Mass Communication and Society 2018 Abstracts

Moeller Student Competition
Effects of Self-Construal and Environmental consciousness on Green Corporate Social Responsibility perceptions • nandini bhalla, University of South Carolina • “Using a 2 (location of the company: India vs. U.S.) x 2 (location of the CSR: India vs. U.S.) between subjects experimental design, the study examines the citizen’s attitudes, WOM, and purchase intent towards a fictitious company doing green CSR in India and in the U.S. A SEM model is created, and results indicated that the individuals’ self-construal orientation play an important role in perceiving and evaluating corporation’s environmentally-friendly initiatives.”

Nothing but the Facts? Journalistic Objectivity and Media Adjudication of President Trump’s False Claims • Deborah Dwyer, Student • Previous research indicates reporters tend to shy away from formally settling disputed claims when covering political topics. This does not assist readers in determining what is true, damaging their epistemic political efficacy and interest. This content analysis examines the type of adjudication practices journalists use when covering untrue statements made by U.S. President Donald Trump. Adjudication practices by outlets that audiences consider “conservative” or “liberal” are compared to determine if and how they differ.

Open Competition
Examining the Rage Donation Trend: Applying the Anger Activism Model to Explore Communication and Donation Behaviors • Lucinda Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Holly Overton, University of South Carolina; Denise Bortree, Penn State University; Brooke McKeever • A national survey (N = 1275) explored how individuals’ anger and efficacy predict attitudes toward political and social activism, related communication behaviors, and financial support behaviors. Findings revealed partial support for the Anger Activism Model, which was tested in this unique context. Efficacy emerged as a stronger predictor compared to anger, and path analysis suggests that while anger directly predicts attitudes and communication behaviors, it also partially predicts efficacy.

From Reality to Drama: The Role of Entertainment TV Storytelling in Empowering U.S. Hispanic Parents • Caty Borum Chattoo, American University School of Communication and Center for Media & Social Impact; Lauren Feldman, Rutgers University; Amy Henderson Riley, American University School of Communication and Center for Media & Social Impact • In 2017, the Univision network and Too Small to Fail, a prosocial multi-media campaign, produced media content across three television storytelling genres (scripted drama, reality TV, news) in order to entertain and educate Hispanic parents and primary caregivers of children aged 0-5 about early brain development, and consequently, the role of parents and caregivers in the successful development of young children. This experimental study assessed the impact of each TV genre and found significant direct effects on knowledge, attitudes, and behavior; the effects were mediated by perceived entertainment value and positive emotions.

Explaining the “Racial Contradiction:” An Experimental Examination of the Impact of Sports Media Use and Response Strategy on Racial Bias towards Athlete Transgressors • Kenon Brown, The University of Alabama; Joshua Dickhaus, Bradley University; Ray Harrison, Jefferson State Community College; Stephen Rush, The University of Alabama • Previous studies (Authors, 20XX, Authors, 20XX) have found that minority athletes were perceived more positively than their White counterparts, counterintuitive to previous research. In order to explain this “racial contradiction,” this study analyzes the racial differences in response to criminal accusations based on the response strategy utilized and the amount of sports news consumed by participants. A between-subjects, double blind experiment was conducted among 464 participants to examine how an athlete’s race, an athlete’s chosen response strategy, and participants’ level of sports news consumption affects the perception of athletes accused of criminal allegations. Results show that while low sports news consumers did not differ in their perception of an athlete, whether he was Black or White, high sports news consumers perceived Black athletes more positively than White athletes, supporting the “racial contradiction.” Also, results showed that while participants that were low sports news consumers accepted the White athlete’s use of denial more than the Black athlete, participants that were high sports news consumers accepted the Black athlete’s use of denial more than the White athlete.

Music Use and Genre Choice as Coping Strategies for Emotions • Jewell Davis; Li-jing Chang, Jackson State University • This study used a survey to explore music use and genre choice as coping strategies for emotions. A total of 605 people answered the survey. Results showed a plurality of the respondents use music frequently to help cope with stress, deal with an issue and express emotions. The study also found rock, country, and pop were top genre choices to help cope with specific emotions, and mood maintenance drives more music use than coping needs.

Effects of Scandals and Presidential Debates in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Elections • Esther Thorson, Michigan State; Weiyue Chen, Michigan State University; Leticia Bode • The study investigates the impact of the presidential debates and two political scandals (Trump groping scandal and Comey reopening of the Clinton email case) on attitudes toward Clinton and Trump, and vote intent. The data include 49 days of a rolling cross section sample of 100 U.S. adults. Results show the campaign events have major effects that differ by partisanship, and that candidate attitudes often mediate the effect of events on vote intent.

Individual differences in second-level agenda setting • Renita Coleman; Denis Wu, Boston University • Studies of individual differences in agenda setting focus primarily on the first level, not the second. This study found some individual differences that make people more susceptible to the media’s agenda of issues do not work the same for affect. Education works in the opposite direction, with the highly educated more protected against media influence. Political party affiliation helps inoculate against the media’s affective agenda, but only when it comes to the opposition party’s candidate.

Effects of Race, Attractiveness, and Mental Health Attribution in Mass Shooting News • Tao Deng, Michigan State University; Syed Ali Hussain; Samuel M. Tham, Michigan State University; Saleem Alhabash, Michigan State University • This study explored effects of shooter ethnicity, attractiveness, and mental illness on a Facebook post using a 2 (ethnicity: White-Muslim) x 2 (attractiveness: low-high) x 2 (mental illness: present-absent) between-subject factorial design (N = 699). Findings showed that negative stereotypes against Muslim can be intensified by reading mass shooting news with Muslim perpetrator. Combining Muslim ethnicity and mental illness, participants expressed less favorable attitude toward mental illness. This trend reversed when the perpetrator was White.

Why? Because I like you: Effects of familiarity on perceptions of media trustworthiness • Stephanie Dunn, Missouri Western State University • This paper assesses the role familiarity and parasocial relationships have on perceptions of trustworthiness and credibility, particularly in evaluation of political commentators. Research presented demonstrates how familiarity and PSR allow commentators to overcome retraction messages. Findings suggest increased familiarity and higher PSR generate more positive message evaluations, higher assessments of source credibility, and increased likelihood of persuasion.

PTSD and Depression in Journalists Who Covered Harvey • Gretchen Dworznik • Thirty journalists from some of the most hardest hit cities during Hurricane Harvey were surveyed for symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTSD) and depression 2 months after the storm. 20% had storm related PTSD and 40% had depression. Though not all met the criteria for diagnosis, 90% were experiencing symptoms of both disorders to varying degrees. Implications for disaster coverage planning and newsroom managers are discussed.

Parents, Children, and Social Media: A Study of Value Congruence • Lee Farquhar, Butler University; Betsy Emmons, Samford University; Nia Johnson • This study examines value congruence, identity stewardship, and parent awareness of child’s behaviors. Participants had typical behavior patterns regarding social media use and concerns for privacy. However, parent monitoring of children’s online behaviors was remarkably low. These same parents were also confident that children were not taking part in behaviors they were not aware of. Lastly, value congruence was associated with open communication and positive behavior modeling, which supports past research.

Hot or Cold: #climatechange Societal Sentiment on Pinterest • Jeanine Guidry, Virginia Commonwealth University; Lucinda Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Linsey Grove, University of South Florida • This study examined visual social media posts focused on climate change through a quantitative content analysis of 500 Pinterest posts. Posts from nonprofit organizations received the least engagement. Inclusion of perceived benefits of addressing climate change and self-efficacy were associated with increased engagement; however, these concepts were mentioned far less frequently than severity of and susceptibility to climate change, which did not drive engagement.

Errors and Corrections in Digital News Content • Kirstie Hettinga, California Lutheran University; Alyssa Appelman, Northern Kentucky University • A between-subjects experiment (N = 386) explores the effects of correction features and reader investment on perceptions of digital news content. Findings suggest that participants paid more attention to the source and the correction when they read from the digital news outlet (Yahoo.com), rather than the legacy news outlet (The New York Times). Findings also suggest that liberal readers cared more than conservative readers about the LGBT-rights-related correction. Recommendations for online corrections practices are discussed.

The Effects of Constructive Television News Reporting on Prosocial Intentions and Behavior in Children • Iris Van Venrooij; Tobias Sachs; Mariska Kleemans • To overcome negative effects of news on young audiences and, instead, foster prosociality, constructive journalism promotes the inclusion of positive emotions and solutions in negative news stories. We experimentally tested whether including constructive elements in a story about a disaster indeed increased prosocial intentions and behaviors among children (N=468; 9-13 y/o). Results showed that solution-based news led to less prosocial behavior than emotion-based and non-constructive news. Negative emotions, but not self-efficacy, served as a mediator.

D.C. media coverage of the District’s Death with Dignity Act • Kimberly Lauffer; Sean Baker, Central Michigan University; Natalee Seely • In 2016, the District of Columbia City Council passed the Death with Dignity Act. Afterward, Congress attempted to block implementation of the law by invoking its power first to overturn the law and then, when unsuccessful in that effort, withhold money from the District. Previous studies examining local media coverage of aid-in-dying legislation have identified several recurrent frames, including fear of abuse, good death vs. bad death, preserving rights/autonomy, and culture war. D.C. media invoked those frames as well as others more specific to the District and the publications within it

Framing and Persuasion: A Frame-building Perspective • Jiawei Liu; Douglas McLeod • Research on framing effects has demonstrated that exposure to frames leads to shifts in readers’ preferences and attitudes. Applying this to message construction, we expect that frames’ persuasive effects will also be reflected in the frame-building process: in order to change preference in a particular direction, the corresponding frame will be selected. Our experimental findings suggest that the link between persuasion and frame-building is strong for emphasis frames but relatively weak for equivalence frames.

“They’re Turning the Frogs Gay!” Credibility and Attributes of Parasocial Relationships with Alex Jones • T. Phillip Madison, University of Louisiana – Lafayette; Emily Covington, University of Louisiana – Lafayette; Kaitlyn Wright, University of Louisiana – Lafayette; Timothy Gaspard, University of Louisiana – Lafayette • Exploitation of Americans’ information diets by foreign powers for the purpose of creating civil unrest is a well-documented practice and relies on “knowing” people whom we will never meet. Much of our responses to fake news, whether we buy into it or not, center around the one-sided relationships we have with people whom we see in the media. Such relationships are called “parasocial relationships,” or PSRs (e.g., Horton & Wohl, 1956) and have a tendency to shape our senses of reality and reactions to those senses of reality. Horton and Wohl (1956) originally identified “para-social relationships” as the one-sided relationships audiences have with mediated personae, namely people we see on television. Parasocial relationships seem to be more powerful than ever, as illustrated by fake news, inflamed divisiveness in the western word, weaponization, and Russia’s countless bots, trolls, and social media pages. According to Westneat (2017), “The information war is real, and we’re losing it.” In this bizzare, new era, fake news occupies all forms of media. In fact, many of today’s societal problems have been blamed on the pervasiveness and influential nature of fake news. This study examines parasocial relationships as well as perceived credibility and viewing frequency of Infowars, hosted by Alex Jones. Through our sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users (N = 584), we have explored which attributes of PSRs are related to perceived credibility of Alex Jones and viewing propensity. This research highlights the value of parasocial research as scholars navigate this post-2016 American presidential election news cycle. Parasocial relationships have become a large part of our identities and, thus, warrant thoughtful scrutiny.

Social (Media) Construction of Public Opinion in the Press • Shannon McGregor • A content analysis of election news and in-depth interviews with journalists documents the use of social media to report public opinion, classifying uses along the type of data, well as its function. Journalists used social media posts as sources of vox populi quotes, especially to showcase public reaction to media events. Social media firms marketed their quantitative metrics as public opinion to journalists, who reported these mostly in service of positioning candidates in the horserace.

Younger millennials’ media use: A qualitative gratifications and media repertoires approach • Danielle Myers LaGree, Kansas State University; Margaret Duffy, U of Missouri • The new media landscape has encouraged media multitasking behaviors. This exploratory study sought to understand why younger millennials are motivated to routinely attend to media across multiple sources and devices. An intregated uses and gratifications and media repertoires theoretical approach guided this qualitative study. In-depth interviews (N = 21) revealed that participants were more emotionally connected to their laptops than their cellphones and use media sources and devices to create work and entertainment spaces.

An experimental test of the effects of hurricane news about human behavior on climate-related attitudes • Jessica Myrick, Penn State University; Jeff Conlin • Mass communication about hurricanes–via traditional and online outlets–often features stories about morality. The best of us help others and the worst of us take advantage of the situation. The present study investigated how these types of hurricane news coverage, when displayed online featuring other users’ reactions, impacts climate-change intentions and policy support. A between-subjects online experiment (N = 514) was conducted using a 3 (news content: acts of kindness, acts of cruelty, control) x 3 (Facebook emoticon reactions: mostly love with some anger, mostly anger with some love, equal love and anger). Results reveal that emotional responses are key mediators of message effects.

Expanding Visibility on Twitter: Author and Message Characteristics and Retweeting • Chang Sup Park, University at Albany, SUNY; Barbara Kaye • Using a content analysis of 3,429 tweets about the South Korean Anti-Terrorism Act of 2016, this study finds that the tweets created by civil society, political actors, and mass media/journalists are more likely to be retweeted than the tweets written by ordinary individuals, suggesting the role of heuristic strategy. This study also finds that content factors influence retweeting (systematic strategy). Emotional tweets are more likely to be retweeted, and rationality of tweets moderates the association between author characteristics and retweeting.

Switchers & Seniors: Evaluating technology versus cohort-based changes in TV news consumption, 1984 -2008 • Patrick Parsons, Penn State University; Krishna Jayakar, Penn State University • This study uses cohort analysis and comparative simulation to gain a better understanding of the relative influence of technological displacement versus shifting demographic patterns in television news consumption from 1984 to 2008 with special attention to TV news consumption declines in the early and mid-1990s, prior to expansion of internet-based news. It considers implications of the research for current and near-future news consumption patterns.

The Effects of Flow in Mobile Gaming: Involvement, Spending Practices, and Attitude • Gregory Perreault, Appalachian State University; Samuel M. Tham, Michigan State University • This research studies free-to-play mobile game players in the United States (n=592) regarding their experience of flow, gaming involvement, and attitude towards the game’s financial model. Following Creswell and Clark’s (2007) exploration model of mixed methods, both qualitative and quantitative measures were utilized to identify and examine the variables. Even though participants reported low attitude towards advertising, the more involved participants indicated they would be accept alternative advertising if it led to more in-game currency.

Content Analysis of Music Alcohol-Dependent Women and Controls Associate with ‘Going Out’ versus ‘Staying Home’ • Anastasia Nikoulina, Indiana University; Thomas James, Indiana University; Joshua Sites, Indiana University; Edgar Jamison-Koenig, Indiana University; Glenna Read, Indiana University; Robert Potter, Indiana University • A content analysis of 636 songs was conducted for alcohol content, drug content, sexual content, risk-taking content, and musical tempo. The song corpus was created by female participants in a previous experimental study and represented their favorite titles for ‘going out with friends,’ or ‘staying home by yourself.’ Participants were selected for the experiment from two cohorts: those with self-reported alcohol dependency and controls. Results of the content analysis show that, as predicted by theory, Party Music was more likely to contain lyrical mentions of alcohol, drugs, and sexual behaviors. Party Music was also significantly faster in tempo than Home Music. These main effects did not interact with which cohort provided the titles. In addressing a research question, results show that regardless of cohort,Party Music was more frequently from the Pop and Hip-hop genre while Home Music was more often Rock and Indie.

Who is to blame? Analysis of government and news media frames during the 2014 earthquake in Chile • Magdalena Saldana, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile • This study relies on Entman’s definition of framing to analyze how the Chilean government and news media framed an earthquake occurring in Chile in 2014. Using structural topic modeling, 705 news stories and 174 press releases were content-analyzed to identify under which conditions the media may attribute blame when disasters are framed beyond the realm of accident. Findings are particularly relevant to understand the relationship between political actors and the press when disasters occur.

“What’s racist about deporting criminal illegal ‘Felons’?” Examining the link between emotion and cognition in tweets about immigration • Saif Shahin, American University; Laura Seroka, Bowling Green State University; Md Rezwan Islam, Bowling Green State University • This study examines nearly 4 million tweets about immigration posted during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (July-December). Sentiment analysis reveals Trust, Fear, and Anger to be the most prominent emotions. Topic modeling suggests Trust was on account of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, while Muslims and Mexicans aroused Fear and Anger. We also explain how emotions may produce cognitive connections among seemingly disparate issues and lead to post-hoc rationalization of anti-immigrant tweets.

Field and Ecological Explanations of Data Journalism Innovation: A Focus on the Role of Ancillary Organizations • Wilson Lowrey, University of Alabama; Lindsey Sherrill, University of Alabama; Ryan Broussard, University of Alabama • This study assesses the roles of ancillary organizations in data journalism innovation from the perspectives of both field and ecology paradigms using interviews with actors in the data journalism profession, including working journalists, leaders of foundations and professional associations, and educators. These two meso-level spatial approaches, field theory and ecology theory, are compared to shed light on the relative helpfulness of field approaches vs. ecology approaches in our social understanding of journalism and news construction.

Exploring Mechanisms of Narrative Persuasion in a News Context: The Role of Narrative Structure, Homophily, Stigma, and Affect in Changing Attitudes and Altruistic Behavior • Daniel Tamul, Virginia Tech; Mary Beth Oliver; Jessica Hotter, Virginia Tech • Two exploratory studies demonstrate, for the first time, that narrative persuasion can diminish the stigma attached to social groups featured in journalistic narratives. Study 1 shows narrative format improves attitudes toward Syrian refugees and this effect is mediated by narrative engagement and subsequently stigma, homophily, and meaningful affect. Study 2 replicates these findings against a separate participant pool, an additional story topic, and compares changes in engagement and stigma to a non-narrative fact sheet and a control condition.

What the fake?! How social media users define, spot, and respond to fake news • Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Darren Lim, NTU Singapore • Through dyadic interviews involving 20 social media users in Singapore, where members of each pair are friends both offline and on social media, this study sought to understand how social media users define, spot, and respond to fake news. The study found that the participants define fake news in terms of facticity, intention, and ethics. They verify if news is real or fake based on their own gut-feel, the content itself, through interpersonal checks, and through institutional sources. Finally, whether or not they correct others who post fake news depends on issue relevance, interpersonal relationships, and personal efficacy. While correcting others might be consistent with their need to do what is right, it might also negatively affect their need to maintain social relationships.

Post-Network Television: Motivations, Behaviors, and Satisfaction in the Age of Netflix • Alec Tefertiller, Kansas State University; Kim Sheehan, University of Oregon • Newer video technologies such as smart TVs and web streaming applications have radically altered how audiences consume televised content. Using an online, national survey (N = 790), this study identified five motivational factors for television viewing, most notably relaxing entertainment. In addition, patterns of ritualistic and instrumental viewing were identified. Audience activity facilitated by new technology was strongly associated with satisfaction and affinity for the television medium.

Dual Influences of Media Figures on Young Undergraduates’ Life Values: The Role of Wishful Identification • Caixie TU; Stella Chia • This study examined media and social influences of media figures and proposed a theoretical framework wherein two influences exert effects on undergraduates’ values. This study also adopted a psychological mechanism of wishful identification to investigate how it mediated such two influences. The whole framework was tested by survey data. Results showed media consumption was directly associated with value endorsement. The indirect associations were mediated by interpersonal discussion about media figures and wishful identification with figures.

Don’t Believe the Next Tweet: Designing and Testing News Media Literacy Interventions for Social Media • Melissa Tully, University of Iowa; Emily Vraga; Leticia Bode • Scholars have called for media literacy interventions as a response to the spread of misinformation online. This study examines the effectiveness of “news media literacy” (NML) messages for Twitter. Using two experimental designs, this study tests NML tweets designed to mitigate the impact of exposure to misinformation and to boost people’s perceptions of their own media literacy and its democratic value. Findings suggest it is difficult to craft messages that achieve these goals simultaneously.

Creating Agents of Change through Civic Media Production, Critical Media Literacy and Experiential Learning • Cindy Vincent, Salem State University; Jennifer Jeffrey, Salem State University • This study applies the civic media model within a media literacy course to examine how the convergence of critical media literacy, civic education and experiential learning help college students understand themselves as engaged community members. Interviews with college students collected over three semesters is qualitatively analyzed to understand how civic media production and experiential learning build a sense of civic agency within college students as collaborators of voice, dialogue and critical consciousness.

Can Inspiration Cross Party Lines? How News Framing of Morality and Partisan Cues Influence Elevation, Disgust, and Moral Judgments of Political Actors • T. Franklin Waddell, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida • Do partisans judge political actors based on the consistency of their moral behavior, or does partisan affiliation override moral evaluation? An online experiment (N = 710) revealed that participants exposed to acts of altruism or redemption reported higher levels of elevation relative to control, while acts of transgression or falls from grace elicited higher levels of disgust relative to control. No evidence of moderation by partisanship was revealed. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Do Press Releases about Digital Game Research Influence Presumed Effects? How Comparisons to Real World Violence and Methodological Details Affect the Anticipated Influence of Violent Video Games • T. Franklin Waddell, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida • Do comparisons to real world violence or details about how aggression is measured in the laboratory affect the presumed influence of violent video games? An online experiment (N = 505) examined this question using a 2 (comparison to violence: present vs. absent) x 2 (measurement details: present vs. absent) between-subjects design. Results reveal that comparisons to violence elicit differential effects on presumed influence contingent on the presence of methodological details and respondent sex.

Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side of the Geofence? • Kearston Wesner • Geofencing technology enables companies to obtain users’ physical location and deliver customized communications, including political messages. But to accomplish this, some businesses transmit user data to third parties without consent. The privacy tort of intrusion and Federal Trade Commission actions target unfair or deceptive practices, but these avenues are inadequate. Users’ privacy should be safeguarded by creating a federal privacy statute that requires opt-in notification and periodic reminders of data collection, usage, and transmission practices.

Depictions of Asperger’s Syndrome on Prime-Time Television: An Intergroup Contact and Social Cognitive Theory Approach • Stephanie Whitenack, Louisiana State University; David Hamilton; Meghan Sanders • Certain depictions of Asperger’s syndrome (AS) on prime-time television can affect how individuals perceive the disorder (Holton, 2013). Learning and relational differences among those who view onscreen portrayals of AS can affect audiences’ understanding, perceptions, and behavioral intentions of the out-group. An experiment was conducted with a total of 130 participants. Results reveal that people identify with more explicit portrayals on screen, however this may produce greater intergroup anxiety when thinking about real-life interpersonal contact.

Conceptualization of the public health model of reporting through application: The case of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s heroin beat • Erin Willis, University of Colorado Boulder; Chad Painter, University of Dayton • This case study seeks to demonstrate the Cincinnati Enquirer’s use of the public health model of reporting and public health news frames. The Enquirer created the first newspaper heroin beat in January 2016. Enquirer reporters framed the heroin epidemic as a public health issue, focusing on solutions, contextualizing the issue through societal determinants of health, and incorporating the voices of constituent groups. Findings are discussed using news framing and the public health model of reporting.

Big Data and Journalism Transformations: Evaluating Automation as a New Entrant to the Journalistic Field • Shangyuan Wu, Nanyang Technological University; Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Charles Salmon • As information circulates in unprecedented amounts, contemporary newsrooms are turning to automation to manage the data deluge. Amid falling revenues and newsroom closures, this study uses field theory and in-depth interviews to investigate how automation, as a new entrant, is transforming the journalistic field, including its impact on the field’s governing principles, the types of capital that journalists must acquire to remain competitive, and journalist attitudes towards the transformation and/or preservation of the field.

Undesirable Issue Indeed, but No Censorship Please! The Third Person Effect in Fake News on Social Media • Fan Yang, University at Albany, SUNY; Michael Horning, Virginia Tech University • An online survey (N =335) was conducted to examine the third person effect (TPE) in fake news and suggested that individuals indeed perceived a greater influence of fake news on others than on themselves. Although they evaluated fake news on social media as socially undesirable, they were also unsupportive of censorship as a remedy. Instead, individuals reported to be less willing to share the news they read on social media either online or offline.

Digital inequalities or personality differences? A longitudinal analysis of social media usage divides in China • Yiyan Zhang, Boston University; Lei Guo, Boston University; Homero Gil de Zúñiga, University of Vienna • This study contributes to the digital divide literature by better explicating a usage divide and by adding a China’s context based on a longitudinal analysis of varied social media uses among a national representative sample collected in mainland China. The results showed age and income significantly predicted many aspects of the usage divide, moderated by individuals’ personality traits. The study also demonstrated that the age- and income-generated usage divide were not significantly widened over time.

Student Competition
Stuck on Social Media: Predicting Young Adults’ Intentions to Limit Social Media Use • Nick Boehm • Health concerns of social media overuse (e.g., depression, anxiety, social isolation, etc.) warrant examinations of factors influencing the use of these technologies. While studies have characterized people’s adoption and use of social media, none have examined factors that would drive individuals to limit their social media use. This study found that an extended theory of planned behavior model significantly predicted intentions to limit daily social media use and behavior surrounding social capital maintenance and growth.

Colorism and Love for Fair Skin: Exploring Digitization’s Effect on India’s Arranged Marriage Matrimonial Ads • Dhiman Chattopadhyay, Bowling Green State University; Sriya Chattopadhyay, Bowling Green State University • Previous studies have found the presence of colorism, especially a bias toward fair-skinned women, in India’s newspaper matrimonial advertisements, where fair complexion is equated with beauty among Indian women. Historically matrimonial advertisements in newspapers are posted by family elders, such as parents of prospective brides. This study explores if the advent of online matrimonial portals has empowered marginalized members of families such as prospective brides greater access to and control over posting matrimonial ads, and if this in turn has changed the way women are depicted in matrimonial ads. Textual analysis of 150 online matrimonial ads indicated that younger women such as would-be brides posted more ads in online media, compared to older family members such as parents; that while there was less overt focus on physical attributes of women such as fairness of skin, colorism was present in more subtle forms; and that while online ads described women’s skills, and desires, they were unable to break free from shackles of socially constructed patriarchal norms where women’s physical attributes such as fair skin were considered critical qualities. Findings were consistent with the tenets of Critical Race Theory that colorism is an ingrained feature of social systems and is constantly negotiated based on a group’s own social interests. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Asian International Students’ Mass Media Use and Acculturation Strategies: Considering the Effects of Remote Acculturation • Lin Li; Shao Chengyuan • Surveying Asian international students in two U.S. universities about their mass media use and acculturation strategies, this study found that American news media use before relocation was positively related to assimilation and negatively related to separation, whereas American TV use after relocation had positive effects on assimilation, integration, and marginalization through increased cultural knowledge. Asian TV use was found to be positively related to separation and negatively related to assimilation and integration across time periods.

