Table Of ContentABSTRACT
WARE, JENNIFER MARIE. Still 'Live at the Scene': An Exploration of Timely Television
News Broadcasts Repurposed as Online Content. (Under the direction of Dr. Melissa
Johnson).
Technology has afforded journalists a myriad of new opportunities to promote and
publish content online. This project provides an overview of many of the new practices that
have become standard operating procedures for digital media news creation and examines
how the heavy imprint of traditional media news values are not contextualized within the
new media platforms. As such, this project demonstrates that the traditional television media
forms and values imported into a new medium may not be the best practice for the new
platform unless new concepts are added to existing journalism practice. While generally the
idea of what makes an event “newsworthy” has not changed dramatically, the video news
dissemination processes have changed considerably. In broadcast journalism, TV news
content is shifted from a one-time TV broadcast that is controlled by the content provider and
broadcast at a specific moment to an interactive online environment in which video content
can be shared and saved by users to play at a later time. This online environment also affords
journalists the ability to upload and change information throughout the day or even
days/weeks later, bringing a sense of immediacy to the online content. This brings to the fore
issues related to the implicit timeliness of repurposed broadcast news videos situated within
an online environment that centers upon immediacy and content interactivity.
This project explores the inadvertent temporal shifts within the products produced
that hinge upon particular news values for a specific medium. When those news values are
repurposed in a new environment, this project demonstrates that further explicit
contextualization of the repurposed materials is needed for those news stories to continue to
provide the same knowledge as they did within the first medium. This project contributes to
the field of mass communication and offers a research technique to capture online
multimedia materials in context. Additionally this project puts forth a theoretical concept of
temporal fixity as a bridge to temporally tie content that has been repurposed online to its
original medium and thus retain the original function of foundational news values. Finally,
this project offers practical solutions to implement the theoretical concept as part of
broadcast journalism best practices.
© Copyright 2012 by Jennifer Marie Ware
All Rights Reserved
Still 'Live at the Scene': An Exploration of Timely Television News Broadcasts Repurposed
as Online Content
by
Jennifer Marie Ware
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
North Carolina State University
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
Raleigh, North Carolina
2012
APPROVED BY:
_______________________________ ______________________________
Melissa Johnson, Ph.D. Susan Miller-Cochran, Ph.D.
Committee Chair
________________________________ ________________________________
Jason Swarts, Ph.D Kenneth Zagacki, Ph.D.
DEDICATION
For Mom, Dad, Grandma Jaeger, and Ash
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BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer Ware is a scholar with research interests in multimedia production, broadcast
journalism, visual communication, digital media, and technology and pedagogy. Jennifer is
from Brookfield, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she
found her passion for broadcast journalism and storytelling. After her Bachelor‟s, she
worked for CBS 58 in Milwaukee, WI as a videographer/morning show editor where she
created the video editing workflow for a new hour-long morning show. Later, she moved to
Virginia Beach, VA and began her Master‟s Degree in film directing at Regent University
where she was awarded the 2003 Outstanding Graduate in Cinema Arts award. She
remained in Virginia working for a public communications department of a city government
and later as the online video advertising producer/director of the Interactive Media division
of The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, VA. She has thirteen years of award-winning
multimedia experience including Milwaukee Press Club Awards for her video journalism and
news reporting, and Telly, NOTOA, and Marcom Awards for her city government work
including the multi-award winning documentary “The Great Dismal Swamp: Glimpse Into
the Wild.” After working for several years in multimedia online advertising for The
Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, VA, Jennifer decided to return to school to once again. Since
beginning her doctoral studies in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program
at North Carolina State University, Jennifer has worked on an NSF grant entitled Scaling Up
STEM Learning with the VCL. Her work included making a role model video library to
increase high school students‟ awareness of STEM careers. She has also published in the
SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Networks and the magazine Teaching and Learning with
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Technology. Jennifer has given presentations at the Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the International Communication Association (ICA),
the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Computers and
Writing (C&W), and the National Science Foundation‟s ITEST Summit (NSF ITEST).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For years I was searching for a Ph.D. program that would allow me to bring the video
production skills I already had to an environment that would build my theoretical
understanding while acknowledging that production skills were also of value. Then I found
the CRDM program at North Carolina State University and I knew I had found exactly what I
was looking for. Throughout my time here I have been stretched intellectually while still
fully using my love of video and storytelling to impact those around me. I‟ve been given
tremendous opportunities to research ways to motivate high school students to pursue new
careers and opportunities, to develop instructional materials to help teachers learn to use
technology in their classrooms, and to create educational resources for college composition
students to learn how to use new media.
I am thankful for the highly skilled and tremendously talented scholars at NCSU who
have shared their knowledge and expertise with me to help me grow. I am thankful to Dr.
Melissa Johnson for her excitement over my project, her continual support, and how her
guidance challenged me to know and do more every day. I am also thankful to Dr. Susan
Miller-Cochran, Dr. Jason Swarts, and Dr. Kenneth Zagacki for not only the courses I‟ve
taken with them during my time here, but also for their level of passion in their own interests.
This passion inspires others in a myriad of ways.
I am also grateful for the friendships I have forged with my fellow classmates within
the program and also those friendships I have made with students and faculty at UNC-Chapel
Hill. These friendships have brought laughter and joy through the many nights of “type type
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type.” For that, I thank you. And thanks of course to Ashley Hall for her continual support
and willingness to listen to me describe my project over and over and over and over again.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................... xii
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................xiii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1
Perspectives from the Field ........................................................................... 2
News Values and Knowledge Production...................................................... 3
Knowledge Production in Broadcast Journalism ........................................... 7
Time as a Defining News Value ........................................................ 8
Kairos as the opportune moment ........................................... 9
Chronos as the context-specific time ..................................... 11
Reporting hard news at the opportune moment ..................... 12
The State of the Broadcast Journalism Industry ............................................ 15
The Value of New Media Skills .................................................................... 16
The Difficulty of Coding Online Multimedia Materials ................................ 18
Contributions ................................................................................................ 19
Theoretical Contribution .................................................................... 19
Methodological Contribution ............................................................. 20
Practical Contribution ........................................................................ 21
Overarching Questions .................................................................................. 22
Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................ 23
Chapter 2: Four Forms of Convergence in the Newsroom:
A Literature Review .......................................................................... 23
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