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I’m on the American Political Science Association Political Communication Section’s award committee again (together with Markus Prior and Holli Semetko) for the Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award, which recognizes a lifetime contribution to the study of Political Communication.

Email me if you have candidates in mind (deadline March 1). The award will be given at APSA 2019.

Previous recipients include Gladys Lang and Kurt Lang, Elihu Katz, Michael Schudson, Lance Bennett, Jay Blumler, Russ Neuman, Diana Mutz, Dan Hallin, Gadi Wolfsfeld, and many others I and so many fellows scholars have learned so much from.

Below is the text I used when promoting the call for nominations in 2017, posted again here for good measure.

“[The Distinguished Career award is] named after Murray Edelman, an impressive and idiosyncratic figure in our field. I’m glad political communication recognize the importance of people like Edelman who do things differently. As the NYTimes noted in his obituary, “Edelman’s highly subjective analytic style put him at variance with the prevailing orthodoxy in contemporary American political science.”

“At variance” — that’s putting it mildly.Not many political scientists would begin a book the way he begun his 1971 book Politics as Symbolic Action:

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.

For all the shortcomings (and I think there are many) of his strand of “post-modern political science” inspired by continental philosophy and older strands of symbolic interactionism, his attention to symbols, meanings, and performance is arguably as relevant today as ever, and perhaps more so than the paradigm Edelman challenged during his lifetime.

As the NYT put it: “Known as rational choice theory, this holds that political actors make rational decisions after weighing all the pros and cons.“ Not quite how I’d describe recent political events.”

Today we are launching a new Reuters Institute report in Davos by Meera Selva and myself called “More Important, But Less Robust? Five Things Everybody Needs to Know about the Future of Journalism” at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation (and streamed online) and featuring a panel discussion with Marty Baron, Sylvie Kauffmann, Nick Kristof and Mark Pieth chaired by Monique Villa and hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The report is primarily based on a wide range of our own research from the last few years, but many other researchers have done work on these trends, and I include links to some examples here.

The five things are

First, we have moved from a world where media organisations were gatekeepers to a world where media still create the news agenda, but platform companies increasingly control access to audiences. (As documented in our annual Digital News Report by Nic Newman et al and discussed in the work of, for example, Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells)

Second, this move to digital media generally does not generate filter bubbles. Instead, automated serendipity and incidental exposure drive people to more – and more diverse – sources of information. (As documented in work that Richard Fletcher has led on social media and search engines, but also in the work of others, including for example Seth Flaxman et al.)

Third, journalism is often losing the battle for people’s attention and, in some (but not all) countries for the public’s trust, increasing information inequality. (As documented in for example a recent factsheet by Antonis Kalogeropoulos and myself, building on work by for example Markus Prior.)

Fourth, the business models that fund news are challenged, weakening professional journalism and leaving news media more vulnerable to commercial and political pressures. (See for example this handbook chapter and the work of Anya Schiffrin on media capture.)

Fifth, news is more diverse than ever, and the best journalism in many cases better than ever, taking on everyone from the most powerful politicians to the biggest private companies. (Different people will have different standards for what they consider better or worse journalism, but we base our cautious optimism on for example the rise of collaborative investigative journalism, deeper engagement with readers, and joint fact-checking work, as well as the growth of what Kate Fink and Michael Schudson call “contextual reporting”.)

These are five broad, global trends trends, but they will not play out the same in every country. They will clearly differ depending on cultural, economic, political, and social context, most notably the intensifying “war on journalism” waged by some politicians, militants, criminals, and others with an aversion to accountability reporting and independent journalism.

“2019 will be another terrible year for the business of news, and journalists will have to face the harsh reality that no one will come to their rescue — not benign billionaires, not platform companies, and not policymakers.”

I’ve written my 2019 prediction for the Nieman Lab at Harvard, focused on the urgent need for building a new business for news, the need for journalists to lead in that process, and the need to recognize that doing so will be a long, hard slog (and that many will fail along the way).

A historical analogy I offer is the time it took to build the mass business of paid print newspapers that is now in terminal decline. As we track the development of new digital pay models for news month by month and year by year, with the fits and stats, break-out success stories few saw coming (here’s looking at you, MediaPart), set-backs, and occasional disappointments (so long, The Sun paywall), we sometimes forget how long it took to build the old models.

Consider the evolution of paid printed newspaper circulation relative to population in the United States — it took 50+ years to build the mass circulation that peaked in the middle of the 20th century (circulation that has been in non-stop decline since).

As I write in the Nieman piece, “mass paid print circulation thus did not appear overnight, but took decades of hard work and constant editorial, commercial, and technological innovation.”

It may well take as long to develop new business models as it took to develop the old ones. Doing so is one of the most important and urgent challenges facing journalism, and I hope journalists will lead in the attempts to do so. “No one cares more, no one has more at stake, and no one is better positioned to build new businesses around journalistic values, editorial independence, and the timeless aspiration to seek truth and report it.”

The full text of my Nieman piece is here.

