This article proposes a nuanced analysis of the temporal spectrum in news narratives, beyond the three conventional temporal orientations (past-present-future), thus affording a more complex understanding of journalism and its varied storytelling patterns. Combining qualitative and quantitative content analysis of print and online news items in the United States and Israel, this framework is used to evaluate and compare different journalistic cultures and media technologies in relation to public time. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article offers a definition for “news” which associates between 5 clusters of temporal layers and different journalistic roles: updating (present and immediate past/future), reporting (recent past), contextualization and ritualistic functions (midrange to distant past), analysis (near future), and projection (far/conjectured future).

Collective memory is a current interpretation of the past that members of a group recognize as commonly shared. The study of collective memory has developed in fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, social psychology, history, cultural studies, and communication. Collective memory concerns a group’s recollections of the past, construed through the perspective of the present, and interpreted to serve present purposes. It emerges from active constructions of the past, typically achieved through the interplay of a wide range of actors. To become manifested as a shared narrative, resulting constructions must be widely disseminated and appropriated by individuals in a group to ensure mutual awareness. As a consequence, collective memory exists in the shared and private imagination of people, and is represented in the texts, practices, and artifacts of a group. The construction, dissemination, appropriation, and discursive mobilization of collective memory play significant roles in political processes.

This article examines the representation of past, present, and future in print and online news, while establishing a link between the temporal orientation of news stories and the constraints of the news cycle. Based on a content analysis of top news stories in the Israeli media, the study shows that a future temporal orientation is more prevalent in print media, which assume the role of projecting upcoming events, analyzing potential outcomes, and shaping collective expectations. In contrast, online news tends to assume the more commonly recognized journalistic role of informing the public on recent-past events. The discussion introduces the notion of “temporal affordances,” referring to the temporal constraints and possibilities of media technologies, which in turn can lead to distinctive content characteristics. These affordances, which connect symbolic and material dimensions, contribute to the shaping and reshaping of the functions served by divergent communication outlets in changing media landscapes.

Audience participation has become a salient component of contemporary digital news environments, challenging traditional boundaries between readers and journalists. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for the evaluation of participation features in news websites, consisting of five axes: Chronology—the stage of news production; Visibility—transparency and prominence; Agency—users’ and editors’ level of activity; Integration—segregation versus embeddedness of participatory features; and Share-ability—inner, public and social circles of activity. This framework was developed in a cross-cultural study based on a grounded theory approach. We examined participation features in 15 prominent news websites in the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel, and conducted a cross-national and cross-organizational analysis. Other than the use of advanced social plugins, no significant cross-national differences were found in the implementation of participatory features. However, the differences discovered between news organizations require further investigation into the factors shaping the selection and construction of news-based participatory features.

This article examines journalists’ narratives of the constellations of factors that shaped the coverage of the 2011–2012 social protest in Israel, and how journalists used the protest to negotiate their roles, practices, and values against the backdrop of their own professional and economic struggles. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters and editors who were involved in the coverage of the protest movement, this article analyzes journalists’ interpretations and negotiations of the various influences on their work during the two major waves of the protest. An analysis of patterns of collision and concurrence between individual, organizational, and professional domains of influence in journalists’ narratives shows that while the norm of objectivity remains a key site of tension in relation to other factors, considerations of newsworthiness are constructed as complementing and justifying all other types of influence. An examination of diachronic patterns suggests that journalists’ individual conditions and positions play a greater role in journalists’ narratives in the first stage of the protest, giving way to professional values and organizational economic considerations in later stages. Although these findings further complicate the protest paradigm, they also show a dominant pattern of “paradigm repair” at the level of both journalists’ professional ideology and protest coverage.

While memory can be both retrospective and prospective, referring to either what happened or what needs to be done, scholarship on media and collective memory has focused on retrospective memories. Shifting the focus to the news media as agents of prospective memory, this article develops the notion of mediated prospective memory. This new construct, which encompasses the various media practices by which collective prospective-memory tasks are shaped and negotiated, is intended to shed light on one facet of the complex relationships between past, present, and future in news discourse; create a much needed bridge between the theoretical frameworks of agenda setting and collective memory; and provide one possible answer to the question of what is unique about journalism’s memory work.

This article examines the journalistic practices associated with the management of visibility of kidnapping and captivity stories, based on a comparative study of the media coverage of seven cases of Colombian, French, Israeli, and US citizens who were taken captive in the first decade of the 21st century. Differences in the general level of visibility given to these stories are identified and explained, followed by an analysis of three patterns of high visibility management across time, termed ‘sustained visibility’, ‘delayed visibility’ and ‘cyclical visibility’. Emerging from the analysis is the complex interplay between hyper-visibility and invisibility in journalistic practices, as well as the notion of “elastic newsworthiness”, according to which news criteria are not only shaping patterns of visibility but are also being shaped by them.

This article proceeds from the assumption that entertainment texts—particularly controversial ones—function in a broad intertextual field and that their political significance does not lie solely in their value as stand-alone texts, or in their direct influence on political knowledge, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, but in their ability to instigate politically relevant discussions in other media venues. Focusing on the mediated discourse surrounding two controversial U.S. docudramas, The Reagans and The Path to 9/11, this study examines the political qualities of the public discourse surrounding these docudramas in the U.S. news media and investigates which factors were significant predictors of political substance in this discourse. Based on a distinction between “issue substance” and “media substance” as the two major types of political substance that emerge in the discourse surrounding controversial texts, the analysis demonstrates how these types of political substance varied across the two docudramas and across various dimensions of the discourse, among them the time in which the discussion took place. The analytical framework presented in this article is offered as a platform for future examinations of the contribution of media-centered political scandals to public discourse, the conditions under which entertainment texts spur substantive political discussions, and the complex interactions between journalism, entertainment, and politics in contemporary media environments.

This article examines the strategies and practices by which the Israeli news media negotiated and (re)appropriated a Lebanese documentary that was produced in cooperation with a French company and was purchased and broadcast by an Israeli commercial channel. Using this transnational textual event, the article explores the dynamics, opportunities and pitfalls associated with transcultural exchanges that take place in a conflictual, translocal context, and the ways in which such exchanges are shaped by an interplay of material-institutional and discursive-symbolic dimensions. The article also provides a multi-layered framework for analyzing the broadcasting and journalistic practices surrounding such textual events, and establishes the relationship between appropriation and witnessing strategies. I show how the Israeli media—driven by commercial interests and applying complex forms of witnessing and appropriation—worked to sustain national myths and suppress the potentially disruptive aspects of the documentary, while at the same time exposing the weaknesses of these myths, as well as the limits of the State’s power. Emerging from this case study is a complex picture of the multifaceted roles played by national news media in a transnational economy, and of the ways in which commercial media interests serve as both hegemonic and disruptive forces within the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

How does the journalistic community negotiate its identity, boundaries, and authority in relation to individuals and cultural forms that challenge the definitions of who is a journalist and what constitutes journalism? And how does it do so against the background of a growing academic validation of these alternative news venues? This study focuses on the figure of Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and on the stages and strategies by which Stewart was embedded into mainstream journalistic discourse, and in which journalists negotiated Stewart’s definition, authority, and position vis-à-vis the U.S. journalistic community. By examining the journalistic discourse over a period of nine years and adopting a cultural, inter-textual, process-oriented approach, the paper seeks to go beyond the framework of “paradigm repair,” attempting to account for journalism’s changing identity and boundaries, while paying particular attention to the ways in which those boundaries are shaped by a complex interplay among different players within, on, and outside the margins of the journalistic community. The paper also suggests that Stewart’s relatively successful co-optation was due to a fit between the normative and epistemological assumptions of three central players — the journalistic community, political communication scholars, and Stewart himself.

This article explores the myriad uses of television drama in mediated political discourse using the case study of 24, Fox’s counterterrorism drama. It examines references to 24 in articles and columns of nine major daily newspapers, magazines, and political Web sites from 2001 to 2007 and demonstrates how the show was invoked to support and express different political opinions, how political identity and media preferences were reconciled, and how different categories of use interacted with different political allegiances, as well as different assumptions about the ontological and epistemological status of the show. The study shows that while, at one level, fictional events and characters can function in political discourse in similar ways to nonfictional people and events, the “ontological openness” of politically relevant fictional texts serves as a resource for political discourse that is not readily available through nonfiction media texts. Finally, this article is an attempt to revisit and develop the concept of inter-textuality as a way to account for the complex interactions within the contemporary media environment, analyze media-related practices beyond direct viewing experiences, and bridge text-centered and audience-centered approaches to communication studies. Within this framework, journalists and political commentators are viewed as both mediators of other media texts for their audiences and as audiences in their own right who use these popular texts to negotiate and express their own identities and ideologies.

This article develops the concept of non-closure in sustained news stories, based on the case study of Ron Arad, an Israeli soldier who was taken captive in 1986 and whose story still continues to produce headlines in the Israeli press. Coverage of the Arad case was examined in the three major Israeli daily newspapers for a period of 17 years, and the textual mechanisms through which the story has been kept alive were identified. The article offers an analysis of three central non-closure strategies: maintaining suspense, thickening the plot, and keeping the protagonist alive. It is suggested that these strategies enhance readers’ involvement with the journalistic texts and function as a bridge between the ritual and information transmission functions of news. Non-closure is thus conceptualized as a force that operates alongside the well-studied forces of closure and renders individual news pieces as episodes in a serial narrative rather than self-contained narrative units.

The introduction of the internet to ultra-Orthodox Jewish society has presented an acute dilemma. While seen as a potential carrier of secular values and officially banned, the internet also presents significant socio-economic opportunities for a community in which women are often the sole providers. This research focuses on the discursive strategies ultra-Orthodox women internet users employ to legitimate their use of this controversial technology. A glaring disparity was observed between these women’s actual, subversive technology-related practices and the rhetorical construction of the same practices, which attempted to portray them as congruent with community values. We suggest that when investigating the domestication of new technologies, examining technology-related discourse may be no less important than the more common to date focus on practice.