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.
In Spain, there is a substantial media ecology for sports media, focussed especially on football; many such media outlets are now also present on Twitter. This makes it possible to study transmedia patterns between these mainstream and social media channels, and the present project has investigated a number …
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.
One key question here is whether such uses are still following mass media logics, or embrace the logics of social media platforms. But the distinction between the two is a simplification, of course; in reality there are sliding transitions between the two, and Twitter’s broadcast-style model of message distribution is …
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 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 project engaged in a quantitative analysis of the Facebook accounts of German political journalists from the federal press gallery (Bundespressekonferenz), and also conducted some short written interviews as well as a smaller number of …
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).
This event, and the information and misinformation that circulated around it …
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.
In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online …
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.
With this increasing diversity and fragmentation, the role of journalism as a social institution is increasingly contested; this also manifests in significant distrust in their ability to provide …
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?
The project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …
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.
Generally, audiences tend to be very confident about their own ability to detect ‘fake news’, and believe such content to mainly affect others …
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.
Polarisation may also matter here, as it may aggravate the polarising effects of conflict-related news, open avenues for the manipulation of what content different users encounter, and undermine user trust in the quality of the content …
