Ike Picone
Biographic Data
| ID | 316620 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ike Picone |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ike |
| FAMILY NAME | Picone |
| SIGNATURE | PICONE I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0423-3456 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Networks of Influence: Journalism Innovation and the Politics of Public Support
In recent years innovation gained traction as a prominent policy rationale informing the design of publicly funded initiatives for journalism support. While this shift reflects the urgency of supporting structural transformation in the field, the processes through which such programmes are designed remain underexplored, particularly the role and configuration of influential stakeholders’ networks and the innovation rationales they help institutio…
Data mirroring: A methodological framework for data-donation-based interviews in media use research
This article introduces “data mirroring,” a methodological framework for conducting data-donation-based interviews using Data Download Packages (DDPs) from digital platforms. Since the General Data Protection Regulation took effect, DDPs have found application in research. While the literature on the value of DDPs primarily points toward scaling and validating aggregate-level data, their potential to illuminate complex user–media relationships wi…
“It’s a bit like pick and choose”: How young media users assign authority to cultural mediators
As the boundaries between producers and consumers in both journalism and cultural industries continue to blur, questions arise about the changing gatekeeping and interpretational roles. The study examines how young adults assign authority to cultural mediators, ranging from traditional cultural journalists to social media personalities, when selecting and evaluating cultural goods. The aim is to understand how journalistic and non-journalistic vo…
What Roles Can Journalists (Still) Play for the Self-Curating News User? Exploring How Young Adults Tailor Their Social Media News Feeds
As young adults increasingly turn to social media for news, they rely on an eclectic mix of journalistic and non-journalistic sources to shape their daily news intake. To navigate this complexity, social media news users develop personal curation practices such as (un)liking or (un)following content to construct their personal news feeds. The study examines how these practices inform the roles that news users attribute to journalists. Using a nov…
Making sense of ambivalence: Audience perceptions and uses of Ben Shapiro as an alternative political commentator
Alternative Political Commentators (APCs) have gained prominence on digital platforms as new opinion leaders to politically engaged young adults. This study responds to a growing demand for an audience-focused exploration of perceptions and use practices of what has been described as reactionary digital media. We specifically examine the case of Ben Shapiro, a leading conservative voice on YouTube, employing a mixed-methods approach, triangulatin…
Affordances-in-Practice: How Social Norm Dynamics in Climate Change Publics Are Shaped on Instagram and Twitter
Social norms are flexible regulating forces of human behavior. They are shaped by humans, whose actions in turn are shaped by their environment, including the online social spaces they venture into. The objective of this research is to create an understanding of how the affordances of social media platforms shape social norm dynamics in online publics, particularly in climate change publics. For this purpose, we make a comparative analysis of the…
Is a financially viable news media market the key to fighting disinformation in Europe? A cross-country quantitative study
The rise of fake news poses a significant challenge for governments worldwide, prompting the European Commission to address the urgency of combating disinformation. In the contemporary ‘market of attention’, where economic considerations often overshadow democratic and societal concerns, disinformation thrives. This study asserts that financial viability within news media markets is a critical yet overlooked factor in the fight against disinforma…
Alex, Do Not Backpedal on Sandy Hook: Reactionary Fandom, Cancel Culture, and the Possibility of ‘Audience Capture’ on YouTube
Cancel culture” has gained tremendous attention in contemporary political discourse. On platforms like YouTube, reactionary ideological entrepreneurs often employ what Ng terms second-order discourses on cancel culture, that is, portraying call-out practices such as shaming public figures as left-wing censorship efforts stifling free speech. This article argues that such call-out practices, generally ascribed to progressive communities, also occu…
Coping with Covid: Exploring reconfigurations of Flemish news repertoires in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
Does the audience welcome an audience-oriented journalism
Although the ‘audience turn’ ( Costera Meijer, 2020 ) in journalism has been extensively discussed in studies, and journalists acknowledge the need to improve their relationship with their audience ( Nelson and Lewis 2022 ), the audience’s perspective on journalistic roles remains underexplored ( Riedl and Eberl, 2020 ). Generally, the examination of journalistic roles has been from a production perspective ( Hanusch 2019 ). We aim to address thi…
The art of attracting attention: A process model of Chinese toubu vloggers' strategies to create online identities and self-brands
Since 2018, toubu vloggers – a term that refers to the vloggers who earn the majority of traffic and attention through vlogging their daily lives on Chinese social media – remain a limited quantity in the emerging and rapidly growing Chinese vlogging market. This article aims to explore the performative identity strategies developed by Chinese toubu vloggers to attract attention and stand out from the multitude of vloggers on social media platfor…
Windows to the World: Imagining Flemish News Audiences and Their Views on Society through the Lens of News Repertoires
News media act as a window to the world. This window is now believed to be shrinking due to developments in digital media such as algorithmic personalization which restricts people to echo chambers in turn affecting citizens’ views on society. It is an example of the moral panics surrounding digital media and obfuscating underlying social dynamics at play. This article seeks to address this issue by looking at news use through the lens of news re…
Mobilized, negotiated and balanced: Chinese school vloggers’ platform engagements and layered identity construction on Bilibili
Entangled with wanghong (literally: popular people on the internet) and the platform economy in China, it has become trendy for Chinese youth to present themselves as they pursue visibility and monetization as vloggers on social media platforms. In this research, we do not focus on celebrities or influencers but on the regular Chinese school vloggers who present and share their everyday lives in and around the school on Bilibili, a youth-oriented…
Operationalising Hybrid Newsroom Ethnography: Observing Amidst a Pandemic
This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually, we operationalise a previously developed model for pinpointing changes inside newsrooms. Our study s…
Media as the great emancipators? Exploring relations between media repertoires and cultural participation in Flanders
Media convergence has afforded users an increasing amount of options regarding the media they consume, available at the click of a button. This has led some to clamor about the potential for media to bridge previously existing inequalities and decrease social stratification not just in media use, but in other realms of society as well. Skeptics have argued that while the convergence of media has given users more options in their own media reperto…
Tuning Out the News. A Cross-Media Perspective on News Avoidance Practices of Young News Users in Flanders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed "coronablocking": the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of h…
Reach or Trust Optimisation? A Citizen Trust Analysis in the Flemish Public Broadcaster VRT
In democracies, one of Public Service Media’s (PSM) main roles is to inform the public. In a digital news ecosystem, where commercial, citizen, and alternative news sources have multiplied, questions about the ability and need for PSM to fulfil this role are increasingly being raised. While the role of PSM can and should be scrutinized, a too-narrow a focus on an informed citizenry may obfuscate aspects, other than audience reach and objectivity,…
Innovation Beyond the Buzzwords: The Rocky Road Towardsa Digital First-based Newsroom
In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingencies of changing the fixed structures of working journalists who are forced to undergo radical change…
Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage…
Interruption, Disruption or Intervention? A Stakeholder Analysis of Small Acts of Engagement in Content Flows
Emerging Trends in Small Acts of Audience Engagement and Interruptions of Content Flows
Een mediapark in Brussel? De mediasector en zijn regionale dynamiek: Synthesenota BSI
In deze synthesenota analyseren we vanuit een mediaclusterperspectief de kenmerken van de Brusselse mediasector en evalueren we de implicaties voor de grote beleidsinterventie van het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest in deze sector: mediapark.brussels. Dit stadsontwikkelingsproject ter hoogte van de Reyerslaan, vlak bij de huidige site van de openbare televisiezenders VRT en RTBF, zal tien jaar in beslag nemen. De resultaten van ons onderzoek werpe…
A mediapark in Brussels? The media industry and its regional dynamics: BSI synopsis
This synopsis analyses from a media cluster perspective the characteristics of the media industry in Brussels and assesses the implications for the major policy intervention of the Brussels Capital Region in this industry: the mediapark.brussels, a 10-year urban and property development project at Reyers around the existing site of the public broadcasting companies VRT and RTBF. Our research results shed light on several clustering configurations…
