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Day three at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with a presentation by Scott Wright, whose focus is on how journalists at The Guardian comment below the line on their own online stories. There’s been little research into the actual comments themselves so far – much of the research in this space has been focussed on interviews with journalists instead. How has such commenting evolved over time, and what do journalists do there now?

The study worked with a macro sample of 110m comments (by journalists and readers), focussed in on a meso-sample of 26 journalists whose comments were coded closely …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

This enables a study of which news stories and categories (e.g. hard or soft content) receive the most comments or …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jaume Suau, who begins by acknowledging that we are living in a hybrid media system composed of mainstream and online media which are used differently and which are reconfiguring old models of audience participation. How do audiences feel about such participation, though?

The project is based on a survey of some 6,600 Spanish online news media users who had registered with one of 18 online news sites, and also conducted 12 focus groups. Some 83% of all participants found frequent engagement with online participatory news media formats important, with younger users …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Pascal Verhoest, whose central question is about how diverse news consumption is. The approach here is not focussing on the diversity of topics, sources, viewpoints, and location, but to examine the time spent using news sources and relate them to social-demographic, ideological, and psycho-social factors (such as political knowledge and self-efficacy).

The project used an electronic media diary system to gather data from Belgium on the time spent in engaging with the news, gathering information on primary activities (e.g. work), secondary activities (e.g. taking a break), and the platform and title …

The final IAMCR 2019 session I’m attending today is on news consumption, and starts with Eylem Yanardagoglu. Research shows that news consumption in general appears to be in decline around the world, with a distinct generational difference in the platforms being used for accessing the news – there is also a substantial shift to online and social media as news sources amongst younger users.

The present study examined news users in Athens, Istanbul, and London, focussing on media and engineering students in each city. Time spent online is greatest in London, but all were significantly active online; Athenian users were …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Claudia Mellado, whose interest is in the impact of Twitter and Instagram on journalistic performance. Such platforms are now widely adopted in journalistic practice, and this can be understood as a hybrid normalisation that blends mainstream and social media logics.

But various assumptions, biases, and blind spots may have crept into this research, and the present project therefore focussed on two key platforms to understand how they affect journalistic role performance: how do the structure, culture, and historical context of the news media intersect with these new spaces?

Various elements of …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Motti Neiger, who shifts our focus to the mediatisation of shared social futures in Israel. These represent the mirror image to the well-known idea of collective memory: such shared social futures contain societal fantasies, fears, aspirations, concerns, and expectations instead.

Such shared social futures are not necessarily prevalent only in online media: to overcome their systemic technological disadvantages, newspapers and other print media now often focus their coverage on what will happen next, while online media often report on the immediate past – the things that have just happened.

Visions of the future can …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

In Spain, there is a substantial media ecology for sports media, focussed especially on football; many such media outlets are now also present on Twitter. This makes it possible to study transmedia patterns between these mainstream and social media channels, and the present project has investigated a number …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2018 session is Mikko Villi, whose interest is in the reserve of news media journalists on Twitter. There are already a number of studies of journalists’ use of the platform; the present paper focusses especially on Finnish news media and journalists, however.

One key question here is whether such uses are still following mass media logics, or embrace the logics of social media platforms. But the distinction between the two is a simplification, of course; in reality there are sliding transitions between the two, and Twitter’s broadcast-style model of message distribution is …

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Gerret von Nordheim and Florian Meissner, whose focus is on the media reporting of digital technology. Such reporting has largely remained dominated by corporate voices, and a previous study has examined how Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung has covered tech issues over time.

The newspaper’s coverage of the violation of privacy norms has gradually declined over the past ten years, while datafication has become a more important topic – why is this so? Some of this may be explained by an elite focus, homophilous networks amongst journalists and tech leaders, and intermedia agenda-setting …