Diversity : Analogue to Digital Content Filtering

On April 14–15, the European IQ Media Conference on “Innovation in the Media” was organized by the Group Nice-Matin and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. IQ Media Hub hosted a conference titled “The Future of Digital Journalism: Artificial Intelligence, Innovation and Integrity”, in Athens. Verica Rupar was invited to be the keynote speaker on “diversity in the news and algorithm”. She started by quoting Alain Touraine: “Can we live together, equal and different?”
When speaking about diversity Verica Rupar made the distinction between understanding diversity as a demographic marker and representation of diversity at every level of production. She made the case about why having diverse teams in every step of the process shapes the reception and impact of a piece of work.

💡 Who speaks to journalists? The speaker begins by discussing the traditional approach of legacy media, which, despite being “carefully diverse,” still tends to favor specific types of sources. She explains how journalists, in their process of filtering information, often prioritize certain perspectives, leading them to listen less to, and engage less with, broader communities. This lack of diversity in sources contributes to a perception of reporting as shallow or one-sided, fostering public distrust in the media.

🤔How people engage with media? Another point the speaker brought up was the way people engage with media or so called diversity of exposure. She spoke about a series of interviews with “Hard to reach communities” during the COVID-19 pandemic in which officials found that what mattered the most to people when they decided which information they could trust was the source. Overwhelmingly what people trusted the most was what appeared in “WhatsApp”. This highlighted the need to diversify the channels used for communication. When it comes to social media we have to talk about the algorithm.

👏 “Challenges in the Age of Algorithms” Verica Rupar described a shift that is happening in the way information is being produced, filtered and distributed. While the everyday persons’ ability to produce media makes it easier for marginalized people to have a platform than ever before, all this “overproduction” leads to “communication noise”. While content used to be filtered by professional individuals due to the sheer volume of content on social media, the curation and filtering of content is done by algorithms. The speaker underlined that “Program-based, automated sets of rules don’t have agency, but their creators do”

Verica Rupar advocates for programmers working on algorithms to have journalism literacy. The shift from legacy media to social media as a trusted source speaks to peoples’ need to hear diverse perspectives which represent the members of their community. However, social media is not without its faults.The algorithmic nature of social media means that those who design and program these systems must recognize how their creations shape information. Viewing programmers as one step removed from news curators highlights how important it is for them to have an understanding of the way media and communications work.

✍️ Eleni Varela (Student at the University of Athens)

📸 Franck Fernandes (Nice-Matin)