Journalism

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The third speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is David Cheruiyot, whose interest is in studying media criticism; such study has a long history, and evaluates expressions of disapproval or judgment of media texts, actors, outlets, or the media as an institution. But such criticism has evolved, especially through the role of social media, where journalists co-exist on the same platform with their critics.

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is the excellent Wiebke Loosen, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences; this has long been understood as a monolithic relationship, but there is now a repertoire of relationships to the different constructions of their audiences that journalists may hold.

The final session at this Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with Yoram Timmerman, whose interest is in incremental online news updates. The ability to update news in this way is very different from other news formats, and especially print, of course; information may now be added, removed, or otherwise modified as new details arise.