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This essay considers how social actors in news have come to shape the contours of news and journalism and what these changes may suggest for other industries. It looks more specifically at the question of who does journalism and news and what that may signal for power dependencies, status, and norms formation. It examines how authors who contributed
to this thematic issue define who gets to decide what is news and journalism, what forms of power are exerted amongst groups, who gets to claim status, and how norms and epistemologies are formed. Ultimately, this essay illustrates how conformity to groups and organizations varies with the investments that these social actors have to core and more peripheral journalism and media groups.

The ongoing refugee crisis presents a plethora of challenges and requires systematic contributions from public and private entities - e.g., governments, non-governmental organizations, community organizations and businesses. Relative to the other three, (explicit) business efforts toward refugee (economic) integration are yet sporadic, limited to a few large organizations. While acknowledging that integration encompasses multiple spheres and is complicated by national and local variations across EU member states, this conceptual article treats business support of refugee (economic) integration as a manifestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and contends that such efforts may enhance employee-organizational identification. Drawing on scholarship from CSR and organization - employee identification, we develop a conceptual model including propositions about mediating and moderating mechanisms of the relationship among refugee integration, CSR communication and employee-organizational identification. Our study offers a conceptual bridge between what is known about the importance, barriers and enablers of refugee labor market integration with the lesser-known organizational, specifically employee, perspectives on the issue. Leveraging on this conceptual framework, further research may focus on testing the relationship empirically through collecting field data from business firms which have made an explicit claim on refugee support.

Disinformation emphasizing radical populist narratives may threaten democratic values. Although extant literature has pointed to a strong affinity between disinformation and the populist radical right, we know little about the effects of such deceptive information. Against this backdrop, this article relies on an experiment in the Netherlands (N = 456) in which participants were exposed to radical right-wing populist disinformation versus decontextualized malinformation. Mimicking the participatory logic of disinformation campaigns in the digital society, we also varied the source of the message (a neutral news message versus a social media post of an ordinary citizen). Main findings indicate that exposure to radical right-wing populist messages can prime support for radical-right-wing issue positions, but ordinary citizen sources do not amplify disinformation's effects. Our findings indicate that malign populist messages may have a delegitimizing impact on democracy, irrespective of how they are presented.

Pro- and anti-vaccination users use social media outlets, such as Twitter, to join conversations about vaccines, disseminate information or misinformation about immunization, and advocate in favour or against vaccinations. These users not only share textual content, but also images to emphasise their messages and influence their audiences. Though previous studies investigated the content of vaccine images, there is little research on how these visuals are distributed in digital environments. Therefore, this study explored how images related to vaccination are shared on Twitter to gain insight into the communities and networks formed around their dissemination. Moreover, this research also investigated who influences the distribution of vaccine images, and could be potential gatekeepers of vaccination information. We conducted a social network analysis on samples of tweets with images collected in June, September and October 2016. In each dataset, pro- and anti-vaccination users formed two polarised networks that hardly interacted with each other, and disseminated images among their members differently. The anti-vaccination users frequently retweeted each other, strengthening their relationships, making the information redundant within their community, and confirming their beliefs against immunisation. The pro-vaccine users, instead, formed a fragmented network, with loose but strategic connections that facilitated networking and the distribution of new vaccine information. Moreover, while the pro-vaccine gatekeepers were non-governmental organisations or health professionals, the anti-vaccine ones were activists and/or parents. Activists and parents could potentially be considered as alternative but trustworthy sources of information enabling them to disseminate misinformation about vaccinations.

This study examines and evaluates the representation of ethnocultural diversity in non-fiction TV programmes broadcasted by the Flemish (Belgian Dutch-speaking) public service broadcaster VRT in the 2016-2017 TV season. A qualitative content analysis of a sample comprising 36 clips and episodes of 14 non-fiction programmes was supplemented by four focus group interviews with a total of 12 participants belonging to different ethnocultural minorities. The findings suggest that despite several measures undertaken by the VRT, the representation of ethnocultural minorities is still unbalanced and biased in at least three ways: first, in presenting minorities as homogeneous groups rather than highlighting intragroup differences; second, in "typecasting" people with a migration background thematically, i.e., for items on topics and issues related to their ethnocultural identity; and, third, in portraying and approaching minorities from a dominant group perspective. The article ends with the recommendation for public service media to further improve ethnocultural diversity in the workforce and to encourage their journalists and TV producers to reconsider their 'professional pragmatics' in order to increase their ethnocultural sensitivity and better manage the representation of super-diversity in their programmes.

In this article, I discuss camera drones as mobile media that help access, collect, and shape physical, digital, and social spaces. As such, consumer drones afford "communication on the fly" in their medium-specific configuration of aerial navigation, visual production, and networked communication. Drawing on in-depth interviews with drone users and auto-ethnographic drone practices, I first highlight what physical-material conditions the flying camera mediates. An analysis of what digital-intangible formations the sensor medium collects and creates follows, before I turn to the sociospatial relations the buzzing mobile interface can establish and disrupt. I show how these conditions of communication on the fly shape user practices of place-sensing and place-making. Through the lenses of mobile communication research, media ecology, and mobilities studies, I ultimately illuminate how the ambiguous aerial system helps expand our thinking of and with notions of communication on the move.

Earlier research has shown that public opinion and policy lines on the topic of immigrant integration are interrelated. This article investigates a sample of 24 countries for which data are available in the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), the World Values Survey (WVS), as well as in the Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS). To our knowledge, this is the first time that these data are connected to one another to study journalists' views on their role to promote tolerance and cultural diversity in societies with diverging immigration policies. The WJS presents an analysis of the role conceptions of professional journalists throughout the world, including a variable measuring the extent to which journalists conceive promoting tolerance and cultural diversity as one of their tasks. Our findings show that journalists (as measured in the WJS) mostly tend to promote tolerance and cultural diversity in countries with more restrictive immigration policies (measured by MIPEX) and less emancipative values (measured by the WVS) Promoting tolerance and cultural diversity is associated with a so-called interventionist approach in journalism culture. Furthermore, we used cluster analyses to attribute the countries under study to meaningful, separate groups. More precisely, we discriminate four clusters of the press among the 24 countries under investigation.

