My Research

Editor.  (In Press).  “Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous.”  New York: IDEBATE Press. This anthology considers the issues surrounding the rise of citizen-produced news content around the world.  Using digital tools ranging from YouTube to SMS messages, ordinary people are collecting and sharing news that might otherwise never get reported.  What does this mean for professional journalism and, ultimately, for democracy?  Chapters include examples from Britain, Burma, Canada, Kenya, Palestine, Iran, South Africa, Taiwan, and the US.

(Co-author Sahar El Zahed). (2011). “I’ll Be Waiting for You Guys”: A YouTube Call to Action in the Egyptian Revolution” (available online).  International Journal of Communication, 5, 1333–1343.

(Co-author Treepon Kirdnark) (in press).  Online maps and minorities: Geotagging Thailand’s Muslims.  New Media & Society.  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 suggest 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.

(Co-author Treepon Kirdnark) (In press). Digitizing Discontent: YouTube and Thailand’s Red Shirt Uprising. In R. Berenger (ed.) Social Media Go to War: Rage, Rebellion and Revolution in the Age of Twitter.   

(Co-author Treepon Kirdnark) (2011).  The Blogosphere in the ‘Land of Smiles’: Citizen Media and Political Conflict in Thailand.  In T. Dumova  & R. Fiordo (eds.) Blogging in the Global Society: Cultural, Political and Geographical Aspects (pp. 19-36).  Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Since the turn of the century, Thailand, dubbed as the “Land of Smiles,” has been racked by internal political instability, turmoil, and violence. This study assesses how an ongoing political crisis in Thailand is deconstructed via blogs. A qualitative content analysis of 45 blogs (838 posts) about Thailand indicates that during a peak period of massive anti-government protests in the spring of 2010, blog posts about the crisis tended to fall under three categories: (a) creating a partisan view of the political conflict, which largely mirrored the dominant discourses already present in mainstream media; (b) presenting a dispassionate account that often provided a synthesis of different viewpoints; or (c) offering improvised accounts of what expatriate-tourist bloggers perceived to be important yet having little context to explain. It is argued that although blogging potentially offers new spaces for representing political perspectives in and about Thailand, these perspectives do not always enhance the public’s understanding of the political processes and in some cases fan the flames of inflammatory rhetoric.

In the Battle(Field): The US Military, Blogging and the Struggle for Authority. (2010) Media, Culture & Society.  U.S. military’s reaction to the rise of social media.  32(5), 863-872. [Summary]

Taming the warblog. (2009). In Stuart Allan & Einar Thorsen (Eds.) Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives (pp.33-42). New York: Peter Lang.  Examines the evolution of the warblog genre since the Iraq war, including its incorporation into corporate media content and the information strategies of the military.  [Comments welcome at the book's website.]

War reporting 2.0. : Social Media and Soldier Content, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Chicago, May 2009.  [Ask for copy]

BBC News in the U.S.: A “Super-Alternative” News Medium Emerges. (Co-author Douglas Bicket.) (2009). Media, Culture & Society, 31(3), 365 – 384. The BBC as a ‘super-alternative’ news/information source in the United States, carrying an aura of credibility that sets it apart from US mainstream news media. It is the BBC’s ‘multifaceted’ nature, its reputation for honesty and integrity, and its independence from US political forces, that allows it to be considered in this way.

Africa on YouTube: Musicians, Tourists, Missionaries, and Aid Workers. (2009). International Communication Gazette, 71(5), 393-407. Examines YouTube videos featuring the countries Ghana and Kenya, finding that ordinary people are creating representations of African countries but that these are much more likely to come from Westerners.  Although Kenya & Ghana are not represented as chaotic and violent as has often been the case in the past, they continue to be stereotyped.

“Window on Your World”: Rise of British News in the US. (Co-author Douglas Bicket). (2008). Journalism Practice. 2(1), 163-178.  This article explores the nature and extent of this new “British invasion,” outlining key institutional, cultural and journalistic factors distinguishing mainstream US media from their UK counterparts. In particular, the British are seen as stepping into a void created by shrinking US international news coverage.appearin entertainment, especially music, videos.

