Raul Ferrer Conill

Karlstads Universitet · Department of Geography, Media and Communication

The datafication and platformization of social processes further the overall shift from an open, public, and decentralized internet towards a private and siloed realm that establishes power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade, and control data. The ongoing process of datafying societies embraces the logics of aggrega...

This essay argues that there are overlooked yet important journalistic beliefs, norms, rules and practices regarding, aesthetics, automation, distribution, engagement, identity, and proximity that could be a part of formalized codes of ethics. There are four reasons why these should be formalized. First, making the implicit normative dimensions exp...

Journalism and other institutions clash over automated news generation, algorithmic distribution and content ownership worldwide. AI policies are the main mechanisms that establish and organise the hierarchies among these institutions. Few studies, however, have explored the normative dimension of AI in policymaking in journalism, especially beyond...

While traditional media often fails to engage young audiences with news, YouTubers’ content gains popularity and attracts attention with specific stylistic practices. Based on dimensions of audience engagement and a worthwhileness approach, this article examines how young audiences engage with YouTubers’ formats and genres used in news media produc...

This chapter explores how innovative narratives, supported by a combination of playful approaches and technological convergence, provide a reconfiguration of digital news storytelling. The use of gamification and newsgames exemplifies what has been called “Total Journalism”. Newsgames seek to integrate two opposing logics: the culture of journalism...

Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or r...

Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produc...

In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news co...

This study investigates the visual objects that are used to either disclose or disguise the commercial nature of native advertising as news articles. We adopt a “material object” approach to explore the potential implications for journalism regarding transparency, trust, and credibility. Methodologically, this study used content analysis covering 2...

Should regional context overshadow theoretical contributions of a doctoral dissertation or an international journal article? In this essay, we argue that expendable region-centricism diminishes the contributions of Majority World Countries to the media and communication discipline. We propose that ‘de-contextualized’ studies – which accentuate the...

Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and control of temporal new...

Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy...

From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of commun...

Research has paid relatively little attention to two aspects that are increasingly important in understanding data journalism as a maturing field: (a) journalism today is increasingly provided by a diverse set of actors both inside and outside of legacy media organizations, and (b) data journalism has become a global phenomenon that cannot be fully...

Traditional news outlets are on the decline and journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. New models of delivering news to the public are being explored in order to increase the levels of readership and user engagement.The narrative of this chapter focuses on the future of journalism and media, and the potential benefits and...

For over a century, crosswords, puzzles, and quizzes have been present in newspapers. Digital journalism has only increased the trend of integrating game elements in news media, often blurring the traditional boundaries between news and games. This dissertation aims to explore and understand how and why news organizations and newsworkers use gamif...

The prominence of “fake news” today has sparked an open challenge to the legitimacy of traditional news media. As a result, a series of independent data-driven organisations are emerging to fact-check legacy news media as well as other news sources. This study examines how these actors advocate and adopt journalistic practice and the perceived impa...

The use of native advertising has sparked a heated debate. While similar formats have a long history within journalism, this new iteration furthers the blurring of boundaries between news and ads by producing ads that look and feel like news, but that are clearly labeled as advertising. This book chapter critically addresses the phenomenon of nativ...

Ferrer-Conill critically analyses the trend of incorporating playful thinking and game elements within working processes among organizations and businesses with the promise of worker empowerment and self-realization. Focusing on the notion of playbour and gamification of work, this chapter discusses and contextualises practical and theoretical outc...

Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper d...

Our contemporary popular culture is at the same time unprecedentedly intriguing and hard-grasped. When trying to describe the vast landscape of branded, interconnected commodities that largely constitute this culture, it is easy to run out of words. While we have grown accustomed to saying that new media accelerate the pace of this culture, we rema...

Native advertising mimics journalistic content while labelling it as advertising. News and native ads are differentiated through a negotiation between news attributes that form the look and feel of a typical news story and a set of boundary devices. In this paper, we explore how boundary devices are implemented and we compare how they differ within...

Crisis and disaster management organizations in developing countries are facing a challenging problem: the processes of urbanization vis a vis traditional societal organizations need for different approaches to communicate with the population. This paper aims to analyze the channels of communication during crisis situations in Ghana and how the pro...

This paper examines the way in which game mechanics and metrics are introduced in a journalistic context, how they are used to motivate journalists and enhance performance, and what are the reactions of journalists who interact with the system. By qualitatively assessing the case of Bleacher Report, it is argued that there is a growing trend in new...

In recent years, the trend of incorporating playful thinking and game elements within working processes has gained popularity among organizations and businesses. The rhetoric behind this phenomenon is anchored in newfound sources of worker empowerment, self-realization for employees and turning labour into a fun and enjoyable experience. This paper...

When Swedish artist Tove Styrke released her album Kiddo (2015) on Spotify, she mobilized her fans through an immersive marketing campaign that stretched across and beyond media platforms: an 8-bit game, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Dreamhack, and a major Swedish music festival were key campaign platforms. The campaign construction was hardly unique...

According to previous research, contemporary journalism is undergoing a quantitative turn. The uses of data and metrics have started to permeate digital news websites in various ways. However, there is a lack of research on how gamification is applied to journalism practice. This article examines how the quantification of news production, readers’...

In order to conceptualize the ways in which data is permeating journalism practice, practitioners and researchers often focus on the instrumental value of data and its incorporation in existing journalistic processes. Data journalism and its many manifestations attempt to make use of databases – usually open data but also large sets of leaked docum...

