The field of journalism is increasingly forced to acknowledge that news consumers and citizens are paying less attention to journalistic media. Tuning out from the news and a rich source of choices in social media and online fora make some dimensions of journalism less central (and often less important) to serve its central democratic function (Peters & Witschge 2014). As one step to face this challenge we are convinced that citizen engagement is a crucial point. In this workshop, we want to bring together citizens (e.g. students or traditional news consumers), media practitioners and citizen science researchers. The aim is to reflect on the kinds of citizen engagement with journalism and other channels of public communication, involving citizens as co-creators of a new kind of (speculative) news interface based on their demands and preferences. Inspired by perceptions of citizens’ daily habits of navigating media, the workshop will be a starting point to rethink the role that journalistic media has in society and democracy, for example in negotiations over pressing social and political issues. We therefore propose to employ a citizen science framework to rethink the participation in civic communication in a complex media environment (D’Ignazio & Zuckermann 2017; Allan & Ewart 2015, Robinson & Wang 2018).

The workshop will be organised in three parts: (1) presentations with Q&A (30min); (2) co-creation exercise (30 min); and (3) discussion of results (30 min).

Speakers:

Christoph Raetzsch (Aarhus University)

Lars Kabel (DMJX)

Jessica Walter (Datalab, Aarhus University) 

Diogo Henriques (Aarhus University) 

Read more about the speakers and the detailed programe here. 

You may also find more info in the general programme.