ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Based on our own needs regarding collaborative work, methodological expansion, fair data usage, and support for open research processes, ZeMKI, the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, has been developing OpenQDA since January 2023. You can use the software at https://openqda.org/ and find the source code and developer documentation at https://github.com/openqda.

The OpenQDA team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.3. OpenQDA has been enhanced with new features, which are now available at https://openqda.org. Below, we would like to introduce these features:

1) Project Management

The listed projects now show how many documents (sources) are already available in each project. In addition, the project overview now also offers the option of selecting documents, allowing you to immediately proceed to editing (Preparation Editor) a document. 

2) Visualizations

All visualizations have been revised and expanded to include various parameterizations. This allows visualizations to be customized even more extensively to suit your specific needs.

3) Feedback and Help Form

It is now possible again to open a dialog for an integrated form via the navigation bar. This enables low-threshold contact with the OpenQDA team without requiring, for example, an account on another platform such as GitHub.

4) Documentation

The user documentation at https://openqda.github.io/user-docs/ has also been expanded to include the above-mentioned features.

Support OpenQDA

We welcome any form of feedback via all available channels (see below) as well as any form of participation in software development and documentation. If you have a GitHub account, you are also welcome to support us with a star.

Links and resources

OpenQDA application: https://openqda.org

User documentation: https://openqda.github.io/user-docs/

Source code: https://github.com/openqda/openqda

doi: 10.5281/zenodo.17182559

Contact: openqda@uni-bremen.de 

https://zemki.uni-bremen.de/en/9287-2/

Juraj Kittler

Publisher: Brill (Leiden, NL)

Publication Date: July 2025

This monograph explores the impact of expanding long-distance communication networks on late medieval business, politics, diplomacy, international law, and personal freedom. Trailblazed initially by pedestrian and later also mounted couriers in the context of Italy, postal operations were first and foremost at the heart of the commercial revolution that transformed late medieval banking and commerce. In their next stage, they were also essential to the formation of centralized states and early modern diplomacy. Expanding access to postal services during the Renaissance was likewise instrumental to the inception of the Republic of Letters, while travel by the posts fostered personal freedom and mobility. The emergence of the earliest postal networks is therefore presented in this volume as the opening stage of an entire series of subsequent communications revolutions that ushered in the modern era.

Publisher’s Page Link: https://brill.com/display/title/72460?language=en&srsltid=AfmBOooNHzKlavrR0CM3MPt2D2lV2S3IkrG1TiuxMe4ZLV41ADiWtK-g

COMMUNICATIONS - THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

(special issue, volume 50, issue 3)

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/comm/50/3/html 

The entire issue is freely accessible. 

EDITORIAL 

Reclaiming the past, rethinking the future: Marking 50 years in media and com£munication scholarship 

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz, Leen d’Haenens, Viviane Harkort 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2025-0087/html 

ARTICLES 

Grappling with surveillance before datafication 

Göran Bolin 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0150/html 

Reclaiming the Radical: Feminist Legacies and the Transformative Power of Media Ethnography 

Laura Candidatu and Koen Leurs 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0198/html 

Media use as social action – then and today 

Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink and Uwe Hasebrink 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0142/html 

The changing norms and standards of scholarly journal articles. A response to Pietilä’s “Peoples Conceptions of the Mass Media” 

Jesper Strömbäck 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0128/html 

To construct or to reveal? Network analysis as formalising communication 

Bernie Hogan 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2025-0071/html 

Stereotyping the Foreigner: Revisiting Gumpert & Cathcart’s Seminal Contribution 

Maria Kyriakidou 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0183/html 

Making progress in a trackless, weightless and intangible space 

Keith Roe 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0185/html 

Alphons Silbermann (1909–2000) and the founding of Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research 

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0196/html 

BOOK REVIEWS 

Book Review of „Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. Simon & Schuster. 352 pp.“ 

Giovanna Mascheroni 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0121/html 

Book Review of „Thompson, J. B. (1995). The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Polity Press.“ 

César Jiménez-Martínez 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0174/html 

Book Review of „Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446220153“ 

Bart Cammaerts 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0143/html 

Book Review of „Jensen, K. B. (Ed.) (2012). Handbook of media and communication research: Qualitative and quantitative methodologies (2nd edition). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203357255“ 

Martine van Selm 

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2024-0209/html 

COMMUNICATIONS 

Editors: Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz-Lietz & Leen d’Haenens 

Associate Editors: Denisa Hejlová, Philippe J. Maarek, Hillel Nossek, Christian Pentzold, Cristina Ponte, Christian Ruggiero, Brigitte Sebbah 

Book Review Editors: Olivier Driessens, Stijn Joye, Rebecca Venema 

Editorial Management: Viviane Harkort 

For questions please contact the editorial management: journal.comun@degruyterbrill.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/communications-journal/ 

Twitter: @commejcr

November 11-14, 2025

Lusófona University, Portugal

Deadline: September 26, 2025

The Media Literacy and Civic Cultures Lab – MeLCi Lab (Lusófona University, CICANT) is organising its V Autumn School from 11 to 14 November 2025 in the form of a bootcamp to boost research hands-on skills. 

The MeLCi Lab Autumn School invites applications from PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars for a four-day intensive online program focused on innovative research methods at the intersection of AI, Communication, and Media Studies.

The School combines practical workshops and keynote lectures, allowing participants to develop hands-on skills with classical and AI-driven methodologies.

In 2025, the school’s AI tracks are specifically designed to meet the needs of media studies and PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and early-career scholars. Participants will explore case studies and practical examples directly relevant to media analysis, digital journalism, and content curation. The sessions will address unique challenges in media-related research, such as bias in content classification, audience segmentation, and the interpretative complexity of multimedia annotation. Interactive workshops and tailored exercises will enable participants to apply AI tools to media-specific datasets, ensuring immediate applicability and facilitating deeper understanding through experiential learning.

In this sense, contributions for the following tracks (not exclusively) will be considered.

Track 1: AI in Research Practice: Foundations, Methods, and Ethics

1. Foundations of current AI tools → Recent natural language processing (NLP) breakthroughs, particularly through large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, have significantly transformed research methodologies across disciplines. The unprecedented accessibility and effectiveness of zero- and few-shot prompting techniques have led to widespread adoption, sometimes even replacing traditional human coders (Gilardi et al., 2023; Grossmann et al., 2023; Ziems et al., 2024). Yet, these powerful tools introduce critical concerns regarding reproducibility, transparency, and ethical use. Prompt stability and variability in LLM responses—affected by minor prompt adjustments—can challenge the replicability and accountability of research (Barrie et al., 2025). This subtrack equips researchers in communication science with essential knowledge of the theoretical foundations of contemporary AI tools, highlighting methodologies and best practices for their ethical and accountable use.

2. Accountable Literature Search Using AI Tools → AI-powered tools such as SciSpace and Litmaps have radically improved the efficiency and comprehensiveness of literature searches. However, the convenience of these tools requires heightened researchers’ accountability. This subtrack guides participants through strategies to validate AI-generated results, critically assess literature coverage, and maintain transparent documentation practices, ensuring methodological rigour and reliability in AI-assisted literature reviews.

3. AI-Assisted Data Annotation in Research Pipelines → Data annotation is a cornerstone in research pipelines, traditionally relying heavily on human coders. However, AI-based annotation tools are emerging as viable and highly effective alternatives, particularly for large datasets. Barrie et al. (2025) highlight that prompt stability—the consistency of AI-generated annotations across multiple semantically similar prompts—remains a significant challenge. This subtrack introduces participants to AI-driven annotation, focusing on practical approaches to enhancing annotation consistency through frameworks like Prompt Stability Scoring (PSS). Participants will gain hands-on experience in assessing and improving the reliability of AI annotations, integrating responsible AI practices into their research workflows.

Track 2: Communication, Audiences, and Civic Cultures in the Age of AI

1. Civic Cultures and Artificial Intelligence → AI can play a crucial role in how citizens engage with the digital world in contemporary times, and a set of opportunities and challenges emerge from it (Sarafis et al., 2025). This subtrack explores the impact of AI-driven platforms and recommendation algorithms on civic engagement, activism, and media literacy.

2. Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy in an AI-Mediated World → Leveraging AI and overcoming its challenges requires the development of broad and critical skill sets, the definition of which is still fuzzy (Chiu et al., 2024). This subtrack intends to explore critical media literacy skills in the era of misinformation, deepfakes, and algorithmic personalisation.

3. Data Ethics, Equity, and Inclusivity in AI Research → Different biases can emerge from the use of AIs, and the ethical implications of using different tools for knowledge production are still unclear. While AI is frequently represented as either a magical solution or a looming threat, our Autumn School aims to demystify AI, exploring its realistic capabilities, limitations, and responsible use (Ferrara, 2024; Ntoutsi et al., 2020). This subtrack will focus on responsible research practices, equity grants, and inclusive research design for underrepresented communities.

Participants do not require previous experience with AI or data science, as introductory modules will provide a foundational understanding.

The Autumn School will be conducted online and in English.

For inquiries, please contact: melci.lab@ulusofona.pt

Call for proposals deadline

Deadline: 26th September  2025

Notification of Acceptance: 13th October 2025

Registration: 27th October

See details about how to submit a proposal at the bottom of this page.

Format

Online

Dates

11 to 14 November 2025 – V MeLCi Lab Autumn School

TIME (Lisbon time zone)

V MeLCi Lab Autumn School Schedule

Check the website for details. 

How to apply 

Interested participants must send their application (in English) by 26 September 2025, including:

• Updated Curriculum Vitae (máx. 3 pages); 
  
• Candidate’s research statement that includes a description of their doctoral dissertation, research questions and methods (máx. 2 pages);
  
• Motivation letter describing your current perspective on AI, specific concerns or interests regarding AI’s role in media practices, and your preferred track/subtrack(s) máx. 1-2 pages;

Please send your application as a ZIP file to melci.lab@ulusofona.pt with the subject “Application for the V MeLCi Lab Autumn School”.

Target-group

PhD Students

Early Career Researchers (with a PhD obtained in the last five years)

Fee *

Lusófona University, CICANT PhD Students 70 euros

PhD students from other Institutions 100 euros

Others 150 euros

*The best participant will not pay the fee

Keynote Speakers

Joana Gonçalves Sá, Researcher at LIP – Laboratory of Particle Physics and at NOVA-LINCS

Massimo Ragnedda, Associate Professor/Reader in Media and Communication Studies at both Sharjah University (UAE) and Northumbria University, Newcastle (UK)

Mustafa Can Gursesli, Postdoctoral Researcher, Gamification Group, Tampere University

Saul Albert, Lecturer in Social Science (Social Psychology) in Communication and Media at Loughborough University

Simone Natale, Associate Professor in Media Theory and History, University of Turin

Tutors

Carla Cerqueira – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Carla Sousa – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Fábio Ribeiro – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Lúcia Mesquita – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Pedro Costa – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Rita Grácio – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Sofia Caldeira – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Sónia Lamy – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Teresa Sofia Castro – Profile | Ciência Vitae | ORCID

Vanessa Rodrigues – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Organisers

Bruno Saraiva – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Carla Sousa – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Lúcia Mesquita – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Manuel Marques-Pita – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Maria José Brites – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

Zuil Pirola – Profile | CienciaVitae | ORCID

October 10, 2025

Online

The Diaspora and Media Working Group will host, together with the Translocal Lives digital initiative, the webinar titled “From Asylum to Arrest: The Criminalization of Migration, Dehumanization, and Technological Control”.

When: Friday 10 October @13h00 UTC / 09h00 New York / 14h00 London / 15h00 Paris / 16h00 Nairobi / 18h30 Kolkata / Brisbane 23h00. The event will last 90 minutes.

Pre-registration is required by 8 October. This webinar seeks to explore the intersection of migration, technology, and human rights, contributing to a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by migrants and the complexities of migration criminalization, along with ethical implications of using digital tools in migratory contexts. By promoting dialogue among academics from both Global North and South perspectives, we aim to engage with critical questions and provide insights into these pressing issues.

