The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

This is not necessarily a purely Australian phenomenon – other news organisations also deliberately publish controversial content in order to pursue user engagement – we might need to rethink the focus …

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

Ritzau has introduced such robotic journalism tools for its financial reporting: building on predesigned story templates and standardised company earnings data, the tools will generate standard articles that report on the …

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Anastasia Kazun, who follows on from the previous presentation by focussing specifically on the countries that Russian media cover. Media influence public opinion about countries and their leaders, of course, because ordinary people will not have any direct experience of geopolitics – this is especially important in Russia, in fact, because most Russians have never travelled abroad.

The present study focusses on Russian press, TV, and online media, which tend to have different thematic interests and reporting styles. It studies the mentions of some 193 countries in Russian media, focussing on the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Anton Kazun, whose interest is in the global news flow around the G20 group of countries. International news are important to our perceptions of other countries and their leaders, but state politics, ideology, and news frames will affect this; further, news attention to different countries is never equal. Factors that increase attention to different countries include GDP, population size, and links through common borders, trade, tourism, and migration.

The personalisation of politics in each country also means that attention may be directed especially to a country’s leader, and this is also …