Michael Opgenhaffen

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Institute for Media Studies

Computational journalistic tools have been implemented in the newsrooms since 2010. As these tools have started automating several work packages, they have the potential to change news workers’ roles and could also jeopardize journalistic autonomy. Due to the rapid technological advances like artificial intelligence, a knowledge gap has emerged in...

As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of...

This study examines how Meta as a company of various social media platforms communicates the disinformation crisis. Social media platforms are seen as a breeding ground for disinformation, and companies like Meta risk not only suffering reputational damage but also being further regulated by national and international legislation. We consider in th...

Facebook remains the most important platform where social media editors package and try to ‘sell’ media outlets’ online news articles to audiences. In one of the first studies of its kind, we assess how this practice was effectuated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use computational analysis to determine the polarity, subjectivity...

Social media editors (SMEs) have become fixtures in contemporary newsrooms as part of designated social media teams. A growing body of scholarship has explored their daily work routines and how they try to ‘sell’ online news on platforms such as Facebook while caught in the middle between mass media and social media logics. Thus far, there is littl...

Engineering teams – a form of newsroom innovation labs – have been heralded as survival entities in the news ecosystem as they have the potential to improve where news goes and moves. At The Washington Post, these teams have been around for three years, and they started to implement tools like election models fueled by A.I. and smart data pipelines...

Over the last 60 years, media outlets have been covering emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. This countrylevel study wants to give a nuanced overview of how these technologies were covered in US newspapers. First, a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling was conducted on articles on AI and automation in...

Over the past ten years, various newsroom innovation labs have emerged to modernize journalistic workflows. These labs have started to alter the news ecosystem, and we therefore focus on the organization, the roles, and the projects of innovation labs. This exploratory study conducted interviews with members of labs of The Washington Post, The Wall...

Social media have become a very important news platform, both for the presentation and consumption of news by social media users. News is therefore eagerly shared by news media on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in the hope of reaching as many news consumers as possible. In this highly competitive media landscape, news media aim...

This chapter examines the changing role of gatekeeping of newsworkers as they interact with computational journalistic tools (CJTs) in news distribution and moderation. As these CJTs get more in charge of gatekeeping over the last years, these tools can alter how daily decisions are made, in both how news is distributed and how comments of the audi...

Fact-checking as a specific genre has become more important than ever over the past two decades to counter misinformation. However, we know from previous research that people rarely actively search for fact-checks. This study therefore argues for the importance of fact-checks as so-called direct content interventions on social media. More specifica...

Newsroom innovation labs have been created over the last ten years to develop algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) that suggest and summarise what news is. Although these ANRs are still in an early stage and have not yet been implemented in the entire newsroom, they have the potential to change how newsworkers fulfil their daily decisions (gatekeepi...

Organizations in crisis can struggle to determine what the most effective response might be. Crisis responses can range between reactive or proactive, vague or transparent, defensive or accommodative, etc. When determining a stance, organizations must take into account not only the reputational consequences of their response, but legal and financia...

One of the main functions of news headlines is to get the public interested in the news article, using different strategies. With the shift from print to online and from online to social media news, further research into news headlines is necessary to understand their use in this new context. This study focuses on a very specific form of news headl...

This study explores the evolution of the climate discourses of China’s flagship party paper People’s Daily. Climate reports during COP1-24 (1995–2018) are analyzed in terms of the underlying development ideas and framings of climate change. It is found that climate change received increasing attention, with the years 2007 and 2015 representing two...

Seventeen in-depth interviews with professional media trainers from Belgium were carried out to examine which recommendations are offered during media training of organizational spokespersons. The interviews reveal the recommendations of media trainers concerning verbal, visual, and vocal cues of spokespersons, with special focus on addressing the...

The aim of this paper is to probe into the social media use by Chinese climate journalists through the examination of their professional practices on social media. Taking COP21 as a case, the study conducted a survey from Chinese COP21 journalists and analyzed WeChat and Weibo posts from Chinese journalists and tweets from their UK and US colleague...

In the past decade, public service broadcasters have been confronted with major shifts affecting their remit, portfolio and financing. Heavily fuelled by cutbacks and increasing competition, discussions on 'distinctiveness' have resurfaced again and stand central in many policy discussions on the legitimacy of public service broadcasting. This arti...

This entry elaborates on style and style guides, the sets of house-rules issued by news organizations in order to manage the use of news style by their journalists and reporters. News media can use these style guides to align itself towards its own journalists and to externally profile itself towards the audience and other news media. By doing so,...

Social media have become important news sources, prompting news organizations to create social media accounts to publish news. This requires a medium-based translation, in which social media editors must remediate news - selecting and possibly re-interpreting content - to accommodate a different audience and format. In this study we investigate thi...

This entry elaborates on style and style guides, the sets of house rules issued by news organizations in order to manage the use of news style by their journalists and reporters. News media can use these style guides to align itself toward its own journalists and to externally profile itself toward the audience and other news media. By doing so, st...

