Raul Ferrer Conill
Biographic Data
| ID | 4449072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raul Ferrer Conill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raul Ferrer |
| FAMILY NAME | Conill |
| SIGNATURE | CONILL R F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Karlstad University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0501-2217 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The whiteboard method: A qualitative approach to studying media technologies
Understanding technological developments in the media industries and their application and regulation can be a challenge for qualitative social science research because technology tends to require the insights of experts such as computer programmers and engineers. This article describes a method for accessing media technologists’ expert knowledge by using the whiteboard to create think-aloud, collaborative, and co-creative sessions designed to ar…
Datafying citizens: Third-party trackers and data-as-payment in government infrastructure
Scandinavians are among the most datafied citizens in the world. With its digitalised welfare states, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish e-governance infrastructures collect massive amounts of data about citizens as they search for jobs, apply for building permits, and check school calendars. In this article, we analyse the use of third-party trackers ( n = 2,761) on Scandinavian municipal websites ( n = 745) between 2007–2023. Mobilising the theoret…
Delivering content: Modular broadcasting technology and the role of content delivery networks
Television distribution has changed profoundly over the past 10–15 years. Now increasingly geared towards streaming, broadcasting's value chain hinges on content delivery networks (CDNs) to reach audiences. CDNs are important for content quality, as they constitute the part of the chain that stores and transmits data from broadcasters to the end-user. In this article, we investigate what this value chain shift means for television distribution in…
Capture Beyond the Platforms: The Material and Infrastructural Conditions for Digital Journalism
News organisations are growing increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures for the distribution of news, AI implementation, and management of data. In this article, we argue that this dependency goes beyond the level of platforms, reaching into the internet backbone infrastructures that transmit, peer, deliver and host data on which journalism relies. Using Norway as a case, we map the actors involved in the subsea cable sectors, internet e…
Dimensions of Data Quality for Values in Smart Cities Datafication Practices
Data quality facilitates data interoperability for optimal decision-making in smart cities datafication. But there are few studies on how technologists (e.g., data scientists), governance people (e.g., municipal workers), and third-party collaborators (e.g., smart city services vendors) assess data quality together in smart cities datafication. This paper offers a response to this knowledge gap, using interviews (n=10) with municipal workers, dat…
Datafied Societies: Digital Infrastructures, Data Power, and Regulations
The datafication and platformization of social processes further the overall shift from an open, public, and decentralized internet towards a private and siloed realm that establishes power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade, and control data. The ongoing process of datafying societies embraces the logics of aggregation and automation that increasingly negotiate transactions between markets and social entities, in…
Recoding Journalism: Establishing Normative Dimensions for a Twenty-First Century News Media
This essay argues that there are overlooked yet important journalistic beliefs, norms, rules and practices regarding, aesthetics, automation, distribution, engagement, identity, and proximity that could be a part of formalized codes of ethics. There are four reasons why these should be formalized. First, making the implicit normative dimensions explicit allow for a shared understanding of journalism, cutting across institutional borders. Second, …
AI ≥ Journalism: How the Chinese Copyright Law Protects Tech Giants’ AI Innovations and Disrupts the Journalistic Institution
Journalism and other institutions clash over automated news generation, algorithmic distribution and content ownership worldwide. AI policies are the main mechanisms that establish and organise the hierarchies among these institutions. Few studies, however, have explored the normative dimension of AI in policymaking in journalism, especially beyond the West. This case study inspects the copyright law’s impact on AI innovation in newsrooms in the …
You Should Read This Study! It Investigates Scandinavian Social Media Logics ☝
In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all S…
The Temporal Nature of Mobile Push Notification Alerts: A Study of European News Outlets’ Dissemination Patterns
Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and control of temporal news personalisation; and (c) reinforces mobile as the locus of contact between news organisations and …
Taking Interdependencies Seriously: The Case of Mozilla’s Entanglements With Journalism
Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in s…
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
Playful approaches to news engagement
From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of communication and participation. Moreover, we reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of mer…
Pathway outta pigeonhole? De-contextualizing Majority World Countries
Should regional context overshadow theoretical contributions of a doctoral dissertation or an international journal article? In this essay, we argue that expendable region-centricism diminishes the contributions of Majority World Countries to the media and communication discipline. We propose that ‘de-contextualized’ studies – which accentuate the theoretical, conceptual, or methodological import of research – could complement current efforts to …
(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study…
“Fact-Checking Africa”: Epistemologies, data and the expansion of journalistic discourse
The prominence of “fake news” today has sparked an open challenge to the legitimacy of traditional news media. As a result, a series of independent data-driven organisations are emerging to fact-check legacy news media as well as other news sources. This study examines how these actors advocate and adopt journalistic practice and the perceived impact they have on news journalism. We draw our data from in-depth interviews with 14 practitioners wor…
Native Advertising and the Appropriation of Journalistic Clout
