Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Destiny Hopkins, whose focus is on the terminology and identity of news influencers who have no formal journalism background or education. Such influencers have become increasingly prominent in US politics, and news influencers were invited to the Democratic National Congress alongside legitimate journalists, for instance.

This was seen critically by journalists and news organisations, of course, resulting in pushback from the influencers themselves; they pointed out the boundary work done by journalists to distinguish themselves from influencers, in particular. This is an …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sally Tuomola, whose interest is in the produsage activities of Finnish news influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. Her project engaged in semi-structured thematic interviews with 20 such influencers across the political spectrum, combined with digital trace data. These were chosen based on their self-presentation as correcting and countering mainstream journalism.

News influencers have been understood as doing boundary work in the journalistic field, critiquing or threatening mainstream journalism and positioning themselves as peripheral actors with distinct personas. Such news influencers engage …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.

The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.

True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such …

For my last conference of the year, I’ve made the short trip up to the Sunshine Coast to attend the AANZCA 2025 conference. I’ll present some work later today, but we start with a keynote by the great Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who begins by introducing the idea of boutique media, as a new form of small-scale news organisations that responds to the decline of mainstream news media.

Boutique media represent a form of post-industrial journalism: as existing news organisations lose revenue and market share, the industry itself is changing substantially; this creative destruction leads to a restructuring of every organisational aspect …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in the sharing of Australian news on Facebook, especially by politicians. This can be understood through the lens of agenda-setting theory: news media content plays a crucial role in shaping what public issues audiences learn about, and politicians’ sharing of news media content seeks to channel and affect these processes. (There are also questions about the extent of such agenda-setting power.)

Cameron’s work focusses on Facebook, which remains a major and influential social media platform in Australia, with the vast majority of federal politicians active …