News devices : how digital objects participate in news work and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Journalists should follow the lead of media scholars and look to the Internet as a rich source of data.

Journalists rarely use the web as a source of data about the state of issues, debates and information flows in different societies. Liliana Bounegru looks at how media scholars have leveraged digital data and algorithmic accountability. In times of shrinking news budgets and staff cuts journalists can turn to such readily available sources of data as a way to understand public engagement with major issues. Scholars can support this process by making the datasets, tools and protocols developed during their work available to others

Three ways in which digital researchers can shed light on the information politics of the “post-truth” era

Digital media played a prominent role in the recent US presidential election, with social media platforms channelling previously fringe universes of political culture, rooted in populism and post-truth politics, right into the mainstream of US political discourse. Meanwhile, traditional mechanisms, from polling to mainstream media, failed to adequately capture public sentiment around political events. Are new instruments needed to understand the socio-technical fabric of the post-truth political landscape? And what can digital researchers do to contribute? Liliana Bounegru outlines examples of approaches being developed at the Digital Methods Initiative that hope to assist digital researchers, data journalists, civil society groups and others looking to increase public understanding of these phenomena

News devices:how digital objects participate in news and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Visual Network Exploration for Data Journalists

International audienceNetworks are classic but under-acknowledged figures of journalistic storytelling. Who is connected to whom and by which means? Which organizations receive support from which others? What resources or information circulate through which channels and which intermediaries enable and regulate their flows? These are all customary stories and lines of inquiry in journalism and they all have to do with networks. Additionally, the recent spread of digital media has increasingly confronted journalists with information coming not only in the traditional form of statistic tables, but also of relational databases. Yet, journalists have so far made little use of the analytical resources offered by networks. To address this problem in this chapter we examine how " visual network exploration " may be brought to bear in the context of data journalism in order to explore, narrate and make sense of large and complex relational datasets. We borrow the more familiar vocabulary of geographical maps to show how key graphical variables such as position, size and hue can be used to interpret and characterise graph structures and properties. We illustrate this technique by taking as a starting point a recent example from journalism, namely a catalogue of French information sources compiled by Le Monde's The Decodex. We establish that good visual exploration of networks is an iterative process where practices to demarcate categories and territories are entangled and mutually constitutive. To enrich investigation we suggest ways in which the insights of the visual exploration of networks can be supplemented with simple calculations and statistics of distributions of nodes and links across the network. We conclude with reflection on the knowledge-making capacities of this technique and how these compare to the insights and instruments that journalists have used in the Decodex project – suggesting that visual network exploration is a fertile area for further exploration and collaborations between data journalists and digital researchers

Staying with the trouble of networks

Networks have risen to prominence as intellectual technologies and graphical representations, not only in science, but also in journalism, activism, policy, and online visual cultures. Inspired by approaches taking trouble as occasion to (re)consider and reflect on otherwise implicit knowledge practices, in this article we explore how problems with network practices can be taken as invitations to attend to the diverse settings and situations in which network graphs and maps are created and used in society. In doing so, we draw on cases from our research, engagement and teaching activities involving making networks, making sense of networks, making networks public, and making network tools. As a contribution to “critical data practice,” we conclude with some approaches for slowing down and caring for network practices and their associated troubles to elicit a richer picture of what is involved in making networks work as well as reconsidering their role in collective forms of inquiry.</p