As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant fa... more As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant factor of news distribution. However, the influence of cultural differences on the relationship between emotions and news sharing remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of cultural disparities on emotional responses to political news in Hong Kong. We introduce the notion of “emotional profile” to capture cultural differences in the level and structure of audiences’ emotional responses to political topics on Facebook news pages. The study was conducted at a highly significant political moment in the former British colony when the National Security Law (NSL) was passed. The study found that readers of China-critical news pages on Facebook express the highest emotional intensity while readers of China’s media in Hong Kong express the lowest emotional intensity, and readers of China-supporting media fall in between. Readers of China-critical Facebook news pages express the most anger, but their political news sharing is correlated the most with “wow” and “sad” reactions. In contrast, readers of Facebook pages of China’s media in Hong Kong are more likely to react with “love”, which is also the emotion most associated with their political news sharing. The notion of “emotional profile” helps discover similarities within and differences across political boundaries of the news ecosystem. We interpret the results with the help of recent scholarly understanding of emotional expression on social media within Hong Kong’s political context.
This dataset includes six figures used for the journal paper that paper examines China's rece... more This dataset includes six figures used for the journal paper that paper examines China's recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effectiveness in counteracting Western dominance in international communication. The figures are interactive D3.JS visualisations written in javascript and displayed in html files. The intention of uploading this dataset is enabling the readers of the paper to be able to access this tool for better understanding of the methodology described in the paper.
As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this... more As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this paper, we seek to assess the impact of digital alternative news media (DANM) in relation to mainstream news media (MNM). We examine the range of DANM, especially public Facebook pages, related to two large-scale social movements neighbouring mainland China as case studies of social movement media exerting maximalist effects. The assessment relies on academic sources, archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements.
This article aims to provide the first comprehensive meta-review of Chinese media studies in an i... more This article aims to provide the first comprehensive meta-review of Chinese media studies in an international academic journal. It situates the state of the field against the historical context of institutional development and the flow of ideas related to the study of media in China. Content analysis was conducted on 147 articles in 52 top academic journals between 1998 and 2008. Results show that research on Chinese media has increasingly drawn interest beyond ethnic Chinese researchers, with a rising proportion of articles published by non-ethnic Chinese, and growing collaboration between non-ethnic and ethnic Chinese researchers. The industries and genres have broadened, but journalism remains the most studied industry – as it has been since media studies started in China. The internet has become the most researched medium. Partly due to the influence of mass communication research in the United States, the media message has become the most popular subject of study. Qualitative m...
This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as in... more This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as initiators, agenda setters or disseminators, in 29 corruption cases exposed on Sina Weibo. It finds that ordinary citizens made up the largest category of initiators but that their power of opinion leadership was limited as they had to rely on media organizations to spread news about the cases. News organizations and online media were the main opinion leaders. Government and Party bodies initiated a fair number of cases and, despite not being strong agenda setters or disseminators, were able to dominate public opinion owing to the fact that news organizations and online media mainly published official announcements about the cases. Media organizations also played a secondary role as the voice of the people. While individuals from some other user categories were able to become prominent opinion leaders, news workers are likely to be the most promising user category to challenge official pro...
Audience engagement has drawn researchers' attention lately, and interactions, which form a l... more Audience engagement has drawn researchers' attention lately, and interactions, which form a large part of the news audience's participatory activities, are a common daily phenomenon. Recent forms of news interactions provided on the web and smartphone apps differ from earlier ones not only in the technological setting but notably in interpersonal context - by involving strangers. This study conducted in Hong Kong, differentiates interaction with people known from interaction with people unknown in examining news interactions. Implications of the findings are discussed with reference to the recent popularity of social media.
Almost 15 years after it started, civic journalism is waning. Some say that its practices have be... more Almost 15 years after it started, civic journalism is waning. Some say that its practices have been integrated into the routines of news making without the label attached. Others say that it is simply dying. This study seeks to define the legacy of civic journalism by investigating the news practices in Savannah Morning News, a newspaper in Georgia, USA. Ethnographic observation and interviews found that the ideas of civic journalism were instituted in the newspaper through its presentation and the routines of discovering community news. However, it was less obvious in the discovery and gathering of news about larger events and issues. The role of the news organization in convening the public for problem solving has continued, but the role of championing particular solutions was not observed.
