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Panel 13

Lise-Lore Steeman and Ans De Nolf: Media Representation of Discrimination Lawsuits in Flemish Newspapers: A Mixed-Methods Content Analysis

09:30

Discrimination lawsuits are fundamental instruments for protecting social justice, addressing issues of inequality, and defending civil rights. These lawsuits are not only legal matters, but also carry significant social weight, influencing how society perceives and addresses issues of discrimination and the justice system (McCombs et al., 1997; de Rover, 2013). Analyzing newspaper coverage of these discrimination lawsuits is crucial as it exposes hidden social injustices and influences public opinion, while also shaping public discourse, policymaking, and accountability in society. Limited research has been conducted on newspaper coverage of discrimination lawsuits, particularly when examining all grounds of discrimination. Previous research has focused on only one or a few grounds of discrimination in a particular case (Smock & Proffitt, 2013; Chaerunnisa & Munandar, 2022) or has examined lawsuits in general rather than discrimination lawsuits specifically (De Cock, 2007; Meyer, 2021). This study therefore aims to delve into press coverage of two prominent Flemish newspapers in discrimination cases by means of a mixed-methods content analysis. 

Our sample (N=357) consists of news articles stemming from the quality paper with the highest circulation number in Flanders (De Standaard) and its counterpart in the popular news market (Het Laatste Nieuws), spanning the years 2014 to 2021. This study adopts a two-pronged approach, beginning with a quantitative examination of reported lawsuits across various discrimination grounds (f. e. disability, wealth, religion, marital status, health, and political beliefs). Subsequently, it conducts a qualitative analysis, focusing on lawsuits based on the four most frequent discrimination grounds found within our data: racial criteria, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. The primary objective of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of how discrimination lawsuits are represented within Flemish newspapers and the impact of different discrimination grounds on their news coverage. Using statistical methods, including ANOVA and chi-square tests to identify significant trends and correlations within the data, in combination with qualitative thematic analysis and wordage analysis, the research scrutinizes various facets of the coverage. These aspects include the prevalence of discrimination grounds, the individuals or entities featured, indicators of responsibility, temporal context, the presence of stereotypes and metaphors, and potential shifts in coverage between 2014 and 2021. To achieve reliable results, coder training took place, inter-coding reliability was measured, and only the reliable variables were used in the analyses. 

Initial study findings reveal newspapers selectively feature discrimination lawsuits in their articles. Out of 544 discrimination lawsuits in Belgium from 2014 to 2021 (Rechtspraak | Unia, n.d.), the two news sources examined produced 357 articles, often covering the same cases multiple times. Consequently, numerous discrimination lawsuits are not covered in the news. Notably, newspaper coverage of discrimination claims predominantly emphasizes (a combination of) racial criteria (29%), religion (27%), gender (26%), and sexual orientation (10%), while the Unia database shows that disability is the second most common ground for lawsuits after racial criteria. Another interesting finding is that in the news articles alleged perpetrators (often majority groups) (M=.86, SD=.35) are addressed significantly more often than alleged victims (often stigmatized groups) (M=.72, SD=.45; t=-4.73, df=329, p<.001). Furthermore, a difference was found between the two news sources, with Het Laatste Nieuws (M=.90, SD=.02) discussing the alleged perpetrator significantly more than De Standaard (M=.82, SD=.03; t=2.18, df=309.18, p=.03). No significant difference was found for the alleged victim (t=1.65, df=334.44, p=.10). The analysis clearly illustrates how journalists' choices between inclusion and exclusion shape their coverage of discrimination lawsuits, revealing the gap between news reporting and reality. More results will be discussed at the conference. 

By dissecting the diverse coverage of discrimination grounds, this study contributes to a more nuanced comprehension of the complex interplay between media representation and societal perspectives on discrimination and discrimination lawsuits. Furthermore, it has the potential to unveil changes in the reporting of discrimination incidents over time, thus sparking discussions about the role of the news and information media in advancing justice, equality, and diversity. Moreover, by investigating the news reporting of legislative interventions such as lawsuits, this research enhances our understanding of the media's role as a democracy watchdog and provides insights into the acknowledgment, misrepresentation, or neglect of discrimination cases and their potential victims (Driessens & Nærland, 2022). 

Ornella Porcu, Liesbeth Hermans, Marcel Broersma: Exclusion in the Innovating Newsroom: On the Uneven Experience of Trust and Creative Autonomy

09:45

The innovative capabilities of organisations – crucial for their survival – are fundamentally linked to the social processes in their organisational culture that stimulate the exchange of creative or new ideas (Bergendahl & Magnusson, 2015; Van den Ende, Frederiksen & Prencipe, 2015). 

News organisations need creativity to enable their own innovation (Deuze, 2019). However, what fosters the exchange of new ideas in newsrooms in transformation, has been strikingly under-researched (Authors; Authors; Authors). This is also the case for the perception of ‘creative autonomy’ of news workers. The freedom to experiment, to be creative, and to investigate radical possibilities at work (Authors), conditional to innovation processes, has received little to no attention in the scholarly research. Moreover, the latter considers the professional freedom of journalists mainly within the context of the construction of the news, making decisions about one’s own news stories (Örnebring and Karlsson 2022; Sjøvaag 2013). Journalistic freedom beyond editorial matters is, as Reich & Hanitzsch (2013) observe, “less obvious and probably less studied” (2013: 135). 

To address these gaps in the literature, we focus on newsroom transformation processes from an organisational perspective, moving beyond the news construction process. We use the concept of ‘innovative learning culture’, defined as a perceived culture that stimulates the (perception of) creative autonomy in the newsroom, enabling innovative behaviour such as the exchange of creative or new ideas (Authors). We also argue that the perception of this innovative learning culture by news workers is a prerequisite for innovative behaviour in the newsroom.  

This study shows how the concept of innovative learning culture can be used both as a theoretical perspective and as a research tool. We present the findings from a larger ethnographic study on innovative behaviour in the newsroom in two national newspaper newsrooms in the Netherlands, based on qualitative interviews and non-participant observation. We ask (1) how do perceptions of trust and fear as emotional drivers impact the sharing and developing of new ideas in the newsroom; (2) how do news workers perceive creative autonomy; and (3) what organisational aspects and social dynamics impact these perceptions in the newsroom. 

The findings show that newsroom hierarchy, in terms of different social groups (Authors), plays a crucial role in both the perception of trust between newsroom management and news workers, and the perception of creative autonomy. Findings show that only, the so called, news room elites experience enough trust to share their creative or new ideas with management. This is also the case for the experience of creative autonomy in the newsroom: findings show this experience is multi-layered, unevenly experienced across the newsroom, and strongly influenced by hierarchy. Both the perception of trust and of creative autonomy is explained mainly by small elite groups having close communicative relations with management. 

We argue that the creative and innovative potential of the majority of news workers is not being utilised in newsrooms in transformation. Not being part of elite groups and typically perceiving more distance from management, leaves a lot of people feeling unseen and not acknowledged by newsroom leaders for their work. We show how the lens of innovative learning culture is useful to yield these insights, studying media organisations in the process of transformation. 

Diego Garusi and Birte Leonhardt: What the Journalists Want: An Analysis of the Trust Claims of Constructive Journalists

10:00

The global decline in trust towards news media, as indicated by surveys (Flew, 2021), has garnered significant attention from scholars seeking to understand and measure this phenomenon. However, research in this field is hindered by several theoretical limitations (e.g., Usher, 2018; Engelke et al., 2019). Certainly, two specific limitations are worth highlighting in this context.

Firstly, there is a tendency to conflate assessments of trustworthiness, trust, and enactments of trust both theoretically and empirically. This conflation hinders a clear understanding of the distinct concepts and their interplay in the context of news media trust (Engelke et al., 2019). Secondly, a significant portion of research on trust in news media focuses primarily on the audience’s perspective. This one-sided focus overlooks the broader dynamics and actors involved in shaping trust, such as news organizations, journalists, and other stakeholders (Moran & Nechushtai, 2023). 

By tackling the abovementioned shortcomings, our study’s aim is to contribute to the research field by theoretically advancing and empirically applying a more coherent and comprehensive understanding of news media trust. 

To address the terminological confusion about trust-related phenomena, it is important to distinguish between three distinct concepts:
1) Perceived trustworthiness: This refers to the evaluation of the entity that is being trusted. For instance, a journalist may be considered trustworthy due to their perceived objectivity or transparency (Möllering, 2006).
2) Trust: Departing from perceptions of trustworthiness, trust is a conditional state characterized by positive expectations, where vulnerability and uncertainty are temporarily set aside (Möllering, 2006). Consequently, unlike assessments of trustworthiness, trust always involves a risk.
3) Enactment of trust: This pertains to the actions taken by the trustor as a result of suspending their vulnerability and uncertainty (Möllering, 2006). For example, an individual may make an electoral decision based on information provided by trusted journalists. 

This study contrasts the widespread one-sided focus on news media trust by redefining it as a fundamental element of the infrastructure that enables news production (Moran & Nechushtai, 2023). It emphasizes that the audience’s assessments of trustworthiness and enactments of trust have a pervasive and influential impact on the entire news production process (Moran & Nechushtai, 2023). 

To condense those two lines of argument, we highlight the importance of recognizing and differentiating the aspects for which journalists seek to be trusted, i.e., the enactments of trust they aim to foster, and how journalists present themselves and adapt their journalistic practices and processes to be perceived as trustworthy.

Two research questions are posed:

RQ1: What enactment of trust do journalists want to pursue by receiving trust from the audience?

RQ2: What is the feature of the journalists’ (discursive) work aimed at improving their perceptions of trustworthiness?

Considering that future-oriented news intensifies journalists’ thoughts about trustworthiness and trust in newsmaking (Aharoni et al., 2023), we choose to address a specific population: constructive journalists. Constructive journalism is indeed a future-oriented type of journalism, focusing on the question “what now?” in addition to the traditional journalistic w-questions (Gyldensted, 2015, p. 175-181). Constructive journalists thus represent a “paradigmatic case” (Aharoni et al., 2023) to shed light on journalists’ efforts in improving their perceptions of trustworthiness and fostering trust. 

To address the research questions, we are conducting in-depth interviews with self-identified constructive journalists in Austria. A thematic content analysis (Kuckartz, 2014) is performed on the transcriptions of the so far collected 12 interviews. 

Preliminary results show that while mainstream journalists are thought to seek trust for commercial purposes, constructive journalists want to be trusted to enhance a solution-oriented attitude about public issues, which serves as a common basis for a more vivid and healthy public deliberation. They try to achieve this goal by including several audience-oriented considerations in the newsmaking process, like objectivity – meant as not showing only the negative aspects of an issue – and empathy – which foster the audience’s motivation to implement the proposed solutions.

Going beyond the research questions that drove this study, interviewees also highlight that assessments of trustworthiness and trust are bi- rather than uni-directional. Indeed, despite the interviewees fully acknowledge the possibilities of dark participation (Quandt, 2018), they encourage and seek audience’s feedback; it constitutes the enactment of the trust of journalists toward the audience. Figure 1 illustrates this process.

To conclude, our exploratory study reveals that news media trust is the result of several processual phenomena that also entail the active participation of other actors than the audience. We hope future research can further explore this research direction.

Sherine Conyers: Lost in Traffic: The Battle for Equitable Journalism Inside an Economy of Attention

10:15

Producing great, inclusive, quality stories is no longer enough in digital news production – if the work is invisible to the audience, so too are the important messages and values it contains. Modern digital newsrooms have increasingly become a hybrid of humans and computers engaged in processes of calculation and response to feedback systems that interpret metrics about digital behavioural and then feed that data back to editorial desks (Anderson, 2011; Christin, 2020; Petre, 2015) and newsroom metrics are where the lines of news value and audience volume become blurred.

Following on from the research of Anderson (2010; 2013), Christin, (2020) and Petre, (2015; 2021), while drawing upon the conceptual work of authors such as Latour (2005), Mumford (1934), Ong (1982), Waisbord (2013) and Coddington (2015), I argue that journalism’s moral imperative – it’s authentic value – is in its ambition to improve community life and life quality. I argue that content produced from this type of work is an act of journalistic discovery, while content manufactured as a result of technological metric feedback loops in the newsroom is an act of metric confirmation. Metric confirmations are essentially financial; where media workers seek to serve and service algorithmic recommenders, metric feedback systems and key performance benchmarks, embedded in notions of economic quantity and has a distinct purpose – to increase traffic and subscriptions where a deeper investment in important, diverse, community-based journalism may not deliver the numbers that keep bosses at bay. Additionally, when it occurs, an act of journalistic discovery may or may not inherently contain the magic recipe of metric drivers within it, but it does not have to. 

Using case studies from ethnography in Australian digital newsrooms, this presentation will highlight an important problem facing digital news production amid increasing technical complexity and dwindling funds – how newsrooms attempt to distribute quality journalism under increasingly metric conditions. I will make the case that the metric obsession in digital media creates two distinct problems: Firstly, it posits journalism as high-cost and high-risk, while content derived from metric confirmation is cheap, fast to produce and likely to supply expected high-traffic rewards. Metric confirmation is then backed up by a vast quantity of already-invested-in technological prediction tools, ready to validate their own volumetric worth. 

Secondly, metric confirmation pushes the responsibility of marketing and distribution success onto journalists themselves, while simultaneously allocating the power and profit of distribution success toward digital platform giants such as Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. 

Paywall or not, the process of metrification in newsrooms have shifted the dial from a profession with fundamental roots in notions of equity and fairness, and the moral imperative for community betterment, toward profit and power motives reaching far beyond the news organisations themselves. The additional skewing of information resulting from mass aggregate processes of metric confirmation is problematic for informational health, balance and accuracy, along with notions of diversity and equity. 

In the endless digital “glut of occurrences” (Tuchman, 1978, p.45) created to fill by metric infrastructures, normative ideals relating to the democratic function of news are trashed and news impact is shattered. In the temporal dysfunction of the digital space news is not stable, while platform distribution processes are largely unregulated and out of newsroom control. 

The examples in this presentation reveal a deep structural problem for news-making in the digital space that creates pressure on journalists to perform business functions ahead of journalistic ambitions. The presentation will show how the interpretation of metric meanings obfuscates journalistic goals, ideals, values and outcomes, and acts as a war cry to journalists that what they do matters, regardless of the analytics presented. Thus, using metrics as a benchmark for determining a ‘job well done’ is a broken calculation not likely to deliver the validation journalism as a profession so desperately needs to survive.

Jannis Frech, Viviane Schönbächler, Volker Lilienthal: We don't have these crazy stories here: How digital security threats, skills and awareness differ in local and national media

10:15

Surveillance, hacking and doxxing: Sensitive data of journalists and their investigations are at risk in the digital age. In order to protect sources and themselves, journalists need to be more aware of the problem and have adequate prevention skills and frameworks in place. Otherwise, nothing less than the freedom of the press is threatened in its value to democracy. However, there’s a clear divide between local and national journalism – in terms of threat scenarios, but also in terms of resources and structures. 

Academic research has become more engaged with questions of surveillance and possible consequences for journalistic practice, especially after Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013. A first anthology reflecting on the effects of surveillance on the work of journalists was published in 2017 (Bell & Owen). Overall, it can be stated that there are two broader debates within which the topic is negotiated. On the one hand, the so-called chilling effect is discussed, i.e. possible inaction or a change in behaviour due to fear of possible surveillance. On the other hand, the debate focuses on how journalists and media organizations respond technologically, i.e., how widespread encryption programs are in newsrooms. For both discussions, it can be noted that the number of studies is growing, but a consistent research picture has not yet emerged (Di Salvo 2022). The focus, however, is primarily on investigative and national or international journalism. It only rarely takes local and regional media into consideration (e.g. Bradshaw 2017). 

