CFP: Methodological Issues and Innovation in Measuring Audience Trust in News

Panel proposal for submission to the International Symposium on Media Frictions to be hosted by Jönköping University, Sweden, on 2-3 May 2024 

ABOUT THE PANEL 

Although credible and insightful audience research is regarded as an urgent need among groups involved in boosting public interest media in countries of the Global South, there are critical disagreements over the validity of audience research methods and analysis. These emerge in both academic and practitioner fields, demonstrating the potential of friction on the issue to spark innovation while also exposing long-embedded inequalities in North-South power relations in knowledge production. 

In June 2023 Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa, co-founder of the Philippines outlet Rappler, let it be known she had resigned from the advisory board of the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) because of issues with the findings of the RISJ Digital News Report’s 46-country survey of online news consumers, partly funded by Google. The RISJ began the annual report in 2012 as an exercise in understanding news consumption habits in the UK, with data also gathered from France, Germany, Denmark and the US for the sake of comparison. Its subsequent expansion to include countries that lack media freedom has raised questions around findings about levels of audience trust in media outlets in authoritarian states. RISJ itself acknowledges that distrust on the part of politicians can distort the findings. Yet those same politicians can use the scores to attack independent outlets. 

This panel seeks to explore frictions in the gathering of data about audience trust in news in countries where media freedom is lacking. Media outlets that depend on international support are nowadays expected to consider audience development as a core competency, not least because the continuous measurement of user groups’ tastes, preferences and behaviours made possible by digital media underpins a model of engagement very different from the ‘exposure model’ of old (Foster, CIMA, 2014). Yet there is ambiguity over what engagement entails. Cutting-edge academic research in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia has captured a tension between audience distrust of mainstream news sources on one hand and, on the other, intense engagement with news in terms of its potential to inform citizens (Dahlgren and Hill, Routledge, 2022). Papers for the panel will examine methodological issues and innovations in audience research, including examples of methodological advances, in contexts where public interest media face serious constraints. 

Panel contributions will be selected by members of the Global Media and Cultural Identities & Social Change research groups at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. Selection will take place among abstracts submitted as set out below. 

Instructions and deadline 

Researchers are invited to submit abstracts of 250 words outlining their proposed paper by January 5, 2024. Abstracts should include the author/s’ name(s), affiliation, and email and postal addresses, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on each author. Please send these items together in a single Word file, not as pdf, naming the file and message ‘FRICTIONS 2024’ followed by your surname(s). Send the file by email to Naomi Sakr, Emeritus Professor of Media Policy, at N.Sakr01@westminster.ac.uk. 

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