There has never been a golden age of journalism, where every last paper made stellar profits and the audience trusted every word that was printed. In recent years though, the difficulty to monetise news, especially on the local level, has resulted in many newsroom closures and job losses. Tech giants like Google and Facebook scooped up most of the digital advertising revenue, depriving newspapers of an important way to finance journalism. Add to this a crisis of public trust in the media and the picture really does not look good.
Despite an acute need for solutions, the gap between academic research on the media industry and journalists’ willingness to take scholars seriously is making everyone miss out. In this session, we bring together these two worlds to discuss better ways of working together on solving news industry’s problems.