I.Majó-Vázquez, S., Mukerjee, S., Neyazi, T.A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2019). Online audience engagement with legacy and digital-born news media in the 2019 Indian elections. University of Oxford
Digital-born media agencies, like Firstpost, The Wire, The Quint etc, have been on the rise in India catering to the internet users who are increasingly turning to the digital space for news. Such digital-born media outlets compete with online presence of legacy media players like The Indian Express, Times Now, India Today etc. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the behavioural pattern of audience of both legacy and digital-born news media and the relative performance of these media players.
By taking the case study of Indian General Election to the Lok Sabha in 2019, Majó-Vázquez et al (2019) analyses the online activity of 101 news outlets, including regional and national legacy and digital-born players, on their Twitter and Facebook profiles. The study uses about 66,000 Facebook posts and more than 63 million tweets generated during the election period in the social media accounts of these news outlets in addition to gathering traffic statistics of the websites of these news outlets from Comscore, a third party audience measurer. The study reveals that regional legacy news outlets dominated digital-born news providers in terms of the volume of political news shared on Facebook during the election period. On Twitter, however, the opposite is true with vernacular media falling far behind digital-born entities and national legacy media who actively used the platform to break news. The paper finds that digital-born outlets have higher audience engagement per thousand followers on Twitter and Facebook than legacy media outlets. It is noted that news outlets with highest audience engagement on social media enjoy less readership in their websites showing that the same content in different online platforms attracted different levels of attention from the news readers. Video narratives are found to have the most user engagement for news agencies. The authors also analyse digital trace dataset to look for audience clusters around some news providers on Twitter and on the web. They conclude that Indian audiences engage with content hosted by starkly different news outlets contrary to popular expectation given the heightening political polarisation in the Indian society. The study, thus, posits that Indian audiences of digital news on Twitter and news websites are not necessarily caught up within echo chambers.
The paper has limitations like collection of data from only two months (April and May) during the election period, using total number of interactions generated per post shared by the outlet on social media as proxy for audience engagement and so on. However, it gives a bird’s eye view of the status of the audience engagement with content created by digital journalists in a rapidly growing market in the Global South. As a scholar interested in the intersection of politics and digital media, I find the paper useful as a starting point to ask critical research questions such as linkages between online and offline news readership, the implications of varied reach of different kinds of digital journalism, insights on digital news production in a politicized media ecosystem etc.
II. Wall, Melissa. (2019). How and why pop-up news ecologies come into being. In Bob Franklin. Scott A. Eldridge II, The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 375-386). New York: Routledge.
The traditional norms associated with journalism are being challenged with the interaction of innovation in communication technologies with journalistic practices. The non-traditional participants in journalism such as activists, NGOs or even algorithms, otherwise known as computational journalism, point towards the changing dynamics of journalism as a field of practice as well as research. Wall (2019) argues that it is necessary to move away from examination of media institutions, like BBC or New York Times, to grasping emergent approaches in news production like social or participatory journalism.
The author moots the idea of “news ecology” to unpack the complexities of 21st century journalistic practices by focusing on the broad processes at work rather than the technological affordances. The chapter presents various conceptualisations of news ecology such as, its role as a “sensitizing concept”; media ecologies as environments; information ecology or “systems of people, practices, values and technologies in particular local environments”; interconnectedness of news agencies as a consequence of digitization of news etc (Wall, 2019). The author brings out the link between the concept of news ecology and destabilising journalistic cultures referred to as “pop up” (Deuze as cited in Wall, 2019). The notion of “pop-up news ecology” developed while studying citizen/activist and professional journalism that came into being in resistance to an authoritarian regime in Syria at the beginning of the civil war. The author cites Wahl-Jorgeson to point out that the lens of pop-up news ecology is useful for it allows the assessment of a “changing cast of actors” (Wall, 2019).
The chapter attempts to elaborate the concept of pop up news ecology while applying it to the loosely organised news distribution during the police shootings of African Americans in the United States. The author contends that a new, alternative digital pop-up news ecology sprouted in the US around the deaths of African Americans due to police brutality. This new media ecology included live streaming, podcasts, tweets, blogs, vines and other black media such as blacklivesmatter.com, fergusonaction.com etc. While Syria and U.S. represent sharply different geo-political contexts, the author concludes that pop-up digital news ecologies emerge in spaces of authoritarianism to applify narratives of resistance regardless of the political system of the country. I recommend this paper for it throws light on how pop-up news ecologies challenge the narrative of the mainstream news ecologies dominated by traditional/professional news outlets. The paper provides a conceptual resource in studying technology-enabled newer forms of journalism which compete with the long-honoured institutionalized forms of journalism in bringing out the voices of democratic dissent.
III. BBC (2019). The digital election: How social media is reshaping UK democracy. The Documentary Podcast
This podcast is hosted by Travis Ridout, Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy at Washington State University. Being a political scientist who works on political advertising, Travis travels to the UK in December 2019 to understand the changing processes of political campaigning in the UK. The podcast that tries to capture the impact of social media on UK democracy begins with a pertinent question: Can a democracy even function like one given the potential influence of fake news on its elections? Political advertising on Television is banned in the UK unlike in the United States. This means that, apart from door-to-door canvassing, digital political campaigns play a substantial role in deciding the fate of elections in a country like the UK that is vulnerable to even small shifts in numbers of votes resulting from highly targeted campaigning efforts.
