The group strives towards being a leading environment for research and development activities within the field of digital journalism in Norway, as well as internationally.
We are doing this by coordinating and strengthening the research already in progress at our department, and by collaborating with other relevant researchers at OsloMet and throughout the world. This includes organizing a series of Digital Journalism Focus Seminars, as well as major conferences, with leading international scholars.
Since 2018 we are also running a fellowship programme that has enabled us to develop much closer modes of collaboration with prominent scholars of digital journalism from five continents in the world.
The group belongs to the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Heads of research group
Members
More about the research group
Journalism as a profession and the journalistic institutions are going through major transformations due to digitalization, changing the structural and political framework for journalism, including media policies and business models. Advertising revenues having dropped substantially, being displaced to global platform companies.
News media increasingly turn to audience analytics and metrics to better understand audience engagement how to provide value and attract reader revenues. Nevertheless, just as citizens have become reliant on digital platforms in their everyday life, also many news publishers depend on platforms non-proprietary to them.
Social media platforms non-proprietary to journalistic institutions nowadays cover many of the functions previously managed by them. Emerging digital technologies change how journalism functions and how both news and other forms of information and disinformation is produced, distributed and consumed.
This has major implications for what it means to be a journalist, and the epistemic news practices these engage in. Digital innovation in areas such as micro-blogging, video, podcasts, chatbots, augmented reality, automation and data journalism has opened new ways for journalists to produce news, express themselves, and develop genres and discourses.
Research-based knowledge is much needed to understand how the profession and the journalistic institutions are changing, and also to gain a more refined understanding of journalism's role and boundaries in society and thus also of what journalism is and what (digital) journalism studies should be.
This also has major implications for citizens news consumption, how they get informed and are able to participate in democratic processes, and social life.
The members of this research group actively pursues research into areas such as:
- digital journalism studies as a field
- epistemologies of digital journalism
- news for and via social media- and mobile media platforms
- digital journalism and its boundaries in relation to organizational and peripheral actors
- alternative news media and their production, content and consumption
- the mechanisms, effect and countering of online disinformation
- disinformation, digital source criticism, and fact-checking
- media management and editorially facing digital innovation
- digital news consumption, audience engagement and analytics
- digital journalism, data and automation
Selected publications by Digital Journalism research group.
Research project Far-right Politics Online and Societal Resilience (FREXO).
Research project The Epistemologies of Digital News Production.
Research fellows
We regularly welcome and hosts prolific scholars from around the world.
We have scholars coming to work with us for at least one week on our OsloMet campus. These scholars have formally applied, and also been chosen, to come to us as a so-called OsloMet Digital Journalism Research Fellow.
We launched this co-funded fellowship programme in spring 2018, and following our inaugural research fellow staying with us in May, we will host many more throughout 2018 and onwards. We continuously review applications.
Focus Seminars
In addition to our research fellows, we welcome scholars to come to us and present their research at the OsloMet Digital Journalism Focus Seminars. These are one or two hour presentations that serve as an opportunity to present and receive feedback on your research. All our fellows are expected to make a presentation to our research group, and faculty at large, while here.
