This introduction to the special issue "Fighting Fakes: News publishers, fact-checkers, platform companies, and policymaking" argues that the institutionalization of interactions related to ...misinformation is central to scholarly understandings of the visibility and structural inequalities of institutionalized efforts to fighting fakes. We look at the ways that contributors of this special issue have shown how materialities, institutions, practices, politics, economics, and culture shape the field of fighting fakes.
As both news and audiences are increasingly mobile, this introduction calls for intensified research into mobility as a core characteristic of journalism. This special issue explores the intersection ...of news with mobility in production, distribution and consumption. News has become mobile in a material sense as it is accessed on portable devices; and in a professional sense of being cut adrift from the business models which sustained it, challenged by peripheral actors and alternative news media, and embracing new technologies, new relationships with the audience and new political challenges to its status quo. One task is to adapt research techniques usually applied to fixed phenomena - or at least applied with the intention of fixing them - to something fluid. This is not impossible. All mobilities need an infrastructure on which to move, offering fixed points in a fluid world. Mobility offers critical questions of power and dominance of who is mobile, how, and under what circumstances; in this way, mobility becomes embodied. And the paradigm calls for research into the mobility of journalism and its interaction with similarly fluid, related actualities: blogs, smartphones, audiences, economics, advertisers, government and technology. Each interacts with journalism to deliver diverse realities.
This editorial is the same across Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, and Digital Journalism. And it is the first in these three journals not written at least in part by Bob Franklin.
In contemporary journalism, there is a need for better conceptualizing the changing nature of human actors, nonhuman technological actants, and diverse representations of audiences—and the activities ...of news production, distribution, and interpretation through which actors, actants, and audiences are inter-related. This article explicates each of these elements—the Four A’s—in the context of cross-media news work, a perspective that lends equal emphasis to editorial, business, and technology as key sites for studying the organizational influences shaping journalism. We argue for developing a sociotechnical emphasis for the study of institutional news production: a holistic framework through which to make sense of and conduct research about the full range of actors, actants, and audiences engaged in cross-media news work activities. This emphasis addresses two shortcomings in the journalism studies literature: a relative neglect about (1) the interplay of humans and technology, or manual and computational modes of orientation and operation, and (2) the interplay of editorial, business, and technology in news organizations. This article’s ultimate contribution is a cross-media news work matrix that illustrates the interconnections among the Four A’s and reveals where opportunities remain for empirical study.
This introduction to the special issue “Fighting Fakes: News publishers, fact-checkers, platform companies, and policymaking” argues that the institutionalization of interactions related to ...misinformation is central to scholarly understandings of the visibility and structural inequalities of institutionalized efforts to fighting fakes. We look at the ways that contributors of this special issue have shown how materialities, institutions, practices, politics, economics, and culture shape the field of fighting fakes.
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