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Thursday, November 10
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JOS10
Reporting Politics
PP 206
Transitions in News Coverage of British General Election Campaigns: All Change or More of the Same?
J. Stanyer
1
, J. Downey
2
, D. Deacon
1
, D. Wring
1
1
Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom
2
Loughborough, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom
This paper will provide a systematic investigation of the mainstream news media’s reporting of last seven British general election campaigns. The 2015
campaign was hailed by many as different from the previous campaigns in coverage terms. Some claimed the growing complexity of the current party
political environment had disrupted traditional patterns of partisanship of the UK press and challenged many of their‘king making’ambitions. Others noted
the introduction of televised leadership debates had put the broadcasters back at the epicentre of the election, and still others observed an increased ‘pres‑
identialisation’of news reporting. However, such claims have not tended to be supported by empirical evidence and there has been little research on how
election news coverage has changed over time. Too often research is temporally myopic failing to document actual changes in news coverage of elections.
This paper seeks to address this shortcoming. It provides a systematic audit of national media responses across seven election campaigns and providing
an invaluable understanding of changes in election reporting. The findings in this paper are based on a systematic quantitative content analysis of main‑
stream national news content for all election campaigns since 1992 conducted by Loughborough University. The content analysis has looked at the same
newspapers and broadcasters in each campaign. This data provides an unique resource which can be used to examine changes in news coverage over time,
and assess specific claims about changes in press partisanship, the impact of leadership debates on coverage and whether presidentialisation has increased.
This paper will focus on: (1) the extent to which coverage is focused on leaders; (2) identifying which issues dominated coverage and the extent to which
agenda varied across news organisations; (3) appraising media evaluations of political contenders, in particular emerging political forces such as UKIP; (4)
the extent to which mainstream media referred to, or relied upon, social and other on-line media in reporting the campaign.
PP 207
Politics in Focus in Shared News Findings from Sweden 2014–2016
M. Karlsson
1
, I. Wadbring
2
, S. Ödmark
3
1
Karlstad University, Department of Geography- Media and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden
2
Nordicom, Gothenburg, Sweden
3
Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden
Sharing has emerged as a keyword in the contemporary media landscape in the last decade (John, 2013). For journalism and the news industry, the focus
of our study, sharing is viewed as both a threat and possibility as it enables greater reach but also less control. So far empirical studies on sharing are limited
to study to what extent news media websites enables sharing (Hille & Bakker, 2013; Ju, Jeong, & Chyi, 2014), what makes health news spread (Kim, 2015),
if sharing is an established practice amongst news users (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2015), who share news (Wadbring & Ödmark, 2015), or showing
that users often get news from social networks (Hermida, Fletcher, Korell, & Logan, 2012). However, so far research has not to a great extent been able to
show what kind of news stories that goes viral and if it change over time. There is also a lack of methodological discussions about how to measure shared
news and what results different approaches provide. The purpose of this study is to simultaneously inform these both areas. Methodologically the analysis
draws from two Swedish studies using content analysis. The first study spans over 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively, in order to compare how viral news
has developed over time. The second study, a large data set from 2014, is used in order to compare if different approaches provide similar results or not
for answering the question about what news stories are most shared. The material used in the first study (2014–2016) derives from from the newsletter
socialanyheter.se. Every day socialanyheter.se collects the most interacted news items in social media, and sends out a newsletter to subscribers with links
to the specific news items. Our analysis is based on the single most interacted news item every day the first five months respectively year, 150 news items
a year. The second study from 2014, is a classical quantitative content analysis of 3000 online news items, where it is possible to see if the news are shared
or not, and also to what extent they are shared. Preliminary findings suggest that the news stories going viral have changed over time, but also that some
traits are the same. Content wise, the most shared news all three years is about politics, but after the introduction of viral sites in the autumn 2014, the most
shared news partly shifted focus. The methodological test shows that the both data sets from 2014, collected with different methods, show similar results.
Politics, written in an emotional and interpretative way, is the most shared content. Implications for journalism are discussed.
PP 208
Links Between Media Actors and Political Actors in a Small Community – Qualitative Case Studies
S. Mecfal
1
1
Univeristy of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology- Institute of Sociology- Department of Social Research Methods and Techniques, Lodz, Poland
When analyzing the local media in Poland a researcher has to remember that local media developed only after the transition of the political system in 1989.
Before that time local media were very poorly developed. There were bulletins published by the factories but local news media were almost nonexistent.
The data presented by Chorązki (1999, p.60–67) show that the number of journals published rose from 370–390 in January 1989, to 2500 by 1999. My
interest in the relationship between local media (as defined e.g. in Gierula, 2005; Kowalczyk, 2003) and social actors resulted in a ‘multiple case study’
(Stake, 2010), so a set of several instrumental case studies (where a researcher is not interested in a case per se, but uses a case to explain different processes
that are included in the research questions), with the main goal of exploring the complexity of these relationships, and identifying the level of involvement
of local journalists and local media owners in these networks. This study describes such networks from after the local elections in 2010 to the local elections
in 2014, although some historical background facts are also used. In this paper I would like to focus on the links between media actors and the political ac‑
tors. I will show the dynamics of the relations and I will use the framework of symmetrical and non-symmetrical links (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2004) to interpret