Our proposal is based on a research project investigating digital security of journalists and their sources in different media outlets throughout Germany. More than 200 journalists from 21 media organizations and freelancer participated in an online survey and received training in digital security. The trainings were observed by the research team and conducted by experts in the field. For this study, the survey and observation data were compared according to the type of media outlet, notably 8 media outlets with local or regional reach and 13 with national and international reach. The survey is still ongoing until December 2023. At the time of writing, a third of participants work in media outlets with local reach and 2/3 with national reach. Women represent 45,5% of the sample, which is in line with the gender representation in the profession in Germany (44% according to Loosen et al. 2023). However, our sample is younger than the average German journalist with more than 80% of participants under the age of 50 (62.4%, ibid). 

Our preliminary findings suggest that regional and local journalists are confronted with different security threats than their colleagues in bigger national or international outlets. National, particularly investigative media, is struggling with questions of digital threats through surveillance, but local and regional media is threatened more by physical implications of their digital traces. While they might be less directly targeted by government-led surveillance, threats might more easily turn physical due to their proximity with the audience and might even threaten security of their journalist’s families. This is consistent with reports of physical threats for journalists in local contexts in Germany (RSF 2023). 

However, the study also found that regional media organizations are not necessarily lagging behind in their IT infrastructure and cyber security efforts. On the contrary, some regional media outlets are quite advanced in their IT environment, enabling journalists to protect themselves and their sources better from digital threats. Despite these developments, a key finding recommends that communication between IT and journalists can be improved and that particularly local journalists need to be more aware of potential digital security risks in order to increase the adoption of secure practices and behaviour. 

Local or regional publishers are also prone to precarious economic situations or affected by media concentration. Unsurprisingly, the lack of resources and money has negative implications on digital security, which is similarly valid for freelance journalists (Schnedler 2017). But we have also found that a decline in the diversity of media in the regional press can have a negative impact on digital security. It might affect IT departments, for example, that tend to be less staffed and must nonetheless cater for more diversified needs due to different businesses being integrated. 

In these cases, responsibility for digital security falls back to the individual journalist, most of whom are rather untrained in digital security, especially in local or regional media. And this is exactly what should be avoided in order to build a sustainable environment that cares about the holistic security and well-being of journalists and their sources (Orgeret & Tayeebwa 2020). 

Panel 14

PRECONSTITUTED PANEL: Richard Stupart, Jennifer R. Henrichsen, Lada T. Price and Lisa Bradley, Diana Bossio, Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova: Panel on wellbeing in journalism

09:30

This panel brings together a diverse set of researchers working on wellbeing in journalism. The panel explores what 'wellbeing' means to different communities of journalists and how practices that might lead to wellbeing are learned and enacted in those communities.

Guarding the Fourth Estate: Navigating Digital Threats and Upholding Journalistic Well-being in a Polarized Era 

The paper, "Guarding the Fourth Estate: Navigating Digital Threats and Upholding Journalistic Well-being in a Polarized Era” analyzes the multifaceted challenges journalists face in an era marked by populism, authoritarianism, and anti-media sentiment. Amidst digital threats, including surveillance and online harassment, journalists also grapple with declining happiness in their profession. The interplay between journalist security and happiness is explored, suggesting strategies for individual and organizational well-being. Harmful repercussions of attacks on journalists, ranging from self-censorship to a decline in autonomy and increased departure from the profession, underscore the pressing need for protective measures to safeguard journalistic integrity in a democratic society. 

“They definitely throw you in the deep end” - a UK graduate perspective on journalism practice. 

This paper is focused on the challenges that new graduate and trainee reporters face when faced with difficult and potentially traumatising assignments in their first graduate or trainee jobs. It is based on the experiences of eight recent BA journalism graduates, all in their first year as reporters in national newsrooms of major UK media outlets. Our interviews included open-ended questions that explored their emerging career as a journalist; reflections on their current role in the newsroom; types of stories and incidents that they have reported on; how they coped with potentially stressful and traumatic events; the impact of routine work on their wellbeing and if they receive any newsroom support. We draw on these interviews to propose a strong argument for embedding resilience enhancing teaching and learning in all university journalism courses and professional journalism training. 

The labour of care and its importance in professional online journalism practice 

While journalists' online practices are neither remunerated nor often overtly acknowledged, they are nonetheless important forms of labour that foster intimate and authentic connection within their online communities of news consumers. These forms of online engagement take many forms, but this paper focuses on expressions of 'care' within social media focussed journalism; from the individual practitioners and organisations, through to the conceptualisation of the profession itself. I argue that centering methods of care in the profession establishes professional communities of practice that have become an important, but undertheorised part of online journalism practices. These practices center care not just for audience need, but also for journalists themselves. Using interviews with professional journalists and YouTubers, we conceptualise how different modes of care appear within community connection and engagement practices, and trace their use within organisational and other professional frameworks. We argue that these different modes of care are important because they provide much more nuance to the wholly transactional or otherwise idealistic understandings of social media labour. 

Empowerment, autonomy and wellbeing: the case of Bulgarian journalists 

This paper explores the relationship among journalistic perceptions of empowerment and perceptions of stress, physical and psychological wellbeing as well as internal and external autonomy among a representative sample of 391 Bulgarian journalists as part of the third wave of the Worlds of Journalism study (2021-2013). It conceptualises journalists’ understanding of their own empowerment through a typology of answers to a question asking them: “If you could change anything in your work as a journalist, what would that be”? The main themes emanating from the typology are then correlated with journalists’ perceptions of their internal and external autonomy as well as physical and psychological wellbeing. While journalists generally report a high level of internal autonomy, their evaluation of external autonomy and the general political atmosphere in their country is very negative and significantly impacts upon their job satisfaction and even willingness to continue living and working in their country. Overall, the study demonstrates the complex nature of the concept of empowerment, which in the case of Bulgarian journalists, has a very strong external dimension related to the wider political context, which despite the high degree of autonomy they feel in their jobs affects their perceptions of their own power and significantly impacts upon their psychological wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Panel 15

Bissie Anderson and Nour Halabi: Weaving the future of journalism? Re-examining journalistic epistemology through an indigenous lens

09:30

Journalism, historically considered a pillar of public knowledge, deliberation and democracy, has been shedding its epistemic authority as increasingly fragmented audiences migrate to ‘alternative’ sources of information. Consequently, within the ever-convergent media ecosystem, discourses of innovation and futures thinking have proliferated as both journalism practice and scholarship have been occupied with the need to “save journalism” and reclaim its epistemic authority by reimagining what journalism could be. 

It is in the context of these foundational shifts to the journalistic system that what theorists have termed “pioneer journalism” emerged, seeking to conceptualise and explain “the re-figurations of [journalism’s] foundations” in a deeply mediatized ecosystem (Hepp & Loosen, 2021). Extant studies of “pioneers” - or transformation-focused collective and individual actors - in journalism (Anderson, 2021; Hepp & Loosen, 2021, 2022; Ruotsalainen et al., 2023) have examined how they reimagine journalism through their use of technology, their experimental practices, and novel ways of engaging audiences in their mission to “bring about media-related change” (Hepp, 2016, p. 927). The notion “pioneer journalism”, however, has been almost exclusively applied to future-focused journalism communities in the Global North, with the exception of Anderson (2023), who expands the notion by applying it to the epistemic praxis of journalism startups in Pakistan, Malaysia and Romania, alongside the UK. 

Over the past two decades, indigenous journalism has experienced a pronounced expansion across the world, and indigenous communities around the world have launched numerous journalistic organizations (Hanusch, 2013) that are steeped in the languages, epistemologies and cultural knowledge of their people. Increasingly, indigenous journalists have called for the critical examination of journalistic norms, terms, and practices to reflect the ways in which journalistic training reflects the White-centric and Western-settler-centric ideologies that originated the field (Sterritt, 2020, 2023). Callison and Young (2019), for example, suggest that digital technology has amplified and laid bare longstanding structural issues of inequality and representational harms inflicted on indigenous communities through established journalistic epistemic practices, which, they claim, are “rooted in sedimented power relations” (p. 202). 

Thus, this project attends to the critiques set forth by indigenous journalists and theorists in its critical examination of the “pioneer journalism” paradigm which has become increasingly prevalent in journalism research and practice. The project seeks to critically examine the concept of “pioneer journalism” in the context of indigenous journalists who experiment in their journalistic praxis. It problematises and challenges the concept “pioneer journalism” from the perspective of indigenous journalists and against the background of the problematic colonialist legacy of the ‘pioneer’ in the history of settler-colonialism. It follows calls for 1) examining indigenous journalism cultures, epistemologies, and conceptions of innovation (Bhroin, Sand, & Rasmussen, 2021; Hanusch, 2014; Ross, 2023) and 2) broadening the conceptual lens in Journalism Studies beyond dominant Western norms, cultures and epistemologies of journalism (Rao & Wasserman, 2007; Waisbord & Mellado, 2014; Ward, 2008; Wasserman & de Beer, 2009).

The study will specifically look at indigenous journalists’ knowledge production practices – in terms of how they position themselves in relation to their audiences and the world, how they make editorial decisions, and the material products of their epistemic praxis. To achieve that, the co-investigators will apply a multi-method design, which includes interviews with 20-30 indigenous journalists working for digital journalism outlets in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, metajournalistic discourse analysis of the outlets’ manifestos and “91ֱ��” webpages, and multimodal discourse analysis of several stories produced by the interviewed participants. The aim is to determine how indigenous epistemic praxes feed into wider debates about reimagining journalistic epistemologies and to question, evaluate and critique the application of the concept of “pioneer journalism” in the context, and from the perspective, of indigenous journalists.

We ask the following RQs: 

RQ1 Does the futures thinking that is inherent in definitions of “pioneer journalism” demand a reckoning with the colonial past in the context of indigenous journalists? 

RQ2 Do existing/traditional conceptions of journalism innovation accommodate indigenous journalists and their epistemic praxes? 

RQ3 How do indigenous epistemologies challenge, augment, or transform journalism as a form of knowledge, epistemic practice, and ways of relating to the world?

The project has received ethical approval from the authors’ institutions and participant recruitment is currently underway. We will have some preliminary findings to share at the ECREA Journalism Studies conference in April 2024, and therefore our project will benefit from expert feedback and discussion as move on from the fieldwork to the data analysis stage.

Lidia Pedro Sole: The challenges of women video journalists working in news

09:45

Journalism is often a dangerous profession in which men and women face challenges and risks daily. However, some challenges and benefits are specific to the type of journalist you are in the field –text reporter, radio reporter, video journalist, etc– and are intimately linked with gender.   

This paper is based on my doctoral study of women video journalists working in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia Pacific. The rise of video journalism is one of the consequences of journalism adapting to new times and market needs. Contemporary journalists are asked to be multi-skilled, flexible, and it is increasingly rare to find a journalist who only writes or only takes pictures. Not long ago, it would take three or four people to produce a news story; nowadays, a video journalist does it all. To date there is limited literature on the experiences and risks faced by video journalists versus other forms of journalism, and there is no specific research on women working as video journalists within mainstream traditional companies -as staff or freelancers- covering news. 

 Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews, the author, who has worked as a VJ for more than ten years, explores how women VJs navigate their professional lives when working as a VJ in different regions of the world. This research expands our knowledge of gender issues in journalism and extends scholarship to examine the experiences of women VJs working in the field in both Western and non-Western cultures.  

Mariana Gomes, Sandra Banjac: Securing their daily bread: A case study on the economic conditions of favela-based news producers

10:00

Scholarship on grassroots news projects, especially those aimed at marginalized groups, have overwhelmingly focused on journalists’ passion and sense of justice driving their work, over the economic conditions that affect their ability to do their work. To look at these forms of journalism from a strictly economic perspective, it’s been suggested, would be to ignore the deep meaning news production has for them as a tool for community development and self-representation (Abreu, 2003; Farinosi & Treré, 2014). However, this study argues that such a rose-tinted approach neglects the reality that even the most engaged journalists must earn a living in order to survive and report on the communities and issues they are passionate about (Holt et al., 2019). Whilst the current literature has provided examples of the funding challenges that alternative news projects face, little is known about the ways news producers make ends meet within a precarious setting. 

This oversight is tightly linked to how journalism professionals and scholars understand journalistic boundaries (Örnebring, 2013; Eldridge, 2019), and emerges from the tension around whether these actors’ work and roles are perceived as a profession or a passion that sits on the periphery of the journalistic field – e.g. by considering it activism or “citizens doing what citizens do” (Campbell, 2015). This is perfectly exemplified by favela-based journalists in Brazil, whom this study investigates. Acting in marginalized spaces, they are “micro-watchdogs”, calling out and denouncing the social inequalities they suffer because of the State’s violence (Castilho & Lima, 2014; Levy, 2018). Yet, the lines remain blurred between being a “favela body” and a “journalist” (Lima, 2015). 

To explore these tensions, this study draws on nine in-depth interviews with favela-based journalists – employees of news projects and freelancers – from Rio de Janeiro. It investigates the question: How do favela-based news producers define their roles and construct boundaries within the journalistic field, and how does this shape their perception of their economic conditions? 

Two key findings emerged: 

(1) Unlike what has been described by previous literature, while favela-based journalists are dedicated to their role as “micro-watchdogs”, their acceptance of precarious

work is not motivated by their professional mission. Rather, these actors have internalized job insecurity simply because they have never experienced an alternative (Matthews & Onyemaobi, 2020). 

(2) Journalists’ construction of boundaries influenced their views on their economic conditions. While news project employees considered their work akin to mainstream journalists, positioning themselves within the journalistic field, and hoped for better salaries, freelancers positioned themselves at the periphery, and saw their work as interconnected with community activism and were critical of journalism’s market logic. One explanation behind this might be that freelancers’ main source of income stemmed from jobs outside of journalism, meaning they did not struggle with precarious contracts like those offered to favela-based employees. On the contrary, employees were more critical of the inherent precarity of their work, acknowledging that income satisfaction was just as crucial to them as it is to any other professional. 

The study concludes that despite the differences in journalists’ positioning, favela-based initiatives cannot afford to stay outside of the journalistic field. For instance, they have embraced collaborations with mainstream media in order to claim journalistic authority, which ultimately attracts more funding. This suggests that viewing favela-based journalism through an economic lens is a process already set in motion by news initiatives, and current research should account for these efforts (Wall, 2018). Professionalization processes ensure fair compensation, which means journalists become less likely to disengage and look for jobs outside of favela-based journalism, contributing to the sustainability of news production and the fight for social justice. Failing to acknowledge this, and the subsequent absence of journalists dedicated to exposing human rights violations in Brazil, could potentially lead to these areas transforming into news deserts (Ferrucci & Alaimo, 2020). From a democratic standpoint, this is alarming and should not be ignored. 

Thus, this study contends that inclusivity extends beyond exploring the drive of alternative journalists and their impact on communities. It emphasizes the crucial need to consider the economic needs of individuals within alternative news projects, just as scholars have cautioned against the perils of job precarity in mainstream journalism. The argument asserts that inclusivity involves not just acknowledging the work of alternative news projects, but also prioritizing the economic circumstances of the individuals operating within these structures.

Lucia Mesquita, Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos, Isabella Gonçalves: Securing Journalism Practice: Strategies of Small Investigative News Outlets in Latin America for Journalistic Safety and Integrity

10:15

Latin America faces the prevalence of one of the highest levels of violence worldwide (Visconti, 2020), including its many typifications, such as political, criminal, domestic, and youth violence (Imbusch, Misse, and Carrión 2011). In many cases, elite actors and political forces contribute to promoting harassment, arbitrary detention, as well as physical attacks (Orgeret and Tayeebwa 2020). For news workers, the violence experienced by them represents a threat to the journalism practice itself, directly affecting the value of the free flow of information. Latin American countries have different levels of difficulty exercising media freedom, ranging from corruption and impunity to cyber surveillance and government violence (RSF 2019). 

Attacks on journalists have been configured to a greater extent as attacks against the freedom of speech and access to information (Garcés Prettel and Arroyave Cabrera 2017; Orgeret and Tayeebwa 2020). The crisis of security journalists face in Latin America is represented in its violence rates, as the region has been the deadliest for journalists in recent years (CPJ 2022). Brazil and Mexico are often ranked among the countries where journalists’ killings are primarily not investigated due to the political instability and weak institutions (CPJ 2019). In the press freedom ranking published by Reporters Without Borders (RWB), countries such as Brazil and Peru are ranked as having a ‘Problematic Situation’. 

Smaller news media organizations are more susceptible to the unattended consequences of reporting in risky conditions and contexts. Even under direct attack and risk to their safety, small sized independent Latin American news outlets are bolstering original journalism by producing high-quality investigations that use data and collaboration in innovative ways to remain competitive in the constantly evolving ecosystem. 

This study focuses on the examples of three small organizations in Latin America, namely The Intercept Brasil (TIB) in Brazil, IDL-Reporteros in Peru, and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CIP) in Puerto Rico, and three specific collaborative and data investigations for which these publishers’ received awards and recognition (Mioli 2019). These watchdog organizations are the ones that are overburdened by the recent developments in political polarization, the rise of authoritarian governments, and the migration of the public debate to the Internet and social media platforms (Requejo-Alemán and Lugo-Ocando 2014, Waisbord 2000). This is especially important for countries like Brazil and Peru that suffered from their politicians intertwined with the Odebrecht scandal (see Lagunes and Svejnar 2020). 

Taking into consideration the experiences of three major journalistic investigations produced in the last decades in Latin America (Car Wash, TelegramGate, and Car Leaks), this research draws 

an exploratory study about the strategies applied to secure information and data, safeguard the lives and wellbeing of professionals, and secure the organization itself. Drawing upon the watchdog reporting and informing the general concepts, this study employs a multi-method approach that combines case studies, document analysis, and in-depth interviews with leading actors in these three organizations. It poses the following research question: What measures do small-sized investigative news outlets adopt to increase safety and reduce threats journalists face? 

We argue that three spheres of security—physical, legal, and digital—are intertwined in the safety strategies adopted by these small-sized news outlets to mitigate the risks their journalists face. Our argument is that different journalistic investigations and collaborative projects require different approaches to each of the spheres. For example, IDL Reporteros (Peru) encountered physical threats and responded to them by offering martial arts classes to journalists and investigating groups targeting the news outlets. Meanwhile, The Intercept (Brazil) mainly faced digital risks, such as organised threats on social media, and the organization opted for moving to a new facility, hiring security guards, and securing communication channels. Finally, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo – CPI (Puerto Rico) was challenged by legal risks, such as powerful actors trying to discredit their reporting. Their response was collaborating with law scholars for legally protecting journalists and creating an action called “media tour” to explain the story and the findings to the public to increase trust. 

By examining the experiences of three small investigative news outlets, we look to what extent journalists and their organizations are taking to secure themselves to produce quality investigative reporting. This study contributes towards a better understanding of the processes adopted by organizations to provide favorable conditions for investigative journalistic work. Moreover, it sheds light on the contributions of small sized organizations to the democracy of Latin America, a region facing political turbulence and high levels of criminality and corruption. In such a context, journalism practiced by small independent organizations plays a central role in strengthening democratic institutions. 

Jennifer R. Henrichsen, Valérie Belair-Gagnon, Greg Perreault: The Security Gap in Journalism: Exploring Attitudes and Practices in Collaborative Reporting

10:30

A growing body of scholarship reveals that journalists are facing widespread digital security threats. These threats and attacks can take the form of harassment (Miller, 2021; Posetti et al., 2021) and mob censorship (Henrichsen & Shelton, 2022; Waisbord, 2020) to more technically sophisticated attacks that utilize targeted spyware technologies and broader forms of surveillance (CIMA, 2021). At the same time, newsrooms are engaging in collaborations within and across newsrooms. These collaborations have increased as labor precarity, economic pressures, and new digital technologies have become more widespread among news organizations in the United States (Sterns, 2012). 

Prior research has found that collaboration provides a valuable means toward systematizing the longstanding commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion in news media and to build and maintain trust with audiences” (Ford et al., 2020, 60), while recent international newsroom collaborations like the Panama Papers and the Pegasus Project have had a significant positive impact on society. Secure tools and channels have been crucial for these investigative collaborations, with scholars showing how communication tools are more likely to be adopted and implemented when such tools are viewed as essential to successfully pursuing a story (McGregor et al., 2017). 

Yet, scholars have also shown how journalists may have a deep ambivalence around information security tools and practices in their work (Henrichsen, 2020), especially if such practices slow down the process of newsgathering (McGregor & Watkins, 2016; Shelton, 2015), while newsrooms also tend to lack information security cultures (Henrichsen, 2022). 

This study is interested in understanding how U.S. journalists think about security within collaborative work and asks the following questions:

• R1): In what ways do U.S. journalists engage in collaborative work
• R2) How do U.S. journalists think about security in collaborative work?
• R3): How do U.S. journalists think about related concerns to security, such as safety and wellbeing, as it pertains to collaboration in the newsroom?

To answer these questions, this paper draws on 44 semi-structured interviews with U.S.-based journalists to explore perceptions around security and collaboration in newsrooms. Interviewees worked for a range of mediums (e.g., broadcast, magazine, print, and digital) and across a range of geographical regions in the United States. The average age of participants was 33. Participants self-identified as white (n=29), black (n=5), Hispanic (n=4), Asian (n=2), mixed race (n=2), and two declined to identify. Twenty-two participants identified as women, 19 identified as men, two identified as non-binary, and one declined to identify.

All interviews were conducted between September 2022 and November 2022 and were transcribed. While participants were asked about a range of topics related to responsible innovation, including inclusive design, journalistic wellbeing, safety and ethical principles, this study focuses on issues of security and collaboration.

Findings

While data analysis is ongoing, initial findings point to several important themes. First, there is an increasingly important role of cross collaboration within and across newsrooms, in large part due to economic conditions facing the media. News organizations might not have journalists in particular parts of the state or the ability to send writers to cover certain stories, leading journalists to share quotes/notes with their competitors to have a more fulsome, if not unique, story. One journalist described how sharing source information with other journalists is sometimes “a necessary evil” to have their bases covered on a story. Journalists also collaborated with others at competing news organizations to obtain broader coverage on an issue, but primarily on low-stake stories that didn’t involve proprietary information or scoops.

Second, journalists frequently mentioned that security was “not a concern” or wasn’t something they had thought about in collaborations or individual reporting. Additionally, journalists expressed a general belief that their organization’s default processes of using two factor authentication, a VPN, or Google Docs were strong enough security protections for their work.

Third, when security concerns arose in conjunction with collaboration, they primarily centered around information management and the implementation of analog strategies. Journalists avoided written communications if information was considered sensitive, turning to phone or in-person conversations to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation or putting sources at risk. Journalists emphasized the importance of being quiet/containing information until publication to avoid alerting their competitors and getting scooped on a story. Journalists did not express broader concerns about the lack of security practices in their work, although they shared how they could envision potential security risks related to collaborations among news organizations. 

These initial findings shed new insight into the nature of collaborative work in journalism and how perceptions around security may influence how journalists engage in collaborative partnerships in the future.

Panel 16

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen: Survival in the Passion Economy: Mental Health and Well-being of Local Journalism Entrepreneurs

09:30

This paper focuses on the mental health and well-being of local journalism entrepreneurs in the UK context. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 57 journalists in 2020 and 2021, with 10 follow-up interviews carried out in 2022, as well as a survey of 116 practitioners, the research examines how these entrepreneurs experience challenges around mental health and well-being as they negotiate the tension between autonomy and precarity.

Local journalism entrepreneurs have stepped into the gap left by the dramatic decline of traditional local and regional newspapers over the past several decades. Since 2010, the UK alone has seen the foundation of more than 400 local news outlets, sometimes referred to as hyperlocals or community news providers. While all of these outlets started their lives as digital publications, over 40% now publish paper editions. Although most of these are small in terms of geographic and audience reach, they collectively reach a significant proportion of the population, with one in five UK citizens regularly accessing these sites. 

In most cases, the journalists working on these outlets have a background in professional journalism, and previously worked for traditional national, regional, and local papers, but decided to start their own outlets in pursuit of greater autonomy. This decision was made either because of redundancies, or on the basis of increasingly challenging working conditions in mainstream media. At the same time, however, these entrepreneurs were driven by an affective commitment to their communities, usually informed by long-standing local belonging, relationships, and networks.

The proposed paper focuses on how their work affects their mental health and wellbeing.

On one hand, findings reveal that many local journalism entrepreneurs value the autonomy and flexibility afforded by their roles, alongside the normative benefits of making positive contribution to community life. On the other hand, the study highlights the precarious nature of local journalism entrepreneurship. The journalists work long hours, sacrificing evenings and weekends, with a significant impact on family life, leisure time and health and well-being. They experience significant stress from the constant battle to keep their outlets financially viable, with many having seen their incomes cut dramatically since taking the leap into entrepreneurship. In most cases, the outlets are run by a single person who is responsible for both the production of content and all business operations, and they are therefore highly vulnerable. 

The proposed paper makes the argument that these entrepreneurs are structurally positioned within broader “passion economy” in which individuals make material sacrifices to pursue more precarious, but creatively rewarding careers (Davidson, 2020). While local news entrepreneurs make individual choices based on what are often deeply held normative principles, they are nonetheless embedded within broader economic circumstances which shape the conditions for creative work (see also Wahl-Jorgensen, 2022).

The study underscores the importance of problematising the “passion economy” in relation to mental health and well-being. It emphasises the need to make explicit the lived and embodied consequences of precarious creative work (Gill & Pratt, 2008) with particular attention to how the normative ideals of journalism contribute to justifying the pursuit of such work. 

Signe Ivask: The Lone Wolves: Estonian War Correspondents Feeling as “Outsiders” in the Newsroom

09:45

The issue of war correspondence has gained increased relevance in Europe in recent years, particularly in light of the Russian attack on Ukraine. However, it has underscored a notable gap within Estonian journalism: a shortage of war correspondents or journalists trained to navigate conflict regions and report on unfolding situations.

In examining the nature of correspondence, existing research suggests that correspondents can either be part of the cultural context on-site or be "parachuted in," emphasizing their outsider status and potential inability to fully grasp the situation (Fondren et al., 2019). Our study, however, delves into a different aspect of outsider dynamics: journalists dispatched to cover war or conflict finding themselves outsiders within their own newsrooms. As one journalist aptly described it, they become "lone wolves." 

As research indicates, many newsrooms heavily depend on a beats system (Cancela, 2021), and in Estonia, war correspondence tends to fall under the umbrella of "foreign news," often composed of translated reports. Traditional correspondence is not explicitly integrated into the newsroom structures, with correspondents notably absent from newsroom contacts' pages (PSM being an exception).

Our research involved in-depth interviews with nine journalists (eight male and one female). Constructing the sample proved challenging given Estonia's small size (population of 1.3 million) and approximately 1300 journalists (Statistics Estonia, 2023), with a notable scarcity of those with war correspondent experience. To provide context, the absence of war journalism education at universities contributes to the self-identification of journalists as "not war correspondents but those sent to cover the conflict on the spot." The sample included individuals who had traveled abroad to cover conflicts or wars in the past decade, totalling 15, with nine journalists agreeing to participate.

Throughout the interviews, a recurring theme emerged: a shift in the dynamics and relationship between the journalist and the newsroom. More specifically, journalists who had been part of the newsroom for several years felt like outsiders when transitioning into the role of a correspondent. Instances of this shift in attitude were evident in a few incidents. One highly regarded journalist in the newsroom faced reluctance from the managing editor when requesting safety equipment: "Instead of a bulletproof vest, my boss gave me a T-shirt with an EU logo, saying, 'Maybe they won't shoot you if you are wearing an EU shirt.'" Another journalist recounted a backpack catching fire from a grenade, only to discover that the newsroom had falsely claimed insurance coverage. The journalist expressed shock, stating, "I was in the middle of a ceasefire without any insurance." Additionally, a journalist intending to cover the Yellow Vest protest in Paris in 2018 faced personal responsibility waivers, yet the resulting materials became the newsroom's cover stories. The journalist found it disconcerting: the newsroom refused to assume responsibility for them or offer support, yet proceeded to utilize their materials nonetheless. Additionally, journalists dispatched to cover conflicts found themselves isolated in the planning phase, lacking the necessary knowledge of equipment and the ability to demand support from the newsroom.

Journalists depart from their customary positions within the organizational structure and concurrently step out of the comforting confines of their usual roles. Anticipating increased attention in their new roles, journalists, however, find themselves receiving less, underscoring a stark conflict between their expectations and the reality they encounter. Consequently, journalists trust and loyalty towards the newsroom becomes compromised. From an organizational structure perspective, it prompts contemplation on how journalists' position changes can contribute to distance between themselves and managerial figures, newsroom and media houses overall. Also, how such shifts affect journalists' attitude and loyalty towards their job, newsroom and colleagues.

Lenka Waschková Císařová, Melanie Haberl, Folker Hanusch, Dominik Hokamp, Alena Kluknavská, Marína Urbániková: (In)visible relationships: Towards a conceptualisation of emotions in the practices and interactions of journalists and politicians  

10:00

The robust and healthy state of journalism is widely accepted to be a key facet of well-functioning democracies. Journalists play a crucial role in informing citizens about political developments that may affect their lives, but they are also key to holding power to account. This much-celebrated watchdog role of journalism has, however, come under increasing attack even in healthy democracies. Journalism is under threat around the world, as it struggles to maintain its cultural authority and institutional trust (Carlson, 2007) in the face of political, economic, technological, and societal transformations. Moreover, political actors are increasingly trying to circumvent journalism, for example establish their own news publications online, which masquerade as journalism (Schwaiger, 2018), or even own mainstream media outlets (Hannah, 2019). 

In order for journalists to fulfil their information and watchdog role, they need to have a professional and functional relationship with politicians. On the one hand, politicians are trying to attract journalists to cover them and get their message to the broader audience, and journalists need politicians as one of the most important sources of information (Van Aelst, Walgrave, 2016); on the other hand, journalists’ and politicians’ close relationships, let alone emotional, are considered unprofessional. 

Research on the relationship between journalists and politicians shows that despite both groups of actors being “often sceptical about their co-existence due to personal experiences as well as different professional aims, the relationship between the actors continues to be based on mutual trust” (Hájek, Vávra, Svobodová, 2015: 46). Nevertheless, “a friendship between journalists and politicians is currently considered a potential threat to mutual trust” (ibid.: 47). 

These challenges to the interactions and relationship of journalists and politicians can be approached from the perspective of emotions. Previous research indicates that emotions may indeed enter this relationship: “the diversity of relations between journalists and politicians, in which relationship boundaries are shaped by not only political and professional factors but also by personal and subjective factors” (Vobič, Maksuti, Deželan, 2017: 1153) Moreover, scholars suggest more research is needed in this area: “how boundaries are constructed, maintained and ignored in political communication” (ibid.).

We understand emotions as an analytical lens through which we can achieve a deeper analysis of the changes and current state of journalism, which was explicitly named only recently as a part of the emotional turn (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) and through which we can better understand the relationship between politicians and journalists. We consider emotion a common denominator for professional behaviour of agents; rules of operation in media organisations; an influence on journalistic production, but also a strategic tool for political actors. A focus on emotions helps to create a more comprehensive map of changes in journalism, which is still missing (Kotisova, 2019). 

It is important to focus not only on individual emotions and their nuances but also to look “beyond ‘emotionality’ in general”, including interconnections and meaning for different groups – for this Barbara Rosenwein (2010: 832) proposes the concept of emotional communities, which refers to groups who share similar emotional values, norms, and expressions (Rosenwein, 2006). They manifest in various ways and can change over time. This approach considers emotions as primary social phenomena: they are shaped by or even constructed through social interaction, using gestures, facial expressions, and language (Verheyen, 2010). 

Within each emotional community, there exists a specific emotional repertoire that guides how individuals experience and express their emotions (Scheer, 2012, 2019). Through this lens, journalists and politicians are not viewed as distinct groups, but rather as deeply interrelated and dynamic figurations, which form and are formed by emotional interaction. Emotional communities can emerge out of various factors, such as temporal, spatial, or identity-related aspects. One individual “often belongs to multiple emotional communities that are united by different, sometimes diametrically opposed, emotions norms” (Plamper, 2010: 256). Therefore, journalists and politicians may encounter situations where the emotional rules of one community conflict with those of another. This could lead to emotional (dis-)connection amongst the actors and could stress out tensions and contradictions between established emotional norms and actual emotional practices.

In this theoretical paper, we focus on (1) the conceptualisation of individual emotions in journalistic and political work, their characteristics, possible causes and consequences, values and directions; (2) the conceptualisation of emotional boundaries between the two groups of actors(journalists and politicians) and their emotional relationships; (3) the conceptualisation and role of emotional communities within these relationships; and (4) the creation of a model of interdependencies between individual emotions, their interconnections, and emotional communities.

Lea Hellmueller, Namrata Acharya, & Carolyne Lunga: Freelance Reporters in Authoritarian Regimes & Conflict Areas: An Ethics of Care Approach

10:15

Introduction and Importance of Project 

In the last few years, we have seen a rise of nationalistic tendencies across nations, even the ones that pride themselves of their democratic ethos (Bieber, 2018). The authoritarian regimes in these nations have led to the dilution of free press, leading to a shift towards a propaganda model, as outlined by Herman & Chomsky (1988). Among freelance journalists, two categories, those covering protests in authoritarian regimes and conflicts, are especially vulnerable to threats, ranging from mental trauma to financial well-being. 

Previous research (Cohen, 2016) highlights this paradox impacting journalistic labor: journalists see freelancing as offering autonomy. On the other hand, freelance journalism further enables media organizations to exploit workers without permanent contracts. 

As freelancing becomes a major employment form in journalism, this project asks critical questions about how that impacts the labor of journalism and the profession in authoritarian regimes and conflict areas from a media ethics perspective. Previous research discussed how the journalism industry downplays the power of increasingly important actors in international newsgathering, keeping them least valued and most hidden (Kotišová & Deuze, 2022). Yet, media organizations depend on freelance labor more frequently particularly when it comes to breaking and evolving news stories regarding conflict and crisis such as natural disasters. Therefore, this study sets out to describe and explain a duty of care approach to understand the relationship and dependencies of freelancers and news organizations. This is particularly important in the aftermath of the pandemic as it has accelerated the pressure on the precarity of workers: The International Federation of Journalists, the world’s largest organization of journalists surveyed journalists in 77 countries in April 2020 to understand the impact on the state of journalism. They found the situation to be most dire for freelancers: Nearly all freelance journalists in their survey reported losing revenue or work opportunities. And more than half said they suffered from stress and anxiety. 

An Ethics of Care Approach 

This study argues that the duty of care lenses enables to understand the relationship between freelancers and news organizations based on an emotional commitment to others (Gilligan, 1982; Wilkins, 2009; Steiner, 2020; Noddings). An ethics of care foregrounds our responsibility, nurturing, caring, affection, empathy, and inclusiveness (Gilligan, 1982). The precarity of the network and relationship between legacy newsrooms and freelancers is invoked more frequently as we witness an increase in freelance journalism labor. In other words, flexible journalism labor foregrounds relationships and networks as import underlying structure in the gatekeeping process (Vos & Shoemaker, 2009). 

Gatekeeping levels such as newsgathering routines, actors, audiences, newsroom structures and social systems simultaneously impact gatekeeping of news inside and outside newsrooms. Because freelance journalism reflects precarious working conditions, an ethical approach of duty of care approach considers what might be possible within the news ecology when it comes to covering conflict and crisis considering the important relationship between freelance journalists and legacy newsrooms and the impact the quality of the relationship may have on the news we consume. When theorizing duty of care in journalism, one aim of this research is to expand its theoretical thinking and empirical knowledge to relationships in which this duty crosses from employer and employee relationships. The aim is to include our thinking of duty of care across freelancers and buyers and distributors of their skills, products (i.e., news organizations). 

Methodology and Anticipated Results 

In a first step, we gather data based on a quantitative survey to understand precarities of freelance journalists and to describe the challenges based on demographics, regions, and type of freelance labor. We are currently conducting a survey with over 500 freelance journalists covering conflict and crisis around the world in collaboration with the Rory Peck Trust – one of the largest NGO providing practical and financial support to freelance journalists and their families worldwide. The main part of the survey includes questions about recent ethical dilemmas that occurred in the field. Here we are asking specifically about ethical dilemmas related to media organizations freelancers depend on. Then our questionnaire focuses on duty of care variables such as how this dilemma has been solved to include considerations about duty to ourselves, duty of care to our sources, duty of care to news organizations, duty of care to other journalists and freelancers/the profession, and duty of care to the public and possible other loyalties freelancers encountered when experiencing this dilemma. We hope that by the time of ECREA, we can present our first survey findings and map out a duty of care approach from the perspectives of freelancers. 

Michal Tkaczyk, Rubén Olveira-Araujo, Jan Motal: Sourcing the Economy in Times of Crisis: Automated Content Analysis of Journalistic Sourcing Practices in the Czech News

10:30

Economic expert sources in the news play an essential role in facilitating the general public’s understanding of complex economic issues (Van Gorp, 2005). Particularly during times of crisis, journalists may turn to external economic experts for knowledge, explanations, and comments (Beck, 1992; Harjuniemi, 2022). Statements made by those authoritative sources are often reported as facts, and thereby, they carry significant symbolic power to define social reality and justify specific policy steps and measures to be taken (Jacobsson, 2016). Prior evidence showed the low diversity of expert sources in economic news beats (Berry, 2019; Davis, 2018) and that journalists typically turn to market-orientated experts who sponsor narrow neo-liberal perspectives and policies (Jacobsson, 2016; Rafter, 2014). Therefore, if certain economic experts’ voices are systematically overrepresented while others are marginalized or excluded, journalists’ sourcing practices not only narrow the terms of public debate (Rafter, 2014) but may also promote particularistic interests.

The research on the economic expert sources diversity in journalistic content is limited. Many prior studies are based on qualitative interviews (e.g., Harjuniemi, 2022) or qualitative analyses of content (Fitzgerald & O’Rourke, 2016). Evidence drawn from quantitative content analysis is mostly cross-sectional, concerned with a broad notion of institutional sources and not specifically with economic expert sources, and it is based mainly on data from Western countries (Berry, 2019; Cawley, 2016; Rafter, 2014; Knowles et al., 2017). The quantitative content-analysis evidence concerned with how the diversity of economic expert sources varies in time, for example, in response to different types of capitalistic crises, is largely missing. 

To address the limitations of prior research, the current study applied NLP techniques to conduct an automated quantitative content analysis of news stories published during the four years (2019-23) in 12 major Czech news outlets, including TV news programs, daily newspapers, and digital news platforms. The study has twofold aims. First, it examines the institutional range and diversity of news sources labelled as economic experts and quoted in the economic news beats for the general audience. Second, it examines how sourcing practices related to the use of economic expert sources vary in time, particularly between crises and regular business.

The preliminary results based on the sample of news stories (N = 681) published between January 2022 and February 2023 showed the unbalanced representation of expert sources regarding their institutional affiliations. Economic experts from financial and investment companies (the so-called “City experts”) accounted for 53%, and from private banks for 32% of all quotes (N = 3 003) attributed to external economic experts in analysed news. Economic experts affiliated with NGOs accounted for 11%, and academia for 2% of quotes (Figure 1). Concerning the reported pattern, interestingly, there were no statistically significant differences between policy-related and not policy-related quotes except for the category “others” (Figure 2). Preliminary results also revealed small variability over time in the space given in news to different categories of economic experts. Their prevalence oscillated over the crisis period; however, the rank order of the two most prevailing categories remained stable (Figure 3). 

The current study contributes to the still limited evidence on the diversity of economic expert sources in the news with evidence based on automated quantitative content analysis. Its preliminary findings corroborate some prior studies showing unequal access to news for institutions providing economic expertise (Berry, 2019; Davis, 2018). The perspective of business and financial capital gains the biggest prominence in coverage of economic issues. Preliminary findings also suggest that journalists’ reliance on economic expertise provided by sources affiliated to financial and investment companies and private banks may vary in time, for example, increase as specific market or political developments occur. The analysis conducted on the entire sample will extend preliminary findings with more robust data in terms of sample size and length of study period. It will also enable a more robust examination of time-based variability in sourcing practices, and whether there were trends or differences between periods of crisis and regular business. 

Panel 17

Oded Jackman and Zvi Reich: The analyst takes it all: Asymmetries of expertise among reporters and commentators

11:30

Despite the consensus among scholars, according to which journalists do not have sufficient knowledge about their fields of coverage (Donsbach, 2004; Lippmann, 1922, Paterson, 2013), the question of what might make sufficient knowledge never treated systematically and empirically. This paper tries to test whether journalists’ desired knowledge can be mapped based on interviews with senior experts and journalists. 

The chosen case study is military reporting, due to the challenging and interdisciplinary nature of their knowledge and their vital role in reporting emergencies, risks, terrorism, and warts. Our gallery of experts interviewed during 2022-23 included 30 people, some of the most senior and experienced Israeli specialists: one former Deputy Chief of Staff, former members of the PM advisory National Security 

Council, current and former IDF spokesperson, heads and members of the intelligence system, retired generals and scholars of military affairs. From the journalistic side the panel included some of the most senior and awarded reporters and commentators. 

Interviewees asked the following: if we were to establish a school for military journalists, what would its curriculum look like? Their replies were reflective and informative, encouraging experts and journalists to outline a desired curriculum of expected knowledge that can inspire other beats as well. Hereon, eight characteristics of journalistic military knowledge: 

1. Despite their known disagreements (Nisbet & Fahy, 2015) experts and journalists tended to agree on journalists’ required knowledge. However, a significant disagreement concerned the configuration of military knowledge and its systematic accumulation. Experts perceived knowledge as more “idealistic”, quasi-academic, systematic and flowing top-down from military's seniors. Journalists, on the other hand, expressed a more “realistic” configuration of knowledge that tends to be more eclectic, partial, harnessed to storytelling functions and often flowing bottom-up – from soldiers, parents and civil society. 

2. In the spirit of Schudson's and Anderson's knowledge paradox (2009), expected knowledge of military journalists is simultaneously “grandiose and incredibly modest” (p. 96). While they follow complex moves such as the development of military strategy, tactical moves, and superpowers’ interests "like following a musical score or partiture", some shallow levels of knowledge and a respective epistemic humility are inevitable in a field with so many types of forces, units and sub disciplines. 

3. Military beat requires an exceptional degree of interdisciplinary knowledge. To understand rocket propulsion systems and why they land at a certain angle, one must be familiar with earth sciences, physics and ballistics; to truly understand the controversy surrounding the involvement of women in combat and in fighter pilot tasks, knowledge in the fields of biology and physiology 

is necessary. While the core remains pure military affairs, it is often traversed by peripheral issues like economics, law and engineering. 

4. Central parts of expected knowledge cannot be learnt theoretically rather based on experiential knowledge – on time spent with training forces. Without it one will never understand what is so challenging in night combat, in surprising encounters with enemy forces or with pressures of command under fire. 

5. Military journalists must have extra knowledge in journalism, to deal with the hyperactive deceptive nature of their information environment. Beyond the regular spin, disinformation and misinformation that can be found in politics, they are facing propaganda, psychological warfare and censorship. Mundane journalistic acts like verification or soliciting a comment are often inapplicable in their beat. 

6. The "10,000-hour rule" is debunked in military reporters where the respected journalists enjoy decades of experience. Journalists characterized their initial years as an era when they failed to understand how much they didn't understand. According to one of them, what constitutes knowledge is not “the length of the runway”, but rather “the height of the flight”, that indicates depth, comprehension, thinking skills, integration, and critique. 

7. Some military journalists have knowledge that exceeds the breadth, and in some cases, depth of senior military officials due to three factors: their extremely long coverage, a panoramic overview of the army's various branches, and a specific personal interest in sub-fields close to their hearts, such as weapons and aircraft systems, that become part of their identity and public branding. 

8. Participants regard the knowledge of military journalists in quasi-intelligence terms. This affinity based on a combination of close acquaintance with intelligence personnel, attraction to their superior and systematic approach to information, and a series of shared functions: systematic data collection beyond the needs of the next story, overcoming objections, being able to ask the right questions and the ability to generalize and organize information effectively for their respective audiences.

Dalia Elsheikh and Daniel Jackson: The Power of Numbers: Four Ways Metrics are Changing the News

11:45

Aided by the shift to increasing digital news consumption, one of the main developments in journalism in recent years has been the rise of analytics and metrics for tracking audiences’ preferences about news content (Hermida, 2020; Van Damme et al., 2020). While the benefits of analytics on news media organisations’ revenues and traffic have been documented (Bodó, 2019; Christin, 2020; Diakopoulos, 2019), concerns about their impact on working conditions, editorial decisions, and the quality of news content are at the centre of several ongoing scholarly debates (Tandoc, 2013; 2017; 2019; Welbers et al, 2016; Nguyen 2013; Neheli 2018). 

To date, most empirical studies on the use of analytics by news organisations have focused on newsrooms in developed countries (Allam and Hollifield, 2021). But there is limited evidence regarding their use and impact on journalism practice in emerging and transitional media systems, where the boundaries between new and old media are more distinct and the media markets are less developed (Jebril et al 2022). Building on interviews with twenty Egyptian journalists working across different platforms and ownership models in the news media sector, this study examines how journalists in transitional Egypt adapt to web analytics and how they perceive the influence of audience metrics on their journalistic practice. Based on their testimony, we identify four ways that metrics are changing journalistic practices and news content. Each of these have power implications in relation to ongoing debates in the field of digital journalism.

First, driven by a dependence on analytics, our findings show how journalists surrendered their roles as agenda-setters and gatekeepers, by following stories already published on social media rather than developing their own original stories. This coincides with previous literature suggesting that there is a decline in journalists’ gatekeeping role due to increased reliance on analytics (Tandoc 2013; Neheli 2018). Yet it is the intersection of the media politics of post-revolutionary and transitional Egypt that make this a particularly troubling case. Here, we firstly found that journalists’ dependence on social media for news content was partly a result of sources refusing access to journalists, and instead directing them to social media accounts. The second troubling dynamic is how a reliance on trending news topics leaves the news agenda open to manipulation, particularly because of its implications for who exercises power. Here, participants spoke about the deliberate use of fake social media accounts and bots by political and religious organisations with the aim of influencing public opinion (see: Elsheikh 2018).

Second, we found that some private outlets depend on money coming from social media as the main source of income, directly linked to journalists’ salaries. Alongside our other findings we argue that this has contributed to a process of infrastructural capture. Nechushtai (2017:1043) describes this process as “circumstances in which a scrutinizing body is incapable of operating sustainably without the physical or digital resources and services provided by the businesses it oversees and is therefore dependent on them.” While social media platforms have provided a seemingly essential income stream for news organisations, the former’s infrastructural capture of the latter has consequences for their ability to scrutinise the activities of some of the most powerful and valuable companies in the world.

