The emerging ‘Alternative’ journalism paradigm: Arab journalists and online news
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The shifting political landscape in the Middle East and North Africa have riveted the world’s attention and drawn media scholars’ scrutiny to the ‘Arab Internet’ at large. Despite this attention, research on the ‘Arab Internet’ has not received its due, and it is even more limited when it comes to exploring online news and journalism. Scholarly works and mainstream media commentary on the subject continue to be predominantly anecdotal with little support from grounded data and evidence. Striving to fill this gap, we argue in this article that the Internet’s seeds of the ‘Arab Spring’ were fomenting for years, slowly but perceptibly transforming Arab news and journalism. To understand these social upheavals requires a dissection of ‘online journalism’, i.e. the new forms of journalistic practice facilitated by the Web. This article analyses the burgeoning online journalism field in the Arab world, and debates the journalism shifts wrought by the Internet, and the future of journalism practices in the Arab world. We argue that Arab online journalists are constructing a new mode of professional practice, best described as ‘alternative’ journalism practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".