Paromita Pain

Normalizing Online Comments

This study sought to understand the role of online comments—particularly uncivil ones—in journalists’ routines. In-depth interviews with 34 journalists reveal they are becoming more comfortable with online comments and often engage with commenters to foster deliberative discussions or quell incivility. However, our data also suggest some journalists feel discomfort with engaging in this way for fear it breaches the journalistic norm of objectivity. Overall, findings suggest journalists are not ceding their gatekeeping role to the public through comments, but rather re-asserting it through moderating objectionable comments and engaging. In addition, findings suggest journalists are participating in “reciprocal journalism” by fostering mutually beneficial connections with the audience.

Revisiting CGNet Swara and its impact in rural India

CGNet Swara is a voice-based platform for citizen journalism, launched in rural India in 2010. Since then, CGNet Swara has logged over 575,000 phone calls, over 6,900 published stories, and 287 reports of specific problems that were solved via the system. In this paper, we characterize the ongoing impact of CGNet Swara using a mixed-methods approach that includes 70 interviews with contributors, listeners, moderators, journalists, officials, and other actors. Our analysis also draws on the content of published posts, two focus groups, and a 9-day field immersion. Our results highlight personal narratives of the transformative benefits CGNet Swara has brought to rural communities. While the resolution of grievances is the most visible impact, we also uncover a diverse portfolio of other impacts connected to contributing and listening to the platform, as well as opportunities to further enhance impact. Our work contributes to the dialogue surrounding the impact of ICTD projects, especially those that span multiple years.

ICT-Enabled Grievance Redressal in Central India: A Comparative Analysis

Helping citizens to resolve grievances is an important part of many e-governance initiatives. In this paper, we examine two contemporary initiatives that use ICTs to help citizens resolve grievances in central India. One system is a state-run call center (the CM Helpline), while the other is an independent citizen journalism service (CGNet Swara). Despite similarities in their high-level goals, approach, and geographies served, the systems have key differences in their use of technology, their level of transparency, and their relationship to government. Using qualitative interviews, field immersions, and other data, we analyze how these differences impact the experiences of citizens, officials, and the intermediaries between them. We synthesize our observations into a set of recommendations for the design of future ICT-enabled grievance redressal systems.

‘You really have to have a thick skin’: A cross-cultural perspective on how online harassment influences female journalists:

In-depth interviews with 75 female journalists who work or have worked in Germany, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America reveal that they face rampant online gendered harassment that influences how they do their jobs. Many of the women report that if they aim to engage with their audience online – which is a job requirement for many of them – they frequently face sexist comments that criticize, attack, marginalize, stereotype, or threaten them based on their gender or sexuality. Often, criticism of their work is framed as misogynistic attacks and, sometimes, even involves sexual violence. The journalists have developed a variety of strategies for dealing with the abuse, including limiting what they post online, changing what stories they report on, and using technological tools to prevent people from posting offensive words on the journalists’ public social media pages. Results show that this harassment disrupts the routinized practice of reciprocal journalism because it limits how much these women can interact with the audience in mutually beneficial ways without being attacked or undermined sexually. While experiences of harassment were consistent across the countries studied, cultural differences were evident in how much the journalists were expected to engage online. Results are discussed in relation to the hierarchy of influences model that aims to explain how multiple forces influence media content.

Mastering the Mug Shot

This project uses a case study of an elected official’s booking mug shot to examine the way political actors engage in embodied performance to maintain their image in visual media. Mug shots are images that are ostensibly equalizing and represent a long-standing link between law enforcement, journalism and visual culture. Released through the “gates” of law enforcement, they are imbued with a connotation of guilt even though they are created prior to a person’s conviction. Using mixed methods, including textual analysis, field observations and interviews, this case study examined the way journalists covered the mugshot booking of former Texas Governor Rick Perry. The event was widely proclaimed a victory rather than a ritual of shame. The study suggests that the governor and his staff engaged in embodied gatekeeping by orchestrating the events leading up to his booking photo which impeded journalists in their effort to independently control their narratives.

Learning by Doing: Teaching Multimedia Journalism through Coverage of the 50th Anniversary of "Freedom Summer".

In-depth qualitative interviews with participants of a high school journalism workshop reveal that immersing students in coverage of a historically important news event enhances learning of multimedia journalism. Study explores how using a team-based approach to coverage of the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, a key event in Mississippi’s civil rights history, bolsters students’ ability to learn to tell stories using text, photos, video, social media, radio, and blogs. Ramifications for multimedia education are proposed.In-depth qualitative interviews with participants of a high school journalism workshop reveal that immersing students in coverage of a historically important news event enhances learning of multimedia journalism. Study explores how using a team-based approach to coverage of the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, a key event in Mississippi’s civil rights history, bolsters students’ ability to learn to tell stories using text, photos, video, social media, radio, and blogs. Ramifications for multimedia education are proposed.

