Industrial Journalism

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. This divide into internal and external efficacy as experienced by individuals, and such efficacy mediates news exposure and political engagement. It is thus a precondition for political participation.

Another aspect to consider here is …

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 …

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.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey …

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 …

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.

The most common perspective that this study found was a sociological perspective, followed by an implicit use of grounded theory approaches. Articles that did not directly use a theoretical framework often developed one of their own, drawing on a multi-stakeholder approach. Discourse …

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. It drew on the full set of publications from the five major journalism journals between 1995 and 2022 – some 6,770 articles – from the OpenAlex database, and examined their co-citation networks: these occur when two earlier articles are cited together in one or more later articles.

The resultant network contained some 5,700 articles connected by 305,000 links, and identified …

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.

Michelle Bartleman now takes over by presenting an updated systematic literature review of journalism scholarship on automated …

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.

But not all such strategies are used in all countries where such media capture takes place, and governments may change their mix of these strategies over time. Their choice depends on local contexts (such as the exploitability of economic or legal systems …

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on democratic backsliding, and begins with Kate Wright; her focus is on state-led democratic backsliding and its relationship with the political capture of public service media organisations. This is difficult to study due to the problems with gaining access to such media organisations, especially as the political capture is taking place; at best, we might review this after the fact through interviews with journalists.

The present study is in the unusual position of having been able to study the state capture of the Voice of America by the Trump administration both …