Industrial Journalism

The third presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Jaume Suau, focussing on agenda-setting in the digital public sphere and exploring especially the role of Spanish citizens as online participants. Spanish users are highly active in engaging with political and social contexts, and this is focussed largely on commenting and sharing news (especially on Facebook and WhatsApp) rather than producing content. News media have failed to harness these energies fully so far.

Such audience participation is changing traditional hegemonies in journalism. Old and new media coexist in the news environment, and complement and influence wach other. Audience …

The next Future of Journalism 2017 session starts with a paper by Kasper Welbers that explores the gatekeeping role of newspapers' social media editors (who manage their Facebook pages), in part by gathering engagement data for the posts on these pages through the Facebook API. Data gathering here is non-trivial, however, as it requires the regular re-gathering of engagement information over longer periods of time in order to establish engagement time-series.

First, there are significant differences between the publication time on the news Website, and publication on the Facebook page; U.K. papers are slower to push content to their pages …

The final paper in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is by Henrik Bødker and Scott Eldridge, which begins by positioning journalism as an inferential community. Journalism often operates in a context where there is an absence of facts, but in writing about matters of societal significance rumours and other unsubstantiated information cannot be ignored and excluded. Instead, inferences – statements about the unknown, based on the known – need to be made.

Such inferences are being made within news texts, across texts, and across institutions, as a communally elaborated text. One example for this is the supposed dossier of …

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Scott Eldridge, whose interest is in the presence of 'fake news' in its various guises in political campaign coverage. This includes news, rumour, and speculative fact, and indeed attempts to address political rumour go back at least to the Roman Empire.

The promise of print news was initially that it would shut down the circulation of rumour by providing black-on-white facts on a professionally organised, mass-market basis – yet rumour clearly persists nonetheless, in formulations such as "sources say", in the push towards insufficiently verified live reporting, and in the incorporation …

The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2017 is Bente Kalsnes, whose aim is to develop a more systematic approach to 'fake news' in the Norwegian context. Bente has some personal experience with this: her photo and name appeared in a Norwegian newspaper as a future Member of Parliament, even though she is not actually a candidate in the upcoming election.

But such mistakes and errors in the news are not the central definition of 'fake news'. Instead, the term is used by authoritarian leaders to attack unfavourable mainstream media coverage, and by media critics to describe various forms of …

The next Future of Journalism 2017 session starts with Julian Petley, who begins by noting the problems with the term 'fake news'. Some such news is deliberately made up as clickbait; some is overt or covert political propaganda; some is not made up but simply seriously biased or inaccurate; and some is deliberately made up for the purposes of media critique or satire.

But fake news also has a very long history. In 1835, for example, the New York Sun reported the discovery of life on the Moon by Sir John Herschel, purporting to reprint an article from the Edinburgh …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Concha Edo, whose focus is on the impact of news aggregators (and especially those beyond the major services). Such services now play a crucial role in channelling audience attention to news sources; research here has largely focussed on the impact of the major services on news industry business models.

Aggregators employ a range of algorithms to connect news and its audiences, yet such algorithms are usually obscure and intransparent; most aggregators then offer the headlines and ledes of news stories, along with an indication of the sites from which …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 study is Richard Fletcher, who begins by noting the role of incidental exposure to news on social media, but now seeks to extend this research to also encompass the impact of search engines in connecting users with news stories. Search engines are one of the most prominent Web applications, and are also used to a significant extent to access news; the focus here is on users who specifically seek out a given news topic by searching for relevant key terms.

This research proceeds from a four-country study of search engine use …

I'm the next presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session, and my presentation is below. A full paper is also available here.

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence from Axel Bruns

The morning session on this second day at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Leighton Andrews, who begins by highlighting the role of Internet intermediaries as gatekeepers for news; over the last year we've also seen the early signs of a regulatory turn that has seen lawmakers take a greater interest in addressing the implications of their role.

One concern here is the emergence of platforms (originally AOL, now Facebook and others) as 'walled gardens' that control information flows and lie outside of EU or U.K. regulations. Further, the algorithms by which these sites operate are largely unknown and outside …