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The final keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 today is by Guy Berger, Director of Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO, who asks the perfectly innocent question "Does Journalism Have a Future?" The challenges it now faces include questions about the authority and objectivity of legacy news organisations, social media, 'fake news', political satire, automation, sourcing and expertise, scrutiny and accountability, and journalism education, to name just a few; each one of these is considerable.

Yet another issue for journalists is their personal safety, as journalists are regularly abused and threatened via social media and other channels. There …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Avshalom Ginosar, who suggests that we can no longer address online journalism as a unified social institution. We have moved here from an old institutionalism that addressed the formal, relatively stable structures of the journalistic field, to an old institutionalism that focusses on the formal as well as informal, complex and evolving processes of journalism.

Does this mean that there is now a new news ecosystem, as JD Lasica has put it? Are there new professional rules, norms, and beliefs, and is online journalism still the same social institution …

The next speaker in this session at Future of Journalism 2017 is Irene Costera Meijer, whose team conducted 72 interviews with news users in the Netherlands to elicit their views on truth and trust in the news. Truth in journalism is perceived as one of the cornerstones of news quality, but this does not mean that such values are conditions either for the production or the consumption of news – and journalists and news users tend to point to each other as responsible for the decrease in the quality of the news and the resulting news scepticism.

How do such …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Tine Ustad Figenschou, whose focus is on media criticism and mistrust in far-right alternative media in Norway. How do such groups express their criticism, and is this a continuation of more traditional forms of press criticism, or is the approach here more cynical, sceptical, and fundamentally distrustful?

Media criticism in alternative media has traditionally perceived 'the mainstream media' as a bloc, driven by commercialism and pursuing its own political goals while romanticising alternative media. This study observes such criticism as it is expressed in five Norwegian far-right sites; it examined …

Up next in this Future of Journalism 2017 session are Klaus Meier and Daniela Kraus, presenting their 'post-truth' research project. They begin by noting that audience engagement is becoming a key factor in journalism, and instituted a Learning Lab Audience Engagement that aimed to provide journalists with the tools to move journalism from a lecture to a conversation.

But audience engagement is still poorly defined: it relates to communication between journalists and their audiences; involves different and more interactive approaches to storytelling; draws on editorial analytics that track user activities and responses; personalised news that enables users to participate in …

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Susanne Almgren, whose focus is on expressions by citizens in news media conversations. Trust (and mistrust) matters especially much here: there is currently increased mistrust between news media and citizens: citizens expect media to provide spaces for national political debate, but such common ground between politics, media, and citizens is now often seen as dissolving.

Participatory features offered by news outlets, such as comments sections, offer an opportunity to study how citizens express trust or distrust. How do they depict various political actors, and describe how they relate to them? Susanne …

The post-lunch session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Irati Aguirreazkuenaga, whose interest is in participatory dynamics between journalists and their audiences; indeed, is there any meaningful form of participation, for instance in public broadcast radio programming?

Radio has long had talk radio formats, of course, where tensions between populism and public accountability, free expression and rational discussion are managed more or less successfully and conscientiously. How did this play out in the context of an event like the Scottish independence referendum, for example?

In Scotland, professional and institutional elites have largely dominated public life, cementing a view that …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Bernadine Jones, who takes us back to the 1994 South African 'miracle election', with a particular focus on global north television reporting of the election.

The early 1990s saw a shift in international news reporting, from Cold War 'us vs. them' reporting to neo-liberal narratives promoting transnational economic cooperation and development. The 1994 South African election provided the perfect opportunity for this framing. This links with wider understandings of media logics (such as personalisation and shallow, dramatised reporting) and mediatisation (especially the televisualisation of politics at the expense of …

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Shannon McGregor, whose interest is in the role of social media in the construction of public opinion by the political press. There's an increasing tendency for journalistic coverage to claim that 'Twitter' or even 'the Internet' responded in a particular way to specific political issues and controversies, and social media certainly play a role in how public opinion is shaped, but how might we think about the type of public opinion that can be observed on social media?

We are able, of course, to measure aspects like …

The next speakers at Future of Journalism 2017 are Iñaki Garcia-Blanco and Lucy Bennett, whose focus is also on the Brexit referendum. There is a long history of anti-European discourse in British politics, and the EU has been framed by the British press in a negative light; eventually this resulted in the 2016 EU referendum, with fault lines running right through the major British parties.

The eventual victory of the Leave camp has been widely described as a victory for populism, and as a sign of how popular discontent can result in unexpected electoral results. Iñaki and Lucy examine this …