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Featured researches published by Melissa Wall.


Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism | 2005

‘Blogs of war’ Weblogs as news

Melissa Wall

This article examines current events weblogs or blogs that were particularly active during the second US war with Iraq, in the spring of 2003. Analysis suggests that these blogs are a new genre of journalism that emphasizes personalization, audience participation in content creation and story forms that are fragmented and interdependent with other websites. These characteristics suggest a shift away from traditional journalism’s modern approach toward a new form of journalism infused with postmodern sensibilities.


New Media & Society | 2007

Social movements and email: expressions of online identity in the globalization protests

Melissa Wall

This study focuses on three email lists — one used by a professional organization (Friends of the Earth) and two by grass roots, street-level participants (Direct Action Network and Peoples Global Action) — in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests. Each list was examined in terms of how it contributed to the expression of collective identities online. Each groups list employed at least one of three processes identified here as key to collective identity: the Friends of the Earth list emphasized cognitive framing of the event; Direct Action Network focused on emotional investments among list members; and Peoples Global Action stressed setting boundaries among movement participants.Yet overall, none of the lists was entirely successful as a vehicle for expressing movement identities, suggesting that while the internet may facilitate certain organizational activities of social movements, it appears to have less impact on their symbolic ones.


Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism | 2015

Embedding content from Syrian citizen journalists: The rise of the collaborative news clip

Melissa Wall; Sahar el Zahed

The ways the New York Times has incorporated citizen videos from the Syrian conflict into its live blog, The Lede, is explored in this article. The analysis reveals the creation of a new journalistic element – the Collaborative News Clip – in which ordinary people are now producing immersive, emotional, multidimensional self-created videos that news outlets cooperatively incorporate into online content. The Collaborative News Clip is created through joint framing and shared gatekeeping by a tier of citizen-activists working with a professional news organization.


International Communication Gazette | 1997

The Rwanda Crisis An Analysis of News Magazine Coverage

Melissa Wall

American media traditionally have created one-dimensional portraits of intracountry conflict in Africa. Worldwide changes since the end of the Cold War have given many media observers hope that African violence might be covered more insightfully. To see whether this was true, news magazine coverage of the 1994 Rwanda crisis was analyzed. Findings suggest that some patterns such as viewing African events through an East-West frame have disappeared, but other types of simplification prevail.


New Media & Society | 2017

Syrian refugees and information precarity

Melissa Wall; Madeline Otis Campbell; Dana M. Janbek

This study employed focus groups to examine the ways Syrian refugees living in a large refugee camp in Jordan are using cell phones to cope with information precarity, a condition of information instability and insecurity that may result in heightened exposure to violence. These refugees are found to experience information precarity in terms of technological and social access to relevant information; the prevalence of irrelevant, sometimes dangerous information; inability to control their own images; surveillance by the Syrian state; and disrupted social support.


International Communication Gazette | 2009

Africa on YouTube: Musicians, Tourists, Missionaries and Aid Workers

Melissa Wall

/ YouTube videos featuring the countries Ghana and Kenya were assessed, finding that this citizen media tool is allowing ordinary people to construct representations of African countries but that these are much more likely to come from westerners. Although these African countries are not represented as chaotic and violent as has often been the case in the past, they continue to be stereotyped. Africans unaccompanied by westerners are most likely to appear in entertainment, especially music, videos.


Digital journalism | 2015

Syrian Citizen Journalism

Melissa Wall; Sahar el Zahed

The Syrian revolution has brought about the creation of a pop-up news ecology, an entirely new, oppositional news system fueled by citizen activists’ use of social media to report on the conflict. Drawing on Castell’s Network Society, this essay assesses the ways such a system came into being, finding a dearth of professional journalism, rapidity of its formation, and assistance by external “connectors” as key factors. This case study provides a potential model for the ways pop-up news ecologies may form in other authoritarian countries.


New Media & Society | 2012

Online maps and minorities: Geotagging Thailand’s Muslims

Melissa Wall; Treepon Kirdnark

This article examines whether participatory media such as Flickr, with its seemingly unfettered tools for mapping citizen-created photographs, offers a means for a more comprehensive representation of minorities in a non-Western country. Assessment of geotags – markers designating longitude and latitude on an online map – associated with photographs of Thailand’s Muslims suggests that by replicating common stereotypes, user-generated content may be limiting rather than opening up discourses about minorities and that citizen participation via new media tools is more constrained and less free than commonly believed.


International Communication Gazette | 1997

A `Pernicious New Strain of the Old Nazivirus' and an `Orgy of Tribal Slaughter' A Comparison of US News Magazine Coverage of the Crises in Bosnia and Rwanda

Melissa Wall

This study compares US news magazine coverage of conflict occurring in Bosnia and Rwanda. Bosnias violence was characterized as an aberration for Europeans, while Rwandas violence was presented as typical of Africans. Coverage suggests that in Bosnia, participants made a logical, albeit evil, decision to commit violence in an attempt to seek revenge for past grievances. In contrast, Rwandas violence is depicted as having no logical explanation and is portrayed as irrational and so alien from Western understanding as to defy explanation.


Journalism Practice | 2015

Change the Space, Change the Practice?

Melissa Wall

This paper explores the results of the introduction of the Pop-Up Newsroom, a virtual, temporary citizen journalism-style mobile news operation, to university student journalists. The results revealed two categories of response: those who embraced change and began to develop networked journalism identities; and those who advocated for the traditional brick-and-mortar newsroom and accompanying practices as preserving professional journalism identities.

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Sahar el Zahed

University of California

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