YouTubing Africa: Old Patterns and New Possibilities. (2008). Rhodes Journalism Review, p. 67.  (.pdf version here) Considers images of African countries on YouTube, focusing on how the election violence in Kenya in late 2007 and early 2008 influenced that country’s image.

The “Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation”: US conservatives take aim at the BBC. (Co-authored with Douglas Bicket). (2008). Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 9(2), 123-140.  Conservative blogs,print media and think tanks attack the BBC post 911. Using the  concepts of news repair and boundary maintenance, we find the BBC’s  perceived transgression was that it threatened to reveal the fallacy ofan argument that conservatives had long worked to establish:that the US mainstream news media are liberal and harshly critical of conservatives.

Social Movements and E-mail:Expressions of Online Identity in the Globalization Protests (2007). New Media & Society. 9(2), 258-277. This study focuses on three email lists used in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests.  Each group’s list employed at least one of three processes identified here as key to collective identity.  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.

Mainstream News & Blogger Criticism: Expanding Journalism’s “Interpretive Community.” World Journalism Congress, Singapore, June 2007.  Drawing on the concepts of news repair and boundary maintenance, assesses how US news and professional trade outlets responded to the discovery by bloggers that Adnan Hajj, a Reuters photographer, had manipulated several war photographs of the Israeli war against Lebanon.

Circling the Wagons: Containing the Downing Street Memo Story’s Impact in America. Co-authored with Douglas Bicket ). (2007). Journal of Communication Inquiry. 31(3), 206-22.   Examining the “Downing Street Memo” news coverage,  we expand the concepts of boundary maintenance and news repair beyond the domestic news realm. This study shows that although the rise of the Internet provides substantial new openings for important foreign-originated news stories in the United States, U.S. news media retain some ability to close down stories perceived as threats to their journalistic credibility.

The Rwanda crisis: An Analysis of News Magazine Coverage. (2007). In A. Thompson (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. Toronto: International Development Research Centre/Pluto Press. (You can download the book for free.) The Journal of Modern Africa Studies has a review.

The blogosphere and Africa: Enhancing the continent’s voices or perpetuating the same old marginalization? Union of Democratic Communications, Vancouver, 2007.

Blogging Gulf War II. (2006). Journalism Studies. 7(1), 111-126.  Overall, bloggers worked within existing discourses about the war, primarily employing pro-war and anti-war frames. The blogs also promoted blogging itself as a solution to the problems of reporting on war as some bloggers saw themselves as improvements on mainstream media.

Blogs over Baghdad: A New Genre of War Reporting. (2006). In R. Berenger (ed.) Cybermedia Go to War-Role of Non-traditional Media in the 2003 Iraq War and its Aftermath (pp.294-303). Spokane, WA: Marquette Books

Blogs of War: Weblogs as News. (2005). Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 6(2), 153-172. 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.

Electronic Iraq: A case of transnational alternative media. (2005). Journal of Middle East Media, 1(1), 9-20

Constructing the Kurds in the Turkish Press: A Case Study of Hurriyet Newspaper. (Co-authored with Dilara Sezgin) (2005). Media, Culture and Society, 27(5), 787-798.

“Asterix repelling the invader”: Globalization and nationalism in news coverage of Jose Bove and the McDonalds incident. (2005). Popular Communication, 3(2), 97-115. This article examines Associated Press and Agence France-Presse wire service coverage of Frenchman Jose Bove’s 1999 ransacking of a Millau, France, McDonald’s, as well as his subsequent trial. Both services covered the Bove incidents similarly, downplaying the broader context of corporate capitalism and the global movement to resist it, while elevating Bove to be a key representative of the movement.

The Rise of NGOs as Alternative News Providers part of the panel, Alternative Media Reframing of the Media Mainstream, International Communication Association, New York, May 2005.  Read here.

Blogs as black market journalism: A new paradigm for news. (2004, March). Berglund Center for Internet Studies.  Available online.

The NGO news sphere, part of the panel, Infos sans Frontières: Reframing Alternative Media. Global Fusion, St. Louis, 2004.  Read here.

Social movements and the ‘Net: Activist journalism goes digital. (2003). In K. Kawamoto (Ed.) Views from the horizon: Perspectives on digital journalism (pp. 113-122). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Puppets or press conferences: NGOs’ vs. Street Groups’ communication in the Battle of Seattle. (2003). Javnost/The Public, 10(1), 1-16. Available online. This article analyzes the types of communication tactics and frames employed by various groups leading up to and during the massive resistance to the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999. Organized institutions such as Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) tended to adopt a reformist frame, using professional communication routines and bureaucratic language designed in part to appeal to mainstream news media. Decentralized “street movement” groups often employed a radical frame and and grass-roots, participatory communication tactics, which drew in part on a post-modern culture jamming ethos that sought to disrupt and resist the very existence of the WTO.

“Like feeding time at the zoo”: Analysis of U.S. newsmagazine coverage of the Iraqi Kurds. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Kansas City, July-August, 2003.

The Battle in Seattle: How Nongovernmental Organizations used websites in their challenge to the WTO. (2002). In Eytan Gilboa (Ed.) Media and conflict: Framing issues, making policy and shaping opinions (pp. 25-43). Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers.

Visions of the African press in colonial Kenya: What the nationalists imagined. International Communication Association, San Diego, May 2003.

Journalism training as ritual. National Communication Association, New Orleans, November 2002.

Repertoires of resistance: Communication tactics of the reformists and radicals in the Battle of Seattle. National Communication Association, New Orleans, November 2002.

The Battle in Seattle: Constructing movement identities. International Association for Media and Communication Research, Barcelona, July 2002.

KFC into India: A case study of resistance to globalization discourse. (2000). In Robin Andersen and Lance Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 291-309). Oxford: Oxford University Press. See International Journal on Media Management 11/01 for review.

The Westernizer, the Developer and the Azmari: Ethiopian journalists’ discourses. International Communication Association, Acapulco, June 2000. View here.  Top student paper, Development Communication Division.

Turning training into exchanging: Recommendations for Western-funded journalism programs. (1999). Journal of Development Communication, 10(2), 54-64

“More Barney than Buddhist”: How the media framed the story of the little lama. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, New Orleans, August 1999.

Turning training into exchanging: Recommendations for Western-funded journalism programs. International Communication Association, San Francisco, May 1999.

Masiye Pambili: An African township magazine across four decades. International Communication Association, San Francisco, May 1999.

A “pernicious new strain of the old Nazi virus” and an “orgy of tribal slaughter”: A comparison of U.S. news magazine coverage of the crises in Bosnia and Rwanda. (1997). Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, 59(6), 121-134.  Compares US news magazine coverage of conflict occurring in Bosnia and Rwanda. Bosnia’s violence was characterized as an aberration for Europeans, while Rwanda’s violence was presented as typical of Africans.

The Rwanda Crisis: An analysis of news magazine coverage. (1997). Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, 59(2), 411-428.

New models for teaching assistants: The Research Mentor Program. Co-authors Hilary Karasz and Paula Reynolds. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Chicago, August 1997. Best student paper, best overall paper, Small Groups Division.

A “pernicious new strain of the old Nazi virus” and an “orgy of tribal slaughter”: A comparison of U.S. news magazine coverage of the crises in Bosnia and Rwanda. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Chicago, August 1997. Markham Award for best student paper, International Communication Division.

KFC into India: A case study of resistance to globalization discourse. International Communication Association, Montreal, May 1997.

Nigerian journalists, 1945-1966: “Nationalist campaigners,” “makeshifts,” or “professionals?” Western Journalism Historians, Berkeley, February 1997.