Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.

True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such …

For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.

Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …

The next ECREA 2024 session is also on polarisation, and I’m chairing as well as blogging it. We start with Petra de Place Bak, whose interest is in the cognitive preferences that make specific types of online content more salient and shareable. One aspect of this might be sentiment- and emotion-based biases.

Petra’s focus is on social media communication, which has to address the twin challenges of information abundance and attention scarcity; this is affected both by platform algorithms and users’ own cognitive preferences. Negative content biases can play a role especially in the latter, as can biases (both positive …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

Twitch is not a conventional news provider, but news is nonetheless present there: it provides a platformed information space for news content, too. The quality of news has always been contingent, dynamic, and contested, and Twitch should therefore not be dismissed out of hand as a space for the news – however, journalistic boundary work continues to place news on Twitch …