The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

Ritzau has introduced such robotic journalism tools for its financial reporting: building on predesigned story templates and standardised company earnings data, the tools will generate standard articles that report on the …

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Changfeng Chen and Wen Shi, whose focus is on the ethical dimensions of AI-driven ‘fake news’ detection – as part of many ethical issues related to artificial intelligence more generally.

Detection mechanisms fall into two broad categories: context model-based and social context-based algorithms. The former of these applies deception detection approaches to news texts: it searches for linguistic clues about lies and truth in the articles. This can detect rumours and misinformation from the rich linguistic clues present in such articles.

Such models build on corpora of ‘fake’ and ‘true’ news …

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.

At the same time, however, it may also mean that readers no longer share the same information landscape, and this could have deleterious impacts on democratic information and participation – the emergence of a ‘filter bubble’ is …

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.

Public broadcasters are in an interesting position in relation to metrics, as they are chasing cultural capital more than economic capital …

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 newspaper’s coverage of the violation of privacy norms has gradually declined over the past ten years, while datafication has become a more important topic – why is this so? Some of this may be explained by an elite focus, homophilous networks amongst journalists and tech leaders, and intermedia agenda-setting …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrew Iliadis, whose focus is on the role of metadata. Metadata and related terms such as ontology have rocketed to broader attention in recent years; here, philosophical concepts related to ontology have come to be translated to computationally accessible relationship constructs between data entities.

This renewed interest in ontologies is related to the growth in available data from a wide variety of sources; we are now at an advanced point in the hype cycle for computational analysis for such data, and further advances require better tools for connecting these disparate and …

The post-lunch session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, who are interested in invisibilities in social media data. For instance, studying protest movements through social media means studying only what is visible about these movements in specific social media platforms – the data must exist in the various technological layers of these platforms in the first place, and those layers significantly constrict what data are available to the researcher. Additionally, such data must also be perceived as meaningful; this requires a shared understanding in the scholarly community that such data can be used …