Journalism

The next presentation at IAMCR 2019 is by Pere Masip and Pablo Capilla, but presented by Jaume Suau. It begins with the fundamental question of what is news, and how this is perceived by audiences – do they employ the same newsworthiness criteria as journalists and editors? The project explored the news published by El País, ABC, El Confidencial, and Público in Spain, representing legacy and born-digital outlets from a range of ideological perspectives.

The study examined the five leading, most read, most commented, and most shared news items on each site over a period of time …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.

At the same time, however, it may also mean that readers no longer share the same information landscape, and this could have deleterious impacts on democratic information and participation – the emergence of a ‘filter bubble’ is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.

Public broadcasters are in an interesting position in relation to metrics, as they are chasing cultural capital more than economic capital …

Day three at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with a presentation by Scott Wright, whose focus is on how journalists at The Guardian comment below the line on their own online stories. There’s been little research into the actual comments themselves so far – much of the research in this space has been focussed on interviews with journalists instead. How has such commenting evolved over time, and what do journalists do there now?

The study worked with a macro sample of 110m comments (by journalists and readers), focussed in on a meso-sample of 26 journalists whose comments were coded closely …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

This enables a study of which news stories and categories (e.g. hard or soft content) receive the most comments or …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jaume Suau, who begins by acknowledging that we are living in a hybrid media system composed of mainstream and online media which are used differently and which are reconfiguring old models of audience participation. How do audiences feel about such participation, though?

The project is based on a survey of some 6,600 Spanish online news media users who had registered with one of 18 online news sites, and also conducted 12 focus groups. Some 83% of all participants found frequent engagement with online participatory news media formats important, with younger users …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Pascal Verhoest, whose central question is about how diverse news consumption is. The approach here is not focussing on the diversity of topics, sources, viewpoints, and location, but to examine the time spent using news sources and relate them to social-demographic, ideological, and psycho-social factors (such as political knowledge and self-efficacy).

The project used an electronic media diary system to gather data from Belgium on the time spent in engaging with the news, gathering information on primary activities (e.g. work), secondary activities (e.g. taking a break), and the platform and title …

The final IAMCR 2019 session I’m attending today is on news consumption, and starts with Eylem Yanardagoglu. Research shows that news consumption in general appears to be in decline around the world, with a distinct generational difference in the platforms being used for accessing the news – there is also a substantial shift to online and social media as news sources amongst younger users.

The present study examined news users in Athens, Istanbul, and London, focussing on media and engineering students in each city. Time spent online is greatest in London, but all were significantly active online; Athenian users were …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Claudia Mellado, whose interest is in the impact of Twitter and Instagram on journalistic performance. Such platforms are now widely adopted in journalistic practice, and this can be understood as a hybrid normalisation that blends mainstream and social media logics.

But various assumptions, biases, and blind spots may have crept into this research, and the present project therefore focussed on two key platforms to understand how they affect journalistic role performance: how do the structure, culture, and historical context of the news media intersect with these new spaces?

Various elements of …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

In Spain, there is a substantial media ecology for sports media, focussed especially on football; many such media outlets are now also present on Twitter. This makes it possible to study transmedia patterns between these mainstream and social media channels, and the present project has investigated a number …