Keynote: Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgenson (University Dean of Research Environment and Culture Cardiff University) The rise of boutique media: Authority, trust and emotion in post-industrial news production

• Boutique media as those that are not institutionalised media creators
• First positive piece of journalism research I’ve seen in years
• Call to Action to expand how we understand media with a range of media forms
• Boutique media has the affordability to be agile and responsive, but is also at risk of being swooned by those they commentate on (i.e. how influencers operate)

Children’s Creative Agency

Digital puppet lab: child expressions of agency, identity, and creativity through multimodal, play-based workshops

Harrison Waed See¹, Sian Tomkinson¹, Lingyue Ding¹, Kylie Stevenson², Giselle Woodley¹, Stephanie Milford¹

1: Edith Cowan University, Australia; 2: Murdoch University, Australia

• Interviewing children is hard, so alternative approaches are needed
• Young people using iPads to understand ‘texture’
• Drawing to workshop scenarios “draw your puppet in an adventure…”
• Co-design emerges as strong because of the ownership the young people have in their puppet design
• Instead of giving answers, ask questions to help guide the participant to find the answer

Children as Creative Digital Players: Exploring Digital Play in Family Contexts Among Children Aged 3–5

Lingyue Ding, Edith Cowan University, Australia

• High penetration rate of internet for people, and young people, as basis of research
• Screentime and parents having negative view of video games, rely more on control-based mediation
• Qual research methods, young people and parents, ethnographic
• Q: what about interviewing paediatricians?
• Much evidence of the resilience, sharing of joy, longer moments of concentration, higher levels of emotions (sounds like negative emotions)

Uncovering the Analogue Archaeology of Children’s Digital Gamble-Play Cultures

Jessica Balanzategui¹, César Albarrán-Torres²

1: RMIT; 2: Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

• ARC grant presentation
• Non mobile game data presented here, but rather material gaming play cultures such as claw games etc. to highlight cross pollination across an ecosystem of young people and gambling
• Melbourne central walkthrough of the space that is from the muliple spaces that blur the line between adventure park/game arcades/Lego shops etc.
• Eb Games and arcade sit side by side, adapted Walkthrough method
• Ambient Play, Larissa and Ingrid
• Conflation of urban space: it’s Melbourne Central – it’s difficult to ‘see’ it when you are there all the time (and probably not a young person)
• Playthings and Playtime

Co-Designing Digital Policy in Early Childhood Education: Turning the Tide on Top-Down Approaches

Stephanie Milford, Sinead Wilson, Karen Murcia, Emma Cross, Sarsha Mennell, Curtin University, Australia

• Policy lag in this space where early childhood centersa re now creating their own ‘policy’ (I suspect more guidelines than policy?)

Journalism Practice & Impact

Turning Tides of Friendship: Chinese-Australian Journalists and Local Communities, 1920-1945© [Zoom]

Caryn Coatney University of Southern Queensland, Australia

• Chinese Australian reporters, editors and publicists are harnessing power to raise awareness of their own communities
• Beyond jounrnalistic values, there is, heroic responsibility, business elite,
• This was underway while the White Australia policy, thre was pushback from other Australian journalists (SMH, Tele, etc.) arguing that trade would be at risk if the White Australia policy remined
• Mrs Fabian Chow (Alice Lee Kim)
• The Chinese journalism world has risen and fallen across eras within Australia, which is very different to what was happening in the US and the UK. Unionism was high there, whereas here they were more focused on traded development.

Virtuous hacks: Identifying the qualities that characterise good journalism through qualitative research

Sacha Molitorisz, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

• Virtue ethics and Australian journalists
• Eudaimonia (flourishing) is a good thing
• Virtue – th epurpose of human life is to live a good life. Identify what the virtues are and cultivate them – this is eudaimonia
• Top three: courage, justice, truth-telling
• Q: how does this differ from journalist ethics?

What do we do with diversity? Limited mechanisms of news media redress under stress

Archie Thomas¹, David Nolan², 1: University of Technology Sydney; 2: University of Canberra

• Diversity is an ambivalent assemblage, heterogeneous, an ’empty signifier’ (Ahmed, 2012), its backlash suggests its successes and failures
• Institutions being forced into ‘diversity’
• Often diversity is the embodied diversity, the visible,
• Diversity policy across news media orgs, through a traffic light system (clear, there but unclear, not there)
• staffing is one persepcitve, infrastrucues and policies is another and this is reflected in different countries
• Q: are news orgs doing diversity in different ways, then?

*image generated by AI, obviously.