Three Media & Democracy projects received international attention

September 24-27, one of the largest international research conferences in communication and media was organized in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia. The conference is called ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association - and in addition to Kristoffer Holt, other media researchers from Sweden also participated, among them Malin Picha Edwardsson from Södertörn University and Bengt Johansson at the University of Gothenburg. What the trio had in common was that they qualified to present projects where Media & Democracy is a partner.

• Malin Picha Edwardsson talked about Local democracy in a digital host.
• Kristoffer Holt on Young Citizens and Quality of News.
• Bengt Johansson on Strengthened local journalism in crises.

How was the conference and how did the presentation go?
- It was an intensive conference with many interesting presentations and opportunities for networking. Our innovative method, where we combine psychophysiological lab measurements such as eye-tracking, with more traditional methods such as interviews, aroused great curiosity in the audience.

Did you get questions and exciting reactions?
- Yes! The panel in which our paper was presented also consisted of other papers that also targeted younger media consumers, which meant that we had a lot of common interests.

For those who do not know about Young Citizens and Quality of News as a project. What has it explored?
- We have investigated how young citizens (18-25) think, think and experience quality in news content. Our way of doing this is from a bottom-up perspective, where we do not start in predefined theoretical constructs, but by talking to and examining how our participants experience and react to news, build an understanding in as unconditional a way as possible . The results are summarized in a Media & Democracy report, which was published in December last year (see link below, editor's note).

That project ended at the turn of the year, but basically at the same time a new one started that we also collaborate in: Young Citizens and Local News. Just as the name suggests, it focuses on local news and local journalism. What else is different?
- We will have a clearer focus on the extent to which this age group makes an effort to find local news and, above all, how this can be done. The focus is therefore more on a developed observational study, rather than the experience itself.

Young Citizens and Local News will close at the end of next year. Are there knowledge gaps that you particularly hope the project will contribute to closing?
- In particular, I believe that this project, like the previous one, contributes to an understanding of today's media landscape from the perspective of the younger audience.

Speaking of new knowledge: what is the most tangible, and perhaps unexpected, thing you took home from ECREA?
- A clear tendency that was noticed this year was how quickly different AI-powered aids entered the scientific knowledge production. Many papers explored in different ways what new possibilities the large language models offer for, for example, analyzing large amounts of text and thus being able to obtain perspectives that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. At the same time, it is clear that there is still some uncertainty about the reliability of many of the results.