Industrial Journalism

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Laura Iannelli, whose focus is on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Italy was amongst the first countries in the world to implement a mass lockdown, and this became an arena for polarised conflict amongst political elites. The question here is whether this also fostered societal and individual polarisation, and what role mis- and disinformation played in this process.

Elite polarisation can lead mass polarisation, although crises can also produce a ‘rally around the flag’ phenomenon that reduces polarisation. This offers two contrasting scenarios, of more …

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however …

The final presenters in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference are Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen; their interests are in the third-party fact-checking network employed by Meta. This operates on the basis of a Meta-provided online dashboard that highlights potentially problematic content, and the dashboard’s operation directs fact-checking away from political content spread by major political figures, and towards other forms of content.

Many fact-checking organisations around the world now substantially rely on income from Meta through their engagement in its fact-checking programme; this is part of a global post-publication debunking turn, but also creates a dependency on …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

Such intermediaries may be understood as cultural intermediaries, algorithmic experts, metricians, or content recommendation platforms; they may complement platforms or assist content production, and AI systems in particular retool, reshape, and rationalise the news. To explore this …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, who begins by noting the critical role of data annotation practices in shaping the machine learning process underlying generative AI; such annotation is a world-making practice, must align with editorial values and the journalistic ethos of objectivity, and can of course also reproduce pre-existing societal biases.

In a sense, then, the algorithms of generative AI must also seek to reproduce (and perhaps improve upon) the famous ‘gut feeling’ of conventional human journalism. The present project worked with developers and data annotations at Danish news organisations – but …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nadja Schaetz, whose interest is in AI hype in news coverage. Journalism has often uncritically covered the rise of generative AI, and swallowed the claims of AI companies about the capacities of their tools; this project collaborated with the Associated Press Local AI Initiative and conducted participant observation in local newsrooms to understand journalistic reactions to this initiative. Through the project AP worked with five newsrooms to provide AI-supported technologies.

What the study observed was not AI hype as such, however: not simply a gap between expectations and reality of …

I’m chairing the next session at this AoIR 2024 conference, which is on the intersections (or collision) between journalism and AI. We start with Sangeet Kumar, who notes the long history of complex interactions between digital media platforms and news publishers; news is just a type of content for platforms, while for news producers it is a mission and vocation. There is a substantial amount of traffic coming from digital search and social media platforms to journalistic sites, and therefore a substantial level of dependency.

This has led to some controversial government interventions like the Australian News Media Bargaining Code …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Paola Palomino-Flores, whose interest is in the intersections of media literacy and misinformation. Misinformation here is defined as false information that is shared unintentionally by users who believe it to be true but have failed to verify its accuracy. This can still disseminate quickly and then cause some very serious harms, of course, confusing people and leading them to poor decision-making.

Paola’s focus is on Peru, and she notes the high reliance of Peruvians on social media for their news; more than 60% of Peruvians get their news from social media …

The third speaker in this session at ECREA 2024 is Margaux Guyot, whose interest is in the evolution of the dynamics between sound and text in social media news videos, examined here for the Wallonie and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland.

Indeed, is text overtaking sound in news videos? There are four ways of engaging with audiovisual content on smartphones: addressing others, serendipitous exposure to video, opportunistic search, and premeditated viewing, and these provide a framework for the analysis here; this paper focusses on videos posted by seven Walloon and Swiss news outlets in 2020 and 2023, and classified them …