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The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) overhaul in 2018 includes video sharing platform services (VSPs), which provide content in an automated way, including user-generated content (UGC). This change is tantamount to a paradigm shift, as these multi-sided platforms differ starkly from the actors that had previously been regulated under the AVMSD. The AVMSD seems to have answered the question, what kind of rules we need. However, problems of implementation and application will not become apparent until later, and only then will it become clear which of the VSPs’ measures are truly expedient and appropriate. To know which rules are precise enough to provide legal certainty while also dynamic enough to adapt to technological developments, we need permanent monitoring processes – as described in our governance cycle. The prerequisite for permanent monitoring processes is fair and transparent data accesses, the design of which is also a fundamental challenge, as we will explain by the house of data access. Continuous monitoring processes are complex procedures involving many layers of competence. But they are also opportunities to timely catch and quickly correct misdevelopments. By implementing the two-step watchdog model in a bigger network, undesirable developments can be recognized at an earlier stage, because watchdogs are strengthened as information purveyors.

Journalistic media increasingly address changing user behaviour online by implementing algorithmic recommendations on their pages. While social media extensively rely on user data for personalized recommendations, journalistic media may choose to aim to improve the user experience based on textual features such as thematic similarity. From a societal viewpoint, these recommendations should be as diverse as possible. Users, however, tend to prefer recommendations that enable “serendipity”—the perception of an item as a welcome surprise that strikes just the right balance between more similarly useful but still novel content. By conducting a representative online survey with n = 588 respondents, we investigate how users evaluate algorithmic news recommendations (recommendation satisfaction, as well as perceived novelty and unexpectedness) based on different similarity settings and how individual dispositions (news interest, civic information norm, need for cognitive closure, etc.) may affect these evaluations. The core piece of our survey is a self-programmed recommendation system that accesses a database of vectorized news articles. Respondents search for a personally relevant keyword and select a suitable article, after which another article is recommended automatically, at random, using one of three similarity settings. Our findings show that users prefer recommendations of the most similar articles, which are at the same time perceived as novel, but not necessarily unexpected. However, user evaluations will differ depending on personal characteristics such as formal education, the civic information norm, and the need for cognitive closure.

The insular usage of media sources is a common tool for populist actors to position themselves in relation to the social mainstream and to hold up their claim of creating a counter public. In this ...

Western countries’ relations with China are characterised by a dichotomy of partnership and conflict, of rapprochement and demarcation. To date, research lacks longitudinal studies that examine how these economic and political tendencies become manifest in the image of China conveyed by Western media. Taking Germany as an example, this study aims to shed light on the development of China coverage in print media between 2000 and 2019. Following a triangulating mixed-method approach, the results of computational topic1 modelling (N = 55,893) are complemented by semi-standardised interviews with China correspondents. A framing analysis shows that China was depicted as a valuable economic partner until a rivalry frame started to become dominant in 2016/17. This shift was accompanied by a significant increase in media interest., The international communication gazette

In transitional democracies, the boundary work of defining journalism and through this, ousting certain media actors as illegitimate and threatful to national security and/or democratic stability can hold a particular urgency. This article considers the sanctions against three Russia-affiliated TV channels by the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council adopted in February 2021 – and the ensuing public debate on this decision – as a particularly informative case of such boundary work. Using thematic analysis of materials from Ukrainian news sites and TV talk shows, the article maps out how media regulators and representatives of the sanctioned and non-sanctioned media outlets competed over the authority to define the boundaries of legitimate journalism in Ukraine amid growing security threats. The findings show that the regulator labeled the sanctioned TV channels as “parasites of journalism,” situated within the Ukrainian media system, yet functioning in the interest of a foreign state. In turn, the sanctioned media actors styled themselves as repressed opposition media, attacking both regulators and non-sanctioned media for undemocratic intervention and a lack of professional solidarity, respectively. Lastly, non-sanctioned media actors have largely supported the sanction decision and detached from the sanctioned actors’ self-legitimation discourse. The study contributes to the literature on boundary work in journalism and showcases how a novel theory of parasites of journalism can enhance the analysis of complex discourses surrounding antagonistic media actors, including in non-Western contexts.

In the digital age, the crisis of journalism has been exacerbated by antagonistic actors infiltrating the journalistic system without adhering to its norms or logic. Journalism itself has been ill-prepared to respond to this challenge, but journalism theory and research have also had trouble in grasping these phenomena. It is thus the aim of this article to propose a theoretical perspective on a specific set of antagonists characterized by its paradoxical nature. It is ‘the excluded third, included’ as described by Serres, the parasite that is both part of the system and its antagonist. From the perspective of systems theory, the parasite is a subsystem that threatens the integrity of the primary system. Thus, the parasite is defined by the relations that describe its position, its behaviour towards the host system. Due to these peculiarities—this contradiction, this vagueness—it evades a classical bivalent logic. This may be one reason why the paradoxical nature of the antagonist from within, the ‘uninvited dinner guest,’ has not been described as such until now. The parasitic practices follow the logic of the hacker: He is the digital manifestation of Serres’ parasite. Accordingly, parasitic strategies can be described as news hacks whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies. In doing so, they not only change the system output but also compromise its values and exploit its resources.

Wir stellen in diesem Aufsatz ein Modell interdisziplinarer Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kommunikationswissenschaft und Methodenwissenschaft (hier: Statistik) vor. Dabeisteht die Frage im Mittelpunkt, wie sich die Kollaboration grundverschiedener Disziplinen uber einen langeren Zeitraum verstetigen lasst. Der agilen Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware, die die fachubergreifende Zusammenarbeit strukturiert, kann hierbei eine zentrale Rolle zukommen. Sie ermoglicht zwei Ebenen der Zusammenarbeit mit verschiedenen Zeithorizonten: auf der einen werden zeitlich begrenzte Projekte umgesetzt, auf der anderen die langerfristige Zusammenarbeit organisiert. Wechselnde Team-Konstellationen und Hierarchien ermoglichen kontinuierlichen Wissensaustausch, die verwendete Programmiersprache ist Grundlage fur die Entstehung einer facherubergreifenden Kommunikation und die Orientierung auf ein gemeinsames Produkt schafft eine Kultur der gemeinsamen Verantwortlichkeit. Um die theoretischen Reflexionen an der Forschungspraxis zu spiegeln, greifen die Autor*innen auf ihre Erfahrungen im Kontext des Dortmund Center fur datenbasierte Medien-Analyse (kurz: DoCMA) zuruck. DoCMA ist deswegen als Fallbeispiel relevant, da Struktur und Organisation hier auf die Erfordernisse der agilen Entwicklung offener Forschungssoftware ausgerichtet wurden.

ZusammenfassungDie vorliegende Studie betrachtet die Praxis des Teilens von Texten durch politische Akteure auf Twitter und analysiert den thematischen Geltungsanspruch, der sich darin spiegelt: zugespitzt populistisch oder vielfältig und inklusiv im Stil einer Volkspartei. Konkret wurde das ‚Verlinkungsverhalten‘ deutscher Bundestagsabgeordneter auf Twitter untersucht – mit besonderem Augenmerk auf der rechtspopulistischen AfD. Hierzu wurden mit Hilfe eines adaptiven Scrapers 56.107 Texte gesammelt, die Bundestagsabgeordnete in der laufenden Legislaturperiode in Tweets geteilt hatten. Der Analyse ihrer Vielfalt diente eine Maßzahl, die thematische Heterogenität auf Basis von Topic-Modellen ermittelt. Die Resultate zeigen, dass populistische Akteure zwar häufiger als andere auf Medien verlinken und dabei heterogene Quellen nutzen, dass sich dies jedoch nicht in thematische Vielfalt übersetzt, im Gegenteil: Die Themenagenda der AfD-Parlamentarier ist weniger vielfältig als die der Politiker anderer Parteien. Die klar populistische Themenselektion korreliert zudem stärker mit metrischem Erfolg (in Form von Likes, Retweets), als dies bei den Themen anderer Parteien der Fall ist.

Right-wing media have been growing in terms of readership and impact in recent years. However, comparative analyses that gauge linkages between mainstream and right-wing media in Europe are virtually missing. We pursued an algorithm-based topic-modelling analysis of 11,420 articles concerning the question of whether reporting of the leading German right-wing newspaper Junge Freiheit differed from that of mainstream media outlets in the context of the refugee crisis of 201516. The results strongly support this notion. They show a clear-cut dichotomy with mainstream media on one side and Junge Freiheit on the other. A time lag could be found, pointing to a reporting pattern that positioned Junge Freiheit relative to the journalistic and political mainstream. Thus, Junge Freiheit can be characterised as a reactive alternative media outlet that is prone to populism: it stresses the national dimension of the crisis, embraces the positions of the right-wing party Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD) and largely neglects complex international, and particularly European, implications.

espanolLa “europeizacion” de las esferas publicas nacionales es una cuestion de crear un espacio mediatico discursivo dentro de la UE. Hay fuerzas de convergencia, como redes en el espacio digital. Al mismo tiempo, hay fuerzas contrarias, un creciente nacionalismo y populistas que critican las elites a “Bruselas”. Aparentemente, la vision de una esfera publica europea comparte su suerte con el proyecto Europeo: despues de anos de crisis, el optimismo se convirtio en desilusion. Utilizando la cobertura mediatica de las elecciones de la UE de 2019 en siete paises europeos (57.943 articulos de Alemania, Hungria, Italia, Polonia, Portugal, la Republica Checa y el Reino Unido), dibujamos cuadro de un publico heterogeneo de la UE. Resulta claramente que la europeizacion horizontal y vertical requieren interpretaciones diferenciadas. Un alto grado de europeizacion horizontal indica una cobertura mediatica convergente y pro-europea (como Alemania o Portugal), un alto grado vertical puede indicar un publico polarizado o un panorama mediatico poco libre (como el Reino Unido o Hungria). EnglishThe issue of the Europeanisation of national public spheres is a question as to how a discursive media space can be created within the EU. There are forces of convergence at work, such as networking within the borderless digital space. At the same time, there are counterforces: increasing nationalism and populists who identify ‘Brussels’ as a target for their criticism of elites. The vision of a European public sphere appears to share the same fate as the European project as such; as a result of years of crisis, optimism has given way to disillusion. Using coverage of the 2019 EU elections in seven European countries (a total of 57,943 articles from Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and the UK), we draw a picture of a heterogeneous EU public. What is particularly clear is that the phenomena of horizontal and vertical Europeanisation require more nuanced interpretations. While a high degree of horizontal Europeanisation indicates convergent and pro-European media coverage (as in the cases of Germany and Portugal), a high degree of vertical Europeanisation may indicate polarised publics or an unfree media landscape (as in the UK and Hungary). From a methodological point of view, the study shows that a combination of computational content analysis and international cooperation between scientists can advance research into the European public.

Die Anwendung digitaler Methoden bietet die Chance, Kommunikationswissenschaften und Okonomik enger zu verknupfen. So besteht in der Konjunktur- und der Finanzmarktforschung seit einigen Jahren ein wachsendes Interesse an der Einbeziehung von Medieninhalten, allerdings meist ohne Ruckgriff auf die Kommunikationswissenschaften. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Uberblick uber Ansatze zur Einbeziehung von Medieninhalten in der Wirtschaftsforschung und stellt einen neuen, multidimensionalen Indikator vor, der wirtschaftspolitische Unsicherheit auf der Grundlage des Topic-Modelling-Verfahrens Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) misst: den Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI). Auf dieser Basis zeigen wir, wie sich der in der Okonomik populare Begriff des „Narrativs“ operationalisieren und mit dem kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Konzept des Frames verknupfen lasst.

Social media today are playing a more important role as a news source than ever before. Yet, there have been no longitudinal studies on journalists’ sourcing practices in recent years that allow us...

The goal of this exploratory case study is to identify different facets of news reporting on surveillance, privacy and data security, and more specifically, how risks in this context are portrayed. The theoretical foundation consists of two elements: 1) the concept of mediatized risk culture, and 2) the discursive arena model of risk communication, which provides the normative background for assessing news reporting. A text-mining approach (topic modeling) is applied to analyze relevant coverage of the German quality newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The study yields a total of seven topics which belong to three categories: violation of privacy norms, power and law enforcement, and datafication. The results show that despite the de-mystification of digital technology after the Snowden leaks, coverage has recently become more affirmative and less focused on risk. We conclude that this may indicate a normalization of mass surveillance and data harvesting even in Germany, a society which traditionally values privacy. In order to add more context to our findings, however, further qualitative analyses were needed. The paper serves as a starting point for further research on media reporting of surveillance, privacy and data security.

Migration crisis, climate change or tax havens: Global challenges need global solutions. But agreeing on a joint approach is difficult without a common ground for discussion. Public spheres are highly segmented because news are mainly produced and received on a national level. Gain- ing a global view on international debates about important issues is hindered by the enormous quantity of news and by language barriers. Media analysis usually focuses only on qualitative re- search. In this position statement, we argue that it is imperative to pool methods from machine learning, journalism studies and statistics to help bridging the segmented data of the international public sphere, using the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a case study., Comment: presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in Social Good Applications, New York, NY