Paško Bilić, PhD senior research associate from the Department of Culture and Communications (IRMO), is the main author of the article entitled ‘Digital news media as a social resilience proxy: A computational political economy perspective’ in the journal New Media & Society, indexed in the Web of Science databases and Scopus. The journal is ranked in the first quartile (Q1) in sociology, political science, and communication sciences. The article was written in collaboration with David Dukić, Lucija Arambašić, Matej Gjurković and Jan Šnajder from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) of the University of Zagreb and Ivo Furman from Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. The research was created within the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) project ‘Resilience of Croatian society due to the COVID-19 pandemic’ (IP-CORONA-2020-04) led by Branko Ančić, PhD from the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb.
Abstract
This article investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic was framed in public, private and non-profit media production. It conceptualises digital news as an indicator of social resilience and the interaction between social and biological/natural systems. We analysed news articles published in 2020/2021 on 21 Croatian websites using natural language processing. We collected 985,850 articles and manually coded samples to train different classifiers. The first classifier was developed to determine which articles relate to COVID-19. The second classifier was used for articles’ topic classification; the third classifier was used to classify articles into resilience classes. A limited discussion of transformative (long-term) resilience, especially in private media, contributed to the most significant content share. The debate focused on keeping the status quo through coping or returning to pre-pandemic conditions through adaptive mechanisms. The news media contributed to how public issues were framed and how science and scientific research were discussed.
Article is available at the link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231214149
