[EN] The Observatory for Research on Media and Journalism of the UCLouvain conducts interdisciplinary research that questions the journalistic profession and the role and evolution of the news media in French-speaking Belgium and in contemporary societies. They also analyse the digital transformation of journalism and news media. The research we carry out uses different methodologies ranging from ethnography, questionnaire surveys, interviews or focus groups to the automated analysis of large corpora of textual or visual data. The ORM is the research centre associated with the Louvain School of Journalism (EJL).
[FR] L’Observatoire de Recherche sur les Médias et le journalisme de l’UCLouvain mène des recherches interdisciplinaires qui interrogent les métiers du journalisme et les rôles des médias d’information en Belgique francophone et dans les sociétés contemporaines. Elles analysent également la transformation numérique du journalisme et des médias d’information. Les recherches que nous menons mobilisent différentes méthodologies allant de l’ethnographie, aux enquêtes par questionnaire, aux interviews ou aux focus groupes, jusqu’à l’analyse automatisée de gros corpus de données textuelles ou visuelles. L’ORM est le centre de recherche associé à l’Ecole de journalisme de Louvain (EJL).
Our work focuses on three challenges that are profoundly transforming media ecosystems today:
The Evolution of Journalism in Times of Mistrust, Uncertainty and Datacentrism
This part of our research focuses on public interest information producers. Some examples of recent research carried out by our members:
- The study of the socio-economics of the news media;
- The sociological analysis of the professional group of journalists and its evolution (careers, status, professional practices and routines, etc.);
- The comparative study of the role of journalists in democracy and the political evolution of journalistic cultures;
- The study of attacks/threats against the journalistic institution and its representatives;
- The analysis of journalistic ethics, media law and regulatory institutions of journalistic activity.
The Transformation of News Production and Circulation in the Digital Age
We focus mainly on the study of the production and circulation of information content in public spaces. Some examples of recent research carried out by our members:
- The analysis of the production, circulation and reception of information and media narratives;
- The analysis of controversies and the career of social problems in public spaces and digital public spaces;
- The analysis of the mechanisms of automation of the collection, production and dissemination of information (thanks in particular to Artificial Intelligence) and the study of the evolution of journalistic roles and practices that this entails;
- The diffusion and impact of misinformation and disinformation and the analysis of informational and infodemic vulnerability.
- The automated analysis (text mining, image, sentimental analysis, stereotypes identification) of large corpora of french-speaking media content.
The Reconfiguration of Media/Audience Relationship (Privacy, Confidence, Engagement, Participation)
An important part of our research is focused on media audiences. Some recent examples of research conducted by our members:
- The analysis of trust indicators in the news media and the media professionals;
- The analysis of new relationship modalities between media and audiences (audience turn): news engagement, individualisation and personalisation of data flows, participation/transparency dynamics, use of blockchain technology as a tool for audience engagement;
- R&D projects aiming at developing new information formats based on the evolution of audiences and their relationship to information: gamification, multimodality, immersive AR-VR-XR technologies;
- Analysis of information automation (AI) mechanisms.