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News Professionals, Audiences and Communication Rights in a Global Perspective

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Futures of Journalism

Abstract

This chapter asks how news professionals working for global outlets use emerging technologies to develop relationships with their audiences, and why that matters from the perspective of communication rights. These include the right to be informed and the right to participate in public communication, both of which are related to the right to representation. Metrics are often said to encourage journalists to be guided by clicks rather than the informational needs of their publics, but interviews excerpted in this chapter suggest that they are also being used to help journalists understand the heterogenous informational needs of their audiences and thus serve them better. Drawing on findings from a study of the communicative dimension of inequality under globalization, it argues that resource-rich news organizations with global audiences can, and do, engage with innovative technology in ways that can be thought to safeguard and, in some instances, even enhance communication rights.

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Funding

This chapter draws on the Just Information project (justinformation.se), funded by the Swedish Research Council.

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Correspondence to Alexa Robertson .

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Robertson, A., Schaetz, N. (2022). News Professionals, Audiences and Communication Rights in a Global Perspective. In: Manninen, V.J.E., Niemi, M.K., Ridge-Newman, A. (eds) Futures of Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95073-6_7

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