This study evaluates the role of transparency in rebuilding trust in journalism amid the increasing integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools in news production. While AI technologies enhance journalistic workflows by automating and augmenting content creation, they also introduce opacity in professional decisions, complicating traditional transparency norms and its disclosure practices. The paper maps citizens’ perceptions regarding disclosures of AI use in journalism, addressing two key themes: (1) the practical information needs of news consumers about AI-generated content and (2) the specific rationales when exposed to (disclosures of) AI generated news content. Through qualitative focus groups (N=21), the exploratory research reveals a strong demand for clear, visible, and detailed disclosures about AI-generated content. Participants emphasized the necessity of including general source references akin to traditional authorship attributions, explicitly stating AI involvement - for example, a label such as ‘generated by AI’ alongside author and publication details. Visual indicators like logos or watermarks in contrasting colors were preferred to ensure AI disclosures are noticeable and not easily overlooked. This study contributes to developing more granular audience-centered, practical guidelines for AI transparency in journalism that goes beyond the mere ‘label’, emphasizing that effective disclosure requires more than simply ‘informing’ audiences.
This study examines alternative media within the digital news ecosystem in six European countries: Norway, Sweden, Austria, Germany, France, and Spain. Using a network approach and a cross-country comparative design, we analyze audience overlap between alternative and mainstream media, the positions alternative media occupy within these networks, and how media systems and political contexts may shape these dynamics. Our findings show that while overall audience overlap is low, it is higher in countries where far-right populist parties have greater institutionalized access to political discourse. We also identify alternative media enclaves within the Northern-type media system characterized by strong professional journalism-particularly in Sweden, where far-right populist actors remained politically marginalized at the time of data collection. This study advances audience-centric alternative media research and offers insights into how contextual factors may shape the relationality between "alternative" and "mainstream".
Previous research suggests that passive and active security-related news consumption via traditional and social media is associated with people's feelings of (in)security. Guided by cultivation theory and the uses and gratifications approach, this study explores common understandings and practices of security-related news consumption in Austria as well as emotional and security-perceptual correlates through an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach. Findings from six focus groups (N = 31) and a cross-sectional survey (N = 1,000) revealed (a) participants' high awareness of differences between traditional and social media reporting on security events, influencing their selective use of each for information needs. However, (b) intensive security-related news consumption, especially when combined with interactive social media engagement, was associated with heightened feelings of fear and anger, along with an increased perception of personal victimization risk. Overall, these findings underscore the importance of an ever-updated understanding of how news consumption is exercised and how it may harm people when over-engaging it.
As ethical self-regulating bodies and institutionalized intermediaries between journalism and the public, media councils translate journalistic norms into concrete standards. This study explores how these institutions adapt their workings and standards to digital journalism's challenges. We conducted a multi-method study of nine European media councils (Belgium's Dutch-speaking and French-speaking councils, Denmark, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, North Macedonia, and Slovenia), combining qualitative content analysis of 152 complaints decisions in 2022 with nine in-depth interviews with council functionaries. Drawing on boundary work theory, we identify normative adaptation strategies across four domains: privacy concerns, corrections and rectifications, journalistic use of AI, and delineating journalistic actors. Both the nature and pace of adaptation vary across these domains, reflecting different perceived threats to journalistic authority. Most adaptation occurs reactively and pragmatically, although almost all councils are proactively outlining ethical use of AI - potentially because of its threat to journalism's epistemic authority. The Danish enforcement of the right to be forgotten represents the most significant adaptive capacity, though it exists in tension with the advisory nature of most councils. Adaptation has largely occurred for online journalism in the traditional sense, with councils converging on explicit correction requirements, while remaining absent for social media corrections.
Social media has fundamentally altered what young adults consider news. However, a conceptual mismatch persists: what researchers consider news and journalistic actors often fails to align with what audiences perceive as such. Drawing on reception studies, this paper developes an audience-centered concept: informativeness. It describes the continuous space of a user's subjective evaluation of media content as new and/or useful. To empirically unpack this concept, this study employed a two-step qualitative research design with eight focus groups of young German adults (ages 18-35). Findings show that audiences attribute informativeness through an encoding schema that is comprised of five core dimensions (informative practices and norms, relevance and relatability, actor-specific, usefulness, and platform-specific), which are flexibly applied beyond and independent of news and news media as a normative standard, and are adaptable to other online information spheres, such as misinformation, health guidance, or political information.
This paper examines the behind the scenes of fact-checking. Based on in-depth interviews with 16 external assessors and advisory board members working for the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), it discusses how these professionals assist in establishing credibility for fact-checking organizations. While scholarship till date has mainly explored frontstage operations through investigating the work of fact-checkers, little is known about the assessment processes of organizations such as IFCN or EFCSN and how they evaluate the performances of fact-checking organizations. This paper turns backstage to get to know the personnel who check the fact-checkers. A thematic analysis shows that assessors are at times caught in a "neutrality dilemma" during evaluation processes. In addition, while assessment processes are oriented with standardized Codes of Conduct and contribute to the professionalization of fact-checking operations, the evaluation process is not always uniform. Lastly, participants raised concerns about the impact of platformization on fact-checking practices, where fact-checkers are pushed into dependency relations with big tech. Overall, this study lifts the curtain on the backstage operations that support fact-checking organizations in their attempt to be recognized as important actors in fighting disinformation.
One characteristic of the transition from low-choice to high-choice media environments is the rise of political alternative news media. Few studies have so far focused on the longitudinal and reciprocal relationship between alternative media use and perceptions of societal problems. Building on the reinforcing spirals model, this study analyses the dynamic relationship between alternative media use and perceptions about three topics that vary in levels of baseline issue politicization: crime, economy, and health care. Using six-wave panel survey data collected in Sweden over three years, findings show that left-wing and right-wing alternative media use is more strongly related to perceptions of politicized than non-politicized issues. However, results from random-intercept cross-lagged panel models reveal few indications of within-person reciprocal dynamics. While users of left-wing and right-wing alternative media diverge significantly in the beliefs they hold about these issues, there is little evidence for media-driven belief reinforcement over time.
As politicians have come to challenge the role of media producers, there is a pressing need to understand how they participate in narrative contests. We address this need by analyzing social media data to offer insights into how Brazilian parliamentarians communicated during a crisis amid the Covid-19 pandemic. By investigating the connections politicians established with social media users, and the content they disseminated through their networks, we reveal three forms of narrative construction. Critics of the government engaged in what we call derivative reporting: They curated information from news media and adhered to journalistic content production formats, repackaging news to suit their agendas. While these politicians maintained ties with news media, the President's allies severed those ties and presented themselves as alternative sources of information. These politicians established a communication ecosystem wherein the credibility of journalists was defied and state messages could be treated as authoritative truth. Local politicians skewed polarization, producing, instead, narratives about how they secured resources to solve the crisis. We discuss these modes of narrative construction as objectivity, authority, and proximity claims to epistemic authority, respectively. Our findings illuminate how political elites challenge what media sources ought to be trusted.
As generative AI becomes increasingly common in news media, newsrooms are trying to find the most effective and reliable ways to communicate this AI use to audiences. This paper aims to unravel audience perspectives regarding the purpose of AI transparency, motivations for desiring transparency, expectations of journalists using AI, and perceptions of different AI labeling approaches to guide the implementation of effective and responsible AI disclosure. Through in-depth interviews with a sample of news consumers in the U.S (N = 20), we find that audiences are less concerned with the technicalities of generative AI content creation but rather, based on their expectations of journalists, they value labeling that signals human-AI collaboration and visible human oversight. By focusing on audience expectations and perceptions, we contribute practical and theoretical insights to the literature on AI labeling.
While engagement with social media audiences has become an increasingly central part of contemporary journalism, this labour can impact on journalists' personal and professional wellbeing. Recent research has outlined the detrimental impacts of social media work on journalists and other online media producers, including online harassment, unmanageable workloads and burnout. Both journalists and online content creators have also reported lack of support from platforms and news organisations to foster better professional wellbeing online. This article explores how professional wellbeing for social media journalism can be supported through some of the social infrastructures of online labour - in particular, frameworks of enacting "care" online. Journalists and content producers care for themselves online using practices such as curating social media consumption and time online. However, we argue that practices prioritising both individual and community care are key to fostering improved professional wellbeing in online labour. Using interviews with both journalists and online content creators, we conceptualise how social media practices centred on "care for self" and "care for others" support professional wellbeing on social media. Perspectives on different modes of care indicate how journalism's professional logics are being negotiated on social media and developing into practices that prioritise improving wellbeing in online labour.
As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshapes digital journalism, questions about its consequences for media credibility and audience selectivity have intensified. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and research on algorithm aversion, this study examines how distinct GenAI applications influence users' evaluations of news organizations. We conducted a pre-registered choice-based conjoint experiment in Chile (N = 2145), a context marked by declining trust in news and increasing AI adoption. The design varied seven domains of GenAI use-including supporting tasks, content creation, personalization, human oversight, and transparency-to estimate their causal effects on perceived media credibility and outlet selection. Results show that users differentiate sharply across GenAI functions. Human oversight and disclosure emerge as the strongest positive predictors of both credibility and selection. In contrast, using GenAI for menial tasks or personalization does not significantly affect evaluations, while automated content production modestly reduces credibility and selection. Attitudes toward AI moderate effects on selection but not credibility. These findings indicate that audience responses are shaped less by the mere presence of GenAI than by the accountability structures governing its use.
Academic freedom, a cornerstone of democratic societies and scientific progress, is facing an alarming global decline. Once a safeguard for scholarly independence, it has steadily eroded since its peak in the early 2000s, leaving researchers increasingly vulnerable to political interference, ideological control, and funding pressures. This deterioration coincides with a broader trend of democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian governance, where regimes employ censorship, legal manipulation, and institutional restructuring to consolidate power. These developments echo historical patterns of suppression and come with profound consequences for academic freedom, and in extension of this, the public availability of rigorous research. Following the publication of the Digital Journalism commentary "Public Knowledge and Expertise Under Authoritarian Siege: A Defense of Academic Freedom from Digital Journalism Studies" (Westlund et al. 2025), we have called for defending academic freedom. Importantly, we feature an extensive list of signatories-scholars and institutions worldwide-who have united in defence of academic freedom in general and digital journalism studies more specifically.
