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This book brings together a diverse, international array of contributors to explore the topics of news "quality" in the online age and the relationships between news organizations and enormously influential digital platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Covering topics ranging from internet incivility, crowdsourcing, and YouTube politics to regulations, algorithms, and AI, this book draws the key distinction between the news that facilitates democracy and news that undermines it. For students and scholars as well as journalists, policymakers, and media commentators, this important work engages a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives to define the key concept of "quality" in the news media.
List of contents
PART 1: FOUNDATIONS
- Introduction
- Communication Technology and Threats to Democracy: We the People are (also) the Problem
PART 2: MEASUREMENT APPROACHES TO NEWS QUALITY
3. Social Media Metrics and News Quality
4. Is that News for Me? Defining News-ness by Platform and Topic
5. User Comments as News Quality: Examining Incivility in Comments on Perceptions of News Quality
6. Beyond the "Trust" Survey: Measuring Media Attitudes through Observation
PART 3: ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS AND NEWS QUALITY
7. All the News that's Fit to Tweet: Sociotechnical Local News Distribution from the New York Times to Twitter
8. Out of Control? Using Interactive Testing to Understand User Agency in News Recommendation Systems
9. Gaming AI: Algorithmic Journalism in Nigeria
10. Editorial Values for News Recommenders: Translating Principles to Engineering
PART 4: NEWS QUALITY, GOVERNMENT, AND MEDIA POLICY
11. How Australia's Competition Regulator is Supporting News, but not Quality
12. Government Interventions into News Quality
13. Conclusion
About the author
Regina G. Lawrence is Research Director of the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, and editor of the journal
Political Communication. Dr. Lawrence's books include
When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press, 2007, with W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston),
Hillary Clinton's Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009, with Melody Rose); and
The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality (University of California Press, 2000).
Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is the author/editor of seven books, including, most recently,
Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Summary
For scholars, journalists, policymakers, and media commentators, this book engages multiple methodological and theoretical perspectives to define the key concept of "quality" in the news media.
Report
Praise for News Quality in the Digital Age
The book offers a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of news quality being delivered through various communication channels. With chapters ranging from computation science to a more political theory-oriented perspective, this project offers a lot of ways to introduce students to the vital issue of assessing the quality of news that is being produced these days for public consumption.
Steven Farnsworth, University of Mary Washington
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of journalism. While many are exploring how to limit disinformation online, this group of scholars is one of the first to consider fully the crucial question of how to define quality news and increase its dissemination. The text also explores the relationship between news quality and algorithms, how artificial intelligence is affecting news production and emerging public policy efforts with the potential to shore up a struggling journalism ecosystem. Lawrence and Napoli have pulled together a stellar team of researchers pushing discussions of journalism in a digital age in a new direction.
Deborah Rae Wenger, University of Mississippi
