Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Nicolas Mattis, whose interest is in news diversification. This builds on notions of democratically (rather than merely economically) motivated news recommender design, the purported links between news diversity and democratically desirable effects, and emerging experiments with various news diversification metrics.

Any kind of digital news environment can be thought of as a choice architecture: they filter, rank, and present news stories to their user. News diversification facilitates engagement with diverse news, and seeks to facilitate normatively desirable outcomes; this involves the adjustment of such choice architectures. Democratic theory can provide …

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 next session at the ICA 2024 conference is on polarisation, and starts with the great Helena Rauxloh. Her paper emerges from the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten, which builds on longitudinal Web tracking and survey data from some 4,000 participants in Germany. The key concept in this study is political efficacy, which is the feeling that political action has an impact on political processes. This divide into internal and external efficacy as experienced by individuals, and such efficacy mediates news exposure and political engagement. It is thus a precondition for political participation.

Another aspect to consider here is …

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a paper that my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus and I are presenting, so I’ll blog Dan’s part and then leave it to our slides to explain my contribution. Our work is part of a large project that investigates the dissemination of problematic, ‘fake news’ content on social media platforms.

We approached this by constructing a masterlist of some 2,300 problematic information domains which have been identified in past research, with a focus mostly on the United States, and building a research stack around that seed list …

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is David Coppini, whose interest is in news consumption and affective polarisation in the Italian context. Italy has a polarised pluralistic media system: the multi-party political system, comprised of three key blocs, is mirrored to some extent by an aligned polarised media system, but there is also a group of broadly neutral news organisations.

Affective polarisation in such a political system may also be associated with divergent patterns of news consumption, but may also be affected by partisan identity or policy preferences. The present study examines this through a two-wave survey …

Up next in this ICA 2024 conference session is my excellent QUT colleague Katharina Esau, presenting a study on the news media framing of both mainstream and more disruptive climate protests in Germany and Australia. This included both the peaceful protests Fridays for Future and School Strike for Climate as well as well as the actions of Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion that blocked traffic and staged symbolic protests in art galleries.

Here are the slides, and the liveblog continues below:

How the news media frame such protests matters. Frames influence …

The fourth speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Michael Dieringer, with yet another systematic review of the journalism studies literature, focussing here especially on epistemological and methodological approaches and trends specifically in qualitative journalism research work over time. Such shifts reflect the key issues of the time, as well as fashions in research approaches.

The most common perspective that this study found was a sociological perspective, followed by an implicit use of grounded theory approaches. Articles that did not directly use a theoretical framework often developed one of their own, drawing on a multi-stakeholder approach. Discourse …

Next up in this ICA 2024 conference session is Yangliu Fan, who presents a bibliometric study of journalism studies publications. This study focussed on the published literature in the field since 1995, examining these publications by understanding their citation patterns. It drew on the full set of publications from the five major journalism journals between 1995 and 2022 – some 6,770 articles – from the OpenAlex database, and examined their co-citation networks: these occur when two earlier articles are cited together in one or more later articles.

The resultant network contained some 5,700 articles connected by 305,000 links, and identified …