Journalism

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …

And the final presenter in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Gabrielle Princessa Wulaningatri, who returns us to the analysis of polarisation in Australian news media coverage. Ideological polarisation in the general population tends to correlate with attitudes towards climate action; such public polarisation is likely to also be reflected at least to some extent in news coverage of this topic.

The key focus here is on value framing in news media coverage; different values (from self-determination to traditionalism) also tend to be aligned with different ideological positionings. The study examined the presence of such values in the …

Next up in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Rowan Wilken, presenting a longitudinal study of news reports about dust storms in Victoria between 1992 and 2024. Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia, and exacerbated by periods of drought in arid and semi-arid areas; major storms are frequently covered by Australian news media. The focus of this paper is especially on dust storms in the Mallee, in northwestern Victoria.

What are the patterns that emerge in such news coverage, then; are there fixed formats for there coverage, or are there seasonal patterns to the journalistic …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.

News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Edward Hurcombe, whose focus is also on news in the 2025 Australian federal election. News consumption is now increasingly fragmented, with a growing number of younger voters no longer engaging with mainstream, legacy media; influencers were therefore invited to the 2025 budget lockdown, and PM Anthony Albanese appeared on influencer Abbie Chatfield’s podcast.

How was the election covered across traditional and social media news outlets in Australia, then? How do they imagine their audiences? Data were gathered from ABC News, The Age, The Guardian, news.com.au, and …

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 next speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Julie Lüpkes and Anne Schmitz, whose focus is on the imagining of digital futures in digital tool development in education and journalism. These are examples of the mutual shaping of technology and society, through a reciprocal process of co-production, and they may embed a variety of smaller or larger ideas for the future, from projection through vision to imaginaries.

What digital futures do such tools present, then, and what factors limit their full realisation? This study engaged in media ethnographies and stakeholder interviews to understand …

And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.

In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own …

The third speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on the role of journalism in fuelling discursive polarisation. He begins by referencing controversial public debates about radical climate protests, which usually evidence some level of discursive polarisation. Such polarisation may be ideological and/or affective, and and become destructive for public debate.

This contrasts with democratic transformative communication, which enables societies to address such conflicts productively. Literature has identified a number of factors that may polarise or depolarise; interestingly, exposure to dissonant views is often seen as polarising, but this …

I presented the next paper at the AoIR 2025 conference, presenting the reflections of a large QUT team on how we might study election discussions across a wide range of social media platforms in the increasingly fragmented online platform environment. Here are our slides: