Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Martha Evans, whose focus is on the reporting on Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. Mandela came to personify the anti-apartheid struggle – also by becoming an absent signifier of the struggle, which enabled him to become the ultimate polysemic persona onto whom all sorts of perspectives were projected.

Robben Island had long been a prison camp and a dumping ground for political prisoners; Mandela’s incarceration there only added to Mandela’s almost mythical status. This also created pressures for his gaolers, however, and as a result he was not entirely cut …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, whose focus is on the South African apartheid propagandist Piet Meyer – a highly power political operator influenced by Calvinist morality, and Chief of Radio for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Meyer was demonised by the more liberal press, and the present paper draws on his personal archives. He came from Boer heritage, and was highly educated; he was suspected of ideological allegiances to German Nazi ideology, but it may be more appropriate to see his major influences as a quasi-theological commitment to self-determination for white South Africans.

Meyer …

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Helena Lima, whose work studies the Spanish online platform P3, founded in 2011 and directed largely at younger, urban, high-brow readers. Incorporating a crowdsourcing approach, audiences have been invited to participate in the platform in a number of ways, too.

Previous research indicates that such projects might lead audiences to focus on ‘soft’ news, while the professional journalists continue to cover ‘hard’ news stories, and this may also enable the platform to do more with a limited set of resources; further, such collaboration may strengthen relationships between the journalists and …

The next presentation at IAMCR 2019 is by Pere Masip and Pablo Capilla, but presented by Jaume Suau. It begins with the fundamental question of what is news, and how this is perceived by audiences – do they employ the same newsworthiness criteria as journalists and editors? The project explored the news published by El País, ABC, El Confidencial, and Público in Spain, representing legacy and born-digital outlets from a range of ideological perspectives.

The study examined the five leading, most read, most commented, and most shared news items on each site over a period of time …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.

At the same time, however, it may also mean that readers no longer share the same information landscape, and this could have deleterious impacts on democratic information and participation – the emergence of a ‘filter bubble’ is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.

Public broadcasters are in an interesting position in relation to metrics, as they are chasing cultural capital more than economic capital …

Day three at IAMCR 2019 starts for me with a presentation by Scott Wright, whose focus is on how journalists at The Guardian comment below the line on their own online stories. There’s been little research into the actual comments themselves so far – much of the research in this space has been focussed on interviews with journalists instead. How has such commenting evolved over time, and what do journalists do there now?

The study worked with a macro sample of 110m comments (by journalists and readers), focussed in on a meso-sample of 26 journalists whose comments were coded closely …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

This enables a study of which news stories and categories (e.g. hard or soft content) receive the most comments or …