Donald Matheson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1245143 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donald Matheson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donald |
| FAMILY NAME | Matheson |
| SIGNATURE | MATHESON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canterbury |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9031-3670 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 207 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Journalism, Invasive Species, and Marginalized Environmental Discourse on Social Media
Invasive species are a threat to ecosystems around the world. In public discourse, however, the topic is marginalized and occluded. This article explores that marginality in terms of identity and positioning work in specialist journalists’ tweets. Two countries with high incursion risks, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States, are studied. The article finds that invasive species are largely left in the realm of the technical and excluded from…
Introduction to Special Issue
This paper introduces the concerns of the papers in the Special Issue and examines communication as a chameleon discipline that responds and adapts to sometimes very challenging contexts. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the diversity of approaches that exist in communication studies and shows how this diversity offers both opportunities to be resourceful and hurdles to be managed. The paper reflects on the definitional ambiguity of co…
Capital, labour and currency
This article examines the relationship between emotion, production and sales in the book publishing industry, specifically how ‘book love’ operates in the publication and promotion of Young Adult (YA) titles. Through interviews conducted in 2020–2023, the article examines how commissioning editors, booksellers and associated professionals in Australia experience and use emotion in their production and sale of YA titles. It argues that emotion pla…
What is Rural Journalism? Occupational Precarity and Social Cohesion in US Rural Journalism Epistemology
Given the recent focus on news poverty and gaps in local journalism, rural journalists would seem to have a challenging job. This study seeks to understand the novel experiences and challenges of journalists who cover rural communities and how they conceptualize their knowledge-building practices. Through the lens of journalistic epistemology, researchers conducted a two-step, in-depth interview procedure with rural US journalists (n = 61) to bet…
The epistemology of live blogging
This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1)…
The performance of publicness in social media
This article sets out to contribute to the critical understanding of public communication in social media by studying the use of Twitter after a severe earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. It also sets out to contribute to methodologies for studying this particular kind of publicness. It argues that the contours of the ‘social imaginary’ of the public, which are usually so hard to delineate and can be approached only in fragments or typica…
ANZCA news
Rethinking public relations in the Australian and New Zealand communication landscape
ANZCA News
When the Photojournalist Returns
This paper concerns the contemporary status of the documentary or news photograph of suffering. Using the paradigmatic case of the return of photojournalists to the scenes of compelling images they have made, it suggests a contemporary need to reconnect them with the lives and voices of those photographed. The paper draws upon theories of photojournalism that emphasize the need to take their connection to the real seriously and describe the civic…
ANZCA Australian & New Zealand Communication Association News
Talking in a Crowded Room
This article analyses two of New Zealand's foremost political blogs on public affairs in the four weeks prior to the 2008 New Zealand general election. The 2008 election represents, we argue, a moment when the scale and reach of blogging propelled it to a position of significance in New Zealand media. The study uses content analysis to track the material posted on these blogs and in their comments sections. It is concerned primarily with quantify…
Minding the Gaps
This article is a reflection - from the position of a journalism researcher - on one of the distinctive features of research on Aotearoa New Zealand media and communication and some of the reasons for that. Studying and teaching about this field in Aotearoa New Zealand is a matter of negotiating the large gaps in academic knowledge about the local situation. In particular, the article suggests researchers prioritise theory-building about the posi…
Positioning in Media Dialogue
This book is a series of analyses of how interviewers and interviewees position themselves and \neach other in Israeli television news interviews, all based on interviews from the early evening \ncurrent affairs show, ‘Erev Xadash’ in the early 1990s. There is a lot of convincing, not to \nmention enjoyable, close analysis of moments of verbal sparring in Israeli televised politics that \nwill add to understanding of the news interview and of ins…
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics and Journalism Research