 

People increasingly rely on distributed forms of discovery like search engines and social media for finding and accessing news. Do they know where the news they consume in these ways come from? In a new article, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Richard Fletcher, and I look more closely at this question, based on data from a tracking study we’ve written about previously with Nic Newman (in this report). We find that users are far more likely to correctly attribute a story to a news brand if they accessed it directly rather than via search or social, but with significant variation depending on whether it is their main brand (one they are already loyal to), how much of an article they read, as well as interest in news.

The “main brand” finding is  particularly important for news organizations as it underlines how important it is to build a strong brand and a loyal audience to really make the most of the opportunities for increased reach via for example search and social, just as the finding that longer reading time helps with correct brand attribution is important, if people find your journalism interesting enough to actually engage with it, they are significantly more likely to remember who produced it.

Full article here, abstract below.

Richard Fletcher has been leading an important line of empirical research for us in the last few years, giving evidence-based answers to a series of important questions around the implications of people’s increasing reliance on algorithmically-curated services like search engines and social media when accessing news.

The latest installment is a piece examining reliance on search engines, which we find drive what we call “automated serendipity” and (controlling for other factors) leads people to sources they would not have used otherwise.

Like our previous work on social media, in challenges widely held assumptions about the role of digital media. As in several other studies (e.g. this), we find no evidence of “filter bubbles” — if anything, the opposite.

Abstract and three key figures below and full article (open access) here.

Search engines are an absolutely central part of the web. Yet we know relatively little about how they shape news consumption. In this study, we use survey data from four countries (UK, USA, Germany, Spain) to compare the news repertoires of those who say they use search engines to search for news stories, and those that do not. In all four countries, and controlling for other factors, we show that those who find news via search engines (i) on average use more sources of online news, (ii) are more likely to use both left-leaning and right-leaning online news sources, and (iii) have more balanced news repertoires in terms of using similar numbers of left-leaning and right-leaning sources. We thus find little support for the idea that search engine use leads to echo chambers and filter bubbles. To the contrary, using search engines for news is associated with more diverse and more balanced news consumption, as search drives what we call “automated serendipity” and leads people to sources they would not have used otherwise.

“Comparing legacy media responses to the changing business of news: Cross-national similarities and differences across media types” has just been published in the International Communication Gazette.

Alessio Cornia led on this, based on interviews done by him and our co-author Annika Sehl as part of our joined research project on how legacy news media across Europe navigate the rise of digital media, audiences transformations, and a changing business of news.

Here is the abstract

In this article, we analyse how legacy media organizations in six countries are adapting to the changing business of news. We focus on how similarities and differences in their responses to digital developments are shaped by the interplay between organizational legacy and national context. The study draws on media sociology and comparative media systems research and is based on 54 interviews with senior editors and managers at 25 newspapers and commercial broadcasters in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK. We find that organizations within the same medium respond to change in similar ways (newspapers versus broadcasters), and that these responses are surprisingly similar across different countries. We argue that factors related to the medium-specific legacy shape media adaptation more than do structural differences between national media systems because news organizations faced with a changing and uncertain environment imitate the strategies adopted by peer organizations elsewhere.

Full article here.

Platform companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are increasingly central to most forms of mediated communication around the world and therefore to most of the individual, institutional, and governance questions with which communication research deals.

To bring together different scholars with overlapping interests in the implications of this rise, Erika Franklin Fowler, Sarah Anne Ganter, Natali Helberger, Dave Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Shannon McGregor and I are organizing a post-conference May 29 after the 2019 ICA conference.

More information about the post-conference here, deadline for extended abstracts is January 11.

We hope to see lots of interesting and intellectually and geographically diverse work presented and discussed at the post-conference.

Next week, October 11-12, the incoming editor-in-chief Cristian Vaccari and I are hosting the fourth annual International Journal of Press/Politics conference at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

It’s a special occasion for me as it will be my last conference as editor (I step down at the end of December and Cristian takes over).

Looking forward to welcoming colleagues from all over the world — full program below.

 

Thursday October 11^th

8.00-8.45am                 Registration and coffee

8.45-9.00                      Opening remarks

9.00-10.00                    Keynote lecture by Andrew Chadwick

10.00-10.30                  Break

10.30-12.00                  Panels 1a and 1b 

12.00-13.00                  Lunch

13.00-14.30                  Panels 2a and 2b

14.30-15.00                  Break

15.00-16.30                  Panels 3a and 3b

7pm-onwards            Dinner

 

Friday October 12

8.00-9.00am                Arrival and coffee

9.00.-10.30                   Panels 4a and 4b

10.30-10.45                  Break

10.45-11.45                  Panels 5a and 5b

11.45-12.00                  Break

12.00-13.00                  Roundtable with IJPP Editorial Board members and closing remarks

13.00-14.00                  Lunch

 

Thursday October 11^th

8.45-9.00    Opening remarks

9.00-10.00  Keynote lecture, Andy Chadwick

10.30-12.00 Panels 1a and 1b

 

PANEL 1a: SOCIAL MEDIA & ELECTIONS (Chair: Gunn Enli)

Facebook Advertising in the United Kingdom General Election of 2017

Nick Anstead, Richard Stupart, Damian Tambini and Joao Vieira-Magalhaes

 

Diverging patterns of Facebook interactions on online news: media sources and partisan communities in the lead-up of 2018 Italian General Election

Fabio Giglietto, Augusto Valeriani, Nicola Righetti, and Giada Marino

 

When does Abuse and Harassment Marginalize Female Political Voices on Social Media?

