Thursday 23 March 2017 – lunchtime seminar with Dr Lily Canter (Journalism, SHU)
Speaker: Dr Lily Canter (Journalism, SHU)
Title: Understanding “what is news?” on digital born platforms
Dr Lily Canter is a hybrid academic-practitioner who teaches on the BA and MA Journalism courses at SHU. Her research interests include digital journalism, social media, journalism education and local media. Lily is also Subject Group Leader for Journalism and a freelance family and consumer journalist who writes for The Guardian and The Telegraph.
The question “what is news?” has been a topic of scholarly examination since Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge developed their news values taxonomy in the 1960s (1965). Studies through the decades have revised the news values list, informing both journalism education and wider debates on the news selection process and subjectivity of journalists.
The most influential and contemporary research to date has been that of Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill (2001) whose content analysis of print newspapers in 2001 is one of the most widely cited articles in Journalism Studies. In 2016 Harcup and O’Neill (2016) revisited their earlier study to create a revised set of contemporary news values in light of the technological challenges faced by journalists today. However this study was still confined to the content of print newspapers and included only a cursory exploration of the most frequently shared stories on Facebook and Twitter.
To date there has been limited research on digital born news websites – platforms that only exist online such as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Vice News. Instead studies tend to focus on the websites of legacy print and broadcast media which have long existed offline.
This presentation will outline the research to date and why the rapidly changing media landscape warrants further research in this field. It will also explore methodologies for conducting content analysis on live news websites and the challenges this poses for researchers.
1.00PM – 2.00PM
Thursday 23 March 2017
CANTOR 9129
See here for details of other seminars in the series.
All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.