The CIR report on disclosure of information: a critique

The publication of the CIR's long-awaited report on disclosure of information seems to have been greeted with an embarrassing silence. Little comment has been heard from the news media, Parliament, trade unions or employers' associations. This may reflect concern with more pressing issues in industrial relations, such as, for example, the search for a prices and incomes policy, but the nature of the report itself may also explain why it created scarcely a ripple in public consciousness. Far from being a clear guide to decision and action, it is merely a collection of very general recommendations which will create little controversy because they are so unexceptional.     

Representations of Australia in South Korean online news: a qualitative and quantitative approach utilizing Leximancer and Korean keywords in context

This article outlines original empirical research using a quantitative computer-assisted big data approach to survey and evaluate the representation of Australia in popular South Korean online news media sources. This is an exploratory content analysis of news reporting (in Korean and English) on Australia in key Korean digital news media providers and distributors over a six-month-period during which certain key events occurred that drew Korean news media attention to Australia. The research aims to address the fundamental question: what forms and patterns of representation of Australia are present in South Korean online news media? It is designed in large part to understand how Australia is present as a theme in Korean online news, and how this theme is contextualized by associated topics, such as trade, security, or tourism. The quantitative analysis is augmented using a qualitative method: a series of key informant interviews conducted with editors and journalists responsible for the production and prioritization of news. Further, it is interpreted by locating the research in the context of the Australia-South Korea relationship. We summarize the complexities that arise when analyzing large amounts of textual content, especially from two very different languages, discuss the opportunities that arise from mixed methods—by combining big data (breadth) with contextual analysis (depth) and offer suggestions for aspiring researchers.     

媒体报道、会计稳健性与股价崩盘风险

新闻媒体的信息传播和监督治理功能在减少信息不对称、缓解管理者囤积坏消息等方面发挥着重要作用。以沪深A股上市公司2012—2018年非平衡面板数据为样本,通过OLS回归分析上市公司股价崩盘风险是否会受到媒体报道及会计稳健性的影响。实证结果表明,媒体报道和会计稳健性与股价崩盘风险呈显著负相关关系,会计稳健性可以强化媒体报道对股价崩盘风险的影响。进一步分析发现,媒体报道与股价崩盘风险之间的负相关主要集中在正面新闻报道较多的公司和诉讼或声誉风险较高的公司。     

America's worst charities: The effect of bad press on philanthropic giving behavior

Negative media stories about nonprofits can potentially lead to decreased financial donations. We used agenda setting theory to study donors' perceptions of what could arguably be called one of the most negative nonprofit media stories in recent times: the 2013 Tampa Bay Times report titled “America's worst charities.” This news story identified and ranked America's 50 worst charities based on solicitation (i.e., fundraising) costs and was investigated further by CNN. We surveyed 655 individuals in August 2016 and found that approximately 3 years since the story had aired, 278 (42.4%) of the sample still remembered the news story, and the majority of them reported that it negatively influenced their thinking (63%) and philanthropic donation behavior (62%). These findings have implications for nonprofit media relations and fundraising.     

News on inflation and the epidemiology of inflation expectations in China

Inflation expectations are important elements in monetary policy analysis. This paper examines how inflation expectations of Chinese consumers and professional forecasters are affected by media sentiments based on the epidemiological foundations of the sticky information model. Rather than assuming professional forecasts are identical to newspaper forecasts, we assume news media are a common source for the transmission of typical people's inflation expectations. We collect media data from 30 leading newspapers and magazines in China and code news reports into three types of inflation: rising, falling, and unchanged. More importantly, we categorize the media pool into comprehensive, economic, and politically oriented media sources. We find a fundamental connection between news media and inflation expectations. However, there are significantly different impacts of news reports in different media sources on expectations. The difference is mainly concentrated in politically oriented media sources, and may be a reflection of China's unique media administration system.     

