Alternative News Sources as 'Collaboratory' Journalism. A case study of Helsingin Sanomat and its relation with the Youth Voice Editorial Board

The new paradigm of connectedness and empowerment brought by the interactivity feature of the Web 2.0 has been challenging the traditional centralized performance of mainstream media. The corporation has been able to survive the strong winds by transforming itself into a global multimedia business network embedded in the network society. By establishing networks, e.g. networks of production and distribution, the global multimedia business network has been able to sight potential solutions by opening the doors to innovation in a decentralized and flexible manner. Under this emerging context of re-organization, traditional practices like sourcing need to be re- explained and that is precisely what this thesis attempts to tackle. Based on ICT and on the network society, the study seeks to explain within the Finnish context the particular case of Helsingin Sanomat (HS) and its relations with the youth news agency, Youth Voice Editorial Board (NÄT). In that sense, the study can be regarded as an explanatory embedded single case study, where HS is the principal unit of analysis and NÄT its embedded unit of analysis. The thesis was able to reach explanations through interrelated steps. First, it determined the role of ICT in HS’s sourcing practices. Then it mapped an overview of the HS’s sourcing relations and provided a context in which NÄT was located. And finally, it established conceptualized institutional relational data between HS and NÄT for their posterior measurement through social network analysis. The data set was collected via qualitative interviews addressed to online and offline editors of HS as well as interviews addressed to NÄT’s personnel. The study concluded that ICT’s interactivity and User Generated Content (UGC) are not sourcing tools as such but mechanism used by HS for getting ideas that could turn into potential news stories. However, when it comes to visual communication, some exemptions were found. The lack of official sources amidst the immediacy leads HS to rely on ICT’s interaction and UGC. More than meets the eye, ICT’s input into the sourcing practice may be more noticeable if the interaction and UGC is well organized and coordinated into proper and innovative networks of alternative content collaboration. Currently, HS performs this sourcing practice via two projects that differ, precisely, by the mode they are coordinated. The first project found, Omakaupunki, is coordinated internally by Sanoma Group’s owned media houses HS, Vartti and Metro. The second project found is coordinated externally. The external alternative sourcing network, as it was labeled, consists of three actors, namely HS, NÄT (professionals in charge) and the youth. This network is a balanced and complete triad in which the actors connect themselves in relations of feedback, recognition, creativity and filtering. However, as innovation is approached very reluctantly, this content collaboration is a laboratory of experiments; a ‘COLLABORATORY’.

Playing Games on Sets and Models

The most prominent objective of the thesis is the development of the generalized descriptive set theory, as we call it. There, we study the space of all functions from a fixed uncountable cardinal to itself, or to a finite set of size two. These correspond to generalized notions of the universal Baire space (functions from natural numbers to themselves with the product topology) and the Cantor space (functions from natural numbers to the {0,1}-set) respectively. We generalize the notion of Borel sets in three different ways and study the corresponding Borel structures with the aims of generalizing classical theorems of descriptive set theory or providing counter examples. In particular we are interested in equivalence relations on these spaces and their Borel reducibility to each other. The last chapter shows, using game-theoretic techniques, that the order of Borel equivalence relations under Borel reduciblity has very high complexity. The techniques in the above described set theoretical side of the thesis include forcing, general topological notions such as meager sets and combinatorial games of infinite length. By coding uncountable models to functions, we are able to apply the understanding of the generalized descriptive set theory to the model theory of uncountable models. The links between the theorems of model theory (including Shelah's classification theory) and the theorems in pure set theory are provided using game theoretic techniques from Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games in model theory to cub-games in set theory. The bottom line of the research declairs that the descriptive (set theoretic) complexity of an isomorphism relation of a first-order definable model class goes in synch with the stability theoretical complexity of the corresponding first-order theory. The first chapter of the thesis has slightly different focus and is purely concerned with a certain modification of the well known Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games. There we (me and my supervisor Tapani Hyttinen) answer some natural questions about that game mainly concerning determinacy and its relation to the standard EF-game