Journalism and Media

The economic viability of news organizations underpins public access to information, yet media sustainability research has mostly asked how the media report on sustainability, not whether news media can themselves be sustained. We map how the economic sustainability of news media is conceptualized in 518 Web of Science and Scopus publications (1987–2026), retrieved through a keyword search and a targeted search of three core media-economics journals, combining bibliometric indicators, NMF topic–modeling and cosine mapping onto five a priori dimensions. The field has grown by 11.5% per year over the last decade, is anchored in media-economics and media-management journals and remains nationally fragmented (16.4% international co–authorship). Its mapped core is economic and institutional: platform dependency (39%), the economic value of news (14%) and revenue models (11%), with business models as the most central theme and 31% of the corpus unmapped. The social pillar is weak: neither journalistic labor nor audience relationships emerged as a topic, and audience vocabulary was absorbed by a broad platform-related topic. AI-related research shows no statistically significant concentration in any dimension (Cramér’s V = 0.09); its share reached 33% in 2025, and an exploratory projection points to about 41% by 2029, although the post-2020 trend is not statistically significant.

This study examines how hegemonic masculinities and anti-feminist discourse circulate on X through the Podcast and Chill Network (@podcastwithmacg), a prominent South African podcast brand. Guided by Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and scholarship on platformed visibility, it uses a qualitative netnographic single-case design that combines critical discourse analysis of posts and replies with descriptive counts of coded material, and distinguishes manosphere-specific content from general masculinity and anti-feminist discourse. Grok was used as a keyword-driven extraction tool to retrieve public posts, replies, quote-posts and reposts published between 1 and 18 June 2026. After manual verification (88 of 120 Grok returns) and screening, 58 items were retained and manually coded against an eleven-code codebook. The findings revealed that the network’s posts constructed masculinity around provider–protector roles and narratives of gender conflict, with conflict-oriented posts attracting the highest visible engagement. Manosphere-specific content, such as red-pill claims of innate female manipulation and MGTOW-style rejection of marriage, appeared embedded within more conventional talk about marriage, provision and reliability. Audience responses reinforced these narratives while discouraging dissenting views. The findings further showed that global manosphere narratives were adapted to the South African context through the incorporation of local cultural and social references. Because X’s ranking system cannot be observed, visibility is analysed through visible engagement metrics, not as evidence of algorithmic amplification or radicalisation. The study argues that, within this network, manosphere discourse is neither wholly imported nor purely local but emerges through the interaction of global misogynistic repertoires, local masculine anxieties, audience labour and platformed visibility.

This study examines hashtagging practices among six selected Arab influencers on Instagram and Twitter/X, focusing on hashtag function, placement, length, and language choice. Drawing on an exploratory content-analytic design, it analyses 3208 hashtag-level observations from 733 posts produced between 2016 and 2021. The study treats hashtags as platformed multilingual resources rather than as simple indexing devices. The findings show that functional hashtags dominate the dataset, but entertaining, inspirational, spiritual, and advertisement-related hashtags also reveal how influencers use hashtags to signal stance, create audience proximity, mark cultural and religious affiliation, and support commercial or lifestyle visibility. Platform differences are also evident: Instagram hashtags are mostly appended, short, and frequently in English, while Twitter/X hashtags are more often embedded, longer, and predominantly Arabic. Language choice further shows how Arabic, English, dialectal Arabic, and transliterated forms perform different identity and visibility functions. Overall, the study shows that Arab influencers’ hashtag usage is not merely a search tool but a reflection of digital identity and cultural discourse.