... journalism with regard to their possibility in achieving the goals of public journalism.2 A t... more ... journalism with regard to their possibility in achieving the goals of public journalism.2 A typology of five models of audience connections is proposed: (1) traditional journalism, (2) public journalism, (3) interactive journalism, (4) participatory journalism, and (5) citizen journalism. ...
Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, ... more Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, conversing, and networking with members of foreign publics. However, manipulative behaviours on social media, prevalent especially in high tension contexts, create disruptions to authentic communication in what could be grey/black propaganda or information warfare. This study reviews existing literature about models of public diplomacy to guide an empirical study of China's communication in the #SouthChinaSea conversation on Twitter. It uses computational methods to identify, record, and analyze one-way, two-way, and network communication of China's actors. It employs manual qualitative research to determine the nature of China's actors. On that basis, it assesses China's Twitter communication in the issue against various models of public diplomacy.
Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social mov... more Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social movements. Often overlooked is the use of social media communication by opponents of social movements to counteract the change advocated. Collecting data from the Facebook Graph API, this study examines both types of communication on public pages of Facebook in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014. It analyzes the content of public messages (1,389 from Hong Kong and 999 from Taiwan) collected on 10 pro-and neutral/anti-movement pages in each movement to study the framing process of the movements in the flow of communication. Changes in frames from posts to comments and then replies provide evidence of frame contestation, which are discussed in terms of counter-framing by counter-movements in online social networks. This is the first comparative study of communication in social movements of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2018
This paper examines China’s recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effe... more This paper examines China’s recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effectiveness in counteracting Western dominance in international communication. Analysing data collected from the Twitter platform of three public accounts run by China’s state news media CGTN, People’s Daily and Xinhua News, it finds that their news agenda about China focuses on the country’s top leaders and achievements, while that about other countries is on breaking news. Their China-related tweets receive more positive replies than their non-China-related tweets, but tweets about China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, receive fewer positive replies than soft news items. Analysis of Twitter data of the #southchinasea hashtag finds that China’s media mainly compete with US sources for influence. China’s state media influence the news agenda on the issue by active and persistent tweeting and drawing retweets. However, US sources are more influential as a whole in setting the news agenda and amplifying certain news events. The study finds evidence that forces seemingly unfriendly to both China and the US attempt to skew the news agenda of #southchinasea using manipulated accounts.
Proceedings of the third annual convention of the Media Ecology Association, 2002
Technology has captured the attention of researchers in computer-mediated communication from earl... more Technology has captured the attention of researchers in computer-mediated communication from early on but there is yet little attempt to assess the impact of technology on community formation on the Internet. This paper investigates the impact of technology on community formation on the Internet through studying a bulletin board created on the World Wide Web by a women’s group in Hong Kong, the Queer Sisters. Using content analysis, an online survey, interviews and observation, I found that a community substantially autonomous of the offline group was formed on the bulletin board. Explanation for the substantial autonomy of the bulletin board community is sought from the technological characteristics of the bulletin board and of the Web. However, other conditions are also found relevant for explanation. Acknowledging that medium theory allows for the existence of contingencies in the impact of media technology, this paper proposes to input contingent conditions as factors that work with technology in the formation of Internet communities.
Retweeting a post on a social media platform is a part of a process of growing significant throug... more Retweeting a post on a social media platform is a part of a process of growing significant through which public opinion formation takes place. A ‘retweet count’ on, say Twitter or Weibo, can be taken as a measure of user influence. The assumption is that when B retweets A’s message, B empathizes with A and wishes to disseminate the message more widely. But this assumption has hardly been tested and preliminary evidence suggests practices for retweeting on Twitter vary. Nor can retweeting practices on Twitter be assumed to apply on Weibo. This paper makes the first effort to understand the practice of reposting on China’s Weibo, focusing on the content of reposts in comparison to that of the original messages. A quantitative comparison is made of the frame (Entman, 1993; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989) of the source post of 21 cases, and their reposts. The posts and reposts all refer to the issue of officials being exposed for corruption on Sina Weibo. The study finds sound evidence of networked framing, in which reposters revised frames of the source posters while disseminating them. Although over half of the reposts merely republished the source post without added content, what emerged were new communicative functions, case definitions, and a diagnosis of the consequences of exposing the cases. However, different types of user accounts drew different reposting frames, which points to a consistent paradigm between the source accounts and the reposters. The results are important for understanding the mechanisms behind the formation of public opinion on Weibo.
