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Industrial Journalism

Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, Gatewatching: Some Presentations on Recent and Upcoming Books

As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

The Need for Journalism to Respond to the Issue of ‘Fake News’

The final speaker at this ECREA 2018 session is my QUT colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals, who shifts our focus to the vexing question of ‘fake news’. However we define such content, it appears to have had a considerable effect on recent events, and some of the most shared stories on Facebook in recent years have been revealed as mis- or disinformation.

Twitter Interaction Patterns of Leading Australian, German, and U.K. Political Journalists

Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.


Journalists’ Discursive Construction of Boundaries

The next speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Folker Hanusch, who shifts our focus to how journalists construct and uphold their professional boundaries through discursive means. Such boundary work remains prominent because of the entry of a range of new journalistic or para-journalistic outlets and amateur or semi-amateur practitioners into the field of news coverage, and rather than developing normative theoretical definitions of journalism it is important to examine how journalists themselves draw the line between themselves and other professional and non-professional news workers, and how they themselves reflect on the ideologies of journalism.

Emerging Models for News at the Periphery of German Journalism

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

Does Digital Media Diversity Weaken Public Consensus on the Important Societal Issues?

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, who notes that the current media ecology may no longer guarantee a common ground of information amongst audiences; the diversity of the issues that people consider to be important may be increasing, and this may mean that people no longer agree on a set of common political issues that are important to be addressed in society.

Individual- and Country-Level Factors That Explain News Avoidance

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

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