The article aims to draw attention to the growing importance of the time variable in media consumption research in a situation of a specific oversupply of content concerning consumer expectations. One of the new phenomena in media consumption is the parallel use of multiple media and content at the same time (multitasking). The traditional division of daily time into working, home, and free time is losing importance, and media consumption occurs in hybrid time. The article reviews the literature on selected research and the concept of media consumption time and the attention economy. The report highlights the need for an in-depth study on the impact of hybrid media consumption on the work environment and private life.

The paper contains a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the news services of the three largest broadcasters and three events essential for the functioning of the state and public life in Poland. The first one was the amendment to the Supreme Court Act of July 2017. The second event was the local elections campaign in Poland (broadcasts aired on the 18th of October 2018, the last but one day of the elections campaign), while the third set of material were the news items on the murder of the Mayor of Gdańsk – Paweł Adamowicz (broadcasts aired on the 15th of January 2019, one day after the tragic event). The analysis focused on the evening news editions by the three most popular broadcasters with the highest viewership, including commercial stations (i.e. TVN’s Fakty and Polsat’s Wydarzenia) and the public broadcaster (i.e. the Polish Television’s Wiadomości). In total, 43 news items of 2 hours, 20 minutes and 6 seconds were analysed. The study has revealed a clear polarisation of news content coming from the licensed broadcasters and the public service broadcaster.

The aim of this paper is to recognize the factors limiting journalists’ sense of autonomy and affecting the level of their self-censorship during the last three decades of the post-transformation period. The issue will be addressed two-fold. First, we will analyze changes in the journalists’ perception on their professional autonomy. Second, we will examine trends in relations between the political system and media system in Poland since the 1990s. The findings show that in the 1990s journalists were still much more concerned about the political factors which could affect their work than about the economic ones. A decade later they had become much more aware of the economic pressures on their profession, such as owners’ expectations and market-driven journalism. In the last few years, however, the constant pressure of ongoing government reforms aimed at bringing the press under tighter political control, as well as the emphasis on ‘national’ content, has already led to some degree of self-censorship on the part of journalists.

The aim of the research was to establish the factors that journalists consider to be of the greatest significance when building the audience’s trust. The research was conducted between the 5th of January and the 31st of January 2020 via a digital platform supporting survey studies. The questionnaire included 13 factual questions (2 open-ended and 11 closed-ended) and 3 questions designed to determine the profiles of 67 respondents. In order to address the research questions, statistical analyses of the feedback were performed using the IBM SPSS Statistics package. The research is the first stage of a research project focusing on the question of trust in journalists. The article complements and elaborates on the available research findings and scientific analyses concerning the community of Polish journalists.

This article is the result of noticing the need to transpose the gatekeeping theory. Technological progress has left its mark on the media ecosystem, generating and then strengthening the convergence processes, and has also changed the understanding of gatekeeping. The architecture of new media, especially social media, places gatekeeping in the context of the network. This allows one to look at the classically understood process from a new perspective, in which the key is to base the concept on network diffusion. Contemporary gatekeeping should be analyzed in the context of such mechanisms as: information bubble, echo chamber, filtering information by users and algorithms. Basic conceptual categories, the gate and the keeper, are also modified. There is a noticeable trend towards the transformation of gatekeeping towards gatewatching, in which social media users do not create their own gates, but observe and use already existing gates. Gatekeeping in the era of social media makes the audience an important element of it, moving towards secondary gatekeeping.

The aim of this study was to describe how the gazeta.pl website newsroom conducted the media narrative regarding restrictions on social, professional and private life based on articles about the COVID-19 epidemic published on the website. The study covered the period from the 14th of January 2020 (publication of the first thematic text related to the epidemic) to the 20th of May 2020 (date of lifting of the requirement to wear face masks in outdoor settings). The research material comprised 16,414 news stories published on the gazeta.pl website in which the word coronavirus was used. The texts were classified into 12 thematic groups. Firstly, the research results indicate that the subject of the pandemic follows the principles of the life cycle of a news topic. In addition, a more detailed, five-phase version of the news topic life cycle concept was proposed. Secondly, no positive correlation was identified between the number of new stories on COVID-19 and the number of confirmed cases of the disease. Lastly, the correlation between the number and frequency of news stories on specific topics connected with COVID-19 was limited.

Michelle Bogre: Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice, London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2019, 264 pages.

Amit Pinchevski: Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma, Oxford University Press, New York 2019, 200 pages.

Craig Silverman (ed.): Verification Handbook: For Disinformation and Media Manipulation,
European Journalism Centre 2020, 151 pages.