Industrial Journalism

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

For the Web tracking data, this focusses on visits to any on a list of news outlets, and from this determined how selective participants media diets were (in terms of time spent with left- or right-wing media. This also depends on a coding of the partisan slant of news media, of course, which was …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Justin Martin, whose interest is in news junkies – or people with a ‘need for orientation’ (NFO), which has traditionally been measured in a simplistic, US-centric way as interest in and uncertainty about the choices in US presidential elections. The present study replaces this with a new NFO scale that better explores news junkies’ intrinsic need for orientation (INFO).

The INFO scale asks four questions: whether people check the news first thing in the day; check the news during downtime; feel more connected to other people by keeping up with the …

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Madhavi Ravikumar, whose interest is in the way the Indian press frames environmental issues. This is against the backdrop of the severe air pollution crisis in New Delhi, and the present study builds on interviews with Indian journalists.

The mass media have served as a crucial platform for raising and debating environmental since the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and how they present these issues plays a significant role in shaping public opinion. Their selection and framing of issues is especially important in this process.

India is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss. Indeed, the US and New Zealand have the two most threatened ecosystems globally.

The present project examines …

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits. These are often marked by conflicting interests and political agendas, resulting in substantial tension between the Global South and Global North.

Media representations of these debates often reproduce specific narratives, which in turn also further …

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

This is in line with the Biden administration’s desire for a new Washington consensus on contemporary issues, received possibly by the legacy press. This calls for a new industrial policy, led by the US, to address these issues, and builds on nostalgic post-war perspectives …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa. Science journalism is a specialised form of journalists covering science, medicine, and technology, and has gained particular prominence especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; the pandemic has also exposed the value-laden aspects of science journalism, however, pointing to the centrality of politics in the scientific enterprise in the post-war era and the predominant Global North perspectives embraced by science journalism. This does not necessarily serve countries like South Africa well.

The present study examined the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Khayrat Ayyad, whose interest is in how media institutions in the UAE engage with their audiences via social media. The UAE is a global leader in the adoption of digital technologies, and there are a number of state-sponsored or -subsidised media outlets across the UAE’s emirates, alongside for-profit media organisations.

So how do such media engage with their audiences using social media? What tools do they use to enhance interactivity, and how do audiences respond to this? The present project conducted a content analysis of the social media accounts of three …

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping. The net effect is potentially the end of the mass audience for the news.

The present project, then, explored the Instagram pages of some 662 global news publishers from 50 …