Industrial Journalism

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

As the boundaries of journalism continue to move and perhaps dissolve, there is an …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, who notes that the current media ecology may no longer guarantee a common ground of information amongst audiences; the diversity of the issues that people consider to be important may be increasing, and this may mean that people no longer agree on a set of common political issues that are important to be addressed in society.

This would mean that we are now seeing the emergence of competing or fragmented public agendas – yet most ness consumption online is still driven by major legacy media, online as well as …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

There are a variety of individual as well as country-level explanations for this. Age, class, gender, and attitudinal reasons (trust in the news, strong ideological positions, perceptions of their own political efficacy) tend to be associated with news avoidance at the individual level; at a …

The third paper in this ECREA 2018 session is by Carlos Aguilar-Paredes, who shifts our focus on selective exposure in sports reporting. This is an unusual approach as such selective exposure is mainly discussed in political contexts. However, sports articles are amongst the most widely read news content.

The present study examined this for the case of Catalunya, where there is also an ideological element to such coverage, as particular teams and their fans, but also the media that cover them, are associated with specific left/right and nationalist/unionist perspectives. Individual sports papers also have close relationships with particular clubs.

This …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Dina Vozab, who combines the concepts of high-choice media environments in the current media ecology, of the news repertoires that news users develop in such high-choice environments, and of the effects of media use across multiple platforms on political participation. She examines this in the context of Croatia, whose media system is characterised as peripheral in the European context, and remains comparatively underresearched. What types of news repertoires exist here, and what is their effect on political participation?

This was analysed using a representative survey of Croatian news users, and found …

I’m afraid I missed most of the ECREA 2018 sessions as I was in a team meeting of our Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project, but I’m here again for the final session of the day, which starts with Mark Boukes. He starts by introducing the concept of political sophistication, and the difficulty in measuring it empirically. Often, this is done by administering knowledge tests, but knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding – so are there alternative indicators?

News consumption can improve knowledge, of course, but again this does not necessarily result in a genuinely enhanced understanding of the …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

When news media frame such parties as anti-democratic, this has a distinct effect on their positioning, but not all extremist parties are marked in this way – and which are marked this way by the media may depend on the political history of the nation: nations with a leftist autocratic history may be more likely to brand leftist parties as anti-democratic, while …

The next ECREA 2018 session starts with Christina Peter, who begins by noting the reference to (supposed) popular opinion as a common rhetorical strategy of populist politicians as well as of journalists; this is classified as an explicit public opinion cue. By contrast, implicit public opinion cues simply represent public opinion for instance in the form of vox-pops.

Such explicit cues are very prominent in the media, while implicit cues are somewhat less prominent; what effects do they have on the formation of popular opinion, however? Does this convince actual citizens that the general public truly hold these views? Christina’s …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

This may mean changing the shape of the news itself, adjusting it to such new platforms – and it is often done in pursuit of greater reach for news content, but this reach is not usually rewarded by greater advertising …

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

This debate about what news is is not new: historically there are four key approaches to this question. The first is journalism-centric, and defines news as the professional output of journalistic practice; it builds …