Radio leaks: Presenting and contesting leaks in radio news broadcasts

his paper analyzes the discursive construction and contestation of ‘leaked’ stories in news broadcast programmes. Drawing on a sample of BBC Radio 4 news programmes recorded between May and June 2000, we analyze four items of news presented as leaks about upcoming events. We suggest that these examples highlight the leaking of information as a valuable newsworthy commodity in that it not only allows news organizations to report what is going to be news before it happens but also enables speculative discourse as to the meaning of the event yet to happen. However, in order for a story to be accepted as a leak it must be seen to fulfil a number of criteria. With this in mind, we identify four features accompanying the introduction of the news items as leaks in the process of authentification: secrecy, authorship/ownership and future orientation. The article then discusses how these features are used when contesting the status of a news story as a leak, and how temporal play contributes to downgrading the content of the leak and, hence, its relevance, immediacy and newsworthiness.

Making media work in space: An interdisciplinary perspective on media and communication requirements for current and future space communities

As humans expand into space communities will form. These have already begun to form in small ways, such as long-duration missions on the International Space Station and the space shuttle, and small-scale tourist excursions into space. Social, behavioural and communications data emerging from such existing communities in space suggest that the physically-bounded, work-oriented and traditionally male-dominated nature of these extremely remote groups present specific problems for the resident astronauts, groups of them viewed as ‘communities’, and their associated groups who remain on Earth, including mission controllers, management and astronauts’ families. Notionally feminine group attributes such as adaptive competence, social adaptation skills and social sensitivity will be crucial to the viability of space communities and in the absence of gender equity, ‘staying in touch’ by means of ‘news from home’ becomes more important than ever. A template of news and media forms and technologies is suggested to service those needs and enhance the social viability of future terraforming activities.

Media, 'Madness' and Ethical Journalism

This article analyses the way newspapers and journalists sometimes fail to acknowledge and resolve some of the contentious ethical dilemmas associated with reporting news. Its focus is on not exploiting and vilifying the vulnerable, especially people with mental illness, through sensationalism and inaccurate and imprecise use of medical terminology such as "psycho ". "schizo" or "lunatic ". Because ethics is central to our understanding of professionalism, this article uses professions and professionalism as benchmarks aginst which to analyse and critique how journalists and newspapers define and report news.Sometimes journalists fail the test of good ethical practice in terms of negative. outdated and inaccurate expressions they use in the news stories they report. Likewise, regulators of news industry standards appear not to recognize and sanction such reporting. The apparent inability to resolve these ethical dilemmas creates a context conducive to tolerance for, not acceptance of. unethical news reporting.

The relationship between media reporting of suicide and actual suicide in Australia

This study aimed to determine whether media items about suicide were associated with differential increases in actual suicides. Data were available on 4635 suicide-related items appearing in Australian newspapers and on radio and television news and current affairs shows between March 2000 and February 2001. These data were combined with national data on completed suicides occurring during the same period, by a process that involved identifying the date and geographical reach of the media items and determining the number of suicides occurring in the same location in selected weeks pre- and post-item. Regression analyses were conducted to determine whether the likelihood of an increase in post-item suicides could be explained by particular item characteristics. We found that 39% of media items were followed by an increase in mate suicides, and 31% by an increase in female suicides. Media items were more likely to be associated with increases in both male and female suicides if they occurred in the context of multiple other reports on suicide (versus occurring in isolation), if they were broadcast on television (versus other media), and if they were about completed suicide (versus attempted suicide or suicidal ideation). Different item content appeared to be influential for males and females, with an increase in male suicides being associated with items about an individual's experience of suicide and opinion pieces, and an increase in female suicides being associated with items about mass- or murder-suicide. Item prominence and quality were not differentially associated with increases in male or female suicides. Further research on this topic is required, but in the meantime there is a need to remain vigilant about how suicide news is reported. Mental health professionals and suicide experts should collaborate with media professionals to try to balance 'public interest' against the risk of harm. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Medicalisation and beyond: the social construction of insomnia and snoring in the news

What role do the media play in the medicalization of sleep problems? This article, based on a British Academy funded project, uses qualitative textual analysis to examine representations of insomnia and snoring in a large representative sample of newspaper articles taken from the UK national press from the mid-1980s to the present day. Constructed as ‘common problems’ in the population at large, insomnia and snoring we show are differentially located in terms of medicalizing—healthicizing discourses and debates. Our findings also suggest important differences in the gendered construction of these problems and in terms of tabloid and ‘broadsheet’ newspaper coverage of these issues. Newspaper constructions of sleep, it is concluded, are complex, depending on both the ‘problem’ and the paper in question.

