This conference aims to make a contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about news and democracy in digitized society, by providing a rethinking of the concept and societal role of news, from a range of analytical and geo-cultural perspectives.
News, for a long time considered a distinct commodity produced by journalists and established media organisations, is currently often considered a concept in flux. This is prompted by changes in news production, including altering practices of journalists and the opportunities for media users to produce and share their own content, but it is equally a result of novel forms of news distribution, where social media platforms, micro-celebrities and alternative and viral news sites have gained a prominent role in news dissemination.
Alongside transformations in the production and distribution of news have followed changing use patterns, leading to renewed questions about participation, trust and civic engagement in the public sphere. It is arguable, furthermore, that the altered context for news consumption interlinks not only with new behaviours around news, but also with more varied understandings of the concept itself – with a range of different sources of information competing for what is to be considered ‘news’.
While these developments have been widely discussed as impacting on democracy and the public sphere, they seem to necessitate a further re-thinking of the features and functions of news today, in relation not only to technological developments and the digitized media landscape, but also with regard to different kinds of societies and geo-cultural contexts for news.
The overall aim of this conference is to make a contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about news and democracy in digitized society, by providing a rethinking of the concept and societal role of news, from a range of analytical and geo-cultural perspectives. The conference aims to bring together researchers from different academic disciplines and geographical areas, with expertise that could bring new perspectives to the inherently Western field of news research, as well as advancing the research agenda around news both theoretically and empirically.
(Text sourced from conference website)