The philosophical hermeneutics of German phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer \n(1900-2002) is rarely cited in journalism studies, although it is better known in the fields of \nhistory, literary study and classical philology. I would like to suggest here that journalism \nstudies can make fruitful use of the philosophical concepts he developed, in particular to \nuse those ideas to bring journalism's interpretative work to the fore in critical enq…
In Search of Popular Journalism in New Zealand
This paper explores the discourses of popular legitimacy deployed by New Zealand journalists. It studies in particular the ways that journalists reflect upon their relationship with “the people”, through their comments in such forums as trade publications, addresses to readers in the voice of the editor and memoirs. It argues that the dominant journalistic voices in Aotearoa New Zealand provide a narrow and poorly defined set of resources to desc…
Blogging the New Zealand Election
While the audiences for news and current affairs on the Internet are small, the Re is evidence from the United States that some online media are having a disproportionate influence on public affairs through their impact on the wider mediasphere. In particular, weblogs are credited with fact-checking the news media, widening the news agenda and forging new kinds of information networks. What is far from clear, however, is whethe R these new media …
Negotiating Claims to Journalism
This paper explores how writers of online diaries, or weblogs, about public affairs negotiate their relationship with the genres and social position of news journalism. Although often labelled radical journalists, this paper finds, through interviews with seven webloggers, that such writers orient themselves in complex ways towards news journalism, at times drawing upon its modes of knowledge, at times setting themselves in opposition to it and a…
Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News
Journalism has been slow to develop distinctive forms in response to the new contexts provided by the internet. One rapidly developing form, unique to the world wide web, is the weblog. This article reviews the claims made by proponents of the form and explores, through the case study of a weblog produced by the British Guardian newspaper, epistemological differences to the dominant Anglo-American news form. The article argues that the rearticula…
Scowling at their Notebooks
This article examines the understanding of newswriting within British print news journalism and, in particular, the practice’s management of the role of language in the news. Its material comprises journalists’ reflections on their practice in metatexts such as memoirs and textbooks. The article draws on phenomenological sociology and Bourdieu’s theorization of the censorship of ways of speaking within the journalistic community to show how writi…
Multimodal Discourse
The birth of news discourse
This article examines some changes in news style in British newspapers between about 1880 and 1930 and proposes that they provide evidence of the emergence of a coherent and self-sufficient discourse of the news. It argues that changes in the ways in which the news has represented the world are as important as technological or economic changes to the development of the 20th-century news form, and that it is therefore important to look closely at …
Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News
Journalism has been slow to develop distinctive forms in response to the new contexts provided by the internet. One rapidly developing form, unique to the world wide web, is the weblog. This article reviews the claims made by proponents of the form and explores, through the case study of a weblog produced by the British Guardian newspaper, epistemological differences to the dominant Anglo-American news form. The article argues that the rearticula…
The epistemology of live blogging
This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1)…
The birth of news discourse
This article examines some changes in news style in British newspapers between about 1880 and 1930 and proposes that they provide evidence of the emergence of a coherent and self-sufficient discourse of the news. It argues that changes in the ways in which the news has represented the world are as important as technological or economic changes to the development of the 20th-century news form, and that it is therefore important to look closely at …
Scowling at their Notebooks
This article examines the understanding of newswriting within British print news journalism and, in particular, the practice’s management of the role of language in the news. Its material comprises journalists’ reflections on their practice in metatexts such as memoirs and textbooks. The article draws on phenomenological sociology and Bourdieu’s theorization of the censorship of ways of speaking within the journalistic community to show how writi…
Negotiating Claims to Journalism
This paper explores how writers of online diaries, or weblogs, about public affairs negotiate their relationship with the genres and social position of news journalism. Although often labelled radical journalists, this paper finds, through interviews with seven webloggers, that such writers orient themselves in complex ways towards news journalism, at times drawing upon its modes of knowledge, at times setting themselves in opposition to it and a…
The performance of publicness in social media
