Post-Sensationalism: Catastrophism and Fight Paradigm in Romanian On-Line Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18662/po/12.4/358Keywords:
sensationalism, online media, catastrophism, fight paradigm, Romanian mediaAbstract
In traditional journalism, sensationalism was a characteristic of tabloid press. The main instruments used in sensationalistic headlines were bombastic epithets (awesome, amazing, greatest etc), and exaggerations used to increase the impact by curiosity. In the last decade, transformation with society and online media consumption behaviour have triggered a change of paradigm: we believe that we are facing a post-sensationalism media narrative, defined by catastrophism and the fight paradigm. In the context of a huge news feed overloaded with information, in the purpose of increasing the number of views of online media, the journalistic discourse has transformed radically and switched from informative to a more aggressive approach. The study shows that in Romania, the pursuit for clicks has generated a new discursive paradigm, a sort of post-sensationalism era, which we referred to as catastrophism and fight paradigm. This conclusion is based on quantitative and qualitative research that analysed Romanian online press headlines and content in approximately the same period of time both in 2018 and 2019. The research followed the frequency and context of usage of a few hashtags and keywords connected with our main concepts of concern: sensationalism, catastrophism, fight paradigm. In other words, we selected a few words that are, in our opinion, the most representative for the aforementioned concepts, and, with the use of professional instruments of press monitoring, we analysed their frequency and dynamics.
References
Altheide, D., & Michalowski, R. S. (1999). Fear in the News: A Discourse of Control. The Sociological Quarterly, 40(3), 475-503. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1999.tb01730.x
Bader, S. & Sîrb, C. (2019). Romanian Online Media Heading Towards a Fight Paradigm. A Qualitative Analysis. Professional Communication and Translation Studies, 12, 7-17. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=820129
Bastos, M. T. (2016, June 24). Digital Journalism and Tabloid Journalism. Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, Forthcoming. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2798428
Blom, J. N., & Hansen, K. R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 76, 87-100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.010
Bazaco, A., Redondo, M., & Sánchez-Garcia, P. (2019). Clickbait as a strategy of viral journalism: conceptualisation and methods. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 74, 94-115. http://www.revistalatinacs.org/074paper/1323/RLCS-paper1323en.pdf
Carston, R. (2015). Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: A Relevance Theory perspective. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 22(1), 153-180. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.232.8854&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Carlson, M. (2018). Confronting measurable journalism. Digital Journalism, 6(4), 406-417. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1445003
Cherubini, F., & Nielsen, R. K. (2016). Editorial Analytics: How News Media Are Developing and Using Audience Data and Metric. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/research/files/Editorial%2520analytics%2520-%2520how%2520news%2520media%2520are%2520developing%2520and%2520using%2520audience%2520data%2520and%2520metrics.pdf
Chen, Y., Conroy, N., & Rubin, V. (2015). Misleading Online Content: Recognizing Clickbait as “False News”. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection, 15-19. https://doi.org/10.1145/2823465.2823467
Christin, A. (2018). Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France. American Journal of Sociology, 123(5), 1382-1415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/696137
Freedman, D. (2015). Paradigms of media power. Communication, Culture & Critique, 8(2), 273–289. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12081.
Ferrer-Conill, R., Karlsson, M., Haim, M., Kammer, A., Elgesem, D., & Sjøvaag, H. (2021). Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts. New Media & Society, 1-24.. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211009246
Garfield, B. (2009). The Chaos Scenario. Stielstra Publishing.
Hanusch, F. (2017). Web analytics and the functional differentiation of journalism cultures: individual, organizational and platform-specific influences on newswork. Information, Communication & Society, 20(10), 1571-1586. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1241294
Hermida, A. (2012). Social Journalism: Exploring How Social Media is Shaping Journalism. In E. Siapera & A. Veglis (Eds.), The Handbook of Global Online Journalism (pp. 309-328). Wiley-Blackwell
Johansson, S. (2020). Tabloid Journalism and Tabloidization. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Communication, 28, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.877.
Magin, M. (2019). Attention, please! Structural influences on tabloidization of campaign coverage in German and Austrian elite newspapers (1949–2009). Journalism, 20(12), 1704-1724. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1464884917707843
Molek-Kozakowska, K. (2013). Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines. Discourse & Communication, 7(2), 173-197. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1750481312471668
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., Levy, D., Rasmus, K N. (2018). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/digital-news-report-2018.pdf
Parc, C. (2019). How does fear hit the headlines?. Lexicon, Sensations, Perceptions and Emotions, 13, 1-53. https://doi.org/10.4000/lexis.2873
Rubin, L., Chen, Y., & Conroy, N. (2017). Deception detection for news: three types of fakes. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083
Walton, D. (2007). Media Argumentation. Dialectic, Persuasion, and Rhetoric. Cambridge University Press.
Zamith, R., Belair-Gagnon, V., Lewis, S. C. (2019). Constructing audience quantification: social influences and the development of norms about audience analytics and metrics. New Media & Society, 22(10), 1763-1784. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819881735
ZeList Monitor. https://www.zelist.ro/
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 The Authors & LUMEN Publishing House
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant this journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work, with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as an earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Postmodern Openings Journal has an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND
