Industrial Journalism

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

Up next in this ECREA 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, whose focus is on news recommender systems. Such systems are algorithms that provide users with personalised recommendations for news content based on past interactions by them or similar users, overall popularity metrics, and other features.

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am. My stay here also involves a couple of teaching roles: I’m teaching an undergraduate course that builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (and I’m hoping to make those lecture recordings available publicly at some point, in case they’re of use in other teaching) and a Masters seminar that explores the many concepts for what has now replaced ‘the’ public sphere (and I’m hoping to convert those ideas and discussions into some new writing eventually, too). Plus, there are plenty of opportunities for future collaborations between the IKMZ and my home institution, the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.

But while I’m here in the centre of Europe I’m also taking the opportunity to connect with a number of key colleagues and communities in my field. Next week, on 13-14 October 2022, I’ll be at the Norwegian Media Research Conference in Stavanger, where I’ve been invited to present one of the keynotes and will outline some of the ideas that are also animating my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation.