Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev; she notes that AI remains seen in a number of different ways by journalists, and attracts both positive and negative perceptions: it is seen as a valuable new tool, but also as something that could replace some journalistic jobs, and might affect the quality of journalistic converage. This is also affected by broader perceptions of AI in society, of course.

The next presenter in this ICA 2024 conference session is Brian So, whose interest is in how Bloomberg is using automated reporting to cover the financial results of Hong Kong-listed companies. Automated reporting has long been seen as supporting especially sports, financial, and weather reporting, since reporting there tends to follow very formalised patterns.

I’m sharing the next session at the ICA 2024 conference, and it starts with Anis Rahman, whose focus is on the use of AI in public media journalism. AI tools are largely emerging from major corporations in Global North countries; public media organisations are not doing a great deal of work in studying, exploring, or developing AI applications as yet, however. Here it is also important to distinguish between full generative AI tools and mere algorithms.

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ahmed Al-Rawi, who is interested in assessing the automated visual analysis of news and social media images. His study draws on the GDELT dataset of news content metadata from around the world, which (using the Google Vision API) also OCRs, labels, and detects logos in broadcast TV content. He extracted some 813,000 news items from the GDELT CloudVision dataset, and from this drew some 10,000 items addressing mis- and disinformation.

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sujin Choi, presenting a stochastic actor-oriented modelling of shared-issue networks and personal news curation behaviours. The focus here is especially on issue publics, which pay particular attention to specific issues; this reflects the attention economy. But how do such issue publics come to be?

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Harry Yan, whose begins by noting the increase of animosity and affective polarisation against opposing parties in the United States. What role do mass media play in this context? We already know that greater Internet use in itself is not to blame here: this has been shown by a range of studies already. More complex explanations need to be found.

The Monday morning session at the ICA 2024 conference begins with Jakob Bæk Kristensen, presenting a study on cross-platform alternative news sharing. Cross-platform studies are highly necessary, but still remain rare: even if many platforms are designed to keep users on-platform, users themselves often act and share content across platforms – but it is difficult to trace those practices across multiple platforms.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Tian Yang, presenting a comparison of the visibility of news on the Web, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Platforms are now central to the presentation of news production, dissemination, and use, and access through social media is considerably more common than direct access to Websites.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ori Tenenboim, whose interest is in why news users limit their public expression online. This might be driven by perceptions of the visibility of their news engagement, and of the consequences that such visibility may have.