Industrial Journalism

The next Future of Journalism 2017 session starts with Julian Petley, who begins by noting the problems with the term 'fake news'. Some such news is deliberately made up as clickbait; some is overt or covert political propaganda; some is not made up but simply seriously biased or inaccurate; and some is deliberately made up for the purposes of media critique or satire.

But fake news also has a very long history. In 1835, for example, the New York Sun reported the discovery of life on the Moon by Sir John Herschel, purporting to reprint an article from the Edinburgh …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Concha Edo, whose focus is on the impact of news aggregators (and especially those beyond the major services). Such services now play a crucial role in channelling audience attention to news sources; research here has largely focussed on the impact of the major services on news industry business models.

Aggregators employ a range of algorithms to connect news and its audiences, yet such algorithms are usually obscure and intransparent; most aggregators then offer the headlines and ledes of news stories, along with an indication of the sites from which …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 study is Richard Fletcher, who begins by noting the role of incidental exposure to news on social media, but now seeks to extend this research to also encompass the impact of search engines in connecting users with news stories. Search engines are one of the most prominent Web applications, and are also used to a significant extent to access news; the focus here is on users who specifically seek out a given news topic by searching for relevant key terms.

This research proceeds from a four-country study of search engine use …

I'm the next presenter in this Future of Journalism 2017 session, and my presentation is below. A full paper is also available here.

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence from Axel Bruns

The morning session on this second day at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Leighton Andrews, who begins by highlighting the role of Internet intermediaries as gatekeepers for news; over the last year we've also seen the early signs of a regulatory turn that has seen lawmakers take a greater interest in addressing the implications of their role.

One concern here is the emergence of platforms (originally AOL, now Facebook and others) as 'walled gardens' that control information flows and lie outside of EU or U.K. regulations. Further, the algorithms by which these sites operate are largely unknown and outside …

The final keynote at Future of Journalism 2017 today is by Guy Berger, Director of Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO, who asks the perfectly innocent question "Does Journalism Have a Future?" The challenges it now faces include questions about the authority and objectivity of legacy news organisations, social media, 'fake news', political satire, automation, sourcing and expertise, scrutiny and accountability, and journalism education, to name just a few; each one of these is considerable.

Yet another issue for journalists is their personal safety, as journalists are regularly abused and threatened via social media and other channels. There …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2017 session is Avshalom Ginosar, who suggests that we can no longer address online journalism as a unified social institution. We have moved here from an old institutionalism that addressed the formal, relatively stable structures of the journalistic field, to an old institutionalism that focusses on the formal as well as informal, complex and evolving processes of journalism.

Does this mean that there is now a new news ecosystem, as JD Lasica has put it? Are there new professional rules, norms, and beliefs, and is online journalism still the same social institution …

The next speaker in this session at Future of Journalism 2017 is Irene Costera Meijer, whose team conducted 72 interviews with news users in the Netherlands to elicit their views on truth and trust in the news. Truth in journalism is perceived as one of the cornerstones of news quality, but this does not mean that such values are conditions either for the production or the consumption of news – and journalists and news users tend to point to each other as responsible for the decrease in the quality of the news and the resulting news scepticism.

How do such …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2017 starts with Tine Ustad Figenschou, whose focus is on media criticism and mistrust in far-right alternative media in Norway. How do such groups express their criticism, and is this a continuation of more traditional forms of press criticism, or is the approach here more cynical, sceptical, and fundamentally distrustful?

Media criticism in alternative media has traditionally perceived 'the mainstream media' as a bloc, driven by commercialism and pursuing its own political goals while romanticising alternative media. This study observes such criticism as it is expressed in five Norwegian far-right sites; it examined …

Up next in this Future of Journalism 2017 session are Klaus Meier and Daniela Kraus, presenting their 'post-truth' research project. They begin by noting that audience engagement is becoming a key factor in journalism, and instituted a Learning Lab Audience Engagement that aimed to provide journalists with the tools to move journalism from a lecture to a conversation.

But audience engagement is still poorly defined: it relates to communication between journalists and their audiences; involves different and more interactive approaches to storytelling; draws on editorial analytics that track user activities and responses; personalised news that enables users to participate in …