Journalism

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

My own presentation is next in this ECREA 2018 session, and covers the central themes of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. The slides are below:

The next session at ECREA 2018 is one that I have a paper in as well – but we start with Marcel Broersma. He begins by asking whether journalism is truly at home in social media: do its strategies align with user tactics in these platforms, and are the platforms being colonised by news organisations? How are publics for journalism constructed on these platforms, and do users have any interest in being interpellated as publics here?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Edda Humprecht, whose focus is on polarisation on Facebook. There is evidence of considerable negativity on this platform, and this may affect users’ perceptions of the world around them; in particular, it may increase their perception of societal polarisation. News outlets operating on the platform are now often accepting negative comments because they do not want to be seen to be censoring user comments – yet at the same time they are complaining about the negative aspects of user participation on social media.

The next iCS Symposium session starts with Fabio Giglietto, presenting his team’s results on the use of social media in the March 2018 Italian election. The project’s aim was to comprehensively examine the role of social media during the election, focussing especially on social media audience engagement with the various media sources available.

The first keynote at the iCS Symposium is by Alice E. Marwick, whose focus is on the motivations for sharing the various forms of content grouped under the problematic moniker of ‘fake news’. Her recent report with Rebecca Lewis on Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online has shown that such sharing can be highly effective: because so many of us are now sharing news and news-like information online, and because especially younger users and journalists are paying increasing attention to what is happening on social media, it is now possible for mis- and disinformation content to migrate from far-right, fringe spaces through mainstream social media sites and on to hyperpartisan far-right press sites and even the mainstream news media. One of the vectors for infiltrating the mainstream news in this process tends to be Fox News, unsurprisingly.

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2018 is Christian Strippel, whose focus is on the discourse architecture of German news Websites. The background to this work is a project to develop the tools to automatically detect and mitigate hate speech in comment sections in such sites.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Miya Williams Fayne, whose focus is on the shift from the black press to broader black media. Early black press were mainly abolitionist newspapers, and were officially recognised by the National Newspapers Association. Today many black media are online and have diversified their areas of focus, and Miya conducted interviews with a number of the editors and operators of such media organisations.