Industrial Journalism

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:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies. Such legal frameworks also often lack a concrete commitment to normative goals. And, of course, the platforms are also able to exercise …

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The project began by mapping the digital infrastructures of news by examining the technology stacks used by different news organisations; this was done through interviews and observations, trade conferences, Stackshare, and methods identifying third-party tools on Websites. This distinguished production and publishing technologies; distribution technologies; and …

The third speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is David Cheruiyot, whose interest is in studying media criticism; such study has a long history, and evaluates expressions of disapproval or judgment of media texts, actors, outlets, or the media as an institution. But such criticism has evolved, especially through the role of social media, where journalists co-exist on the same platform with their critics.

Some such criticism has also been invited and amplified by news organisations themselves, claiming that it improves their news production processes and enhances media accountability. But criticism can also impact on journalists’ conduct …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is the excellent Wiebke Loosen, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences; this has long been understood as a monolithic relationship, but there is now a repertoire of relationships to the different constructions of their audiences that journalists may hold. This paper developed a typology of journalist-audience relationships, therefore, and it is based on 52 interviews with journalists of various backgrounds, beats, and organisations in Germany. The interviews sought to determine the communicative figurations between journalists and audiences.

This produced a typology of 11 relationship …

The final session at this Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with Yoram Timmerman, whose interest is in incremental online news updates. The ability to update news in this way is very different from other news formats, and especially print, of course; information may now be added, removed, or otherwise modified as new details arise. This can be detected computationally by comparing multiple versions of the same article, but there is very limited research on such changes to date – perhaps because of the need for more complex methods for the systematic analysis of such changes.

This study, then, explores …

The final speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos and Lucia Mesquita, who are working with the concept of philanthrocapitalism to examine the funding of journalism in the Global South. This philanthrocapitalism represents an evolution of funding models in recent decades: a substantial number of private organisations, including major digital platforms, with a strong focus on capitalist business efficiency are now providing a great deal of the available funding.

An example for this is the Google News Innovation Challenge, providing grants to smaller and larger journalism organisations. How does this affect the …