Journalism

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Damiano Spina, who begins by highlighting the current challenges to the global information environment. In the IPIE survey of disinformation experts, politicians, social media platforms, and governments were seen as the most problematic sources of mis- and disinformation.

Computational methods are critical to addressing these problems. They can assist in fact-checking by engaging in claim detection and assessing check-worthiness, supporting evidence retrieval, and enabling veracity and truthfulness classification. But they can also assist in the reporting and dissemination of fact-checks. This does not remove the role of the …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey …

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence …

The final ICA 2024 conference session I’m attending today is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Seungsu Lee. His interest is in partisan political communication, and he introduces the idea of like-minded and cross-cutting news media use and its relationship with political talk in homogeneous groups, and their effects on knowledge and polarisation.

Conversely, partisan heterogeneity within the same local communities means that people are more likely to encounter cross-cutting political information and views, motivate them to seek additional information, have their partisan identities primed, and access political knowledge. This might be operationalised for instance by looking at …

The final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is on the evolution of the concept of ‘alternative news media’ – associated today perhaps with anti-establishment, far-right outlets, but in past research more often seen as progressive or even radical left, providing a platform for marginalised voices. Common to these is perhaps that such media see themselves as a corrective to mainstream, establishment media.

What do we make of such research, then? This project focussed on some 1,300 articles on alternative media from 2004 to 2021, and shows a substantial growth in research on alternative media since the …

The fourth speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Michael Dieringer, with yet another systematic review of the journalism studies literature, focussing here especially on epistemological and methodological approaches and trends specifically in qualitative journalism research work over time. Such shifts reflect the key issues of the time, as well as fashions in research approaches.

The most common perspective that this study found was a sociological perspective, followed by an implicit use of grounded theory approaches. Articles that did not directly use a theoretical framework often developed one of their own, drawing on a multi-stakeholder approach. Discourse …

Next up in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yangliu Fan, who presents a bibliometric study of journalism studies publications. This study focussed on the published literature in the field since 1995, examining these publications by understanding their citation patterns. It drew on the full set of publications from the five major journalism journals between 1995 and 2022 – some 6,770 articles – from the OpenAlex database, and examined their co-citation networks: these occur when two earlier articles are cited together in one or more later articles.

The resultant network contained some 5,700 articles connected by 305,000 links, and identified …

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Yoonmo Sang, whose focus is on journalism ethics research over the past decades. Such research is critical especially in an increasingly challenged news media landscape. The present study examined some 1,170 journalism ethics studies published from 2013 to 2022 in Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, and Journalism Studies, drawing on LDA topic modelling to identify the underlying themes in these articles.

The annual volume of articles on journalism ethics grew substantially over this time. Early on, professional practices were a key theme; trust emerged …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference reflects on the recent history of journalism studies, and starts with the excellent Raul Ferrer-Connill and a paper on the past 20 years of scholarship on citizen journalism. His team reviewed a sample of some 170 articles on citizen journalism to explore the theories, contexts, and methodologies of their research.

Some 50% of these studies did not identify a clear theoretical framework; the other half used structuration theory, field theory, uses and gratifications, gatekeeping, and a variety of other theoretical frameworks. Some one third of these studies focussed on North America, while …