Industrial Journalism

The next session I’m attending here at Future of Journalism 2023 conference is on the Russian war on Ukraine, and starts with James Rodgers, who begins by noting the long history of censorship of foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, and links this to questions about the Russian war on Ukraine as a potential rekindling of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to content forms and formats, to audience and engagement, and other aspects.

But there was a lack of a critical stance – while researchers lamented journalism’s difficulty in adapting to the new Internet technologies now available, a critical stance towards the impact of these technologies on journalism was often missing. This applies for instance to the mental health consequences for journalists of the competitive metrification of journalism engagement measures via social media metrics, or of the increasing targetting of journalists representing minorities with abuse on social media. Journalism research instead adopted the discourse of platform companies, without questioning its biases.

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

Continuing with the round-up of recent activity I began in my last few posts (covering new articles, new conference presentations, new research videos, and my lecture series on Gatewatching and News Curation), here’s an update on a few other writings and presentations for a more general audience.

Facebook News Ban Redux

Perhaps most timely of these, paradoxically, is the oldest: in October 2022 I was interviewed by Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist on his long-running Law Bytes podcast, about Canada’s proposed C-18 bill that is modelled closely on Australia’s controversial News Media Bargaining Code. In Australia, the NMBC resulted in Facebook blocking Australian users from accessing or posting any news on its platform for over a week, before a compromise that strongly favoured Facebook was found – and as I write this, the same is happening in Canada. I spoke to Michael about Australia’s long and tortured path towards and through the news ban, and shared our findings on what happened on Facebook during the Australian news ban (in short: live continued as usual, proving Facebook’s point that news matters a lot less to the platform than policy-makers might have thought):

Social Media Campaigning on the Voice Referendum

In other current events, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also begun to track the social media campaigns surrounding Australia’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which will be held in the final quarter of 2023. We’re still at an early stage of the campaign, of course, but already the PoliDashboard project (which our colleagues at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University have kindly extended to cover Australia) is picking up on the intensified advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and so is our Australian Ad Observatory operated by the Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Together with my colleague Dan Angus, I published an overview of our observations to date in The Guardian recently; subsequently, I also appeared on the Centre for Responsible Technology’s Burning Platforms podcast:

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Justin Martin, whose interest is in news junkies – or people with a ‘need for orientation’ (NFO), which has traditionally been measured in a simplistic, US-centric way as interest in and uncertainty about the choices in US presidential elections. The present study replaces this with a new NFO scale that better explores news junkies’ intrinsic need for orientation (INFO).

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Madhavi Ravikumar, whose interest is in the way the Indian press frames environmental issues. This is against the backdrop of the severe air pollution crisis in New Delhi, and the present study builds on interviews with Indian journalists.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss.

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits.

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa.