DATAPUBLICS - Transforming Journalism and Audiences in the age of datafication

The project examines what the ever-increasing amount of data available in our society means to Journalism, and thus sheds light on the changes in the relations between the news media and the news users. In recent few years, big tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have taken on an increasing role in news distribution, and their increased importance is changing not only the journalism as we know it today, but also the news media ecosystem itself. At the same time, news organizations have big data sets about the behavior of the news user, just as the news user can partly personalize his news consumption through filters and partly subject to filtering through various algorithms. In other words, the data affirmation has fundamentally changed the news journalism, and this project examines what it means and what consequences it has for the democratic conversation and public connection. Through four empirical studies, we analyze how datafication of news transforms the way the publics are created and how it affects citizen engagement with the public. Overall, the project thus contributes to a new field of research on datafication of the news media and their publics and will theoretically develop the concept of “Datapublics”.