Research Project > DATAPUBLICS - Transforming Journalism and Audiences in the age of datafication > News

DATAPUBLICS-results presented at MediaFutures in Bergen

“Journalistic values and public formation are at risk when the power of deciding what’s news moves into the algorithmic design rooms, become datafied by data-infrastructures, and entangled with platforms,” PI Jannie Møller Hartley argued in her keynote at MediaFutures.
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  • DATAPUBLICS - Transforming Journalism and Audiences in the age of datafication (Research Project)
    • PI Jannie Møller Hartley presents DATAPUBLICS-results Wednesday in Bergen at the MediaFutures conference.
    PI Jannie Møller Hartley presents DATAPUBLICS-results Wednesday in Bergen at the MediaFutures conference.

    Journalism is and has been increasingly datafied since the introduction of tv-meters and metrics.

    “The process is now complete with data-driven personalised distribution, pulling the field towards the ‘audience-as-market’ pole,” Møller Hartley explained in the hybrid setting in Bergen Wednesday at the MediaFutures conference. The conference was organized by the Research Centre for responsible Media Technology and Innovation.

    In the first part of her talk, she focused on personalisation of news and publics, building on the ethnographic field work she has done together with Anna Schjøtt Hansen in a Danish news organisation.

    Møller Hartley explained how the algorithm to personalise means that the decision making moves into the data analytics and data science departments inside news organisations. However:

    “The pull back mechanism where editors serve the collective and make sure that the front page is handhold to some extent, ensures that the editorial staff maintain some of the ‘deciding’. But the future is certainly more personalisation, so we need to make sure we safeguard the journalistic values in the process and that news organizations act in a transparent manner. Users don’t have the same expectations to news organisation as they do to Netflix and Facebook,” Hartley said.

    She underlined that journalistic organisations have a different editorial mission than more commercial content providers. This calls for a different approach to personalisation and to the use of data.

    In her talk, she also examined the datafied infrastructures of news, giving examples from post doc Lisa Merete Kristensen’s work on Google rankings of news as infrastructures.

    Lastly, the relationship between audiences and datafied media came under scrutiny, providing examples from casestudies done by Mette Bengtsson and Anna Schjøtt Hansen on corona sceptic citizens gaming the algorithms to form networked publics.