The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient …

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing suggests that this volume of content encountered triggers symptoms of cognitive overload, and the hypothesis here is that the size of a user’s news repertoire will be positively associated with their level of news overload. Strategies for avoiding such …

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

Much of the research on ‘fake news’ points out that it damages democracy – but it can also have significant negative or positive impacts on personal relationships. The sharing of such content fits into existing sharing behaviours; sharing the news with others is now a widespread social practice, and news is usually shared especially because stories are useful, emotions, bizarre, positive, entertaining, or exaggerated.

’Fake news’ …

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

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 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 …