Industrial Journalism

And the final speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on coding Italian news data using Large Language Models. This worked with some 85,000 news articles shared on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections, and first classified such URLs as political or non-political; it then produced and clustered text embeddings for these articles, and used GPT-4-turbo to classify the dominant topics in these clusters.

This required considerable prompt crafting, especially also to ensure that prompts remained within the LLM’s token limits. Key challenges here included the choice of LLM …

The next speaker in this final AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Hendrik Meyer, whose interest is in detecting stances in climate change coverage. This focusses especially on climate change debates in German news media, focussing on climate protests, discussions about speed limits, and discussions about heating and heat pump regulations.

Here stances might be better understood as evaluations related to a given issue or policy, and Large Language Models can be useful tools in assessing this, but this also requires considerable prompt crafting in order to generate consistent results. Computational costs for doing so (especially with complex prompts) …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is my QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is especially on the use of LLMs in stance detection in news content. A stance is a public act by a social actors, achieved dialogically through communication, which evaluates objects, positions the self and other subjects, and aligns with other subjects within a sociocultural field.

Here, the focus is broadly on stances towards issues, persons, groups, and organisations. There are some tools for doing so, but they mainly focus on English-language content, are designed for specific types of data, and tend …

I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.

We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:

I …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

A definitive answer to this question is beside the point: the more important issue here is that this question was repeated frequently …

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference panel is my QUT colleague Daniel Whelan-Shamy, with whom I’ll present our paper on polarisation on Indigenous debates in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In both countries there is a long and complex history of colonial oppression towards their respective Indigenous peoples. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum sought to remedy this through the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples, while in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed as early as 1840 and gradually led to greater recognition and rights for Māori groups. Our work examines the patterns of potentially …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Laura Iannelli, whose focus is on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Italy was amongst the first countries in the world to implement a mass lockdown, and this became an arena for polarised conflict amongst political elites. The question here is whether this also fostered societal and individual polarisation, and what role mis- and disinformation played in this process.

Elite polarisation can lead mass polarisation, although crises can also produce a ‘rally around the flag’ phenomenon that reduces polarisation. This offers two contrasting scenarios, of more …

I got lost along the way and came a little late to the post-lunch session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which is on crisis communication and has started with Sara Kopelman. Her interest is in the use of photojournalistic GIFs in Israeli news coverage.

She studied some 541 GIFs from such sites, and found a spread between neutral news, leisure news, and – somewhat surprisingly, given the usual uses of GIFs – negative news. Journalists find such GIFs useful for telling a story; it does so visually without needing a caption. Their endless repetition also poses some ethical questions, however …

The final presenters in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference are Yarden Skop and Anna Schjøtt Hansen; their interests are in the third-party fact-checking network employed by Meta. This operates on the basis of a Meta-provided online dashboard that highlights potentially problematic content, and the dashboard’s operation directs fact-checking away from political content spread by major political figures, and towards other forms of content.

Many fact-checking organisations around the world now substantially rely on income from Meta through their engagement in its fact-checking programme; this is part of a global post-publication debunking turn, but also creates a dependency on …