Un mediapark à Bruxelles ? L’industrie des médias et sa dynamique régionale: Note de synthèse BSI
La présente note de synthèse examine les caractéristiques de l’industrie des médias à Bruxelles du point de vue des clusters de médias et en évalue les implications pour la principale action stratégique de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale à l’égard de cette industrie, à savoir, le projet décennal mediapark.brussels pour le développement urbanistique et immobilier du quartier Reyers, autour du site actuel des organismes publics de radiotélévision q…
Who Shares and Comments on News: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who u…
When News is Everywhere: Understanding participation, cross-mediality and mobility in journalism from a radical user perspective
This article contends that not only journalism but also journalism studies can benefit from a stronger commitment to the public. While the bodies of literature on “popular journalism”, “public journalism” and “citizen/participatory journalism” have, in different contexts and from different angles, made a strong case in favour of a public-oriented approach to journalism, it is remarkable how few of the empirical studies on journalism are based on …
Innovation Beyond the Buzzwords: The Rocky Road Towardsa Digital First-based Newsroom
In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingencies of changing the fixed structures of working journalists who are forced to undergo radical change…
Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage…
Who Shares and Comments on News: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who u…
Mobilized, negotiated and balanced: Chinese school vloggers’ platform engagements and layered identity construction on Bilibili
Entangled with wanghong (literally: popular people on the internet) and the platform economy in China, it has become trendy for Chinese youth to present themselves as they pursue visibility and monetization as vloggers on social media platforms. In this research, we do not focus on celebrities or influencers but on the regular Chinese school vloggers who present and share their everyday lives in and around the school on Bilibili, a youth-oriented…
Operationalising Hybrid Newsroom Ethnography: Observing Amidst a Pandemic
This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually, we operationalise a previously developed model for pinpointing changes inside newsrooms. Our study s…
Tuning Out the News. A Cross-Media Perspective on News Avoidance Practices of Young News Users in Flanders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed "coronablocking": the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of h…
The art of attracting attention: A process model of Chinese toubu vloggers' strategies to create online identities and self-brands
Since 2018, toubu vloggers – a term that refers to the vloggers who earn the majority of traffic and attention through vlogging their daily lives on Chinese social media – remain a limited quantity in the emerging and rapidly growing Chinese vlogging market. This article aims to explore the performative identity strategies developed by Chinese toubu vloggers to attract attention and stand out from the multitude of vloggers on social media platfor…
Does the audience welcome an audience-oriented journalism
Although the ‘audience turn’ ( Costera Meijer, 2020 ) in journalism has been extensively discussed in studies, and journalists acknowledge the need to improve their relationship with their audience ( Nelson and Lewis 2022 ), the audience’s perspective on journalistic roles remains underexplored ( Riedl and Eberl, 2020 ). Generally, the examination of journalistic roles has been from a production perspective ( Hanusch 2019 ). We aim to address thi…
Coping with Covid: Exploring reconfigurations of Flemish news repertoires in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
Alex, Do Not Backpedal on Sandy Hook: Reactionary Fandom, Cancel Culture, and the Possibility of ‘Audience Capture’ on YouTube
Cancel culture” has gained tremendous attention in contemporary political discourse. On platforms like YouTube, reactionary ideological entrepreneurs often employ what Ng terms second-order discourses on cancel culture, that is, portraying call-out practices such as shaming public figures as left-wing censorship efforts stifling free speech. This article argues that such call-out practices, generally ascribed to progressive communities, also occu…
When News is Everywhere: Understanding participation, cross-mediality and mobility in journalism from a radical user perspective
This article contends that not only journalism but also journalism studies can benefit from a stronger commitment to the public. While the bodies of literature on “popular journalism”, “public journalism” and “citizen/participatory journalism” have, in different contexts and from different angles, made a strong case in favour of a public-oriented approach to journalism, it is remarkable how few of the empirical studies on journalism are based on …
