Felix Marvin Simon

University of Oxford | OX · Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ)

Platform companies play an important role in the production and distribution of news. This article analyses this role and questions of control, dependence and autonomy in the light of the ‘AI goldrush’ in the news. I argue that the introduction of AI in the news risks shifting even more control to and increasing the news industry’s dependence on pl...

A growing number of news organisations have set up specific guidelines to govern how they use artificial intelligence (AI). This article analyses a set of 52 guidelines from publishers in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Looking at both formal and thematic characteristics, we provide comparative insights into how news outlets...

Many observers of the current explosion of generative AI worry about its impact on our information environment, with concerns being raised about the increased quantity, quality, and personalization of misinformation. We assess these arguments with evidence from communication studies, cognitive science, and political science. We argue that current c...

Despite growing interest, the effects of AI on the news industry and our information environment — the public arena — remain poorly understood. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the implications of the news industry’s dependence on technology companies for AI. Drawing on 134 interviews with news workers at 35 news organizations in the Un...

The effective adoption of responsible AI practices in journalism requires a concerted effort to bridge different perspectives, including technological, editorial, journalistic, and managerial. Among the many challenges that could impact information sharing around responsible AI inside news organizations are knowledge silos, where information is iso...

Recently, an increasing number of news organizations have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows, leading to a further influx of AI technologists and data workers into the news industry. This has initiated cross-functional collaborations between these professionals and journalists. While prior research has explored the impact...

Why do supporters of former US president Donald Trump make short tribute videos which resemble mainstream action film trailers with their idol as the protagonist? And why does the Trump campaign use a similar trailer template for video of rallies and campaign spots? This contribution traces the increasing use of cinematic storytelling templates in...

Tacit Cinematic Knowledge discusses how knowledge is configured in and through cinematic practices, and in interaction with moving images. The contributions engage with diverse epistemic environments such as political campaigns, medical care, corporate communications, coastal engineering, and astronomical observations. They highlight different form...

Sophisticated AI systems are increasingly everywhere. In many ways, we have already been affected by the rollout of AI systems into more and more areas of life, from insurance and law to healthcare and the media – often without really noticing. However, 2023 will likely prove to be a particularly critical moment in the history of AI. Ever since the...

Who are mis-/disinformation studies for? What agenda does the field serve? How can it be improved? While the increase in the attention towards the topic in the last years is healthy, it has also led to an explosion of papers in all directions, and the field has been subject to various criticisms and attacks. In this commentary, we discuss the statu...

This backgrounder aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how digital media are shaping democracy and what might be done to limit possible avenues of anti-democratic abuse while kindling their democratic potential.

Disinformation was a common occurrence in the Global South before it became a preoccupation in the Global North. This chapter describes a range of research conducted between 2017 and 2019 as part of the Journalism Innovation Project at Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and more recent work by the authors. It address...

In 2020, the term 'infodemic' rose from relative obscurity to becoming a popular catch-all metaphor, representing the perils of fast, wide-spreading (false) information about the coronavirus pandemic. It featured in thousands of academic publications and received widespread attention from policymakers and the media. In this article, we trace the or...

Despite the disruption the coronavirus pandemic has caused in academia, research has not ground to a halt. On the contrary, the early months of the pandemic saw a real boost in productivity in many scientific fields, with many researchers starting to work on COVID-related projects. This essay addresses this "pivot to COVID" in the fields of journal...

In this Reuters Institute report, we look at three key lessons learned on communications in the coronavirus crisis and look to the months ahead. We focus on communications because communication is central to any crisis, including a public health crisis, and is central to the political discussion around how we, as a society, handle them. Information...

This article provides one of the first analyses of visuals in misinformation concerning COVID-19. A mixed-methods analysis of ninety-six examples of visuals in misinformation rated false or misleading by independent professional fact-checkers from the first three months of 2020 identifies and examines six frames and three distinct functions of visu...

A core tenet of journalism is to contribute toward a functioning and healthy public sphere by ensuring transparency over issues and perspectives from different segments of society. However, it has become increasingly doubtful whether the news media can reflect the true diversity of society while lacking internal diversity in their newsrooms. In our...

In this Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford report, we examine information inequality and other social differences in how people have navigated the coronavirus communications crisis in the UK based on data from a series of surveys fielded fortnightly since mid-April. Our research was conducted as COVID-1...

Right-wing populists are gaining ground in Western democracies. Surveys show that they often distrust established media and public service media (PSM) in particular, claiming that they are biased against them. This paper examines how they have challenged PSM and proposes some potential responses to these challenges. The paper is based on an analysi...

In this factsheet we identify some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far. We analyse a sample of 225 pieces of misinformation rated false or misleading by fact-checkers and published in English between January and the end of March 2020, drawn from a collection of fact-checks maintained by First Draft News.

This report focuses on how digital-born news media navigate audience engagement in the context of both rapid developments in a digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environment and significant political pressure, including the ‘weaponisation’ of social media to target and harass independent news organisations and individual journalists, alo...

The study investigates structural influences on newsroom diversity in Germany, the UK, and Sweden. Based on semi-structured interviews with editors in chief, newsroom managers, heads of journalism schools and university journalism programs, as well as with journalism students and early-career journalists in all three countries, the study focuses on...

Big data techniques are increasingly used in marketing and to inform business decisions. The film industry is one area where big data that analyzes social media is being used to predict the popularity of films and to gauge audience interest. This is also an area where the stakes are high, and there has been extensive research about how to maximize...

As legacy news revenues continue to decline, and with the lion’s share of digital advertising revenues claimed by large technology companies, pay models have become an increasingly important part of the business of digital news. In this factsheet, we analyse the adoption of three dominant forms of pay models – freemium, metered paywalls, and hard p...

This report examines how digital-born news media in the Global South have developed innovative reporting and storytelling practices in response to growing disinformation problems. Based on field observation and interviews at Rappler in the Philippines, Daily Maverick in South Africa, and The Quint in India, we show that all three organisations comb...

Data-driven campaigning has been in the spotlight over several years. Yet, we still have a limited understanding of political data analytics companies: how they envision data analytics and voter targeting, their role in electoral processes and what promises they make to their clients. This article focuses on the way in which such issues are conceiv...

Popularity on social media has become more important for journalists as news organisations increasingly encourage their journalists to develop online personas which are popular with audiences. However, outlets’ social media guidelines have also narrowed journalists’ scope for action to do so, particularly in what they can post. Using a quantitative...

When UK Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on 29 March 2017, the United Kingdom officially initiated its exit from the European Union. After being a member of the EU for 44 years, it was the first country ever to make use of this formal mechanism created less than a decade ago. Much has been written about how the U...

In this RISJ factsheet we analyse 720,799 news-related tweets from a larger dataset of 4.4 million tweets collected during the 2017 German Federal Election to examine the role of digital-born and legacy news media in online political discussions in Germany.

The LEGO Movie, the highest-grossing animation film of 2014, surprised and impressed children, adults, and critics worldwide. The film's transfranchisal approach and its clever merchandising helped the Lego Group become the world's biggest toymaker in the following year. In order to provide context for understanding the Lego comeback, we first addr...

Im Jahr 2014 wurde The LEGO Movie zu einem überraschenden Erfolg an den Kinokassen und von Kritikern und Zuschauern gleichermaßen gelobt und gefeiert. Abgesehen von der Frage, was den Film so beliebt und kommerziell erfolgreich machte, ist The LEGO Movie innerhalb dieses Beitrags vor allem in Hinblick auf sein Corporate Branding interessant. Der Fi...