Impacts of news media coverage on Canadian medical crowdfunding campaigns

While donation-based crowdfunding for health-related purposes raises hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, most campaigns fail to meet their fundraising goals. Crowdfunding campaigners are advised to seek traditional news media coverage of their campaigns to increase donor interest and fundraising success. In this study, we seek to better understand what happens to donor behavior via donation-based crowdfunding campaigns after they receive news media coverage. While research has focused on the impact of social media sharing on donation-based crowdfunding, academic analyses of the impact of news media coverage is largely speculative. We searched the Newsstream and Factiva databases for Canadian news coverage of domestic donation-based health-related crowdfunding campaigns. This news coverage was paired with the crowdfunding campaign reported on in the story. Campaign text and daily fundraising totals and donor amounts were recorded for the 7 days before and after publication of the news article. The authors identified emergent patterns in this data around the amplification of personal information from the crowdfunding campaign to a wider audience and inclusion of new personal details. This process identified 17 relevant pairs of news stories and crowdfunding campaigns over a review period of just under 5 months in 2021–22. These campaigns raised a total of CAD$443,134 (median CAD$20,030) out of a total goal of CAD$772,500 (median CAD$40,000) or 57.4% of the requested funds. Median campaign donations and donor numbers increased for the 3 days following publication of the news article. Our exploratory analysis shows a relationship between crowdfunding campaigns that receive news media coverage and the numbers of donations and total amount donated shortly after this coverage. Campaigners may feel pressure to participate in news media coverage in order to reach their fundraising goals. Media coverage has implications for campaign recipient privacy and the equitable distribution of health-related funding. This exploratory analysis establishes the need for additional research on this topic.     

Press freedom and jumps in stock prices

Press freedom varies substantially across countries. In a free environment, any news immediately becomes public knowledge through mediums including various electronic media and published materials. However, in an unfree environment, (economic) agents would have more discretionary powers to disclose good news immediately, while hiding bad news or releasing bad news slowly. We argue that this discretion affects stock prices and that stock markets in countries with a free press should be better processors of economic information. Using an equilibrium asset-pricing model in an economy under jump diffusion, we decompose the moments of the returns of international stock markets into a diffusive risk and a jump risk part. Using stock market data for a balanced panel of 50 countries, our results suggest that in countries with a free press, the better processing of bad news leads to more frequent negative jumps in stock prices. As a result, stock markets in those countries are characterized by higher volatility, driven by higher jump risk and more negative return asymmetry. The results are robust to the inclusion of various controls for governance and other country- or market-specific characteristics. We interpret these as good stock market characteristics because a free press improves welfare and increases economic growth.     

Information or Opinion? Media Bias as Product Differentiation

Two aspects of media bias are important empirically. First, bias is persistent: it does not seem to disappear even when the media is under scrutiny. Second, bias is conflicting: different people often perceive bias in the same media outlet to be of opposite signs. We build a model in which both empirical characteristics of bias are observed in equilibrium. The key assumptions are that the information contained in the facts about a news event may not always be fully verifiable, and consumers have heterogeneous prior views ("ideologies") about the news event. Based on these ingredients of the model, we build a location model with entry to characterize firms' reports in equilibrium, and the nature of bias. When a news item comprises only fully verifiable facts, firms report these as such, so that there is no bias and the market looks like any market for information . When a news item comprises information that is mostly nonverifiable, however, then consumers may care both about opinion and editorials, and a firm's report will contain both these aspects—in which case the market resembles any differentiated product market . Thus, the appearance of bias is a result of equilibrium product differentiation when some facts are nonverifiable. We use the model to address several questions, including the impact of competition on bias, the incentives to report unpopular news, and the impact of owner ideology on bias. In general, competition does not lead to a reduction in bias unless this is accompanied by an increase in verifiability or a smaller dispersion of prior beliefs.     