Crisis Management on Social Media: Inoculation Strategy and Organizational Interactivity • Pratiti Diddi, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY; Lewen Wei, Pennsylvania State University • In this study we conducted a three-phase online experiment to examine the efficacy of the inoculation strategy and organizational interactivity in bolstering attitudes in crisis management on social media. With exposure to crisis of selected issues, if not preempted, users’ threat levels went up; if preempted, on the other hand, low response rate to negative comments led to undesirable perceptions of the organization. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Discussing Vulcans, Hermione, Khaleesi, and the Winchesters: An evaluation of parasocial interactions in online fandom forums • Sara Erlichman, Penn State • As parasocial interactions (PSI) are increasingly becoming observable in online settings and associated with fandom, it brings to question the role of parasocial relationships (PSR) in fandom communities. By conducting a content analysis, this study analyzes whether PSIs were present in online fandom forums (i.e. Star Trek, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and Supernatural), as a possible indicator of fans actively maintaining their PSRs. The presence of parasocial interactions was supported in this study demonstrating the overlap of participatory fandom and fans’ relationship maintenance for fictional characters.

Social Media as an Emerging Institution: Expectations and Norms Online at the U.S. State House • Meredith Metzler • This paper draws on Polsby’s (1968) classic piece to ask: is social media an emerging political institution? Social media is a differentiated communication medium, but state legislative offices find it difficult to navigate. The perceived behavioral norms of the site—speed, confrontation, and boundary-less communication—conflicted with the legislators’ norms of “civil” interpersonal communication primarily with constituents. As social media emerges as an algorithmic communication institution, the conflicting norms will need to be reconciled.

Fake News Correction: How USDA Corrects Fake News about Organic Foods on Social Media • Keonyoung Park, Syracuse University; Jun Zhang, Newhouse School of Syracuse University; Laura Canuelas-Torres; Zheng Li • Building on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion, we explored the effects of different social media sources (i.e. government, nonprofit organizations, news corporations, and businesses) in correcting misinformation from fake news about organic foods. We conducted an online experiment, using a Mturk sample of US adults (N=264). Government (i.e., USDA) was the only source with significant impact on leading individual’s efforts to correct previous knowledge. Users seem to activate the central processing during this activity.

Local to global via social media: Using social media for news could make you global-minded • Aditi Rao, University of Connecticut • Contemporary society is becoming increasingly global. This globalization is often referred to in the context of businesses, tourism, trade, education, etc. However, globalization of individuals, i.e., having a global mindset, especially in the context of social media is not often heard of. The current study aimed to investigate whether using social media for news correlated with global-mindedness. A cross-sectional survey administered online asked college students (N = 324) to indicate their news-seeking habits on the four social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. A Global-Mindedness Scale was also included in the same survey to measure global-mindedness and its five dimensions (responsibility, cultural pluralism, efficacy, globalcentrism, and interconnectedness). Results showed a positive correlation between social media use for news and global-mindedness and its dimensions, except for globalcentrism. With regard to using social media for seeking news, Facebook and Twitter were found to be used the most. However, Snapchat and Instagram were the most used social media platforms. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Finding A Voice: Newspaper Editors and The Effect of Sexual Assault and Rape News • Susan Tebben, Ohio University • A qualitative study on newspaper editors in northern and southern Ohio. Using in-depth interviews, the study focuses on personal experiences and training and its effect on victim-naming policies, word choice in stories of sexual assault and rape, and the effect of an editor’s particular training and/or experience on how the topic is covered in newsrooms. Journalistic standards are consistent among the editors interviewed, but editorial decisions depend on the particular editor’s experience and training.

Underlying Effects of Endorser Identity and Bodily Addressing in Public Service Announcements • Lewen Wei, Pennsylvania State University; Arienne Ferchaud; Bingjie Liu • This study conducted a 2 x 2 between-subjects online experiment (N = 423) to explore audience reactions towards public service announcements (PSA) varying in the identities of message endorsers (peer vs. celebrity) and their bodily addressing styles (front vs. side), and the underlying psychological mechanisms. Findings suggest that on selected issues (anti-smoking and anti-sexual-abuse), celebrity endorsers with a frontal bodily addressing style induced more positive reactions to PSA via parasocial interaction experience with the endorser, whereas peer endorsers with a side bodily addressing rendered more message effectiveness via elicited empathy towards the endorser. Implications and limitations are discussed.

2018 ABSTRACTS

International Communication 2018 Abstracts

Markham Student Paper Competition
Phillip Arceneaux, University of Florida • The West Africa we were shown: A visual content analysis of the 2014 Ebola epidemic • Via content analysis, this study investigated what themes of West Africa were visually publicized by U.S. newspapers, and if such themes mirrored coverage of African groups. Data were collected from the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Dallas Morning News. Quantitative findings suggest coverage favored victim-based frames which became significantly less negative once Ebola patients were in the United States. Such results contribute to literature regarding public perception of foreign affairs covered in the media.

William Edwards; Kyle Saunders • Perceptions and Reality of Press Freedom Following the Arab Spring: An Analysis of Egypt, Iraq, and Tunisia • This study examines the relationship between perception of press freedom and both frequency of political news consumption and perception of government corruption in Egypt, Iraq, and Tunisia in 2013. Results showed that frequency of political news consumption is positively correlated with a poor perception of press freedom in Egypt, and that poor perception of press freedom is positively correlated with perception of corruption levels in government in Egypt and Iraq.

James Gachau • Facebook Groups as Affective Counterpublics • Using counterpublic theory à la Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Zizi Papacharissi, and Michael Warner, this article analyzes the media content shared on three Facebook groups’ walls. Based in Kenya, the first group identifies with freethought and atheism in a society that is predominantly Christian. The second group campaigns for a proud Black identity in a world increasingly perceived as hostile to Blacks. The third group espouses a feminist atheist identity against Judeo-Christian “white male supremacy.”

Chen Gan, 1990 • Influence of Cultural Distance on Female Body Image: Race, Beauty Type, and Image Processing • This experimental study aimed to investigate the role of cultural distance on beauty ideal, regarding different races and inclined beauty types, in women’s responses to idealized media images. A sample of 140 young Chinese women viewed advertisements containing East Asian models in Cute/Girl-next-door looks (CG), East Asian models in Sexual/Sensual looks (SS), Caucasian models in CG looks, Caucasian models in SS looks, or product-only images. Image processing variables (comparison, fantasy, and internalization) and body image outcomes (state mood and body satisfaction) were measured immediately after advertising viewing. It was found that exposure to CG-type models elicited higher comparison, fantasy, internalization, and improved positive emotions among participants than SS-type models. Model’s race only had effect on internalization, and participants exposed to Caucasian models reported higher internalization than those exposed to East Asian models. Moreover, regression analyses revealed significant relationships between image processing variables and body image outcomes. This study develops a framework for cross-cultural body image research and casts some implications on the influence of exposure to Western media on Chinese women’s beauty ideal and feminine values.

Gregory Gondwe, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO • News believability, trustworthiness and information contagion in African online Social networks: An Experimental design • This experimental study seeks to find out what kind of news source is most believable in Africa between those generated by the West and those generated within the African continent. Second, it measures the levels of contagion within those news stories from two different continents. Using Zambian and Tanzanian online news sources, the study employs experiments to argue that NWICO and McBride’s debates are still relevant in today’s digital age.

Volha Kananovich • Thanks, Obama: Internet Memes as Contested Political Spaces in the United States and Russia • Drawing on the concept of a meme as a “nationwide inside joke” and a potential vehicle of anti-elite political expression, this study compares the evolution of Obama memes in America and Russia. The findings show that, despite the broad participatory appeal of the format, the reach of the meme remains contingent on the socio-political context. This may constrain the meme’s diffusion outside the tight community of liberally minded, politically savvy Internet users.

Liudmila Khalitova, University of Florida; Sofiya Tarasevich, University of Florida • Assessing the role of international broadcasters as information subsidies in the international agenda-building process • This paper explores the agenda-building potential of government-sponsored international broadcasting (GIB) by focusing on the relationships between congruence of political culture and journalists’ practices regarding the use of foreign government-sponsored news content. The findings suggest that value proximity between a broadcaster’s home country and the host country increases the likelihood that the host country’s media will use the GIB as an information source and will accept frames promoted by the government that funds the GIB.

Claire Shinhea Lee • Making Home through Cord-cutting: The Case of Korean Temporary Visa-status Migrants’ Post-Cable culture in U.S. • With the rapid development of new media technology, many people are “cutting the cords” and viewing television through Internet-based video services via streaming or downloading. This study aims to better understand and contextualize this phenomenon through investigating Korean temporary visa-status migrants’ television viewing practices. Through 40 qualitative interviews and employing the framework of the domestication theory perspective, this paper examines how these deterritorialized individuals who experience dislocation make home through cord-cutting practices. By making use of the Internet and delivery technologies/ interfaces legally and illegally, Korean tempv migrants go beyond territorial limitations and make home materially, feel home affectively, and connect home relationally in their diasporic space. Moreover, the study debunks some utopian ideas about online audiences and shows what remains fixed in terms of transnational post-cable culture. I argue that the paper provides many insights into investigating contemporary television audiences and suggest a novel approach to studying migrant media practices.

Nyan Lynn, University of Kansas • The danger of words: Major challenges facing Myanmar journalists on reporting the Rohingya conflict • When covering the Rohingya conflict, Myanmar journalists were criticized for failing to question the government and army. They were also criticized for their reports, most of them are one-sided and lack of multiple voices. This research studied why Myanmar journalists failed to report this conflict professionally and what major challenges they have faced. This research interviewed 17 reporters and editors from 10 media outlets, most of them based in Yangon.

Ruth Moon, University of Washington • “They only threaten you or cut off your job”: How Rwandan journalists learn self-censorship • This paper examines the communication and implementation of a self-censorship norm among journalists in Rwanda. Using observation and interview data from eight months of fieldwork, I show that self-censorship in this context is communicated in a two-step process that can be understood using the concept of isomorphism from institutional theory. Editors and publishers are directly pressured to produce particular kinds of news coverage and pass on the expectation to reporters through obliquely communicated expectations.

Subin Paul, University of Iowa • The Qatar-Gulf Crisis and Narratives of Emotionality in Nepal’s English-language Press • This study examines the media discourse on the 2017-18 Gulf diplomatic crisis and its effect on one of the most marginalized populations in Qatar: Nepali migrant workers. While the diplomatic crisis made news headlines across the Middle East, Nepal-based newspapers were the only ones to cover the vulnerable migrant worker population in some detail. In writing about this population, three prominent English-language publications in Nepal, the Kathmandu Post, Republica, and People’s Review employed emotional storytelling. Drawing on Wahl-Jorgensen’s notion of the “strategic ritual of emotionality,” this study specifically analyzes the use of emotion in the three publications’ news coverage. The study finds that the publications engaged in the ritual of emotionality not by assigning that function to external news sources, as common in Western newspapers, but mainly through their own journalists and opinion writers who narrated their subjective viewpoints and concerns. This unreserved embrace of emotions and subjectivity in newswriting illuminates a unique, cultural mode of producing journalism.

Robert L. Stevenson Open Paper Competition
Kirsten Adams, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Daniel Riffe; Meghan Sobel; Seoyeon Kim • “Pivoting” With the President’s Gaze: Exploring New York Times Foreign-Policy Coverage Across Nine Administrations • Through an analysis of 50 years of New York Times’ international news coverage (N = 20,765) across nine presidencies, ranging from Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 to Barack Obama in 2015, we apply an interpretive framework guided by presidential historians’ nonpartisan insights to an examination of the top-ten countries and topics covered during each administration in order to assess whether the Times’ gaze toward particular events or issues aligned with presidential “pivots” or priorities in foreign policy agendas. This study extends previous research on press nationalism and foreign policy coverage, updating this line of inquiry to examine whether or how an elite American newspaper covered international affairs throughout the past 50 years. We find limited evidence exists of an “echoing press” consistently following the “presidential gaze,” illustrating that events in the rest of the world can turn the press’ gaze away from policy goals; however, countries and topics covered during each administration do indicate some alignment with key presidential “pivots” or priorities over time. Further, some presidential and press priorities remained consistent across administrations, illustrating the linear way conflict and diplomacy carry over from one president to the next. This study documents and interprets changing patterns in foreign-policy coverage and contributes to a larger body of work discussing the complex roles of the president-as-newsmaker and of the press who cover – and sometimes “echo” – his administration’s efforts.

Aje-Ori Agbese • Thanks, Tonto and Mercy! Three Nigerian Newspapers’ Coverage of Domestic Violence in Nigeria, 2015-2017 • This study explored how Nigerian newspapers portrayed domestic violence and domestic violence cases in Nigeria. Through content and thematic frame analyses of three Nigerian newspapers from 2015 to 2017, the study found that Nigerian newspapers provided their audiences with a variety of information and failed to portray domestic violence cases as a social problem. Rather, they were portrayed as isolated incidents and blamed the victim for her death or beating.

Ali Al-Kandari, Gulf University for Science and Technology; Mariam Alkazemi, Virginia Commonwealth University; Deb Aikat, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Political and Cultural Forces on the Uses and Gratifications: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in the U.S and Kuwait • Fundamentally disparate norms of politics, freedom and culture distinguish civil societies in U.S. and Kuwait and impact social media users. By integrating uses and gratifications theories, this study compares U.S. and Kuwaiti social media users’ motivations, time spent, and engagement with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, the leading social media platforms. Based on an audience-oriented survey of U.S. and Kuwaiti social media users, this study concludes that while Kuwaiti users were more likely to use Snapchat and Twitter, U.S. users were more likely to use Facebook and Instagram. Different free speech norms differentiate U.S. and Kuwait. Freedom of speech is not absolute in Kuwait like most nations in the Arab region. The U.S. protects free speech through the First Amendment to its Constitution. This explicates why Kuwaiti social media users’ motivation of learning and information through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat constituted mean values higher than users in the U.S.

Mel Bunce • Foreign correspondents and the international news coverage of Africa • This paper contributes to our knowledge of the factors influencing international news coverage of Africa. It presents the results of 67 interviews with foreign correspondents in sub Saharan Africa that explore the daily practices, working conditions and news values of these journalists. The interviews show that foreign correspondents in Africa have significant autonomy to shape news content – but only when they work at more elite news outlets – those which Pierre Bourdieu would describe as seeking ‘symbolic capital’.

Li Chen, WTAMU • When Hippocrates encountered Confucius – A textual analysis of representations of medical professionalism on Chinese medical dramas • Using the theory of Social Representation, the current research project studies the representations of medical professionalism on Chinese medical dramas. The study has three goals: 1) to reveal the anchoring of medical professionalism on Chinese medical dramas; 2) to examine the objectification of medical professionalism; and 3) to analyze the consistency and inconsistency between the localized medical professionalism and the medical professionalism codes proposed by medical scholars and professional associations such as Charter on Medical Professionalism. The results of the textual analysis suggest that medical professionalism was anchored within a Confucian framework: medical dramas used two typical terms, benevolent skills and benevolent heart, to describe the meaning of medical professionalism. Chinese medical dramas were found to add two more components to medical professionalism, making it inconsistent with conventional medical professionalism.

Karin Assmann, University of Maryland; Stine Eckert • ProQuote: A German women journalists’ initiative to revolutionize newsroom leadership • Using standpoint epistemology and critical mass theory this study examines outcomes of the so-called ProQuote [Pro Quota] initiative in Germany to bring at least 30 percent of women journalists into leadership per newsroom. In-depth interviews with 25 journalists in 12 newsrooms find somewhat increased transparency in personnel decisions; improvements in work culture; and more representation of women and diversity on the editorial agenda in all newsrooms that have reached or came near ProQuote’s goal.

Katherine Grasso; William Edwards • A Different Story: Examining the Relationship between Exposure to Snapchat’s “LIVE” Story Feature and Perceptions of Muslims and Arabs • Using Intergroup Contact Theory, the relationship between viewing content depicting Muslims/Arabs on Snapchat and viewers’ attitudes toward Muslims/Arabs was tested. In an online survey, 397 participants reported the frequency and nature of portrayals of Muslims/Arabs in news media, entertainment media, and on Snapchat. Participants’ attitudes about Muslims/Arabs were also measured. Portrayals of Muslims/Arabs on Snapchat were positive, but attitudes toward Muslims/Arabs were not better among Snapchat viewers than non-viewers. These tests, however, lacked statistical power.

Lyombe Eko; Natalia Mielczarek • Raping Europa Again?: Discursive Constructions of the European Refugee Crisis in Four German and Polish News Magazine Covers. • Newsmagazine covers are visual narratives that draw upon myths and archetypes to explain contemporary events. We analyzed how four German and Polish news magazine covers re-presented the European immigration crisis of 2015. The covers of Der Spiegel, Die Stern (Germany), WSieci and Polityka (Poland) couched critiques and concordance with government policy in ancient myths of difference between East and West. Despite discordance of form, the covers demonstrated concordance of substance with respect to the crisis.

BELLARMINE EZUMAH, Murray State University • De-Westernizing Journalism Curriculum in Africa through Glocalization and Hybridization. • The debate that dominant model of global journalism education is predominantly western has permeated the journalism education discourse for decades. Despite several attempts by scholars and international organizations, specifically, the UNESCO through the International Programme for Development of Communication (IPDC), to de-westernize journalism curriculum, remnants of the dominant paradigm debate still persists. This paper recognizes the existence of western concepts in journalism education worldwide at the same time, concedes that striking attempts have been made to de-westernize and glocalize journalism curriculum. Essentially, this paper hinges on the thesis that instead of resisting the UNESCO model, reformation and adaptation through glocalization and hybridization is encouraged. As such, we further provide a practical application whereby both sides of the above argument are accredited and a hybridization intervention was applied in a collaborative venture between a US-based Scholar and Ugandan Scholars in developing a locally-congruent curriculum for a brand new journalism program at a university in Uganda.

Alex Fattal, Penn State • Target Intimacy: Notes on the convergence of the militarization and marketization of love in Colombia • This article looks beneath the linguistic hinges of “campaigns” and “targets” that connect military and marketing expertise, two spheres that are experiencing a tactical and epistemological convergence in Colombia. The plain of that convergence, I argue, is intimacy and the shared objective is the instrumentalization of love—in the pursuit of victory and profit. I trace how both sets of experts—generals and executives—have come to valorize and appropriate, by any means possible, intimacy, a fleeting index of love, in the context of the Colombian military’s individual demobilization program. Through ethnographic analysis I trace the way in which consumer marketers working with the military try to persuade guerrilla fighters to abandon the insurgency, and the ways military intelligence officers do the same. In juxtaposing the two respective the processes, I show how targeting serves as a switch that connects the counterinsurgency state and the marketing nation in Colombia.

Victor García-Perdomo, Universidad de La Sabana; Summer Harlow, University of Houston; Danielle Kilgo, Indiana University • Framing the Colombian Peace Process: Between Peace and War Journalism • This bilingual, cross-national study analyzes stories about the Colombian peace process that were engaged with on social media to understand the use of peace and war framing in news reporting. Results show that, even during peace talks, media use war narratives more often than peace frames, and social media users amplify more war than peace-oriented content. Proximity also was shown to be an important factor, as Colombian media used more war frames than foreign media.

Vanessa Higgins Joyce, Texas State University; Summer Harlow, University of Houston • Seeking Transnational, Entrepreneurial News from Latin America: An Audience Analysis • Digital-native entrepreneurial news sites from Latin America are generating change in the region’s industry. These news organizations are being accessed nationally and across national boundaries. This study examined, through the theoretical lens of social capital, factors contributing to the creation of transnational audiences for these news organizations. A survey of audiences for these independent news sites in Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela indicated that economic capital, youth, and being female predicted transnational entrepreneurial news use.

Lea Hellmueller; Valerie Hase • Giving Voice to Terrorists: A longitudinal model explaining how national political contexts influence media attention toward terrorist organizations • Few studies have examined how national political contexts shape news attention of terrorism beyond the coverage of terrorist attacks. Based on an automated content analysis between 2014 and 2016 (N = 18,531), this study examines media attention in the US and the UK toward international terrorist organizations in a longitudinal setting. Results reveal that mediated visibility of terrorists is based on media’s political and national embeddedness besides characteristics of terrorist groups.

Lea Hellmueller; Matthias Revers, University of Leeds • Populist Journalism Challenging Media and Political Fields: Transnational analysis of right-wing meta-journalistic discourses • Anti-institutional media discourses have become an integral part of digital right-wing media (e.g. Big Journalism on Breitbart.com). Drawing on automated text analysis, this study analyzes media criticism of right-wing digital websites (2015-2017) in Germany, Austria, and the US. Media outlets, while focusing on anti-globalization discourses, embrace transnational logics of concerns for the decline of Western democracies. Discourses are theorized as space between journalistic and political fields that transcend national boundaries and contribute to social destabilization.

Liefu Jiang, University of Kansas; Peter Bobkowski, University of Kansas • Reading, commenting, and posting: Social media engagements and Chinese students’ acculturation in the United States • Through an online survey with 209 participants, this paper employs acculturation theory to investigate the relationship between social media use and Chinese students’ acculturation in the United States. The findings suggest that the use of western social media platforms is positively related to Chinese students’ acculturation. Specifically, consuming and creating engagements on western social media are positively related to students’ psychological adaptation, while contributing engagements on western platforms are positively related to sociocultural adaptation.

Ralph Martins; Shageaa Naqvi, Northwestern University in Qatar; Justin Martin, Northwestern University in Qatar • Predictors of Cultural Conservatism in Six Arab Countries • This study examined predictors of self-reported cultural conservatism/progressivism among nationals in six Arab countries (n=4,529): Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the UAE. Many variables found in prior research to be correlated with conservatism in Western countries—support for censorship, income, support for cultural preservation, and others—were not positively associated with conservatism in Arab countries. In fact, willingness to censor media was mostly negatively associated with conservatism in the Arab countries studied here. Some variables did correlate with conservatism in ways reflective of countries where conservatism has been studied extensively; age was positively associated with conservatism and education was negatively correlated, for example, but these relationships were not consistent across countries. Self-reported conservatism differed significantly across countries; Emiratis and Tunisians felt more conservative than people in their countries, while Lebanese and Egyptians were more evenly split among conservatives and progressives.

Mireya Máruqez-Ramírez; Claudia Mellado; María Luisa Humanes; Adriana Amado; Daniel Beck; Jacques Mick; Cornelia Mothes; Dasniel Olivera; Nikos Panagiotou; Svetlana Pasti; Henry Silke; Colin Sparks; Agnieszka Stepinska, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan; Gabriella Szabo; Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Moniza Waheed; Haiyan Wang • Detached watchdog versus adversarial reporting: a comparative study of journalistic role performance in 18 countries • This paper analyses the performance of the detached/passive and the adversarial/active orientations of the watchdog role (N= 33,640) from 18 countries, modelling the factors that better explain their presence in the news. The findings showed that the detached watchdog prevails around the world, although significant differences appear in the type of hybridization of journalistic cultures depending on the orientations – passive versus active – of the watchdog role. The data revealed that the adversarial/active type of watchdog prevails in advanced democracies with contexts of political and economic turmoil, and also in some transitional democracies from Eastern Europe; while the passive stance of this role peaks in liberal democracies such as the United States and Germany. Our results also indicate that societal variables are the strongest predictors of both types of orientations, but specially of adversarial reporting.

Rachel Mourao, Michigan State University; Weiyue Chen, Michigan State University • Covering protests on Twitter – The Influences on Brazilian Journalists’ Social Media Portrayals of the 2013 and 2015 Demonstrations • This paper uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shaped the way Brazilian journalists tweet about left and right-leaning protests. Through a mixed methodology matching survey to social media data, we found that individual attitudes predict the way reporters tweeted about protestors, indicating that social media is a space for personal, not professional, expression. As a result, patterns of protest coverage were often challenged, suggesting that Twitter has not yet been normalized.

karlyga myssayeva, al-Farabi Kazakh National University; Saule Barlybayeva, al-Farabi Kazakh National University; Sayagul Alimbekova, al-Farabi Kazakh National University • Political News Use and Democratic Support: A study of Kazakhstan’s TV impact • This study examines the impact of television during the democratization process in Kazakhstan. Television plays a significant role as a public watchdog, with greater success than other media in disseminating a range of perspectives, information, and commentary in Kazakhstan. The analysis examines whether televised political news and information leads to support for democracy and increases public interest in the democratization process. The study discusses the utility and implications of the role of television in democratization.

Olga Kamenchuk, Ohio State University; erik nisbet • Liberation or Control? How do the attitudes of Russian Facebook users differ from those on Runet platforms Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki? • We examine the potential of social media to be a technology of liberation or control in Russia. We theorize that Facebook users, as opposed to users who only use co-opted Russian platforms will express more pro-democratic attitudes. Employing a nationwide household survey conducted in 2016 our analysis shows Facebook users are less trusting and more critical of the government and also express greater support for civil liberties than Russian’s who only use Vkontakte or Odnoklassniki.

BRETT LABBE, University of Indiana South Bend; SangHee Park, University of Wisconsin – Whitewater • U.S. News Media’s Framing of the ‘North Korean Crisis’ Under the Trump Administration: The New Ideological Foreign Affairs Paradigm • On 11 February 2017, North Korea launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test of the Trump Administration. Over the ensuing year the North Korean government continued to defy international pressures through the intensification of its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. During this timeframe, an escalation of adversarial rhetoric between the Trump Administration and the Kim Jong-un military government gained widespread media attention for its potential to escalate into military aggression. This study analyzes USA Today coverage of the ‘North Korean crisis’, and its subsequent de-escalation following the announcements of diplomatic talks in March 2018 in order to gain insight into the nature of mainstream U.S. media framing of the issue. Consistent with ‘Cold War’ and ‘War on Terror’ framing scholarship, this study found that the mainstream U.S. media facilitates the construction of dominant, ideological narratives that guide dominant interpretations of the international system and the United States’ position and actions within it.

Subin Paul, University of Iowa; David Dowling • Dalit Online Activism: The Digital Archive as a Site of Political Resistance in India • As digital news archives maintained by mainstream media outlets and libraries proliferate across the world, much less is discussed in academic literature about the efforts of socially marginalized groups to document their news stories. Our case study of Dalit Camera (DC), an online news archive based in Hyderabad, India, examines how historically disadvantaged groups such as Dalits, or “Untouchables,” are leveraging digital tools to narrate their oppressive past to the outside world parallel to the rise of political censorship in India. As part of its archiving process, DC is preserving footage of Dalit resistance against the hegemonic domination by caste Hindus and is thus becoming a useful resource for journalism history scholars. Through their grassroots network of citizen journalists, DC is also engaged in reporting caste-based discrimination and violence today, contributing to the Dalit social movement for equality and justice. Using Manuel Castells’s insights on social movements in the digital age and situating the work of DC within the field of Subaltern Studies, our essay explores the challenges and politics of news archiving in contemporary India, in the process explaining how various socio-political factors curate the content of news archives, and consequently, the construction of journalism history.

Victoria Knight, University of Georgia; Ivanka Pjesivac, University of Georgia; Michael Cacciatore, University of Georgia • Otherization of Africa: How American Media Framed People Living with HIV/AIDS in Africa from 1987 to 2007 • This study examined otherization framing of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa in American media 1987-2007. The results of a content analysis of the representative sample of news articles from three outlets (N=421) show that American media overwhelmingly used otherization frames throughout the 20-year period, in relation to negative article tone. The study represents the first attempt to quantify otherization framing of Africa in HIV/AIDS context. The implications for international reporting and theory are discussed.

Jyotika Ramaprasad • Journalism Ethics and the BRICS Journalist • This paper presents results of a survey of journalists from BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) on their ethical orientations: absolutist, situationist, subjectivist, and exceptionist. These orientations are personal level generalized ethical beliefs based on a person’s relativism and idealism in the ethics arena. Individual, work related, and societal level factors are considered as correlates to assess how much they account for these beliefs.

Nataliya Roman, University of North Florida; Mariam Alkazemi, Virginia Commonwealth University; Margaret Stewart, University of North Florida • Tweeting about Terror: Using World Systems Theory to compare international newspaper coverage online • This study looks at news coverage of terrorist attacks on Twitter over a five-year period. It examines Twitter accounts of three American and three UK elite newspapers. This study found that World Systems Theory predicted terrorist attacks coverage in the American media, but not in the UK media. Terrorist attacks in core countries received significantly more attention than attacks in non-core countries in the American media. Also, this study revealed that just three terrorist attacks: January and November 2015 Paris attacks and Brussels 2016 bombings, accounted for nearly a half of the overall U.S. and UK tweets examined in this study.

Jane B. Singer, City, University of London; Marcel Broersma, Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen • Innovation and Entrepreneurship: International Journalism Students’ Interpretive Repertoires for a Changing Occupation • Amid ongoing media disruption worldwide, discourse about journalism has increasingly emphasized innovation within the newsroom and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it. This paper uses the concept of interpretive repertoires to understand how international students preparing for journalism careers understand innovation and entrepreneurialism in relation to changing industry circumstances and long-standing conceptualizations of occupational norms and behaviors. We find shared repertoires that embrace technological change, but generally within an acceptance of traditional normative practice.

Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University; Maria Clara Martucci; G. Scott Burgess, Wayne State Univesity • To censor and surveil: Cross-national effects of online suppression technologies on democractization • Using country- and multi-level analyses, we assess whether internet censorship and surveillance obstruct democratization, providing the first cross-national tests of online surveillance effects. Across 63 countries, online government monitoring is negatively associated with democratization, while internet censorship exhibits no additional effect. We theorize that suppression technologies erode democratic progress by thwarting collective action and examine how they affect individual-level disruptive political participation in a sub-sample of 21 countries. Together, these results suggest the need for greater scrutiny of surveillance and censorship technologies and the countries that use them. Political implications are discussed.

Linsen Su; Xigen Li • Perceived Agenda-Setting Effects in International Context: Media’s Impacts on Americans’ Perception toward China • The previous studies on agenda setting mainly address the effects on aggregate level without full consideration of individual differences. The current study puts forward a highly-related but different concept—the perceived agenda setting effects of media by the audience. The study confirms the existence of perceived agenda setting effects through a structured online survey (N=848) of American adults in April 2016. It finds that coverage on issue involving US interests has the strongest perceived agenda setting effect, while coverage on Chinese tourism has the least effect. The study finds that the media use, interest in China, and media trust are all positively related with perceived agenda setting effect, but direct experience of traveling to China has no significant effect. The study identifies the mediation effect of media use on perceived agenda setting effect through interest, but moderation effects of media trust and direct experience are not significant.

Miki Tanikawa • Is “Global Journalism” truly global? Conceptual and empirical examinations of the global, cosmopolitan and parochial conceptualization of journalism • An acute debate has arisen among some journalism scholars as to whether or not a brainchild of the age of globalization was born in the media world: global journalism. This study introduces the debate and conceptually clarifies the points of disagreement between the two camps including those who deny its existence. In a parallel quantitative study, measures developed to capture the concepts, “stereotypes” and “domestication” whose existence in the news journalism is viewed as inconsistent with the tenets of global journalism, were employed, and found that such content has increased in major international news media in the last 30 years.

Olesya Venger • Nation’s Media Usage and Immigration Attitudes in Europe: Exploring Contextual Effects Across Media Forms, Structures, and Messages • Drawing upon theories of social threat and media systems, the current study uses aggregate data on 20 European nations to examine the basic relationship between nation’s media usage, public attitudes about the general consequences of immigration, and their specific beliefs about immigrants worsening the nation’s crime problem. Nations with higher daily usage of newspapers and the internet were found to have more positive general attitudes toward immigrants, but television viewership was not significantly associated with these attitudes. Regardless of media source, national attitudes about immigrants causing crime were also unrelated to the density of media usage within these countries. Content analyses of several national newspapers (e.g., UK, Hungary, Sweden) were conducted to help understand the pattern of these aggregate relationships and other supplemental analysis revealed the moderating effects of nation’s media system on these results. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and their implications for future research on media’s role in shaping public attitudes about immigration and other social issues across different types of media forms, structures, and messages.

Anan Wan, University of South Carolina; Leigh Moscowitz, University of South Carolina; Linwan Wu, University of South Carolina • Online Social Viewing: Cross-Cultural Adoption and Uses of Bullet Screen Videos • Bullet screen technology, is an innovative way of presenting online videos, allowing viewers to contribute comments that simultaneously appear over the videos. Popular in East Asia, the technology is making its way to American audiences. This study employs a comparative qualitative focus group approach to explore how American and Chinese viewers respond to and interact with this new format of online videos. Three themes have emerged: 1) unique affordance, 2) barriers to adoption and usage, and 3) cultural differences pertaining to technology adoption and usage. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Aimei yang, University of Southern California; Wenlin Liu, U of Houston; Rong Wang • Discourse of the Cross-Sectoral Alliances Network in the Global Refugee Crisis: Studying CSR through a Global Perspective • The scope and magnitude of the current global refugee crisis is unprecedented. This crisis has posed severe challenges to social stability and sustainable development around the world. Surprisingly, in an era when corporations are expected to take part in addressing social issues, our initial assessment showed that some of the largest corporations in the world have communicated their alliances with NGOs and IGOs on the refugee issue quite differently. We draw upon the National Business System Theory and the Media Repertoires Approach to understand what factors influence corporations’ CSR communication of strategic alliances with nonprofit and public-sector organizations on the refugee issue. Findings of this study showed that countries’ economic inequality, citizens’ education level, and philanthropic culture, as well as the nature of digital media platforms affected the communication of cross-sector strategic alliances. Implications for CSR theory and practices are discussed.

Li ZHI, Cityu University of Hong Kong; Limin Liang • Media Improvisations and Bureaucratic Tensions in China:Transcending media control & news routines in disasters • In the controlled media environment in China, marketized media go beyond their normal reporting mode when bureaucratic tensions arise in the propaganda system’s response to major disasters. This study builds on the framework of regulated marketization and the literature of fragmented authoritarianism in understanding Chinese media and the propaganda system. Through analyzing 36 significant disasters and conducting a case study on one typical disaster, it reveals how marketized media get the chance to strive for more autonomy and improvise new strategies to report disasters. Regulated by the Party-State, marketized media must follow the propaganda apparatus’s reporting guidelines in routines. The media’s journalistic roles, norms, obligations are confined to the limited realm delineated by the reporting guidelines. Even in the very unexpected and newsworthy disasters, the marketized media need to abide by the guidelines. They could not go beyond the routine practices and improvise strategies to accommodate the disasters, when the Party-State’s control are strict and consistent. However, sometimes, the propaganda agencies involved in disasters may lack good coordination or have conflicts of interests. Such tensions delay, suspend, and nullify some of the strict reporting guidelines, making disasters venues for improvisations.

2018 ABSTRACTS

Communicating Science, Health, Environment, and Risk 2018 Abstracts

Encouraging Safe Wildlife Viewing in National Parks: Effects of a Risk Communication Campaign on Visitors’ Behavior • Katie Abrams, Colorado State University • Seeing wildlife in their natural habitat with little to no boundaries or protections can have some undesired consequences, especially as people get up close to animals. In four national parks, we tested the effects of a risk communication campaign designed using several elements from previous research and relevant theories on how close national parks’ visitors got to wildlife. Results showed, once the campaign was in place, fewer visitors were observed within unsafe distances to wildlife in three of the four parks.

Mapping perceived barriers to science communication: Inter-issue and inter-group comparisons • Lee Ahern, Penn State; Sushma Kumble, Towson; Jeff Conlin; Jinping Wang, Penn State University • The science of science communication has established that barriers to science communication are different for different science issues, for different audiences, and in different contexts. The research presented here takes a novel approach to measure and visualize the public’s—and scientists’—perceived barriers to effective science communication for specific issues. Results provide face validly for the approach, with known audience difference and issue differences mapping out significantly differently across perceived barriers to effective science communication.

Barriers in Communicating Science for Policy in Congress • Karen Akerlof, American Association for the Advancement of Science, George Mason University; Maria Carmen Lemos, University of Michigan; Emily T. Cloyd, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Erin Heath, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Selena Nelson, George Mason University; Julia Hathaway, George Mason University; Kristin Timm, George Mason University • How does Congress use science? And what are the barriers that staffers experience in finding, interpreting, and using scientific information in energy, environment, and science portfolios? This qualitative study of 16 interviews with Republican and Democratic staffers from the House and Senate applies a science usability model to the hyper-polarized legislative context, finding similarities, and some potential differences, between “strategic” use of science to support or defend policy positions and “substantive” use in policy decisions.

A Content Analysis of e-Cigarette Brand Messages on Social Media • Jordan Alpert, University of Florida; Huan Chen; Alyssa Jaisle, University of Florida • Although rates of cigarette smoking in the U.S. are declining, E-cigarettes (e-cigs) are rapidly expanding. While there is no definitive conclusion yet on the dangers of e-cigs, data indicates that e-cigs can be addictive and dangerous since they contain nicotine. The FDA permits e-cig brands to market their products, but imposed restrictions on messages that promote flavors and claims that e-cigs are healthier than cigarettes. However, these rules can be circumvented within social media platforms like Twitter. The objective of this study was to perform a content analysis of tweets posted by the top selling e-cig brands on Twitter to identify and categorize the most frequently utilized communication strategies. Using the hierarchy of effects framework, over 500 tweets were analyzed, which resulted in behavioral messaging as the most often used messaging strategy, followed by affective and cognitive. Findings indicate that brands are creating messages in Twitter to engage with followers, offer discounts, and advertise flavors. However, tweets about the positive health effects of using e-cigs were minimal. Implications of unregulated messages within social media include attracting young adults to become part of the e-cig community, which can lead to trial and frequent usage.

Exploring differences in crisis literacy and efficacy on behavioral responses during infectious disease outbreaks • Lucinda Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Brooke Liu, University of Maryland; Seoyeon Kim; Yan Jin • This study examined the effects of efficacy and literacy on individuals’ information seeking and protective action taking during infectious disease outbreaks through a nationally representative survey of 1,164 U.S. adults. New measures of crisis efficacy and disaster literacy were tested. Results revealed that crisis efficacy, organizational efficacy, and disaster literacy drove information seeking and protective action taking, while health literacy did not. Interestingly, disaster literacy negatively predicted both information seeking and protective actions.

Shall we? Let’s Move! • Aqsa Bashir, University of Florida • Beyond her status as the wife of the first African American U.S. president, former First Lady Michelle Obama is famous for her commitment to health and fitness. In 2010, she launched the Let’s Move! Campaign, aimed at combating childhood obesity in order to achieve a healthier future for America. Little research has examined the media coverage this campaign received. Hence this paper describes a framing analysis of media coverage by two popular news sources, one conservative—FOX News, and one liberal—CNN. The analysis revealed three distinct frames: healthy future for American children, policy change, and exercise is trendy. Furthermore, the campaign received more positive coverage from the liberal news source as compared to more neutral coverage by the conservative news source.

Strategic Communication as Planned Behavior: What Shapes Scientists’ Willingness to Choose Specific Tactics • John Besley, Michigan State University; Kathryn O’Hara, Carleton University; Anthony Dudo, University of Texas, Austin • Truly strategic science communicators make careful choices about the goals and communication objectives they seek to achieve. They then select the tactics that have the most likelihood of allowing them to achieve their communication objectives ethically and efficiently. However, little previous research has sought to develop and test theory aimed at understanding these choices. The current study therefore aims to contribute to the development of a theory of strategic science communication as planned behavior based on the Integrated Behavioral Model. It does so in the context of exploring Canadian scientists’ reported willingness to choose six different tactics as a function of attitudes, normative beliefs and efficacy beliefs. The results suggest that beliefs about both response-efficacy and self-efficacy, and perceptions of ethicality and norms, are important predictors of willingness when considering a tactic. Differences between scientists in terms of demographics and related variables provide only limited benefit in predicting such willingness.

Bringing People Closer: The Pro-Social Effects of Immersive Media on Users’ Attitudes and Behavior • Priska Breves, University of Wuerzburg • This experimental study (N = 85) examined how varying the degree of immersiveness of a short documentary about a remote health issue influenced users’ reported spatial presence, feelings of empathy, perceived issue importance, and behavior. Participants watched the documentary using either a high-quality VR headset (HTC Vive), a low-quality cardboard VR headset or a regular computer screen. Technology’s immersiveness affected the dependent variables as predicted, increasing spatial presence and resultant attitudes and behavior.

Vulnerable live patients, powerful dead patients: a textual analysis of doctor-patient relationships in popular Chinese medical dramas • Li Chen, WTAMU • Using Framing Theory as a theoretical framework, this study examined depictions of patients and doctor-patient communication in Chinese medical dramas. Two major findings were revealed by the textual analysis. First, medical dramas extended the definition of “patient” to include family members, an outcome of the impact of Confucian ethics. Second, doctor-patient communication was found to be two-fold: conversations during interventions were typically paternalistic, while conversations about non-medical issues exhibited consumeristic features. Doctors’ unshakable dominance during interventions resulted from patients’ lack of awareness of their rights as independent individuals, while doctors’ vulnerable position in medical disputes resulted from systemic deficits in the current legal system. Both trends challenged the typical doctor-patient relationships described by previous literature. The study showed that media dramas defined and presented inherent problems in doctor-patient communication, identified and pointed out (either directly or indirectly) the causes of most of these problems, and made moral judgements about these issues using vivid individual stories, but they did not attempt to offer solutions to the problems. Theoretical and practical implications of the study were discussed.

The Effects of Format and Language on Information Retention of Climate Change News Narratives in Digital Presentations • Christina Childs DeWalt, Florida Atlantic University • Reporting on climate change has been a special challenge for journalists, but new approaches to storytelling may help curb some of the inherent confounds found in environmental discourse. Through experimental analysis, this study examines how anthropomorphic language (assigning human characteristics to non-human agents) and non-linear digital news story formatting can impact online media consumers retention of information presented in climate change news narratives.

Campus sustainability: An integrated model of college students’ recycling behavior on campus • Moonhee Cho, University of Tennessee • Proposing an integrated model based on multiple theoretical approaches, the study examined factors influencing college students’ campus recycling intention and actual recycling behavior. An online survey results with a total of 475 responses found that self-determined motivation, attitude toward recycling, perceived behavioral control, and negative anticipated emotion had direct effects on campus recycling intention while recycling intention, self-determined motivation, and household recycling influenced actual campus recycling. Both theoretical and practical implications are also provided.

Social Media and Concerns about Global Climate Change: News Use and Political Ideology in 20 Countries • Trevor Diehl, University of Vienna; Brigitte Huber; Homero Gil de Zúñiga, University of Vienna; James H. Liu, Massey University • This study tests the relationships between political ideology and social media for news in forming public concerns about global climate change in 20 countries. Little is known about how dependency on social media shapes attitudes toward climate change, especially in non-Western contexts. Theories of risk perception are examined using multi-level comparative analysis with survey data (N=21,218). This study contributes to conversations about the ability of media technologies to create informed public opinion on science issues.

Health Behavior Intention: A Concept Explication • Ciera Dockter, University of Missouri • Health behavior intention is considered one of the most effective ways to measure and predict an individual’s behavior, but research in health communication and related fields indicate the concept needs revision. Differing concepts are used interchangeably, and operationalization and measurement of health behavior intention do not take into account the many factors that can influence health behavior intention. This explication addresses these issues by providing a new conceptual definition and operationalization of the concept.

Examining the Effect of Climate Change Images on People’s Estimation of Egocentric Psychological Distance • Ran Duan, Michigan State University; BRUNO TAKAHASHI, Michigan State University; Adam Zwickle • Climate change has been widely perceived as a psychologically distant risk, that is, its uncertain impacts will affect other people, will happen in other places or sometime in the future. In this study, relying on construal level theory, we examined how the level of abstraction and concreteness of climate change imagery affects viewers’ perceived psychological distance of climate change, including spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical (level of uncertainty) distances. Participants (n=402) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, one that had abstract images and one with concrete images. Results showed that the abstract and concrete images successfully activated people’s abstract and concrete mindsets respectively, and people who viewed abstract images were more likely than those who viewed concrete images to perceive climate change as a spatially and temporally distant issue.

Understanding the role of gatekeeping in New England journalists’ priorities for reporting on aquaculture • Kevin Duffy; Laura Rickard, University of Maine; Paul Grosswiler, University of Maine • Print news media tend to equate aquaculture with risk – a surprising finding given journalists’ general aversion to risk reporting. By framing aquaculture as “risky”, news producers build an agenda, potentially influencing public opinion. To understand risk culture surrounding aquaculture, research must examine not only newspaper content, but also perceptions of public mediators disseminating such messages. Using Q-method, we examine New England journalists’ (N = 15) perceptions of aquaculture’s news value, suggesting theoretical implications for gatekeeping.

Seatbelts Don’t Save Lives: Discovering and Targeting the Attitudes and Behaviors of Young Arab Male Drivers • Susan Dun, Northwestern University in Qatar; Amal Ali • Our two-part, mixed methods study, first investigated the driving beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of young Arab men then created and evaluated a message targeting their seatbelt beliefs and attitudes. There was change in the desired direction. The results provide information necessary for communication campaigns to specifically tailor persuasive messages for this high-risk yet understudied group of young Arab men in a bid to save lives and decrease the injuries that result from traffic accidents.

Reaching an At-Risk Population: Visual Health Communication Campaigns for Migrant Workers • Susan Dun, Northwestern University in Qatar; Amal Ali; Bothayna Al-Mohammadi, Northwestern University; Sana Hussain; Muhammad Muneeb Ur Rehman; Muhammad Humam, Northwestern University in Qatar • The needs of a rapidly globalizing world have created a demand for construction and maintenance labor, much of which has been done by migrant workers from developing countries resulting in approximately 258 million migrant workers operating around the globe. Such laborers are often a vulnerable population because of low literacy levels and unsafe work conditions. Developing effective health message campaigns to assist migrant workers to understand how to navigate health systems and receive care is necessary to improve their quality of life. The purpose of our project is to test the effectiveness of primarily visual communication messages targeted at educating and motivating migrant workers to utilize available health resources. Following standard health communication campaign procedures, our project has three stages: Phase 1 formative research where we interviewed migrant workers to assess their health conditions, health facility utilization and preference of channel and media, results which we report here. In phase 2 we are currently developing visual communication messages targeting the issues we discovered in the formative research, a process we anticipate completing by mid-April. In phase 3 we will conduct the evaluation research, testing message comprehension and persuasiveness in May 2018. We are partnering with a labor supply company who will use the revised messages to communicate with their employees, resulting in, hopefully, an actual increase in the quality of life of the workers. As expected, we discovered a lack of understanding of and difficulties in navigating the health care system; problems which our visual communication messages should help alleviate.

Latitudes, Attitudes, And Climate Change Agency • Troy Elias, University of Oregon; Mark Blaine, University of Oregon; Deborah Morrison, University of Oregon; Brandon Harris, University of Oregon • This research uses international survey data from 1,211 Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Nigerians, and Americans to examine which media, psychological, and cognitive variables influence the tendencies of Brazilian, Costa Rican, Nigerian, and American consumers to participate in pro-environmental and green purchasing behaviors. Results of the study indicate that America lags behind Costa Rica, Brazil, and Nigeria in pro-environmental attitudes, pro-environmental identity, attitudes toward green purchasing, and pro-environmental behaviors.

Engagement in Cancer Screening: Theoretical Exploration Using A Meta-Analytical Structural Equation Modeling Approach • Guangchao Feng, Shenzhen University; Zhiliang Lin, Jinan University; Wanhua Ou, Shenzhen University; Xianglin Su, Shenzhen University • The present study aims to explore the theoretical underpinning of low participation in screening programs through a model-based meta-analysis. It was found that the health belief model is the most adopted theoretical framework. Moreover, the intended uptake of screening was only positively predicted by cues to action, health literacy, and perceived susceptibility, and behavior was negatively predicted by intention.

Examining the Impact of Motivational Salience and Involvement on Visual Attention to Scientific Information • Laura Fischer, University of Kentucky; Courtney Meyers, Texas Tech University; Glenn Cummins, Texas Tech University; Courtney Gibson, Texas Tech University; Mathew Baker, Texas Tech University • Literature suggests scientists struggle to make information salient to consumers, and the value-oriented frame may be a way to connect with consumers through increased motivational salience. To evaluate the effects of competing message frames on visual attention, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted to understand participants’ attention to messages about two agricultural science issues. The results indicated the reader devoted more time to reading advertisements that were framed to be more motivationally salient.

In the Crosshairs: The Perils of Environmental Journalism • Eric Freedman, Michigan State University • Journalists covering environmental issues around the globe are at heightened risk of murder, arrest assault, threats, self-exile, lawsuits, and harassment because environmental controversies often involve influential business and economic interests, political power battles, criminal activities, and corruption, plus politically, culturally, and economically sensitive issues concerning indigenous rights to land and natural resources. This study uses in-depth interviews to explore such situations, including the psychological effects on these journalists’ sense of mission and professional practices.

Risk perception, efficacy belief, and safety climate: Use of risk perception attitude framework to examine information seeking for workplace health and safety among flight attendants • Timothy Fung • Using the risk perception attitude framework (RPA), this survey study examined the joint influence of risk perception, efficacy belief, and safety climate on flight attendants’ intent to seek workplace health and safety information. Findings showed that significant differences in information availability and negative attitude toward service protocols and work-related guidelines were observed among the four RPA groups. Safety climate moderated the effect of efficacy belief on the relationship between risk perception and information seeking intent.

The role of counterfactual thinking in narrative persuasion: Its impact on patients’ adherence to treatment regimen • Timothy Fung • The purpose of this study is to explicate the underlying process of how narratives, accompanied with counterfactual thinking, exert cognitive and affective influence on audiences. One hundred thirty-six patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis participated in a 2 (Goal failure) by 2 (Counterfactual thinking) between-subject factorial experiment. The analyses showed that promotion-/prevention-framed failure and additive/subtractive counterfactuals jointly influenced the patients’ anticipated regret and mental simulation, which, in turn, influenced their attitudes and intentions toward treatment adherence.

Journalists, Policy, and the Role of Evidence in the News • Nicole Gesualdo, Rutgers University; Matthew Weber, Rutgers University • Evaluating the presence of research evidence in the news can reveal how journalistic practices affect the ways in which audiences assess information, such as the credibility of policy proposals. This study uses content analysis to analyze the type and quantity of evidence in articles about regulations on food marketing to children, and the language choices made in the articles. Results indicate consistency in language use across time and news organizations, suggesting established norms and routines.

Tweeting in the Midst of Disaster: A Comparative Case Study of Journalists’ Practices Following Four Crises • Amber Hinsley, Saint Louis University; Hyunmin Lee, Drexel University • This comparative case study examines how local journalists used Twitter as a crisis communication tool during four emergency situations in the U.S. The public’s retweeting and liking patterns also identified messages that resonated with them. A content analysis found that while local journalists used objective reporting most frequently across all crises, there were variances in Twitter practices of journalists covering the two man-made crises. The two natural disasters showed more similarities. These findings can help develop best-practices strategies for journalists and benefit emergency management personnel as well.

Time to Work Out! Examining the Behavior Change Techniques and Relevant Theoretical Mechanisms that Predict the Popularity of Fitness Mobile Apps with Chinese-Language User Interfaces • Guanxiong Huang, City University of Hong Kong; Enze Zhou • Eyeing the huge potential mHealth market in China, developers both inside and outside of China have created an increasing number of fitness mobile applications with Chinese-language user interfaces. The present study analyzes the content of those fitness mobile apps (N = 177), with a particular focus on their behavior change techniques and relevant theoretical mechanisms. It finds that three theoretical mechanisms, modeling/observational learning, self-regulation, and social comparison/social support, are prevalent among fitness mobile apps with Chinese-language user interfaces. Moreover, based on the configurations of the behavior change techniques, three distinct clusters are identified: “instructional apps” (N = 75), “self-regulation apps” (N = 58), and “triathlon apps” (N = 44). Among them, “triathlon apps” equipped with technical features reflecting all three theoretical mechanisms are found to be the most popular among users. This suggests the usefulness of health behavior change theories in promoting physical activity via mobile apps in that the inclusion of more theoretical content in the app design enhances the app’s effectiveness. More theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

“To Fly Under Borrowed Colours”: Mediated Communication and Scientific Ethos • Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp, Lynchburg College; Darwin Jorgensen, Roanoke College • Credit for insulin’s discovery played out through mediated communication to separate audiences: to scientific audiences through science journals and anniversary reminiscences and to the public through journalistic accounts. Claims by the four principal researchers clustered around punctuation of the sequence of events, bolstered by three aspects of discovery: primacy of scientific ideas, importance of place, and uses of power. These elements provide prescriptive advice for modern scientists conducting mediated outreach to a skeptical public.

Folk theorizing the quality and credibility of health apps • Shaheen Kanthawala, Michigan State University; Eunsin Joo; Anastasia Kononova; Wei Peng; Shelia Cotten, Michigan State University • Increasing popularity of health apps raises questions regarding how individuals assess their credibility and quality. Through semi-structured interviews and open coding thematic analysis, we found users determined credibility of health apps through cues based on app features, ‘borrowed’ credibility decisions, and equated quality to personal preferences. Non-quality or credibility cues leading to download were also noted. Findings are discussed as folk theories of quality and credibility of health apps using dual-processing models and media literacy.

Smart Device Proficiency and Use, Loneliness, and Ego Integrity: An examination of older adult smartphone users in South Korea • Kisun Kim, Bowling Green State University; Sung-Yeon Park, University of Nevada, Reno; Hyung-Cheol Kang, Sookmyung Women’s University • The relationship between smartphones and older adults’ ego integrity in South Korea was examined. Older adults who used a smartphone were recruited to investigate their smartphone proficiency/use, loneliness, and ego integrity. Smartphone use was directly related to higher ego integrity, but smartphone proficiency was not. Loneliness was negatively related to ego integrity. Path analysis revealed that the relationships between smartphone proficiency and ego integrity and smartphone use and ego integrity was each mediated by loneliness.

