Developing a More Critical Stance towards Technology in Digital Journalism Research

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 content forms and formats, to audience and engagement, and other aspects.

But there was a lack of a critical stance – while researchers lamented journalism’s difficulty in adapting to the new Internet technologies now available, a critical stance towards the impact of these technologies on journalism was often missing. This applies for instance to the mental health consequences for journalists of the competitive metrification of journalism engagement measures via social media metrics, or of the increasing targetting of journalists representing minorities with abuse on social media. Journalism research instead adopted the discourse of platform companies, without questioning its biases.

Journalism research cannot avoid biases of some form; but it must acknowledge these and understand its own positionality, and the way it relates to broader power structures and inequalities. This requires making our own normative assumptions explicit, too. We must discover where power is situated in current digital journalism practices, for instance – as journalists use social media as critical tools of their trade, how can they maintain their own mental health by drawing on the digital disconnection practices that other social media users might utilise? They might choose to disconnect from specific platforms or platform affordances, for example, or grant dedicated access to particular audiences only – but this also comes at a cost to their own working practices and professional productivity.

Some organisations offer support on this – including the Committee to Protect Journalists or the International Centre for Journalism –, and these efforts are valuable, but also mean that this self-protection is left to journalists themselves, and their primary employers have been less engaged in supporting their staff (except for some of the larger news outlets). And the central message from newsroom bosses is still that connecting online is a critical imperative for journalists in the digital world – journalists who resist this or point out the negative consequences (overload, harassment, etc.) are sidelined and discouraged, and coping mechanisms suggested by employers are often simplistic and unlikely to make a difference. This can also lead to the emergence of more informal networks of mutual support between newsroom staff, without employer involvement.

Journalists’ ability to choose to connect or disconnect thus relates also to their own privilege, and the kind of journalistic work they do; for some disconnection is much easier than for others. Reasons for such privilege are easy to identify (age, gender, status, skills, …), but much harder to address in practice.

Moving on from mainstream journalism to partnerships between platforms and third-party fact-checking organisations, Valérie highlights the OsloMet SCAM project on fact-checking that she’s been involved in; the partnerships between fact-checkers and platforms are valuable because they provide a steady income stream for fact-checking organisations and enable them to grow, but also involve certain power asymmetries, which can create inequalities that make some forms of information more visible than others. English-language contexts and organisations are privileged, for instance, and long-term relationships create a dependence on platform partnerships.

Such partnerships also make some parts of the anti-disinformation industry more visible than others, therefore, and generate inequalities in revenue, and between countries, regions, languages, and ethnicities, for instance. In comparison with their effects in the English-speaking Global North, this can increase threats to some of the most vulnerable communities, therefore. And the institutional routines that fact-checkers establish over time might systematically overlook some forms of mis- and disinformation that do not fit into these routines.

For journalism research, these observations mean that we must be both critical and constructive in our work – not one at the expense of the other. We must ask questions like: what and who is technology for in journalism? How should we confront questions about power and influence in technology? How can we avoid cheerleading and maintain a more critical outlook? What should we prioritise in the next decade of research on journalism and technology? How can we be critics of yet still support the news industry in its important functions – in a way that makes the industry listen and act?