Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exaggerations And Caveats In Press Releases And Health-Related Science News, Petroc Sumner, Solveiga Vivian Griffiths, Jacky Boivin, Andrew Williams, Lewis Bott, Rachel Adams, Christos Venetis, Leanne Whelan, Bethan Hughes, Christopher D. Chambers

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Background: Exaggerated or simplistic news is often blamed for adversely influencing public health. However, recent findings suggested many exaggerations were already present in university press releases, which scientists approve. Surprisingly, these exaggerations were not associated with more news coverage. Here we test whether these two controversial results also arise in press releases from prominent science and medical journals. We then investigate the influence of mitigating caveats in press releases, to test assumptions that caveats harm news interest or are ignored.

Methods and Findings Using: quantitative content analysis, we analyzed press releases (N = 534) on biomedical and health-related science issued …

The Incorporation Of Transformative Consumer Research Principles Within The 'Cancer Good News' Social Marketing Project: A Case Study, Lyn Phillipson, Julie Hall, Leissa Pitts

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Abstract presented at the World Social Marketing Conference, 19-21 April 2015, Sydney, Australia

Why Do People Access News With Mobile Devices? Exploring The Role Of Suitability Perception And Motives On Mobile News Use, Hongjin Shim, Kyung Han You, Jeong Kyu Lee, Eun Go

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Using self-reported survey data (N = 281), the present study explores the structural relationships among mobile users' perceptions of the suitability of two types of mobile news (political feature news and entertainment news), users' motivations for mobile news usage, and their behavioral patterns. Our findings show that two types of perceived suitability for mobile news, particularly for political feature news, are strongly associated with all dimensions of motivations for mobile news usage. Furthermore, as predicted, our findings show that the information-seeking motive is the very factor that determines mobile news usage. The results also reveal that the accessibility motive mediates …

Reaching 'An Audience That You Would Never Dream Of Speaking To': Influential Public Health Researchers' Views On The Role Of News Media In Influencing Policy And Public Understanding, Simon Chapman, Abby Haynes, Gemma Derrick, Heidi Sturk, Wayne Hall, Alexis B. St George

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

While governments and academic institutions urge researchers to engage with news media, traditional academic values of public disengagement have inhibited many from giving high priority to media activity. In this interview-based study, the authors report on the views about news media engagement and strategies used by 36 peer-voted leading Australian public health researchers in 6 fields. The authors consider their views about the role and importance of media in influencing policy, their reflections on effective or ineffective media communicators, and strategies used by these researchers about how to best retain their credibility and influence while engaging with the news media. …

The Cancer Good News Project, Lyn Phillipson, Julie Hall, Leissa Pitts

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Abstract presented at the International Social Marketing Conference 2014, 17-18 July 2014, Melbourne, Australia

Project Good News - Engaging Priority Cald Communities To Reduce The Stigma Associated With Cancer, Lyn Phillipson, Julie Hall, Leissa Pitts, Tara Hunt

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Abstract presented at the Innovations in Cancer Services and Care NSW Conference 2013

Who Cares Wins: The Role Of Local News And News Sources In Influencing Community Responses To Marine Protected Areas, Michelle Voyer, Tanja Dreher, William Gladstone, Heather Goodall

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Mass media is a key tool by which environmental interventions, such as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are communicated to the public. The way in which local news outlets present and explain MPAs to local communities is likely to be influential in determining how they respond to the proposal. In particular the tendency of news media to focus on areas of conflict and dispute ensures ideology and politics play a central role in reporting of MPA proposals, often simplifying debate into an 'us versus them' or 'fishers versus conservationists' ideological conflict. This can lead to the outright rejection of an MPA …

Review Of Weizmann, Elda. (2008), Positioning In Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles In The News Interview, Claire Emily Scott

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This book presents an investigation of interactional discourse features of news interviews in Israeli (Hebrew) television media, focussing on the way interviewers and interviewees are discursively positioned with respect to each other. The study is based on two sets of data, comprising a 24-hour corpus of news interviews from the “New Evening” (Erev Xadash) program on Israeli national television, and a corpus of meta-comments from leading Israeli media figures.

