Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 Journalism: How One University Used Virtual Worlds to Tell True Stories Leonard Witt, Farooq A. Kperogi, Gwenette Writer Sinclair, Claire Bohrer and Solomon Negash “Security by Obscurity”: Journalists’ Mental Models of Information Security Susan E. McGregor and Elizabeth Anne Watkins Quieting the Commenters: The Spiral of Silence’s Persistent Effect on Online News Forums Hans K. Meyer and Burton Speakman Interactivity, Social Presence, and Journalistic Use of Twitter Jeremy Littau and Mi Rosie Jahng The Economics of Accountability Journalism: What Price is Right? James Breiner Six Things You Didn’t Know About Headline Writing: Sensationalistic Form in Viral News Content From Traditional and Digitally Native News Organizations Danielle K. Kilgo and Vinicio Sinta Did You Get the Buzz? Are Digital Native Media Becoming Mainstream? Lu Wu Toward Omnipresent Journalism: A Case Study of Real-Time Coverage of the San Antonio Spurs 2014 NBA Championship Game Zhaoxi (Josie) Liu Table of Content #ISOJ Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 Editor’s Note...................................................................................................................................3 Journal Details................................................................................................................................5 Journalism: How One University Used Virtual Worlds to Tell True Stories.....................................5 Leonard Witt, Farooq A. Kperogi, Gwenette Writer Sinclair, Claire Bohrer and Solomon Negash “Security by Obscurity”: Journalists’ Mental Models of Information Security..................................33 Susan E. McGregor and Elizabeth Anne Watkins Quieting the Commenters: The Spiral of Silence’s Persistent Effect on Online News Forums.................................................................................................................51 Hans K. Meyer and Burton Speakman Interactivity, Social Presence, and Journalistic Use of Twitter........................................................71 Jeremy Littau and Mi Rosie Jahng The Economics of Accountability Journalism: What Price is Right?...............................................91 James Breiner Six Things You Didn’t Know About Headline Writing: Sensationalistic Form in Viral News Content From Traditional and Digitally Native News Organizations.....................................111 Danielle K. Kilgo and Vinicio Sinta Did You Get the Buzz? Are Digital Native Media Becoming Mainstream?.....................................131 Lu Wu Toward Omnipresent Journalism: A Case Study of Real-Time Coverage of the San Antonio Spurs 2014 NBA Championship Game......................................................................151 Zhaoxi (Josie) Liu #ISOJ Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 Journal Details Co-Editors-in-Chief: Rosental Calmon Alves Amy Schmitz Weiss About Us #ISOJ The Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism is an international journal devoted to advancing the scholarship in the area of journalism and innovative technologies. The editors invite manuscripts reporting original research, methodologies relevant to the study of journalism and innovative technologies (online, tablets, mobile platforms, etc.), critical syntheses of research and theoretical perspectives on journalism today. The journal maintains a social scientific and broad behavioral focus. We encourage submissions from scholars outside and within the journalism and mass communication discipline. Disclaimer The editors cannot be held responsible for any errors or consequences that arise from the use of information contained in the #ISOJ Journal. The views and opinions in the journal do not reflect those of the publisher or editors. Copyright and photocopying All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or any way without the prior permission in writing from the copyright holder. Authorization to photocopy items for internal and personal use is granted by the copyright holder of the libraries and other users registered with their local Reproduction Rights Organization and/or Copyright Clearance Center and provide the appropriate feed paid directly to the RRO. 2 #ISOJ Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 Editors’ Note Welcome to the sixth volume of the #ISOJ, The official research journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism. This sixth volume features eight articles from the research papers that were peer-reviewed and selected for presentation at the April 2016 symposium. We are happy to include these articles in this journal as they represent papers that received the highest judging marks among all the other papers in the research competition this year. This issue focuses on digital security concerns for journalists, the impact of social media in journalism, the potential for virtual reality in immersive storytelling, the evolution of digital native news organizations, and the economics of accountability journalism. The journal aims to demonstrate the quality and uniqueness of the research that is being conducted today in online journalism from scholars around the world. Our aim is that this journal can serve as a living archive that records the trends and challenges in online journalism today and document the research work of the International Symposium on Online Journalism symposia. Cheers, Amy Schmitz Weiss and Rosental Calmon Alves Co-editors 3 #ISOJ Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 4 Using Virtual Worlds to Tell True Stories Journalism: How One University Used Virtual Worlds to Tell True Stories Leonard Witt, Farooq A. Kperogi, Gwenette Writer Sinclair, Claire Bohrer and Solomon Negash This case study demonstrates a relatively low-cost, quick-startup project that advances work in virtual world immersive journalism; in this case, to amplify the voices of often marginalized youth in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Using ethnographic and survey research, it provides insights into producing “machinimas” (videos filmed in virtual worlds) to tell journalistic stories using virtual world tools, props, scenery and avatars, and provides a prototype for college-level journalism, communication and media studies programs considering initiating their own immersive journalism and virtual reality journeys. Introduction This paper developed from a grant-funded, university-based project that emulated, at least in part, the work of Nonny de la Peña. The research team uses her definition of immersive journalism as a touchstone: “[The] production of news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situations described in news stories” (de la Peña, et al., 2010, p. 291). Our research uses a combination of ethnographic and survey research methods. It is written from the perspectives of the project leaders: a journalism professor who was the Principal Investigator, a virtual world development expert who oversaw the creation of the virtual world and machinimas, one of the 11 student interns, an app developer and an online journalism researcher. The professor, the virtual world expert, and the intern have borrowed from the autoethnography qualitative research toolkit in writing their individual sections. The approach “acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research…” (Ellis, 2011, Section 1, para 3). The paper aims to inform journalism, communication and media studies programs in deciding if they should be offering immersive journalism courses or developing immersive journalism curriculum and virtual reality labs or centers. 5 #ISOJ Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2016 Virtual Worlds and Immersive Journalism — An Overview The temporal co-occurrence of immersion and interactivity is the essence of virtual reality. As Burdea and Coiffet (2003) point out, virtual reality is neither exclusively telepresence nor augmented reality nor, for that matter, any particular hardware. It is “a simulation in which computer graphics are used to create a realistic-looking world [where] the synthetic world is not static, but responds to the user’s input (gesture, verbal command, etc.). This defines a key feature of virtual reality, which is real-time interactivity. Here real time means the computer is able to detect an input and modify the virtual world instantaneously” (p. 2, emphasis original). Immersive journalism enables participants to have an embodied experience of actually entering “a virtually re-created scenario representing the news story… typically represented in the form of a digital avatar, an animated 3D digital representation of the participant, and see the world from the first-person perspective of that avatar” (de la Peña, et al., 2010, p. 292). As Raney Aronson-Rath, James Milward, Taylor Owen and Fergus Pitt (2016) point out, immersive journalism draws extensively from social presence theory, which argued that, in spite of popular notions to the contrary, interlocutors in mediated online discourses can project social cues that inspire social presence in their dialogic enterprise (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). Short, Williams and Christie (1976) showed that social presence theory has two interconnected parts: intimacy and immediacy. Immersive journalism expands on these notions. The possibilities of what some scholars have called avatar anthropomorphism (Lugrin, Latt, & Latoschick, 2015) and the illusions of place, plausibility, and body ownership that are possible in virtual reality provide