This article sets out to contribute to the critical understanding of public communication in social media by studying the use of Twitter after a severe earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. It also sets out to contribute to methodologies for studying this particular kind of publicness. It argues that the contours of the ‘social imaginary’ of the public, which are usually so hard to delineate and can be approached only in fragments or typica…
What is Rural Journalism? Occupational Precarity and Social Cohesion in US Rural Journalism Epistemology
Given the recent focus on news poverty and gaps in local journalism, rural journalists would seem to have a challenging job. This study seeks to understand the novel experiences and challenges of journalists who cover rural communities and how they conceptualize their knowledge-building practices. Through the lens of journalistic epistemology, researchers conducted a two-step, in-depth interview procedure with rural US journalists (n = 61) to bet…
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics and Journalism Research
The philosophical hermeneutics of German phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer \n(1900-2002) is rarely cited in journalism studies, although it is better known in the fields of \nhistory, literary study and classical philology. I would like to suggest here that journalism \nstudies can make fruitful use of the philosophical concepts he developed, in particular to \nuse those ideas to bring journalism's interpretative work to the fore in critical enq…
Minding the Gaps
This article is a reflection - from the position of a journalism researcher - on one of the distinctive features of research on Aotearoa New Zealand media and communication and some of the reasons for that. Studying and teaching about this field in Aotearoa New Zealand is a matter of negotiating the large gaps in academic knowledge about the local situation. In particular, the article suggests researchers prioritise theory-building about the posi…
Blogging the New Zealand Election
While the audiences for news and current affairs on the Internet are small, the Re is evidence from the United States that some online media are having a disproportionate influence on public affairs through their impact on the wider mediasphere. In particular, weblogs are credited with fact-checking the news media, widening the news agenda and forging new kinds of information networks. What is far from clear, however, is whethe R these new media …
Rethinking public relations in the Australian and New Zealand communication landscape
The birth of news discourse
This article examines some changes in news style in British newspapers between about 1880 and 1930 and proposes that they provide evidence of the emergence of a coherent and self-sufficient discourse of the news. It argues that changes in the ways in which the news has represented the world are as important as technological or economic changes to the development of the 20th-century news form, and that it is therefore important to look closely at …
Multimodal Discourse
Scowling at their Notebooks
This article examines the understanding of newswriting within British print news journalism and, in particular, the practice’s management of the role of language in the news. Its material comprises journalists’ reflections on their practice in metatexts such as memoirs and textbooks. The article draws on phenomenological sociology and Bourdieu’s theorization of the censorship of ways of speaking within the journalistic community to show how writi…
Negotiating Claims to Journalism
This paper explores how writers of online diaries, or weblogs, about public affairs negotiate their relationship with the genres and social position of news journalism. Although often labelled radical journalists, this paper finds, through interviews with seven webloggers, that such writers orient themselves in complex ways towards news journalism, at times drawing upon its modes of knowledge, at times setting themselves in opposition to it and a…
Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News
Journalism has been slow to develop distinctive forms in response to the new contexts provided by the internet. One rapidly developing form, unique to the world wide web, is the weblog. This article reviews the claims made by proponents of the form and explores, through the case study of a weblog produced by the British Guardian newspaper, epistemological differences to the dominant Anglo-American news form. The article argues that the rearticula…
Blogging the New Zealand Election
While the audiences for news and current affairs on the Internet are small, the Re is evidence from the United States that some online media are having a disproportionate influence on public affairs through their impact on the wider mediasphere. In particular, weblogs are credited with fact-checking the news media, widening the news agenda and forging new kinds of information networks. What is far from clear, however, is whethe R these new media …
In Search of Popular Journalism in New Zealand
This paper explores the discourses of popular legitimacy deployed by New Zealand journalists. It studies in particular the ways that journalists reflect upon their relationship with “the people”, through their comments in such forums as trade publications, addresses to readers in the voice of the editor and memoirs. It argues that the dominant journalistic voices in Aotearoa New Zealand provide a narrow and poorly defined set of resources to desc…
