Histories of Digital Journalism

June 24-25, 2022

Budapest, Hungary

Deadline: October 20, 2021

Keynote Speakers

• Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam)
• Laura Ahva (Tampere University)

A conference exploring the intersections of history, culture, digital technology and journalism.

Although the shared past of digitization and journalism stretches back at least to a half-century, digital journalism history is a field still in formation. Building on the momentum of the recent ‘historical turn’ in digital media and internet studies, the aim of the conference is to bring together an interdisciplinary network of scholars to interrogate digital journalism histories and to start a global critical exchange on various approaches to and aspects of historicising digital journalism.

As digital journalism has been re-configured by socio-historical contradictions of communication and complexities of its technological innovations, journalism scholarship should continuously strive for enhancing critical exchange to advance studies that intersect with numerous disciplines, theoretical approaches and methodological traditions. Emphasis of the conference is on the plurality of histories instead of one single digital journalism history, acknowledging diachronic as well as synchronic complexities of social relations, political contingencies, cultural traditions and power configurations between journalism and digitisation. Instead of enforcing one great master narrative, the conference aims to offer a space to embrace the co-existence of parallel, sometimes complementing, often conflicting historical investigations and narratives.

By aiming to explore the intersections of history, culture, digital technology and journalism, the conference welcomes papers and panels that are grounded on diachronic or synchronic explorations of digital journalism ‘pasts’, while elaborating the relevance of its historical findings for digital journalism ‘futures’. The conference invites theoretical and methodological reflections on historicising digital journalism as well as original single case studies or comparative inquiries into the phenomena from the decades of the long digital revolution of journalism. The conference welcomes papers that examine the digital journalism histories of the global ‘centers’ and we especially encourage inquiries from the ‘peripheries’ of digital journalism development and scholarship.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

– Mythologies of technology: reconsidering ‘dead’ and ‘new’ technologies in journalism

– Transforming social control in the digitized newsroom: investigating separation and integration tendencies

– Re-configuring the labour process in digital journalism: between standardisation and creativity of digital news production

– Digital platforms, tools and practices in journalism: from Teletext, CD-ROMS and Minitel to www, smartphones and social media

– Changing skillsets in digital journalism: deskilling, reskilling, upskilling newsworkers

– (Dis)continuities of forms and genres in journalism

– Labour relations of digital journalism: standardisation, precarisation, entrepreneurialism

– Liquefied identities of digital journalism: boundary work between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ journalists, ‘professional’ and ‘citizen’ journalists, journalists and ‘technologists’, ‘journalists’ vs ‘bloggers’

– Re-inventing journalistic profiles: from ‘mouse monkeys’, ‘meta journalists’ to ‘robot journalists’

– Digitized audiences between participation and commodification

– Business models of digital journalism: from legacy media ecosystem to platform capitalism

– Ethical, legal and regulatory issues of digital journalism: from www to automation

– Particular online journalistic genres moving online: digital music, sport, food journalism

*Technical details and important dates

Deadline for submitting abstracts and panel proposals is October 20, 2021 (CET).

Please submit all submissions via this online form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScLTg4do6bMlFrDrcxL6MJJJqudnWJtR9rrRxrRSgtUoo0qiA/viewform

Panel proposals should consist of 3 or 4 papers, and all the paper abstracts belonging to a proposed panel should be submitted individually through the form. The maximum length for panel and paper abstracts is 400 words.

Conference talks will be 15 minutes long followed by 5 minute long discussions.

Further information will be found on the constantly updated conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/hodj2022/news

Organizers and contact information

The conference will be held at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and is jointly organised by the Department of Sociology and Communications, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, BME and the Social Communication Research Centre, University of Ljubljana (UL).

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact the organizers:

Dr. Tamas Tofalvy, Associate Professor (BME): tofalvy.tamas@gtk.bme.hu

Dr. Igor Vobič, Associate Professor (UL): igor.vobic@fdv.uni-lj.si