As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant fa... more As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant factor of news distribution. However, the influence of cultural differences on the relationship between emotions and news sharing remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of cultural disparities on emotional responses to political news in Hong Kong. We introduce the notion of “emotional profile” to capture cultural differences in the level and structure of audiences’ emotional responses to political topics on Facebook news pages. The study was conducted at a highly significant political moment in the former British colony when the National Security Law (NSL) was passed. The study found that readers of China-critical news pages on Facebook express the highest emotional intensity while readers of China’s media in Hong Kong express the lowest emotional intensity, and readers of China-supporting media fall in between. Readers of China-critical Facebook news pages express the most anger, but their political news sharing is correlated the most with “wow” and “sad” reactions. In contrast, readers of Facebook pages of China’s media in Hong Kong are more likely to react with “love”, which is also the emotion most associated with their political news sharing. The notion of “emotional profile” helps discover similarities within and differences across political boundaries of the news ecosystem. We interpret the results with the help of recent scholarly understanding of emotional expression on social media within Hong Kong’s political context.
This dataset includes six figures used for the journal paper that paper examines China's rece... more This dataset includes six figures used for the journal paper that paper examines China's recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effectiveness in counteracting Western dominance in international communication. The figures are interactive D3.JS visualisations written in javascript and displayed in html files. The intention of uploading this dataset is enabling the readers of the paper to be able to access this tool for better understanding of the methodology described in the paper.
As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this... more As consumption of mainstream news media declines and alternative news media proliferates, in this paper, we seek to assess the impact of digital alternative news media (DANM) in relation to mainstream news media (MNM). We examine the range of DANM, especially public Facebook pages, related to two large-scale social movements neighbouring mainland China as case studies of social movement media exerting maximalist effects. The assessment relies on academic sources, archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements.
This article aims to provide the first comprehensive meta-review of Chinese media studies in an i... more This article aims to provide the first comprehensive meta-review of Chinese media studies in an international academic journal. It situates the state of the field against the historical context of institutional development and the flow of ideas related to the study of media in China. Content analysis was conducted on 147 articles in 52 top academic journals between 1998 and 2008. Results show that research on Chinese media has increasingly drawn interest beyond ethnic Chinese researchers, with a rising proportion of articles published by non-ethnic Chinese, and growing collaboration between non-ethnic and ethnic Chinese researchers. The industries and genres have broadened, but journalism remains the most studied industry – as it has been since media studies started in China. The internet has become the most researched medium. Partly due to the influence of mass communication research in the United States, the media message has become the most popular subject of study. Qualitative m...
This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as in... more This article examines the prominence of various user categories as opinion leaders, defined as initiators, agenda setters or disseminators, in 29 corruption cases exposed on Sina Weibo. It finds that ordinary citizens made up the largest category of initiators but that their power of opinion leadership was limited as they had to rely on media organizations to spread news about the cases. News organizations and online media were the main opinion leaders. Government and Party bodies initiated a fair number of cases and, despite not being strong agenda setters or disseminators, were able to dominate public opinion owing to the fact that news organizations and online media mainly published official announcements about the cases. Media organizations also played a secondary role as the voice of the people. While individuals from some other user categories were able to become prominent opinion leaders, news workers are likely to be the most promising user category to challenge official pro...
Audience engagement has drawn researchers' attention lately, and interactions, which form a l... more Audience engagement has drawn researchers' attention lately, and interactions, which form a large part of the news audience's participatory activities, are a common daily phenomenon. Recent forms of news interactions provided on the web and smartphone apps differ from earlier ones not only in the technological setting but notably in interpersonal context - by involving strangers. This study conducted in Hong Kong, differentiates interaction with people known from interaction with people unknown in examining news interactions. Implications of the findings are discussed with reference to the recent popularity of social media.
