Blogs

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2018 session is Mikko Villi, whose interest is in the reserve of news media journalists on Twitter. There are already a number of studies of journalists’ use of the platform; the present paper focusses especially on Finnish news media and journalists, however.

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Gerret von Nordheim and Florian Meissner, whose focus is on the media reporting of digital technology. Such reporting has largely remained dominated by corporate voices, and a previous study has examined how Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung has covered tech issues over time.

The next session at IAMCR 2019 starts with a paper by Matthias Degen, whose focus is on the challenges that journalists face when distributing news on Facebook in Germany. The platform is now reasonably well established in Germany, too, and this means that news outlets and journalists are also beginning to explore its use and perhaps normalising its use as part of their daily practices.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Christian Schwarzenegger, whose focus is on the use of alternative information sources by people who no longer trust the mainstream media. Historically, the latter have been key pillars of society, providing citizens with a shared and reliable set of news – but ‘the’ public sphere is now multiple, and there is no longer a guarantee that everyone will encounter the same set of news stories.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

Day two at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with another ‘fake news’ panel, and the first presenter is Seong Choul Hong. His focus is on the continuing controversy over global warming, which remains a target for mis- and disinformation. Even Donald Trump has described climate change as a ‘hoax’ in the past. The present project is interested in the third-person effect of such controversies. This effect appears to be stronger in countries with less content regulation, incidentally.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mariella Bastian, who points out the impact of the digital turn in journalistic conflict coverage; journalists themselves are now more mobile, but citizen content has also become easier to incorporate into the coverage. Further, digital media also intensify the dissemination of content coverage, and this could both increase or decrease hostility between the conflict parties.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Christian Baden, who shifts our focus to processes of polarisation. Some existing work on polarisation focusses on the themes and content along which groups are polarised, but in itself such differences may not be problematic; rather, the key issue here is whether such polarisation is increasing and results in incompatible perspectives.