Environmental Framing on Twitter: Impact of Trump’s Paris Agreement Withdrawal Announcement on Climate Change and Ocean Acidification Dialogue • Sojung Kim, George Mason University; Sandra Cooke • Despite the popularity of social media, its role in communicating emerging environmental issues has not received much attention. One example is ocean acidification (OA), the process by which carbon dioxide dissolves into and acidifies the world’s oceans. Although scientists consider OA to be as dangerous a problem as climate change (CC), public awareness of OA is low. This study investigated how public discussions about CC and OA occurred on Twitter, with what content frames and by whom. Tweeting patterns before and after President Trump’s announcement of the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement were compared. The results showed that for CC tweets, Political/ Ideological Struggle/Activism and Disaster frames were the most prevalent, whereas a fair amount of Promotional or Piggybacking frames were found among OA tweets. Trump’s withdrawal decision sparked substantial debate on CC and facilitated open expressions of extreme and polarized opinions on Twitter.

Hope in the Depths of Despair: Theorizing about Hope in the Fear Appeal Context • Hanyoung Kim; Yen-I Lee, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; Jeong-Yeob Han, University of Georgia Department of Advertising & Public Relations • Although various theories have postulated that fear as the central emotional construct in their suppositions, fear stems from only the half portion (i.e., threat component) of fear appeal messages. In addition, empirical evidence for the role fear in predicting persuasion outcomes is scarce. Addressing this issue, the current study sought to operationalize a qualitatively different emotion, hope, in the fear appeal context by taking the cognitive appraisal theory and functional theories of emotion as theoretical bases. Results from an experimental study (N = 223) revealed that perceived efficacy and perceived threat, which stem from efficacy and threat components, respectively, positively predicted hope in a multiplicative manner. That is to say, perceived threat positive moderated the impact of perceived efficacy on hope. In addition, hope positively affected the persuasion outcome (i.e., intention to obtain HPV vaccination). Theoretical and empirical implications for health communication are discussed.

Unveiling Psychological Mechanisms of Climate Change and Health Message Processing: A Mediation Approach • Sojung Kim, George Mason University; Di Pei; John Kotcher, George Mason University; Edward Maibach • The present study employed a longitudinal survey experiment with American adults to investigate whether cognitive and emotional responses to messages about climate change-related health risks would mediate the relationships between participants’ individual differences and their injunctive beliefs and behavioral intention of supporting climate change policies. Liberals or people with poorer health were more persuaded by the messages, and in turn reported stronger injunctive beliefs and policy support, compared to conservatives or people with better health.

The Politics of Environmentalism and Resistance to Media Advocacy of Pro-Environmental Civic Engagement in South Korea • Hyunjung Kim • The purpose of the current study is to establish a basis for and propose a strategy to increase individuals’ participation in the environmental movements by reducing resistance to mediated communication advocating environmentalism in South Korea. Drawing on the theory of psychological reactance, we explored a possible explanation for the decrease in individuals’ participation in environmental movements despite media advocacy and increased public awareness of the need for an environmental movement. A web-based experiment was conducted with a 2 by 2 factorial design with media and political orientation as between-subjects factors. The results demonstrate that pro-environmental civic engagement intention after exposure to an online newspaper editorial advocating the environmental movement is greater for the progressives in the progressive media group than for those in the conservative media group. The effect of media congeniality was explained by perceived media credibility and psychological reactance to the message. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The Role of Risk, Efficacy, and Worry in College Students’ Health Insurance Information Seeking: Applying the Risk Perception Attitude (RPA) Framework • Hyeseung Koh, University of Texas Austin; Sara Champlin, The University of North Texas; Amanda Mabry-Flynn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • The purpose of this study is to identify what might motivate college students to engage in health insurance information seeking and to more effectively target health insurance communication by segmenting the audience based on differences in motivations. The risk perception attitude (RPA) framework was used as a theoretical foundation to guide the study. The results indicated that risk perceptions and efficacy beliefs influenced college students’ health insurance information seeking, which is mediated by feeling of worry. There findings emphasize that both cognition and emotion play an integral and often tandem role in influencing health information seeking behaviors. Based on our findings what can health communication scholars, health practitioners, message designers, policy makers, and university health staff do to encourage students to seek information or to improve their physical and psychological health.

A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Positive and Negative Vaccine Attitude Predictors in Singapore and the United States • Wei Yi Kong; Christopher Cummings; David Berube • Vaccines are some of the most effective disease prevention tools but there are growing concerns over vaccine safety and efficacy. With vaccine attitudes underpinning vaccine uptake, this study investigated the factors predicting vaccine attitudes and how those factors differ across cultures. Results found traditional media to impact on negative vaccine attitudes, and suggest health belief, science and technology belief, and vaccine governance trust to be influential in changing attitudes in Singapore and the United States.

How Perceived Similarity Moderates Sympathy and Pride Appeal Organ Donation Messages • Sining Kong, University of Florida; Yu Hao Lee • This study aims to examine how perceived similarity affects the effect of different emotional appeal organ donation messages. Through two factorial-design experiments (2×2: similarity vs dissimilarity, and sympathy vs pride), we examined how perceived similarity moderates emotional appeals in organ donation messages. Study 1 is an online experiment examining perceived similarity and physical similarity. Study 2 is a lab experiment with incidental similarity and demographic similarity. The results revealed that only perceived similarity has an impact on people’s emotional and behavioral intention. Furthermore, regardless of the emotional appeal message, perceived similarity induced both more sympathy and pride, which indicates a mixed altruistic and egoistic motivation in organ donation intention. These findings offer important theoretical and applied implications for future research.

Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness in Online Health Information Seeking • Seow Ting Lee, University of Colorado Boulder • This study explicates the relationship between intrinsic human motivation needs and extrinsic information gratification needs to understand why people go online for health information. Applying Self Determination Theory, the study adopts a relational approach to examine online health information seeking behaviors within the framework of patient-physician relations, consistent with a significant body of work that has implicitly or explicitly juxtaposed online health information seeking and the face-to-face doctor’s office visit experience. Based on a survey of 993 online health information seekers in India, our findings suggest that the three basic human motivation constructs of Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness differentially predict online health information seeking behaviors. Support for Autonomy in the online environment emerged as the most salient predictor of online health information seeking behaviors, but support for Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness in the office visit experience could not explain why people engage in online for health information seeking.

Revisiting the Effects of Threat Appraisal and Self-efficacy on Protection Motivation from a Terror Management Theory Perspective • Jiyoung Lee, Syracuse University; Yungwook Kim, Ewha Womans University • Although a wealth of studies has tested fear appeals, little has noted why fear appeals sometimes fail to result in health-promoting behaviors. By applying terror management theory (TMT), this study retested how severity, susceptibility, and self-efficacy affect fear control and danger control responses in the context of fear appeals on terrorism. Four hundred participants were randomly assigned to one of the two groups: mortality salience (200) and control (200). Results from multi-group analyses show the significant relationships between susceptibility-danger control, severity-danger control, and susceptibility-danger control in all groups. Importantly, self-efficacy was a contributor for leading fear control responses especially to death-primed individuals whose susceptibility is high. Danger control responses were shown to participants who had both high levels of severity and self-efficacy but only confined to those who are not death-primed. By investigating health-related influencers and behavioral outcomes from a TMT perspective, this study can expand the current fear appeals literature.

Breaking the silence: Extending theory to address the underutilization of mental health services among Chinese immigrants in the United States • Jo-Yun Queenie Li, University of South Carolina • Using a nation wide survey of 445 Chinese immigrants in November 2017, this study investigates the effects of cognitive barriers (i.e., acculturation levels) and affective obstacles (i.e., mental illness stigma) on Chinese immigrants’ perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral responses toward mental health services, by combing situational theory of problem solving and the theory of planned behavior. Findings provide empirical support for the combined model, showing that all the cognitive and affective factors can predict Chinese immigrants’ communicative action and behaviors regarding mental health services utilization. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Now or future? Motivating Chinese women to get the HPV vaccines for their children • Sixiao Liu; Janet Yang; Haoran Chu • This study examines the impacts of gain vs. loss-framed messages and narrative messages on Chinese women’s intentions to get the HPV vaccines for their children. No main effect was found for message types, but loss-framed message slightly increased vaccination intention. Time orientation moderates the relationship between message framing and vaccination intention. Narrative message works better among present-minded individuals, whereas gain-framed message was more persuasive for future-minded individuals.

Framing Obesity: Effects of Obesity Labeling and Prevalence Statistics on Public Perceptions • Jiawei Liu; ByungGu Lee; Douglas McLeod; Hyesun Choung • This study investigates the effects of obesity labeling (disease vs. body type) and prevalence statistics (prevalence rates of obesity, extreme obesity, or overweight-obesity combined). Our findings suggest that adults’ obesity perceptions deviate from reality and that they use framed cues as reference points when making estimates/judgments; audience perceptions of the nature and prevalence of obesity were significantly affected. In addition, perceiving obesity as a disease and as more widespread can produce positive real-world outcomes.

Spotlight on Suicide: A Content Analysis of Online News Coverage of Celebrity Suicide Death, 2012-2017 • Susan LoRusso, University of Minnesota, Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication • Using the Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide, 311 media reports of 43 celebrity suicide deaths from 2012-2017 were analyzed. Good-reporting practices were largely absent in the census, and an average of three poor-reporting practices per media report were present. Additionally, a comparative analysis was conducted assessing adherence before and after the Associated Press included guidelines for reporting on suicide in the 2015 Stylebook. Differences in media outcomes between celebrities’ level of fame were also explored.

Processing Victim Portrayals: How Multiple Emotions and Victim Perceptions Influence Collective Action for Environmental Justice • Hang Lu, Cornell University • Social conflict situations, such as environmental injustice, racial discrimination and gun violence, have been drawing increasing public attention. To help resolve these conflicts, collective action from the general public is needed. Through two experiments, the current research examined one possible way to get the public involved with collective action, that is, via the portrayals of victims and the emotions and perceptions the portrayals convey. The first experiment (N=954) adopted a 2 (compassion: high vs. low) x 2 (moral outrage: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design. The second experiment (N=990) utilized perspective taking instructions (empathic vs. objective) for manipulation. Together, the findings from the two experiments show that emotions, such as compassion, moral outrage, and distress, and cognitive factors, such as perceived victim’s suffering and identification with the victim, mediated the effects of victim portrayals on collective action intentions. These findings contribute to the literature by connecting victim portrayals with collective action, expanding the array of emotions in predicting collective action, and furthering the investigation of collective action in third-party contexts.

Green Dress Reactance: Examining the Identity Threat and Resistance to Persuasion • Yanni MA • Environment communicators often face challenges in campaigning for pro-environment strategies, in which messages cannot successfully promote sustainable behaviors such as recycling. Research has shown that resistance to persuasion by means of showing psychological reactance could be the reason the persuasive messages fail to work. However, what elicits the defensive mechanism to persuasion has not been fully studied. An experiment conducted to examine the underlying role of environmental identity in understanding identity threat after reading anti-/pro-recycling messages. Additionally, this article examines the role of perceived identity threat in relation with three major components of resistance (i.e, psychological reactance, counteraruging and negative emotion). Results find an anti-recycling message increases identity threat among high environment identifiers, which leads to high resistance. Moderated mediation analyses suggest that identity threat depends on people’s environment identity, and may also be an antecedent of reactance, counterarguing and negative emotion.

Perceived Barriers and Facilitators in Primary Care of Diagnosing Mental Illness in the Geriatric Population: A Systematic Review • Nia MASON, Louisiana State University; Stephanie Whitenack, Louisiana State University; Diane Francis, Louisiana State University • The aim of this systematic review is to determine the barriers and facilitators in primary care of diagnosing depression and anxiety in geriatric patients. The 15 studies offered five themes. Three were exclusive to barriers: education, stigma, and the negative attitudes of medical professionals. No themes were specific to facilitators. Two themes, communication and time, were considered barriers and facilitators. Findings show that doctors recognize barriers but suggest offering continued education to better understand effective ways of communicating with this population.

We drink so we are: Effects of perceived similarity with a drinker on observational learning • Mira Mayrhofer; Jörg Matthes, U of Vienna • Based on social cognitive theory, we conducted two experiments manipulating the presentation of a model’s alcohol-related behavior (rare drinker, experienced drinker, alcoholic) and the occurrence of alcohol consequences. Results suggest that model-observer similarity mediates effects of alcohol portrayals on expectancies, however, only for self-referencing participants. A direct path from consequence portrayal to expectancies and attitudes was also found. Participant’s alcohol-related behavior moderated effects, underlining the need of targeting mediated health-education efforts based on it.

Third-person Effects of Conflicting Information about Childhood Vaccinations.: Role of Health Locus of Control and Issue Importance in Predicting Individuals’ Support for Immunization Requirements • Robert McKeever, University of South Carolina; Joon Kyoung Kim, University of South Carolina; Jo-Yun Queenie Li, University of South Carolina; Taylor Jing Wen, University of South Carolina • Researchers have well-documented individuals’ perceived gap in media influence between oneself and others, called third-person perceptions (TPPs). Building on this robust body of research, this study investigates how parents perceive impact of inconsistent conclusions about childhood vaccinations and its impact on support for immunization requirements. Individuals’ importance of childhood vaccinations was positively associated with TPPs and support for immunization requirements. Health locus of control was not associated with TPPs, but negatively associated with supporting required immunizations.

Creating Patient Self-Advocacy Workshops for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Individuals: Process Description, Pilot Results, and Suggestions to Establish Evidence-Based • Richard Mocarski, University of Nebraska at Kearney; William (Sim) Butler, University of Alabama; Nathan Woodruff, Trans Collaborations; Robyn King, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Debra Hope, University of Nebraska Lincoln; Natalie Holt, UNL; Larisa Spencer; Brittany Hanzlik; Joshua Eyer, University of Alabama • Individuals who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming (TGNC) can face many barriers to health care ranging from lack of appropriately trained providers to overt discrimination and refusal of care. Many of these challenges are exacerbated in rural areas where health care can be sparse for everyone. Although more providers who are educated to provide TGNC-affirmative services is the ideal solution, in the short term TGNC individuals would benefit from being better able to self-advocate for appropriate care. This paper describes the pilot testing of a narrative-based self-advocacy training workshop developed in a community based participatory research partnership. The workshop was well-received in a small pilot test with six members of the TGNC communities. Specific strategies included in the workshop and details on measuring outcomes are described in the paper. The workshop protocol fits well in the context of narrative medicine and represents an application of forensics to help reduce health disparities for TGNC people that also can serve as a model for other evidence-based workshops.

Exploring the Antecedents of Online Information Seeking and Sharing in a Public Health Crisis • Bitt Beach Moon, Indiana University; Chang Won Choi, Innocean Worldwide; Sung-Un Yang, Indiana University • The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of information seeking and sharing during a public health crisis. Focusing on the 2016 Zika-virus outbreak in South Korea, the study conducted the online survey of 788 Korean participants to test the research hypotheses. The results showed publics’ online seeking and sharing behavior were influenced by cognitive, affective, and media trust factors. Theoretical and strategic implications were further discussed in the conclusion.

Name frame and celebrity endorsement effects of autonomous vehicle technology communications: Mechanisms and moderators • Jessica Myrick, Penn State University; Lee Ahern, Penn State; Ruosi Shao, Penn State University; Jeff Conlin • Autonomous or driverless vehicles (or cars) represent an emerging technology that has the potential to radically transform the everyday lives of people around the world. Despite the world-changing predictions hovering around the technology, there has been little research into how this automotive technology is being communicated, or theorizing about the most effective ways to increase public acceptance of it. As such, the purpose of the present investigation is to empirically test the effects of using different name frames (i.e., autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars, or driverless cars) and using celebrity endorsers on audience responses to promotional messages about autonomous vehicles. Furthermore, we want to examine how these promotional messages are interpreted in light of individual differences in audience members, such as a tendency to enjoy novel consumer products or to trust machines over humans. Finally, we seek to assess how attention to news coverage of autonomous vehicles may also influence audience responses to promotional messages about autonomous vehicles. A nationwide experiment (N=721) found strong evidence that attention to media, emotional responses (excitement, anxiety, curiosity), subjective knowledge, and some message factors impacted risk perceptions and behavioral intentions. Implications for theory and message design are discussed.

The Effects of Media-Induced Nostalgia After a Celebrity Death on Social Sharing and Prosocial Behavior • Jessica Myrick, Penn State University; Jessica Willoughby, Washington State University • When a well-known celebrity dies, mass media outlets cover the event and people talk about it. When the celebrity was also a famous media figure who lived a long life, chances are high that much of that media coverage and conversation relate to memories of the past. As such, this situation is ripe to evoke nostalgia, a mixed affective state that has previously not received much attention as a potential response to media about a celebrity’s death. Two studies, a survey immediately after Mary Tyler Moore’s death and a later experiment, investigated the role of nostalgia in shaping social sharing intentions as well as intentions to help the diabetes community through prosocial actions. The results revealed that nostalgia is an important drive of media effects in this context and it can be used in strategic messages to promote prosocial health-related actions after a celebrity death.

Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone: Emotional Support and Health Outcomes of Low-Income Adults • Kang Namkoong, University of Maryland; Samantha Stanley; Jiyoun Kim • This study examines the effects of perceived emotional support networks on health outcomes of low-income populations. Secondary data was collected from the Health Information National Trends Survey (Cycle 4). Results reveal that lacking an emotional support network has greater detrimental effects on the physical health and psychological well-being of low-income persons compared to comparable higher income persons. These findings suggest the need for health programs that that enhance access to emotional support for underserved populations.

The Effects of Social Norms and Role Model Messages on College Women’s Intentions to Refuse Unwanted Alcohol • Nicole O’Donnell, Virginia Commonwealth University • This study analyzes the effects of exposure to electronic health messages on the likelihood of sorority women to refuse unwanted alcohol. One place to reach sorority women with targeted health messages is on social networking sites, and there is a need for research that explores the best theory-based message strategies for these platforms. A total of 822 sorority women participated in a randomized controlled trial pretest-posttest experiment with four conditions. Individuals viewed role model messages, norm corrective messages, a combination of these approaches, or a control condition with no health information. Individuals in the three treatment conditions had higher post-exposure intentions to refuse alcohol compared to individuals in the control condition. In addition, individuals in the norm corrective and combined conditions had higher post-exposure normative perceptions than individuals in the role model and control conditions. No between-group differences were observed for post-exposure self-efficacy. Regarding media effects, individuals in the norm corrective condition rated the messages as having a greater information quality than individuals in other conditions and participants perceived that norm corrective messages would have the greatest influence on their peers. Implications for health behavior theory and media effects research are discussed.

Adopting an affirmative consent definition in sexual assault prevention programming on college campuses • Rebecca Ortiz, Syracuse University • Sexual violence is a major concern on college campuses. Colleges and universities are encouraged to take a more comprehensive and active prevention approach to addressing sexual violence on college campuses. As a result, some colleges and universities have adopted and educate their students using an “affirmative consent” standard, such that for a sexual encounter to be considered consensual, it must include explicit, voluntary, and conscious agreement to engage in sexual activity by all parties involved. Whether adoption of an affirmative consent standard by college students actually leads to a greater likelihood to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication is, however, still largely unknown. The current study thus sought to examine the extent to which accurate knowledge and understanding of affirmative sexual consent could explain the likelihood that college students would intend to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication, alongside other influential predictors, as proposed by the Integrated Behavioral Model. Results indicated that while college students who were more likely to define sexual consent based upon an affirmative consent stand were also more likely to intend to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication in the future, it was ultimately the ability to apply that knowledge to a variety of situations that predicted behavioral intentions. Colleges and universities must therefore not only inform their students about the definition of affirmative sexual consent, they must also provide them with situational knowledge about how to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication.

From Sensation to Stigma: Changing Standards for Suicide Coverage in Journalism Textbooks, 1894-2016 • Perry Parks, Michigan State University • This paper is a historical and interpretive analysis of journalism textbooks published from 1894 to 2016 to show how instruction on suicide coverage shifted dramatically with professional practice and social attitudes over the 20th century. Suicide was a popular genre of sensational human interest story featured in early journalism textbooks, but contemporary texts barely acknowledge suicide, portraying it as a generally private matter requiring characteristics of prominence, impact or unusualness to make news.

Shifting Perceptions of Global Warming in 2011 and 2017 • Shaelyn Patzer; Selena Nelson, George Mason University; Marc Trotochaud • Research has shown that, despite the difficulties of distinguishing the influence of climate change from natural fluctuations in the weather, some individuals believe that they have personal experienced the effects of global warming. Correspondingly, evidence has indicated that specific experiences recounted by individuals are often reflections of actual trends in regional and local weather. Many of the papers exploring personal experience have focused on establishing the credibility of this link, with less attention placed on examining how perceptions have changed over time. Through a series of four studies, this paper employs nationally representative, qualitative survey data from 2011 and 2017 to explore the ways that individuals believe they have been impacted by climate change. Our study found that, while there is considerable influence of recent weather events in the content of responses, there is evidence to believe that awareness of long-term climate trends has increased.

A Communication Inequalities Approach to Disparities in Physical Activities: The Case of the VERB Campaign • Macarena Pena-y-Lillo, Universidad Diego Portales; Chul-joo Lee, Seoul National University • This study focuses on the VERB campaign and explores disparities in physical activity between children of more and less advantaged groups. Using a three-wave longitudinal survey dataset, this study found that the effects of exposure to the VERB campaign on behaviors were mediated by perceived behavioral control (PBC), and intentions. However, only children from advantaged backgrounds were able to turn their intentions into physical activity practice.

The crucial role of friends in health communication • Klaus Schoenbach; Marium Saeed • In this study, we investigate the role of friends as an important factor for the health behavior of teenagers primarily in two ways: as a source of health information, but also as encouraging health-related actions. For this purpose, we use data from a large-scale and representative survey of 13-20 year-old nationals in Qatar, an Arab country with severe health problems among its adolescent population. Our results show that, first, Qatari teenagers think that their friends care about health issues very similar to their own. But friends are also an important source of health information; they are consulted often, their information is trusted, and they provide health information that encourages their peers to attempt to change their own health behavior. Finally, peer orientation – i.e., perceptions of how much their friends care about health issues – is more relevant in steering adolescents’ health information seeking than their own personal concerns about health.

Why aren’t we talking about weight? Information underrepresented women receive about weight management during pregnancy • Summer Shelton, University of Florida; Matthew R. Cretul, College of Journalism & Communications, University of Florida; Amanda Kastrinos; Debbie Treise, University of Florida; Amanda Bradshaw, University of Florida; Easton Wollney, University of Florida; Alexis Bajalia; Kendra Auguste • Excessive gestational weight gain is associated with a number of adverse health outcomes for mother and baby. This research assessed the patient-provider conversation about nutrition, exercise, and weight management from the perspective of the prenatal patient. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18, low-income, underrepresented women, living in the rural South. Findings revealed the majority of women’s providers had never discussed their gestational weight gain, even when particularly excessive. Recommendations for improving this conversation are provided.

Parachuting into a hurricane: Twitter interactions between government entities and the public during Hurricane Irma • Jeremy Shermak, University of Texas at Austin • Twitter has become a communications mainstay during natural disasters. During 2017’s Hurricane Irma, Twitter was ablaze with information from citizens, media, and government agencies racing to provide urgent – perhaps lifesaving – information. However, Twitter, even in a crisis situation, is not immune to incivility and detrimental activity that often afflicts social media. This study analyzed Twitter communications between government entities and citizens throughout the storm to examine ways these messages often became uncivil.

Facebook use, emotions, and pro-environmental behaviors: The mediating role of hope and worry • Tsung-Jen Shih, National Chenghi University; Wen-wei Chen, National Chenghi University • This study examined the impact of Facebook use and how hope and worry mediated the effects of Facebook use on people’s pro-environmental behavior. This study also investigated how the mediation effects of emotions may condition one feature of the social networking sites, the social norms. Drawing upon survey data from college students in Taiwan (N = 778), the results indicated that hope negatively mediated the effect of Facebook use. Additional analysis showed that, after taking risk perception into account, the negative effect of hope on pro-environmental behavior disappeared. Worry also served as a significant mediator and this mediation effect was moderated by social norms. Specifically, the indirect relationship became stronger when people’s perceived social norm on Facebook was lower. Implications of the findings will be discussed.

Perceived scientific agreement as a gateway belief leading to pro-environmental behaviors: The role of balanced reporting and conflicting comments on Facebook • Tsung-Jen Shih, National Chenghi University • In the issue of climate change, there exists a gap between scientific consensus and public perception of scientific agreement. Whereas the occurrence of climate change and its association with human activities are generally accepted within the scientific community, the general public is found to have a misunderstanding about the level of consensus. To the extent that perceived scientific consensus is linked to public attitudes, this study examined its origination and consequences in an experimental context. Drawing upon a two factorial, between-subject experimental design, this study found that participants exposed to one-sided stories, either supporting or opposing climate change, perceived more scientific certainty than those exposed to the balanced story. Furthermore, the effect of the texts on attitudinal certainty was moderated by the type of comments left by the users. Finally, perceived agreement and attitudinal certainty were found to mediate the effect of texts on pro-environmental behaviors. Implications of these findings will be discussed.

Attribution and attributional processes of organizations’ environmental messages • Sumin Shin, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; Eyun-Jung Ki, The University of Alabama • This experimental study, guided by attribution theory, investigated the impact of the substantiation and specificity of organizations’ environmental messages on perceived communication motivation and how this perception prompts audiences’ affective and cognitive responses. Findings showed that specific messages increased perceived intrinsic motivation, while vague messages increased perceived extrinsic motivation; in turn, the perceived intrinsic motive positively influenced audiences’ message attitude, organization attitude, message credibility, organization credibility, and organization’s green image, but the perceived extrinsic motive negatively influenced these aspects.

“You Can’t Drink Oil”: How the Water is Life Movement Employed Risk Communication Techniques to Garner Popular Support for Their Cause • Sarah Smith-Frigerio, University of Missouri • During the Mni Wiconi (Water is Life) movement, Facebook Live videos and curated Facebook videos became popular among groups within the larger assemblage of water protectors protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Videos used fear appeals, calls to action, and frames of mitigating loss to persuade popular opinion to support the cause. Case study analysis of the 25 most-viewed videos from four different Facebook pages found themes involving the battle between peaceful, prayerful water protectors and violent law enforcement officers. Additionally, the potential loss of life and violation of treaty rights were found in fear appeals. Calls to action included funding legal defense, petitioning political figures and governmental agencies, and most importantly, coming to Standing Rock to bear witness and to stand with water protectors. There was also narratives about women, children, and elders of many tribes, united together, on the front line to prevent the loss of our planet and lives.