Third, our findings sit alongside a long line of studies that find the institutionalisation of metrics to have disruptive influences on newsroom hierarchies and relationships (Bunce 2015; 2017; Tandoc 2017; Welbers et al 2016; Vu 2014). We found that journalists’ work is often evaluated based on analytics regardless of story content, and how they are being controlled by the digital dashboards installed in some newsrooms. We found how the creation of social media departments, staffed by young and untrained media professionals, were now at the leading edge of news content creation at Egyptian news organisations. Established journalists resented both the power now wielded by social media teams, and the financial rewards they were reaping.

Finally, our participants described a shift towards tabloid content, a lack of original or investigative reporting, and the copying of content from other outlets. Most worryingly, we found that Egyptian newsrooms are placing (journalistically) untrained and inexperienced staff at the front line of online news production with license to follow the trending topics of the day and to maximise eyeballs. While this may drive audience attention to the news brand, participants also spoke of concerning ethical aberrations alongside basic mistakes. When editors justified such practices, they were invariably on the grounds of the (analytics-informed) popularity of soft news topics amongst audiences rather than journalistic value.

Johana Kotišová: Affective epistemology of journalism: Conceptualizing the role of journalists’ emotions in fact-finding and knowledge-production practices

12:00

This theoretical paper seeks to take emotions seriously (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019) and move the emotional turn in journalism studies to the next conceptual level by (A) developing the concept of affective epistemology of journalism and (B) identifying five epistemic affordances of emotions. The paper builds on criticisms of the objectivity paradigm (Peters, 2011; Wright, 2011) and argues that instead of the traditional segregation of facts from emotional experiences and values (McNair, 2017) and theorizing away the role of emotional attachments, the latter should be acknowledged as valid parts of fact-finding and knowledge-building practices.

The notion of affective epistemology draws from the Feminist Standpoint Epistemology (or FSE), philosophy and anthropology of emotions, and recent research on emotions in journalism. First, it borrows from the Feminist Standpoint Epistemology the idea of bodies of knowledge that are socially situated and limit and enable what one can know (Steiner, 2018). FSE suggests that ‘knowledge comes from someplace: a standpoint, which is partly grounded in, inter alia, embodied experience’ (Steiner, 2018, p. 1856) and that our (emotional and bodily) experiences offer insights unavailable to those lacking such experiences. By doing so, the FSE reveals the meaning of particular positionalities and treats journalists’ and their subjects’ raced, sexed/gendered, and classed embodied experiences as potential resources. Second, the paper draws from philosophical and anthropological theorization of emotions as embodied knowledge to argue that – contrarily to the widespread meta-journalistic discourse on professionalism, valuing neutrality and detachment – emotions are not in opposition to journalistic professionalism but in line with it, as they are indispensable for rational deliberation and cognitive processes (Damasio, 2004; Ignatow, 2007; Scarantino & de Sousa, 2021). Third, the argument builds on recent empirical evidence and theoretical work in journalism studies, where various authors have argued against the narrow conception of journalistic epistemology as a purely intellectual endeavor based on objectivity, neutrality, and distance (Al-Ghazzi, 2021; Blacksin & Mitra, 2023; Stupart, 2022), and have attempted to rehabilitate emotions and feelings as legitimate sources of moral knowledge and ethical reasoning (Kulbaga & Spencer, 2022; Stupart, 2021). The vital role of emotions in journalistic fact-finding and knowledge-building practices is particularly apparent in crisis and conflict journalism and journalism in the so-called Global South (AUTHORS, YYYY).

The paper also conceptualizes five affordances of emotions in knowledge-building practices: (1) motivational affordance, (2) methodological-epistemological affordance, (3) ontological-narrative affordance, (4) innovative-collaborative affordance, and (5) phatic-interactional affordance. First, emotions – such as joy, excitement, and moral feelings – motivate media professionals to pursue fact-finding practices. In turn, feelings, such as indignation or sympathy, are also motivated by on-the-ground events, such as corruption or suffering, thus potentially working as their indicator. Second, journalists’ non-habitual emotions (e.g., shock), when compared to their sources’ or subjects’ habitual emotions (or lack thereof), can help identify significant aspects of situations. Moreover, emotional imagination and empathy can also ‘open doors’ to news sources. Third, certain emotions can give access to response-dependent qualities of situations, which are only accessible through particular emotional responses, such as being amused or moved. Fourth, emotions, like trust and other social-relational emotions, can drive collaborations and innovations. Fifth, emotions, working as a currency in the current attention economy, can work as journalists’ ‘feelers,’ helping them understand their audiences, thus promising to help overcome the disconnect between the two (Zelizer et al., 2022). Further research is needed to elaborate on the individual affordances empirically; this paper aims to establish a theoretical basis for future empirical work.

While emotions can also mislead journalists’ judgment, their positive and manifold epistemic value has been significantly underrated. This paper attempts to challenge how we usually see the place of emotions in journalistic knowledge-production and fact-finding practices. The insights into affective epistemology, showing that a knower’s emotions are potentially epistemically valuable, can inform the broader debate around the shaken journalists’ epistemic authority and the post-truth crisis (Steiner, 2018).

Priscilla Hau, Steve Paulussen, Pieter Maeseele: Political parties making the news. Examining the content marketing mix of the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Belang

12:15

In today's hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017), journalistic gatekeepers compete with various digital actors, including social platforms, algorithms, users, and quasi-journalistic actors (Broersma & Graham, 2015; Nygaard, 2020). This digital transformation has not only reshaped the media landscape but also transformed political communication (Kreiss & McGregor, 2018). Political actors have become less reliant on journalistic earned media coverage. Instead, they have increasingly invested in digital content marketing, allocating substantial budgets to online advertising. Furthermore, apart from earned and paid media content, the importance of owned media content has seen an increase through print, online, and social media channels to convey political messages. In addition, political parties also create ‘news channels’ to disseminate quasi journalistic content. Ekman & Widholm (2022) refer to this as ‘parasitic news’ which “utilizes the wider social and institutional legitimacy of professional journalism to produce and distribute information for political purposes” (p. 3). So far, the content marketing strategies of political parties remain underexplored. Therefore, we examine how a Flemish political far-right party (Vlaams Belang) utilizes their paid and owned media, incorporating both their political messages and quasi-journalistic content, to compete with traditional journalistic gatekeepers. 

In this study, we explore the content marketing mix of Vlaams Belang for several reasons. In the 2019 Belgian federal elections, Vlaams Belang became the second-largest party with 12% of the vote. However, the party has been excluded from government participation due to other political parties' reluctance to form alliances with this far-right party. Consequently, as an opposition party, they receive relatively less coverage in legacy news media compared to governing parties. Therefore, Vlaams Belang has strategically invested in both paid and owned media channels. Belgium's unique party funding system, which provides financial support through public subsidies and private contributions, has allowed Vlaams Belang to allocate substantial resources to their digital and social media efforts. They are among the top three political entities in Europe in terms of spending on advertisements on Facebook and Instagram in 2022 (AdLens, 2023). Moreover, Vlaams Belang actively utilizes a wide array of online channels, more than other Flemish parties. They aim to influence public discourse, even in their role as an opposition party. 

This study seeks to analyze Vlaams Belang's content marketing mix, encompassing their owned and paid media channels, along with their earned media coverage. Utilizing quantitative content analysis, we address two primary research questions. First, we investigate whether the thematic content on Vlaams Belang's digital owned and paid media channels differs from what is covered in earned media (RQ1). Second, we examine whether Vlaams Belang offers a more significant platform for its party politicians through their owned and paid media channels compared to those featured in earned media coverage (RQ2).

Vlaams Belang employs a variety of communication channels to disseminate their messages. Their owned media include their official political website, V-Nieuws (a platform in which Vlaams Belang politicians are in executive roles), a YouTube channel named VlaamsBelang-TV, and the party accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. Individual party members' accounts are not included in this study. Regarding paid media, our primary focus is on Facebook and Instagram advertisements as the Facebook Ad Library provides access to these advertisements. In the category of earned media, Vlaams Belang garners attention through legacy news outlets and (partisan) alternative media sources. Our data collection process spanned a three-month period from February 14th to May 14th, 2023, achieved through tools like the Coosto social media management tool, the Facebook Ad Library, and BelgaPress. This resulted in a total of 2,345 owned media items, 119 paid media advertisements, and 993 earned media items. 

The preliminary findings highlight the crucial role of Vlaams Belang's own media channels in shaping their message and amplifying their politicians' voices. They cover a diverse range of themes, with variations in attention between owned and paid media compared to earned media. The party leader serves as a multifaceted spokesperson across various themes in owned media, while earned media focuses on a narrower range of topics. Other Vlaams Belang politicians, featured as spokespeople for specific themes in owned media, have reduced visibility in earned media. The party website and YouTube channel serve as primary platforms for controlled publication of parasitic news, providing exclusive spaces for a wide range of politicians. Social media, particularly Twitter, plays a pivotal role in disseminating this quasi-journalistic content. This study aims to shed light on the evolving landscape of political communication and journalism in the digital age, revealing insights into the blurred boundaries and potential implications for democracy and public discourse. 

Panel 18

PRECONSTITUTED PANEL: Sanne Vrijenhoek, Lien Michiels, Felicia Loecherbach, Myrthe Reuver: Diversity and News Recommender Systems

11:15

News recommender systems are increasingly deployed on news websites as an additional service, adding a layer of personalization that helps readers find the news that is in some way interesting or relevant to them as individuals (Wu et al., 2019). In doing so, they are taking on tasks that were traditionally done by editorial teams, and are essentially becoming gatekeepers in what news is shown to the audiences. They move control over the distribution of news articles away from the editorial team, into a ‘black box’, under the development of technical teams that are often not very familiar with editorial principles, in an algorithm that may be hard to understand and influence (Bastian et al., 2021; Bodo, 2019). With individual reading experiences also comes less control over and insight into the overall reading experience, leading to worries on selective exposure through so-called filter bubbles and echo chambers (Haim et al., 2018; Michiels et al., 2023). Furthermore, in their current state recommender systems are primarily optimized on predicting clicks, which may increase revenue but also has a tendency to promote clickbait and sensationalist content (Wang et al., 2021). Lastly, the loss of editorial oversight may also make it easier for misinformation to spread (Pathak et al., 2023). However, when done well, news recommender systems could also potentially broaden the horizons of their users by presenting diverse recommendations, including items different from what they are used to or expecting to see, in a way that is not possible without personalization (Helberger, 2019; Vrijenhoek et al., 2021). In doing so, they may increase understanding and tolerance for groups different from one (Ferrer-Conill & Jr, 2018). If we can tailor personalized news recommendations to what a user has read in the past, and align this with the media organization’s mission and values, news recommender systems could be a very valuable tool in informing audiences. 

Many European media organizations have shown interest in deploying news recommender systems to further diversity. Yet, this is easier said than done, as the normative principles underpinning diversity are often not or at least not directly suitable for quantification; something that is essential for any computational system (Loecherbach et al., 2020; Vrijenhoek et al., 2022). This is true for things such as the coverage of multiple opinions - what is an opinion, and how can a computer automatically identify one? (Reuver et al., 2021) - but also for the inclusion of underrepresented and minority groups, which requires the presence of an extensive amount of potentially sensitive data. Solving or at least alleviating these issues requires an interdisciplinary approach, with knowledge of journalism, computer science, linguistics, communication science, and also philosophy. In many instances it may be the case that solutions should be procedural, rather than algorithmic. The members of this panel have studied diversity in news recommendations from their respective disciplines, and each focus on different aspects of news recommender systems that affect the presence or absence of diversity in a news selection. From the perspective of their own field they will discuss general challenges of optimizing a recommender system for diversity, and highlight where and how interdisciplinary collaboration can help move the field forward. 

Speaker 1: Diversity of What? On the challenges of finding a technical definition of (news) diversity

Speaker 1 has a background in Artificial Intelligence, but is currently conducting research at the Law faculty. In their work, they focus on building a bridge between the computer sciences’ descriptive- and the social sciences’ normative definitions of diversity. 

Speaker 2: Defining and Measuring Filter Bubbles 

Speaker 2 has spent the past five years studying news recommender systems in practice. Their interdisciplinary work revolves around filter bubbles: What are they, and how can we reliably measure them in the context of online news? 

Speaker 3: Data donations for studying the (perceived) diversity of news consumption 

Speaker 3 has a background in political communication and journalism. Their work revolves around measuring diversity in real-world settings through data donated by users (such as social media data and browsing histories) as well as researching gaps between (automated) measurement and user perceptions of abstract concepts such as diversity. 

Speaker 4: Diversity, Difference, and Measuring Stance 

Speaker 4 has a background in linguistics, journalism, and AI. Their PhD research has focussed on detecting different viewpoints in text for news recommendation. They attempt to combine the newest Large Language Models with theory and methods from the social sciences, especially careful evaluation: are we measuring what we intend to measure? 

Panel 19 

Scott A Eldridge II: Countervailing influences: Journalism’s evolving boundaries across its recent past

11:15

Overview. This paper explores prevailing theories in journalism studies for making sense of the field and its boundaries (Carlson and Lewis, 2020), expanding on these by considering the methodological potential for using digital humanities approaches to studying journalism’s boundaries across its recent history (Bødker, 2021). Furthermore, its ambitions include aligning our consideration of journalism’s boundaries with political theories that can help us beJer examine changes in journalism as they have been affected by countervailing forces in politics and society writ large. These extra-journalistic forces include forces of fragmentation, including populism and cultural backlash, among others (c.f. Norris and Inglehart, 2019). 

Objective. This paper addresses conceptual and methodological challenges that have emerged from ongoing research focused on the boundaries of the journalistic field. It then proposes a typology and methodological framework for addressing these, based on a longitudinal web-archival study that uses web archives (e.g. Archive.org, among other ad hoc web archives) to capture the evolution of non-traditional, digital, news sites and the impact they have had on shaping the journalistic field. 

Context. Shifting platforms, short-lived media ventures, and (ant)agonistic journalistic actors who blur journalism and politics have challenged normative ideas of journalism (Eldridge, 2019). Within journalism studies, scholarly attention has largely addressed these developments as challenges to boundaries between ‘traditional’ and digital ‘peripheral’ media (see, for example: Schapals, 2022). This can (though not always) gloss over the influence that intertwined forces of ideology and politics have had on journalism over time, and the inflection of cultural shifts upon journalism’s recent history in western societies. These have had an impact upon our thinking about the role of different media, including traditional journalism, alternative journalism, and ‘extreme’ forms of news media, and how we think about their contributions to our democracies (c.f. Ihlebæk et al. 2022; Frischlich et al. 2023). 

At the same time, a diverse array of media that has developed online have been difficult to bring into a longer narrative of journalism and change. Digital news ventures might only exist for a few years before being closed, consolidated, or bought up by different venture capitalists or corporations (see: BuzzFeed News, or Gizmodo Media). This makes it difficult to capture any lasting impact on the wider journalistic field. Meanwhile, peripheral journalistic actors regularly blur lines between journalism and politics (e.g. the work of Glenn Greenwald, or news found at Guido Fawkes) which make it hard to describe their boundary challenges as ‘momentary,’ and rather calls our attention to their continuous, varied, transgressions of journalistic boundaries (more journalistic at one moment, less at another; c.f. Eldridge, 2021). 