Several news media have started to introduce gamification techniques into their digital platforms as a new storytelling format for news consumption. Since habit strength is the most powerful predictor of news consumption, the goal is to not only engage news consumers, but also to provide a personalized news experience and to persuade users to foste...

New forms of storytelling that include game mechanics, such as newsgames and gamification have steadily been incorporated into digital journalism (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010). By adding game-like features that act as persuasive actors in order to motivate young readers to consume news, digital publishers aim to attract readers and foster t...

One of the most celebrated characteristics of the internet is that it holds incredibly large amounts of data. It is also one of the most problematic characteristics of the internet. There is an overabundance of data generated on social networking sites, user comments on media outlets, review platforms, and governmental data sources that is shaping...

In 2006 Jay Rosen penned an article in which the shift of power relations between the audience and the media is addressed as a ground breaking change that would lead to an emancipated status for the people formerly known as the audience. Rosen’s article would spark a long-standing debate on audience participation, favoring an understanding of audie...

Crisis and disaster management organizations in developing countries are facing a challenging problem: the processes of urbanization vis a vis traditional societal organizations call for different approaches to communicate with the population. In countries where vulnerabilities, threats, and risks are high, the establishment of channels of communic...

This paper examines the increasing trend of adopting native advertising in the digital editions of traditional news media outlets. Native advertising is defined here as a form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content, with the attempt to recreate the user experience of reading news inst...

Gamification has become a popular concept that has both permeated scholarly work and practical implementation. However, reflection on its applicability is usually done through a performative dimension in which unique applications are studied, usually only aiming to determine effects on the public. This paper expands this approach by theorizing gami...

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, and data practices. To do so we analyse an investigative journalism story run by The Guardian that combined open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. The case study highlights how data can be made accessible to people...

This paper explores the increasing trend of adopting native advertising in the digital editions of traditional news media outlets. Native advertising is defined here as a form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content, as an attempt to recreate the user experience of reading news instead...

The conflicting powers that drive journalism are entangled within tensions between commercial and professional logics, trying to dictate the future of the trade. The professional logic, which regards audiences as citizens, is the driving force that nurtures the civic and ideal-typical values properties of journalism. The commercial logic, which reg...

Traditional news outlets are on the decline and journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. New models of delivering news to the public are being explored in order to increase the levels of readership and user engagement.The narrative of this chapter focuses on the future of journalism and media, and the potential benefits and...

As the use of mobile phones spreads through society, traditional news consumption is steadily being substituted by innovative environments and behaviors, sparking new ritual forms of media consumption. Additionally, video games have become a pervasive type of media that attracts the big majority of youth, sometimes displacing news consumption. For...

The irruption of digital journalism introduced several opportunities and challenges to journalism. Roughly two decades after the introduction of the internet, big data has started to transform the way we understand information and how to use it. The quantification of visitors, readers, and users’ interactions has become the de facto analytic tool f...

This research project examines the effects of applying gamification techniques in the consumption of news in the emerging mobile society. The focus is placed on young users and their mobile media choice and news consumption habits. As mobile devices have expanded their functionalities, the rise and ubiquity of constant Internet connectivity has al...

As digital technology has been embedded in journalism practice, the notion of space seemed to transcend physical barriers. However, during the last years, mobile technology and augmented reality (AR) have allowed reformulating the bind between news and space. Locative journalism has emerged as a novel source of news services delivering news accordi...

Journalism has several gears for motivating its existence, alongside with information, entertainment, and advertisement (McQuail, 1994). The conflicting powers that drive journalism are entangled within tensions between commercial logics and professional logics (Altheide & Snow, 1991; Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013), trying to dictate the future of the...

The traditional newspaper is declining and journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. New models of delivering news to the public are being explored in order to increase the levels of readership and user engagement. This paper introduces a new framework for researching the application of gamification techniques in journalism...

There is a multiplicity of factors that can explain the ever-growing adoption of virtual organizations in the current international workplace. These factors are interwoven in a way that feeds each other in an ebb and flow of the trends of virtualization. Virtual teams, as groups that are geographically and organizationally dispersed, tend to feel...

A decade after the launch of Facebook, social media has expanded and established itself as one of the everyday life arenas for communication for millions of users. However, the standardized services such as communities without thematic approaches (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) have started to see a dip in user engagement. This paper examines...

1 Research questions My PhD research will address the following practical and meta-theoretical ques-tions: How does mobility affect the creation, distribution, and consumption of news? What are the theoretical and practical implications of applying gamification in a mobile news context? How could gamification techniques be successfully implemented...

There is a multiplicity of factors that can explain the ever-growing adoption of virtual project management in the current international workplace. These factors are interweaved in a way that feeds each other in a ebb and flow of the trends of virtualization. This current increase of virtual projects and their economic importance has led to a new s...

The concept of trust is of vital importance in crisis environments. In developing countries, where vulnerabilities, threats, and risks are higher, establishing proper channels of communication that can generate trust in the population are even more important. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the channels of communication during a crisis situ...

Within a framework of development, this paper discusses the current estate of education access as well as some of the current challenges for the implantation and design of ICT initiatives in developing countries, and reflects on the new shift of paradigm in the field of ICT4E. These challenges can be overcome by applying methods that merge their im...