About the project "Datafied News Media – Datafied Publics?"

The project examines what the ever-increasing amount of data available in our society means to Journalism, and thus sheds light on the changes in the relations between the news media and the news users. In recent few years, big tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have taken on an increasing role in news distribution, and their increased importance is changing not only the journalism as we know it today, but also the news media ecosystem itself. At the same time, news organizations have big data sets about the behavior of the news user, just as the news user can partly personalize his news consumption through filters and partly subject to filtering through various algorithms. In other words, the data affirmation has fundamentally changed the news journalism, and this project examines what it means and what consequences it has for the democratic conversation and public connection. Through four empirical studies, we analyze how datafication of news transforms the way the publics are created and how it affects citizen engagement with the public. Overall, the project thus contributes to a new field of research on datafication of the news media and their publics and will theoretically develop the concept of “Datapublics”.

As a core group our work is guided by and organised around answering the central guiding research question:

• How are news practices, publics and their interconnections (re)configured by datafication?

We will investigate the relationship between news media and its audiences through four interconnected subprojects, developing methods and empirical knowledge to do so. The following interrelated sub-questions will guide this work.

We will investigate the relationship between news media and its audiences through four interconnected subprojects, developing methods and empirical knowledge to do so. The following interrelated sub-questions (four work packages) will guide this work.

• How is datafication changing the news media industry’s relation to the audiences?
• How is datafication changing news-work and journalistic practices?
• How is datafication changing audiences’ news consumption and public connection?
• How is datafication and personalisation changing news audience practices and agency?

Lastly, bringing all the subprojects together, the group seeks to answer an overall and more predictive question:

• What are the implications of datafication for the shaping of publics, audience agency and hence for public connection in democratic societies?