Journalism

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 study is Richard Fletcher, who begins by noting the role of incidental exposure to news on social media, but now seeks to extend this research to also encompass the impact of search engines in connecting users with news stories. Search engines are one of the most prominent Web applications, and are also used to a significant extent to access news; the focus here is on users who specifically seek out a given news topic by searching for relevant key terms.

I'm the next presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session, and my presentation is below. A full paper is also available here.

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence from Axel Bruns

The morning session on this second day at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Leighton Andrews, who begins by highlighting the role of Internet intermediaries as gatekeepers for news; over the last year we've also seen the early signs of a regulatory turn that has seen lawmakers take a greater interest in addressing the implications of their role.

The final keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 today is by Guy Berger, Director of Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO, who asks the perfectly innocent question "Does Journalism Have a Future?" The challenges it now faces include questions about the authority and objectivity of legacy news organisations, social media, 'fake news', political satire, automation, sourcing and expertise, scrutiny and accountability, and journalism education, to name just a few; each one of these is considerable.

Yet another issue for journalists is their personal safety, as journalists are regularly abused and threatened via social media and other channels. There are too many such messages to report and seek retribution for; the social media platforms respond only reluctantly to such reports; and any attempts to stop the trolls only tend to produce more trolling.

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Avshalom Ginosar, who suggests that we can no longer address online journalism as a unified social institution. We have moved here from an old institutionalism that addressed the formal, relatively stable structures of the journalistic field, to an old institutionalism that focusses on the formal as well as informal, complex and evolving processes of journalism.

The next speaker in this session at Future of Journalism 2017 is Irene Costera Meijer, whose team conducted 72 interviews with news users in the Netherlands to elicit their views on truth and trust in the news. Truth in journalism is perceived as one of the cornerstones of news quality, but this does not mean that such values are conditions either for the production or the consumption of news – and journalists and news users tend to point to each other as responsible for the decrease in the quality of the news and the resulting news scepticism.

The next session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Tine Ustad Figenschou, whose focus is on media criticism and mistrust in far-right alternative media in Norway. How do such groups express their criticism, and is this a continuation of more traditional forms of press criticism, or is the approach here more cynical, sceptical, and fundamentally distrustful?

Up next in this Future of Journalism 2017 session are Klaus Meier and Daniela Kraus, presenting their 'post-truth' research project. They begin by noting that audience engagement is becoming a key factor in journalism, and instituted a Learning Lab Audience Engagement that aimed to provide journalists with the tools to move journalism from a lecture to a conversation.

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Susanne Almgren, whose focus is on expressions by citizens in news media conversations. Trust (and mistrust) matters especially much here: there is currently increased mistrust between news media and citizens: citizens expect media to provide spaces for national political debate, but such common ground between politics, media, and citizens is now often seen as dissolving.

The post-lunch session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Irati Aguirreazkuenaga, whose interest is in participatory dynamics between journalists and their audiences; indeed, is there any meaningful form of participation, for instance in public broadcast radio programming?