Collaborative Media: Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions
Who Shares and Comments on News: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who u…
Interruption, Disruption or Intervention? A Stakeholder Analysis of Small Acts of Engagement in Content Flows
Emerging Trends in Small Acts of Audience Engagement and Interruptions of Content Flows
Een mediapark in Brussel? De mediasector en zijn regionale dynamiek: Synthesenota BSI
In deze synthesenota analyseren we vanuit een mediaclusterperspectief de kenmerken van de Brusselse mediasector en evalueren we de implicaties voor de grote beleidsinterventie van het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest in deze sector: mediapark.brussels. Dit stadsontwikkelingsproject ter hoogte van de Reyerslaan, vlak bij de huidige site van de openbare televisiezenders VRT en RTBF, zal tien jaar in beslag nemen. De resultaten van ons onderzoek werpe…
A mediapark in Brussels? The media industry and its regional dynamics: BSI synopsis
This synopsis analyses from a media cluster perspective the characteristics of the media industry in Brussels and assesses the implications for the major policy intervention of the Brussels Capital Region in this industry: the mediapark.brussels, a 10-year urban and property development project at Reyers around the existing site of the public broadcasting companies VRT and RTBF. Our research results shed light on several clustering configurations…
Un mediapark à Bruxelles ? L’industrie des médias et sa dynamique régionale: Note de synthèse BSI
La présente note de synthèse examine les caractéristiques de l’industrie des médias à Bruxelles du point de vue des clusters de médias et en évalue les implications pour la principale action stratégique de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale à l’égard de cette industrie, à savoir, le projet décennal mediapark.brussels pour le développement urbanistique et immobilier du quartier Reyers, autour du site actuel des organismes publics de radiotélévision q…
Small acts of engagement: Reconnecting productive audience practices with everyday agency
In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage…
Reach or Trust Optimisation? A Citizen Trust Analysis in the Flemish Public Broadcaster VRT
In democracies, one of Public Service Media’s (PSM) main roles is to inform the public. In a digital news ecosystem, where commercial, citizen, and alternative news sources have multiplied, questions about the ability and need for PSM to fulfil this role are increasingly being raised. While the role of PSM can and should be scrutinized, a too-narrow a focus on an informed citizenry may obfuscate aspects, other than audience reach and objectivity,…
Innovation Beyond the Buzzwords: The Rocky Road Towardsa Digital First-based Newsroom
In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingencies of changing the fixed structures of working journalists who are forced to undergo radical change…
Media as the great emancipators? Exploring relations between media repertoires and cultural participation in Flanders
Media convergence has afforded users an increasing amount of options regarding the media they consume, available at the click of a button. This has led some to clamor about the potential for media to bridge previously existing inequalities and decrease social stratification not just in media use, but in other realms of society as well. Skeptics have argued that while the convergence of media has given users more options in their own media reperto…
Tuning Out the News. A Cross-Media Perspective on News Avoidance Practices of Young News Users in Flanders During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed "coronablocking": the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of h…
Windows to the World: Imagining Flemish News Audiences and Their Views on Society through the Lens of News Repertoires
News media act as a window to the world. This window is now believed to be shrinking due to developments in digital media such as algorithmic personalization which restricts people to echo chambers in turn affecting citizens’ views on society. It is an example of the moral panics surrounding digital media and obfuscating underlying social dynamics at play. This article seeks to address this issue by looking at news use through the lens of news re…
Mobilized, negotiated and balanced: Chinese school vloggers’ platform engagements and layered identity construction on Bilibili
Entangled with wanghong (literally: popular people on the internet) and the platform economy in China, it has become trendy for Chinese youth to present themselves as they pursue visibility and monetization as vloggers on social media platforms. In this research, we do not focus on celebrities or influencers but on the regular Chinese school vloggers who present and share their everyday lives in and around the school on Bilibili, a youth-oriented…
