Larissa Fedunik
24 July 2024: Cross-cultural projects on the changing media landscape have sparked opportunities for global collaboration at the University of Canberra’s News & Media Research Centre, drawing international researchers to the Bruce campus.
Recently, the N&MRC played host to three such visitors, whose work focuses on the changing roles of journalists, and growing mistrust in the news, findings reflected in the Centre’s latest Digital News Report: Australia 2024.
Professor Claudia Mellado, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile, visited the University to co-host a masterclass titled “Journalistic Role Performance: Paths Taken and Pathway” with N&MRC member Associate Professor David Nolan.
In her masterclass, Professor Mellado explored the roles of journalism in different cultures and best practices for large-scale comparative research. Specifically, she discussed the strategies used in the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project.
Professor Mellado is the principal investigator of the JRP, which was established in 2013 to analyse the state of journalistic cultures across 18 countries.
“The overarching aim is to get a close picture of the way in which journalists perform roles in different countries and how this is specific to different cultures, media systems and political systems,” said Associate Professor Nolan, who contributed to the JRP’s Australian case study.
He explained that journalism encompasses many dimensions beyond simply reporting current events.
“We measure what journalists are doing and the roles that they perform, such as that of an integrity watchdog and performing ‘infotainment’,” he said.
As the Global Lead of the project, Professor Mellado has taken a lead role in training JRP research groups around the world to carry out the comparative research. She leads the data-gathering team in Chile and is also responsible for managing the international teams.
“It’s very resource-intensive work,” she said. “We’re coding every single story across a whole range of journalistic roles.”
The second wave of the project captured data in 2020 from 37 countries on almost every continent (with the exception of Antarctica). Analysis has been published in several international papers, and the research is ongoing.
Another recent visitor to the University, Dr Jong-Gu Park has spent a sabbatical year at the N&MRC as a visiting scholar. Dr Park is the Chief Research Fellow at the Korea Broadcast Advertising Corporation (KOBACO), where he carries out research on media and advertising policy, including children’s media usage.
“I am thoroughly enjoying collaborative research alongside the N&MRC’s esteemed scholars, Professor Sora Park and Dr Jee Young Lee,” said Dr Park.
Dr Richard Fletcher, Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in England, will spend July in Canberra. His visit was facilitated through the Distinguished Fellow Scheme under the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise (DVCRE).
“My research interests include how people interact with news in different countries, as well as the impact of new technologies,” said Dr Fletcher, who is currently working on a new project looking at AI and the future of news.
Dr Fletcher co-leads the Digital News project, the largest annual survey of global news consumption published in the international Digital News Report (DNR). He has been collaborating with N&MRC researchers since 2015 on projects stemming from DNR, for which Professor Sora Park leads the Australian research arm.
“We’ve worked together since 2015, both on the Australian side and the broader international project,” he said.
On 11 July, Dr Fletcher hosted a masterclass for Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students, at which he shared practical advice on carrying out surveys across different countries – an extremely relevant topic for projects like DNR.
“The masterclass was for anyone who's curious about how you can use the surveys to understand how things are different in different parts of the world,” he said.
Professor Sora Park believes that these cross-cultural collaborations are extremely valuable for both the University and the international research community.
“At the N&MRC, we investigate issues that are of concern to the local community,” she said. “But it's always good to have that global perspective because international researchers might have different solutions to these problems.”
Dr Fletcher and Professor Park are both members of the Rise of Mistrust Discovery Project, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), which focuses on news audiences and issues of media trust. These themes were the topic of Dr Fletcher’s on-campus seminar on 17 July, titled “Is the public’s connection with news fraying? Global trends in news use and attitudes”.
“We’ve seen this big decline in interest in news over the world,” said Dr Fletcher.
“There's the rise of digital media, social media for news use and the growth of smartphone use. These trends are playing out at different speeds in different parts of the world. What’s important – and challenging – is understanding how people respond, and also what's driving these broader changes.”
Photographs by Liam Budge.