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics and Journalism Research
The philosophical hermeneutics of German phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer \n(1900-2002) is rarely cited in journalism studies, although it is better known in the fields of \nhistory, literary study and classical philology. I would like to suggest here that journalism \nstudies can make fruitful use of the philosophical concepts he developed, in particular to \nuse those ideas to bring journalism's interpretative work to the fore in critical enq…
Minding the Gaps
This article is a reflection - from the position of a journalism researcher - on one of the distinctive features of research on Aotearoa New Zealand media and communication and some of the reasons for that. Studying and teaching about this field in Aotearoa New Zealand is a matter of negotiating the large gaps in academic knowledge about the local situation. In particular, the article suggests researchers prioritise theory-building about the posi…
Positioning in Media Dialogue
This book is a series of analyses of how interviewers and interviewees position themselves and \neach other in Israeli television news interviews, all based on interviews from the early evening \ncurrent affairs show, ‘Erev Xadash’ in the early 1990s. There is a lot of convincing, not to \nmention enjoyable, close analysis of moments of verbal sparring in Israeli televised politics that \nwill add to understanding of the news interview and of ins…
Talking in a Crowded Room
This article analyses two of New Zealand's foremost political blogs on public affairs in the four weeks prior to the 2008 New Zealand general election. The 2008 election represents, we argue, a moment when the scale and reach of blogging propelled it to a position of significance in New Zealand media. The study uses content analysis to track the material posted on these blogs and in their comments sections. It is concerned primarily with quantify…
When the Photojournalist Returns
This paper concerns the contemporary status of the documentary or news photograph of suffering. Using the paradigmatic case of the return of photojournalists to the scenes of compelling images they have made, it suggests a contemporary need to reconnect them with the lives and voices of those photographed. The paper draws upon theories of photojournalism that emphasize the need to take their connection to the real seriously and describe the civic…
ANZCA Australian & New Zealand Communication Association News
ANZCA news
Rethinking public relations in the Australian and New Zealand communication landscape
ANZCA News
The performance of publicness in social media
This article sets out to contribute to the critical understanding of public communication in social media by studying the use of Twitter after a severe earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. It also sets out to contribute to methodologies for studying this particular kind of publicness. It argues that the contours of the ‘social imaginary’ of the public, which are usually so hard to delineate and can be approached only in fragments or typica…
The epistemology of live blogging
This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1)…
Introduction to Special Issue
This paper introduces the concerns of the papers in the Special Issue and examines communication as a chameleon discipline that responds and adapts to sometimes very challenging contexts. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the diversity of approaches that exist in communication studies and shows how this diversity offers both opportunities to be resourceful and hurdles to be managed. The paper reflects on the definitional ambiguity of co…
Capital, labour and currency
This article examines the relationship between emotion, production and sales in the book publishing industry, specifically how ‘book love’ operates in the publication and promotion of Young Adult (YA) titles. Through interviews conducted in 2020–2023, the article examines how commissioning editors, booksellers and associated professionals in Australia experience and use emotion in their production and sale of YA titles. It argues that emotion pla…
What is Rural Journalism? Occupational Precarity and Social Cohesion in US Rural Journalism Epistemology
Given the recent focus on news poverty and gaps in local journalism, rural journalists would seem to have a challenging job. This study seeks to understand the novel experiences and challenges of journalists who cover rural communities and how they conceptualize their knowledge-building practices. Through the lens of journalistic epistemology, researchers conducted a two-step, in-depth interview procedure with rural US journalists (n = 61) to bet…
Journalism, Invasive Species, and Marginalized Environmental Discourse on Social Media
Invasive species are a threat to ecosystems around the world. In public discourse, however, the topic is marginalized and occluded. This article explores that marginality in terms of identity and positioning work in specialist journalists’ tweets. Two countries with high incursion risks, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States, are studied. The article finds that invasive species are largely left in the realm of the technical and excluded from…
Sociology (20 works) · Media studies (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Social science (9 works) · Journalism (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Politics (7 works)