Political parties in the UK are resorting to newer forms of campaigning to gain the attention of the voters. The Conservative Party rolled out a digital campaign, to win over certain segments of the population that have traditionally voted for the Labor Party, using electro music superimposed with phrases like ‘‘Get brexit done’ that was played by hundreds of thousands of the youth in the country. The Labour Party used professionally produced advertisements that appeals to the emotions of the voters by referring to the need of public healthcare provider NHS among the underprivileged sections. Political advertisements can also be more direct attacks that aim to gain attention or create enough outrage to change focus from the opposing parties. Sometimes political campaigns try to sell their ideas as that of mainstream legacy media in order to influence public opinion in their favour. An example of this is the misplaced video clip of BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg in the Conservative Party’s advertisement that gives the impression that she is supporting the Tories. As political parties focus their paid efforts on online media, campaign strategists feel that online campaigning has better impact than large billboards for it can reach a wider audience from various backgrounds at a much lower cost.
I feel the podcast is an important addition to the curriculum of a student of digital political studies like me for it discusses the tactical creation of fake news and social media recommendations to induce voting in favour of the candidates endorsed by the content. From memes to catchy stories, these digital election campaigns report everything that could sway voters. With an increasing number of people in the UK getting their news from social media, the podcast enlightens students that political parties are using digital tools in ways they haven’t before to reach out to voters because of factors that are partly technological and partly cultural. In the podcast, we hear both people who opined that they trusted online news media more than traditional news media and others who said they take digital news with a pinch of salt. With online campaigning becoming as crucial as street campaigning, social media certainly provides a nearly free space for democratic participation. It also, however, poses the threat of erosion of common discourse with public discourse being replaced by microtalk. The podcast reminds us that there is a need for ways to regulate the digital news space to protect democratic goals and goods.
IV. SBS SDF (2015). When Journalism Meets Technology – Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab | SDF2015.
Joshua Benton, Director of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University gives this talk about emerging technologies in journalism at the Seoul Digital Forum hosted by one of the biggest TV networks, SBS, in Korea. Los Angeles Times, a major newspaper in California, uses QUAKEBOT, an algorithm written by an in-house journalist which can, in the event of an earthquake, retrieve information on it from the US Geological Survey website and turn it into a news story with information embedded in context within 4 minutes of the earthquake. Similarly, the New York Times used algorithms to publish 3000 different versions of a story on income mobility which provided a map that reflected the status of income mobility in the location from where you were reading the story. The Associated Press also hired North Carolina based firm Automated Insights to produce automatically generated bot driven stories from data created by hundreds of college baseball games across the U.S. Benton explicates through these examples the ways in which data and automation is changing journalism. Popularly called “robot journalism”, automated tools of storytelling can be very powerful when they are linked with social networks, according to Benton. He gives the example of a Twitter account called ReplayLastGoal that was created during the World Cup which automatically captured the live stream of the game, recorded 15 seconds of the video leading up to the goal and tweeted-all without human interference. Benton also touches upon the uses of data visualization for digital journalists who can show complicated concepts, like for instance the yield curve on American treasury bonds, through 3D visualisation techniques. Interactive graphics are the most viewed and shared by users of news websites. Benton refers to the New York Times’s decision tree showing what an individual choice in an individual state might mean for the outcome of Presidential Elections in the US and similar kind of data visualisations possible only with the access to large datasets.
Benton also raises the issues of poor distribution of content by digital journalists due to lack of data on the preferences of their readers. Publishers who traditionally earned revenue through advertising are now replaced by technological giants like Facebook, Google who have vast amounts of user data earning them enormous advertising revenue. These platforms end up becoming more powerful than publishing media. The publishers who generate news content are thus at a disadvantage unless they invest in data analytics.
I would suggest this talk for the lucid explanation it provides about the possibilities of automation in digital journalism. The talk gives examples of automation that struggling media companies can emulate in their practices to withstand competition in the 21st century. The talk is also relevant for the observations made by the speaker on the importance of data visualisation and data analytics. As an aspiring digital humanist, these facets of digital journalism particularly intrigue me.
References
Majó-Vázquez, S., Mukerjee, S., Neyazi, T. A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2019). Online audience engagement with legacy and digital-born news media in the 2019 Indian elections. Reuters Institute. University of Oxford.
Available at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019-06/Maj%C3%B3 V%C3%A1zquez_Social_media_and_news_in_the_Indian_election_FINAL.pdf
BBC (2019). The digital election: How social media is reshaping UK democracy. [podcast] The Documentary Podcast. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07xgpzq [Accessed 9 Feb. 2020].
Wall, Melissa. (2019). How and why pop-up news ecologies come into being. In Bob Franklin. Scott A. Eldridge II, The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 375-386). New York: Routledge.
SBS SDF (2015). When Journalism Meets Technology – Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab | SDF2015.
video Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF_W6qAaqLY [Accessed 9 Feb. 2020].
