Industrial Journalism

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Howard Lee, whose focus is on truth in Singapore’s online mediascape. He begins by highlighting the independent media outlet The Online Citizen Asia and the current affairs magazine Jom, who have had various run-ins with the Lee family who have been in control of Singaporean politics for several years.

One example is the saga over former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s house, which was destined for demolition but was saved by one of his sons, who became the current Prime Minister; this resulted in an unusual spat between the siblings …

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Carlotta Antonelli and Mauro Bomba, whose interest is in the dynamics of the political discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic in the main talkshows on Italian TV, with particular focus on the positioning of women with political roles in such discourse. In such contexts, media serve in a function as representatives of public views and responses to the issues they themselves cover.

The present study took a mixed-methods approach, analysing the content of seven daytime talkshows from seven Italian TV stations. Women represented only about one quarter of the nearly 150 political …

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

Democracy itself is founded on a set of abstract positions that privilege the rational and ignore structural inequalities and power relations in society, and democracy’s ills are often attributed to bad-faith actors and the rise of illiberalism – but we might …

And we conclude the COMNEWS 2023 conference with another set of keynotes, starting with a remote presentation by Verica Rupar on journalism, search engines, and the public interest. She begins by noting the considerable transformations driven by digital technologies over the past years, not least in journalism, since the emergence of the World Wide Web itself; this was first seen as providing a greater platform for non-elite participants, with search engines also offering more access to such a more diverse range of voices.

This has enabled journalists to adjust their information-seeking practices, but the ranking algorithms of search engines also …

And the final presenter in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Fransiscus Xaverius Lilik Dwi Mardjianto, exploring journalistic roles in fact-checking in Indonesia. There is considerable social media use in Indonesia, especially via mobile phones, and a concentrated media market that is closely aligned within political interests; WhatsApp and Facebook are used to disseminate political content, and a considerable part of this can be mis- and disinformation, biased, or propaganda. This has also resulted in a low level (39%) of trust in the news media.

As a result, there are several fact-checking organisations, especially since the explosion of disinformation during the …

The third speaker in this session at COMNEWS 2023 is Olivia Lewi Pramesti, whose interest is in hoaxes ahead of the 2024 Indonesian election. The volume of misinformation is expected to increase substantially during this time, and digital literacy in Indonesia has not kept track with this growth in problematic information; social media are being used substantially for storytelling, and have considerable influence on public opinion. How can local media push back against this?

The policies of media outlets have an important role to play in facilitating the fight against mis- and disinformation. This project used interviews with newsroom staff …

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the …

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides: