"The traditional financial models for news are dying. Could churches, environmental movements, and open source communities hold clues to its survival? We’re at a moment of profound transition and successive crisis for news. Our mission is to explore how membership models might help. A key takeaway
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from our research over the past 12 months is that membership models are fundamentally different from subscription or product models–and that they require whole new methods and mindsets to be successful. Membership isn’t just “subscription by another name” (though it’s often referenced that way), or about giving consumers access to a product. It’s participation in a larger cause that reflects what they want to see in civil society. In membership, there’s a different “social contract” or “value proposition” between the site and its members. At the basic level of: What do you give? What do you get? Subscribers pay their money and get access to a product. But members join the cause and participate because they believe in it." (Executive summary)
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"This article examines the role of local radio in the contemporary media environment, specifically as a site for community engagement. Previous research finds journalistic organisations, at the local level, are critical to the functioning of society and more needs to be understood about their contem
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porary role amid destabilised and fragmented public discourse. In contrast to unrestrained and untrustworthy social media platforms, the mediation of local radio can assist in encouraging more inclusive, constructive, and respectful views from people from diverse sectors of society. Empirical research from a case study of a locally produced ABC Radio Community Conversation event exploring community tensions about built, heritage and environmental development in the Australian island state of Tasmania provides new insights into how the facilitation of local radio discussion can help build trust, public knowledge and enable greater participation. Listening and transparency from journalists about their practices is important, creating a space where people can connect in a civil and empathetic way not easily afforded by social media." (Abstract)
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"Drawing on available data and literature, this paper begins with an introduction on the media landscape in Ghana and explains how the media have contributed to promoting participatory and accountable governance. It further discusses the trends, barriers of media and governance in Ghana and makes ke
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y recommendations on how participatory governance can be improved." (Introduction, page 2)
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"From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new for
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ms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies." (Publisher description)
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"Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history. This book is the
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first history of documentary filmmaking in Syria. Based on extensive media ethnography and in-depth interviews with Syrian filmmakers in exile, the book offers an archival analysis of the documentary work by masters of Syrian cinema, such as Nabil Maleh, Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Hala Al Abdallah, Hanna Ward, Ali Atassi and Omar Amiralay. Joshka Wessels traces how the works of these filmmakers became iconic for a new generation of filmmakers at the beginning of the 21st century and maps the radical change in the documentary landscape after the revolution of 2011. Special attention is paid to the late Syrian filmmaker and pro-democracy activist, Bassel Shehadeh, and the video-resistance from Aleppo and Raqqa against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State." (Publisher description)
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"The premise of this research is that digital activism, like many other forms of online engagement work in an ecosystem. And just like the success of a species is largely dependent on environmental factors, and its reaction to those circumstances, so does the success of a digital activist platform.
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It is a start to unify the different elements of digital activism that have been studied by various researchers and codify these into a model. The study then goes further to offer an explorative analysis on how this ecosystem works using three blogging platforms operating in Sub-Saharan Africa as examples." (Abstract)
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"Even at the most audience-informed organizations, journalists recognize the immense difficulty in making sense of what audience members and relevant experts know, particularly without presently available tools and ample staff. This work is hard, yet there is an increasing amount of interest in it.
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We hear more reporters, editors, and audience development staff around the world asking: how can this work be operationalized? With this report you see what we have learned so far about memberful routines. We close by highlighting some of the limits and cautions of working closely with members. We do this not to dissuade you from pursuing these routines, but to help as you undertake your own projects with members, donors, subscribers, and contributors: not every story can have, and not every story should have, reader involvement; make it crystal clear to community members: Everyone has opinions. Your opinions will not run our newsroom; member engagement is hard work. Staff need to be identified, trained, and given time to do it right; be ready to handle the incoming traffic if your callouts and other outreach succeed and you have plenty of takers. Design for potential over-supply of information!; project management is a discipline unto itself. Without it, news sites will find it hard to succeed at establishing memberful routines; members in their natural state do not necessarily know what news organizations need from them. We have to teach them that part." (Conclusion, page 53)
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"#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley.
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The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women's studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade." (Publisher description)
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"Citizen science is a vast field. It covers the spectrum of research approaches and offers different methods for engaging volunteers with research in a variety of ways. Common to every citizen science project is a need to communicate with the public effectively. This to recruit and retain citizen sc
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ientists, but equally to inform, train and thank them, in the proper manner, when the project ends. It was this need which prompted Scivil, the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Citizen Science, to set up the working group on communication and participation. The working group decided to document its communication expertise in this guide for anyone who plans to initiate a citizen science project [...] In this guide we provide the building blocks to write up a communication plan for your project, and we include exercises on how to identify a target audience and reach out to schools. We also offer a set of tactics and tools, to secure the initial and continued participation of your citizen scientists. Finally, with our practical tips, you can begin the job of defining your communication plan and choosing the right tactics for effective communication in citizen science. This guide is for anyone who finds themselves communicating and engaging with citizen scientists. The content of the guide is based on studies of citizen participation and the real-life experience of science communicators." (Preface, page 4)
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"[...] this pilot study in Siaya County sought to assess what makes for more effective public participation in Kenya. In contributing to a timely policy concern about how to best meet the imperatives/aspirations of devolution, it sought also to address the limited empirical evidence in scholarship a
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bout how to design effective public participation. The pilot study had two operational components, designed to generate new insights into public participation in the context of devolution in Kenya: 1) implementation of an intervention, designed to generate citizen engagement and feed insights from citizen voice into a Country policy process; 2) a study into the intervention, examining the extent to which its distinct elements make it an effective means of providing for public participation with County governments in Kenya." (Introduction, page 4)
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"As an introduction to this special issue of CyberOrient, this text provides an insight into ongoing research in studies of digital layers of revolutions, digital communication, and dissidence in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region. Providing a short overview of the latest development
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s of uprisings and street demonstrations in the region, the text reflects on similarities and differences between the various revolts currently taking place. Digital dissidence is part and parcel of these revolts. Zooming in on the Syrian case, this article assesses how the Syrian revolution and its digital components developed into the humanitarian crisis it has become after nine years of violence. The article then shortly reflects on the Sudanese revolution of 2019, which is seemingly the most successful uprising in the Arab world thanks to a strong digital component, as noted in the words of its own revolutionaries. This text then introduces two contributions to this special issue focused on, respectively, Egypt and the occupied Palestinian territories. The contest between what Layla Shereen Sakr calls “techies on the ground” and repressive regimes is compared to that of a race between a hare and a turtle, in which the techies continuously circumvent the attempts by the repressive regimes to curtail their means of digital communication and capacity for organizing collective action." (Abstract)
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