Industrial Journalism

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Brigid O’Connell, whose focus is on the emergence of the newspaper The Light as a problematic alternative news source. It can be described as dark political communication: political content that seeks to deepen political polarisation and discontent.

The Light’s coverage centres on COVID-19 denialism and conspiracist perspectives; it publishes in print and online, and originated in the UK and Ireland before adding an Australian edition soon after, funded by a coalition of COVID-19 sceptics and others. The publication describes itself as a ‘truthpaper’, and in this aligns …

The second paper in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by my QUT colleague Klaus Gröbner, whose focus is on transnational similarities between far-right news outlets. The far right has increasingly connected at a transnational level in recent years even in spite of its largely nationalist orientation; CPAC and the network of ‘patriot’ parties in Europe are both vehicles for this, and this has also led to a coalescence in their talking points over time – positioning themselves against ‘the establishment’, aligning themselves with white supremacist ideas, opposing gender policies and LGBTIQ+ rights, and pushing climate change disinformation …

And the final day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a session on transnational news that begins with Niusha Hansel and Linda Jean Kenix. Their study examines news coverage of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to deport migrants. Some 600,000 undocumented immigrants have (supposedly) been deported during the first year of Trump’s second term, and a total of 2 million have left the US; this has also caused widespread protests, including the No Kings protests across the country.

How has this been reported internationally, across English-speaking countries UK, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Nigeria, and India? Common to these are …

The final speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is David Nolan, whose focus is specifically on constructions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the 2025 Australian federal election, in the wake of the Trump administration’s cancelling of DEI programmes in the US. Such interventions were seen as having the potential for a ‘Trump effect’ during the Australian election, too – with attempts by conservative politicians and others to create an ‘anti-woke’ groundswell.

Attacks on DEI programmes tend to misrepresent what such programmes aim to achieve: procedural and distributive justice in organisations and institutions. DEI is …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ashleigh Haw, who shifts our focus to the qualitative aspects of encountering and engaging with mis- and disinformation during the 2025 Australian federal election. Participants here were 35 voting-age residents of the Deakin, Dickson, Gilmore, and Werriwa electorates who had also participated in the survey and diary components of the research project. These were interviewed for the project, exploring their information resilience, civic reasoning, and critical media literacy.

This enabled the researchers to further explore the reasons that participants had for identifying certain content as mis- and disinformation …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Jee Young Lee, whose focus is on a content analysis of mis- and disinformation examples from the 2025 Australian federal election. Australian voters remain highly concerned about such problematic information, but fewer than one third of voters actively engage in fact-checking themselves; they rely instead on their gut feeling about the veracity of information rather than on concrete evidence of its truthfulness.

In that light: what do audiences regard as mis- and disinformation; how do determine this, and what do they do? This project used a digital diary …

My final session for today at the AANZCA 2025 conference is a panel on mis- and disinformation in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with Kieran McGuinness, whose focus is on a survey of Australian adults during May and June 2025, conducted on behalf of the project by YouGov.

Respondents were asked about their access to and understanding of news during the election, Mainstream news, face-to-face discussions, political ads, and social media were the most prominent sources. Amongst social media users, mainstream news brands, politicians and parties, ordinary people, individual journalists, and alternative voices on YouTube were most prominent …

The post-lunch session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Tauel Harper, whose focus is especially on the role of public service media in combatting such problematic information. Disinformation is a serious threat to democracy in Australia and elsewhere, of course; its impact on the public sphere is deeply concerning, especially since the role of the public sphere is to regulate claims to truth.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relationship between trust in government and the efficacy of policy; this also points to the importance of meaning-making spaces to the …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Merja Myllylahti, whose interest is in changes to how ongoing changes to search engines well beyond AI are changing Web traffic to news outlets. This takes a broader view of audience behaviours in relation to search, and of structural conditions in the search marketplace.

There have been significant concerns about a decline in traffic to news sites; however, the evidence for this decline remains limited at present. Comparing 2018 and 2025 traffic patterns for New Zealand, for instance, traffic from search seems fairly stable; it is the traffic …