The stigma of mental illness is pervasive in adolescents and interferes with treatment and overall life quality for those with disorders. A strategy for reducing stigma is to create awareness of counterstereotypes that can undermine the perceived homogeneity of the stigmatized group and promote help seeking for those with the illness. This study tested the strategy by presenting counterstereotypical information about the effectiveness of treatment for major depression in a national survey of youth ages 14 to 22 (N = 1,258), some of whom had experienced symptoms of depression (N = 284). The information was presented either before or after evaluating an untreated person with major depression. Despite the stigma of the mental illness stereotype, respondents reported lower levels of unfavorable stereotype expectations and reduced stigma for an individual with major depression who had been successfully treated compared with one who was not treated. The effect was robust across differences in beliefs about treatment efficacy and experiences with symptoms of depression; it was even stronger when the counterstereotypical information was presented after respondents evaluated an untreated person. The results indicate that messages focusing on persons who have been successfully treated are part of a promising strategy for reducing the stigma of mental illness in young people.

Police accountability organizations known as "cop-watching" groups are proliferating thanks to smartphone penetration and the ease of video sharing on social networks. These groups use digital media technologies to challenge official accounts of events and encroach on the borders of traditional journalism. This qualitative project collected material over the course of 2 years, and uses participant observation and long-form interviews to explore the nature of this activism. Grounded analysis suggests that cop-watching represents a unique form of citizenship; one that combines text and practice to produce embodied narratives, which can give voice to the concerns of others. As a form of so-called sousveillance, cop-watching extends and complicates existing theories about surveillance, journalism, and visual evidence.

Video has become a key component for multi-media newspaper websites. Working with video is often a new skill for print-based journalists, who previously may have considered it the province of television news organizations. Institutional convention has held up television news as a foil to still images and the printed word, a dualism that has fostered hierarchal thinking about video and its normative role in journalism. Such hierarchal thinking, or what Pierre Bourdieu discussed in terms of distinction, is often reflected in institutional, automatic, unconscious daily practices. This study looks through Bourdieu’s lens at a set of observational and interview data to describe the way journalists in newspaper organizations are adopting video for presenting news. The study finds that newspaper journalists, both writers and still photojournalists, are responding in ways that allow them to claim a distinct form of multi-media presentation, thereby sustaining their place in the traditional journalistic hierarchy.

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This article represents a qualitative analysis of the Twitter feed from one news organization during the first phase of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. The tweets, images, and videos from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalists constitute a real-time record as the protests unfolded. By applying a strand of framing theory known as the protest paradigm, the analysis discovered that journalists’ tweeting marganalized protesters and framed police officers as dispassionate protectors of social order. Journalists’ tweeting of protesters took on a more sympthatic tone when they both were subjected to police tear gas.These findings have implications for the coverage of race, violence, and protests in the United States as well as the way Twitter binds and represents an interpretive community.

Video has become a central part of news on the web. As an emerging form of news, news videos are appearing with varied narrative structures, styles and formats. Narrative structure is one way that journalists establish discursive authority. Because of contrasting traditions regarding visual news, newspaper videos might be expected to employ different narrative strategies. This content analysis compared the narrative structure of videos posted by newspaper websites with those posted by television organizations. It finds that form reflects contrasting traditions, with newspaper videos taking a more mimetic (showing) approach and television websites using a more diegetic (telling) narrative style.

New media technologies allow for unprecedented participation in the public sphere, with financial investments on a par with other mainstream hobbies. Citizen video journalists (VJs) are acquiring the technical, and in some cases, narrative skills needed to participate in online discourse. Yet citizen VJs lack the institutional authority enjoyed by professional journalists. This project compares the narrative strategies employed by professional and non-professional VJs to assert their authority. Practitioners were observed in a variety of professional and activist contexts in the UK and the USA over the course of two years and their stories were subjected to textual analysis. The project identifies emerging strategies used by citizen VJs to establish authority.

Highly publicized deaths of Black men during police encounters have inspired a renewed civil rights movement originating with a Twitter hashtag, “Black Lives Matter.” Supporters of the law enforcement community quickly countered with an intervention of their own, using the slogan, “Blue Lives Matter.” This project compared the discourses of their respective Facebook groups using cultural discourse analysis that considered words, images, and their symbiosis. Based on a foundation of structural Marxism as articulated by Althusser, this project found that the two groups’ symbol systems are homologous with larger, ideological tensions in American culture: faith and reason.