The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform’s affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok’s features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.

This article examines the historical contingency of news values as evidenced in journalism historiography and more than a century of journalism reporting and writing textbooks dating to 1894. Textbooks are important distillers and (re)constructors of journalists’ conceptions of news and not-news. Findings suggest that although key news values such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, unusualness, conflict, human interest, and impact have been fundamentally stable since the early 1900s, the way those values are applied to reporting depends on the sociocultural context of the era. A key implication is that news values are neither natural nor inevitable, but rather within journalists’ power to change.

This case study examines a creative approach by two journalism professors to enhance experiential learning in separate skills-based newswriting and editing courses by collaborating to produce a live online news report from campus each week on a four-hour deadline. The study builds on previous research into how innovative classroom structures that engage students in practical, published journalistic work affect learning and students’ response to their experiences.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, is widely credited with altering Americans’ environmental consciousness and changing people’s relationship with nature, science, and government. One means by which the book, which chronicled the dangers of pesticides, has attained and reinforced its symbolic status in collective memory is through newspaper coverage, which remained persistent through its first five decades. This study of 50 years of Silent Spring in two elite newspapers traces how news media can help elevate a situated artifact into an enduring icon with contemporary power—not just through thoughtful, well-researched journalism but also through numerous instrumental decisions by copy editors, agate clerks, and calendar compilers.

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