On Being 'Fat': Obese And Overweight Australians Respond To News Depictions Of Obesity And Overweight, Richard Warwick Blood, Kate Holland, Samantha Thomas, Asuntha Karunaratne, Sophie Lewis

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

There is scarce research into the ways in which overweight and obese people interpret news media coverage of obesity and the so called obesity epidemic. This paper reports on a qualitative study using a purposive sample of 152 overweight, obese and morbidly obese people living in Melbourne, Australia. Most participants felt the news tended to portray them in negative and stereotypical ways. Characteristic portrayals identified by participants included obese and overweight people as: morally irresponsible and a burden on society; objects of ridicule and derision; and the subject of dehumanising images. Participants were highly reflexive and their personal experience as …

Peace And Cohesive Harmony: A Diachronic Investigation Of Structure And Texture In ‘End Of War’ News Reports In The Sydney Morning Herald, Claire Scott

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents one aperture from a multistratal, diachronic investigation of the changing context of war news reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald from 1902 to 2003. The larger study applies an ensemble of systemic analyses and theoretical perspectives to ‘end of war’ reports from seven wars over this period. In this paper, a cohesive harmony analysis (following Hasan, 1984, 1985) is applied to three texts (Boer War, Korean War and Iraq War), providing empirical evidence for structural boundaries in the texts and giving an account of the semantics of topical relevance (cf. Cloran, 1999; Lukin, 2008 in press). The …

What's New In Online News?, Helen M. Hasan, Nor Hazlina Hashim, Joseph Meloche

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines aspects of the field of Information Systems (IS) concerned with its diversity and with the rapid changes within the discipline that have been incurred by the continued evolution of the IS artefact. This examination is done in order to establish the suitability of the Cynefin framework, developed for knowledge management, as a suitable tool for sense-making in IS. A description and assessment of the Cynefin framework is provided with its varied applications in both organisational practice and research. The paper then applies the framework to make sense of some historical trends and contemporary issues of IS emphasising …

“Objectivity” And “Hard News” Reporting Across Cultures: Comparing The News Report In English, French, Japanese And Indonesian Journalism., Elizabeth A. Thomson, P R. White, P. Kitley

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper is concerned with comparisons of the language of hard news reporting across languages and cultures. Within English-language journalism, authorial “neutrality” and use of the “inverted pyramid” structure are frequently seen to be distinctive features of the modern hard news report and one of the grounds by which journalists assert the “objectivity” of their writing. This paper proposes a framework for investigating these notions linguistically and cross-linguistically, i.e. by reference to systematically observable features of the language and the text organizational structures used in the hard news reporting of different journalistic traditions. The paper reports that what might be …

The Nature Of ‘Reporter Voice' In A Vietnamese Hard News Story, V. T. H. Tran, Elizabeth Thomson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This chapter investigates the attitude of the reporter in an article about Iraq war published in a newspaper in Vietnam, the Nhan Dan Daily. Appraisal theory, especially attitude and engagement, is used as the tools of analysis to explore the reporter’s opinions and ideological positioning expressed in the article. The analysis reveals the reporter’s negative attitude towards US government as well as the strategies used to engage other parties in support of the reporter’s point of view.

Making News Today: Literacy For Citizenship, David R. Blackall, Philip Reece

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper is a report on an evaluation of the Making News Today project. This project is a partnership involving the University of Wollongong, Apple Computers, WIN Television and participating schools, supported with a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Schools participating in the project are involved in the analysis and creation of news items for television. This evaluation focuses specifically on the potential of the Making News Today project as a vehicle for teaching literacy for citizenship.

Computer-Mediated Communication And The Italian News: An Integrated Approach To Foreign Language Learning, Mariolina Pais Marden

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper describes a project which integrated email communication between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) and the Italian daily broadcast telegiornale (tg) in the context of foreign language learning. For one semester students of Italian at the University of Wollongong regularly watched the Italian telegiornale and met once a week to discuss it with the instructor and the rest of the class. As part of the project learners participated in one-to-one email interactions with selected NS of Italian and discussed a range of topics presented in the news. This paper discusses some of the key characteristics of the …

Speaking Up And Talking Back: News Media Interventions In Sydney's 'Othered' Communities, Tanja Dreher

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney's western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked 'gang' activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa , a federal election campaign fought on the theme of 'border protection' and global news reporting of September 11 and the 'war on terror'. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events and cultural production, …