The opportunity. Archival approaches to research borrowing from digital humanities offer us alternative means of tracing these non-traditional journalistic actors and their challenges to journalistic boundaries over time (Brügger, 2010). Drawing examples from the US, UK, and Netherlands, this paper uses a longitudinal study of 30 alternative, online media dating back to the turn of the century. Analysis examines the ways these media presented themselves as journalistic practitioners, their work as journalistic practices, and their propositions as either confirming traditional journalistic norms, or introducing new ones. This maps to the three levels of Boundary Work outlined by Carlson and Lewis (2020). By drawing these out over time and across national contexts, through its analysis it presents a methodological framework for studying alternative, peripheral, news media that combines qualitative textual analysis and digital archival research to build a perspective of shiRing dynamics. 

From its analysis, this paper proposes a typology that cross-compares the occurrence of boundary work at journalism’s boundaries to parallel developments in society. It takes an understanding of journalistic boundaries, seen through the framework of boundary work’s functional processes of expansion, expulsion, and protection of autonomy, to relate these to theories of cultural backlash and populism, and the ongoing fragmentation experienced in these countries during these periods. 

Conclusion. In closing, this paper takes encouragement from field theory and tries to think about the field as a space of constant reimagining, subject to different forces in society, including those beyond journalism’s own control to shape its dimensions (see: Bourdieu, 2005; Eldridge, 2023). It concludes by arguing the journalistic field’s dimensions are not only never stable, but caught in ongoing processes of change that continue to take place along its boundaries. 

Grégoire Lits and Olivier Standaert: Measuring and Understanding Diversity Shifts Among Journalists in French-Speaking Belgium (2012-2023)

11:30

This proposal outlines a comprehensive study aimed at evaluating the progression of diversity within the journalistic community in French-speaking Belgium over a decade-long period, from 2012 to 2023. Building upon the seminal 2012 survey commissioned by the Belgian Association of Professional Journalists (AJP 2012), our research employs an exact replication of the original methodology, surveying 543 individuals out of 2250 press card holders. This approach enables a rigorous assessment of the evolution in diversity profiles within newsrooms, while also considering the impact of diversity management policies implemented in response to this issue since 2012 and the rising of pro-diversity discourses in newsrooms in Belgium and elsewhere (see among numerous others: Brochardt et al. 2019). 

The study conducted in 2012 marked a pioneering effort in assessing diversity among journalists in French-speaking Belgium. It revealed stark disparities in gender representation, highlighting a significant under-representation of women (32%) and a low rate of diversity in foreign origin (16.6%). Furthermore, it sheds light on the over-representation of white males above the age of forty. Subsequent independent studies in Belgium reinforced these findings (Standaert & Mertens 2016; Vanhaelewyn et al. 2023, etc). and explored related issues of violence and discrimination against women journalists (De Vuyst & Raeymaeckers 2019; Malcorps et al 2022; Le Cam et al. 2022).

In our 2023 survey, in order to achieve a nuanced comprehension of the observed evolutions, we also integrated three constructs from the extant literature on workplace diversity into our questionnaire (that has, to our knowledge, never been done in the field of journalism studies). These constructs enabled us to evaluate pro-diversity attitudes in a general context (utilising the 5-item pro-diversity beliefs scale by Kauff et al., 2018), assess pro-gender diversity beliefs in the workplace (employing a 2-item scale derived from Van Knippenderg et al., 2004, 2007, 2013 and Schudson et al., 2022), and gauge the perception of workplace diversity (utilising a 6-item construct). Additionally, we augmented our quantitative survey with 10 qualitative interviews conducted with managers and HR representatives from ten distinct newsrooms.

Results and Discussion:

Gender Diversity: While there has been a modest increase in the proportion of women among journalists (from 32% to 35.4%) between 2012 and 2023, this figure still lags behind the overall employment rate of women in Belgium. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a persistent 'leaky pipeline' phenomenon (Blickenstaff 2005), indicating a consistent attrition of women throughout their careers (see fig. 1).

Origin Diversity: With regard to diversity of origin, the proportion of journalists from foreign backgrounds, which was close to 16% in 2012, has increased slightly (18,1%), but this increase must be put into perspective by the fact that diversity in the general population (with about 45,7% of French-speaking Belgian resident being foreigner or being Belgian but having at least one parent how does not have the Belgian nationality) has increased more over the period than in our sample (see fig. 2). As a result, despite the positive trend observed, the gap between the journalist population and the French-speaking Belgian population in terms of diversity of origin is greater today than it was ten years ago.

In our endeavour to comprehend these developments, our analysis of the various constructs reveals that journalists, as a collective, espouse robust pro-diversity attitudes, harbouring a general belief in the societal benefits of diversity. Nevertheless, notable gender and age differentials emerge, with women and younger cohorts exhibiting a greater appreciation for diversity compared to their male and older counterparts. 

Pertinently, in terms of perceiving diversity within the workplace, a noteworthy observation is the significant disparity in perception between journalists holding hierarchical roles and their counterparts. Managers tend to perceive their workplaces as more diverse than non-managerial journalists, a trend that is also mirrored among male and older cohorts. 

Moreover, the analysis of these indicators, which indicate a favourable perception of diversity, coupled with the perception among the dominant demographic (men over 40) and those occupying positions of authority, that their workplaces are already somewhat diversified, offers a key insight into the gradual pace of change in editorial diversity witnessed from 2013 to 2023. Notably, this effect does not hold significant weight for women in positions of authority, thus corroborating Assmann & Eckert's (2023) contention that an increased presence of women in leadership positions could accelerate shifts in terms of diversity within newsrooms.

This presentation provides an opportunity to deliberate on the relevance and limitation of quantitative diversity metrics and explore avenues for crafting mixed-methods research designs that seek to elucidate the observed trends.

Tomás Dodds, Wang Ngai Yeung, Rana Arafat: Bound by Exile: Exploring Kinship Dynamics Among Diaspora Journalists

11:45

As the world becomes a more dangerous place for journalism, reporters have begun to migrate out of their home countries, looking for safe havens that will allow them to report more freely. According to the latest report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (2023), “journalist killings in 2022 rose nearly 50% globally amid lawlessness and war.” Latin America was the deadliest region for media workers, contributing with 30 of the 67 journalists and media workers killed worldwide. However, this number has been quickly surpassed since the Israeli bombardments that are taking place in the Gaza Strip. According to figures compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) (2023), a total of 34 journalists have been killed since October 7th in the region. Across the world, in what was once hailed as one of the most freewheeling media markets in Asia, Hong Kong journalists are now being forcibly ejected from the industry and imprisoned for their work. 

Recent years have shown a noticeable rise in forming diasporic media organisations. Diaspora media serve as platforms for “self-expression, the representation of cultural artefacts and the contestation of negative stereotypes by migrant people in the public sphere” (Ogunyemi, 2015, p.1). Diaspora journalists mediate the ongoing conflicts in their homelands and engage in transnational advocacy practices in two unique ways; creating diasporic news websites that promote counter-narratives to the state-owned media (Arafat, 2023), and building digital networks that “blur boundaries between journalism, activism, human rights advocacy, social movements, and civil society work” (Arafat, 2021, p.2174). They further use their diasporic communities in promoting newsafety in their conflict-torn homelands by providing professional safety trainings, releasing solidarity statements for detained journalists, offering emergency rescue for local journalists under attack, and releasing safety guides or codes of conduct (Porlezza & Arafat, 2021). While literature focused on examining diaspora journalists’ role in serving local reporters in home countries, little scholarly attention was given to comparing how different groups of diaspora journalists build their communities/networks and how their kinship dynamics shape their news reporting and role perceptions in exile. 

To this end, our paper delves into the pivotal role of kinship in fostering community building and facilitating collaboration among diaspora journalists across different regions in the world. Furthermore, it examines the proactive measures taken by diaspora journalists to establish and/or utilize inclusive data and educational infrastructures, thereby bolstering advocacy and empowerment initiatives for fellow journalists living in exile. Hence, this research focuses on how different groups of exiled journalists create communities and mobilise resources that allow them to report the news for their own diasporas. Beyond analysing the experiences and operations of diasporic media organisations, we are interested in how transnational kinship plays a role in constructing unique ecologies for journalistic work. In this light, with the help of the interviews, we diagrammed a relational network between actors for each organisation. As will be shown in our results, the networks can further our exploration of how journalists, audiences, technology and any other actors associate with each other. 

To answer this question, our research draws upon 12 semi-interviews structured with diasporic media organisations from Latin America, the Middle East, and Hong Kong actively producing news content. We selected four media organisations per region, eight of them based in the US, two in the UK, and two in Taiwan. The selected media organisations should have a digital presence, meaning that they should exist on at least one social media platform. 

Ultimately, our interviews aim to map various perspectives on diasporic collaborations, kinship relations and diasporic-journalistic role perceptions. 

Our findings offer important implications for understanding how journalists adapt in the context of war or political prosecution, as well as how journalistic role performances and relationships with fellow reporters and audiences mutate when in exile in order to keep producing public interest content. Moreover, our results also show how, through diasporic journalistic organisations, both communities and journalists partake in a process of cultural preservation, identity reaffirmation, and transnational bridge-building, fostering a sense of kinship that transcends geographical boundaries. 

Bissie Anderson: Meaning-ful Encounters: Theorising knowledge production in community-centred journalism

12:15

Journalism’s eroding epistemic authority and the diminishing public trust in journalism as a knowledge-producing institutions have become increasingly critical topics of scholarly debate in the field of Journalism Studies since the advent of the network society (Carlson, 2017; Castells, 2010; Ekström & Westlund, 2019). Some scholars have issued calls for journalism to reckon with its legacy and to rethink core strategic rituals and epistemic practices it has traditionally relied on to substantiate its truth-claims (Callison & Young, 2019). Community-centred journalism has been hailed as one of several solutions to journalism’s deepening “epistemic crisis” (Steensen, 2019), motivating scholarly interest in how community-focused journalists around the world reimagine knowledge production in their networks of networks (Author; Callison & Young, 2019; Wenzel, 2019).

This paper presents a conceptual framework of meaning-ful encounters, based on a comparative case study of community-focused journalism startups/collectives in different parts of the world. The study contributes to our understanding of the relational production of knowledge in ‘pioneering’ community-centred journalism networks, illuminating how community-centred journalists co-produce knowledge vis-à-vis their communities, audiences, and the public. Empirically grounded in metajournalistic discourse analysis of manifestos and “mission” webpages, and interviews with 30 journalism producers, from four journalism startups/collectives in Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania and the UK (New Naratif, The Current, DoR, and Bureau Local, respectively), as well as qualitative multimodal discourse analysis of seven stories produced by the above-mentioned organisations, this novel conceptual framework theorises ‘pioneering’ community journalism’s epistemic praxis along three dimensions – the production level, the story level, and the social level. 

The study has applied methodological triangulation and followed an abductive approach to data analysis, tagging between the empirical data (three datasets across four case studies) and existing theories before reaching theoretical saturation (Tracy, 2018). The conceptual framework is rooted in new materialist ontologies (Barad, 2007; Delanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2015), more specifically the concept of “encounters” (Fox & Alldred, 2017; Massumi, 2015) – which is the level at which power operates in new materialist views of social and creative production. The theoretical construct is consistent with empirical observation found in the cross-case analysis and the theoretical saturation of 1^st level codes and 2^nd level concepts through the comparative analysis of metajournalistic, interview and story artefact data across the four case studies. Through using replication logic (Eisenhardt, 1989), the emergent concepts were refined and synthesised into the three-dimensional theoretical construct meaning-ful encounters (Table 1).

Meaning-ful encounters is defined as the capacity-producing, enactive or transformational relations and interactions at all stages of journalistic knowledge production that create the conditions of possibility for agency, action, and impact on a personal, interpersonal, and social level. In the proposed conceptualisation, meaning-ful does not only relate to having or producing meaning, or to being socially meaningful, but to being agency-producing, transformational and enactive – i.e., the encounters that are material and consequential to the knowledge production process, that make possible what community journalists can do. The meaning-ful encounters in community-focused knowledge production point to a productive collectivity, as actors, actants, communities and networks come together to co-produce knowledge – a relationship that goes beyond the duty to inform and extends to a circle of care that promises a nourishing, empowering and even transformational experience – for both communities and journalists themselves. Meaning-ful encounters goes beyond the production of meaning and knowledge in journalistic representations of reality, and extends to giving agency and voice, and empowering people and communities by telling “stories that matter” (Bureau Local slogan), thus pushing the boundaries of journalistic epistemology through shifting the focus to the social impact and value of journalism.

The study that this paper presents makes a theoretical and methodological contribution to the field. First, it proposes an enactive, relational framework that could be extrapolated theoretically to examine journalistic knowledge production in various contexts. Second, through the critical analysis of story designs, including their encoded agentic capacities vis-à-vis audiences and wider world, it connects methodologically meaning production and reception. The study also has some normative potential as it offers recommendations for a meaningful and relational industry practice, thus feeding into both academic and practice debates on journalism’s changing epistemologies (Callison & Young, 2019). Beyond that, through its cross-border focus, it contributes to ongoing efforts to develop cross-national, global-comparative understandings of journalistic practice, ethics, and epistemologies (Berglez, 2008; Ward, 2008, 2018).

 

Panel 20

Fiona McKay: Obstacles and Opportunities: Experiences of EDI Interventions for Women in Journalism in Scotland

11:15

Over the last few decades, a plethora of policies and initiatives have been developed to improve women’s representation in journalism. This includes interventions to increase the numerical under-representation of women in media discourse, as well as in the industry itself in both leadership positions and the overall workforce, recognising that there are still significant barriers to equity in each of these areas. For women in the workforce in particular, research taking an intersectional approach also shows increase marginalisation for different groups of women including those working in sports media (Jenkin 2020), women with disabilities (Darke 2018) and women of colour (Boyle, House and Yaqoob 2021). This presentation will discuss data from two ongoing projects prepared for Engender, Scotland’s feminist policy and advocacy organisation, and the Equal Media and Culture Centre (EMCC), a hub for research, monitoring and advocacy for equality in the creative and media sectors in Scotland. These projects explore the efficacy of EDI initiatives which have focused on improving women’s representation and experiences in the journalism sector through engaging with key stakeholders involved in such initiatives. Based on qualitative interviews, this paper discusses the mechanisms which have been considered successful – or otherwise – as well as women’s experiences of the effectiveness of these measures. 

Seth Lewis, Gregory Perreault, Maxwell Ely: ChatGPT and the Crisis of Journalistic Authority

11:30

Journalists have often troubled over the boundaries of their craft, concerned that their work could be duplicated by actors not operating with the normative values of the field. In early iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) in the mid-2010s, journalists rationalized that the level of precision reflected in journalism was not to be found in work produced by crude forms of AI. Yet the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 ushered in a new era of AI that would seem to do all that journalists fear: replace the knowledge-generation elements that have always been key to the field, and thus produce quality writing with an efficiency that might threaten their jobs. Through the lens of journalistic authority, the present study seeks to explore how journalists evaluated this authority crisis through an analysis of metajournalism (n=94) discussing ChatGPT and the related wave of generative-AI chatbots, built on large language models, that can produce human-sounding text at scale.

Automated journalism has been widely discussed by the trade press, popular press, and academia for over a decade, often framed as a profound concern for news professionals in that automation threatens to replace both the mundane and the creative work of journalism (Carlson, 2015). Journalistic authority concerns journalists’ ability to “‘authorize’ their version of events and reify their authoritative status to audiences” (Zelizer, 1990, p. 366). Part of the means with which journalists manage their authority is outward facing—that is, through diminishing the authority of competitors that are perceived to be “not meeting journalistic standards” (Robinson, 2006, p. 80). But it is also inward facing, helping journalists manage the dangers to their professional position that appear to be arising from within the field. Journalists use methods such as metajournalistic discourse—that is, they produce journalism about journalism—to help reinforce their role in society, such as by demonstrating that they are “serious about providing a public service” and engaged in this discourse “to repair the ideational substance of an evolving institution” (Vos & Thomas, 2018, p. 2008).

