It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:
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 …
I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.
Political actors also act as news curators on social media, and in doing so make specific news selection decisions; how audiences engage with the news shared by political actors then also depends on their …
Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.
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This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing …
The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance. Such (intentional or unintentional) avoidance as well as use of alternative media is seen as problematic as it reduces people’s ability to participate fully in public debate, and should also be seen as a political act.
There are many definitions of alternative media; some …
One of the major components of my guest professorship at the University of Zürich in late 2022 was to develop and deliver a one-off undergraduate course on gatewatching and the continuing transformation of journalism as a result of the impact of social media, from the early days of blogs and citizen journalism to the present. This builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. I also took the opportunity to augment the book's contents with a handful of additional lectures on topics such as 'fake news', fact-checking, 'filter bubbles', and the …
First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian …
'Fake News' on Facebook: A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Problematic Information Dissemination between 2016 and 2021
Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Xue Ying (Jane) Tan, Edward Hurcombe, Nadia Jude, Phoebe Matich, Stephen Harrington, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Scott Wright
