Managing Vietnamese newsrooms: the role of internal communication

There have been many studies on news production but little has been found about newsroom efficiency despite the fact that this is journalists’ main concern. The very few (mostly foreign) researchers who study Vietnamese media usually look at them from policy making and political-social perspectives, and with an outsider’s eye. They have little physical access, if any, to the media houses, which surely limits their view. Their approach implicitly over-emphasizes the influence of political forces and neglects the media’s own dynamics. This research takes a different approach: from insiders’ point of view. Using two daily newspapers as case studies, this multi-disciplinary ethnographic research seeks to understand the strategies Vietnamese news media employ to cope with the subsidy cuts and increasing competition while still under close political control. A particular focus is on the newsroom operational strategies to improve efficiency. It is found that organizational structure and culture, work climate, motivation and employee satisfaction, leadership and management styles, personnel policies (task requirements vs personal abilities and skills), systems/policies and procedures, and most importantly, communication are the factors that affect the newsroom efficiency, as well as newsroom strategy implementation and results.

Mem Tri: Memory Forensics Triage Tool

This work explores the development of MemTri. A memory forensics triage tool that can assess the likelihood of criminal activity in a memory image, based on evidence data artefacts generated by several applications. Fictitious illegal suspect activity scenarios were performed on virtual machines to generate 60 test memory images for input into MemTri. Four categories of applications (i.e. Internet Browsers, Instant Messengers, FTP Client and Document Processors) are examined for data artefacts located through the use of regular expressions. These identified data artefacts are then analysed using a Bayesian Network, to assess the likelihood that a seized memory image contained evidence of illegal activity. Currently, MemTri is under development and this paper introduces only the basic concept as well as the components that the application is built on. A complete description of MemTri coupled with extensive experimental results is expected to be published in the first semester of 2017.