Many journalism stakeholders have begun looking to philanthropic foundations to help newsrooms find economic sustainability. The rapidly expanding role of foundations as a revenue source for news publishers raises an important question: How do foundations exercise their influence over the newsrooms they fund? Using the hierarchy of influence model, this study utilizes more than 40 interviews with journalists at digitally native nonprofit news organizations and employees from foundations that fund nonprofit journalism to better understand the impact of foundation funding on journalistic practice. Drawing on previous scholarship exploring extra-media influence on the news industry, we argue that the impact of foundations on journalism parallels that of advertisers throughout the 20th century - with one important distinction: Journalism practitioners and researchers have long forbidden the influence from advertisers on editorial decisions, seeing the blurring of the two as inherently unethical. Outside funding from foundations, on the other hand, is often premised on editorial influence, complicating efforts by journalists to maintain the firewall between news revenue and production.

Applying a dual-process rationale, this study explored the cognitive and affective mechanisms involved in the processing of hedonic versus eudaimonic film clips and their putatively distinct inspirational effects. The two types of narratives were operationalized in terms of complete and incomplete goal satisfaction in the film endings. Participants either watched the final boxing match from Rocky, where the protagonist loses the fight, but achieves self-mastery and finds love (eudaimonic narrative) or from Rocky II, where he wins against his opponent (hedonic narrative). A combination of continuous measures of how pleasant participants felt (slider ratings) and psychophysiological measures (heart rate, galvanic skin response [GSR], pulse volume amplitude [PVA]) indicating cognitive load and arousal was used to track the audience responses while watching a compilation of the same intro and the different fight versions. Results revealed that arousal was more strongly associated with participants' affective scores during the hedonic (winning) version than during the eudaimonic (losing) one. Furthermore, participants experience more positive affect and arousal after watching the protagonist win the match compared to those that watched him lose. Lastly, participants in the eudaimonic condition were more likely to be inspired to exercise afterward. Implications of our results are discussed.

Using behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg's conceptual framework on the role computer technology plays for users as a starting point, this article argues that persuasion through digital games can be approached from three different perspectives: digital games as media for persuasion, digital games as tools for persuasion and digital games as social actors for persuasion. In this article, I use five cancer gaming cases to illustrate how these three different persuasive roles can be used to accomplish different persuasive goals. In this respect, I explain how each of these persuasive roles digital games can play in the process of persuasion can serve to support cancer patients to face three different challenges: (1) lack of information about the treatment or the disease itself, (2) lack of motivation to start or continue with the treatment, and (3) difficulties in coping with the treatment or the disease. The analysis of these games is theoretical in nature and is done to illustrate my arguments. The categorization proposed in this article can be used as an analytical approach for the study of persuasive gaming strategies.

Journalists are currently facing a multitude of threats. Commonly, these are considered in terms of harassment and bodily harms such as incarceration and murder of journalists. In the Bangladeshi case we argue that the parameters for evaluating what constitutes safety for journalists go beyond conventional wisdom. On the basis of in-depth interviews of 23 Bangladeshi journalists, we argue that the concept of journalists' safety has three intertwined dimensions. First, journalists' safety incorporates avoiding bodily harm (imprisonment, enforced disappearance, and so forth), and harassment, as well as economic and career threats. Second, in order to remain safe, journalists undertake various tactics including compromising the objectivity of news in a regime where security apparatus and pro-government journalists work in tandem to surveil and intimidate non-partisan journalists. Third, the tactics used by journalists decrease public faith in the media and the media can no longer play a watchdog role. We argue that one needs to reconceptualize the safety of journalists within these three intertwined dimensions.

In Sweden, the system of press subsidies was expanded in 2019 to give special support for "weakly covered areas." This new support has had positive effects, but changes in the system also introduced new demands on the content concerning democratic values etc. If state support should be used for saving local journalism, how far can state influence on the content be acceptable for independent local media? The commentary describes the system of support and discusses this crucial question.

In this article we present a research project that experimentally develops a local news platform based on empirical research (interviews, group discussions, a survey) and a co-creation approach. What is presented here is not a typical empirical social science research study but the culmination of an entire approach that is oriented toward software development. This article's aim is to present the project's conceptual ideas, its interdisciplinary character, its research-based development approach and the concept for a local news platform that grew out of our preliminary work. At each level we focus on the relationality which arises in the figurations of the actors involved and their various perspectives. First, we illustrate how relationality already shaped the objective of our project and how this results in its interdisciplinary structure and research design. We then discuss this idea with reference to our empirical findings, that is, the paradox of the local public sphere: While all the actors we interviewed - those who (professionally) produce content and those who use it - have a high appreciation for the idea of a local public sphere, the mediated connection to this sphere is diminishing at the same time. We understand this as the real challenge for local journalism and the local public sphere at large, and not just for individual media organizations. This is also the reason why we argue for a fundamentally relational approach: from a theoretical point of view, it can be used to grasp the crisis of the local public; from a practical point of view, relationality represents the core characteristic of the platform in development. On this basis, we will then show how the concept of the experimental local news platform evolved through the use of a prototype as a relational boundary object. This development lead to the conceptualization of the platform molo.news which itself is characterized by a fourfold relationality. Our concluding argument is that approaching relationality in a more rigorous way could be the key to exploring the future of local journalism.