Newsmakers and news sources in “hybrid media system” (the case of the full-scaled Russian invasion coverage by Ukrainian media)
Description
The aim is to define and compare the most popular newsmakers and news sources for Ukrayins’ka Pravda (UP – the oldest, qualitative, and the most read online media), representing professional mass media, and for Ukrayina Seychas (US – one of the most popular Telegram channels), representing new media, and to describe the specifics of news production in the “hybrid media system”. The hypothesis of the research: H1 Professional mass media (UP) and new media (Telegram channel US) have strong differences in choosing both newsmakers (mentions) and news sources (newsmakers, quoted in the headlines), because leading officials and politicians (Ukrainian and international) are not recognizable for fragmented new media audience, who mostly follow information of personal interest in high-competitive media environment with many choices. H2 Both the percent of mentions and the percent of quoted newsmakers are larger for professional mass media (UP), than for new media (US), as far as new media perceive news as entertainment and do not follow the norms and traditions of classic news writing: to include recognizable newsmaker, references to sources, etc. H3 Professional mass media (UP) mention both personalities and organizations/institutions as far as consider them newsworthy, on the contrary, new media (Telegram channel US) publish news about popular personalities – to attract public’s attention, to encourage readers to share content. H4 In the “hybrid media system” qualitative mass media give preferences to reliable sources, whereas for new media it is not obligatory, thus, UP will use more reliable (official) sources, while in contrast there will be more unreliable (non-official) sources in US’s texts. Content and Method For this research computer assisted method of news collection (headlines) and newsmakers and news sources identification was used (Python language) . With request module news archive html-pages (htpps://Pravda.com.ua/archives/) were collected from Ukrayins’ka Pravda website (from 24th of February till 31st of October). With bs4 module headlines were got 35577 total. To identify a popular newsmaker – a mention of both a person’s surname and an organization/institution name were considered. With re module and a vocabulary of the most popular personalities and organizations/institutions a list of the most popular newsmakers was created To define a news source, three the most common for UP types of references were exploited: A proper name or an abbreviation before a semicolon; A proper noun or an abbreviation after a dash; A proper noun or an abbreviation after a quotation mark and a semicolon. As for US, at first the chat history was exported (the same period). The first sentence considered the headline (total 30784). As a rule, here the first sentence and a headline match. The same vocabulary and regular expressions were used to identify newsmakers and news sources.