E&P 9.

4: News dissemination during crises: Then and now

Times of national crisis contribute, among other things, to an outpouring of communication
informal and formal, personal and public, mediated and face-to-face. Studies of these moments have
created a recognized genre of scholarship. While not the first of such studies, those conducted after
the assignation of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 occupy a central position in this
literature, in part because of the extensiveness of research conducted. A large sampling of this work
is assembled in the edited volume by Bradley Greenberg and Edwin Parker, The Kennedy
Assassination and the American Public: Social Communication in Crisis (1965). Although prepared
nearly a half-century ago, the contributions to the book are testimony to the almost universal desire
to create scholarly understanding of tumultuous social moments.
Distribution of news and information during crises has changed in the past half-century. Now,
transmission is almost immediate; news appears in multimedia format, is prepared by citizen
journalists at the scene of crisis long before news agencies arrive, and is distributed through
electronic networks to the far corners of the globe at the speed of electricity. Or is the distribution so
radically different now than then?
As introduction to the Greenberg and Parker volume, Wilbur Schramm formulated some of the
questions he felt were central:
what happens between a news event and its appearance in the media.How was it
covered? How were the decisions made about what people to talk to, what questions to ask,
what pictures to take? What concepts of public interest governed the choice of details? What
standards of evidence determined when a report should be incorporated into the news?
What is the difference between news coverage policies for press and for broadcast?
(Schramm, 1965: 10)
While these questions remain of importance today, they seem short of the mark in an era of usergenerated content and social media. As introductory and relatively informal exercise, compose
questions that seem relevant today with the ubiquitous presence of social media. With this set of
brainstorm-style questions in hand, examine the questions posed by contemporary scholars who
strive to understand the process of communication during times of crisis. There are many moments
of crisis that have been investigated, such as: the terrorist attack of 9/11 (Entman, 2003; Li & Izard,
2003; Spence et al., 2006), the tsunami in Japan (Acar & Muraki, 2011; Hjorth & Kim, 2011), the Arab
Spring (Ahy, 2014; Allagui, 2014; Howard & Duffy, 2011; Iskander, 2011). Select one such moment
and examine the scholarship published; compare the questions asked in those studies with those
formulated by Schramm and other contributors to the Greenberg and Parker volume.
References
Acar, A., & Muraki, Y. (2011). Twitter for crisis communication: lessons learned from Japans tsunami
disaster. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 7(3), 392.
Ahy, M. H. (2014). Networked communication and the Arab Spring: Linking broadcast and social
media. New Media & Society, 1461444814538634.
Allagui, I. (2014). Arab Revolutions: Breaking Fear| Waiting for Spring: Arab Resistance and Change
Editorial Introduction. International Journal of Communication. Retrieved from
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2727
Entman, R. M. (2003). Cascading Activation: Contesting the White Houses Frame After 9/11. Political
Communication, 20(4), 415432.
Greenberg, B. S., & Parker, E. (Eds.). (1965). The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public:
Social Communication in Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hjorth, L., & Kim, K. -h. Y. (2011). The Mourning After: A Case Study of Social Media in the 3.11
Earthquake Disaster in Japan. Television & New Media, 12(6), 552559.
Howard, P. N., & Duffy, A. (2011). What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab Spring?, 130.
Iskander, E. (2011). The Arab Spring| Connecting the National and the Virtual: Can Social Media Have
a Role in Institution-building After Egypts January 25 Uprising? International Journal of
Communication, 5, 13. Retrieved from http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1165
Li, X., & Izard, R. (2003). 9/11 Attack Coverage Reveals Similarities, Differences. Newspaper Research
Journal, 24(1), 204.
Schramm, W. (1965). Introduction: Communication in crisis. In B. S. Greenburg & E. Parker (Eds.), The
Kennedy Assassination and the American Public: Social Communication in Crisis (pp. 121).
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Spence, P. R., Westerman, D., Skalski, P. D., Seeger, M., Sellnow, T. L., & Ulmer, R. R. (2006). Gender
and Age Effects on Information-Seeking after 9/11. Communication Research Reports, 23(3),
217223.
Additional resources
Doan, S., Vo, B. H., & Collier, N. (2011). An analysis of Twitter messages in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.
Tokyo. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.1618.pdf
Imran, M., Castillo, C., Diaz, F., & Vieweg, S. (2014). Processing Social Media Messages in Mass
Emergency: A Survey. Qatar. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7071v2
Johnson, A. (2014). Cartographies of disaster. The Japanese earthquake changed our relationship to
place, and post-disaster social media changed it again. Reform. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/re-form/cartographies-of-disaster-24fe711d04e6
Lindsay, B. R. (2011). Social Media and Disasters: Current Uses, Future Options, and Policy
Considerations. Washington, DC.
Palen, L. (2008). Online Social Media in Crisis Events. EdDUCAUSE Review Online Review Online.
Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/online-social-media-crisis-events
Schultz, F., Utz, S., & Gritz, A. (2011). Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to
crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media. Public Relations Review, 37(1),
2027.
Slater, D. H., Keiko, N., & Kindstrand, L. (2012). Social Media, Information and Political Activism in
Japans 3.11 Crisis. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 10(24). Retrieved from
http://www.japanfocus.org/-nishimura-keiko/3762