Co-sponsored by: IAMCR’s Diaspora and Media Working Group and the Translocal Lives digital initiative

Moderators:

• Sofia Zanforlin, Professor at Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and Vice-chair of the Diaspora and Media Working Group.
  
• Amanda Alencar, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Director of Translocal Lives digital initiative.
  

For more information and to subscribe, here: 

https://iamcr.org/webinars/migration-technology-humanrights

The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors (ISWNE) and the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media at Kansas State University are seeking proposals for papers that provide insight and guidance on general issues and/or everyday problems that confront community newspapers and their newsrooms, with particular reference to weekly general-interest publications with circulations under 10,000.

This competition is an extension of the Center’s former “Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium,” co-sponsored for 20 years by the National Newspaper Association (NNA) and its foundation. The competition’s ultimate goal is to engage academicians and community newspaper journalists in productive “conversations about community journalism.”

Proposals will first be peer-reviewed by faculty with expertise in community journalism. Final selection of the papers to be written will be made by a panel of working and retired community journalists who will evaluate the proposals on the basis of their potential value to newsrooms.

Completed papers will undergo a final academic peer review prior to publication in an issue of ISWNE’s Grassroots Editor. The schedule has been set up to ensure publication of all accepted papers by January 2027 or sooner.

Proposals from graduate students are especially encouraged, as are proposals with an international focus, or reflecting an international perspective on community papers’ newsrooms.

One paper will be selected by the community journalists panel for presentation at the 2026 ISWNE conference tentatively scheduled forJuly 15-19 in Cardiff, Wales. ISWNE and the ISWNE Foundation will provide the author with a complimentary conference registration as well as $250 toward travel. The paper’s author will be expected to make whatever arrangements are necessary to attend this conference or to present on Zoom.

A second place paper also will be selected and the authors of both top papers will receive complimentary one-year memberships in ISWNE.

Focus: Papers should deal with topics relevant to the newsrooms of community weeklies, particularly those with small staffs and circulations under 10,000. The papers should provide useful guidance on general issues and/or everyday problems that such newsrooms may face.

Examples could include legal, political, or ethical issues; alternative print/digital integration models; or surveys to determine successful techniques for staff recruitment/retention, for boosting online presence or to elicit “best practices” for special editions. Roundups of how states handle Sunshine Law violations or how papers train young reporters to be alert for such violations would also be of interest. So would explorations of new ways to convey information to a local audience (e.g., using AI) and how to monetize them. These, of course, are only some of the many areas on which research could focus.

Note that ISWNE members have access to the organization’s Hotline, where topics of current interest to weekly newsrooms are regularly discussed. Non-members may request temporary access by contacting Executive Director Chad Stebbins at cstebbins@mopress.com. This is one way to focus Proposals and the resulting papers on issues of concern to community weekly newsrooms.

Most successful proposals will deal with applied research, although theoretical papers that provide the basis for further applied research also are acceptable, as are general research topics that establish a clear connection to newsroom issues.

Guidelines for Developing Proposals: Proposals should be limited to a maximum of two pages. These proposals should explain clearly and concisely how the final papers will be of practical use to community weekly newsrooms. They should note any prior work on which they will build or which they will assess critically.

Proposals will be evaluated on the relevance and importance of the topic and on its value to newsrooms. Other criteria include originality, clarity of the writing, appropriateness of the methodology to be used, the likelihood that valid conclusions will be reached and the choice of materials that will be used to document the paper’s conclusions/support its recommendations.

Suggested Length for the Paper: 2,500 to 6,000 words.

Logistics for submission: Proposals should be submitted electronically to Huck Boyd Center Director Sam C. Mwangi at scmwangi@ksu.edu. The proposal itself should contain nothing that would identify the author. It must be accompanied by a separate title page containing full author contact information (name, email-address, mailing address, university and/or professional affiliation and phone number). These two items must be emailed by Nov. 3, 2025.

Other Dates:

• Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by Dec. 1, 2025.
  
• Completed papers are due to scmwangi@ksu.edu no later than March 15, 2026.
  
• The author of the paper selected for presentation at the 2024 ISWNE conference will be notified by April 15, 2026; peer review comments will be provided as soon as possible.
  
