Current projects

  • Russian independent journalism in exile: in search of relevance and resilience, 2023-2024
    • The project studies the emerging ecosystem of exiled media that had to flee Russia and what type of journalism they produce. Empirical data include interviews with media practitioners and workers of organisations, supporting free journalism, observations in newsrooms and digital ethnography. The research explores possible resilient model(s) of journalism in exile and problematises its relevance for their Russia-based readership.

Previous projects

  • Sustainable journalism for the algorithmic future, 2020-2021
    • The project investigates how data-driven media practices and the increased influence of IT industries on media business affect journalism and its role in the public sphere. Integrating new evidence from a hybrid media system (Russia) into a comparative study, it helps understand the context-specificity of this impact and will formulate a vision on making journalism societally, economically and ethically sustainable for the algorithmic future.
  • Augmented Journalism: Shaping News Work in the Age of Automated Journalism, workshop series, 2020-2021
    • Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Augmented Intelligence (IA) are seen as key triggers of journalism’s quantitative turn today. Data-driven journalistic practices, together with practices of algorithmic and automated journalism, necessitate a reconsideration of the roles and relations within human-machine communication. We argue that a new professional paradigm has emerged based on human-machine interaction. The paradigm, which we term “augmented journalism”, requires a sustained and critical assessment of the reconfiguration of human and machine roles in news work. In 3 workshops (Helsinki, Stockholm, Bergen) we will set a research agenda for this emergent field and conceptualise the epistemological dimensions of augmented journalism.
  • STRAPPA: Strategies of Persuasion: Russian Propaganda in the Algorithmic Age
    • PI Mariëlle Wijermars has taken up a new position as Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University. As a result, this project has been (partially) terminated on 15 August 2019. Project researcher Teemu Oivo continues his research until the end of March 2020, after which the project will be concluded.
  • Selling Censorship: Affective Framing and the Legitimation of Internet Control in Russia (PI Mariëlle Wijermars)