On 1 January 2009, Oscar Grant was shot and killed in a subway station by Bay Area Rail Transit officers. This event was recorded by several passengers on their cellphones and later uploaded to the video-sharing website YouTube. The videos generated significant protests among online and offline communities, and were eventually used as evidence in the ensuing trial. This study employed a critical thematic analysis to examine audience responses to this act of citizen journalism on YouTube. Results indicated that although some viewers critiqued the video quality and the cameraperson’s passivity, several supportive comments praised the cameraperson’s presence of mind and courage. Furthermore, some viewers called for resistance and retaliation, while others advocated a more prudent response. We argue that these findings necessitate a reconceptualization of traditional notions of the guard-dog media and the public sphere to accommodate new media technologies.

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‘Fake news’ has been a topic of controversy during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Much of the scholarship on it to date has focused on the ‘fakeness’ of fake news, illuminating the kinds of deception involved and the motivations of those who deceive. This study looks at the ‘newsness’ of fake news by examining the extent to which it imitates the characteristics and conventions of traditional journalism. Through a content analysis of 886 fake news articles, we find that in terms of news values, topic, and formats, articles published by fake news sites look very much like traditional—and real—news. Most of their articles included the news values of timeliness, negativity, and prominence; were about government and politics; and were written in an inverted pyramid format. However, one point of departure is in terms of objectivity, operationalized as the absence of the author’s personal opinion. The analysis found that the majority of articles analyzed included the opinion of their author or authors.

This study explored the effects of objectivity and transparency on perceived news credibility and newsworthiness. Some journalism scholars and practitioners have argued that transparency is replacing objectivity, which has been a dominant standard in traditional journalism. An online experiment (n=222) found that objective articles were rated more credible and more newsworthy than opinionated articles, while non-transparent articles were rated more credible than transparent articles.