Symposium theme

Imagine for a moment how news production works. Perhaps you envision professionally trained journalists, investigating important topics with careful attention to validate the news. They objectively weigh the information and sources in question, and then creatively and autonomously compose news stories with the public’s interest in mind. Their products—news articles or broadcast news stories—are marked by epistemological rigor, quality as well as democratic significance. However, this idealized and narrow vision of news production, as journalism, rarely matches contemporary realities. 
Professional journalists working for legacy news media are caught up in rapidly transforming and often shrinking institutions. Increasingly demanding market conditions, particularly for newspapers, have led to staff layoffs and, for those journalists left behind, growing expectations to do more with less. Rapidly changing digital technologies have become interconnected with journalism, ratcheting up the technical complexity of news work and the requirements for engaging with active audiences via social media. At the same time, algorithms, mobile applications, and other computerized systems of media production, with largely hidden values embedded in their software code, are now quickly becoming key gatekeepers of news, filtering and shaping much of what people read online. Against this backdrop, many dystopian views surround the future of journalism, questioning whether news media will be able to sustain their role as the so-called Fourth Estate, contributing to democracy and enlightenment as a check on government power.
Now, imagine again the practice of journalism. What emerges is a picture of significantly downsized and financially strained newspapers and other news publishers, where stressed journalists rush to compose numerous news reports, data visualizations, live blogging, pods, etc., while simultaneously interacting with the audience through social media—all while becoming starkly aware of the commercial realities in which they work. What also emerges is an image of various computerized publishing systems, now performing many of the tasks previously done by humans—including automated news writing and personalized news distribution. 
There are a range of peripheral contributors to journalism, that is individuals and organizations that in the past have not been seen as aligned with journalism, but certainly are in an age of digital media. Such individuals are to be found inside legacy news media, for example technologically savvy programmers, digital designers, coders, web analytics managers, artificial intelligence creators, and so forth. News is also increasingly being produced by freelancers, amateurs, non-governmental organizations, public relations professionals, communicators, corporations and so forth. We also find a range of actors imitating how the news look, but where this are not produced according to journalistic ethical principles and routines, but instead are marked by economic and/or political interests (c.f. native advertising and disinformation). News is currently published and distributed across platforms proprietary to the news media, as well as platforms non-proprietary to them, such as social media platforms, news aggregators, and a range of alternative media. Professional journalists are increasingly losing their positions as gatekeepers, the prioritization of news is done by algorithms and artificial intelligence, and the source criticism is left to the readers and the public. The public’s trust in legacy media (and other traditional institutions in society) is in decline, and while some present this only as a problem, this can also be taken as a positive indicator of citizens having become more news literate. Ultimately, the journalism professions function in democracy is in a flux.
For this symposium, the organizers welcome two kinds of article submissions: theoretically informed and empirically rigorous articles (using quantitative, qualitative, computational, and/or mixed methods), as well as conceptualizations involving systematic and relevant literature reviews. Contributors may address issues including, but not limited to, the following:

* Intra-organizational coordination and collaboration among media professionals such as journalists, technologists, businesspeople
* The roles different peripheral actors have in epistemological news processes
* Where and when peripheral actors impact news production; 
* The influence peripheral actors have on journalism culture and practice; 
* How journalists and news publishers engage in participatory journalism via proprietary and/or non-proprietary platforms’
* How journalists and technologists produce unique or customized content for distinct non-proprietary platforms (e.g. Facebook or Google Home speakers)
* Professional and knowledge-oriented norms, values, and practices applied when publishing and distributing news by legacy media and emerging types of news producers.
* Professional perceptions and approaches to the discursive construction of “truth” and “facts” in the context of news production;
* Professional development, appropriation, and use of technological systems and tools in news production and news distribution (i.e. automated journalism or measurable journalism)
* Professional and democratic challenges and opportunities relating to producing and distributing news in an age marked by dominant platform companies