Zoekresultaten

New moral dilemmas in online journalism

In this article, the main question is whether and, if so, to what extent online journalism raises new moral issues and, if any, what kind of answers are preferable. Or do questions merely appear new, since they are really old ones in an electronic wrapping, old wine in new bottles? And how does journalism deal with the moral aspects of online journalism? The phenomenon of the Internet emerged in our society a few years ago. Since then, a large number of Dutch people have gone online, and the World Wide Web is now an integral part of our range of means of communication. Dutch journalism is online too, although certainly not in the lead. More and more journalists use the Internet as a source, especially for background information. Newspapers have their web sites, where the online version of the printed paper can be read. And that is it for the time being. There are no more far-reaching developments at present, certainly not on a large scale. Real online journalism is rather scarce in the Netherlands. The debate concerning the moral aspects of online journalism is mainly being conducted in the United States. First of all, by way of introduction, I will present an outline of online journalism. The first instance is the online version of the newspaper. Here, only to a certain degree new issues come up for discussion, since the reputation of reliability and accuracy of the papers, in spite of all criticism, also applies to their online versions. Besides, especially in the United States and increasingly in European countries as well, there is the so-called dotcom journalism, the e-zines, the online news sites without any relationship with printed newspapers. This may be the reason why these sites do not have a strong commitment to moral standards, at least as they have developed in the journalistic culture of the newspapers. After having outlined the moral issues arising in online journalism, the question will be addressed whether and, if so, to what extent it is meaningful and desirable to develop instruments of self-regulation for this new phenomenon of journalism.

Developmental needs of adolescents in the online lifeworld in the context of youth work

The online lifeworld gives adolescents various opportunities to meet their developmental needs. Not all young people benefit from these opportunities. They encounter negative experiences, have difficulties fulfilling their needs and engage in risky and harmful behaviours in the online lifeworld. This poses challenges for Dutch youth work professionals, as little is known about the digital lives of Dutch adolescents and the challenges they encounter when meeting their developmental needs in the online lifeworld. In this qualitative study, a photovoice method was used to collect screenshots from adolescents (N = 175) concerning their experiences and needs in the online lifeworld. Six types of developmental needs in the online lifeworld were distinguished. The article concludes that understanding how adolescents use online affordances to fulfil their developmental needs is a starting point for all youth work professionals in providing adequate support to adolescents in the online lifeworld.

What drives consumers to use local online retail platforms?

Local online retail platforms (LORPs) are gaining popularity as digital channels that can increase physical retail agglomerations’ attractiveness and viability by stimulating online sales and consumer footfall. However, insights are needed to enrich academic understanding and guide practitioners in their decision-making process regarding use and optimization of these platforms for boosting retail agglomeration vitality. Drawing on uses and gratifications theory, an online survey of 442 Dutch consumers revealed that positive attitudes toward browsing LORPs induced both online purchase and offline visit intentions. Interestingly, despite LORPs' local focus, non-place-specific motives more substantially impacted positive browsing-related attitudes toward LORPs than place-specific ones.

The Role of Fake Review Detection in Managing Online Corporate Reputation

In a recent official statement, Google highlighted the negative effects of fake reviews on review websites and specifically requested companies not to buy and users not to accept payments to provide fake reviews (Google, 2019). Also, governmental authorities started acting against organisations that show to have a high number of fake reviews on their apps (DigitalTrends, 2018; Gov UK, 2020; ACM, 2017). However, while the phenomenon of fake reviews is well-known in industries as online journalism and business and travel portals, it remains a difficult challenge in software engineering (Martens & Maalej, 2019). Fake reviews threaten the reputation of an organisation and lead to a disvalued source to determine the public opinion about brands. Negative fake reviews can lead to confusion for customers and a loss of sales. Positive fake reviews might also lead to wrong insights about real users’ needs and requirements. Although fake reviews have been studied for a while now, there are only a limited number of spam detection models available for companies to protect their corporate reputation. Especially in times with the coronavirus, organisations need to put extra focus on online presence and limit the amount of negative input that affects their competitive position which can even lead to business loss. Given state-of-the-art derived features that can be engineered from review texts, a spam detector based on supervised machine learning is derived in an experiment that performs quite well on the well-known Amazon Mechanical Turk dataset.

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Personalization of Point-of-Purchase Communications: Quo Vadis?

In an era of information overload, relevance is key. Even more so in thephysical store, where consumers are in a ‘shopping state of mind’ (Shankaret al., 2010), and where still a significant proportion of all purchasedecisions is being made.Relevance can be achieved by filtering information and targeting shopperswith context-aware messages (Riegger at al. 2022). A commonly studiedexample is that of location-based messaging (i.e. aligning the message withthe consumers’ geographic position; Meents et al. 2020). An alternativeapproach is to adapt the message to the characteristics and behavior of thein-store receiver in question, implying personalization of communication.Various technological devices can be used by retailers to transferpersonalized messages to shoppers in their stores. The focus of this studyis on digital signage (DS) in stores, as these are commonly used byretailers for their digital in-store communication.While the personalization of DS messages may benefit customers (e.g.message relevance), it also comes with high perceived risk to individualprivacy (Hess et al. 2020) To employ these type of personalized messageseffectively, it is important to understand how customers feel and respond.The present study has four objectives, examining (1) whether theperceived benefits of varying levels of personalized DS communication atthe point-of-sale outweigh the perceived risks, (2) why or why not, and (3)who is more and less open to it, and (4) for which specific situations is itmore accepted. We address these objectives both from a practitioner andconsumer perspective, using a mixed-methods approach.First, we have conducted 16 exploratory expert interviews with variousspecialists in the domain of artificial intelligence, shopper marketing, datamanagement and consumer privacy. Transcripts have been contentanalyzedusing NVIVO 12 software. Insights emerged in terms of how toimplement personalized targeting via DS in retail stores, minding legal aswell as ethical challenges in preserving consumer privacy. For example,the level of personalization via in-store digital screens differs greatly; DScontent can be adapted based on customers’ demographics, emotions,preferences and shopping behavior, and all possible combinations of suchpersonal information. It is expected that customers will responddifferently, depending on the level of personalization.In Spring 2023, these results will be complemented based on a consumersurvey. That way, consumers and a multitude of specialists in the smartservices context of personalized communication at the point-of-sale havebeen investigated, allowing for setting the boundaries in terms ofdesirability and feasibility (technology- and privacy preservation-wise).