Industrial Journalism

The next speaker at the ICA 2024 conference is Jennifer Ihm, who begins by outlining key interests in news-sharing research: such content has been studied for its information value as well as its viral dissemination. But how do social media users assess the value and relevance of the news being shared? There might be two types of self-presentational value in news-sharing: based on self-constructive motivations, or based on audience-pleasing motivations (relational, informational, or entertainment aspects may all contribute here).

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with the great Helena Rauxloh. Her paper emerges from the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten, which builds on longitudinal Web tracking and survey data from some 4,000 participants in Germany. The key concept in this study is political efficacy, which is the feeling that political action has an impact on political processes.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list. That stack drew on that list to gather public posts from Facebook’s CrowdTangle data service between 2016 and 2022 (some 42 million of them, from around 918,000 public pages and groups); identify the 1,000 most prominent pages and groups sharing problematic information; gather all of their posts during these years, independent of whether they contained problematic information or not (some 70 million from the 953 still available public pages and groups); and examine – through topic modelling and practice mapping – what else they talked about.

Slides are here, and more live-blogging below:

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence public opinion and policy-makers, and policy-makers also seek to influence media framing – but media frames are difficult to investigate both qualitatively and quantitatively. Key questions here include whether there are problem statements, identified causes, blame attribution, proposed solutions, and other aspects.

The fourth speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Michael Dieringer, with yet another systematic review of the journalism studies literature, focussing here especially on epistemological and methodological approaches and trends specifically in qualitative journalism research work over time. Such shifts reflect the key issues of the time, as well as fashions in research approaches.

Next up in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yangliu Fan, who presents a bibliometric study of journalism studies publications. This study focussed on the published literature in the field since 1995, examining these publications by understanding their citation patterns.

The post-lunch session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending has been organised by the Global Journalism Innovation Lab (GJIL) project, and focusses on AI-generated content in the news. Elizabeth Dubois starts us off by defining generative AI as a type of artificial intelligence system which is capable of generating text, images, and other media in response to prompts. Such generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate new data that have similar characteristics.

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.