Reimagining Journalistic Practices and Digital News Production during Public Health Crises

Abstract

Public health crises are an example of a persistent global concern, with news outlets shaping health crisis discourses through the design, production, and distribution of their content. The article is based on a study that examined how social media platforms, such as Facebook, serve as news outlets for presenting and constructing issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on the production and dissemination of relevant news articles on digital platforms, with a particular emphasis on the Philippines-based Digital News Exchange’s (DNX) Facebook News Page in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental. DNX emerged as the first digital news platform in the region following the closure of one of the Philippines’ largest television networks. The objective of this article is to explore how semiotic resources are used and analyzed to comprehend how digital platforms construct health communication, with particular attention to news values, semiotics, and platformization of pandemic stories in DNX. Employing multimodal analysis, it examines DNX’s digital news content and considers the implications of post-COVID news production for health communications in the Philippines. Findings suggest that media texts can sustain persuasive discourses that may influence how news outlets present stories, while also acknowledging that these discourses may have a limited impact on audience reception. In turn, this contributes to the expanding body of literature on media-based textual analysis and media consumption in the Philippines.