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The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on polarisation, so of course I had to check it out; it starts with Mel Bunce and her colleagues’ study of the Media Freedom Coalition. However, they’ve asked for this study not to be tweeted at this stage, so I shall also not blog about it for now.

The second speakers in this session, then, are Jannie Møller Hartley and Elisabetta Petrucci, whose interest is in diversity in news recommender systems. Such systems may involve content filtering (based on the content of news articles) and collaborative filtering …

The second keynote at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference today is by the wonderful Jane B. Singer, who will be reflecting on the past and future of journalism studies as a field. We can mark somewhere around 100 years as journalism studies now, as the first issue of Journalism Quarterly (now Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) was published in 1924 – and much of the research published since then has attempted to define journalism as an object of study, and sometimes also explored the prospective future of journalism. Editors of this and other major journals in the field …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session on the war in Ukraine is Turo Uskali, whose interest is in news surveillance technologies in war reporting; his team is exploring this through interviews with Finnish war correspondents in Ukraine, and their Ukrainian fixers, from 2014 to 2021. How are they cutting through the fog of war in their reporting?

But first, the project conducted a literature review of research on war reporting, which covered a broad range of wars; only three of the articles found focussed on the role of new surveillance technologies such as drones and …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Marisa Porto, whose interest is in local news sustainability during times of crisis – what can be learnt from the performance of local news organisations in Ukraine during the current war? Her project studied 10 local newsrooms there in September and October 2022 (some six months after the Russian invasion), with interviews at times interrupted by air raids and other safety issues.

This also represents some of the challenges to the journalists themselves, of course; news organisations needed to develop safety protocols for their work, especially for reporters out …

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

Journalistic crisis reporting depends on the time available for preparations, and the routines in reporting that journalists can build on. From the initial breaking news situation, more context becomes available, and …

The next session I’m attending here at Future of Journalism 2023 conference is on the Russian war on Ukraine, and starts with James Rodgers, who begins by noting the long history of censorship of foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, and links this to questions about the Russian war on Ukraine as a potential rekindling of Russia’s imperial ambitions. Such censorship increased in the Cold War period, with some brief periods of thawing relations and thus fewer restrictions towards foreign journalists at times; in the Putin era, conditions for foreign journalists have severely declined again.

Today, Russian state media are …

It’s a Thursday in September in a surprisingly non-drizzly Cardiff, so I must be at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference – and it kicks off with a keynote by Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, whose focus is on the intersections between digital journalism and digital platforms. Journalism has always engaged in digital news innovation, and journalism research has accompanied this; the research has usually seen this innovation as a tangible process with its particular dynamics and stakeholders, and that could be measured and quantified, for instance by assessing its online success. Such success might mean improvements to work methods and workflows, to …

The next speaker in this fast-paced final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Iuliana Calin, whose interest is in the susceptibility to disinformation. What is new about this today, given the long history of mis- and disinformation throughout history? Iuliana particularly notes the impact of AI and algorithms, of emotions, and of cognitive biases, and aims to build a psycho-social profile of the people most susceptible to disinformation, in order to develop communication strategies to address them.

Her study builds on a survey of 150 Romanian respondents, and tested participants’ susceptibility to disinformation, as well as several other personal traits …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Karolína Bieliková, whose interest is in the resilience to disinformation on social networking sites amongst active users. How can such resilience be improved? Karolína’s research takes an individual-centric view, exploring users’ strategies for building their resilience.

Users who provide corrections to mis- and disinformation might be crucial here – what motivates them, how do they choose their strategies for engaging with mis- and disinformation, and how can they and their actions be supported and empowered? The present study explored this in the Czech Republic, through 60 interviews with active …

The next speakers in this final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Elizaveta Kusnetsova and Martha Stolze, whose focus is on computational propaganda and the broader relationship between algorithmic systems and mis- and disinformation. This has been highlighted especially by the use of algorithmic tools by the Russian propaganda machine, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. This continues a long-standing tradition of Soviet and Russian propaganda by using new technologies.

The present study focusses on the ‘US biolabs in Ukraine’ disinformation story, and is interested in what information sources search engines provide in response to this …