Snurb's blog

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 public opinion and policy-makers, and policy-makers also seek to influence media framing – but media frames are difficult to investigate both qualitatively and quantitatively. Key questions here include whether there are problem statements, identified causes, blame attribution, proposed solutions, and other aspects.

The final ICA 2024 conference session I’m attending today is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Seungsu Lee. His interest is in partisan political communication, and he introduces the idea of like-minded and cross-cutting news media use and its relationship with political talk in homogeneous groups, and their effects on knowledge and polarisation.

The final speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is on the evolution of the concept of ‘alternative news media’ – associated today perhaps with anti-establishment, far-right outlets, but in past research more often seen as progressive or even radical left, providing a platform for marginalised voices. Common to these is perhaps that such media see themselves as a corrective to mainstream, establishment media.

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.

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.

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is Yoonmo Sang, whose focus is on journalism ethics research over the past decades. Such research is critical especially in an increasingly challenged news media landscape. The present study examined some 1,170 journalism ethics studies published from 2013 to 2022 in Digital Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, and Journalism Studies, drawing on LDA topic modelling to identify the underlying themes in these articles.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference reflects on the recent history of journalism studies, and starts with the excellent Raul Ferrer-Connill and a paper on the past 20 years of scholarship on citizen journalism. His team reviewed a sample of some 170 articles on citizen journalism to explore the theories, contexts, and methodologies of their research.

The post-lunch session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending has been organised by the Global Journalism Innovation Lab (GJIL) project, and focusses on AI-generated content in the news. Elizabeth Dubois starts us off by defining generative AI as a type of artificial intelligence system which is capable of generating text, images, and other media in response to prompts. Such generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate new data that have similar characteristics.

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.