Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Michelle Kulig, whose focus is on perceptions of algorithmic recommender systems amongst news avoiders in the United States. The US political environment is characterised by terminal polarisation, with competitive news markets that incentivise outrage while being subjected to political pressures, and an absence of strong and trusted public service media that might function as an epistemic anchor.

News consumption here is now primarily via social media environments, which are to some extent algorithmically curated and therefore produce further epistemic disruption. There is …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the fabulous Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the use of news in AI formats. This represents a new form of platform pressure, similar perhaps to earlier pressures to have news presented on social media platforms: now AI products are also being used to access news content, and news providers are forced to respond to this.

To date, news has appeared in AI largely because Ai companies have scraped news content from news Websites; this is governed (at least in principle) …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Destiny Hopkins, whose focus is on the terminology and identity of news influencers who have no formal journalism background or education. Such influencers have become increasingly prominent in US politics, and news influencers were invited to the Democratic National Congress alongside legitimate journalists, for instance.

This was seen critically by journalists and news organisations, of course, resulting in pushback from the influencers themselves; they pointed out the boundary work done by journalists to distinguish themselves from influencers, in particular. This is an …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.

The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on news influencers, and we start with Carlos d’Andréa. His focus is on the Google News Initiative and its impact on shaping journalism in Brazil. Such initiatives promote specific ideas of journalism and innovation; GNI started in 2018 and serves in a sense as a media patron that promotes particular journalistic norms and practices.

GNI emerged in the context of demands that digital tech giants should reimburse news publishers for their content, and Brazil hosts some 22% of projects funded by GNI grants between 2018 …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Zhengyi Xu, whose focus is on news avoidance in Switzerland. News has a critical democratic role to play, of course, and news avoidance is a key concern in this context – but the relationship between news avoidance and political participation has not yet been tested fully. Indeed, many studies have merely tested whether or how much people avoid the news, but reality may be more complex, and the strategies by which people avoid news (at different times, in different contexts, etc.) should be taken into …

The second full day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with a session on news avoidance, and a paper by Krisztina Burai that focusses on Facebook. She begins by saying that citizens have agency in navigating political information, but that this has changed over time: through the choice of newspapers they read; through the choice of broadcast TV channels they watched; through the greater choice of channels in the network age; and finally through the abundance of information sources they can follow in the social media age, and the news feed curation tools available to them.

Social media …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Milin Zhang, whose focus is also on digital media use; it is critical to measure such use accurately, but self-reporting is often a dubious measure and correlates poorly with direct tracking data. This is true for any kind of media use, but political media use is of particular interest and relevance in our field. If both measurement sources have their problems, then, it is difficult to know which to trust, and the empirical consequences of such choices also remain unclear.

This project, then, explores how well these two sources …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Cornelius Puschmann, whose focus is on mapping mobile news pathways. It’s clear that the media landscape has shifted, and is continuing to shift: this has produced both fragmentation and convergence in what news people access, and how they do so – e.g. through various social media platforms and apps. These platforms now also provide a vastly expanded content ecosystem, blending diverse conventional and emerging sources and formats.

This is shaped by device and platform affordances that affect visibility, personalisation, network association, editability, and …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Floriane van Alphen. She begins by pointing out the challenges for climate journalism: by some accounts, news media do not do enough to alert audiences to the challenge of climate change; by others, they are complicit in confusing their audiences about how to address it. Nonetheless, climate journalists remain relatively well trusted, compared to other journalists, even in spite of the flood of climate mis- and disinformation that floods this space.

The challenge with addressing any of this is that it may be renegotiating the …