The New Yellow Journalism: Examining the Algorithmic Turn in News Organizations’ Social Media Information Practice through the Lens of Cultural Time Orientation

August 13, 2018 at 06:47PM Link Library-Generated RSS Feed The New Yellow Journalism: Examining the Algorithmic Turn in News Organizations' Social Media Information Practice through the Lens of Cultural Time Orientation

Ascher, Diana.
University of California, Los Angeles, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017. 10621917.

To address the complex challenges posed by increasingly fast information exchange in social media networks and declining advertising revenue in the digital era, news organizations are turning to software to automate online engagement. To date, there has been little study of whether algorithmic social media solutions used by news organizations are able to replicate the nuances of culturally informed human judgment. Using a novel combination of the critical incident technique, network analysis, and a new interpretive method—the Time Analytic Framework for Information Practice—this dissertation explores the effects of cultural time orientation on the social media activity of three culturally distinct news organizations before and after automation. The present study investigates how cultural time orientation may exacerbate or mitigate the effects of the algorithmic turn on news organization information practice by examining cases in which tweet prioritization appears to have violated reader expectations. Findings suggest that the three methods employed by the news organizations to automate the information practice previously conducted by social media managers reflect the news organizations’ cultural time orientations. Further, case studies of persistent tweets in each social media network reveal the emergence of a new form of yellow journalism—algorithmic sensationalism—arising from information practices that disproportionately amplify inflammatory content and lack a mechanism for applying timely human judgment.

Indexing (details)

Subject

Journalism;
Information science;
Artificial intelligence

Classification

0391: Journalism
0723: Information science
0800: Artificial intelligence

Identifier / keyword

Communication and the arts; Applied sciences; Culture; Data; Information; Network analysis; News; Time

Title

The New Yellow Journalism: Examining the Algorithmic Turn in News Organizations' Social Media Information Practice through the Lens of Cultural Time Orientation

Source

DAI-A 79/02(E), Dissertation Abstracts International

Place of publication

Ann Arbor

Country of publication

United States

Advisor

Lievrouw, Leah A.

Committee member

Borgman, Christine L.; Furner, Jonathan; Rice, Ronald E.

University/institution

University of California, Los Angeles

Department

Information Studies

University location

United States -- California

Source type

Dissertations & Theses

Document type

Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number

10621917

ProQuest document ID

1958949240

Copyright

Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.

Document URL

http://bit.ly/2w7tbHl