Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

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.

News engagement plays a crucial role in democratic life, and plays a role in what people see and engage with; if users self-censor such engagement then this also affects what other people see in their digital media spaces. Non-engagement may also relate to relationship management, and be affected by users’ privacy calculus about their …

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Iris Baas, whose interest is in the self-identity of Dutch Twitter users who share the news. Twitter is (even now, following its enshittification) a key platform especially for news consumption in the Netherlands, and who is sharing news on the platform is therefore centrally important. Are there district groups of such users, then – and what news do they share?

This project worked with the Twitter bios of such news-sharing users to determine patterns in their identities; it drew on some 400,000 tweets from 2021 (that were still online, from …

The next speaker at the ICA 2024 conference is Jennifer Ihm, who begins by outlining key interests in news-sharing research: such content has been studied for its information value as well as its viral dissemination. But how do social media users assess the value and relevance of the news being shared? There might be two types of self-presentational value in news-sharing: based on self-constructive motivations, or based on audience-pleasing motivations (relational, informational, or entertainment aspects may all contribute here).

Issue relevance in news articles may be at the personal, audience, or societal level, then: personal relevance is likely to be …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on news-sharing, and starts with Shu-Chu Sarrina Li, whose focus is on Facebook, Instagram, and Line in Taiwan. Social media are very popular in Taiwan – some 91% are regular Line users, 85% use Facebook, and 65% use Instagram, and half of all Taiwanese use some of these platforms to use and share news as well.

This paper approaches these practices through niche theory, which encourages scholars to explore media resource utilisation by identifying the breadth of the niches that such media address, and the overlap between the niches addressed by …

The final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is on the evolution of the concept of ‘alternative news media’ – associated today perhaps with anti-establishment, far-right outlets, but in past research more often seen as progressive or even radical left, providing a platform for marginalised voices. Common to these is perhaps that such media see themselves as a corrective to mainstream, establishment media.

What do we make of such research, then? This project focussed on some 1,300 articles on alternative media from 2004 to 2021, and shows a substantial growth in research on alternative media since the …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference reflects on the recent history of journalism studies, and starts with the excellent Raul Ferrer-Connill and a paper on the past 20 years of scholarship on citizen journalism. His team reviewed a sample of some 170 articles on citizen journalism to explore the theories, contexts, and methodologies of their research.

Some 50% of these studies did not identify a clear theoretical framework; the other half used structuration theory, field theory, uses and gratifications, gatekeeping, and a variety of other theoretical frameworks. Some one third of these studies focussed on North America, while …

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

Public communication flows online are now a dynamic network, which is difficult to model …

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides: