Digital currents : how technology and the public are shaping TV news

Bivens, Rena 1980- (author.).

Summary: "Social media has irrevocably changed how people consume the news. With the distinction between professional and citizen journalists blurring like never before, Digital Currents illuminates the behind-the-scenes efforts of television newscasters to embrace the public's participation in news and information gathering and protect the integrity of professional journalism. Using interviews with more than one hundred journalists from eight networks in Canada and the United Kingdom, Rena Bivens takes the reader inside TV newsrooms to explore how news organisations are responding to the paradigmatic shifts in media and communication practices. The first book to examine the many ways that the public has entered the production of mainstream news, Digital Currents underscores the central importance of media literacy in the age of widespread news sources."--Publisher description.

Record details

ISBN: 9781442615861
Physical Description: vii, 321 pagges ; 23 cm.
Publisher: Toronto : University of Toronto Press, c2014.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-305) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

1. Digital media, cultural shifts, and television new production -- The public's arrival -- Focus of this book -- A note on causation: technologies and society -- User-generated content and citizen journalism -- Social networking services -- Television news organizations: the hierarchical structure -- Canada versus the UK -- General path and control structure of a television news item -- Bulletins, twenty-four-hour news, and convergence -- Structure of this book -- 2. Constraining new production: the view from the twentieth century -- Evaluating the literature -- Two phases of research: an obsession with constraints -- Exposing the social construction of news -- Society's information producers -- Internal and external pressures -- Shared news values -- Considering the audience -- 3. The technology-autonomy-constraint model -- Description of the model -- Phases of news production -- Autonomy-constraint ratio -- Analysis using the TAC model and ratio -- 4. Intake phase: information producers and news flow -- Established actors -- Unconventional actors -- 5. Selection and assignment phase -- Executive producers and the assignment relationship -- Inside the editorial conference -- News values -- 6. News-gathering, story-writing, and transmission phases -- Issues of control -- Selecting sources, challenging officials, and maintaining balance -- Digital media and news-gathering -- Newsroom technologies and story-writing -- Transmission and immediacy -- 7. External pressures: audiences, governments, and public relations -- Audiences -- Complaints -- Government and PR pressures -- 8. Making news: power, journalists, and the public.