• Changes suggested by the second peer review will be sent to all other authors by July 31, 2026 for use in preparing the final version of their papers.
  
• Final versions of the papers should be sent electronically to Chad Stebbins at cstebbins@mopress.com by Sept. 15, 2026.
  

ISWNE was founded in 1955 to promote high standards of editorial writing, facilitate the exchange of ideas and foster freedom of the press in all nations. It aims to help members of the weekly press improve their editorial writing and news reporting and to encourage strong, independent editorial voices. Chad Stebbins has been ISWNE’s executive director since 1999.

The mission of the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media, established in 1990, is to serve and strengthen local newspapers, radio stations, online media and other outlets that play a key role in the survival and revitalization of small towns in the United States. Gloria Freeland was the Center’s director from 1998 until her retirement in 2020. Sam C. Mwangi is the new director.

September 30, 2025, 14:00 CET

Registration for ECREA members is now open: https://forms.gle/YzAQWM7LoVmGHY3v6

The recent years have been marked by wars and authoritarian repression that have greatly affected the academic community. There have been various responses from academic institutions aimed at supporting scholars at risk, supporting academic freedom, and discussing the role educational institutions should have in responding to conflict and pressure. Wars, persecution, and insecurities have pushed scholars into exile, forcing them to adapt to new academic environments.  

ECREA already started the discussion with a focus on Ukraine and Gaza, which opened many questions about the academic role in responding to mass atrocities and authoritarian threats to academic freedom. For this reason, the EDI subcommittee proposed ECREA to hold a series of webinars to discuss academic freedom, scholars at risk, and strategies for assisting scholars. 

The first webinar will address the issue of scholars in exile and strategies for supporting them. The discussion will focus on the experiences of scholars who were forced to leave their country and adapt to a new academic environment. The webinar will provide an opportunity to reflect on the structures or circumstances that forced scholars into exile, as well as the pressures, expectations, and roles scholars experience while in exile.

In what ways can ECREA protect and support its members, whose physical safety can be at risk if they are in zones of war or violence, or whose academic and civic freedoms might be under attack from repressive governments or institutions, including academic institutions? We hope the webinar series will help ECREA develop a response to these issues, such as recommendations or other practices designed to support academics.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Bermal Aydın, formerly a lecturer at Mersin University in Turkey, was dismissed, banned from public employment, and had her passport cancelled for signing the Peace Petition, “We will not be a party to this crime.” Supported by CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics), she became a postdoctoral fellow and later a guest teacher at the London School of Economics (LSE), researching authoritarian neoliberalism and the politically motivated precarisation of academics and journalists in Turkey. She taught and supervised master’s dissertations at LSE, published in journals such as Globalizations and Turkish Studies, co-edited books, contributed chapters, and continues her work independently.

Dr. Zeina Al Azmeh is political sociologist at the University of Cambridge. Her work examines the cultural sociologies of knowledge production in exile and their impact on diasporic political subjectivities. Her book Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving will be published this December with Cambridge University Press. She has published in journals such as Theory and Society, Cultural Sociology, Qualitative Inquiry, and IJPCS and chairs the Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network in the UK.

Dr. Olena Zinenko is a media scholar and senior lecturer at Institute of Sociology and Media Communication, Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine, a feminist peace activist, and currently a PSI Visiting Fellow at the IFHV, Ruhr University, Bochum. Her research focuses on media discourse analysis, investigating the role of media in peace processes and public communication in Ukraine. 

The webinar will be accessible to ECREA members only. 

IAMCR’s INTER/ACTIONS: Multimodal Academic Communication Task Force launched its report, Media and Communication Research Through a Multimodal Lens, at the 2025 conference in Singapore. 

Presented at the International Council meeting in July 2025, the report highlights the value of initiatives and strategies that stimulate the use of non-written communication of research results (e.g., documentary and ethnographic film, video essay, exhibition, installation,  performance). Reflecting on how theorizing through and as production can generate new research insights for media and communication studies, the report identifies several areas where IAMCR’s support of multimodal scholarship would make lasting impact in the discipline. 