Changing the Image of STEM: Challenging Adolescents’ STEM Stereotypes Using Diverse Media Role Models • Jocelyn Steinke, Western Michigan University; Brooks Applegate; Jay R. Penny; Sean Merlino • This study investigated the effects of viewing online videos featuring diverse STEM role models. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to assess the efficacy of the videos in challenging stereotypes and promoting identification. Findings indicated that adolescents favored female and Black/African American followed by White and Hispanic STEM role models. Additionally, adolescents reported a preference for STEM role models who challenged gender and racial/ethnic STEM stereotypes, pursued interesting hobbies, and worked in interesting STEM fields.

The Impact of Source Credibility and Risk Attitude on Individuals’ Risk Perception toward GM Foods: Comparing Young Millennials in the U.S. and China • Ruoyu Sun; Juan Meng, University of Georgia • This research investigates the effects of source credibility and risk attitude on young millennials’ risk and benefit perceptions and purchase intentions toward GM foods. Results from two samples (young millennials in the U.S. and China) confirmed individuals’ risk attitude significantly influences their purchase intentions toward GM foods. Results also revealed a significant interaction effect of source credibility and risk attitude on risk perception of GM foods among Chinese respondents. Practical and research implications are discussed.

A systematic review of research on news media coverage of the environment • BRUNO TAKAHASHI, Michigan State University; Anthony Van Witsen; Apoorva Joshi; Ran Duan, Michigan State University; Wenzhu Li • In this study, we examine the English language literature on news media coverage of environmental issues from 1975 to 2016 to describe the state of the field. The study uses the systematic review methodology to explore the geographic diversity of the studies, the environmental topics and media that have been analyzed, and the methodological and theoretical approaches that the studies followed. Particularly, these findings call attention to the disproportionality in the analysis of climate change, the focus from and on the U.S. and Europe, and the focus on newspapers over other forms of media. Given the expansion of environmental communication research in this decade itself, our study highlights the scope for scholars to examine, for example, issues such as sustainability or environmental justice, and assess media coverage from developing countries and growing economies where the news media present a largely different picture of environmental issues than they do in the developed world. We critically reflect on these trends to provide recommendations for future research.

Resisting Stigma and Evaluating Realism in Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Psychiatric Drugs. • Tara Walker, University of Colorado Boulder • Classic labeling theory suggests that people diagnosed with mental illness internalize this label, but research has shown that individuals will sometimes actively resist stigma. This study analyzes responses to a survey about a DTC advertisement to look at how experience with mental illness influences perceptions of stigma and realism. The study concludes that perceiving stigma is a form of resistance, and people experienced with mental illness tend to see the ad as more stigmatizing and less realistic.

Does Truvada ‘Prevent’ HIV? Examining How News Can Alter FDA-Regulated Messages • Ryan Wallace, University of Texas, Austin • Examining how the HIV-1 Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) drug Truvada is represented in news media, this long-term study utilized mixed methods (content and textual analyses) to accurately identify how journalistic choices could impact the way in which this drug is portrayed—spreading misinformation about effectiveness and influencing audience’s perceptions. This study also identified how media routines, like finding sources and citing approved “indications for use,” may have serious public health implications by systematically altering FDA-regulated messages.

Applying the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model to Examine Public Engagement with Genetically Modified Foods in China • Nainan Wen • The Planned Risk Information Seeking Model (PRISM) has received consistent support in health and environmental contexts. However, it still remains a question whether it applies to other contexts, such as scientific controversies for which risks are perceived to have great impact on human beings’ collective wellbeing in the long run. Therefore, this study extended to test the PRISM in the context of genetically modified foods in China. Based on a stratified quota sample of 1,370 citizens collected in Jiangsu Province, this study found that the PRISM variables predicted GMO information seeking and subsequent behavior of engaging in GMO related activities through direct or indirect paths. However, information insufficiency had less significant impact compared with the other PRISM variables. Implications of these findings were discussed.

Counter Self-Objectification Induced Appearance Anxiety: Testing Persuasion Resistance Strategies on Objectifying Social Media Content • XIZHU XIAO • Despite the opportunities for health information seeking and health behavior modeling social media provides, it induces various negative effects such as self-objectification and body image concerns among young adults. Using a between-subject experiment, this study tests the effects of persuasion resistance strategies (persuasive intent warning vs. persuasive intent priming) on countering appearance anxiety caused by objectifying social media images. Results suggest that intent warning significantly reduces appearance anxiety compared to the control condition. However, intent priming worsens the adverse impacts of objectifying social media content. As opposed to previous research that argues intent priming is effortless, this study shows that intent priming is as demanding of cognition as intent warning in an objectifying social media environment. Implications and future directions are further discussed.

User Engagement in Public Discourse of Genetically Modified Organisms: The Role of Opinion Leaders on Social Media • Qian Xu, Elon University; Nan Yu, University of Central Florida; Yunya Song • This study examines how source attributes of opinion leaders and message frames adopted by them influence user engagement in the public discourse of genetically modified organism (GMO) on Chinese social media. Account type and account verification emerged as significant predictors for engagement in the GMO discourse. Users were more likely to engage in GMO opinion leaders’ posts when they adopted the fact, opportunity, pro-GMO, or international frames in their posts. The findings also revealed that different source attributes and message frames varied in their abilities to influence three dimensions of user engagement – numbers of reposts, comments, and likes, respectively.

How does Media Promote Pro-environmental Behaviors as Collective Action: An Examination of Illusion of Knowledge • Xiaodong Yang, Shandong University; Xiaoming Hao, Nanyang Technological University; Shirley Ho, Nanyang Technological University • This study revisits the mechanism underlying media effects in promoting pro-environmental behaviors via affecting individuals’ knowledge by including illusion of knowledge as an important factor that shapes attitude and behavioral change in addition to actual knowledge. Regarding illusion of knowledge, both illusion in self-evaluation of knowledge and illusion in perceived knowledge differential between self and others are taken into accounts. The results showed that individuals’ attention to media messages about climate change affected both actual knowledge and illusion of knowledge, which promoted their positive attitude toward pro-environmental behaviors, and in turn motivate pro-environmental behavioral intention. In particular, the more positive illusion people had in self-evaluation of knowledge and in perceived knowledge differential between self and others, the more positive attitude they would develop. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Engagement in Science: Exploring the View and Engagement Practice of Scientists from Different Organizations • Shupei Yuan, Northern Illinois University; John Besley, Michigan State University; Anthony Dudo, University of Texas, Austin • The current study investigated how scientists from different types of organizations (university, NGO, industry and government) view and practice public engagement. This project surveyed scientist members from seven scientific societies. The results suggest that scientists in different organizations shared some views regarding the factors that influence engagement activities and communication objectives, differences were also observed. Scientists from the industry consider themselves less involved in public engagement and have slightly less willingness to practice in the future, and scientists from NGO are more engaged and perceive more positive normative belief than others. The findings addressed the gaps in science communication research that overlooked engagement contributors outside of academia, and suggest area of potential emphasis for public engagement support from organizations.

Scientific Societies’ Support for Public Engagement: An Interview Study • Shupei Yuan, Northern Illinois University; Anthony Dudo, University of Texas, Austin • Scientific societies play an important role in scientists’ career development and have a great impact on the advancement of science. The current study explores scientific societies’ view of and support for public engagement. Interviews with 21 key actors of societies based in the U.S. suggest that societies recognize the value of public engagement and outreach, and the emphasis has been increasing over time. Depending on the size and the discipline of the society, various types of engagement activities and support are offered. We also explored the potential challenges and opportunities for societies to support science public engagement. The current project aimed at providing societies an overview of this issue and identifying ways societies can better allocate resources to support public engagement.

Exploring Public Perception of Depression: The Interplay between Attribution of Cause and Narrative Persuasion • Nanlan Zhang, University of South Carolina; Taylor Jing Wen, University of South Carolina • Improving awareness and mitigating stigma related to depression have been a concern to both health communicators and practitioners. This study conducted a 2 (narrative vs. non- narrative) by 2 (high controllability vs. low controllability) experiment (N=242) to test the interaction effects of narrative persuasion and cause controllability of depression. The results show that narrative messages attributing depression to an uncontrollable cause increase identification, feeling of pity, and intention to help. However, the study finds that the positive effects of narrative messages are conditional, and they may be less effective than non-narrative messages when the cause of depression is controllable. Also, the findings suggest identification as the underlying mechanism of such interaction effects on emotional and behavioral responses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed further.

2018 ABSTRACTS

2018 Abstracts

AEJMC 2018 Conference Paper Abstracts
Washington, DC • August 6 to 9

The following AEJMC groups will conduct research competitions for the 2018 conference. The accepted paper abstracts are listed within each section.

Divisions:

• Advertising
• Communicating Science, Health, Environment, and Risk (ComSHER)
• Communication Technology (CTEC)
• Communication Theory and Methodology
• Cultural and Critical Studies
• Electronic News
• History
• International Communication
• Law and Policy
• Magazine
• Mass Communication and Society
• Media Ethics
• Media Management, Economics, and Entrepreneurship
• Minorities and Communication (MAC)
• Newspaper and Online News
• Public Relations
• Scholastic Journalism
• Visual Communication (VisCom)

Interest Groups:

• Community Journalism
• Entertainment Studies
• Graduate Student
• Internships and Careers
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer
• Participatory Journalism
• Political Communication
• Religion and Media
• Small Programs (SPIG)
• Sports Communication (SPORTS)

Commissions:

• Status of Women

<< AEJMC Abstracts Index

Visual Communication 2017 Abstracts

Online Coverage of Brittany Maynard’s Death: Visual and Verbal Information • Kelsie Arnold; Kimberly Lauffer • This study examined textual and visual elements in web-based coverage of Brittany Maynard’s decision to exercise Oregon’s right to die in order to understand how the media framed their coverage using multimedia components. The authors used a qualitative perspective and a quantitative data collection instrument to synthesize data and key themes that emerged from the research. Culturally embedded frames, loaded language, and graphic elements were all deemed essential to telling the story of Brittany Maynard.

Attributes of Likable Organizational Logos: An Exploratory Study using Q Methodology • Angie Chung; Dennis Kinsey • Logos have a big impact on how people feel about an organization. The goal of this research is to identify the subjective perceptions when people evaluate logos and explore what elements affect the likability of organizational logos. This exploratory research used Q Methodology to quantitatively and qualitatively examine subjective preferences for different types of logos. Forty participants sorted 50 organizational logos (Q sample) from “most appealing” (+5) to “most unappealing” (-5). Three different factors emerged from the correlation and factor analysis—the first group expressed the importance of color, the second group thought logos with living creatures were appealing and the third group were attracted to logos suggesting dynamic movement. Findings are discussed in terms of practical implications for how organizations can choose logos that can be received more positively.

A reciprocal-networked model of the photojournalistic icon: From the print-television news era to the present • Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon; David Perlmutter, Texas Tech University; Natalia Mielczarek, Virginia Tech • Millions of news images have been created, but only a relative few have become the fabled “icons” of photojournalism that have been popularly ascribed with extraordinary powers to mobilize national opinion, start or stop wars, or at least capture “decisive moments” in history. Since most of the photoicon era occurred when news was a wholly industrial (via print and then broadcast and cable) enterprise, media gatekeeping has been a critical component of the process of icon creation, distribution, and maintenance. Traditionally, news photographs became iconic, in large part, through their purposive, industrially defined, and prominent placement on elite newspaper front pages and lead position in broadcast/cable news across the globe. But as we rapidly move away from print news and towards a digital/internet/social news environment, what is the effect on the formation of iconic imagery? We argue that it is both a changed reality of news delivery formats and the democratization of news production and dissemination via social media that predicates a theoretical shift in the formation of iconic imagery. Using the historical research method, we draw from current theoretical tenets of iconic image formation and leading research on iconic imagery to present propositions of a model of iconicity that we term the “reciprocal-networked model of iconicity,” which presents four central and related stages: creation, distribution, acceleration, and formation. We conclude this philosophy of images with some speculative predictions about the development of photoicons within the evolution of our reciprocal-networked model, arguing that several trends are predictable.

Fire, ice or drought? Picturing humanity in climate change imagery • Kim Sheehan; Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon; David Morris II, University of Oregon • Despite scientific evidence of climate change, Americans continue to minimize its importance. At the same time, research suggests that advocacy campaigns and news media coverage of climate change—both text and images—do not necessarily resonate with audiences. The current study brings together existing theory on the knowledge-deficit model and research findings on both climate change imagery and story personification to explore in a 3x3x2 experiment how photographs relating to climate change have the best potential to connect with people regarding emotion and engagement.

Resignifying Alan Kurdi: News photographs, memes, and the ethics of visual representation • Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Iowa • The Turkish photojournalist Nilufer Demir’s photograph of the drowned refugee child Alan Kurdi attained worldwide recognition as a media spectacle, initially prompting humanitarian responses and political action, but later morphing into online memes and inciting public backlash as “war porn.” I argue here that the ethical motivations of photojournalism and memes are oppositional with regard to their representations of embodied vulnerability. While photojournalistic depictions of vulnerable bodies are motivated by an ethics of care intended to generate empathy and progressive social change, memes disrupt those affective connotations through processes of mimicry and replication. By means of a comparative semiological analysis, this paper examines the way the sign system of Demir’s photograph was mutated into a meme, radically changing the ethical connotations of the former. The differing ethical affordances of news photos versus memes, and their relationship, may help to explain the reversal of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism initially sparked by the Alan Kurdi photograph and tell us more about the ethical frictions and contrapositions at work in the contemporary media environment.

Access, deconstructed: An analysis of metajournalistic discourse concerning photojournalism and access • Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado; Ross Taylor, University of Colorado • This study examines metajournalistic discourse published surrounding the intersection of photojournalism and access. Researchers conducted a textual analysis of metajournalistic discourse published in articles by The Image, Deconstructed from 2011 to 2017 (N=70). Findings suggest that photojournalists define access differently than scholars. They obtain access through purposeful body language and verbal communication, clarity of intent and persistence. These findings are interpreted through the lens of the theory of metajournalistic discourse.

Using Angle of Sight to Confirm Media Bias of a Political Protest • Michael Friedman, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga • The study sought to understand if photographic media bias of political protest could be detected by applying the photographic principle of angle of sight to the pictures of the event. The investigation focused on the photographic news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests from two competing and politically opposite New York City tabloid newspapers. The purpose of the study was to determine if there were any differences in the selection of angle of sight photographs, which could act as a subtle cue to either glorify or condemn the protests. Results show strong statistical support that both papers chose the angled photograph that matched with their political opinion of the protest and is relevant to other researchers who seek to understand our legacy of media coverage of political protests.

Professional Photographers and Platforms and the Perceived Credibility of Photographs on the Internet • Gina Gayle; Andrew Wirzburger, Syracuse University; Jianan Hu; Honey Rao • As the use of amateur journalists in place of professionals to photograph current events has begun to shape news content (Pantti & Anden-Papadopoulos, 2011), and people assign varying levels of credibility to the sources of news content (Bracken, 2006), understanding the effects of “professional” labels is growing increasingly salient. This study sought to investigate differences in perceived credibility of photographs on the internet depending on whether or not a professional had taken the photograph and whether or not it had been published by a professional media outlet. Definitions for the dimensions of perceived photograph credibility were adapted from previous research into general internet credibility (Metzger, 2007). The researchers hypothesized that people provided with information that the photograph was somehow “professional” would perceive it to have higher credibility. The study was designed as an experiment with four groups that evaluated photographs using a self-administered online questionnaire; each group was provided with different information about the photograph to stimulate differences between groups. Results produced no significant differences between groups for the concept of credibility but did yield significance for “authority,” one dimension of credibility. These results may be due to the influx of citizen journalism as well as diminishing public trust in mainstream news media.

Chaos, Quest and Restitution Narratives of Depression on Tumblr • Ali Hussain, Michigan State University • This paper studies how visuals from Tumblr might be used to evoke narratives of depression. Fourteen patients with moderately severe depression were interviewed using photo-elicitation method. Findings encompass three types of narratives: chaos, quest and restitution. Chaos narrative describe experiencing illnesses with no cure or unreliable treatments. Quest narrative are about patients’ fighting back. Restitution narrative points toward the belief that health is restorable. Study offers implications to use images during depression counseling sessions.

Show me a story: Narrative, image, and audience engagement on sports network Instagram accounts • Rich Johnson, Creighton University; Miles Romney, Brigham Young University • Social media is a growing space for interpersonal and masspersonal communication and the shared image that often accompanies these messages has become a factor in increasing audience engagement. This study seeks to understand what types of images generate more engagement from social media audiences. A group of communication scholars argue that narrative is the most basic form of human communication and therefore messages with strong narrative themes more easily connect the message from the communicator to the audience. This study performed a content analysis of nearly 2,000 images shared by Sports Networks on Instagram. Operating under Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) methodology for determining narrative in image, the study found that images that contained narrative or metacommunicative messages (Bateson, 1951) resulted in greater interest and engagement by audiences through the manifestation of likes and comments. The study offers a methodology for organizations seeking greater engagement from social media audiences.

Cognitive Effects of Emotional Visuals and Company–Cause Congruence in Visual CSR Messages • Sun Young Lee, Texas Tech University; Sungwon Chung, Fort Hays State University • Using the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP), associative network theory, and expectancy violation theory as theoretical frameworks, this study seeks to explore the cognitive effects of two aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages: emotional visuals and company–cause congruence. We employed a 2 (emotional tone of visuals: positive vs. negative) × 2 (company–cause congruence: low vs. high) within-subjects experimental design. We tested these factors using three CSR issues: hunger in Africa, water shortage in Africa, and an environmental issue. The results showed interaction effects between the two factors for recognition sensitivity (d′) to company logos, ordered from being the highest when using a negative image and high company–cause congruence, to a negative image and low company–cause congruence, a positive image and low company–cause congruence, and a positive image and high company–cause congruence as the lowest. For cued recall of company names, we found that there were two main effects, with no interaction effects, and negative images were more effective than positive images: high company–cause congruence was more effective than low company–cause congruence. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Sleight of Hand, Slight of Truth: Deceptive Editing of Documentary Footage in The Look of Silence • Thomas Mascaro, Bowling Green State University • Abstract: The documentary film The Look of Silence conceals editorial sleight of hand involving a 1967 NBC documentary The Battle for Asia, Part III: Indonesia: The Troubled Victory. The editing, which is not disclosed to audiences, misrepresents the original report and contravenes documentary practice. This case illuminates libel law, with regard to DVD and interview statements accompanying a film’s release, and worrisome trend of “poetic” films eclipsing empirical reporting in documentaries.

Solutions in the shadows: The effects of incongruent visual messaging in solutions journalism news stories • Karen McIntyre, Virginia Commonwealth University; Kyser Lough, The University of Texas at Austin; Keyris Manzanares • This experiment examined the impact of story-photo congruency regarding solutions journalism. We tested the effects of solution and conflict-oriented news stories when the photo paired with the story was congruent or incongruent with the narrative. Results revealed that a solution-oriented story with a congruent photo made readers feel the most positive, but surprisingly readers were most interested in the story and reported the strongest behavioral intentions when the story was paired with a neutral photo.

The dead Syrian refugee boy goes viral: Funerary Aylan Kurdi memes as tools for social justice in remix culture • Natalia Mielczarek, Virginia Tech • The picture of the 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, became iconic after it went viral on social media. Within hours, Aylan was a symbol, a hashtag and a meme. This project analyzes the most popular funerary Aylan memes to understand their meanings and functions as they proliferated cyberspace. Through visual rhetorical analysis, the project expands the functions of memes from the typically theorized visual jokes and social commentary to tools of social justice. The case study demonstrates how memes get deployed as rhetorical statements to subvert and re-negotiate reality, in this case to create a ‘better ending’ for the dead boy and to seek atonement for his death. The project also analyzes the paradoxical relationship between a news icon and its digital appropriations, suggesting a new metric for iconicity in digital participatory culture.

What Makes a Meme a Meme? Five Essential Characteristics • Maria Molina, Pennsylvania State University • During the 2016 presidential elections (December 2015-2016), the term “meme” had a higher search interest in the U.S. than the word “election” (Google Trends, 2016). But what makes an Internet meme a meme? And what attracts users to not only view memes, but also create and share them? This article reviews the existent literature, explicates this form of user-generated content, and provides a set of characteristics to differentiate Internet memes from other type of content also shared online. The goal of this exercise is to provide the study of Internet memes with an integrated definition, encompassing the mutually understood set of characteristics of memes. As Chaffee (1991) describes, a concept explication plays a vital role for the advancement of a field as it helps uncover the different components of the term, provides a description of the studies that have been done in the field, and postulates areas of future research and how to move in a cohesive direction. More specifically, it will provide a tool, or measure for the analysis of the uses, motivations, and effects of this new media trend.

The Graphicness of Renowned Imagery: A Content Analysis of Pulitzer Prize Winning Photography • David Morris II, University of Oregon; Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon • An ongoing journalistic debate centers on the extent of acceptability of graphic imagery in the news media. In order to provide a more complete understanding of this ongoing debate, it is essential to conduct research that provides insight into the content of such imagery, especially renowned imagery. The current research uses a content analysis to explore the visual themes and type of graphicness present in the census of 763 Pulitzer Prize winning photographs from 1942 to 2015.

Closing the Gap Between Photojournalist Research and Photojournalism Practice: Exploring the Motivations of the Subjects of Sensitive Photo Essays • Tara Mortensen; Brian McDermott; Daniel Haun, University of South Carolina • There have always been challenges to pursuing photo essays, including the wariness of potential photo subjects who are often in the midst of personal hardships themselves, as well as a commitment of months or years to a single story. But contemporarily, there is a shrinking number of photojournalists and resources in the newsroom, as many have been replaced with iPhone-armed reporters and the abundance of citizen-shot photography (Allan, 2013; Hartley, 2007; Örnebring, 2013; Stelter, 2013; White, 2012). Citizens are more willing than ever to share thousands of photos a second on Snapchat and millions of photos on instagram every day (Biale, 2016; Schlosser, 2016), but an irony to this phenomenon and additional blow to photojournalists who are struggling to maintain their professional status (Gade & Lowrey, 2011; Mortensen, 2014) is that these same people are often hesitant allow professional photojournalists to tell their story (McDermott, 2012). This study is the first to inquire about the factors that influence peoples’ willingness to allow professional photojournalists tell their story, including topics such as sexual assault in the military, a woman’s struggle with losing her legs, and a mother’s struggle with losing a child. Guided by uses and gratifications theory, ten in-depth interviews with subjects of peer-judged contest winners from 2014 – 2016 in the multiple picture story categories of the NPPA Monthly Clip Contest, the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Contest, and the World Press Photo Contest were conducted and analyzed using a constant comparative method (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

Priming effects on Instagram: An analysis of how pictures on Instagram affect individuals’ risk perceptions and information seeking behaviors • NIcole O’Donnell • This research explored how images on Instagram affect individuals’ information processing and seeking. Participants viewed Instagram posts that discussed the natural flavors added to processed foods. Individuals in a science-image condition had higher risk perceptions than individuals in a health image condition; however, this effect was moderated by nutrition label usage. Additionally, 45% of participants choose to seek further information on the topic. Implications for the integration of priming effects and information processing theories are discussed.

Profile Pictures and Political Expression: The Perceived Effectiveness of Avatar Activism (an Austrian Case). • Judith Schossboeck, City University Hong Kong • This paper investigates the phenomenon of avatar activism (AA), understood as changing one’s profile picture in a social media (SM) or online social network (OSN) for political reasons or a good cause from a quantitative perspective. Specifically, the effectiveness of avatar activism as perceived by users engaging in this practice, as well as its relation to factors like age, participation in OSNs, online social capital and political engagement are investigated. An online questionnaire of n = 210 was distributed before the Austrian Presidential Elections in December 2016, and the topic AA was placed within the context of the elections, but also addressed other examples of AA. After increasing the variable perceived effectiveness of AA along several levels related to cognitive or actual impact, results show that most people do see this activity as a good form of self-expression, but doubt the actual political impact. Age, participation in OSNs and online social capital could not be identified as influencing factors of perceived effectiveness of AA. However, engagement in AA is related to other forms of political engagement. The limitations of the study and possible further directions are discussed.

Networked photographic repertoire and capital: Prosumption of selfies among Taiwanese gay men on Instagram • Hong-Chi Shiau, Shih-Hsin University • This study attempts to illustrate identity performance and consumption by Taiwanese gay men through their behavior of posting and commenting on selfies. This study selects a gay community on Instagram as a site for fieldwork because millennials are quitting Facebook, once Taiwan’s most popular social networking site, but now in a steep decline. The prosuming of selfies on Instagram is analyzed as a particular form of speech community, adjusted to the orientation of users towards initiating social bonding, corporal aesthetic regulation, or even sexual encounters. Through ethnographic interviews with 17 gay male college students from Taiwan and textual analysis of their correspondence though texting on Instagram, this study contextualizes how the rituals and social processes engaged in on Instagram help constitute a collective identity pertaining to Taiwanese gay men on Instagram. The prosuming of selfies is examined as an identity-making process involving three nuanced types of cultural capital. These uploaded representations of the self are referenced to the collective past. Three typological personae are identified to illuminate the notions of cultural, aesthetic and emotional labor. The conclusion offers an alternative sociological intervention that goes beyond the notion of digital narcissism to help understand how the labor of presenting selfies is invested and reproduced.

‘Sight Beyond My Sight’ (SBMS): Concept, Methodology, and a Tool For Seeing • Gabriel Tait, Arkansas State University • Sight Beyond My Sight (SBMS), a new visual research method, aims to empower individuals to participate in the photographic communication and social science research process. This introductory study examines local people taking pictures to share knowledge about topics. This SBMS case study of photos from eleven participants (eight men and three women) between the ages of 18-65 from Liberia, West Africa, explains the method, discusses the participants, highlights some photographs taken, and offers an encapsulated analysis of what was learned from Liberians about Liberia. Advancing the participatory research methods of “Photovoice” (Wang and Burris 1994) in public health communication education, “Shooting Back” (Hubbard 2009) in photojournalism, and “Autophotography” (Ziller 1990) social psychology, SBMS bridges a gap in communication and social science research practices.

The evolution of story: How time and modality affect visual and verbal narratives • T.J. Thomson, University of Missouri • A majority of Americans distrust the news media due to concerns over comprehensiveness, accuracy, and fairness. Since many interactions between journalists and their subjects last only minutes and can be published within minutes, if not live, research is needed to explore how journalists’ understandings of their subjects’ narratives evolve over time and how much time is necessary to avoid surface-level coverage. Also, since people are now exposed to more image-based rather than text-based messages, additional research is necessary to explore how the verbal narratives spoken by subjects compare to their nonverbal narratives as captured by news photographers in visual form. Through a longitudinal, interview-based approach, a photojournalist working on a 30-plus-day picture story was interviewed weekly for six weeks over the course of his project to track perceptions of how his subjects’ verbal narratives changed. At the conclusion of the projects, the photojournalist’s subjects were also interviewed to explore how their verbal and nonverbal narratives compared. Informed by literature in role theory, narrative, and visual journalism, the findings explore how news media narratives can be more nuanced and how people shape their visual and verbal narratives consciously and unconsciously.