Data for this study was gathered from externally focused metajournalism—opinion pieces and editorials—published in leading news publications in the United Kingdom and the United States (e.g., The Atlantic, NPR, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times of London); and it was gathered from the journalistic trade press in the U.S. and the U.K. This was collected from the introduction of ChatGPT—November 30, 2022—for a four-month period concluding March 31, 2023. This led to an overall corpus of 94 pieces of metajournalism. 

This study finds that journalists largely used discussions of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence to reify their authoritative status by positioning themselves as authorities on new technology, and by casting skepticism on chatbots’ reliability and validity. That said, journalists also perceived AI tools such as ChatGPT less as a danger to their authority and more as an opportunity that, if used correctly, could even enhance their authority as arbiters of truth.  

While metajournalism as a whole operates with a shared purpose—to offer journalism about journalism—this study reflects the influence of the audience in shaping what that metajournalism looks like. Our study reflected significant discrepancies between data gathered from the trade press (aimed at fellow journalists) and the mainstream press (aimed at the broader public). From the standpoint of journalistic authority, it makes sense why this discrepancy may exist. Journalists would naturally want to stabilize the field through metajournalism, and they sense a legitimate threat in ChatGPT. It may also be that journalists reporting for the mainstream press would hope to rally news consumers in opposition to AI so as to defend journalists’ existing position of authority. We discuss the implications of these findings, including the importance of bringing a conceptual lens—such as journalistic authority—to the often-descriptive studies that explore emerging technologies in journalism. 

Andreea Voina: Talked 91ֱ��, Not Talked To: Roma Women’s Representation in Media and Politics.

11:45

Identity categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, religion, class, disability constitute the basis of social inequalities individuals have faced throughout history. Although the representation of non-dominant or even historically marginalized categories of individuals represents a consistent body of research on a global scale, in recent years, intersectionality as a scientific lens has aided scholars in shifting the conversation from single identity categories framing people’s experiences to intersecting identities that lend complex lived experiences. Among such categories with problematic representations are Roma women, the most vulnerable minority group in the European Union (Kóczé, 2020; Topolánsky, 2018) under the neoliberal market logic, as they lie at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Following McGarry’s (2014) myriad representations approach, this article analyses the representation of and representation for Roma women. In an exploratory approach, I aim to bring a contribution to the understanding of how Roma women’s identities place them between invisibility and hypervisibility, by first analysing media representations of Roma women and candidates and attitudes towards them, and then how they construct and communicate their identities in relation to media and political representation.

As primary source of information, opinion, and attitudes about minority groups, media is worth examining in relation to the experience of Roma individuals; media frames influence inequality through racialized and biased lenses that will affect social positioning and racism against Roma (Tremlett et al., 2017), by perpetuating the cycle of inferiorisation and dehumanization (Kóczé & Rövid, 2017). News media was found to carry negative representations of ethnic minorities that incite violence, hatred, or lead to more marginalization and social exclusion (Bhatia et al., 2018). For instance, the Roma migrants have become the symbol for unwanted immigration from Eastern Europe in the Brexit debate (Breazu & McGarry, 2023). Moreover, negative representation of Roma in public and private discourse overlooks a long history of discrimination and social exclusion (Breazu, 2022). Drawing on theories of intersectionality, media and political representation, this paper employs a multi-method approach to carry out a case study on Roma women’s representation in the Romanian media and politics, through an intersectional lens. 

Overall, Roma women are missing from media narratives across the timeframe under analysis. When present, media representations of Roma women were carried out in news articles covering political statements, diaspora events, or violence. The main frames used to portray Roma women were primitiveness, criminality, and refusal to comply with norms, in representations that emphasized the disruption produced by Roma women across societies. The sentiment analysis of comments to the news analysed above and shared on Facebook by the news outlet showed: 1) 84% negative attitudes (stereotypes, anecdotal content, violence), 2) 12% neutral attitudes (generally positive stereotypes unrelated to news content, i.e., Roma being innate artists), and 3) 4% positive attitudes, reflecting support for the news content or the Roma community overall. As “hate speech incubators that increase the possibility of violent action” (Crawford, 2009, cited in Peltonen, 2010, p. 33), online venues such as Facebook host strong sentiments against Roma women, mostly related to the ‘welfare mother’ frame.

Participants to this study reported two types of representations: that of negative reporting of mainstream media outlets, looking for sensational content and providing misleading information (including misquoting the Roma women), and the positive representation in quality media. However, the women felt like the negative stereotypes promoted by the mainstream media represented a source of interaction of the non-Roma with Roma women, leading to further marginalization and social exclusion. Media narratives surrounding Roma women reflect a focus on exceptionalism and on othering (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2022), to justify their reporting angles. Intersectionality is found pivotal in Roma women’s lived experiences and dealing with oppression, and political representation currently reflects tokenism; however, Roma female experts interviewed perceived moral responsibility to make a difference keeps them engaged in activism and in their commitment to contribute to knowledge and understanding of the lived experiences of the Roma women.

Petra Pichaničová, Marína Urbániková: Behind the Bylines: A Systematic Literature Review on the Relationship Between Journalists' Gender and News Content

12:00

The field of journalism has a long history of being a male-dominated profession. Men have traditionally held top management positions in media production with significant influence, higher earnings, and more favourable working conditions (Pajnik & Hrženjak 2022; De Vuyst & Raeymaeckers 2019; O’Brien 2014). Furthermore, male perspectives have overwhelmingly dominated the news content (Djerf-Pierre & Edström 2020; North 2016; Byerly 2011; Cann & Mohr 2001). In marked contrast, female journalists are often assigned to cover topics associated with lower social status, and women remain underrepresented both as sources and subjects in the news (Macharia 2020; North 2016). This persistent gender imbalance underscores the enduring influence of gender on power distribution and journalistic processes and practices (Ruoho & Torkkola 2018; North 2009). 

Efforts to increase the representation of women in the media industry are widely acknowledged as a crucial step in fostering more inclusive news reporting. This entails achieving balanced reporting, reducing stereotypes, and expanding the coverage of a broader range of topics, particularly those related to gender equality. The concept of "critical mass" suggests that reaching a certain level of gender diversity in newsrooms can lead to the emergence of a distinctive perspective, feminine writing, or news content oriented toward women (Byerly & McGraw 2020; Schoch 2013; Correa & Harp 2011; Melin 2008). This belief is further reinforced by national and global policies that advocate for greater female representation, not only within the media but also in leadership roles on a broader scale. It aligns with the broader societal demand for journalism to mirror the diversity of society and promote diverse and multifaceted discussions in democratic communities.

This raises the question of the existence and extent of a relationship between the gender of the journalist and the media content they produce. Some of the previous studies suggest that female journalists frequently highlight a "female perspective" in their work, attributing this perspective to differences in education and gender-specific socialisation (Schoch 2022; Abisaid & Li 2020; Schoch 2013). Additionally, some research findings indicate that women journalists are more likely to draw upon female sources and concentrate on subjects related to social challenges, sexual violence, and advocacy movements (Leiva & Kimber 2022; Kim & Yoon 2009; Armstrong 2004).

Conversely, another line of research yields opposite findings and suggests that journalistic routines tend to minimise gender differences between editors and journalists (Shor et al. 2015; Shoemaker & Vos 2009). Furthermore, criticism has been aimed at overly simplistic analyses of gender disparities among journalists, which may not fully consider the influence of cultures, structures, and practices within newsrooms (Whipple & Coleman 2022; Ruoho & Torkkola 2018). It is also crucial to recognise that gender alone is not a significant determinant of journalists' professional perspectives (Hanitzsch & Hanusch 2012) and that these characteristics do not necessarily represent the content produced by all women or men as homogenous groups (Tenenboim-Weinblatt & Baden 2021).

Given the plethora of existing studies on the relationship between the gender of journalists and the media content they produce, and especially given their mixed results, the proposed paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review that maps the current state of research in this area. The aim of the systematic review is to summarize existing empirical studies exploring the relationship between journalists' gender and various aspects of the media content they produce, to examine how contemporary research addresses this topic, and to synthesise our current understanding of this relationship. 

The systematic review includes 74 empirical studies published in two reputable databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, which employ quantitative content analysis (or related quantitative methods) to examine and compare content produced by male and female journalists in their professional work. The review covers articles published from 1990 to 2023. This broad timeframe allows us to analyse and synthesise the most up-to-date research in the field of interest. In addition to the results and findings themselves, the systematic review also focuses on examining the methodological procedures, measurement tools, and variables used to investigate the relationship in question.

Panel 21 

Rita Araújo: Journalism as a profession “off-limits to low-income classes”: does precarity shape journalism practice?

13:45

In the past decade journalism and the news industry have been struggling with several challenges and transformations, due to technological changes such as digitalization but also due to structural constraints of the media business such as the growing concentration of media ownership. Current challenges in journalism practice promoted by digital environments are associated with negative effects to the profession, like the decrease of journalists’ well-being, the worsening of physical and mental health, the decline in job satisfaction, and even a drop in the quality of journalism content (Šimunjak & Menke, 2022; Thomson, 2021). The increasing harassment towards journalists, especially online, also adds to journalists’ emotional labor and emotional management, as well as the global precarity of the profession. Several surveys among Portuguese journalists during the COVID-19 pandemic indicate an increasing deterioration of employment conditions, such as labor insecurity, loss of income and loss of jobs (Araújo et al., 2021; Camponez et al., 2020; Lopes et al, 2020; Miranda et al., 2021). This decline in journalism’s conditions affects not only the newly arrived to the profession, but also experienced reporters and those with higher academic training. Another survey conducted in 2023 (n=222) shows that 83% of inquired journalists recognize their emotional labor was higher than usual during the pandemic. Drawing on those results, we are conducting semi-structured interviews with Portuguese journalists in order to understand their perceptions about emotional labor and emotional management in their everyday work, its causes, consequences, and the existence of support systems (both individual and organizational) and coping strategies. Precarity arises as a common concern among interviewed journalists (n=40), and it can assume several definitions according to them. Most of our sample has permanent positions within media companies, an average of 16.3 years in the profession and the mode income is 1300€. Several interviewees complain about the absence of progression in the profession. “One of the most distressful things about this profession is the absence of progression”, says one journalist with more than 10 years of experience. Another one argues that journalists “only get a raise when [they] change [within media outlets]”. One interviewee explains that “the salary context is very tough”, while a fellow journalist characterizes the income differences within journalism as a “patchwork”. Several journalists show concern with this global precarity associated with the profession, and the subsequent lack of diversity that it encompasses. “This is a serious problem to the profession, because there will be less diversity of people who come from different backgrounds, different places”, one journalist says. And another one completes: “I believe that nowadays the profession is completely off-limits to low-income classes”. The difficulty in accessing the profession due to economical reasons may contribute to a lack of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds within Portuguese newsrooms, which ultimately does not benefit journalism and the plurality and diversity it should convey. We will discuss these questions and theorize how precarity may contribute to changing journalistic practices. 

Emma Verhoeven: Social justice sensitivity: Journalistic practices in the coverage of LGBTI topics

14:00

Valuable journalism, as theorised by Costera Meijer (2022), increases the understanding between people and social groups. This audience-centered approach underlines the value of recognising oneself in the news coverage and learning about other people and perspectives. In this light, journalism has the capacity not only to inform but also connect people by fostering tolerance, acceptance, and inclusivity. This study focuses on the representation and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and topics in the news from a production perspective. Specifically, it examines the decisions journalists make when reporting on LGBTI issues and how these tie in with the concept of valuable journalism. 

This empirical study is based on semi-structured interviews with journalists from Dutch speaking Belgian newspapers. These include popular newspapers Het Laatste Nieuws and Het Nieuwsblad, quality newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen, and regional newspapers Gazet van Antwerpen and Het Belang van Limburg. Journalists were selected in two ways. The first group, which I will refer to as the ‘reporters’, published several articles on LGBTI topics in the year prior to the interviews. The second group, which I will refer to as ‘news managers’, makes day-to-day editorial decisions on what appears in the newspaper. During the interviews, I also used snowball sampling by asking about other journalists who write about LGBTI topics. At the time of writing, interviews are being conducted. The intended sample consists of 12 reporters and 6 news managers. During the interviews, journalists are asked to reflect on the decisions they make while writing about LGBTI topics and whether their newsrooms have guidelines about these topics. Other questions include their imagined audience, how journalists reconcile principles of neutrality and impartiality with inclusive (or valuable) reporting, source selection, and how to report on (deliberate) LGBTI-phobia. To make the interviews less abstract, three short articles on LGBTI topics are used as elicitation material, and participants are asked to reflect on them. 

As this study is work in progress, the results are still preliminary. At the time of writing six reporters have been interviewed. Their ages range between 25 and 57 and all of them identify as part of the LGBTI community. This was not intentional and may reflect that LGBTI journalists tend to write about these topics from personal interest as well. Most of them indicate this might be true, but also that it comes from a broader sensitivity for injustice. As stated by one reporter: ‘I don’t always have personal affinity with what I write about. It’s my journalistic interest. It’s not because I’m bisexual that I write about transgender people.’ (Bisexual man, 50+) 

None of the reporters state having a conflict between inclusive reporting and neutrality, and they all indicate that they try to report as inclusive as possible. However, the degree of overtness in which they are ‘pro-LGBTI’ differs. Most of them see their reporting as a way of subtly educating their audience, in which they ‘keep a bit of distance, even if I think that some things [LGBTI-phobes] do are reprehensible, I’ll just describe it. I count on the intelligence of the reader to connect the dots’ (Gay man 1, 30-35). This is also an attempt to make the news more palatable. Closely related, the reporters tend to choose moderate sources over radical ones, fearing a skewed image as that representation may become the representation of LGBTI topics. The imagined audience for news about LGBTI topics is most often equated with the broader readership of the newspaper itself. Most of these readers are assumed to be LGBTI friendly, but the newsroom is generally assumed to be ‘more progressive, younger, and more woke than the reader’ (Gay man 2, 30-35). 

The results of this study will shed light on how news coverage about social justice topics, like LGBTI issues, can be valuable journalism. It will also elucidate the barriers that (LGBTI) journalists face that might prevent them from covering (some) LGBTI issues, and which steps newsrooms can take to support them.

Marta Santos Silva, Branco Di Fátima and Adriana Gonçalves: Is Innovation Fostering Accessibility? An Analysis of Portuguese Media Suggests the Disabled Are Still Left Out of News

14:15

Worldwide access to news has become increasingly dependent on Internet connections, with most people getting their news from electronic devices such as their computers, tablets or mobile phones. People in the United States of America, for instance, mostly get their news from the websites and apps of news outlets (68%) or search engines (65%) (Pew Research Center, 2021) and similar numbers are registered for the European Union (Eurostat, 2022). In Portugal, 79% of people used the Internet to check the news, with 85% of people mentioning that they specifically used their smartphone to do so (Cardoso, Paisana & Martinho, 2022). 

Websites are the most commonly used way for audiences to reach media outlets (Macakoğlu & Peker, 2022) - among mobile device users, there are five times more users checking the news on websites, through their browsers, than using mobile apps (Nelson & Lei, 2018, p.7). 

However, in order to be accessible to all audiences, websites must adhere to parameters for accessibility, understood as “as the ability of all target users, including the disabled, to access, use, understand and interact with the website” (Macakoğlu & Peker, 2022). Given that “many studies in the literature have shown that websites are developed without considering the disability of individuals, and (...) contain a large number of accessibility barriers,” (Macakoğlu & Peker, 2022) this study proposes an analysis of Portuguese news outlets’ websites, with a focus on differences between their mobile and desktop versions, when it comes to accessibility parameters. 