Corporate Environmental Reporting and News Coverage of Environmental Issues: an Agenda‐Setting Perspective

Departing from agenda‐setting theory, this paper explores whether environmental content in newspapers is related to corporate environmental agendas presented in corporate environmental reports and annual reports. Based on a sample of 1668 corporate reports published between 1997 and 2008, this paper compares corporate reporting against environmental news content over the same period with time lags of one and two years as well as without time lags. The results suggest that the media agenda and the corporate environmental agenda mirror each other. The results further suggest that, for some issues, there may be an impact of the news media agenda on corporate environmental agendas, but not vice versa. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Web content mining for comparing corporate and third‐party online reporting: a case study on solid waste management

This study investigates the coverage of solid waste management on 1142 websites maintained by companies, news media and non‐governmental organizations to validate an automated approach to content and language analysis. First, a frequency analysis of waste management terms sheds light on the breadth and depth of their environmental discourses, revealing that corporate and media attention to waste management is small compared with that of non‐governmental organizations. Second, an investigation of their attitudes toward waste management suggests that companies avoid negative information in environmental communication, unlike news media or non‐governmental organizations. Ultimately, an automated tool for ontology building is employed to gain insights into companies' shared understanding of waste management. The ontology obtained indicates that companies conceptualize waste management as a business process rather than framing it from an ecological perspective, which is in line with findings from previous research. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Media Content,Accounting Quality,and Liquidity Volatility

We examine how the linguistic content of news items affects the volatility of a firm's liquidity, and we consider whether accounting quality moderates the media content-liquidity volatility relation. Regarding the unconditional relation between media content and liquidity volatility, one view is media content could reduce liquidity volatility by providing additional information about fundamental values; another view is it could increase liquidity volatility by increasing investor uncertainty, particularly for negative news. Using data from Thomson Reuters News Analytics, we find evidence supporting the view that media content, positive and negative, has incremental information. Regarding the moderating role of accounting quality, pre-existing accounting information of higher quality could enhance investors' reactions to media content by providing a more precise baseline, or it could reduce investors' reactions to the news if investors anchor on higher quality financial statements. Our findings are consistent with more credible accounting information serving an anchor role, and suggest that investors condition their reaction to media content based on the quality of a firm's pre-existing accounting information.     

Who Gets on the News? The relation between media biases and different actors in news reporting on complex policy processes

Abstract

Having a voice in media is important to gain power and legitimacy in policy processes. However, media are biased in transmitting information. Using a quantitative content analysis of ten years’ news reporting around water management policies in the Netherlands, we study how much media attention different groups of actors receive and how media biases relate to this attention. Executive politicians get on the news because of their authoritative position; less authoritative actors getting on the news is more related to information biases. Information biases can thus function as a form of checks and balances in news reporting on policy processes.     

广播媒体重大事件、突发事件新闻报道应急机制初探

作为广播媒体,要想在众多媒体特别是同类媒体的竞争中脱颖而出,除了媒体记者自身过硬的素质和敏锐的新闻洞察力,还需要靠什么抓住瞬间出现的新闻机遇?如何面对相同新闻素材做出与众不同的新闻报道?笔者认为,建立一套行之有效应急机制是非常必要的。本文结合实践,探讨了建立和完善重大事件、突发事件新闻报道应急机制的几点思路。     

Discovering latent commercial networks from online financial news articles

Unlike most online social networks where explicit links among individual users are defined, the relations among commercial entities (e.g. firms) may not be explicitly declared in commercial Web sites. One main contribution of this article is the development of a novel computational model for the discovery of the latent relations among commercial entities from online financial news. More specifically, a CRF model which can exploit both structural and contextual features is applied to commercial entity recognition. In addition, a point-wise mutual information (PMI)-based unsupervised learning method is developed for commercial relation identification. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed computational methods, a prototype system called CoNet has been developed. Based on the financial news articles crawled from Google finance, the CoNet system achieves average F-scores of 0.681 and 0.754 in commercial entity recognition and commercial relation identification, respectively. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed shallow natural language processing methods are effective for the discovery of latent commercial networks from online financial news.     

Infused with news value: Management,managerial knowledge and the institutionalization of business news

This article explores the development and institutionalization of business news, and its implications for management. Business news is often seen either as a sign of media commercialization or as a target for corporate communication strategies. In contrast to this, business news is explored in the present article as a particular type of knowledge that has emerged and become institutionalized in recent decades. The empirical analysis first describes the institutional development of business news in Denmark and then examines changes in business news texts from the 1960s to the present, not just as a particular type of business-oriented media content but ultimately as a form of managerial knowledge characterized by being simultaneously autonomous, negotiated and boundary-spanning.     

媒体关注度对新股表现的影响——来自中国股票市场的证据

新闻媒体对证券投资的影响日趋重要,它会通过影响投资者的心理和行为而影响资产价格。首次公开发行的股票(IPOs)由于倍受媒体关注,从而会在上市以后的价格表现上产生一定的影响。本文选取2006年6月至2008年6月上市的246只首次公开发行的股票作为样本,以百度新闻搜索到包含股票名称的新闻数量作为媒体关注度的衡量指标,实证检验了媒体关注度对新股表现的影响。本文得出结论:媒体关注度通过影响投资者情绪,对新股短期累积超额收益产生正的影响,而对长期累积超额收益产生负的影响。同时发现,媒体关注度高的新股,其发行价格也相对较高。     

警察的媒介形象构建分析

本文运用内容分析法,研究了由05年1月1日至09年12月31日在《南方周末》以及与之相关的南方报业网中以"警察"为标题的345个文本资料并进行分析研究。发现并了解此类评论性媒介倾向于选择警察负面新闻进行报道,造成负面报道比重过高,丑化警察媒介形象。嫌介对警察负面形象的持续报道,有意或无意识的造成了负面新闻在时空上产生共鸣效果、累积效果,进一步加剧了警察媒介形象丑化。进而影响着公安机关在人民群众心目中的形象,甚至于影响着整个政府的公信力。     

Protecting expatriates in hostile environments: institutional forces influencing the safety and security practices of internationally active organisations

Abstract

The operations of internationally active organisations continue to encroach on hostile locations that are vulnerable to the negative consequences of crises such as political upheaval, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Yet research into how firms ensure the physical and psychological safety and security of international staff in these locations is limited. This article reports an empirical study exploring the expatriate safety and security practices of 28 internationally active organisations from three industries that commonly operate in hostile environments. We unveil starkly different approaches across the three industries, and label these approaches ‘regulatory’ (mining and resources), ‘informal mentoring’ (news media) and ‘empowering’ (international aid and development). We use institutional theory to propose that these configurations reflect legitimacy-seeking choices that these organisations make in response to the various institutional environments that affect each sector. Our results provide a platform for initial theory building into the interrelated elements of organisations’ safety and security practices, and the institutional factors that shape the design of these.     

Examining how advocacy groups build relationships on the Internet

• In 2006, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) became American law after brief Congressional discussions despite the public outcries from animal rights organizations. The AETA made it a federal terrorist crime to harm any animal enterprise financially, which could include legal forms of protests and boycotts. Members of the “Stop AETA” coalition failed to draw attention to the legislation. The relationship management theory of public relations provides a framework to determine how well the coalition members developed relationships with like‐minded individuals and the media. Results from a content analysis of the coalition members' Web sites revealed that nonprofit organizations and citizen‐advocacy groups attempted to develop relationships through a variety of strategies, including making the visit a positive experience, being open and transparent in their advocacy efforts, and providing access to coalition leaders. The results suggest that the coalition was unable to generate much news coverage for the issue because coalition members did not sufficiently reach out to cultivate relationships with journalists. Specific suggestions are provided for future advocacy groups to use the Internet to develop and cultivate relationships with key stakeholder groups.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE FUTURE OF THE NEWS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Technical developments in the field of journalism and broadcasting are changing the shape of both media. Many of these developments are very welcome. However, there is a danger that the quality of journalism may fall and that part of society may disengage from news coverage. This may require a policy response but not necessarily the continued support of a single state-funded public service broadcaster.