The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …

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 project is based on a survey of some 6,600 Spanish online news media users who had registered with one of 18 online news sites, and also conducted 12 focus groups. Some 83% of all participants found frequent engagement with online participatory news media formats important, with younger users …

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 present study examined news users in Athens, Istanbul, and London, focussing on media and engineering students in each city. Time spent online is greatest in London, but all were significantly active online; Athenian users were …

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.

Such shared social futures are not necessarily prevalent only in online media: to overcome their systemic technological disadvantages, newspapers and other print media now often focus their coverage on what will happen next, while online media often report on the immediate past – the things that have just happened.

Visions of the future can …

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 …