The way political reporters understand their own role in election campaigns is changing, signalling a deeper shift in journalistic self-conception. In traditional discourses of journalistic identity, campaign reporters are positioned as playing a unique democratic role enabling citizens to make informed voting decisions. This article asks, ‘How do campaign reporters understand and construct their own value and that of their work in an increasingly fragmented and crowded news environment?’ It offers new empirical insight through a two-country study that both considers journalist perspectives and situates these within relevant theoretical debates. It analyses interviews with political reporters in the United States and Australia in 2017, guided by two conceptual frameworks that consider the ways journalists actively construct their own identity and authority: interpretive communities and metajournalistic discourse. This allows insight into the way political reporters reconsider the need to cover campaigns from ‘on the bus’ and defend the enduring value of being there.

In the first of these articles, those aspects of group life which can be represented as an equilibrium in a phase space were considered. In the discussion of social equilibrium it was emphasized that for understanding social events, and for planning social action, a reference from the phase space to the total social field is usually necessary. As an example of such an analysis of a social field, certain problems of social channels will be discussed briefly in this second article. We shall then consider some general problems of social planning, with particular reference to the role of “action research ” in bringing about social change.

This research aims to design and prototype a tool to perform intelligence on open sources (OSINT), specifically on official medical bulletins for the detection of false news. MedOSINT is a modular tool that can be adapted to process information from different medical official bulletins. From the processed information, intelligence is generated for decision making, validating the veracity of the COVID-19 news. The tool is compared with other options and it is verified that MedOSINT outperforms the current options when analyzing official bulletins. Moreover, it is complemented with an expert explanation provided by a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) system. This is proved to be an ideal complement because it can find explanatory cases for an explanation-by-example justification.© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The violent spectacle of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot provides a case study of how online open-source investigation helped identify members of the mob and provide deeper understanding of the day’s events. Considering this form of investigation as an emerging network for the hybrid institution of journalism, an assemblage extending beyond the newsroom, this study takes a mixed-method, networked ethnography approach to map out this open-source space. Using a network analysis of open-source investigators based on Twitter data shows that the recently emerged Bellingcat organization and similar open-source groups serve a liaison function, bridging professional journalists and largely anonymous citizen “sleuthers.” Using this network as a guide, depth interviews were conducted with key participants, showing that the community was organized around an accountability ethos and a methodology of verification. We argue that this interlocking network has potential to strengthen the resilience of the journalistic institution, build citizen trust and resist politicized historical revisionism.