Parsing photograph’s place in a privately public world • T.J. Thomson, University of Missouri; Keith Greenwood, University of Missouri • Billions of personal cameras exist globally that capture more than one trillion images each year. In contrast to studies that focus on cameras in a particular industry or field, such as body cameras in law enforcement or diagnostic imaging in medical settings, this study adopts a comparative and integrative approach using the public-private distinction to explore 1) how people in different social spheres perceive cameras and those who operate them, 2) what factors influence those perceptions, and 3) how technological convergence, camera access, and digital dissemination ease are impacting social life. Through in-depth interviews with individuals in the public and private spheres, an understanding of camera operators as primarily disruptive or primarily affirmative emerged and participants and factors that influenced their perceptions were gathered. Participants also said more cameras and converged technology are blurring the lines between public and private, that exposure in public seems to reduce inclination for private exposure, that cameras are shifting the nature of experience, and that cameras are becoming increasingly regulated.

Location, Location, Location: Visual Properties and Recognition of Video Game Advertising. • Russell Williams • Videogame placements are important for advertising and there is limited cognitive capacity available to players during a game to notice these ads. This is a quasi-experimental study using a commercial videogame and the Limited Capacity Model as an exploratory mechanism. It demonstrates that positioning in the focal visual block enhanced recognition, and that integrated ads and landmarks are better recognized than interruptive advertisements. Practical implications are discussed.

2017 ABSTRACTS

Public Relations 2017 Abstracts

OPEN COMPETITION
What’s the “Right” Thing to Do? How Ethical Expectations for CSR Influence Company Support • Lucinda Austin; Barbara Miller, Elon University; Seoyeon Kim, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • This study investigated a new concept in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research—publics’ perceived ethical obligation of companies to address CSR, comparing low- and high-fit CSR programs when companies contribute negatively to social issues through their products or processes. Through a mixed-design experiment, findings revealed that participants placed higher expectations for ethical obligation on corporations in high-fit CSR scenarios. Additionally, ethical expectations—when met—influenced participants’ attitudes about and supportive intentions towards the company.

Risky Business: Exploring Differences in Marketplace Advocacy and High-fit CSR on Public Perceptions of Companies • Barbara Miller, Elon University; Lucinda Austin • A between-subjects experiment explored differences in outcomes for high-fit corporate social responsibility (CSR) versus marketplace advocacy programs. Findings revealed that marketplace advocacy, as compared to high-fit CSR, led to increased skepticism and attributions of egoistic motives, and decreased attributions of values-driven motives, company attitudes, attitudes about the social initiative, and supportive intentions.

Testing Perceptions of Organizational Apologies after a Data Breach Crisis • Joshua Bentley, Texas Christian University; Liang Ma, Texas Christian University • This study used a 2x2x2x2x2 experimental design (1,630 participants) to test stakeholder reactions to four apology elements in two data breach scenarios. All four elements, expressing remorse, acknowledging responsibility, promising forbearance, and offering reparations contributed to participants’ perception that the organization had apologized. In a high blame scenario, remorse and forbearance were even more important. Acknowledging responsibility did not have a significant effect on organizational reputation, future purchase intention, or negative word of mouth intentions.

Giving from the heart: Exploring how ethics of care emerges in corporate social responsibility • Melanie Formentin, Towson University; Denise Bortree, Penn State University • Public relations-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) research largely focuses on organizational goals; scholars rarely examine CSR impacts. In this paper, nonprofit-organization relationships are explored, illustrating how ethics of care is an appropriate normative perspective for encouraging CSR that privileges the beneficiary’s needs (Held, 2006). Depth interviews with 29 nonprofit representatives addressed scholarly gaps. Inductive analysis revealed that nonprofit practitioners describe good CSR as being concerned with themes related to trust, mutual concern, promoting human flourishing, and responsiveness to needs.

Whose responsibility? Connecting Organizational Transgressors with Government Regulating Institution • ZHUO CHEN, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Yi-Hui Huang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong • This study examines the underlying logic of situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), i.e., the concept that organizational transgressors are independent from the broader “institution” of their environment. Based on analysis of a case of false medical advertising (the Baidu-Wei Zexi case), our study contends that the responsibility attributed subject of a crisis should be extended from the corporate transgressor (Baidu and the hospital involved) to an institutional subject— the government regulating institution. Accordingly, we believe that the intensifying factors (consistency and distinctiveness) and consequential factors (affective and behavioral) should be modified. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, the empirical findings support this argument; for example, attributing responsibility to the government regulating institution rather than to a corporate transgressor can provide a more powerful predictor of activist action. Similarly, negative emotion about corporate transgressors can damage affective attitudes towards the government regulating institution. All in all, this study expands the theoretical scope of attributed subjects in SCCT—linking corporate wrongdoers to their government regulating institution. Thus, our study calls for revisiting the underlying logic of SCCT and contends that a corporate actor is indeed intertwined with the broader institution.

President Donald Trump Meets HBCU Presidents: A Public Relations Post-Mortem • George Daniels, The University of Alabama; Keonte Coleman • When President Donald Trump welcomed more than 60 presidents of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) to the Oval Office for a photo opportunity in February 2017, he made history in the size of the crowd in his office. A textual analysis of 44 news articles and 22 statements of the HBCU presidents shows national media played up controversies while local media gave the HBCU leaders an opportunity to advocate for more resources.

Linking SNS and Government-Citizen Relationships: Interactivity, Personification, and Institutional Proximity • Chuqing Dong; Hyejoon Rim, University of Minnesota • Recent years have seen an increasing adoption of social network sites (SNS) in governments at all levels, but limited research examined the effectiveness of the government using SNS that may differ by institutional proximities (e.g., federal, state, and local). To fill the gap, the study explored the interactive and interpersonal approaches of relationship management in the context of government SNS communication. Specifically, two experiments were employed to examine the effects of interactivity, organizational characters, and institutional proximity in predicting the public’s perceived government transparency, engagement intention with government SNS, and trust in government. The study found that agencies at the state and local levels would benefit to different degrees in the government-citizen relationship quality based on the two communication strategies. Moreover, the results encouraged authorities to embrace SNS as a relationship-building tool by replying more to individual citizens’ comments, use a personal tone in conversations, and post more of citizen-oriented contents instead of organization-centered information. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed in the context of the Organization-Public Relationships (OPR) in the public sector.

Using Real and Fictitious Companies to Examine Reputation and News Judgments in Press Release Usage • Kirstie Hettinga, California Lutheran University; Melanie Formentin, Towson University • This study uses an experimental design to explore working journalists’ (N = 253) willingness to use or reference press releases that contain typos. The authors explore whether company reputation can overcome errors. The use of both real and fictitious companies yielded interesting findings for future public relations research. The reputations of existing companies, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, were rated more favorably than a fake company, and press release judgments most strongly predicted potential usage.

CSR, Hybrid, or Ability Frames: Examining How Story Frames Impact Stakeholders’ Perceptions • Michel Haigh, Texas State University; Frank Dardis, Penn State University; Holly Ott, University of South Carolina; Erica Bailey, Penn State University • This study examines the impact of corporate social responsibility messaging strategies and messages frames on stakeholders’ perceptions of organizations through a 3 (ability/CSR/hybrid) x 2 (thematic/episodic) online experiment. Results indicated that corporate social responsibility and hybrid strategies perform significantly better than the ability strategy when thematic framing is employed, but that the ability strategy performs well in the episodic-framing condition. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Is social media worth of investment? Seeking relationship between social-mediated stakeholder engagement and nonprofit public donation–a big data approach • Grace Ji; Don Stacks • The majority of investigations in nonprofit public relations have been continuously studying how and whether nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can maximize the full potentials of social media to engage stakeholders online. Yet few have questioned if social media-based stakeholder engagement can impact organizational outcomes that happen both on and offline, such as public donation. Taking the stakeholders’ perceptive, this study attempts to examine the effect of Facebook-based stakeholder engagement with NPOs on organizations’ fundraising success. Using Ordinary Least Square estimation method with lagged variables, the authors modeled nine-year longitudinal social media and financial penal data from the largest 100 NPOs in the United States. Results suggest that not all stakeholder engagements are significant predicators for charitable donation. Only liking and commenting engagement behaviors are positively associated with public donation, but sharing behavior does not improve fundraising success. More interestingly, over posting could associate with a decrease in public donation. The findings bring new empirical insights to existing literature and also practical implications to non-profit public relations professionals.

An Examination of Social Media from an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) Perspective in Global & Regional Organizations • Hua Jiang; Marlene Neill, Baylor University • Communication executives perceive internal social media as a channel that should be integrated and consistent with other communication messages, and also understand the necessity of coordinating with other communication disciplines. Through in-depth interviews with 28 internal and social media communication executives working in the United States, we found evidence of both true collaboration and functional silos. We also examined social media policies and resources provided to empower employees as social media ambassadors. Implications and recommendations were discussed.

The Rashomon Effect of an Air Crash: Examining the Narrative Battle over the Smolensk Disaster • Liudmila Khalitova, University of Florida; Barbara Myslik, University of Florida; Agnieszka Turska-Kawa, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland; Sofiya Tarasevich, University of Florida; Spiro Kiousis, University of Florida • The study explores the agenda-building efforts by Russian and Polish governments in shaping international news coverage of the airplane crash near Smolensk, Russia, which killed the Polish President. Compared to the two governments’ public relations messages, Polish and Russian news outlets played a more significant role as their countries’ advocates in determining the international media agenda. Moreover, the Russian media seemed more influential than the Polish outlets in shaping the international narrative about the crash.

Growth of Public Relations Research Networks: A Bibliometric Analysis • Eyun-Jung Ki, University of Alabama; Yorgo Pasadeos, University of Alabama; Tugce Ertem Eray, University of Oregon • This research reports on a 6-year citation study of published scholarly research in public relations between 2010 and 2015 in comparison with Pasadeos, Berger, and Renfro (2010) and Pasadeos, Renfro and Hanily’s (1999) works, which examined the literature’s most-cited works in the 2000s and 1990s respectively and identified a research network. Like the two earlier studies, this study identifies current authors and their publication outlets, taxonomizes most-cited works, and draws a co-citation network. Comparing the current study’s findings with those of ten and twenty years earlier helps us understand how the field has evolved as a scholarly discipline and offers future directions for study.

Enhancing Employee Sensemaking and Sensegiving Communication Behaviors in Crisis Situations: Strategic Management Approach for Effective Internal Crisis Communication • Young Kim, Marquette University • Understanding employees and their communication behaviors is essential for effective crisis communication. Such an internal aspect of crisis communication, however, has been undervalued, and the need for research has been recently growing. To fill the research gap, the aim of this research is to explore effective internal crisis communication within the strategic management approach, considering employee communication behaviors for sensemaking and sensegiving and their antecedents. A nationwide survey in the U.S. was conducted among full-time employees (N =544). This study found that two-way symmetrical communication and transparent communication were positively strong antecedents of employee communication behaviors for sensemaking and sensegiving in crisis situations, controlling for other effects.

Bless or Curse: How Chinese Strategic Communication Practitioners Use Social Media in Crisis Communication • Sining Kong; Huan Chen, University of Florida • This paper aims to examine how Chinese strategic communication practitioners use social media in crisis communication. In-depth interview was used to collect data from twenty Chinese strategic communication practitioners, who have experience in dealing with crises and issues via social media. A model was advanced and depicted how to use social media to monitor and respond to crises, and how to use social media, especially the live broadcast, to mitigate publics’ negative emotions to rebuild positive relationship with publics.

Unpacking the Effects of Gender Discrimination in the Corporate Workplace on Consumers’ Affective Responses and Relational Perceptions • Arunima Krishna, Boston University; Soojin Kim, Singapore Management University • The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) how allegations of gender discrimination impact consumers’ relationship with the brand in question, and (b) individual-level factors that impact consumers’ negative affective response to the allegations and eventually, consumer-brand relationships. Findings from a survey conducted among U.S. Americans indicate that individuals’ relational perceptions with a corporate brand whose products/services they consume are negatively affected by allegations of misconduct, in this case, gender discrimination. Results revealed that individuals’ moral orientation and anti-corporate sentiment predicted their perceptions of moral inequity of corporate behavior, which in turn impacted their negative affective response to the allegations. Such negative affective response then impacted individuals’ consumer-corporate brand relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed (120 words).

Crisis Information Seeking and Sharing (CISS): Scale Development for Measuring Publics’ Communicative Behavior in Social-Mediated Public Health Crises • Yen-I Lee, University of Georgia; Yan Jin, University of Georgia • Although publics’ information seeking and sharing behaviors have gained increasing importance in crisis communication research, consistent conceptualization and reliable scales for measuring these two types of communicative behavior, especially in social-mediated crises, are lacking. With a focus on public health crisis situations, this study first refined the conceptual framework of publics’ communicative behavior in social-mediated health crises. Then two multiple-item scales for measuring publics’ crisis information seeking and sharing (CISS) in public health crises were developed and tested by employing online survey dataset from a random national sample of 559 adults in the United States. Results indicate that there are eight types of crisis information seeking behavior and 18 types of crisis information sharing behavior, online and offline, crossing over platforms, channels and information sources. The two CISS scales reveal underlying processes of publics’ communicative behavior and provide a valid and reliable psychometric tool for public relations researchers and crisis communication managers to measure publics’ information seeking and sharing activities in social-mediated public health crisis communication.

Enhancing Empowerment and Building Relationships via Social Media Engagement: A Study of Facebook Use in the U.S. Airline Industry • Zhiren Li, University of Florida; Rita Linjuan Men, University of Florida • Born in the Web 2.0 era, social media platforms have altered the way people communicate and collaborate with others and with organizations. This study uses Facebook to examine the U.S. airline companies’social media engagement with their consumers. By conducting a web-based quantitative survey, our findings suggest that social media engagement in the U.S. airline industry has a positive influence on airline-customer relationships. Social media empowerment also mediates the effect of social media engagement on overall organization-public relationships. However, the results of our findings differ somewhat from previous studies, hence, we call for further research on social media engagement and organization-public relationships.

Is Experience in Fact the Best Teacher? Learning in Crisis Communication • Clila Magen, Bar Ilan University • The following study deals with the crisis communication learning process of organizations in the private sector. It indicates that if there is any crisis communication improvement it is primarily on the exterior layer. In the cases analyzed in the study, very few profound changes were apparent when the organizations faced recurring crises. Despite the promising potential which lies within the Chaos Theory for crisis communication, the research demonstrates that a crisis will not necessarily lead to self-organizing processes which push the organization to improvement and advancement.

How Should Organizations Communicate with Mobile Publics on Social Messengers: An Empirical Study of WeChat • Rita Linjuan Men, University of Florida; sunny tsai, university of miami • Mobile-based social messengers are overtaking social networking sites as the new frontier for organizations to engage online stakeholders. This study provides one of the earliest empirical studies to understand how organizations should communicate with mobile publics to enhance public engagement and improve organization-public relationships. This study focuses on WeChat—one of the world’s most popular social messaging apps. Organizations’ information dissemination, interpersonal communication, and two-way symmetrical communication are found to effectively drive public engagement, which in turn enhances relation outcomes. Strategic guidelines based on the study findings are provided.

Crisis Management Expert: Elements and Principles for Measuring Expert Performance • Tham Nguyen, University of Oklahoma; Jocelyn Pedersen, University of Oklahoma • Crisis management or crisis communication has become an important research area and recommended course for college students studying public relations and communication. Yet, it takes time for students or average professionals to transfer knowledge into practice in order to be considered an expert in the field. In a study of twenty-five in-depth interviews with Belgian crisis communication practitioners, Claeys and Opgenhaffen (2016) found that practitioners relied mainly on experience, scientific research, gut feelings and intuition rather than theories to respond to a crisis. This study also noted that decision-making about crisis communication depends on the circumstances, particularly, when the crisis involves potential legal issues or when it threatens to damage an organization’s reputation and its many important relationships. Organizational decision makers sometimes call on experts to help them reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity of the situation they face. Yet, when is it appropriate to call an expert in a crisis situation? And how can decision makers gain the most from what a crisis management expert can offer? By reviewing literature in crisis management and expert performance, this conceptual paper discusses what experts and decision makers are, the relationship between crisis experts and decision makers, and it outlines elements and principles to consider in developing a measurement system for expert performance. In addition, the paper proposes a general model for crisis management expert performance. Concluding thoughts will provide suggestions about what to consider before calling a crisis management expert and what decision makers should expect from crisis experts.

A Qualitative Analysis of How People Assess the Credibility of Sources Used by Public Relations Practitioners • Julie O’Neil, Texas Christian University; Marianne Eisenmann, inVentiv Health; Maggie Holman, Texas Christian University • This study examined how people assess the credibility of sources used commonly by public relations practitioners—earned news stories, traditional advertisements, native advertisements, independent blogs and corporate blogs. Researchers conducted five groups with 46 participants and implemented a survey with 1,500 participants recruited from a consumer panel. Participants view earned media stories as the most credible. Regardless of source utilized, people value strong writing, copious facts and balanced perspectives when processing public relations messaging.

Examining the role of Culture in Shaping Public Expectations of CSR Communication in the United States and China • Holly Ott, University of South Carolina; Anli Xiao, the Pennsylvania State University • This study examines the role of culture in shaping publics’ expectations for CSR communication through survey research in the United States (N = 316) and China (N = 315). Results highlight differences in each public’s expectations of what and how companies should communicate CSR. Among Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity are identified as the strongest predictors for CSR variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Where are the women? An examination of the status of research on women and leadership in public relations • Katie Place, Quinnipiac University; Jennifer Vardeman-Winter, Univ. of Houston • Despite evidence that there are no significant differences in leadership ability among women and men in public relations, women are still largely absent from leadership and senior management positions. Furthermore, very few studies about leadership in public relations have considered the affect gender has on leadership enactment and success. Therefore, this secondary analysis examined the state of women and gender scholarship about leadership in public relations as part of a larger study about the state of women in the communication discipline. Specifically, our research found that the majority of the research about leadership and gender highlights women’s lackluster leadership presence, factors contributing to women’s lack of presence, leadership styles and preferences, and leadership and management roles of women. This manuscript provides recommendations for improving women’s presence in leadership roles, particularly in providing a roadmap for future research opportunities. These include considerations for methodological approaches, leadership approaches and roles research, types of leadership, cultural change, and education.

Changing the Story: Implications of Narrative on Teacher Identity • Geah Pressgrove; Melissa Janoske, University of Memphis; Stephanie Madden, University of Memphis • This study takes a qualitative approach to understanding the connections between narrative, professional identity and reputation management in public education. Central to the findings are the factors that have led to a reputation crisis for the profession of teaching and thus contribute to the national teacher shortage. Ultimately, this study points to the notion that increasing retention and recruitment can be effected when narratives are understood and the principles of reputation management are applied.

Spokesperson is a four-letter word: Public relations, regulation, and power in Occupy New York • Camille Reyes, Trinity University • “This case study analyzes interviews with members of the press relations working group of Occupy Wall Street in New York. Using critical cultural theory as well as history, the group’s media relations tactics are discussed with an emphasis on the role of spokesperson, revealing contested meanings about public relations work in the context of a social movement. The moments of regulation and production in the circuit of culture explain the constraints experienced by many of these activist practitioners as they navigate the horizontal structure/ideal of their movement with hierarchical norms of more institutional public relations practices—creating a paradox of sorts. How does one defy the status quo when seeking to engage with a mainstream media system that—to their eyes—is co-opted by the wealthy elite, while using tactics that are seen as equally problematic? Historical analysis lends a comparative frame through which to view a critical cultural interpretation of public relations in an understudied context.

Distal Antecedents of Organization-Public Relationships: The Influence of Motives and Perceived Issue and Value Congruence • Trent Seltzer, Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication; Nicole Lee • Using an online survey of 514 US adults, this study identified which relational antecedents motivated individuals to enter organization-public relationships (OPRs) across a variety of organization types. Additionally, we examined the relative influence of motives, perceived issue congruence, and perceive value congruence on OPR perceptions. Findings suggest social/cultural expectations and risk reduction are the primary motives influencing perceptions of OPRs; however, perceived issue and value congruence with the organization are more influential antecedents than motives.

Does an Organization’s CSR Association affect the Perception of Communication Efforts? • Kang Hoon Sung, Cal Poly Pomona • Organizations often utilize interpersonal communications tactics on social media such as responding to customer comments or adopting a human conversational voice for better evaluations. Past studies have shown that these interpersonal communication tactics could indeed lead to positive outcomes and give the organization a more human and sincere face. The study examined whether the organization’s perceived CSR associations could have an influence in this process. Grounded in prior research on suspicion and organization’s personality dimensions, the current study investigated the influence of organization’s prior CSR associations on the organization’s interpersonal communication efforts that are associated with increasing the sincerity personality dimension (e.g., increased interaction, enhanced conversational tone). The results of the online experiment revealed that CSR activities significantly increased the organization’s perceived sincerity personality dimension and decreased suspicions about motives of the organization’s communication efforts. The mediation analysis suggests that less suspicion leads to more perceived sincerity toward organization, eventually leading to increased relationship quality.

The ‘New York World,’ Byron C. Utecht, and Pancho Villa’s Public Relations Campaign • Michael Sweeney, Ohio University; Young Joon Lim, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley • This paper attempts to assess Francisco “Pancho” Villa not as a general or quasi-politician, but rather as a practitioner of public relations. It investigates, by close observation of his actions and words, his strategy and tactics to build support among three specifically targeted audiences: the people of Mexico, American war correspondents, and the people of the United States. This paper examines secondary literature about public relations and about Pancho Villa’s life for evidence of his practicing public relations as we understand it today. Supplementing this literature review are primary documents from the archives of Byron C. Utecht at the University of Texas at Arlington. Utecht’s collection consists of his original photographs of his travels in Mexico on behalf of the New York World; telegrams to and from the World; typewritten notes and stories; clippings of his articles in the World and the clients of its wire service; and published interviews with Utecht about his trips into Mexico both as a lone journalist and as an accredited correspondent. It seeks to answer the key question: How did Villa practice public relations?

Ten years after The Professional Bond: Has the academy answered the call in pedagogical research? • Amanda Weed, Ashland University • CPRE is scheduled to release its next report of the status of public relations education in September of 2017. In anticipation of the report, this research seeks to determine if the academy has answered the call of The Professional Bond through an examination of pedagogical research published from 2007 to 2016 in four academic journals including the Journal of Advertising Education, the Journalism & Mass Communication Education, the Journal of Public Relations Education, and Public Relations Review. By conducting a meta-analysis of published research through a content analysis of article types, themes, and topics, this research determined that pedagogical research in public relations is lacking, especially among the topics specifically addressed in The Professional Bond.

The Role of Dissatisfaction in the Relationship Between Consumer Empowerment and Their Complaining Behavioral Intentions • Hao Xu, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities; Jennifer Ball, Temple University • This experimental study examined the mechanism of how consumer complaining behavioral intentions are driven by social media empowerment, and the role of dissatisfaction in this mechanism. The results revealed that dissatisfaction has both mediating and moderating effects in the relationship between consumer empowerment and some of the specific complaining behavioral intentions. Both theoretical and practical implications in terms of the dynamics of consumer dissatisfaction and power-induced complaining intentions were discussed.

Partisan News Media and China’s Country Image: An Online Experiment based on Heuristic-Systematic Model • Chen Yang, University of Houston – Victoria; Gi Woong Yun, University of Nevada, Reno • Based on Heuristic-Systematic Model, this research used a 2×2 pretest-posttest experimental design to measure China’s image after participants’ exposure to the news stimuli about China from a partisan media website. Two manipulated factors were media partisanship (congruent or incongruent partisan media) and news slant (positive or negative coverage of China). The results did not demonstrate any priming effect of news coverage. However, media partisanship had a significant influence on country beliefs. Significant interaction effects on country beliefs and desired interaction were also found.

NGOs’ humanitarian advocacy in the 2015 refugee crisis: A study of agenda building in the digital age • Aimei Yang, University of Southern California; Adam Saffer • In the 2015 European refugee crisis, humanitarian NGOs offered help and actively advocated for millions of refugees. The current study aims to understand what communication strategies are most effective for humanitarian NGOs to influence media coverage and publics’ social media conversations about the crisis. Our findings reveal that agenda building on traditional media and in social media conversations require different strategies. Specifically, although providing information subsidies could powerfully influence traditional media coverage, its effect waned in the context of social media conversations. In contrast, NGOs’ hyperlink network positions emerged as the one of the most influential predictor for NGOs’ prominence in social media conversations. Moreover, stakeholder engagement could influence agenda-building both in traditional media coverage and social media conversations. Finally, organizational resources and characteristics are important factors as well. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Using Facebook efficiently: Assessing the impact of organizational Facebook activities on organizational reputation • Lan Ye, State University of New York at Cortland; Yunjae Cheong, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies • This study analyzed 22 companies’ efficiency of using Facebook in reputation management by using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Results reveal that overall, the efficient companies (n =8) posted less frequently than did the inefficient companies (n = 14); companies receiving more engagements were more efficient than those receiving fewer engagements; and companies adopting one main Facebook Page were more efficient than those adopting multiple Facebook Pages. Size and length of history of an organization were not found to affect efficiency outcomes significantly.

The Effects of Behavioral Recommendations in Crisis Response and Crisis Threat on Stakeholders’ Behavioral Intention Outcomes • Xiaochen Zhang, Kansas State University; Jonathan Borden, Syracuse University • This experiment investigates the intersection between crisis threat, self-efficacy, affect and organizational messaging strategies on stakeholder behavioral outcomes in crises. Behavioral recommendations in crisis messages affected stakeholders’ behavioral outcomes through self-efficacy. Negative emotions also mediated behavioral recommendation and threat’s influence on stakeholders’ behavioral outcomes. Results imply that the extended parallel process model has significant implications for crisis management, however increases in stakeholder self-protective behaviors come at the expense of organizational reputation.

Issues Management as a Proactive Approach to Crisis Communication: Publics’ Cognitive Dissonance in Times of Issue-Related Crisis • Xiaochen Zhang, Kansas State University • Through an experiment, this study examines effects of issues management (issues attribution framing) on publics’ response to issue-related crisis. In Coca-Cola and obesity crisis’s case, public-organization identification and issues involvement were identified as predictors of blame, corporate evaluation, and purchase intentions. Results indicated that high identification and high issue involvement publics may experience cognitive dissonance and are more likely to support the organization under the external attribution frame (framing the obesity issue as personal responsibility).

STUDENT
The First Generation: Lessons from the public relations industry’s first university-trained social media practitioners • Luke Capizzo, University of Maryland • Public relations educators are grappling with the best methods to prepare undergraduates for the constantly shifting world of social media practice. The recent graduates (2011-2016) interviewed for this study constitute the first generation of practitioners with robust, formal social media training. Their experiences in school and in the workforce reinforce some current best practices—such as the value of internship experiences, the resonance of case studies, and the importance of excellent writing skills—but also point toward the need for increased emphasis on strategic social media, brand writing, visual communication, and the continued importance of a deeply integrated curriculum. Using social cognitive theory as a guiding framework, this study examines the salience of observational learning, behavior modeling, and self efficacy for building pedagogical theory for the social media classroom.