Almost 15 years after it started, civic journalism is waning. Some say that its practices have be... more Almost 15 years after it started, civic journalism is waning. Some say that its practices have been integrated into the routines of news making without the label attached. Others say that it is simply dying. This study seeks to define the legacy of civic journalism by investigating the news practices in Savannah Morning News, a newspaper in Georgia, USA. Ethnographic observation and interviews found that the ideas of civic journalism were instituted in the newspaper through its presentation and the routines of discovering community news. However, it was less obvious in the discovery and gathering of news about larger events and issues. The role of the news organization in convening the public for problem solving has continued, but the role of championing particular solutions was not observed.
... journalism with regard to their possibility in achieving the goals of public journalism.2 A t... more ... journalism with regard to their possibility in achieving the goals of public journalism.2 A typology of five models of audience connections is proposed: (1) traditional journalism, (2) public journalism, (3) interactive journalism, (4) participatory journalism, and (5) citizen journalism. ...
Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, ... more Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, conversing, and networking with members of foreign publics. However, manipulative behaviours on social media, prevalent especially in high tension contexts, create disruptions to authentic communication in what could be grey/black propaganda or information warfare. This study reviews existing literature about models of public diplomacy to guide an empirical study of China's communication in the #SouthChinaSea conversation on Twitter. It uses computational methods to identify, record, and analyze one-way, two-way, and network communication of China's actors. It employs manual qualitative research to determine the nature of China's actors. On that basis, it assesses China's Twitter communication in the issue against various models of public diplomacy.
Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social mov... more Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social movements. Often overlooked is the use of social media communication by opponents of social movements to counteract the change advocated. Collecting data from the Facebook Graph API, this study examines both types of communication on public pages of Facebook in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014. It analyzes the content of public messages (1,389 from Hong Kong and 999 from Taiwan) collected on 10 pro-and neutral/anti-movement pages in each movement to study the framing process of the movements in the flow of communication. Changes in frames from posts to comments and then replies provide evidence of frame contestation, which are discussed in terms of counter-framing by counter-movements in online social networks. This is the first comparative study of communication in social movements of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2018
This paper examines China’s recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effe... more This paper examines China’s recent initiative on international social media and assesses its effectiveness in counteracting Western dominance in international communication. Analysing data collected from the Twitter platform of three public accounts run by China’s state news media CGTN, People’s Daily and Xinhua News, it finds that their news agenda about China focuses on the country’s top leaders and achievements, while that about other countries is on breaking news. Their China-related tweets receive more positive replies than their non-China-related tweets, but tweets about China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, receive fewer positive replies than soft news items. Analysis of Twitter data of the #southchinasea hashtag finds that China’s media mainly compete with US sources for influence. China’s state media influence the news agenda on the issue by active and persistent tweeting and drawing retweets. However, US sources are more influential as a whole in setting the news agenda and amplifying certain news events. The study finds evidence that forces seemingly unfriendly to both China and the US attempt to skew the news agenda of #southchinasea using manipulated accounts.
Proceedings of the third annual convention of the Media Ecology Association, 2002
Technology has captured the attention of researchers in computer-mediated communication from earl... more Technology has captured the attention of researchers in computer-mediated communication from early on but there is yet little attempt to assess the impact of technology on community formation on the Internet. This paper investigates the impact of technology on community formation on the Internet through studying a bulletin board created on the World Wide Web by a women’s group in Hong Kong, the Queer Sisters. Using content analysis, an online survey, interviews and observation, I found that a community substantially autonomous of the offline group was formed on the bulletin board. Explanation for the substantial autonomy of the bulletin board community is sought from the technological characteristics of the bulletin board and of the Web. However, other conditions are also found relevant for explanation. Acknowledging that medium theory allows for the existence of contingencies in the impact of media technology, this paper proposes to input contingent conditions as factors that work with technology in the formation of Internet communities.