This chapter addresses how the native advertising discourse manifests in reality. The novelty of native advertising is that it advocates for openly merging commercial and editorial content, aggravating an existing tension between the professional and commercial logics of journalism. While there are several accounts of permeability where political and commercial actors influenced editorial content, journalistic autonomy remained relatively unprobl…
The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making sense of the audience in the newsroom
Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience…
Quantifying Journalism? A Study on the Use of Data and Gamification to Motivate Journalists
According to previous research, contemporary journalism is undergoing a quantitative turn. The uses of data and metrics have started to permeate digital news websites in various ways. However, there is a lack of research on how gamification is applied to journalism practice. This article examines how the quantification of news production, readers’ interactions, and use of game mechanics have started to permeate journalism practice in digital outl…
Outsourcing Newswork
Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics. A case study on civic participation in the digital age
Camouflaging Church as State: An exploratory study of journalism’s native advertising
This paper explores the increasing trend of adopting native advertising in the digital editions of traditional news media outlets. Native advertising is defined here as a form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content, as an attempt to recreate the user experience of reading news instead of advertising content. Methodologically, this study examines 12 news websites of legacy newspapers…
Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation
Journalism as a profession, as a commercial endeavour, and as a sociotechnical phenomenon has long been evolving, leading to a multifaceted journalism shaped by these many transformations. In the l
The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making sense of the audience in the newsroom
Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience…
(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study…
Camouflaging Church as State: An exploratory study of journalism’s native advertising
This paper explores the increasing trend of adopting native advertising in the digital editions of traditional news media outlets. Native advertising is defined here as a form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content, as an attempt to recreate the user experience of reading news instead of advertising content. Methodologically, this study examines 12 news websites of legacy newspapers…
Pathway outta pigeonhole? De-contextualizing Majority World Countries
Should regional context overshadow theoretical contributions of a doctoral dissertation or an international journal article? In this essay, we argue that expendable region-centricism diminishes the contributions of Majority World Countries to the media and communication discipline. We propose that ‘de-contextualized’ studies – which accentuate the theoretical, conceptual, or methodological import of research – could complement current efforts to …
Recoding Journalism: Establishing Normative Dimensions for a Twenty-First Century News Media
This essay argues that there are overlooked yet important journalistic beliefs, norms, rules and practices regarding, aesthetics, automation, distribution, engagement, identity, and proximity that could be a part of formalized codes of ethics. There are four reasons why these should be formalized. First, making the implicit normative dimensions explicit allow for a shared understanding of journalism, cutting across institutional borders. Second, …
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
Quantifying Journalism? A Study on the Use of Data and Gamification to Motivate Journalists
According to previous research, contemporary journalism is undergoing a quantitative turn. The uses of data and metrics have started to permeate digital news websites in various ways. However, there is a lack of research on how gamification is applied to journalism practice. This article examines how the quantification of news production, readers’ interactions, and use of game mechanics have started to permeate journalism practice in digital outl…
Capture Beyond the Platforms: The Material and Infrastructural Conditions for Digital Journalism
News organisations are growing increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures for the distribution of news, AI implementation, and management of data. In this article, we argue that this dependency goes beyond the level of platforms, reaching into the internet backbone infrastructures that transmit, peer, deliver and host data on which journalism relies. Using Norway as a case, we map the actors involved in the subsea cable sectors, internet e…
Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation
Journalism as a profession, as a commercial endeavour, and as a sociotechnical phenomenon has long been evolving, leading to a multifaceted journalism shaped by these many transformations. In the l
Outsourcing Newswork
Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics. A case study on civic participation in the digital age
Camouflaging Church as State: An exploratory study of journalism’s native advertising
This paper explores the increasing trend of adopting native advertising in the digital editions of traditional news media outlets. Native advertising is defined here as a form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content, as an attempt to recreate the user experience of reading news instead of advertising content. Methodologically, this study examines 12 news websites of legacy newspapers…
Quantifying Journalism? A Study on the Use of Data and Gamification to Motivate Journalists
According to previous research, contemporary journalism is undergoing a quantitative turn. The uses of data and metrics have started to permeate digital news websites in various ways. However, there is a lack of research on how gamification is applied to journalism practice. This article examines how the quantification of news production, readers’ interactions, and use of game mechanics have started to permeate journalism practice in digital outl…
“Fact-Checking Africa”: Epistemologies, data and the expansion of journalistic discourse
The prominence of “fake news” today has sparked an open challenge to the legitimacy of traditional news media. As a result, a series of independent data-driven organisations are emerging to fact-check legacy news media as well as other news sources. This study examines how these actors advocate and adopt journalistic practice and the perceived impact they have on news journalism. We draw our data from in-depth interviews with 14 practitioners wor…
Native Advertising and the Appropriation of Journalistic Clout