Unearthing the Facets of Crisis History in Crisis Communication: Testing A Conceptual Framework • LaShonda Eaddy, The University of Georgia • Coombs’s (2004) Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) identifies performance history, which includes crisis history and relationship history, as an intensifier of attribution of responsibility during crises. The proposed model examines crisis history and its possible roles among various stakeholder groups as well as possible impact on organizational control, crisis emotion and crisis responsibility. The study also offers a crisis history salience scale that was developed based on a thorough literature review as well as in-depth interviews with public relations practitioners, public relations scholars, journalists, and the general public. The crisis history salience scale can assist crisis communicators consider the multiple facets of crisis history during their crisis communication planning and implementation.

Dominant coalition perceptions in health-oriented, non-profit public relations • Torie Fowler, University of Southern Mississippi • Unlike many departments within an organization, public relations is often faced with the task of proving their importance to the dominant coalition. In health-oriented, non-profit organizations, leaders may find it hard to prove their value when patients, research, or life-saving technology takes precedent. This study examined the perceptions of public relations leaders in this specific field regarding their inclusion in the dominant coalition, how they are able to influence decision-making in their organization, and what barriers could keep leaders from obtaining membership into the coalition. This qualitative study included nine in-depth interviews, where four of the nine participants, perceived they were included in the dominant coalition of their organization. Several themes were identified when participants were asked how they were able to influence decision-making, such as: being included early, having credibility, practicing proactive public relations, and devising a strategic plan. Although less than half of the participants believed they were included in the dominant coalition, all of them thought they could influence the decisions made by the dominant coalition in some capacity. There were two consistent barriers to inclusion: a misunderstanding of public relations and an uneducated or inexperienced practitioner. This study contributes to the body of knowledge about public relations by bringing additional insight into how health-oriented, non-profit public relations leaders perceive that they are able to influence decision-making of the dominant coalition. The study also shows how current literature about public relations inclusion in the dominant coalition does not align with actuality for this group of leaders.

Constructing Trust and Confidence amid Crisis in the Digital Era • Jiankun Guo • Using a hypothetical food-poisoning crisis on campus, this qualitative research explored college students’ construction of trust and confidence online/offline via in-depth interviews. It applied the Trust, Confidence, and Cooperation (TCC) Model as a conceptual lens, but added new insights pertaining to the altering media landscape. Results showed that students constructed trust/confidence online according to a variety of factors (message features, sources, sites, and targets), but virtually all of them valued offline “facetime” due to its ability to convey emotional cues. Multimedia, therefore, offered an advantage in offering emotional reassurances via online channels. Participants also viewed trust-/confidence-building from the authority as a fluid process accumulated slowly overtime, regardless of channels. This study contributes to crisis communication scholarship in the digital era, particularly with an aim to facilitate community resilience.

Understanding the Donor Experience: Applying Stewardship Theory to Higher Education Donors • Virginia Harrison, The Pennsylvania State University • This study examines how stewardship strategies and involvement impact organization-public relationship outcomes for higher education donors at three different levels of giving. Findings suggest that stewardship strategies positively predict OPR outcomes, and that donors at different giving levels experience stewardship strategies and OPR outcomes differently. Also, findings reveal that stewardship may include only three strategies. Involvement only slightly moderates the relationship between stewardship and OPR outcomes. Implications for fundraising practice and theory are made.

Stakeholder relationship building in response to corporate ethical crisis : A semantic network analysis of sustainability reports • Keonyoung Park; Hyejin Kim, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities • This study explored how a corporation’s ethical crisis affects the way of sustainability reporting as a crisis communication tool. Especially, this study sheds light on the relationship building with stakeholders after the ethical crisis. To do so, we examined the Korean Air’s sustainability annual reports (SAR) before and after the ‘Nut Rage’ incident using a series of semantic networking analyses. Asiana Airline’s SARs before and after the crash at the San Francisco International Airport were also analyzed to find distinctive characteristics of the ethical crisis. The result suggested that the Korean Air’s SAR seemed to show the importance of relationship with stakeholders after the ethical crisis, while there was no meaningful change after the non-ethical crisis of Asiana Airlines. The results were discussed in relation to the situational crisis communication theory.

What Did You Expect? How Brand Personality Types and Transgression Types Shape Consumers’ Response in a Brand Crisis • Soyoung Lee, The University of Texas at Austin; Ji Mi Hong; Hyunsang Son • The current research examined how different types of brand personality play a role to develop a specific consumers’ expectation toward a brand, and how this expectation works in various ways in different types of brand transgressions. Based on expectancy violation theory and brand transgression research, a 2 (brand personality types: sincerity vs. competence) × 2 (brand transgression types: morality-related vs. competence-related transgression) factorial design was employed. Corporate evaluations and purchase intention toward the brand were considered as dependent variables. The results revealed that a brand having a sincerity personality is more vulnerable to a morality-related transgression. However, there is no difference in consumers’ responses by transgression type for a brand with a competence personality. Findings showed that brand personality types and transgression types can be critical factors to influence consumers’ responses in times of crisis. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.

What Makes Employees Stay Silent? The Role of Perceptions of Problem and Organization-Employee Relationship • Yeunjae Lee • This study aims to examine the impacts of individuals’ perceptions of problems and organization-employee relationship on employees’ silence intention during periods of an organizational issue. Using the situational theory of problem-solving (STOPS) and relational theory, this study intends to explore conceptual convergences by building linkages among issue-specific perceptions, relationship, and employee silence. An online survey was conducted for 412 full-time employees working in companies with more than 300 employees in the U.S. Results suggest that individuals’ perceived relationship is negatively related to their problem, constraint recognition, and silence intention, while it is positively related to involvement recognition. Perceptions of constraint recognition and less involvement to an organizational issue are associated with employee silence. Different impacts of individuals’ issue-specific perceptions and relationship were also examined for different types of silence—acquiescent, prosocial, and defensive silence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

“Breaking the Silence”: Segmenting Asian Americans in the United States to Address Mental Health Problems in the Community • Jo-Yun Queenie Li • This article describes an exploratory study designed to investigate the applicability of cultural identity in public segmentation within a racial/ethnic population in order to address mental health issues in Asian community in the United States. Using a pilot survey of 58 Asian Americans, this research employs the acculturation theory and the situational theory of publics to explore individuals’ communication behavior related to mental health issues. By doing so, this study contributes to the (re)conceptualization and operationalization of cultural identity in intercultural public relations discipline and provides practical implications to organizations that target specific racial/ethnic groups. The findings show that Asian Americans who are more highly acculturated in the United States could be considered as the active publics. They may be helpful in spreading out information, reaching out potential publics, encouraging themselves and other members in the community who have suffered from mental health issues to utilize mental health services.

Pouring Water on Conservative Fire: Discourse of Renewal in Facebook’s Response to Allegations of Bias • Tyler G Page, University of Maryland • Using Facebook’s 2016 trending topics crisis, this study applies the message convergence framework and discourse of renewal to analyze an organizational crisis response. The study reports a qualitative analysis of Facebook’s crisis response statements and a quantitative content analysis of 140 blog, magazine, and newspaper articles covering the crisis. Tone of news coverage improved when discourse of renewal strategy was covered and when media coverage included at least one quote from the organization.

Understanding Public Engagement in Sustainability Initiatives: The Situational Theory of Publics and the Theory of Reasoned Action Approaches • Soojin Roh, Syracuse University • In an attempt to extend the situational theory of publics, this study tested a public engagement model to explain how situational factors, subjective norm, and attitudes toward a sustainability initiative influence public’s communication action as well as different types of behavioral engagement intention. An online survey (N=502) was administered to test predictors of participation intent for recycling clothes campaigns and continuous public engagement with the sustainability cause. Structural equation modeling results indicate that problem recognition and constraint recognition are key predictors of information gaining (information seeking, sharing, and processing) and campaign participation intent. Subjective norms and positive attitude toward the campaign lead to the greater likelihood of participating in the campaign. The analysis also yielded a significant association between information gaining and public’s behavioral engagement including civic engagement, suggesting the mediating role of information gaining. Furthermore, the analysis showed a significant direct effect of involvement on civic engagement. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Understanding Public Engagement on Digital Media: Exploring Its Effects on Employee-Organization Relationships • Yuan Wang, The University of Alabama • This study examined the effects of employees’ organizational identification and engagement with mobile phones and social media on their relationships with the organization and positive word-of-mouth (WOM) communication through a web-based survey of employees via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Findings suggested that employees’ organizational identification significantly influenced their digital media engagement. This study also identified employees’ organizational identification and digital media engagement as new predictors of employee-organization relationships, which, furthermore, led to positive WOM communication.

Defining and Communicating Diversity: A Content Analysis of the Websites of the Top PR Agencies • Anli Xiao, the Pennsylvania State University; Jinyoung Kim; Wunpini Mohammed; Hilton Erica; Colleen Pease • “This paper examines how top PR agencies define diversity, how they express diversity identities and communicate diversity values to prospective employees and clients. Through a content analysis of top PR agencies’ websites, this study finds PR agencies’ defined diversity narrowly and they showed limited efforts in communicating diversity values to future employees and clients. Agency ranking significantly correlated with some diversity efforts communicated. Implications are discussed.

TEACHING
Experiential Learning and Crisis Simulations: Leadership, Decision Making, and Communication Competencies • Hilary Fussell Sisco, Quinnipiac University; John Brummette; Laura Willis, Quinnipiac University; Michael Palenchar, University of Tennesseee • Students benefit from simulation exercises that require them to apply public relations research and theories. Using an experimental learning approach (N=16), this present paper assesses the effectiveness of a crisis simulation exercise using a pre-test/post-test evaluation. Findings suggest that crisis simulation exercises can prepare future practitioners by providing them practices in discipline-centric experiences that also bolster their personal professional development in the areas of leadership, decision making and communication competency.

One Liners and Catchy Hashtags: Building a Graduate Student Community Through Twitter Chats • Melissa Janoske, University of Memphis; Robert Byrd, University of Memphis; Stephanie Madden, University of Memphis • This study takes a mixed-methods approach to understanding how graduate student education and engagement are intertwined, and the ability of an ongoing Twitter chat to increase both. Analysis includes the chats themselves, a mixed-methods survey to chat participants, and memoing completed by the researchers (also faculty chat participants and the chat moderator). Key findings include the importance of building both online and offline connections, the ability of Twitter chats to increase fun and reduce stress, and to gain both tacit and explicit knowledge. Finally, the project offers practical suggestions for those looking to start their own chat series.

Millennial Learners and Faculty Credibility: Exploring the Mediating Role of Out-Of-Class Communication • Carolyn Kim • Every generation experiences distinct events and develops unique values. The Millennial generation is no exception. As Millennial Learners enter classrooms, they bring with them new views about education, learning and faculty/student communication. All of this blends together to influence their perspectives of faculty credibility. This study explores the mediating role of out-of-class communication (OCC) in relation to the historical dimensions known to compose faculty credibility.

Examination of Continuous Response Assessment of Communication Course Presentation Competency • Geoffrey Graybeal, Texas Tech University; Jobi Martinez, Texas Tech University • This study examined the use of continuous response (dial test) technology as a means of providing feedback to improve formal presentations required to meet learning objectives in college communication courses and a variety of assessment strategies utilized in the assignment. Findings suggest that use of video assessment and a student self-assessment have the greatest impact on final presentation performance and that the first dial test pitch should not be graded.

Competition and Public Relations Campaigns: Assessing the Impact of Competition on Projects, Partners, and Students • Chris McCollough, Columbus State University • Scholars in public relations pedagogy have provided a strong body of research on the impact of service learning, community partnerships (Daugherty, 2003), and applied learning in general on campaigns, writing, and production courses common to the public relations curriculum (Wandel, 2005). Rarely explored, however, is the impact of competition among student groups within a public relations course on the quality of campaigns, student experience, client satisfaction, and achievement of learning outcomes (Rentner, 2012). The paper will present a comparative analysis of campaign courses that employed competitive and non-competitive campaign course models to demonstrate the impact of incorporating competition within public relations courses.

Integrating Web and Social Analytics into Public Relations Research Course Design: A Longitudinal Pedagogical Research on Google Analytics Certification • Juan Meng, University of Georgia; Yan Jin; Yen-I Lee, University of Georgia; Solyee Kim, University of Georgia • This longitudinal pedagogical research contributes with integrating web and social analytics-based activities into the Public Relations Research course design. Results from the pre- and post-tests confirmed that students’ knowledge on web and social analytics is low but desire to learn is high. Consistent patterns on learning outcomes suggest more experience-based learning activities are needed to leverage the practical implications of web and social analytics in public relations research and practice. More pedagogical recommendations are discussed.

Media Relations Instruction and Theory Development: Relational Dialectical Approach • Justin Pettigrew, Kennesaw State University • There has been almost no research in the area of media relations or media relations instruction in the public relations literature. This study seeks to fill a gap in theory-building in the area of media relations and examines the state of media relations instruction in today’s public relations curriculum through a survey of public relations professors. The author suggests relational dialectical theory as a way to better understand the relationship between public relations practitioners and journalists, and proposes a relational dialectical approach to theory building and in teaching media relations in today’s changing landscape.

Developing a Blueprint for Social Media Pedagogy: Trials, Tribulations, and Best Practices • ai zhang, Stockton University; Karen Freberg, University of Louisville • Social media research, and particularly social media pedagogy, has increased substantially as a domain in public relations research. Yet, along with this increased focus on social media pedagogy, educators and other higher education professionals are under pressure from industry, professional communities, and university administrations to keeping their classes updated and relevant for their students. To better understand the current state and rising expectations facing educators teaching social media, this study interviewed 31 social media professors to explore the trials and tribulations of their journey and to identify best practices of social media as a pedagogical tool. The study also suggested a blueprint for implementing social media pedagogy in the classroom. Future implications for both research and practice are also discussed.

DOUG NEWSOM AWARD FOR GLOBAL ETHICS GLOBAL DIVERSITY
An Exploratory Study of Transformed Media Relations Dimensions After the Implementation of an Anti-graft Law • Soo-Yeon Kim, Sogang University; JOOHYUN HEO • The Improper Solicitation and Graft Act, which went into effect on September 28, 2016, strictly prohibits gift-giving to journalists, thereby making a traditional media relations practice in Korea illegal. A survey of 342 public relations practitioners revealed that providing monetary gifts, performing formal responsibility, building informal relationships, getting paid media coverage, and taking informal support were found to be significant subdimensions of media relations. After implementation of the anti-graft law, public relations practitioners expressed a belief that the practice of providing monetary gifts will shrink the most and performing formal responsibility would experience the most growth. The formal responsibility factor was significantly positively related to support for the new law and public relations ethics, while taking informal support was negatively linked to public relations ethics. Getting paid media coverage showed the most significant positive relationship with difficulties of effective media relations.

MUSEUM OF PUBLIC RELATIONS PR HISTORY AWARD
Raymond Simon: PR Educational Pioneer • Patricia Swann, Utica College • Raymond Simon, professor emeritus of public relations at Utica College, whose teaching career spanned nearly four decades, was among PRWeek’s 100 most influential 20th century people in public relations. Simon’s contributions to education include developing one of the first full-fledged public relations undergraduate curriculums; authoring the first public relations-specific classroom textbooks for writing and case studies, in addition to a textbook for the principles course; and developing student potential through national student organizations and mentoring.

2017 ABSTRACTS

Newspaper and Online 2017 Abstracts

OPEN COMPETITION
News Dynamics, Frame Expansion and Salience: Boko Haram and the War against Terrorism • Ngozi Akinro, Texas Wesleyan University • This study considers frame salience and frame change in relation to terrorism coverage. Through content analysis of 807 news articles by Nigeria Vanguard and Punch and two US newspapers; New York Times and Washington Post on the coverage of the Boko Haram crisis over 16-month period, this study examines change patterns in the coverage of the Boko Haram crisis. The Boko Haram group is an Islamic fundamentalist group operating out of north-eastern Nigeria since 2002. The group claims international ties with other terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda and ISIS (Alkhshali & Almasy, 2015). The group is responsible for nearly half of all civilian deaths in African war zones in 2014. This study considers episodic and thematic framing through a two dimensional frame changing pattern and found frame movement from issue specific framing to thematic suggesting humanitarian and emotional appeal, to global perspective focused on the war on terrorism.

Mediated Policy Effects of Foreign Governments on Iraqi Independent Media During Elections • Mohammed Al-Azdee, University of Bridgeport (UB) • I use the term, mediated policy, to refer to messages sent to Iraq by foreign governments through their international news media during the 2010 Iraqi elections. I hypothesize that US Mediated Policy, Iranian Mediated Policy, and Saudi Mediated Policy are latent constructs interacting in a structural model, affecting a fourth latent variable, Iraqi Independent Media. The analysis shows in 2010 English was barrier to Iraqi independent media, and significant mediated policies influenced Iraqi independent media.

The Effects of Disclosure Format on Native Advertising Recognition and Audience Perceptions of Legacy and Online News Publishers • Michelle Amazeen, Boston University; Bartosz Wojdynski • This experimental study examines elements of native advertising disclosures that influence consumers’ ability to recognize content as paid advertising and contrasts subsequent evaluations of legacy and digital-first publishers with those exposed to online display advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 participants were able to recognize native advertising, our study shows that effectively designed disclosure labels facilitate recognition. However, participants who did recognize native advertising had lessened opinions of the publisher and the institution of advertising, overall.

“Alphabet soup”: Examining acronyms in newspaper headlines • Alyssa Appelman, Northern Kentucky University • American journalism is facing an uphill battle for respect and trust. Through a content analysis and survey, this project suggests acronyms as a potential explanation. Acronyms in a local newspaper were largely unknown to a sample of target readers, and one-third of participants specifically expressed negative emotions, including frustration and annoyance, when news outlets publish unknown acronyms. These findings suggest that focusing on reader comprehension over brevity can help journalists repair their public image.

Who Gets Vocal about Hyperlocal: The Role of Neighborhood Involvement and Status in the Sharing of Hyperlocal Website News • Peter Bobkowski, University of Kansas; Liefu Jiang, University of Kansas; Laveda Peterlin, University of Kansas; Nathan Rodriguez, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point • To examine who shares hyperlocal news in person, over email, and through social media, a reader survey of seven hyperlocal news websites was conducted (n = 1,880). More readers share hyperlocal news in person than through email or social media. Higher neighborhood involvement and education tend to characterize readers who share hyperlocal news. Education moderates the relationship between neighborhood involvement and social media sharing. The study extends precepts of channel complementarity and communication infrastructure theories.

An Investigative Journalist and a Stand-Up Comic Walk Into a Bar: The Role of Comedy in Public Engagement with Environmental Journalism • Caty Borum Chattoo, American University School of Communication; Lindsay Green-Barber, The Impact Architects • An investigative journalism project focused on environmental contamination in New Jersey, Dirty Little Secrets, worked with stand-up comics to translate investigative content into stand-up comedy routines performed in front of a live audience. Through a quantitative survey administered after two live comedy shows, this study finds that the public learned factual information, perceived comedians as credible, and expressed willingness to get involved in the core issue. Implications for public engagement with investigative journalism are discussed.

Service at the intersection of journalism, language, and the global imaginary: Indonesia’s English language press • John Carpenter, University of Iowa; Brian Ekdale, University of Iowa • Drawing on interviews with journalists who work in Indonesia’s locally owned and operated English-language press (ELP), we argue English’s status as the language of global and regional imaginaries informs how ELP journalists negotiate their understandings of public service. This study contributes to research on the contextual negotiation of professional ideologies of journalism by considering how publication language—here, English in a country where it is a foreign language—shapes the ways journalists conceive service to their various publics.

Framing Drunken Driving as a Social Problem • Kuang-Kuo Chang, Shih Hsin University • This study content analyzed how drunken driving was framed in Taiwan’s local press in terms of the social determinants. Findings suggest that the coverage was highly negative and episodic substantiated largely by the predominant uses of convenient social actors. In contrast, public health advocates, academics and interest groups that can guide the reporting toward more thematic were barely used to present the causal factors and public policy as health determinants. Implications from the finding are elaborated.

Gaming the News: Examining the Effects of Online Political Quizzes on Interest in News and Politics • Gina Chen; Yee Man Margaret Ng, The University of Texas at Austin; Victoria Chen, The University of Texas at Austin; Martin J. Riedl, The University of Texas at Austin • This study sought to understand whether people’s exposure to online quizzes about politics could pique people’s interest in news and politics. An online experiment (N = 585) showed that exposure to quiz questions about politics directly increased people’s perception of their own political knowledge. In addition, exposure to political quizzes indirectly lead to increased interest in politics and intention to get politically involved as well as boosted interest in political news.

Connectivity with a Newspaper and Knowledge of Its Investigatory Work Influence Civic Engagement • Esther Thorson, Michigan State University; Weiyue Chen, Michigan State University; Stephen Lacy, Michigan State University • A survey of residents in the Florida Times-Union (T-U) market showed that both digital and print exposure to the newspaper’s content predicted positive attitudes about civic engagement, as mediated through news interest and perceptions of personal connectivity with the T-U. These attitudes predicted civic engagement behaviors such as volunteering and talking to others about community issues. T-U readers showed higher knowledge of major investigative projects the newspaper had done than those exposed to television news.

Tripling the Price and Wondering Why Readership Declined? A Longitudinal Study of U.S. Newspapers’ Price Hikes, 2008-2016 • Iris Chyi, University of Texas at Austin; Ori Tenenboim, The University of Texas at Austin • Since the recession U.S. newspapers have increased the price of their print product substantially. While price is a major determinant of consumer demand, circulation trends are often reported out of context, leading to misinterpretations of reader preference. This longitudinal study examines 25 major newspapers’ print price and reveals that subscription rates nearly tripled since 2008, indicating readership declines are partly self-inflicted. Analysis of readership data suggests stronger-than-expected attachment to print. Managerial implications are discussed.

PolitiFact Coverage of Candidates for U.S. Senate and Governor 2010-2016 • Joan Conners, Randolph-Macon College • This study explores PolitiFact fact-checking coverage for potential patterns of ideological bias, the types of claims being examined, as well as where such claims originate in claims about political candidates for the U.S. Senate or Governor in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Republican candidate claims were judged to be less accurate than claims by Democratic candidates. Candidate claims that attacked one’s opponent were found to dominate PolitiFact coverage, and were frequently found to be inaccurate.

A movement of varying faces: How “Occupy Central” was framed in the news in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, the U.K., and the U.S. • Y. Roselyn Du, Hong Kong Baptist U; Fan Yang, UW – Madison; Lingzi Zhu, Hong Kong Baptist U • News stories concerning the “Hong Kong Occupy Central” crisis were analyzed to define how the events were framed in the U.K., the U.S., mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Framing was analyzed in terms of selection and description biases, including news perspective, favorability toward the protesters or the government, sourcing pattern, and attribution of responsibility. The results show significant differences among the five markets, not only between contrasting media systems, but also between comparable ones.

Fighting Facebook: Journalism’s discursive boundary work with the “trending,” “napalm girl,” and “fake news” stories of 2016 • Brett Johnson, University of Missouri; Kimberly Kelling • “Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its Trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of fake news during the U.S. presidential election. Blending theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work and platform ethics, this paper examines how the Guardian, New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that with all three stories, these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e. include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e. place it outside the boundaries of journalism).

Misconception of Barack Obama’s religion: A content analysis of print news coverage of the president • Joseph Kasko, SUNY Buffalo State • This study examines the interaction between public opinion and media treatment of Barack Obama’s religious beliefs, which he is Christian. Yet, only 34 percent of Americans said that they believed Obama was a Christian in an August 2010 Pew Research poll. That was a 14 percent decline from a Pew poll the previous year. This study uses second-level agenda setting to explore if the media contributed to the misconception about his religion.

Fake News, Real Cues: Cues and Heuristics in Users’ Online News Credibility Judgments • Kate Keib, Oglethorpe University; Bartosz Wojdynski • Two experimental studies sought to identify cues and heuristics used by consumers to assess online news content from an unknown source, and what influence these factors have on credibility assessments. Results show that on-page design cues including writing style, pictures and advertisements influence credibility assessments, and these cues do garner attention and influence such assessments. Practitioners can use on-page cues to build credibility among customers. The cues and heuristics identified warrant future research by scholars.

Differences in the Network Agendas of #Immigration in the 2016 Election • Jisu Kim, University of Minnesota -Twin Cities; Mo Jang, University of South Carolina, Columbia • “As an application study of the network agenda-setting model, this study examines how the media and public network agendas can differ, based on which political candidate was mentioned along with with the immigration issue in news coverage and in public tweets. Through network analyses, this study shows that there were differences in the salient attributes of the immigration issue, and that the dominant narrative structure of the issue depended on which political candidate was mentioned.

The Imagined Audience for and Perceived Quality of News Comments • Jisu Kim, University of Minnesota -Twin Cities; Seth Lewis, University of Oregon; Brendan Watson, Michigan State University • “A survey of news commenters’ perceptions of the quality and potential audiences for comments on news websites and Facebook found similar perceptions of quality and civility across platforms. But Facebook commenters were more likely to imagine friends among their audience, compared to politicians and journalists on news websites. Based on the imagined audience for comments, Facebook is not an equivalent substitute for commenting on news websites. Implications for journalism and future research are discussed.

Does Working Memory Capacity Moderate the Effects of Regulatory Focus on News Headline Appraisal and Processing Speed? • Yu-Hao Lee, University of Florida • News consumers regularly scan news headlines before devoting more efforts to reading the content. During this stage, news consumers may use their intuitive responses to the headlines to determine if the news sounds interesting and is worth reading. This study examines how individuals’ regulatory focus orientations affect their appraisal of news headlines and the moderating role of working memory capacity on appraisal score and speed. One hundred and two undergraduate participants performed a news appraisal task in which they gave a score to headlines that used either a gain-frame or a loss-frame. The results showed that promotion-focused individuals gave higher scores to gain-framed headlines, and individuals with lower working memory capacity relied on their regulatory focus more during headline appraisal. However, there was no significant effect on loss-framed headlines. The study has theoretical contributions to understanding the psychological mechanism behind headline scanning and cognitive processing. It also has some practical implications for news editors on how to tailor headlines to individuals’ regulatory focus.

Contest over Authority: Navigating Native Advertising’s Impacts on Journalism Autonomy • You Li • This study analyzes the discourses of 10 U.S. news organizations’ integration of native advertising across five years. The findings map three stages of integration ranging from sharing editorial space, editorial resource to editorial staff, exemplifying the renegotiation of the business-journalism boundary at the structural, procedural and cultural levels. The pro-native advertising discourse legitimizes the integration as extending journalistic quality to advertising, while in fact impedes journalistic autonomy both internally and externally.

