Journalism

The second day at Future of Journalism 2023 conference in Cardiff begins with a pre-recorded keynote by my former QUT colleague John Hartley, and John is also standing by for the Q&A later. He begins with the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 – after whom a memorial travelling scholarship at the University of Wales is named.

Is Jones the ideal type of the fearless truth warrior in journalism, though, or a pawn in the Great Game of imperialist powers? The existence of a scholarship and the rhetoric around it suggests the …

The final speaker in this last Thursday session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Steen Steensen, whose focus is on the impact of political fact-checking during the 2021 parliamentary election in Norway (as part of the Source Criticisms and Mediated Disinformation project, or SCAM). Fact-checking during election campaigns has emerged recently as an important practice, but there is not much impact on the reach and impact of such fact-checks – much of the research to date has focussed on the practices of fact-checkers instead.

Ordinary people are more likely to engage with and share fact-checks that are conclusive …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Carolyn Jackson-Brown, who highlights the dilemma for journalists inherent in their dual missions to inform and entertain (or, more to the point, attract clicks from news users). Her focus here is on the reporting of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, and she worked with journalism students on how they received news about the war – in the first place, from TikTok, Twitter, and professional journalists’ accounts.

Quickly, the students discovered that much of the early coverage by pro-Russian actors on TikTok was fake. Moving to the …

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful? But in addition, there are also various top actors within society who create and spread disinformation content, and their dissemination strategies and goals might be …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Karen Assmann, who begins with Nieman Lab’s prediction that ‘democracy beats’ (journalism in defence of democracy) were soon coming to US journalism – a prediction made in 2021 and then again in 2022, yet still barely realised. Journalism has of course long been seen as a pillar of democracy, yet what this means is hardly ever fully explained – this is a folkloristic view, for the most part.

Instead, what political journalism (in the US) means is often simply horse-race reporting, and there have been long-standing calls (going …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on polarisation, so of course I had to check it out; it starts with Mel Bunce and her colleagues’ study of the Media Freedom Coalition. However, they’ve asked for this study not to be tweeted at this stage, so I shall also not blog about it for now.

The second speakers in this session, then, are Jannie Møller Hartley and Elisabetta Petrucci, whose interest is in diversity in news recommender systems. Such systems may involve content filtering (based on the content of news articles) and collaborative filtering …

The second keynote at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference today is by the wonderful Jane B. Singer, who will be reflecting on the past and future of journalism studies as a field. We can mark somewhere around 100 years as journalism studies now, as the first issue of Journalism Quarterly (now Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) was published in 1924 – and much of the research published since then has attempted to define journalism as an object of study, and sometimes also explored the prospective future of journalism. Editors of this and other major journals in the field …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session on the war in Ukraine is Turo Uskali, whose interest is in news surveillance technologies in war reporting; his team is exploring this through interviews with Finnish war correspondents in Ukraine, and their Ukrainian fixers, from 2014 to 2021. How are they cutting through the fog of war in their reporting?

But first, the project conducted a literature review of research on war reporting, which covered a broad range of wars; only three of the articles found focussed on the role of new surveillance technologies such as drones and …

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.

This also represents some of the challenges to the journalists themselves, of course; news organisations needed to develop safety protocols for their work, especially for reporters out …

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 …