Yannis Theocharis, Maarja Luhiste, Zoltan Fazekas, Sebastian Adrian Popa, and Pablo Barberá

 

PANEL 1b: NEWS CONSUMPTION (Chair: Homero Gil de Zúñiga)

More News Avoiders? A Longitudinal Study of News Consumption in Low and High Choice Media Environments 1997-2016

Rune Karlsen, Audun Beyer, and Kari Steen-Johnsen

 

News consumption on social media in authoritarian regimes: polarization and political apathy

Aleksandra Urman 

 

Gateways to news and selective exposure: Evidence from survey and navigation data

Ana Cardenal, Carlos Aguilar-Paredes, and Mario Pérez-Montoro

 

13.00-14.30 Panels 2a and 2b

 

PANEL 2a: CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATION (Chair: Ralph Schroeder)

The Moderating Effect of Political Responsibility on Populist Communication Online: The case of the German AfD

Tobias Widmann

“His Tweets Speak for Themselves”: An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Twitter Behaviour

Suzanne Elayan, Martin Sykora and Tom Jackson

 

The rally-intensive campaign: A distinct type of election campaign in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond

Dan Paget

 

PANEL 2b: JOURNALISM IN DANGEROUS PLACES (Chair: Jane Suiter)

“Beyond the Dark Mountains”: Suspicion and Distrust in the work of journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Tali Aharoni

 

Strategies for safety autonomy: The role of journalists’ capital enhancing professional autonomy in violent contexts

Julieta Brambila

 

Local authoritarian enclaves in democracies and democratic hybrids: How much do they explain the harassment and murder of journalists over the last quarter century?

Sallie Hughes and Yulia Vorobyeva

 

15.00-16.30 Panels 3a and 3b

 

PANEL 3a: JOURNALISM IN PRACTICE (Chair: Ana Langer)

Democratizing Views in International News: Proportions of Northern and Southern Perspectives in American and Finnish Coverage of the Global South

Kirsi Cheas

 

The political determinants of journalists’ career

Andrea Ceron, Sergio Splendore,Rosa Berganza, Thomas Hanitzsch, and Neil Thurman

 

How German and British journalists differ in their political and ethical role conceptions

Henkel, Imke, Neil Thurman, Veronika Deffner, and Ivica Obadic

 

PANEL 3b: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES (Chair: Jay Bumler)

The Authentic Politician: Strategies to Construct Authenticity in Political Campaigns

Gunn Enli

 

Old and New Echo Chambers

Paolo Mancini and Anna Stanziano

 

Communicative Power in the Hybrid Media System

Andreas Jungherr, Oliver Posegga, and Jisun An

 

Friday October 12

9.00-10.30 Panels 4a and 4b

 

PANEL 4a: NEWS CONTENT (Chair: Neil Thurman)

From Network to Narrative: Understanding the Nature and Trajectory of News Stories

Sarah Oates

 

Thinking through the political media system:  Surprising similarities between polarized media outlets during Election 2016

Chris Wells, Josephine Lukito, and Zhongkai Sun

 

An anatomy of the complex role of the media on policy ‘U-turns’

Ana Ines Langer

 

PANEL 4b: MISINFORMATION AND MANIPULATION (Chair: Erik Bucy)

The Populist Campaigns against European Public Service Media: Hot Air or Existential Threat?

Felix Simon, Annika Sehl and Ralph Schroeder

 

Fake News as a Combative Frame: Results from a qualitative content analysis of the term’s definitions and uses on Twitter

Dominique Doering and Gina Neff

 

Disinformation and Media Manipulation in the Swedish 2018 Election

Ralph Schroeder, Lisa Kaati, and Johan Fernquist

 

10.45-11.45 Panels 5a and 5b

 

PANEL 5a: ONLINE NEWS AND MEDIA USE (Chair: Gina Neff)

Are there echo chambers? A 7-nation comparison

Grant Blank & Elizabeth Dubois

 

The Proliferation of the ‘News Finds Me’ Perception Across Different Societies

Homero Gil de Zúñiga Nadine Strauss Brigitte Huber James Liu

 

PANEL 5B: COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ON ATTITUDES TO NEWS (Chair: Ana Cardenal)

Perceived Media Bias and Political Action: A 17-Country Comparison

Matthew Barnidge, Hernando Rojas, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Paul A. Beck

 

Polarization and Inequality: key drivers of distrust in media old and new?

Jane Suiter and Richard Fletcher

 

12.00-13.00 IJPP Editorial Board Roundtable (with Paolo Mancini, Sallie Hughes, and Sarah Oates) and closing remarks

 

13.00-14.00 Lunch