This chapter addresses how the native advertising discourse manifests in reality. The novelty of native advertising is that it advocates for openly merging commercial and editorial content, aggravating an existing tension between the professional and commercial logics of journalism. While there are several accounts of permeability where political and commercial actors influenced editorial content, journalistic autonomy remained relatively unprobl…
The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making sense of the audience in the newsroom
Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience…
Playful approaches to news engagement
From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of communication and participation. Moreover, we reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of mer…
Pathway outta pigeonhole? De-contextualizing Majority World Countries
Should regional context overshadow theoretical contributions of a doctoral dissertation or an international journal article? In this essay, we argue that expendable region-centricism diminishes the contributions of Majority World Countries to the media and communication discipline. We propose that ‘de-contextualized’ studies – which accentuate the theoretical, conceptual, or methodological import of research – could complement current efforts to …
(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study…
You Should Read This Study! It Investigates Scandinavian Social Media Logics ☝
In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all S…
The Temporal Nature of Mobile Push Notification Alerts: A Study of European News Outlets’ Dissemination Patterns
Push notifications provide news outlets with direct access to audiences amid concerns around information overload, disinformation, and heightened competition for reader attention. Such news distribution is relevant because it (a) bypasses social media and news aggregators, reaching readers directly; (b) alters the agency and control of temporal news personalisation; and (c) reinforces mobile as the locus of contact between news organisations and …
Taking Interdependencies Seriously: The Case of Mozilla’s Entanglements With Journalism
Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in s…
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
AI ≥ Journalism: How the Chinese Copyright Law Protects Tech Giants’ AI Innovations and Disrupts the Journalistic Institution
Journalism and other institutions clash over automated news generation, algorithmic distribution and content ownership worldwide. AI policies are the main mechanisms that establish and organise the hierarchies among these institutions. Few studies, however, have explored the normative dimension of AI in policymaking in journalism, especially beyond the West. This case study inspects the copyright law’s impact on AI innovation in newsrooms in the …
Dimensions of Data Quality for Values in Smart Cities Datafication Practices
Data quality facilitates data interoperability for optimal decision-making in smart cities datafication. But there are few studies on how technologists (e.g., data scientists), governance people (e.g., municipal workers), and third-party collaborators (e.g., smart city services vendors) assess data quality together in smart cities datafication. This paper offers a response to this knowledge gap, using interviews (n=10) with municipal workers, dat…
Datafied Societies: Digital Infrastructures, Data Power, and Regulations
The datafication and platformization of social processes further the overall shift from an open, public, and decentralized internet towards a private and siloed realm that establishes power asymmetries between those who provide data and those who own, trade, and control data. The ongoing process of datafying societies embraces the logics of aggregation and automation that increasingly negotiate transactions between markets and social entities, in…
Recoding Journalism: Establishing Normative Dimensions for a Twenty-First Century News Media
This essay argues that there are overlooked yet important journalistic beliefs, norms, rules and practices regarding, aesthetics, automation, distribution, engagement, identity, and proximity that could be a part of formalized codes of ethics. There are four reasons why these should be formalized. First, making the implicit normative dimensions explicit allow for a shared understanding of journalism, cutting across institutional borders. Second, …
Delivering content: Modular broadcasting technology and the role of content delivery networks
Television distribution has changed profoundly over the past 10–15 years. Now increasingly geared towards streaming, broadcasting's value chain hinges on content delivery networks (CDNs) to reach audiences. CDNs are important for content quality, as they constitute the part of the chain that stores and transmits data from broadcasters to the end-user. In this article, we investigate what this value chain shift means for television distribution in…
Capture Beyond the Platforms: The Material and Infrastructural Conditions for Digital Journalism
News organisations are growing increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures for the distribution of news, AI implementation, and management of data. In this article, we argue that this dependency goes beyond the level of platforms, reaching into the internet backbone infrastructures that transmit, peer, deliver and host data on which journalism relies. Using Norway as a case, we map the actors involved in the subsea cable sectors, internet e…
The whiteboard method: A qualitative approach to studying media technologies
Understanding technological developments in the media industries and their application and regulation can be a challenge for qualitative social science research because technology tends to require the insights of experts such as computer programmers and engineers. This article describes a method for accessing media technologists’ expert knowledge by using the whiteboard to create think-aloud, collaborative, and co-creative sessions designed to ar…
Datafying citizens: Third-party trackers and data-as-payment in government infrastructure
Scandinavians are among the most datafied citizens in the world. With its digitalised welfare states, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish e-governance infrastructures collect massive amounts of data about citizens as they search for jobs, apply for building permits, and check school calendars. In this article, we analyse the use of third-party trackers ( n = 2,761) on Scandinavian municipal websites ( n = 745) between 2007–2023. Mobilising the theoret…
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Media Studies and Communication (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Business (11 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Journalism (8 works) · Social science (8 works)