The Prague Media Point conference “Media and technology: innovative journalism in a contested political space” is calling for papers. The conference will be held on 15-18 November in Prague.

In an increasingly unstable world, independent media are facing unprecedented challenges. Journalism’s crucial role to represent the public interest is being actively undermined by declining audiences, upended business models, and the emergence of alternative sources of content. The net result is disturbingly low levels of trust among consumers who complain about political and business agendas, fake news, and low-quality media overall.

Possible topics for submission include but are by no means limited to:

• Digitally aided journalism practices and all the trends that affect content production. Proposed papers in this area may cover new forms of data journalism, experiments in virtual reality/immersive story-telling, mobile reporting investigation, reporting, and visualization, such as automation, augmentation, and AI in the newsroom. This area also includes the use of digital tools in overcoming the lack of gender diversity, political polarization, and other problems.
• Digitally aided entrepreneurial practices in media and audience engagement. This area will focus on innovative and disruptive business models and issues affecting revenue streams. This includes the role of big tech companies, membership/subscription strategies, and aggregation platforms. Additionally, this topic will explore, for example, the issues of personalized user experience, new ways of audience engagement and reaching neglected target groups, and tactics for overcoming the digital divide.
• Policy and governance issues in media and technology. This area will center on regulations affecting the work of digital media outlets such as legal norms, censorship, net neutrality, and policy responses to the avalanche of fake news and disinformation. This area could also address the role of public service media.

500-word abstracts should be sent by 15 May. The deadline has been extended till 31 May 2018.

Read the full call for papers on the event website.