Assessment Committee

• Associate professor Henrik Bødker, Department of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University (chair)
• Associate professor Jannie Møller Hartley, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University
• Professor Seth Lewis, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon

Supervisors

• Professor Anja Bechmann, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
• Associate professor Aske Kammer, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University

The dissertation will be available for reading in a digital version before the defence following a statement from the borrower promising to delete the file afterwards. If you wish to read the dissertation please contact Lynge Asbjørn Møller lyngemoller@cc.au.dk.

The defence is scheduled for three hours and is open to the public. All are welcome.

Abstract.

In his PhD defence, Lynge Asbjørn Møller presents three years of research into the role of journalistic professionalism when traditional news organisations develop and implement news recommender systems for algorithmic curation on their websites. The results reveal that traditional news organisations develop and implement news recommender systems for algorithmic curation in ways that both challenge and uphold journalistic professionalism. At the level of algorithmic development, the studied news organisations did not design the news recommender systems to reflect normative values of journalistic professionalism. Rather, they chose to retain the manual control of their human editors on the most important parts of their websites when implementing the systems, demonstrating that news organisations are thinking holistically about the role of the systems and their technical limitations in efforts to tailor the technology to journalism. Further, journalistic agency was incorporated into these news media logics of algorithmic curation through solutions that allow journalists to influence the output of the systems by adding enriched metadata and moderating the candidate lists. Based on these findings, a journalist-in-the-loop approach to algorithmic curation is proposed to embed journalistic professionalism into the process by involving journalists in both algorithmic development and in new algorithmic news curation practices.