The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Bernadine Jones, who takes us back to the 1994 South African 'miracle election', with a particular focus on global north television reporting of the election.

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Shannon McGregor, whose interest is in the role of social media in the construction of public opinion by the political press. There's an increasing tendency for journalistic coverage to claim that 'Twitter' or even 'the Internet' responded in a particular way to specific political issues and controversies, and social media certainly play a role in how public opinion is shaped, but how might we think about the type of public opinion that can be observed on social media?

The second morning keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 is by Claire Wardle, in a pre-taped keynote (thanks to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security). She begins by introducing the First Draft project, which takes a similar approach to news fact-checking organisations, but instead focusses on claims and visual content circulated by unofficial sources prior to publication in the news. (The overlap between these approaches is also of great interest.)

How can computational techniques help with this; how can unofficial material be effectively verified; how can this be treated by law and regulation; and how does this address the current state of information disorder in a massively multi-channel media environment? The project takes an explorative approach, and importantly also translates its findings into educational resources for journalists and journalism students. It has focussed especially on recent elections in the U.S., France, Britain, and the upcoming German federal election, as well as on humanitarian crises.

It's Thursday, so this must be Cardiff and the Future of Journalism 2017 conference. We start with a double-barrelled keynote involving Silvio Waisbord and Claire Wardle, and Silvio starts us off by considering the role of journalism in a 'post-truth' environment. There's been a great deal of discussion about 'fake news' and 'post-truth' in the aftermath of Brexit and Donald Trump's election, much of it from outside of this discipline – so what can journalism studies add to it?

These are odd times. The criticism of corporate news is now louder on the right than on the left; social constructionists are now louder in their defence of journalistic and scientific facts; journalism is now perhaps better than ever in its fact-checking even as trust is at a low ebb; we are supposedly in an age of post-truth, yet truth-seeking movements are growing in many authoritarian regimes. Some of these debates are already very familiar from the global south, in fact: it's only now that the rest of the world has caught up with it.

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Bill Dodd, whose focus is on 'propositional journalism': journalism that proposes change and assesses possible future solutions and opportunities. This has been suggested as a way to re-engage audiences with democratic processes and might be seen as empowering, but whose ideas are presented and how they are framed in such journalism – that is, who is chosen to be empowered – can also reveal democratic deficits.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Kathryn Bowd, whose interest is in the work practices of local journalists in regional areas in a changing communicative environment. Local journalists have long been key members and organisers of the local community, but like their metropolitan colleagues they are now feeling considerable economic pressures; regional newspapers have perhaps held up for longer than their larger city and national counterparts, but are now also struggling – and here, given their smaller staffing bases, the loss of a handful of journalists can have a disproportionately large impact on the news outlet.

The post-lunch session at ANZCA 2017 starts with a paper by Penny O'Donnell, on the continuing transformation of journalism. She suggests that journalism unions still play an important role in promoting occupational cohesion and jurisdictional control over what is journalism, even in spite of the substantial changes to journalistic practices.

Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood has been busy. His company’s announcement on 3 May 2017 that Fairfax would sack 125 of its newsroom staff led to Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalists going on strike, at the worst possible time in the Australian political calendar.

Meanwhile, media reports highlighted Hywood’s annual pay of over $7 million – which at a median reported salary for journalists of just over $51,000 would comfortably pay for the total number of staff laid off in Hywood’s announcement.

This is not to say that Hywood does not deserve a CEO-level salary, of course. But in light of the criticism of the job losses at Fairfax, his defence of executive pay levels was tin-eared, to say the least:

We pride ourselves on providing above-market salaries. … We need good people to work at this business. You don’t fix the issues confronting the media business by doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result.

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.