content curation: Quality judgment and the future of media and web search. Searcher 20: 30–41.

33.

Jacobson

(2012) Transcoding the news: An investigation into multimedia journalism published on nytimes.com 2000–2008. New Media & Society 14: 867–885.

34.

Johnson

Buchanan

Jordan

(2014) Blog topic and word frequency: What differentiates between high and low powered blogs? Psychology of Popular Media Culture 3: 154–163.

35.

Johnstone

Slawski

Bowman

(1976) The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

36.

Leccese

(2009) Online information sources of political blogs. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86: 578–593.

37.

Liu

(2010a) Distinguishing how elite newspapers and A-list blogs cover crises: Insights for managing crises online. Public Relations Review 36: 28–34.

38.

Liu

(2010b) Trends in distributed curatorial technology to manage data deluge in a networked world. The European Journal for the Informatics Professional 11: 18–24.

39.

Nasr

(2014) Bridge over troubled waters: A content analysis of television advertisements in Lebanon. Global Media Journal: Mediterranean Edition 9: 1–12.

40.

Neuendorf

(2002) The Content Analysis Guidebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

41.

Nip

(2006) Exploring the second phase of public journalism. Journalism Studies 7: 212–236.

42.

Orchingwa

(2014) ‘PriSchool’: Overcoming mass-incarceration with a new design. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/uzoma-orchingwa/prischool-overcoming-mass_b_5762672.html

43.

Rosenbaum

(2011) Curation, community and the future of news. Available at: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102626/Curation-Community-and-the-Future-of-News.aspx

44.

Russell

(2014) The news agenda online: Hyperlinks on prestige traditional media and internet-only websites. In: Presented at AEJMC annual conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 6–9 August.

45.

Schudson

(1981) Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books.

46.

Shoemaker

(1991) Gatekeeping. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

47.

Shoemaker

Vos

(2009) Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge.

48.

Sigal

(1973) Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of News-making. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company.

49.

Singer

(1998) Online journalists: Foundations for research into their changing roles. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4.

50.

Singer

(2005) The political j-blogger ‘normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices. Journalism 6: 173–198.

51.

Sobieraj

Berry

(2011) From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication 28: 19–41.

52.

Spiggle

(1986) Measuring social values: A content analysis of Sunday comics and underground comix. Journal of Consumer Research 13: 100–113.

53.

Stanoevska-Slabeva

Sacco

Giardina

(2012) Content curation: A new form of gatewatching for social media? In: Presented at international symposium on online journalism, Austin, TX, 5 April.

54.

Taylor-Miesle

(2014) An endangered species on the ballot in Maine. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-taylormiesle/an-endangered-species-on_b_5923046.html

55.

Thompson

(2013) Are content curators the new editors? EContent, 3 June, pp. 12–17.

56.

Thorson

Wells

(2016) Curated flows: A framework for mapping media exposure in the digital age. Communication Theory 26: 309–328.

57.

Tuchman

(1972) Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity. American Journal of Sociology 77: 660–679.

58.

Van Leuven

Heinrich

Deprez

(2015) Foreign reporting and sourcing practices in the network sphere: A quantitative content analysis of the Arab Spring in Belgian news media. New Media & Society 17: 573–591.

59.

Voakes

(1999) Civic duties: Newspaper journalists’ views on public journalism. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76: 756–774.

60.

Vos

Heinderyckx

(2015) Gatekeeping in Transition. New York: Routledge.

61.

Voxmedia.com (2014) Vox | vox media. Available at: http://www.vox.com/2014/3/30/5555690/welcome-to-vox

62.

Williams

Carpini

MXD

(2004) Monica and Bill all the time and everywhere: The collapse of gatekeeping and agenda setting in the new media environment. American Behavioral Scientist 47: 1208–1230.