Previous research on news media and audience engagement has focused on mainstream news and journalists’ personal social media accounts. This paper use interviews with Black press journalists and focus groups with readers to examine digital Black press news outlets’ engagement practices on social media. I find that Black press editors balance business-focused and community-centered goals when engaging with their audience. Also, while digital Black press readers and journalists do not always agree on when or how entertainment and political content is posted, the two-way communication between them allows for ongoing iteration. I then conclude that both Black press outlets and readers contribute to the digital Black public sphere, which relies on the active exchange of information and a negotiation of ideologies.

The platformization of news has profoundly impacted journalism's political economy, notably in the contentious realm of editorial content moderation. Scholars have raised concerns that platforms’ automated and commercially driven moderation systems interfere with traditional editorial values and allow platforms to wield significant "opinion power" to shape public discourse. In response, the European Union has introduced a new media privilege in the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). This privilege requires platforms to explain and enable media organisations to contest moderation decisions before they go into effect, as well as rights to redress in cases of disagreement. However, this paper argues that by relying on platforms to operationalise this privilege, the EMFA paradoxically risks entrenching their power rather than mitigating it. By institutionalizing platforms as co-governors of the media ecosystem, the EMFA allows them to determine which media organizations qualify for special treatment. This approach fails to challenge platforms' opinion power and may exacerbate existing inequalities within the media sector, favoring large, well-resourced organizations. We identify two structural issues underpinning this contradiction. First, an underestimation of platforms as profit-driven entities with vested interests in shaping governance models to their advantage. Second, an overreliance on norms of procedural fairness and multistakeholderism, making the media privilege dependent on platforms' infrastructures and interests. This dynamic risks obstructing the goals the EMFA seeks to achieve. Drawing on this structural analysis, we identify several problematic attributes of the media privilege procedure, including its focus on individual rights, vague distribution of power, and lack of transparency.

Research highlights how negative, discriminatory narratives about marginalised groups are increasingly amplified through the digitalisation of the news media. Adopting a multi-method approach using surveys of 450 news audience members acting as everyday digital activists who have challenged the mainstream media on how it reports on minority groups together with ten follow-up focus groups with a sub-cohort of 70 survey respondents, I investigate how British audiences use digital activism to hold the news media to account for discriminatory and divisive coverage against these groups. In this paper, I present the findings of the research in relation to the demographics and motivations behind this type of media-centric digital activism, and how everyday audiences use digital activism to push for a more responsible, fairer news media when reporting on marginalised groups. By investigating the complexities of the media-audiences nexus in the digital age, these insights provide an urgent intervention to contemporary scholarship about how news audiences challenge powerful media institutions through digital activism at a time of increasing disinformation and rising levels of hate towards marginalised communities.

This study explores how Chinese journalists perceive, use, and report on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the reflected journalist roles. Through qualitative analysis of 18 in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists from various news organizations, the study examines how journalists, as both users and mediators of algorithms, shape public understanding while influenced by the sociotechnical and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017; Jasanoff, 2015) surrounding AI. The findings reveal that despite concerns over the opaque knowledge apparatus underpinning the AI value construction, Chinese journalists strive to maintain critical reporting without contributing to media hype. Engaging with the literature on the boundaries and boundary work of journalism (Carlson & Lewis, 2015, 2019), the study argues that Chinese journalists deploy preemptive boundary work to define their profession, as well as safeguard journalistic autonomy (Örnebring & Karlsson, 2022), involving dismissing the potential benefits of GenAI tools, building AI anchors that are less ‘real’ so that people could easily identify the use of AI tools that justifies the investments in journalistic innovation, and insisting on human being the final gatekeepers. Positioned within China’s unique political and media landscape, the research underscores the complexities of journalistic practice in the AI era.