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How news media make emerging technological risks visible shapes how those technologies enter public debate. This study examines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) risk representation in Australian digital news through a mixed-methods content analysis of 379 articles from seven outlets published between 2020 and March 2024. Ethical, legal, and regulatory compliance risks receive the most attention, followed by economic and employment concerns and technical performance risks, while sociocultural and mental health risks remain marginal. Extinction risk also receives substantial coverage. Public outlets give greater attention to governance, education, and sociocultural concerns, whereas private outlets more often emphasize technical and extinction risks. Public outlets also contain more original reporting and Australian contextualization. Across the sample, GPT is frequently named but rarely explained in technical detail, while developing country and Global South contexts receive limited attention. These findings contribute to a contextual understanding of how GenAI risks are represented in Australian digital news.

Crisis communication research is strongly influenced by the crises of our day. In this essay, we review the trends in crisis communication scholarship with reference to two major crises that have significantly influenced scholarship and society. Existing crisis communication scholarship has bifurcated into two groups, examining the base crisis responses and reputation management messages. We highlight useful models that can assist in this research such as the internalization, explanation, distribution, and action model (IDEA) model and the revised model of reputation repair (REMREP). Further, we argue the key to the future of crisis communication scholarship is a holistic approach that marries protecting stakeholder safety and building healthy relationships with stakeholders as the twin pillars of successful crisis communication. Like load-bearing pillars in construction, these two pillars are both necessary for organizations and communities to withstand the stress of crises. The failure of either pillar, in any type of crisis, can cause a collapse.

Existing research on Instagram-based political legitimation has largely focused on Western contexts, whereas leader-centered African cases and fragmented media settings remain underexplored. This study analyzes how Zimbabwe’s President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, constructs political legitimacy on Instagram over 8 years (2017–2025). Using Van Leeuwen’s four legitimation strategies and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic grammar of visual design as the analytical framework, we employed Zeeschuimer, a browser-based social media data-collection tool, to purposively collect still photographs from the sampled period. We coded the posts as image–caption pairs according to Van Leeuwen’s typology and organized them into emerging thematic narratives of legitimation. Findings highlighted strategic narratives about Zimbabwe’s alignment with international powers, infrastructure development priorities, the people’s consensual choice, and regional leadership, collaboration, and support. We argue that these findings demonstrate Mnangagwa’s use of Instagram’s features for curated self-presentation and narrative control to build a discourse of competent, people-focused, and internationally recognized leadership that consistently downplays legitimacy-challenging information. This study offers a multimodal analytical perspective on political legitimacy in the Global South, extends the boundaries of political communication scholarship, and provides insights into how platform-based legitimation and affordances operate in Zimbabwe’s contested political environment.