Through the lens of disabled people’s rights to access the news and the role of journalism in contemporary society (Segatto & Woitowicz, 2014, p.89), this article asks whether Portuguese news outlets are prepared to be viewed by people with different kinds of disabilities, for example, whether they are optimized for screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people. 

For our methodology, we chose Google’s open access tool Lighthouse, which is used to audit the interface and programming on websites (Heričko et al., 2021). This tool does not register more qualitative data, such as the use of accessible language in journalists’ written text or the inclusion of subtitles for deaf or hearing impaired people in video content, but it does provide a good indication of how prepared websites are to cater to the needs of disabled people, scoring them out of 100. Our sample included the websites of the most visited national news outlets in Portugal, namely six print newspapers, four television stations, three radio stations, two magazines, and two digital native news outlets. 

On average, digital native outlets scored better in accessibility, which we suggest could be related to their digital-first nature. The best overall outlet was digital-first Observador with the closest scores to 100 and a marginal difference between its desktop (95) and mobile (94) scores. 

Some other outlets score somewhat high on their desktop versions, such as the print weekly Expresso (94), or TV stations SIC Notícias (90) and CNN Portugal (84), but then significantly lower on mobile (respectively, 86, 72 and 77). On Google Lighthouse, any score below 90% for Accessibility represents a “Poor” user experience, meaning that people with disability only have a “Good” user experience on Observador, SIC Notícias (but only on desktop), CM-TV (but only on mobile), and Expresso (also only on desktop). 

Although none of these outlets scored below 50%, which is considered to be a “Bad” user experience, a vast majority of them do score between 90 and 50%. Notably, the state television channel RTP rates 58 and 59 on their desktop and mobile versions respectively, among the worst in the group. 

In general, the landscape for news accessibility for the disabled in Portugal is poor across the board, and generally poorer on mobile. For other types of performance indicators such as website speed and security best practices, the same tendency remains: better scores for desktop versions than mobile versions for the majority of news outlets. This suggests that programmers working for news outlets in Portugal do not appear to have mobile as their priority, which is out of sync with data showing that readers increasingly use their phones and other mobile devices for news. Further insight on this subject might be gathered in a future study by reaching out to programmers and developers in news rooms and media companies, through questionnaires or interviews, to understand their priorities and guidelines when building these structures. 

Panel 22

Lukáš Slavík, David Lacko, Jakub Macek: Difficult Credibility Attribution During Facebook News Consumption: The Negligible Influence of Trust in Media And Friends

13:45

For involvement of citizens of democratic societies, credible news by which they can orient actions (Ryfe, 2019) and maintain a shared sense of reality (Coleman, 2012) play a crucial role. As news is a commodity of experience (Vanacker & Belmas, 2009), its evaluation as credible forms from confrontation with it. However, thorough scrutinization of each news piece is cognitively demanding and time-inefficient. Therefore, credibility can also be based on trust in news source (van Dalen, 2019), which thus acts as an “economizer” saving recipients’ time and energy (Coleman et al., 2012; Rosanvallon, 2008). Current audiences still rely on two general types of news sources – institutional (specific news media outlets) and individual (“friends”). This implies two distinct types of trusts, one linked with expectation of media to be reliable and perform correctly (Strömbäck et al., 2020; Fawzi et al., 2021), and on other linked with expectation of other individual’s benevolence and integrity (Potter, 2019). 

With the multiplication of news sources (Bergström & Jervelycke Belfrage, 2018) and mainly with shifting news consumption and recirculation to social network sites (SNS) (Newman et al., 2021), audiences’ social surroundings play a crucial role in news consumption. To some degree, the individual re-circulating news on SNS take on the role formerly proper to media professionals as they supply their “friends” with current news information and frame it with opinion (Bergström & Jervelycke Belfrage, 2018), contextualize it (Boczkowski et al., 2018; Fletcher & Nielsen, 2018) and so establish the curated flows of news (Thorson & Wells, 2016). In these flows, media source remains present on their own, but also mainly as one of the elements in the so-called layered source situation (Jang, 2021), when media source and intermediary source are mixed into one phenomenological and perceptual situation during news sharing.

In recent years, regarding Facebook post/news credibility or quality, there has been a revival of interest in the impacts of trust in media (Jang, 2021), source distance (Kang et al., 2011), sharer’s personality clues (Metzger & Flanagin, 2015), number of likes (Luo et al., 2020), and homophily (Flanagin et al., 2014). However, it has not been examined how SNS news credibility is shaped by trust in a media outlet and by interpersonal trust in an intermediary and especially by combination of these two forms of trust. Therefore, our experimental study (N=702, university students, 2x3 between-subjects) using an environment evoking a Facebook Timeline with user customization aims to determine whether and how credibility of news consumed on Facebook is affected by one’s trust in the media outlet that publishes the news, by trust in the person who shares the news, and their combination.

The main finding of our study is that, despite our assumptions, neither media nor intermediaries are effective economizers in the SNS environment – trust in these sources has (almost) no influence on the credibility of the news. 

Although the news from the individually most trusted media is more credible than the news from the most distrusted one, the media outlet’s role is surprisingly small and not determinative (Kümpel & Unkel, 2020; Weber et al., 2019), and trust in an intermediary does not affect news credibility at all. Thus, the assumption that news intermediaries have taken over guaranteeing the news credibility (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2018; Oeldorf-Hirsch & DeVoss, 2020) was not confirmed. Moreover, we have not observed any cumulative effect of media dis/trust and trust in news intermediaries, nor substitution mechanism for the effect of the incongruence of institutional and interpersonal trust on news credibility. 

We discuss potentially the far-reaching implications of a situation in which the credibility of news on Facebook seems to be a sui generis phenomenon: the risk of increasing news avoidance (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020) of feelings of the uselessness of news media, including further reducing trust in news media and the entire SNS environment. We identify the way news is consumed in the SNS and mainly the “cynicism” (Quiring et al., 2021) caused by the high level of media literacy among the young and highly educated (our sample) as the primary cause. 

Kim Verhoevena, Steve Paulussena, Gert-Jan de Bruijn: Genre conventions of fact-checks: Topics, style, and form of fact-checking in Belgian news media

14:00

Genre approaches to journalism are not new (Ekström, 2002; Ettema & Glasser, 1998; Steensen, 2009). Especially, more recently, with the emergence of digital journalism, a growing focus appeared on understanding the epistemologies of online news subgenres, such as live-blogging (Matheson & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) and data journalism (Ramsälv et al., 2023). In a context of rising concerns over mis- and disinformation, the epistemological practices of fact-checkers also receive much attention in digital journalism studies (Ekström et al., 2020). Yet, while several studies have investigated the role perceptions (Mena 2019; Rodríguez-Pérez et al., 2022), professional norms (Sarelska & Jenkins, 2022; Singer, 2021), and journalistic practices (Cheruiyot & Ferrer-Conill, 2018; Lelo, 2022) of fact-checkers in different countries, the number of studies that focus on genre conventions in fact-checking is limited (Juneström, 2020). This is somewhat striking as fact-checking is commonly described as a new genre of journalism (Graves, 2017). Moreover, studies on the effectiveness of fact checks underline the performative power of genre conventions, such as the explicit labeling of stories as a 'fact-check' or the inclusion of an explicit rating (Li et al., 2022; for a comprehensive literature review on the effectiveness of fact-checks, see Walter et al., 2020). Labels are indeed one distinctive characteristic of fact-check stories, but what other conventions constitute the fact-checking genre? For this study, we distinguish between conventions regarding the subject (i.e., topic selection), the news reporting style (with a focus on source and verification transparency), and the form in which they present their fact-checks (e.g., use of labels). Hence, our central question reads as follows: 

Which genre conventions regarding subject, style, and form constitute the fact-checks published in Belgium? 

Method 

This study examines fact-check conventions related to topic selection, style, and form through a quantitative content analysis of 375 fact-checks from Belgium's verified International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) signatories published between 1 September 2021 and 31 August 2022. Specifically, we investigated fact-checks published by two Flemish (Belgian Dutch-language) news outlets, Knack and VRT NWS. Knack is a quality news magazine owned by Roularta Media Group, with a weekly print edition and a 24/7 news website. VRT NWS is the news website of the Flemish public broadcaster VRT. These two organizations are the only legacy news media in Flanders that are verified IFCN signatories. In 2022, Knack and VRT NWS joined forces with a non-profit fact-check organization Factcheck.Vlaanderen to create a platform, DeCheckers.be, where all their fact-checks are published. In sum, the two news outlets in this study represent the professional journalistic community of fact-checkers in Flanders. 

The lead author used manual coding to code all fact-checks. Issues and questions about the coding scheme were discussed with the co-authors. To develop the codebook, we used a method of constant comparison, as used by Glaser and Strauss (2017), resulting in a list of different elements related to the origin and topics of the fact-checks, the source and verification transparency, and the formats of the fact-checks. All statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS 28. Statistical significance was set at p < .05. 

Results 

Results show that the most prominent topics in fact-checks resembled the 'top public policies' of the time in which the fact-checks were published and that fact-checkers focused more on statements circulating on social media or online than on statements made by elite actors, such as politicians, experts, or professionals. Concerning style, both news outlets use source and verification transparency but embed it differently in their fact-checks. Regarding the form of fact-checks, labels are used to mark the fact-checks explicitly as such, and giving a final judgement is a common convention. Still, these final judgements are not provided through rating scales, and each news outlet uses different formats for these final judgements. 

Conclusion and Discussion 

Overall, it can be concluded that there seems to be a debunking turn, as Graves et al. (2023) suggested, indicating that fact-checkers indeed have been shifting their attention away from verifying political statements toward 'debunking' viral misinformation. Moreover, source and verification transparency, using explicit labels, and providing final judgements are important for fact-checkers. However, the specific implementation of these conventions in their fact checks varies between topics and between the two news outlets, indicating limited consistency in genre conventions in fact-checking. The debunking turn (Graves et al., 2023) could explain this limited consistency, as debunking claims might require different conventions than fact checking claims made by elite actors, such as politicians, experts, or professionals. 

Stephanie D'haeseleer, Kristin Van Damme, Tom Evens: How audience flagging can help fact-checkers debunk misinformation on TikTok: A qualitative audience study

14:15

TikTok is experiencing exponential user growth, taking a worldwide lead among social media platforms. This growth is not limited to younger audiences, with older age groups also embracing snackable short videos for news and information (Newman et al., 2023). However, TikTok’s growing presence does not remain without controversy. It is accompanied by an increase in misinformation, such as misleading and erroneous information, edited photos and videos, out-of-context information and AI-generated content. The development of deepfakes and voice cloning techniques has also further blurred the line between real and fake visual content, both for the public and journalists (Paris & Donovan, 2019; Pira, 2023). Due to these developments, journalists and fact-checkers are consequently challenged by various forms of misinformation on social media. 

This study centres on tackling misinformation on TikTok and investigates how fact-checking can be optimised on the platform. It, therefore, focuses on the affordances of the platform itself (i.e., TikTok users flagging er reporting messages), and TikTok’s collaborations with third-party initiatives (e.g., journalists and fact-checking communities). Fact-checking on social media involves a team of experts (i.e., fact-checkers) to verify the accuracy of questionable stories. These experts need to know which messages provoke doubt among audiences. Hence, it is important to monitor misinformation online. Especially on TikTok, this monitoring is challenging, due to the hyper personal ‘For You’ page. The central research question of this paper is therefore: How can TikTok users contribute to the monitoring of misinformation on TikTok, so that fact-checkers can more quickly debunk misinformation stories on the platform?

To answer the research question, the study considers two elements. First, regarding audience flagging, we examine which affordances on TikTok enable users to report potentially false information on the platform (i.e., flagging, sharing, or reporting). TikTok users can use the platform’s flagging or reporting feature, or alternatively share a message with journalists or other experts via direct message or tagging in comments. The aim is not just to list the affordances that users can use to flag misinformation, but more importantly to understand how they interact with them, their attitudes towards TikTok’s affordances and the spread of misinformation on TikTok. Based on, these insights, we formulate recommendations on how fact-checking on TikTok can be further improved. By (automatically) reporting potentially false information as a user, fact-checkers on TikTok can optimise their fact-checking process and work more efficiently. In this way, end users, journalists and the TikTok platform work together to combat misinformation.

Using a think-aloud protocol and about 25 in-depth interviews with TikTok users aged 16+ in Flanders, we thus investigate which affordances and cues they consider important and useful for flagging online misinformation, and which types of fact-checking they find clear, attractive and credible. Preliminary findings suggest that developing a chatbot or tool that automatically notifies fact-checkers when users flag potential misinformation could accelerate the fact-checking process.

Nina Kievits, Tomás Dodds, Astrid Vandendaele: Looking for balance - The impact of audience metrics on Dutch TV reporters’ (perceived) sense of editorial freedom.

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This paper explores the impact of audience metrics on the editorial autonomy of Dutch TV journalists. Audience metrics, which are quantitative data on the online behaviour of website users, have become widely available to news organisations. These metrics provide journalists with insights into the preferences of their audience and can be used to inform editorial decisions. But at the same time. Metrics have also created new dependencies between media workers and third-party platforms. 

Audience metrics technology has emerged as one of the most significant technological innovations in the 21st century. With the availability of such data, journalists are better equipped to understand the preferences of their audience, enabling them to make editorial decisions based on this information. In the current media landscape, this understanding is crucial due to declining advertising revenue and visitor numbers. News organisations must provide relevant content to encourage website users to spend more time on their platforms, thereby allowing them to charge higher fees to advertisers. This strategy serves as a defence mechanism against external commercial pressures. However, existing literature predominantly portrays audience metrics as exerting a negative influence on the news selection and production process. It is the responsibility of journalism to address important topics rather than being solely guided by audience preferences. Nonetheless, little is known about how journalists strike a balance in which they consider audience preferences without compromising their editorial autonomy, particularly within the context of Dutch newsrooms. This research seeks to explore this balance. 

For this study, we collected a total of eleven semi-structured in-depth interviews with employees of RTL Nieuws. This newsroom was selected due to its commercial orientation and reliance on advertisements. RTL Nieuws utilises Smartocto as its audience metrics software and has even designated a project leader for this purpose. Grounded theory was employed to analyse the data and address the main and sub-questions. 

The findings indicate that journalists at RTL Nieuws continue to engage in agenda-setting and are not solely driven by audience preferences. They also publish content on topics that they anticipate will receive fewer clicks, such as foreign affairs. However, they strive to present these topics in a manner that will still attract a wide readership and have an impact on the audience. Smartocto exerts a significant influence on the news selection and production process. The interviewees express satisfaction with being guided by the available data during the pre- and post-publication phases. Consequently, the placement and design of online content on the website are regularly adjusted. The interviewees are able to appreciate the insights provided by Smartocto while maintaining a separation between the numbers and the content. Contrary to the literature reviewed, the interviewees successfully upheld their autonomy. 

The study provides empirical evidence from a Dutch newsroom that challenges the dominant view in the literature that audience metrics exert a negative influence on journalistic autonomy. Moreover, the study highlights the importance of considering the economic structure of news organisations when examining the impact of audience metrics. Furthermore, this paper has several implications for journalism practice. It suggests that journalists can use audience metrics to inform their editorial decisions without compromising their autonomy. In addition, the study suggests that news organisations should be transparent about how they use audience metrics. This will help to build trust with the audience and ensure that journalists are not simply chasing clicks. Finally, we suggest that news organisations should invest in training journalists on how to use audience metrics effectively. This training should include how to interpret the data, how to use it to inform editorial decisions, and how to avoid the potential pitfalls of audience metrics.