Future of Journalism 2023

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Marisa Porto, whose interest is in local news sustainability during times of crisis – what can be learnt from the performance of local news organisations in Ukraine during the current war? Her project studied 10 local newsrooms there in September and October 2022 (some six months after the Russian invasion), with interviews at times interrupted by air raids and other safety issues.

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.

The next session I’m attending here at Future of Journalism 2023 conference is on the Russian war on Ukraine, and starts with James Rodgers, who begins by noting the long history of censorship of foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, and links this to questions about the Russian war on Ukraine as a potential rekindling of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

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.