I’m on one of my rare visits to ICA, and at a journalism session that starts with my colleague Folker Hanusch. He points out the considerable offline homophily between journalists - they hang out and interact with each other, and this may also translate to an online context. Some of this also intersects with news organisations, news beats, gender, and other identity traits, however – and on specific platforms, of course, homophily may also result in different patterns for different forms of interaction (e.g. @mentions vs. retweets on Twitter).

This study worked with the Australian TrISMA infrastructure and …

A few weeks ago I visited Israel to present a keynote at the inaugural Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers. The keynote draws on my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, and focusses especially on the news industry’s responses to the growing role that gatewatching and newssharing via social media play in the dissemination of news and related journalistic content. The presentation slides are below.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past …

Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:

What are the major challenges in Internet research?

The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Catherine Maggs, whose focus is on WikiLeaks. When it first emerged to mainstream media attention, the site was a spectacle, collaborating with some mainstream media at first but also already receiving substantial criticism from many established media organisations for its conduct.

WikiLeaks can be understood with reference to Manuel Castells's concept of counterpower; it challenged the journalistic status quo, in part also because of the question of whether what it did could be considered as a journalistic practice at all, while by now founder Julian Assange's personal troubles have …

The next speaker at AoIR 2017 is Catherine Son, who examines the role of digital publics in Australian print media practices. In 1996, for instance, when the Port Arthur massacre took place, many of the digital publics that were in evidence during the 2015 Lindt Café siege in Sydney, and a review of these two events of national significance serves to highlight the evolution of the Australian media ecology over these twenty years.

Tasmania's Port Arthur, a former penal colony with a very dark past, was the site of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of 35 people, and …

The last day at AoIR 2017 starts with Marita Lüders, who begin by highlighting the crucial role of the news media in democracy, and also of citizen trust in the news media as a requirement for the media to exercise that crucial role. But such trust has declined, while citizen choices of older and newer news media have multiplied, with a growth especially in lower-credibility news channels.

So what are the components of trust in the news media? This paper utilises a model that examines trust in organisations, which has not yet been applied to news organisations; it sees trust …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on 'fake news' in Denmark. he begins by suggesting that we are now entering a hyper-factual era: digital media are transforming our definition of news, and political leaders have been capitalising on this by creating their own definitions of news. This has also been described as an era of 'post-truth', but at the same time we have rarely talked more about what is 'true' and what is 'false' than we do today.

In Denmark, tabloids have been at the forefront of these developments. One of the …