Retweeting a post on a social media platform is a part of a process of growing significant throug... more Retweeting a post on a social media platform is a part of a process of growing significant through which public opinion formation takes place. A ‘retweet count’ on, say Twitter or Weibo, can be taken as a measure of user influence. The assumption is that when B retweets A’s message, B empathizes with A and wishes to disseminate the message more widely. But this assumption has hardly been tested and preliminary evidence suggests practices for retweeting on Twitter vary. Nor can retweeting practices on Twitter be assumed to apply on Weibo. This paper makes the first effort to understand the practice of reposting on China’s Weibo, focusing on the content of reposts in comparison to that of the original messages. A quantitative comparison is made of the frame (Entman, 1993; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989) of the source post of 21 cases, and their reposts. The posts and reposts all refer to the issue of officials being exposed for corruption on Sina Weibo. The study finds sound evidence of networked framing, in which reposters revised frames of the source posters while disseminating them. Although over half of the reposts merely republished the source post without added content, what emerged were new communicative functions, case definitions, and a diagnosis of the consequences of exposing the cases. However, different types of user accounts drew different reposting frames, which points to a consistent paradigm between the source accounts and the reposters. The results are important for understanding the mechanisms behind the formation of public opinion on Weibo.
Interviews with seven journalists reveal that significant differences exist between Chinese immig... more Interviews with seven journalists reveal that significant differences exist between Chinese immigrant journalists in Hong Kong and their Hong Kong colleagues. The most observed difference is in news judgment and the terminology used in writing. Other differences observed are writing approach, story structure, stress on checking facts, attribution of sources, and work ethos. Chinese immigrant journalists report that they are changing to become more like their Hong Kong colleagues in some respects but seem resistant to change in other respects. The process of acculturation throws light on the question of what journalistic culture may emerge as communication between the various Chinese communities increases.
The Internet and mobile phones have spread to the extent that in some societies
the majority of p... more The Internet and mobile phones have spread to the extent that in some societies the majority of people possess the capability to send information to multiple recipients. The ease in broadcasting information has posed a challenge to the traditional monopoly of the mainstream media in the distribution channels of, among others, news information. Individual citizens can now record events with miniature video cameras, digital cameras or mobile phones with virtually no training. This poses a challenge to the news media, whose teams of professional journalists have traditionally monopolized news gathering. How these challenges play out in different societies varies according to political, economic, cultural, geographical and technological conditions. This study of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in China in 2003 found that the role of the mainstream news media was eclipsed in Hong Kong by citizen news channels and government news sites. In other parts of China, Taiwan excluded, the role of the mainstream news media in public information was strengthened as the government decided to use them to counteract citizen news, which the government also tried to censor by using new information technology. The governments in both mainland China and Hong Kong have emerged as more dominant news sources as a result of their use of new information technology to monitor the events.
Nip, J.Y.M. (2017) Social media transforming news: Increasing public accountability in China–with... more Nip, J.Y.M. (2017) Social media transforming news: Increasing public accountability in China–within limits.In B. Franklin & S. Eldridge II (Eds.). The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, pp. 511-519. London & New York: Routledge.
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archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements.
archival materials, descriptive social media metrics, and an original analysis of external content shared on public Facebook pages and groups using data collected from the Facebook Graph API. A six-dimensional scheme is proposed to guide the assessment. Sorting through and piecing together multiple sources, we arrive at a multi-faceted description, comparison, and analysis of the impact of DANM during two social movements.
Chinese immigrant journalists report that they are changing to become more like their Hong Kong colleagues in some respects but seem resistant to change in other respects. The process of acculturation throws light on the question of what journalistic culture may emerge as communication between the various Chinese communities increases.
the majority of people possess the capability to send information to multiple
recipients. The ease in broadcasting information has posed a challenge to the
traditional monopoly of the mainstream media in the distribution channels of,
among others, news information. Individual citizens can now record events with
miniature video cameras, digital cameras or mobile phones with virtually no
training. This poses a challenge to the news media, whose teams of professional
journalists have traditionally monopolized news gathering. How these challenges
play out in different societies varies according to political, economic, cultural,
geographical and technological conditions. This study of the SARS (severe acute
respiratory syndrome) epidemic in China in 2003 found that the role of the mainstream
news media was eclipsed in Hong Kong by citizen news channels and
government news sites. In other parts of China, Taiwan excluded, the role of
the mainstream news media in public information was strengthened as the government
decided to use them to counteract citizen news, which the government also
tried to censor by using new information technology. The governments in both
mainland China and Hong Kong have emerged as more dominant news sources as
a result of their use of new information technology to monitor the events.