Journalism

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Rupert Kiddle, whose interest is in encoder-produced news embeddings. This is an increasingly common technique, which helps analyse and categorise news articles both for internal journalistic purposes and for scholarly research. But they are not very sensitive to differences over time, and instead engage in a kind of temporal averaging of embeddings; this can be addressed, but remains difficult.

Most models also remain intransparent about their training data and weighting approaches, so there is a need to develop new approaches. This project draws …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Magdalena Wojcieszak, who is presenting work towards a news content quality classifier. The consumption of online news is diverse: people consume traditional news article,s blog content, YouTube news videos, news podcasts, and many different formats.

But how do we assess the quality of all this content? There are various different measures for this, and many of them are problematic, not least for their domain- rather than article-level assessments and their conflation of quality with ideological bias; some also include factuality and other features …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with Rongxin Ouyang, who will introduce us to a new social media measure called Bartik instrument. We have for many years discussed the bidirectional relationship between audience engagement and news production: news media set agendas for audiences, but news engagement by audiences also affects how news media select which topics they cover. The causal nature, direction, and strength of this relationship remains unresolved.

This study explores this relationship for Facebook and Twitter: it gathered data from CrowdTangle (2.2m posts) and the Twitter Academic API (4.5m posts) …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …

The final speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Rodrigo Seroubian and Belén Sosa, whose focus is on Uruguay. In particular, they focus on the subnational level: while Uruguay’s democracy is strong at the national level, below that level there are certain problematic dynamics, and this impacts on the capacity of citizens to form critical opinions.

This focusses on self-censorship as the voluntary withholding of information by journalists, but not as the result of violence, threats, or harassment, but through invisible omissions. Such self-censorship is not spontaneous: it reflects certain structural issues …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Florian Töpfl, whose focus is on the news repertoires of Russian speakers in Germany. Past work on this has found four key sub-types here: those with a politically motivated news repertoire, who tend to choose either pro-Western or pro-Kremlin news repertoires; those with a truth-seeking news repertoire, who actively compare diverse news sources; and those with a situationally motivated news repertoire, who are relatively limited news users overall.

This study extended on this by interviewing some 25 Russian speakers during September …

The second day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on mis- and disinformation, and the first speaker is Xiaxin Huang. Her work asks how national identity shapes emotions towards the nation, and how such emotions in turn affect misinformation beliefs – and whether these pathways are different for Republicans and Democrats.

This builds on a multi-wave 2024 US survey, which asked about aspects like national identity, national pride, negative national affect, and misinformation beliefs (relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story and the 6 January 2021 coup attempt). National pride …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sreerupa Sanyal. Her focus is on incidental news exposure on social media platforms and its relationship to the strength of individual partisanship and political involvement.

Questions then are how partisanship strength influences political involvement, how political involvement affects incidental news exposure, and how both partisanship strength and political involvement affects incidental news exposure. This was tested through a multi-wave panel survey of some 500 respondents.

Partisanship strength did not predict political involvement; political involvement did predict higher incidental exposure; and strong partisans did …

As my battery runs out for today, I’m in a final session on partisanship at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which begins with a paper by Harry Yan. His focus is on the alignment between news headlines and images; such alignment is especially important now that headlines and header images frequently circulate together as news is shared on social media platforms.

To the extent that these align, they may represent a form of multimodal media bias, and such bias might also result on differences in social media engagement. The project tested this for a dataset of …