Lecture 13 in the course From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: News and Journalism in the Digital Age. This lecture series addresses the continuing transformation of the production and consumption of journalism in the contemporary media environment. It provides a brief history of the impact of participatory online news production and engagement practices – from the first wave of citizen journalism to the social media platforms of today – on how news content is disseminated and experienced; examines reactive and proactive responses to these changes by news organisations and journalists; and explores the longer-term impact of these developments on the public sphere, touching on the power of social media platforms and their role in shaping their users’ information diets. Readings are largely drawn from Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Bruns, 2018), with additional readings recommended for selected lectures. Reading for this lecture: Bruns, A. (2018). Conclusion: A Social News Media Network. Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 9. Peter Lang.

1. CRICOS No.00213J
Conclusion:
A Social News Media Network
Prof. Axel Bruns
Guest Professor, IKMZ, University of Zürich
a.bruns@qut.edu.au — a.bruns@ikmz.uzh.ch

2. CRICOS No.00213J
Mock Exam and Exam 😱
• Mock Exam:
• Test run to make sure your technology is working
• 16 Dec. 2022, 07:00 to 22:00
• https://hs6.epis.uzh.ch
• Log on, find the sample exam, make sure everything works
• Exam:
• 23 Dec. 2022, 10:15 to 11:00
• https://hs6.epis.uzh.ch
• 45 minutes – 34 Kprim questions
• Four answers per question – mark each as true or false
• Four correct answers: 2 points; three correct answers: 1 point; otherwise 0 points

3. CRICOS No.00213J
Journalism and Social Media
• Last week:
• What power do the major platforms have over the emerging media ecosystem?
• This (final!) week:
• Concluding thoughts on the social news media network
• Next week:
• Online exam… 😱😱😱

4. CRICOS No.00213J
Journalism, Social
Media, Platforms, …

5. CRICOS No.00213J
A Social News Media Network?
• Observations from the past 20+ years:
• Journalism’s grudging acceptance of social media as tools of the trade (especially during breaking news)
• Journalism’s normalisation into social media logics (e.g. social media accounts, metrics, …)
• New journalistic roles, new forms of journalism (e.g. news curation, clickbait, liveblogs, short video, …)
• News audiences as active participants and contributors to news coverage and evaluation (e.g. gatewatching)
• Crowdsourcing of new voices to greater visibility (i.e. news curation by users, not just journalists)
• Direct user engagement with experts, politicians, celebrities (bypassing journalists)
• Implications for ‘the’ public sphere – a network of publics rather than one public sphere
• Concerns about ‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’, ‘fake news’ – and attempts to address them
• Growing power of platforms, platform operators, platform algorithms – and attempts to regulate them
• News remains important and popular, but the social media landscape keeps changing constantly…

6. CRICOS No.00213J
Image: Midjourney

7. CRICOS No.00213J
Social
Image: Midjourney

8. CRICOS No.00213J
Social: People Power
‘there is a growing demand for more open, accessible and informative news media. People
like journalism so much they are prepared to help create it themselves—for free’ — Beckett
‘contemporary online journalists can hardly be called gatekeepers’ — Le Cam and
Domingo
‘[Twitter] blurs long-standing distinctions between newsmaker, news reporter and news consumer’ —
Hermida
‘[journalists] must reinvent themselves and supply relevance and sense making, knowing that the task at hand
means capturing the faint signals drowned in deafening background noise. They must achieve this in the new
context where they [have] forever lost their monopoly’ — Heinderyckx
‘journalists would be curators in a community conversation’ — Lewis and Usher
‘the once privileged position occupied by the journalist has been reclaimed, as it were, by those
citizens who want to participate more directly in the construction of the public sphere’ — Turner
‘the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend[s] instead to lead to the
fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue
publics’ — Habermas

9. CRICOS No.00213J
News
Image: Midjourney

10. CRICOS No.00213J
News: Content Is King
‘[journalism is] under even greater pressure … to offer the user something unique:
analysis, comment, collation and so on’ — Ahmad
‘processes of curation may be better conceptualized as drawing
information in rather than keeping it out’ — Thorson and Wells
‘algorithmification [will lead to a] change in the nature of news selection’ — Heinderyckx
‘curating cannot solely be done through algorithms. Curation still requires human skill and
discernment’ — Liu
‘the crisis of journalism is thus one of vanishing authority and vaporizing trust because
citizens have more access to information and can assess alternative representations of
social reality’ — Broersma
‘one key component of the original concept of gatekeeping is losing ground dramatically:
verification’ — Heinderyckx

11. CRICOS No.00213J
Media
Image: Midjourney

12. CRICOS No.00213J
Media: News Organisations Still Matter
‘a “new” dynamic of newsgathering, production and dissemination is taking shape that affects journalistic practices’ —
Heinrich
‘the news that is most read, shared, and discussed in social media is
produced by professional news organisations’ — Newman et al.
‘in the future … organising news will be the most important role of news organisations’ —
Jarvis
‘counter-intuitively, the abundance of disintermediated information may … give quality
networked journalism a market advantage’ — Beckett
‘Facebook might see this as an engineering task, but these simple decisions are also editorial’ —
Bell
‘journalism’s ideological commitment to control, rooted in an institutional instinct toward protecting
legitimacy and boundaries, [is] giving way to a hybrid logic of adaptability and openness’ — Lewis
‘it is difficult to see how news media culture can remain the same if the journalism alters’ —
Beckett
‘we have to get over this journalistic arrogance that journalists are the only people
who are the pickers of authority in the world’ — Rusbridger

13. CRICOS No.00213J
Network
Image: Midjourney

14. CRICOS No.00213J
Network: Social Media Are Networked Media
‘it seems that the methods of a “closed” operational sphere of journalism are overcome
and being replaced by a highly dynamic process of information exchange’ — Heinrich
‘news organizations must now accommodate a multitude of interconnected flows of content’ —
Heinderyckx
‘Carvin was not simply broadcasting, but was immersed in the culture of a media environment that
privileges relationship over information delivery, interacting and conversing with others to co-construct the
news’ — Hermida
‘curated flows … created through the overlapping curating activities of journalists, strategic communicators,
individuals, social networks, and online display algorithms in the contemporary media environment’ —
Thorson and Wells
‘the emergence of digital and social media needs to move beyond simple models of
substitutions versus complementarities, as they have created a much more complex
ecosystem for the creation and distribution of news’ —Newman et al.

15. CRICOS No.00213J
 A Social News
Media Network

16. CRICOS No.00213J
‘journalism is too important to be left to
journalists and too valuable to be left to
chance or crude market forces.
Networking journalism is not just an
option, it is an imperative and a
necessity’
— Charlie Beckett

17. CRICOS No.00213J
Yet More Challenges
• When social media arrived:
• ‘this feels like some kind of emergency’ — Rusbridger (2009)
• ‘an inevitable catastrophe that hopefully will not take place’ — Deuze (2009)
• ‘the prospects for traditional journalism are looking grim’ — Turner (2009)
• When Brexit and Trump happened:
• Moral panics over ‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’, ‘fake news’
• Journalists seen as out of touch with ordinary people
• Debates over ‘bothsidesing’ (false equivalence) and ‘objective’ journalism
• During COVID-19 and <waves hands> everything else:
• More concerns about mis- and disinformation, and coordinated influence operations
• Worries about growing political and societal polarisation
• Concerns about news industry business models and the power of platforms
• …

18. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-suspends-accounts-journalists-musk

19. CRICOS No.00213J
Hope for the Future
‘[new outlets] are finding ways to make the best of new technologies and new
opportunities without giving up the professional dedication that has sometimes, over
the long century of its emergence, made journalism worth our highest regard’ —
Schudson
‘the Guardian has six reporters doing the environment, but that’s not enough to do the
environment in reality. There is great content on the environment out there on the web. And
so we went to the ten or 20 best web sites and said, why don’t you sit on our platform?’ —
Rusbridger
‘the market for consistently delivered well-edited beat reporting remains’ — Russell
‘[public service media could be] “supernodes” within an evolving globalized network journalism culture
that is characterized by “interactive” practices of newsgathering, production and dissemination’ —
Heinrich
‘in the end we have to confront the question of how we subsidize something society needs
and where there is evident market failure’ — Rusbridger
‘journalism will not die out in this environment, because it is needed on so many social,
political and cultural levels. Journalism has a future’ — McNair

20. CRICOS No.00213J
‘good societies are engaged societies—they are
robust and active, dialogical and diverse, freely
sharing ideas and information. We might think of
this as a ‘networked’ variation on Habermas’[s]
idealized public sphere …, featuring the same
animated deliberation, but with a network
arrangement that is more horizontal (peer-to-
peer), and more representative of marginalized
voices vis-à-vis ‘coffee house’ interests’
— Seth Lewis

21. Image: Midjourney

22. CRICOS No.00213J
Next Time

23. CRICOS No.00213J
Exam
• Exam details:
• Friday, 23.12.2022, 10:15-11:00
• Online from anywhere
• Trial run available beforehand
• Contents:
• Kprim questions from across the readings and lectures this semester

24. CRICOS No.00213J
(Image
by
Markus
Spiske
on
Unsplash.com)
Thank you!