Blogs

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.

Day three at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with a presentation by Scott Wright, whose focus is on how journalists at The Guardian comment below the line on their own online stories. There’s been little research into the actual comments themselves so far – much of the research in this space has been focussed on interviews with journalists instead. How has such commenting evolved over time, and what do journalists do there now?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jaume Suau, who begins by acknowledging that we are living in a hybrid media system composed of mainstream and online media which are used differently and which are reconfiguring old models of audience participation. How do audiences feel about such participation, though?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Pascal Verhoest, whose central question is about how diverse news consumption is. The approach here is not focussing on the diversity of topics, sources, viewpoints, and location, but to examine the time spent using news sources and relate them to social-demographic, ideological, and psycho-social factors (such as political knowledge and self-efficacy).

The final IAMCR 2019 session I’m attending today is on news consumption, and starts with Eylem Yanardagoglu. Research shows that news consumption in general appears to be in decline around the world, with a distinct generational difference in the platforms being used for accessing the news – there is also a substantial shift to online and social media as news sources amongst younger users.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Claudia Mellado, whose interest is in the impact of Twitter and Instagram on journalistic performance. Such platforms are now widely adopted in journalistic practice, and this can be understood as a hybrid normalisation that blends mainstream and social media logics.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Motti Neiger, who shifts our focus to the mediatisation of shared social futures in Israel. These represent the mirror image to the well-known idea of collective memory: such shared social futures contain societal fantasies, fears, aspirations, concerns, and expectations instead.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.