Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides:

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information.

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance.

One of the major components of my guest professorship at the University of Zürich in late 2022 was to develop and deliver a one-off undergraduate course on gatewatching and the continuing transformation of journalism as a result of the impact of social media, from the early days of blogs and citizen journalism to the present. This builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. I also took the opportunity to augment the book's contents with a handful of additional lectures on topics such as 'fake news', fact-checking, 'filter bubbles', and the power of social media platforms - topics that have emerged and grown in importance even further since the book was published.

The lectures were all recorded, and it would be a shame if the material went to waste after it's one-off presentation in Zürich. So, I'm pleased to say that after a little light editing, the 13 weekly lectures from this course are now online, and collected in a handy YouTube playlist. They're each running between 60 and 90 minutes in length, and the slides are also available separately (they're linked from the description of each video). I've listed the full syllabus of readings below.

I hope this is useful, and would love to see these lectures be used in teaching wherever they might suit – for instance in undergraduate journalism, media studies, or social media courses. Please share these materials with anyone who might be able to benefit from them.