All Forest, No Trees? Data Journalism and the Construction of Abstract Categories • Wilson Lowrey; Jue Hou, Universtiy of Alabama • This study takes a sociology of quantification approach in exploring the impact of “commensurative” processes in data journalism, in which distinct incidents and events are aggregated into oversimplified abstract categories. This literature predicts heavy reliance on government data, use of national over local data, and a tendency to take data categories at face value, without scrutiny. Findings from a content analysis of data journalism projects at legacy and non-legacy outlets over time, reveals some support for predictions.

Picturing the solution? An analysis of visuals in solutions journalism • Jennifer Midberry; Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon • Solutions journalism, rigorous and fact-driven news stories of credible solutions to societal problems, is gaining a great deal of momentum. To date, research on this journalistic practice is scant and what little research there is has generally focused on text. Given the growing practice of solutions journalism and the dominant role of photographs in the news media, this research used content analysis and semiotic analysis to examine the use of visual reporting in solutions stories.

Looking at past and present Intermedia agenda-setting: A meta analysis • Alexander Moe, Texas Tech University; Yunjuan Luo, South China University of Technology • The purpose of this study was to explore one important phase of agenda-setting research that looks at who sets the media agenda using rigorous meta-analysis approaches. The researchers drew upon empirical intermedia agenda-setting studies from 1990 to 2015. A total of 17 qualified studies included in the final analysis produced homogeneity, and the weighted grand mean effect size for those studies was .713, indicating consistent and strong intermedia agenda-setting effects in the findings across a range of studies. The results also suggest a convergence of media agendas despite an increasing number of different media outlets with the development of new media technologies.

Social media echo chambers: Political journalists’ normalization of Twitter affordances • Logan Molyneux, Temple University; Rachel Mourao, Michigan State University • This study analyzes the content of tweets sent by 784 political journalists during the first 2016 U.S. presidential debate. It finds that journalists most often interacted with each other, almost to the exclusion of audience members. Newer affordances of Twitter including quote tweets and reply threading are not as normalized as older affordances, and journalists used them in differing ways. Also, journalists’s tweets mentioning policy issues tended to be retweeted, whereas those containing humor did not.

Disrupting traditional news routines through community engagement: Analysis of a media collaboration project • Jennifer Moore, University of Minnesota Duluth; John Hatcher, University of Minnesota Duluth • This research examines the impact of a community storytelling project designed to disrupt relationships between news organizations and their audiences. Informed by scholarship on the changing role of journalists as facilitators rather than gatekeepers of public discourse, community engagement methods were used to study this two-year storytelling project. Ripple Effect Mapping (REM) methods measured its impact. Findings reveal that traditional news media deviated little from established journalism routines while citizens participation was diverse and expansive.

The Small, Disloyal Fake News Audience: The Role of Audience Availability in Fake News Consumption • Jacob Nelson, Northwestern University; Harsh Taneja, University of Missouri • Fears of fake news stem from two assumptions: that fake news consumption has grown widespread, and that it reaches an audience that spends little time with news and is thus more susceptible to false claims. However, prior audience behavior research suggests that light media users disproportionately gravitate towards established, popular brands, while heavy users visit both familiar and obscure fare. This paper examines online audience data in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election to empirically analyze whether or not these long-observed patterns of audience behavior play out when it comes to fake news. We find a positive relationship between time spent online and fake news exposure, indicating that the fake news audience comprises a small group of heavy internet users. In doing so, we offer a more accurate portrait of the fake news audience, and contribute to the ongoing conversation about fake news’ reach, and its consequences.

Covering Pulse: Understanding the lived experience of journalists who covered a mass shooting • Theodore Petersen, Florida Institute of Technology; Shyla Soundararajan, Florida Institute of Technology • “The June 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub near downtown Orlando, Florida, provided a real challenge to local media. This qualitative study includes in-depth interviews with Central Florida print, television, and radio journalists to understand what it was like to cover such a tragedy. These journalists talk about ethics, sourcing, violence, and mental health.

Gender Profiling in Local News • David Pritchard, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Emily Wright, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee • A content analysis of five weeks of staff-written stories in all sections of a large daily newspaper in the American Midwest (n=954 stories) tested a variety of hypotheses relating to patriarchal practices in journalism. The empirical results supported all hypotheses, documenting gendered practices both at the level of the individual journalist and at the level of the organization. Although gender profiling of the kind the research demonstrates are widely considered to be normal and natural in American journalism, the authors argue that such profiling not only reflects patriarchy, but reinforces it. By downplaying women’s contributions in social, economic, political, and cultural realms, patriarchal journalism diminishes democracy.

When journalists think colorful but their news coverage stays grey. Exploring the gap between journalists’ professional identity, their role enactment and output in newspapers. • Patric Raemy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; Daniel Beck • The aim of this study is to explore the connection between professional identity of newspaper journalists, their perceived freedom of reporting and their role performance in a multi-language country and a Western European context. We combine a content analysis of news coverage with an online survey among the authors of these articles. It is an exploration of the gap between journalistic role perception, enactment and performance as well as of the methodology of analysis.

Whose tweets do you trust? Message and messenger credibility among mainstream and new media news organizations on Twitter • Anna Waters, University of Alabama; Chris Roberts, University of Alabama • Gauging message and messenger credibility has become even more complicated as more people consume media from social media instead of traditional channels. This experimental survey of young adults compared credibility of mainstream and new media, using the same messages on Twitter. Mainstream sources and their messages were considered more credible than new media sources. Media skepticism had a significant effect on perceived message and messenger credibility; political cynicism did not.

Listicles and the BuzzFeed Generation: Examining the Perceived Credibility of Listicles Among Millennials • Sean Sadri, Old Dominion University • Listicles are a new media phenomenon that have become a staple of virtually every news organization (articles that are simply lists or rankings and offer arguably less substance than a traditional article). This study sought to determine the perceived credibility of listicles among the age group most inclined to read them (millennials). Examining the appeal of listicles can provide insight into the direction that news may be going for the next generation of news readers. Using a sample population of millennials (N = 363), participants were randomly assigned to read an article in one of two formats: a listicle or a traditional article. Following the article, participants were given a questionnaire rating the credibility of the article and another asking participants to recall facts from the story. The experiment found that millennials rated the listicle as significantly more credible than the traditional article. The study also hypothesized that millennials may retain more information from a well-constructed listicle than a traditional article containing the same information, but this hypothesis was not supported. The study results and the implications of these findings are discussed.

Exploring the “wall,” Bible and Baphomet: Media coverage of church-state conflicts • Erica Salkin; Elizabeth Jacobs • This study seeks to build upon previous research on media coverage of law and faith by exploring newswork related specifically to church-state conflicts. Qualitative content analysis of coverage around two case studies reveals a broad assumption of audience familiarity with key constitutional and religious ideas. When scenarios venture into the unique, however, explication does emerge, suggesting that some lack of legal or religious depth may be attributed to a belief that audiences don’t need it.

Alienating Audiences: The Effect of Uncivil Online Discourse on Media Perceptions • Natalee Seely, UNC-Chapel Hill • Online discussion forums offer news consumers venues for expression and participation, but these forums have also been condemned for offensive and uncivil language. Some news outlets have required users to register with identifying information before commenting in an effort to keep conversation civil. Others have discontinued discussion forums altogether for fear of losing credibility or turning off readers. Previous literature has identified several forms of incivility within comment forums, including insulting language, stereotyping, and vulgar speech. This study used a one-way experimental design to determine the effects of uncivil language within online news comment forums on participants’ (n=198) perceptions of news credibility, their willingness to participate in the discussion, and their levels of media trust. Results indicate that those who read a news article accompanied by uncivil comments—which contained insulting language and stereotypes about various groups—were significantly less willing to participate in the discussion compared to those who viewed neutral comments. No significant differences in credibility perceptions or media trust were found. Findings demonstrate that offensive speech in online forums may have a chilling effect on participation in news discussion.

Anonymous Journalists: Bylines and Immigration Coverage in the Italian Press • Francesco Somaini, Central Washington University • This study investigated the relationship between news coverage of immigrants and refugees and identifiability of stories’ authors in the two daily newspapers with the largest circulation in Italy: Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica. The content of 400 news stories published in 2013 was examined. The data showed that the outlets produced comparable shares of “anonymous” and “signed” stories. Corriere della Sera, the more conservative outlet, provided consistently more negative representations of immigrants than la Repubblica, more liberal, did. However, in the left-leaning daily, articles that carried no byline—i.e., whose author was identifiable neither as a journalist nor as a wire service—tended to portray immigrants and refugees more negatively than stories carrying a byline did. Conversely, degree of antipathy for migrants expressed in online comments did not vary in relation to byline. However, readers of Corriere expressed more antipathy for immigrants than those of la Repubblica did. The findings suggest that anonymity might be associated with more frequent stereotypical representations of immigrants even in news outlets that are considered more liberal.

Knowledge-based Journalism in Science and Environmental Reporting: Opportunities and Obstacles • Anthony Van Witsen, Michigan State University; Bruno Takahashi, Department of Journalism, Michigan State University • Recent calls for knowledge-based journalism advocate a new level of scientific knowledge in news reporting as a way of meeting the professional challenges caused by rapid technological change in the news industry. Scientifically knowledgeable journalism has the potential to redefine the existing science-media relationship; however early criticisms called it naïve and unworkable in existing, rapidly changing newsroom practices. This study attempts to go beyond the initial enthusiasm and the skepticism to develop a better theoretical basis by which knowledge-based journalism could function, how reporters and editors could learn it, and what audience might exist for it. It examines the history of earlier professional reform efforts in journalism to discover why new practices have sometimes been adopted or abandoned. It finds that implementing knowledge based journalism requires knowing the actual benefits of improved scientific understanding for news consumers and poses research questions designed to lead to testable hypotheses for developing it and measuring its impact on audiences. Among its conclusions: that increased scientific training by reporters might increase journalists’ grasp of the traditional problem of managing scientific uncertainty, changing the information asymmetry between journalists and their scientist sources and altering the balance of power between them. Over time, this could affect the audience’s tolerance for uncertainty as well.

Coding the News: The Role of Computer Code in the Distribution of News Media • Matthew Weber, Rutgers University; Allie Kosterich, Rutgers University; Rohit Tikyani, Rutgers University • This article examines the role of code in the process of news distribution, and interrogates the degree to which code and algorithms are imbued with the ability to make decisions regarding the filtering and prioritizing of news, much as an editor would. Emphasis is placed specifically on the context of mobile news applications that filter news for consumers. In addressing calls to attend to the intersection of computer science and journalism, an additional goal of this article is to move the analytic lens away from the notion that code is replacing humans as producers of news and to shift towards an understanding of how code orders and communicates the news. Thus, the focus of this research is on algorithms as technological actants, filtering news based on decisions imbued into the code by human actors. An investigation of code contained in 64 open source mobile news apps is presented and the content of the code is analyzed. Findings highlight the journalistic decisions made in code and contribute to discussion surrounding the relationship between algorithmic and traditional news values.

Examining the Relationship Between Trust and Online Usage • Katie Yaeger, University of Missouri School of Journalism; Harsh Taneja, University of Missouri • This study tests the relationship between trust and online usage of 35 popular United States news sources. A series of regression models using pooled cross-sectional data of trust measures and usage measures from three months found a positive, statistically significant relationship between trust and direct traffic, but it found no association between trust and frequent usage. It also found overall that additional variables did not significantly impact the relationship between trust and direct traffic.

STUDENT PAPERS
The Least Trusted Name in News: Exploring Why News Users Distrust BuzzFeed News • Jordon Brown, The University of Texas at Austin • “This experiment measured readers’ perceived sense of credibility when presented with three different news stories. Although all three news stories were actually from BuzzFeed, they were presented as though only one was, and one from Yahoo News, and one from The Wall Street Journal. This study found the perceived credibility was impacted by the news source, but not always by the individual article.

Framing EU borders in live-blogs: A multimodal approach • Ivana Cvetkovic, University of New Mexico; Mirjana Pantic, University of Tennessee • New media and 2.0 Web technologies affected the breaking news reporting forcing traditional media to embrace a new multimodal format of live-blogs. By acknowledging the importance of multiple modes in meaning making, this paper employs multimodal method to examine the similarities and differences in framing the European Union borders in live blogs in European media. Three frames emerged from the analysis: border management, borders as lived spaces, and borders as politically constructed spaces.

The mobile community: College students and the hometown sense of community through mobile news app use • Chris Etheridge, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • “This project explores how mobile technology can impact the relationship between geography and news consumption. Findings indicate that college students who have installed a mobile news app focused on their hometown have a higher connection to that community than those who do not have apps and those who have apps with a national or global focus. In this case, this connection exists even when circumstances remove the person from that community.

Vapor and Mirrors: A Qualitative Framing Analysis of E-Cigarette Reporting in High-Circulation U.S. Newspapers • Vaughan James, University of Florida; Paul Simpson • Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have been gaining popularity in the United States since their introduction into the market in 2008. Use among teenagers and young adults has recently skyrocketed, tripling between 2013 and 2014. Given that these products are still unregulated at the federal level, they represent a major public health concern. News media can have substantial effects on public perception of technology and health issues, and so it is important to understand the ways that the U.S. media present e-cigarettes. This study examined the framing of e-cigarettes in three major high-circulation U.S. newspapers. A qualitative content analysis was performed on 92 e-cigarette-related news articles published between January 2008 and October 2014. Three major frames arose in newspaper reporting: Comparison/Contrast, Regulation, and Uncertainty. Understanding the frames presented in the media can help to both explain e-cigarettes’ rising popularity and highlight potential regulatory issues that will require attention from public health officials.

‘Engaging’ the Audience: Journalism in the Next Media Regime • Jacob Nelson, Northwestern University • As the journalism industry loses revenues and relevance, academics and professionals have pinned their hopes for salvation on increasing “audience engagement.” Yet few agree on what audience engagement means, why it will make journalism more successful, or what “success” in journalism should even look like. This paper uses Williams and Delli Carpini’s “media regimes” as a theoretical framework to argue that studying the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding it – is vital to understanding journalism’s transition from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is yet to fully emerge. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It concludes with a call for more research into audience engagement efforts to better understand what journalism is, and what it might become.

News Organizations’ Link Sharing on Twitter: Computational Text Analysis Approach • Chankyung Pak, Michigan State University • This study aims to analyze news organizations’ news link sharing on social media. Computational data collection and text analysis techniques in this study allow for a large scale comparison between shared and unshared news. I found that news organizations are more likely to share hard news than soft news on social media while the latter is more published on their websites. News organizations’ decision on what to share constrains news diversity available to news readers.

Way-finding and source blindness: How the loss of gatekeepers spread fake news in the 2016 Presidential election • George Pearson, The Ohio State University; Simon Lavis, The Ohio State University • Changing news patterns allows users to consume stories from multiple sources. This was hypothesized to lead to a disinterest in sources (source blindness) and reliance on curators for news. Additionally both variables were expected to lead to increased misinformation acceptance. A parallel mediation model on national survey data revealed that reliance on curators was not significant, however consuming news from multiple sources did increase source blindness which in turn increased misinformation acceptance.

Is the Robot Biased Against Me? An Investigation of Boundary Conditions for Reception of Robot as News Writer • Bingjie Liu; Lewen Wei, Pennsylvania State University • This study tested effects of robot as news writer on reducing hostile media effect. In a 2 (robot vs. human news writer) X 2 (hard news vs. feature story) online experiment, 212 participants read news representing one of the four conditions randomly and evaluated its quality. We found for feature story, only believers of machine intelligence evaluated that by robot as positive whereas hard news by robot was well received regardless of one’s belief.

Trustee Versus Market Model: A Journalistic Field Experiment • Douglas Wilbur, The University of Missouri at Columbia • This field experiment examines data gathered through a competition hosted by the Austin-American Statesman, the test their daily news via email delivery service the Midday Break, and a news aggregation service called the Statesman’s News For You, managed by the Reportory Company. The Midday Break represents the trustee model of journalism since stories are chosen by editors in a traditional manner. The Statesman’s News For You represents that market model of journalism since users select story preferences through a personalization function. Results of aggregate user data revealed that the Statesman’s News For You subscribers opened more of their services email and read more of their delivered news stories than those of Midday Break. A survey of both groups revealed that Statesman’s News For You subscribers gave their services higher ratings for crebibility, likelihood of recommending to a friend and perceived control than Midday Break subscribers. This field experiment lends some evidence that the market model of journalism might offer a better route for newspaper survivability and economic success.

Young vs Old: How Age Impacts Journalists’ Boundary Work Shift in Social Media Innovation (ACES and MacDougall awards) • Yanfang Wu • A cross-sectional, self-administered questionnaire online national survey (N=1063) was administered to examine how older and younger newspaper journalists differ in adopting social media as an innovation. The study found no significant difference exists between younger journalists and older journalists’ rating of social media innovation friendly culture in their news organizations. However, younger journalists tend to view innovative instructions on using social media as more frequent, useful, and effective than older journalists. The more effective younger journalists rated their news organizations’ innovative instructions on social media, the less younger journalists interact with audiences on social than older journalists, which reflects a higher social media instructions expectation from younger journalists for journalistic work boundary shift.

The Syrian exodus: How The Globe and Mail, The New York Times and The Sun framed the crisis? • Zulfia Zaher, Ohio University • This study examined the cross-national coverage of the Syrian refugee crises in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and The Sun newspapers. The study employed a quantitative content analysis to measure the attention paid to the Syrian refugee crisis and investigated the prevalence of the five generic frames (economic consequences, human interest, responsibility, conflict, and morality) (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). This study analyzed 204 articles from these three newspapers published between February 1st, 2015 to February 28th, 2016. This study found that The New York Times attached more importance measured by the length and the page position while The Sun attached the least importance to the coverage of Syrian refugee crisis. The result also demonstrated that the most salient generic frames were human-interest. This study found that three out of five generic frames — economic consequences, responsibility, and conflict — are significantly different across these newspapers. The results further revealed that various events influenced the way frames were presented in these three newspapers.

2017 ABSTRACTS

Media Management, Economics, and Entrepreneurship 2017 Abstracts

Do Similar Brands ‘Like’ Each Other? An Investigation of Homophily Among Brands’ Social Networks on Facebook • Mohammad Abuljadail, Bowling Green State University; Gi Woong Yun, University of Nevada, Reno • The advent of internet and communication technologies enabled marketers of brands to have more ways to communicate with their audience; one of which is connecting with other brands. One of the most popular outlets that allows brands to connect with other brands online is Facebook. Brands on Facebook can establish an official fan page where they can interact with their fans as well as network with other brands’ official Facebook pages through “liking” them. This paper seeks to investigate the “liking” behavior among local and global brands (brand to brand) on Facebook in Saudi Arabia and whether these brands’ “liking” network is based on homophilous relationships. The results showed that both status, (e.g., geography and gender), and value (e.g., family ties and religion) homophilous relationships are in play. However, value homophily was a strong factor in brands’ network in Saudi Arabia for some brands in the absence of status homophily network. Although status homophily in general played a role, geographical proximity was not a strong factor compared to previous reports on social network analysis. The data for this study was obtained from 40 brands marketed in Saudi Arabia. Using Netvizz and Gephi, network structures were mapped to explore the relationships among the brand’s’ Facebook pages.

Predictors of Success in Entering The Journalism And Mass Communication Labor Market • Lee Becker, University of Georgia; Tudor Vlad, University of Georgia; C. Ann Hollifield, University of Georgia • As a talent industry, media industries are highly dependent on the quality of the labor force available to be hired. The entry-level journalism and mass communication labor market has been the subject of analysis over the years, leading to the general conclusion that the characteristics of the students who graduates as well as what they did while at the university help to predict success in the media labor market. The research has been based on limited measures of job market success and small samples, sometimes of students only at one point in time. This study revisits the question of what predicts success in the media labor market with a data set spanning 27 years and with multiple measures of job market success. The findings indicate that what the students bring to the educational environment influences what they do while at the university but also continues to have impact after graduation. The decisions students make at the university also matter. Specifically, women have more success in the media labor market than men, but they get paid less. Minorities have more difficulty in the market than nonminorities, but they get paid better if they find work. Selecting public relations as a major is an advantage, as is completing an internship. These relationships hold even after controlling for other factors, including the performance of the labor market for all persons 20 to 24 years old. The findings suggest that media industries still have critical labor management issues to address.

Facebook and newspapers online: Competing beings or complimentary entities? • Victoria Chen, The University of Texas at Austin; Paromita Pain, The University of Texas at Austin • In an attempt to engage more readers online, newspapers, today are adopting Facebook as a distribution platform. Focused on understanding the value of Facebook as a distribution platform for newspapers, this study shows that news engagement, where news that attracts and holds readers’ attention, on Facebook, increases the brand loyalty of newspapers and Faebook. Brand wise both Facebook and newspapers benefit when news is distributed through Facebook. The study challenges popular beliefs about the influence of Facebook on the business of journalism and shows that Facebook and newspapers are mutually beneficial in helping build the brand loyalty of both. It also shows that tie strength and not homophily encourages the sharing of news on Facebook. While these results may seem optimistic, the study further suggests that leveraging Facebook as a news distribution platform to engage audiences should be treated more cautiously.

Management of Journalism Transparency: Journalists’ perceptions of organizational leaders’ management of an emerging professional norm • Peter Gade; Shugofa Dastgeer; Christina Childs DeWalt; Emmanuel-Lugard Nduka; Seunghyun Kim; Desiree Hill; Kevin Curran • This national survey of 524 journalists explores how journalists perceive transparency, a recent addition to the ethics codes of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio Television Digital News Association, has been managed as a normative innovation, and the impact of management on its adoption in journalism practices. Results indicate journalists perceive transparency as not been well managed, and that how it is managed has a significant effect on the extent it is practiced.

Brand Extension Strategies in the Film Industry: Factors behind Financial Performance of Adaptations and Sequels • Dam Hee Kim • In the film industry, which is notoriously high risk, sequels and adaptations stand out as successful films. Focusing on adaptations and sequels as extended brands, this paper analyzed 2,488 films released from 2010 to 2013 in the U.S. to investigate films’ box office performance. Results suggested that adaptations from comic books and toy lines were successful, and those produced in sequels were even more successful. Industry factors behind brand extension strategies are also examined.

Rapid Organizational Legitimacy: The Case of Mobile News Apps • Allie Kosterich, Rutgers University; Matthew Weber, Rutgers University • This article examines the importance of legitimacy for the performance of new ventures in the emerging space of mobile news apps, which consists of players from both traditional news and technology. This creates a distinct challenge for survival and performance, further compounded by the short timeframe deemed acceptable for apps to succeed. A multi-faceted model of legitimacy is proposed and tested; findings underscore the vital role of communication-based legitimacy in the struggle for rapid success.

Transformation of the Professional Newsroom Workforce: An Analysis of Newsworker Roles and Skill Sets, 2010-2015 • Allie Kosterich, Rutgers University; Matthew Weber, Rutgers University • Transformation continues to impact news media; news organizations are adapting accordingly through shifts in required skills and prescribed roles of newsworkers. This research uses online public databases to trace employment histories of NYC-area newsworkers and explore processes of institutional change related to the professional newsworker. This case study highlights the applicability of quantitative research methods in furthering understanding of professional media dynamics and management challenges related to the emergence of new job roles and skills.

The effects of a TV network strike on channel brand equity • Shin-Hye Kwon, Sungkyunkwan University; Lu Li, Sungkyunkwan University; Byeng Hee Chang, Sungkyunkwan University • This article has attempted to outline the effects of a television channel strike from both the user and the company sides. In the direct effect of strike analysis, viewer ratings(MBC) were higher before the strike than during it. In the indirect effect of strike analysis, strike awareness had a negative influence on brand image for news, entertainment, and information, with especially high influence for information and news. Brand image also had a meaningful influence of brand loyalty mediated by brand satisfaction and awareness of brand quality. Thus, loyalty to MBC decreased as viewers learned about the strike. This study has several implications that a specific channel’s brand equity does not decrease until viewers become aware of a strike at the channel. In addition, we suggest different possible effects of a media strike on the brand image of a channel or network. Third, we infer the changes in viewer ratings to be a direct effect of media strikes. Another theoretical implication of this study is its explanation of how a strike at a specific company strike can affect competing companies using the concept of media deprivation and dependency theory. Lastly, This study’s results offer practical information for media companies’ strike management.

Consumer choice of mobile service bundles: An application of the Technological Readiness Index • Miao Miao; Xi Zhu; Krishna Jayakar • This paper asks whether consumers are rational in choosing the most appropriate mobile service bundle (combining voice, text and data), given their actual levels of usage. It also investigates whether psychological or demographic factors can predict the likelihood that a user will choose optimally. Using the Technological Readiness Index as a theoretical framework, this study finds that customers who are optimistic about technology are more likely to choose the optimum bundle, while those who are insecure about technology are significantly less likely.

Assessing News Media Infrastructure: A State-Level Analysis • Philip Napoli; Ian Dunham; Jessica Mahone, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University • This paper develops and applies an approach to evaluating the robustness of the news media infrastructure of individual states. Drawing upon the Cision Media Database, and employing a detailed filtering methodology, this analysis provides indicators that facilitate comparative analysis across states, and that could be employed to facilitate analyses over time within and across individual states. This assessment approach is derived from multivariate analyses of the key geographic and demographic determinants of the robustness of the news media infrastructure in individual states.

High Brand Loyalty Video Game Play and Achieving Relationships with Virtual Worlds and Its Elements Through Presence • Anthony Palomba • Based on a uses and gratifications and presence conceptual framework, this study considers high brand loyalty video game players’ levels of presence, and evaluates how virtual relationships and perceptions of brand personalities may moderate the relationship between high brand loyalty video game players’ gratifications sought and media consumption experiences. A national survey of 25-year-old to 35-year-old high brand loyalty video game players (N=902)was conducted. Theoretical contributions surrounding the importance of presence during video game play to reach desired gratifications as well as industry implications are discussed.

Content Marketing Strategy on Branded YouTube Channels • Rang Wang, University of Florida; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida • As YouTube becomes a viable competitor in the media ecosystem, this study assessed top brands’ content marketing strategy on branded YouTube channels via content analysis. Using a consumer engagement conceptual framework, the study examined brand strategies addressing the interactivity, attention, emotion, and cognition aspects of engagement and explored the role of firm characteristics, including YouTube capability, financial resources, ownership, and product category, in strategy differentiation. Implications of utilizing YouTube in branding and engaging were provided.

Exploring Cross-Platform Engagement in an Online-Offline Video Market • Lisa-Charlotte Wolter, Hamburg Media School; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida • In an ever-increasing fragmented media environment, the need for comparable metrics across online and offline platforms is intensifying. This study introduces the concept of engagement in an audience setting; discusses its role in today’s video consumption process, and elaborates on the rationale and approach of assessing engagement in online-offline environments. We will present results from a qualitative study of globally conducted in-depth interviews with 73 experts. Research implications and a cross-platform engagement framework are presented.

2017 ABSTRACTS