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It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States. This focusses especially on the role of Gab, Parler, and Rumble, and other alt-tech Websites; it builds on an influencer dataset containing Trumpist influencers; an NYU dataset of Parler posts; and a Twitter dataset of tweets by 13 people who objected to the certification of the 2020 election results, which includes the deleted tweets …

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in …

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The project began by mapping the digital infrastructures of news by examining the technology stacks used by different news organisations; this was done through interviews and observations, trade conferences, Stackshare, and methods identifying third-party tools on Websites. This distinguished production and publishing technologies; distribution technologies; and …

The third speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is David Cheruiyot, whose interest is in studying media criticism; such study has a long history, and evaluates expressions of disapproval or judgment of media texts, actors, outlets, or the media as an institution. But such criticism has evolved, especially through the role of social media, where journalists co-exist on the same platform with their critics.

Some such criticism has also been invited and amplified by news organisations themselves, claiming that it improves their news production processes and enhances media accountability. But criticism can also impact on journalists’ conduct …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is the excellent Wiebke Loosen, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences; this has long been understood as a monolithic relationship, but there is now a repertoire of relationships to the different constructions of their audiences that journalists may hold. This paper developed a typology of journalist-audience relationships, therefore, and it is based on 52 interviews with journalists of various backgrounds, beats, and organisations in Germany. The interviews sought to determine the communicative figurations between journalists and audiences.

This produced a typology of 11 relationship …

The final session at this Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with Yoram Timmerman, whose interest is in incremental online news updates. The ability to update news in this way is very different from other news formats, and especially print, of course; information may now be added, removed, or otherwise modified as new details arise. This can be detected computationally by comparing multiple versions of the same article, but there is very limited research on such changes to date – perhaps because of the need for more complex methods for the systematic analysis of such changes.

This study, then, explores …

The final speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos and Lucia Mesquita, who are working with the concept of philanthrocapitalism to examine the funding of journalism in the Global South. This philanthrocapitalism represents an evolution of funding models in recent decades: a substantial number of private organisations, including major digital platforms, with a strong focus on capitalist business efficiency are now providing a great deal of the available funding.

An example for this is the Google News Innovation Challenge, providing grants to smaller and larger journalism organisations. How does this affect the …

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

This project began by mapping ownership of such infrastructure in Norway: while unusually, only one sub-sea Internet cable is privately owned, content delivery networks and data centres are overwhelmingly privately owned. This private ownership of content delivery networks (an example is a …

The post-lunch session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on platforms, and begins with Sherine Conyers. Her focus is on newsroom metrics, and she conducted an ethnography of networked digital newsrooms in Australia with a particular focus on their metrics tools. Her focus here is on two case studies which illuminate platformisation at work .

The first case study is of a slow news day at a news organisation, with the Chartbeat Big Board news engagement metrics moving slowly and editors on the lookout for new stories. Meanwhile, searches related to Jennifer Aniston are trending …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

Networks have transcended traditional national boundaries and are now delivering content to global audiences; this gives audiences immediate access to global events worldwide. More recent networks such as RT or CGTN are engaged in an intense struggle for ideological supremacy, pursuing explicit public diplomacy objectives, while domestic networks like Fox News are …