#NastyWomen: Reclaiming the Twitterverse from Misogyny

Using the lens of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, this chapter explored how Twitter is both a dangerous space for women and a digital sphere that women have reclaimed from rampant misogyny. We qualitatively analyzed 1,390 tweets that used the hashtags #NastyWomen or #NastyWoman that were posted after President Donald Trump, a presidential candidate at the time, called his opponent Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during the final debate of the campaign. Using a discourse analysis of the tweets that use these hashtags, we probed how hashtags are used to shame and silence women but are also a potent tool of women’s digital empowerment. We found that women, particularly women of color, used these hashtags to symbolically reroute the conversation about “nasty women” into something productive, rather than dwell on the hateful words. Thus, the hashtags drew women together into intimate publics, where they felt emboldened being political together. As a result, these hashtags enabled women who supported Clinton to challenge the patriarchy in the collective digital space of Twitter. We believe these hashtags about Clinton offer a microcosm of the types of experiences average women have online, as they also face digital misogyny and have the power to reclaim this sphere through the use of hashtag feminism.

“Hashtag Feminism”: Activism or Slacktivism?

Authors Chen, Pain, and Barner address hashtag feminism and its use of hashtags across a variety of digital platforms with an aim toward theorizing about who defines feminism in the digital sphere and how this relates to future directions for feminist media research and theory. They examine how the hashtag provides a potent tool to give voice to the marginalized and silenced, and thus contributes to social media’s role in fomenting social justice, political resistance, and empowerment for women. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept, they argue that the hashtag offers discursive power to galvanize the voiceless into “intimate publics” that produce a coherently robust form of activism online, particularly among those left out of the traditional mainstream media discourse. Yet, at the same time, the agency wrought by the hashtag may offer a constrained empowerment that reinforces hegemonic norms, perpetuates digital subjugation of women, and reifies damaging narratives of victimhood and cultural imperialism.

Educate. Empower. Revolt

This analysis examines how citizen journalism in two very resource-poor areas in India is mobilizing communities and sparking movements demanding change. The Video Volunteers and CGNET Swara are two citizen journalism organizations that work in Central India, in areas whose human and development indexes are among the lowest in the country. Citizen journalism has been studied both as a consequence and as an instigator of social revolution. The Arab Spring movement and the case of Mohamed Bouazizi in the 2010 Tunisian uprisings are prominent recent examples. But citizen journalism in these and similar cases usually focus on the framing of martyr narratives where individuals and their protests or reactions against human rights atrocities make them “a symbol of the struggle for justice, dignity and freedom.” Through a content analysis of 400 news stories posted in the year 2015–2016 and qualitative interviews with 30 participants and a focus group of 15 participants, this study analyses how the Video Volunteers and CGNET Swara train citizens to produce news, the kinds of frame that are used to mobilize audiences, and encourage them to articulate outrage against the many human rights atrocities that occur in these areas. Findings show that citizen journalism succeeds because of the culturally resonant frames used and effective frame alignment that resonate with their main audiences and producers. The news produced and disseminated activates connective structures to facilitate collective action among audiences and communities who earlier had little means or recourse to address such issues. This collective action encourages participants to gather offline to fight for their demands and positively transform their communities.

This Reporter is so Ugly, How can She Appear on TV?: Negotiating gender online and offline in Taiwanese media

In Taiwan, 25 professional female journalists were interviewed, to understand how they negotiate gender and professional identities online and offline through the lens of Shoemaker and Reese’s media routines and the socialization theory as articulated by Rodgers and Thorson. The findings suggest that while Taiwanese women journalists found that gender in some aspects of reporting is an asset, gendered harassment online and incivility in the digital sphere are important issues with which they have to contend. Comments on stories and professional identities online primarily focused on their looks and physical attributes. They were openly uncivil and abusive. Such incivility affected normal journalistic routines and prevented them from being impartial conveyors of information. Not just online abuse but cultural norms that expect women to be subservient deterred them from promoting stories on personal social media and negatively affected their coverage of controversial issues. In some cases, though gender provided certain advantages, the participants were aware that these gains were limited and ultimately patriarchal in nature. Although the study’s primary focus is on Taiwan, the analysis is applicable beyond national boundaries.