Industrial Journalism

It’s a lovely Thursday in spring in Bologna, and I’m here at the renaissance Palazzo Ercolani for the opening of the concluding symposium of the I-POLHYS project on polarisation in hybrid systems. We start with Sergio Splendore and, whose focus is on journalists’s perceptions of polarisation.

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Caryn Coatney, whose focus is on the data journalism of the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team. Data journalism has evolved considerably over the past years, with the initial focus on data visualisation giving way to a broader role that in some news organisations also includes the maximising of news content engagement metrics through clickbait.

The next speaker at ANZCA 2023 is Sky Marsen, whose interest is in health communication during crisis. This involves matters of personal and social identity and high levels of scientific uncertainty that motivate many to look to opposing discourses from religious and other sources. The present project explored culturally diverse contexts in developing nations, and focusses here on a case study of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16.

The final session at ANZCA 2023 that I’m attending starts with Alex Beattie, whose interest is in news avoidance in Aotearoa. This usually refers to intentional news avoidance, but it is not always clear just how intentional such avoidance is; broader media platform choices might also have an impact on whether and how people see the news, for instance.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Claire Fitzpatrick and Ashleigh Haw, who extend our focus to a comparative analysis of the ‘freedom’ movements in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In Aotearoa, the protest was organised by a diverse group of participants without clear leadership, and the atmosphere around the protest declined precipitously as prosocial and family-oriented protests were overwhelmed by some much darker messages calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cameron McTernan, who is interested in news diversity on social media. Media diversity has long been an issue and a priority in media policy, but has often focussed on media ownership and media content at the outlet level, without necessarily taking into account the role of social media in the distribution of content. This is becoming increasingly important because media supply chains are becoming less linear as social media logics and algorithms affect news distribution.