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Eugene Nulman. Media Exposure of Novel Protests: Domestic Femininity in News Coverage of the Great Railway Adventure Protests. Media, Culture & Society, September 2015; vol. 37, 6: pp. 922–936.

Social Movements often incorporate masculinity into protest events as a means of achieving media attention. This attention is then used to mobilize, increase membership, and generate social and political outcomes. This article explores the media attention potential of novel social movement actions that deal with “domestically feminine” elements of protest. This article examines the case of the Great Railway Adventure, a series of protests in England organized by the Craftivist Collective and Climate Rush incorporating feminine dress, craftwork, and food. It analyzes the success of these elements in generating media attention and the role the elements play in news media’s framing of the protests. By employing a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, I found that the elements were able to achieve limited levels of media attention through novelty and situational irony when combined with more standard elements of direct action campaigning. These elements also shaped the content of many but not all of the news articles.

Benjamin Ka Lun Cheng and Wai Han Lo. Can News Be Imaginative? An Experiment Testing the Perceived Credibility of Melodramatic Animated News, News Organizations, Media Use, and Media Dependency. Electronic News, September 2012; vol. 6, 3: pp. 131–150.

In recent years, some media organizations have begun to use a new type of animation in news reports that is melodramatic and emotion-laden. These have successfully drawn considerable numbers of viewers to their online news reports. The use of such techniques is controversial and has sparked debate over its appropriateness. An experiment with 153 college students as participants was conducted to compare the perceived credibility of news reports with and without melodramatic animation. The results show that the animation format neither enhances nor dampens news credibility. However, they also show that sound effects reduce the credibility of news reports using melodramatic animation. The perceived credibility was also related to the credibility of the news organization and the medium dependency of the viewer. Implications for animated news media, future research directions, and ethical issues of using such technique are discussed.