ABSTRACT 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 ii 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 iii 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). iv 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 v 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. vi 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 vii Chapter 3: Capturing Online Video in Context: A Screencapture Research Technique .......................................................................... 24 Chapter 4: A Content Analysis of Timeliness, Immediacy, and Content Interactivity