Climate negotiations have increasingly resonated with global governance and world power relations. However, media studies of climate change have paid relatively less attention to media frames of the problem solving. This study addresses this issue by examining the media coverage of COP21 from three countries that have considerable influence on clim...

Sinds de verkiezingscampagne in de Verenigde Staten van 2016 en het onverwachte resultaat van het brexit-referendum in Groot-Brittannië is de term 'fake news' niet meer weg te denken uit het publieke debat. Desinformatie is van alle tijden, maar in de digitale mediawereld gebeurt de verspreiding vaak heel gericht en zien we een exponentiële toename...

With the rising popularity of social media as news sources, a new common format element for presenting news has emerged: in addition to the classic headline, lead and picture, news organizations add a status message when they share their news articles on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Based on media logic theory, we argue that the commu...

Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers' public pages on Facebook. Sinc...

Samenvatting Geautomatiseerde dataverzameling van digitale nieuwscontent biedt nieuwe mogelijkheden voor onderzoek naar journalistiek. Dit artikel introduceert drie technieken – scrapers, API’s en data-archieven – om digitale data te verzamelen en bespreekt juridische en ethische aspecten van digitale dataverzameling. Het doel is om onderzoekers da...

Journalism research increasingly investigates large amounts of digital content, but collecting such content raises technological, legal, and ethical issues. This paper provides an overview of three techniques for collecting digital content (web scraping, API’s and data-archives) in light of legal and ethical considerations. As opposed to existing m...

This article shows that the collaboration between social science and computer science scholars proves fruitful in enhancing conceptual and methodological innovation in research appropriate for the digital world. It presents arguments for ways in which a multi-disciplinary approach can strengthen media studies and innovatively advance both research...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ policy with regard to employees’ social media use. Specifically, the authors examine the extent to which employers allow the use of social media in the workplace, what opportunities can be related to employees’ social media use and how social media guidelines are implemented within organiza...

Twenty-five in-depth interviews with Belgian crisis communication practitioners were conducted to examine the gap between theory and practice. Crisis communication has become an important research area within public relations. Several studies have resulted in theories and guidelines regarding the effective use of communication during organizational...

Fears exist that social media use by news media and journalists may affect basic journalistic tenets such as objectivity, gatekeeping, and transparency. As a result, more and more news media organizations are issuing guidelines to manage employee use of social media. In this article we discuss the complex relationship of a selection of market-leadi...

Now that an increasing number of journalists and editorial offices make use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to research, break, distribute and discuss the news, social media guidelines are being issued with increasing frequency by news organizations that want to indicate to journalists what is and is not permitted on these pl...

This research is based on two observations. First, journalism practice has changed rapidly and dramatically in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Digitization has imposed pressures on conventional business models, transformed the news production process, and redefined the relationship between newsmakers and their audiences. Second, durin...

The present study analyzed long-term trends in parental mediation of adolescent television viewing and how this mediation related to changes in teenagers' attachment to their parents. A Belgian panel of early adolescents (n = 883) and of middle adolescents (n = 651) rated three times in three consecutive years how often their parents used restricti...

Results of an online survey (N = 931) reveal that, in contrast with the general belief, college students do not at all seem to be heavy users of online news media and online news features (multimedia, interactivity and hypertext). A cluster analysis shows that the use of online news media and interactive features differs among the students, a major...

Journalism in Flanders: correspondence between practice, education and research Journalism in Flanders: correspondence between practice, education and research As journalism practice has changed over the last decade, so have the journalism curricula and the research field. While the news business was undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the d...

As journalism practice has changed over the last decade, so have the journalism curricula and the research field. While the news business was undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the digital revolution, Flanders witnessed a boom in journalism curricula and saw the emergence of a new research domain, namely journalism studies. Given the consta...

This paper argues for not studying the Web as one, homogeneous medium, but instead as a meta-medium that carries various divergent news media like news blogs, discussion forums, Web TV, and RSS news feeds, each with a specific presentation style. Based on a content analysis of Flemish online news media, the level of multimedia, interactivity and hy...

This study examines the impact of the use of multimedia, interactivity, and hypertext in Internet news reporting on learning from news. A knowledge experiment (N = 53) reveals that the use of multimedia, interactivity, and hypertext applications in online news indeed have an effect on recognition and cued recall, taking into account the level of di...

As journalism practice has changed over the last decade, so have the journalism curricula and the research field. While the news business was undergoing dramatic changes as a result of the digital revolution, Flanders witnessed a boom in journalism curricula and saw the emergence of a new research domain, namely journalism studies. Given the consta...

The focus of computer mediated communication research has been lying on the dialogical aspect of internet communication while the presentation and consumption of online news have been understudied. In this chapter, we make a strong plead for not studying the internet as one, homogeneous medium, but instead as a meta-medium that carries various dive...