Operationalising Hybrid Newsroom Ethnography: Observing Amidst a Pandemic
This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually, we operationalise a previously developed model for pinpointing changes inside newsrooms. Our study s…
Does the audience welcome an audience-oriented journalism
Although the ‘audience turn’ ( Costera Meijer, 2020 ) in journalism has been extensively discussed in studies, and journalists acknowledge the need to improve their relationship with their audience ( Nelson and Lewis 2022 ), the audience’s perspective on journalistic roles remains underexplored ( Riedl and Eberl, 2020 ). Generally, the examination of journalistic roles has been from a production perspective ( Hanusch 2019 ). We aim to address thi…
The art of attracting attention: A process model of Chinese toubu vloggers' strategies to create online identities and self-brands
Since 2018, toubu vloggers – a term that refers to the vloggers who earn the majority of traffic and attention through vlogging their daily lives on Chinese social media – remain a limited quantity in the emerging and rapidly growing Chinese vlogging market. This article aims to explore the performative identity strategies developed by Chinese toubu vloggers to attract attention and stand out from the multitude of vloggers on social media platfor…
Is a financially viable news media market the key to fighting disinformation in Europe? A cross-country quantitative study
The rise of fake news poses a significant challenge for governments worldwide, prompting the European Commission to address the urgency of combating disinformation. In the contemporary ‘market of attention’, where economic considerations often overshadow democratic and societal concerns, disinformation thrives. This study asserts that financial viability within news media markets is a critical yet overlooked factor in the fight against disinforma…
Alex, Do Not Backpedal on Sandy Hook: Reactionary Fandom, Cancel Culture, and the Possibility of ‘Audience Capture’ on YouTube
Cancel culture” has gained tremendous attention in contemporary political discourse. On platforms like YouTube, reactionary ideological entrepreneurs often employ what Ng terms second-order discourses on cancel culture, that is, portraying call-out practices such as shaming public figures as left-wing censorship efforts stifling free speech. This article argues that such call-out practices, generally ascribed to progressive communities, also occu…
Coping with Covid: Exploring reconfigurations of Flemish news repertoires in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
“It’s a bit like pick and choose”: How young media users assign authority to cultural mediators
As the boundaries between producers and consumers in both journalism and cultural industries continue to blur, questions arise about the changing gatekeeping and interpretational roles. The study examines how young adults assign authority to cultural mediators, ranging from traditional cultural journalists to social media personalities, when selecting and evaluating cultural goods. The aim is to understand how journalistic and non-journalistic vo…
What Roles Can Journalists (Still) Play for the Self-Curating News User? Exploring How Young Adults Tailor Their Social Media News Feeds
As young adults increasingly turn to social media for news, they rely on an eclectic mix of journalistic and non-journalistic sources to shape their daily news intake. To navigate this complexity, social media news users develop personal curation practices such as (un)liking or (un)following content to construct their personal news feeds. The study examines how these practices inform the roles that news users attribute to journalists. Using a nov…
Making sense of ambivalence: Audience perceptions and uses of Ben Shapiro as an alternative political commentator
Alternative Political Commentators (APCs) have gained prominence on digital platforms as new opinion leaders to politically engaged young adults. This study responds to a growing demand for an audience-focused exploration of perceptions and use practices of what has been described as reactionary digital media. We specifically examine the case of Ben Shapiro, a leading conservative voice on YouTube, employing a mixed-methods approach, triangulatin…
Affordances-in-Practice: How Social Norm Dynamics in Climate Change Publics Are Shaped on Instagram and Twitter
Social norms are flexible regulating forces of human behavior. They are shaped by humans, whose actions in turn are shaped by their environment, including the online social spaces they venture into. The objective of this research is to create an understanding of how the affordances of social media platforms shape social norm dynamics in online publics, particularly in climate change publics. For this purpose, we make a comparative analysis of the…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Media Studies and Communication (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Social media (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Business (7 works)