Industrial Journalism

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.

The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation …

And the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented by Matthias Kast and Martin Bürger, exploring the way that communicative AI technologies are being discussed in the German news media, with particular focus on the frames, actors, and topics.

New technology is often presented as either threat or progress, and various risk and progress frames can be defined here; a more general frame might also be identified. Their co-occurrence with actors and topics in communicative AI news coverage is also important to examine.

The study examined some 3,800 articles from …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sayan Dey, whose focus is on India: how do similar media structures here generate different framing patterns and political legitimacy in this multi-ethnic society? His study compares this for the 2023 elections in the northeastern states of Nagaland and Tripura. Nagaland is mostly populated by ethnic Naga, while Tripura has a mostly Bengali population.

This project builds on framing theory, social identity theory, and governmentality and political economy; it examines media structures at the macro level, framing practices at the meso level, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Silva Heinonen, with a focus on harmful discourse on migration online. In Belgium, news media are frequently framing migration as a threat, use dehumanising language, and amplify populist and far-right policy responses. This creates negative emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety, and is further disseminated via social media platforms.

The effects of such content is often tested through single-exposure effect studies, which is problematic; on social media, effects are more likely to occur through repeated exposures, and will be also be dependent …