Industrial Journalism

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

The third paper in this ECREA 2018 session is by Carlos Aguilar-Paredes, who shifts our focus on selective exposure in sports reporting. This is an unusual approach as such selective exposure is mainly discussed in political contexts. However, sports articles are amongst the most widely read news content.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Dina Vozab, who combines the concepts of high-choice media environments in the current media ecology, of the news repertoires that news users develop in such high-choice environments, and of the effects of media use across multiple platforms on political participation. She examines this in the context of Croatia, whose media system is characterised as peripheral in the European context, and remains comparatively underresearched. What types of news repertoires exist here, and what is their effect on political participation?

I’m afraid I missed most of the ECREA 2018 sessions as I was in a team meeting of our Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project, but I’m here again for the final session of the day, which starts with Mark Boukes. He starts by introducing the concept of political sophistication, and the difficulty in measuring it empirically. Often, this is done by administering knowledge tests, but knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding – so are there alternative indicators?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

The next ECREA 2018 session starts with Christina Peter, who begins by noting the reference to (supposed) popular opinion as a common rhetorical strategy of populist politicians as well as of journalists; this is classified as an explicit public opinion cue. By contrast, implicit public opinion cues simply represent public opinion for instance in the form of vox-pops.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

My own presentation is next in this ECREA 2018 session, and covers the central themes of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. The slides are below: