The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Eddy Hurcombe, whose focus is on the pursuit of social media interactions metrics by Australian news organisations that post deliberately controversial content – in essence, trolling for engagement. This taps into the social media logics that build on the platforms’ governing principles – and these social media logics now also increasingly govern the engagement with and dissemination of news stories.

This is not necessarily a purely Australian phenomenon – other news organisations also deliberately publish controversial content in order to pursue user engagement – we might need to rethink the focus …

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …

The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.

We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

Ritzau has introduced such robotic journalism tools for its financial reporting: building on predesigned story templates and standardised company earnings data, the tools will generate standard articles that report on the …