"As the world's urban poor increase in numbers, they become acutely vulnerable to hazards from extreme weather events. On 8 November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan struck the province of Leyte, Philippines, with casualties numbering in the thousands, largely because of the ensuing storm surge that swept the c
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oastal cmmunities. This study investigates the role and dynamics of risk communication in these events, specifically examining the organizational processing of text within a complex institutional milieu. The authors show how the risk communication process failed to convey meaningful information about the predicted storm surge, transmitting and retransmitting the same routine text instead of communicating authentic messages in earnest. The key insight is that, rather than focus solely on the verbatim transmission of a scripted text, risk communication needs to employ various modes of translation and feedback signals across organizational and institutional boundaries. Adaptation will require overcoming organizational rigidities in order to craft proportionate responses to extreme weather events that may lie outside personal and institutional memory. Future work should build upon the textual processing approach to risk communication, expanding it into a comprehensive relational model of environmental cognition". (Abstract)
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"Welche publizistischen Angebote können gemacht werden, damit das Interesse der Bürger am eigenen Umfeld (wieder) zunimmt? Wie kann die lokale, demokratische Öffentlichkeit gestärkt werden? Diese Fragen werden im vorliegenden Buch untersucht. Im Rahmen des Bundesprogramms „Zusammenhalt durch T
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eilhabe“ wurde das jeweilige Kommunikationsgefüge der Landkreise Ludwigslust (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) und Vogtlandkreis (Sachsen) analysiert. Im Fokus standen acht Orte mit 2.100 bis zu 20.000 Einwohnern. Insgesamt zeigt die Untersuchung, dass Bürgerzeitungen – sowohl durch Nutzung als auch durch redaktionelle Mitarbeit – das örtliche Engagement der Bürger stärken können. Heimatgefühl und Engagement sind miteinander verzahnt, ein Modell zeigt diese wechselseitigen Einflussfaktoren auf." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better unders
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tand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict." (Abstract)
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"Hay muchas razones diferentes por las cuales nos hacemos periodistas ambientales, pero nuestra misión es muy similar: contar historias que ayuden a las personas a entender mejor cómo es que los seres humanos nos relacionamos con el mundo natural que nos rodea, la forma en que este afecta nuestras
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vidas y el impacto que tenemos en él. Como periodistas ambientales, tenemos la oportunidad de plantear temas que otras personas no tienen en cuenta, o preguntar sobre prácticas que son muy buenas (y pueden servir de ejemplo) o muy malas (y deben ser cambiadas). Podemos abogar por justicia cuando los derechos de las personas se ven transgredidos o amenazados, y podemos educar a la gente para que puedan convertirse en sus propios mejores defensores. A medida que aumenta la conciencia pública sobre cuestiones medioambientales —desde el uso de pesticidas, pasando por el cambio climático, hasta el deslizamiento de relaves mineros, por ejemplo—, también lo hace la necesidad de que haya periodistas que puedan investigar y explicar las causas, consecuencias y posibles soluciones. Si bien el periodismo ambiental es una especialidad, esta no existe de forma aislada. Así, si bien te ayuda el conocer un poco sobre la ciencia medioambiental, probablemente también te encontrarás abordando temas de política, economía, salud, aspectos sociales y puntos de vista culturales: cómo es que el mercurio en los peces afecta a la salud humana, por ejemplo, o los datos económicos de cómo el oro proveniente de la minería ilegal en la Amazonía termina en los mercados internacionales, o cómo la construcción de una hidroeléctrica afecta a las tradiciones culturales de las comunidades indígenas aledañas, y puede estar relacionada con la corrupción." (Páginas 7-8)
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"Boosting health care in rural areas is a serious challenge. Involving local radio stations can help. In northern Uganda, a local FM station supports the fight against leprosy." (Introduction)
"It is a paradox of communication and media studies that while media are widely seen as key institutions in the “project of time, space and life management” (Silverstone, 2005), not enough attention is given to the ways in which mediation is socially produced and becomes politically effective. A
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lthough rarely taken into account as an analytical variable in studies of international development communication, mediation is implicit in donor-driven practice. In the act of framing a problem and favouring a solution, and of communicating about a problem and solution in particular ways, donors seek to mediate their complex relationships with recipient countries and with citizens at both ends of the donor-recipient equation. But which forms of media engagement do they propose to these ends? How is mediated communication aimed at doing good for the citizens of recipient countries? How is it used to communicate do-gooding to the citizens of donor countries? Which media technologies are foregrounded and which media-driven practices are favoured to promote one and the other? Which perceptions of media engagement influence donors’ strategic choices, and how are citizens understood in those choices? Based on a qualitative study of a large-scale mediated communication intervention mandated by the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote reconciliation and democratize media systems in the successor states to the former Yugoslavia in 2005 (Enghel, 2014), this paper examines forms of media engagement at work in donor-driven international development communication and considers their uses as components of a politics of mediation." (Abstract)
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"Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages that exceeds human capacity to process. Emergency managers
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, decision makers, and affected communities can make sense of social media through a combination of machine computation and human compassion - expressed by thousands of digital volunteers who publish, process, and summarize potentially life-saving information. This book brings together computational methods from many disciplines: natural language processing, semantic technologies, data mining, machine learning, network analysis, human-computer interaction, and information visualization, focusing on methods that are commonly used for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints, and offering more than 500 references to in-depth information." (Publisher description)
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"This report draws on two studies: first, a nationally representative quantitative survey, and, second, a qualitative study across three locations in Sierra Leone [...] Ninety-five per cent of research participants reported accessing health information in the previous three months – 93% receiving
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information about Ebola and 43% receiving information about pneumonia. Media access – in particular for radio (81%) and mobile (83%) – is high. There is a strong interest in health information in Sierra Leone. 86% of Sierra Leoneans want to receive more information on health for themselves and their families. People are particularly interested in receiving information on health issues that they already have some knowledge of – 29% mentioned that they wanted information on malaria and typhoid. This compares with the 11% of people who want to receive information on health topics that they currently do not know much about. People act upon information that enables them to address symptoms quickly at home, is cheap to access and both cheap and easy to implement. Nine per cent of Sierra Leoneans have never used formal healthcare services. There are a number of reasons why people do not seek formal health providers or access health information." (Executive summary, page 7-8)
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