Journalism

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

And the final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful T.J. Thomson, who has explored the use of AI in newsrooms for the past few years in a number of contexts. His present study interviewed journalists at major news outlets in five European countries and Australia, to explore the use of generative visual AI in news production as well as the policies and principles surrounding it.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yanning Chen, whose interest is in how journalists’ perceptions of AI affect their adoption of such tools. This draws on a survey of some 455 Chinese journalists, which sought to identify the utility value that these journalists perceived for AI tools, as well as their personal preferences related to the utilisation of these tools.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev; she notes that AI remains seen in a number of different ways by journalists, and attracts both positive and negative perceptions: it is seen as a valuable new tool, but also as something that could replace some journalistic jobs, and might affect the quality of journalistic converage. This is also affected by broader perceptions of AI in society, of course.

The next presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Brian So, whose interest is in how Bloomberg is using automated reporting to cover the financial results of Hong Kong-listed companies. Automated reporting has long been seen as supporting especially sports, financial, and weather reporting, since reporting there tends to follow very formalised patterns.

I’m sharing the next session at the ICA 2024 conference, and it starts with Anis Rahman, whose focus is on the use of AI in public media journalism. AI tools are largely emerging from major corporations in Global North countries; public media organisations are not doing a great deal of work in studying, exploring, or developing AI applications as yet, however. Here it is also important to distinguish between full generative AI tools and mere algorithms.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation.

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory.