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Journalism

Snurb — Monday 23 December 2024 16:01

A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ACSPRI 2024 | AoIR 2024 | ECREA 2024 | ICA 2023 |

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

 

Polarisation, Destructive

…

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Snurb — Friday 29 November 2024 15:40

Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum (AANZCA 2024)

Elections | Government | Polarisation | Politics | AANZCA 2024 | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Industrial Journalism | Journalism | Practice Mapping |
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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:52

For Different Generations, What Even Is News?

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kirsty Anderson, whose interest is in how younger and older news audiences use the news differently. Interviews with news users bear this out: for younger users news is whatever pops up on their social media feeds, while older users might regard only fully fact-checked information as news.

News is critical to societies, of course, and journalism has a special status in terms of news. But this is under threat as news is now available anywhere, any time, and also from sources other than conventional journalism. This is also expressed in …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:51

Distinguishing Political from General News Avoidance

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its …

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Snurb — Wednesday 27 November 2024 08:49

Source and Engagement Diversity for Australian News on Facebook

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.

This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:19

Australian News Media’s Lukewarm Response to the Counter-Terrorism Laws That Curb Its Freedoms

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

The final speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Saira Ali and Catherine Son, exploring Australian media’s response to counter-terrorism laws that limit press freedom. Such laws emerged in the post-9/11 era, and Australia has now passed a record 96 counter-terrorism laws since 2001 – these compound the lack of explicit provisions for press freedom under Australian law.

Any of these laws also impact on the Australian news media, so how have Australian media responded to security laws that restrict press and other freedoms, then? How have they responded especially to the ASIO Act, Metadata Retention laws, and the …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:16

What Happened on Facebook during Its Australian News Ban?

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

I was the next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session, presenting our research on the changes in news posting and engagement during Facebook’s brief news ban in Australia in late February 2021, following the introduction of Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code. We would have liked to examine this for the ongoing news ban in Canada since August 2023, too, but unfortunately the Facebook URL Shares dataset has not been updated since November 2022, so we have not data to work with at this stage.

My slides are below:

Facebook without the News: Link-Sharing Patterns during Meta’s Australian and …
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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:15

How and When Are News Media Subsidies Justified by Governments

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session is on media regulation and starts with Timothy Koskie, with a paper on news media regulation. He notes that we are in a time of permacrisis, and this is also being presented to us by contemporary news coverage; can these real or imagined catastrophes also provide us with an impulse for us to rethink news media regulation?

Specifically, should we rethink our approach to news media subsidies? The US started its first news media subsidy experiment as early as 1792, as part of building the new country; such state support is designed to foster …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 13:35

Patterns in Australian News Media Coverage of the Voice to Parliament Referendum

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum from Katharina Esau

Katharina notes that we are in a moment of polycrisis, with several crises all intersecting and influencing each other; in this, the role of news media cannot be overestimated, and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices would be extremely valuable. But we also live in a time of polarisation, which is complicated by the many incompatible …

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Snurb — Monday 25 November 2024 16:14

Assessing Media Concentration in the New Network Media Economy

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Streaming Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.

This integrated approach better reflects the …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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