Is competition really bad news for cooperatives? Some empirical evidence for Italian producers' cooperatives

In this paper, we analyse the nature of the relationship between market power and technical efficiency for producers' cooperatives. More specifically we test two hypotheses: first, we evaluate the extent to which increasing market pressure may help producers' cooperatives to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits; second, we test whether higher technical efficiency induces producers' cooperatives to have a larger market share. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the Wine Production and Processing sector, using both frontier analysis and dynamic panel techniques. The results support the hypothesis that increasing market pressure can affect positively the cooperativeś efficiency, while gains in technical efficiency do not seem to have any impact on the cooperatives' market share. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Political discourse, media and translation

This volume addresses the role played by translation in international political communication and news reporting and brings to light the usually invisible link between politics, media, and translation. The contributors explore the interrelationship between media in the widest sense and translation, with a focus on politics texts, institutional contexts, and translation policies. These topics are explored from a Translation Studies perspective, thus bringing a new disciplinary view to the investigation of political discourse and the language of the media. The first part of the volume focuses on textual analysis, investigating transformations that occur in translation processes, and the second part examines institutional contexts and institutional policies and their effects on translation production and reception.

Pushing the Quality Level in Networked News Business: Semantic-Based Content Retrieval and Composition in International News Publishing

Electronic publishing exploits numerous possibilities to present or exchange information and to communicate via most current media like the Internet. By utilizing modern Web technologies like Web Services, loosely coupled services, and peer-to-peer networks we describe the integration of an intelligent business news presentation and distribution network. Employing semantics technologies enables the coupling of multinational and multilingual business news data on a scalable international level and thus introduce a service quality that is not achieved by alternative technologies in the news distribution area so far. Architecturally, we identified the loose coupling of existing services as the most feasible way to address multinational and multilingual news presentation and distribution networks. Furthermore we semantically enrich multinational news contents by relating them using AI techniques like the Vector Space Model. Summarizing our experiences we describe the technical integration of semantics and communication technologies in order to create a modern international news network.

Energy security in the news:North/South perspectives

Analysis of newspaper reporting on the topic of energy security in eight countries – four from the global North (France, Germany, the UK, and the United States) and four from the global South (China, India, Brazil, and South Africa) – produces no support for the thesis that news is disseminated from core countries to the periphery and semi-periphery. There is an important difference between China and the other three fast-developing countries and a highly asymmetric flow of news not aligned to old core-periphery boundaries. In general, energy security is mainly covered in trade and business outlets and less in newspapers with mass circulation, indicating that the topic is still an elite concern. In some instances, attention has surged at the same time in different countries. But very few of these instances show a homogenous coverage across countries. Despite increasingly globalised media, news is created and consumed at a national level.

A seismic shift? An evaluation of the impact of new media on perceptions of freedom of expression and privacy

New media platforms have changed the media landscape forever, as they have altered our perceptions of the limits of communication, and reception of information. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp enable individuals to circumvent the traditional mass media, converging audience and producer to create millions of ‘citizen journalists’. This new breed of journalist uses these platforms as a way of, not only receiving news, but of instantaneously, and often spontaneously, expressing opinions and venting and sharing emotions, thoughts and feelings. They are liberated from cultural and physical restraints, such as time, space and location, and they are not constrained by factors that impact upon the traditional media, such as editorial control, owner or political bias or the pressures of generating commercial revenue. A consequence of the way in which these platforms have become ingrained within our social culture is that habits, conventions and social norms, that were once informal and transitory manifestations of social life, are now infused within their use. What were casual and ephemeral actions and/or acts of expression, such as conversing with friends or colleagues or swapping/displaying pictures, or exchanging thoughts that were once kept private, or maybe shared with a select few, have now become formalised and potentially permanent, on view for the world to see. Incidentally, ‘traditional’ journalists and media outlets are also utilising new media, as it allows them to react, and disseminate news, instantaneously, within a hyper-competitive marketplace. However, in a world where we are saturated, not only by citizen journalists, but by traditional media outlets, offering access to news and opinion twenty-four hours a day, via multiple new media platforms, there is increased pressure to ‘break’ news fast and first. This paper will argue that new media, and the culture and environment it has created, for citizen journalists, traditional journalists and the media generally, has altered our perceptions of the limits and boundaries of freedom of expression dramatically, and that the corollary to this seismic shift is the impact on the notion of privacy and private life. Consequently, this paper will examine what a reasonable expectation of privacy may now mean, in a new media world.