Industrial Journalism

My presentation was up next at IAMCR 2023, and outlines the overall agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Laura Teruel Rodríguez, with a paper on the intersection of polarisation and disinformation. Disinformation (and other forms of information disorder) has played a considerable part in driving polarisation, especially in contexts such as the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump as US President; the project is interested, therefore, in the correlations between polarisation and disinformation in the European quality press since 2017.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Mazlum Kemal Dagdelen, whose focus is on nationalist discourse in the late-1960s Turkish Cypriot children’s magazine Tuncer (named after a teacher supposedly killed by Greek Cypriots). Cyprus is of course an island divided between Turkish and Greek Cypriot areas since the Turkish invasion of the early 1970s, and populated by Turkish and Greek communities since at least the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus.

Next up at IAMCR 2023 are Aleix Martí and Roger Cuartielles, whose focus is on the circulation of information in Spain during the COVID-19 crisis. Legacy media as well as social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played key roles in this infodemic. Social media in particular played a disintermediating role, enabling the further spread of mis- and disinformation.

The next speaker in this afternoon session at IAMCR 2023 is Ester Minga, with a focus on the intertwined crises of migration and COVID-19 in Portugal. Portugal does not receive as many asylum requests as larger European countries, but has been very proactive in taking in its share of migrants since the major refugee crisis in 2015; this is a continuation of Portuguese Luso-Tropicalism.

The post-lunch session on this second day at IAMCR 2023 starts with Vered Elisha Malka, whose focus is on the consumption of news about the current Russian-Ukrainian war in Israel and Germany. Media coverage of the event has been extensive, of course, and news media consumption patterns may be influenced by a number of underlying parameters. Such media consumption patterns also affect public opinion about the war, of course.

The next presenter in this morning session at IAMCR 2023 is Katharina Schöppl, whose interest is in news avoidance amongst users of alternative media. Media are critical to the construction of a shared reality and public sphere, yet media realities are not comprehensive, which gives rise to alternative news media options as well as news avoidance.

The first session at IAMCR 2023 this hot Tuesday morning starts with Raül Nuevo Gascó, and his focus is on populism. But this term is being used in very different ways by different scholars as well as in mainstream media, and instead Raül is moving from an essentialist to a constructivist perspective, and from an inductive to a deductive approach. This accepts that populism can have different meanings; that these differ between different national contexts; and that these meanings are collectively constructed in each case.

And the final speaker for this session and this day at IAMCR 2023 is Aline Duelen, whose focus is on the use of AI in combatting disinformation. Disinformation is a major problem in online communication spaces today, of course, and there is some existing research that identifies factors that play a role in detecting disinformation – but these cannot easily be automated, as their application usually requires the application of critical thinking skills. The development of more automated systems therefore requires citizen co-creation approaches.

The next paper in this IAMCR 2023 session is by Livia Gardía-Faroldi, who presents a comparative analysis of disinformation on social media across the UK, France, and Spain. Such a comparative study is necessary given the very different political and media environments across these countries. Do the audiences in these countries differ in their interest and trust in the news; their concern about fake news; and their use of social media for informational purposes?