Download the report at: https://iamcr.org/MCR-report-2025 

Direct link to PDF: https://iamcr.box.com/shared/static/0ydqyr8934xpbkau87luyu7v44oatabc.pdf 

TOC 

What is Multimodal Research? 

Examples of Multimodal Research 

* Documentary & Ethnographic Film 

* Video Essay and/or Videographic Criticism 

* Exhibition 

* Installation Art 

* Performance 

Opportunities & Challenges with Multimodal Research 

What IAMCR Can Do to Support Multimodal Research 

About the Task Force 

The report was prepared by members of the IAMCR’s INTER/ACTIONS: 

Multimodal Academic Communication Task Force. The Task Force was established with a threefold mandate: (1) to examine the various possibilities for multimodal research; (2) to develop initiatives and strategies that stimulate the use of non-written communication of research findings at IAMCR; and (3) to reflect on the use of such strategies at IAMCR and beyond. Its members include: 

* Sandra Ristovska, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, USA (Chair) 

* Arezou Zalipour, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand 

* Aysu Arsoy, Associate Professor, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus 

* Jeremy Shtern, Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada (EB liaison) 

* John L. Jackson Jr., Provost, University of Pennsylvania, USA 

* Johanna Sumiala, Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland 

* Nico Carpentier, Extraordinary Professor, Charles University, the Czech Republic 

* Pedro Pinto de Oliveira, Professor, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Brazil 

Baltic Screen Media Review

Deadline: October 15, 2025

Over the past decade, media have quietly become graph-shaped. Newsrooms, streaming platforms, archives, and social networks now depend on webs of entities - people, places, works, events - and the typed relations that connect them. Under labels such as linked data, the semantic web, and knowledge graphs, these infrastructures coordinate how content is produced, described, discovered, licensed, preserved, and increasingly generated by AI. They sit beneath the interfaces we see, but they structure what becomes visible, recommendable, and valuable. Understanding contemporary media therefore requires understanding the graphs that organise them.

The rise of knowledge graphs in media is not an accident of technical fashion; it is the logical outcome of long trajectories in cataloguing, digitisation, and platformisation. Libraries and broadcasters moved from card catalogues to MARC and Dublin Core; heritage institutions spent two decades aligning authority files and opening collections; web companies standardised schema-based markup at scale; collaborative knowledge bases such as Wikidata turned entity curation into a public good; and audiovisual industries confronted the complexity of rights, versions, localisations, and windowing across global markets. In parallel, machine learning made structured, linked metadata indispensable: entity linking, recommendation, search, summarisation, and content moderation all perform better when grounded in persistent identifiers and interoperable ontologies. To all this was added the trust and provenance crises of the synthetic media era, which has led to a renewed emphasis on verifiable origin trails, signatures, and content credentials that are most useful when they are linked. The economics of attention, the politics of authenticity, and the pragmatics of large-scale automation all seem to converge on the need for shared, machine-readable meaning.

These developments demand analysis from multiple angles. From the political economy of media, knowledge graphs can be read as new “coordination layers” that concentrate bargaining power and lock in ecosystems - or, alternatively, as public infrastructures that lower search and verification costs, widen market access, and enable plural discovery. Media industry studies can show how graphs reshape workflows: from pre-production knowledge bases and clearance graphs, to versioning and localisation, to explainable recommendation pipelines in the platform back-end. Media economics can evaluate the intangible asset value of metadata itself, model network effects that arise when catalogues interlink across firms and borders, and assess when openness produces positive externalities and when enclosure yields short-term rents but long-term fragility.

For media semiotics, graphs offer a new instrument to study meaning circulation: intertextuality, world-building, genre drift, and translation across modalities can be traced as patterns of links among works, motifs, and characters. Audience and reception studies can examine how knowledge graph-grounded explanations and provenance labels affect trust and satisfaction, when serendipity expands or narrows horizons, and how fan communities co-produce knowledge that later feeds institutional graphs. Media archaeology could bring historical depth, showing how past documentation practices prefigure today’s ontologies and how reconciliation of “lost” entities can revive suppressed or minoritised histories. Science and Technology Studies could open the black box of standards and maintenance: ontologies are negotiated, versioned, and policed by communities; their categories include and exclude, often reproducing the centre–periphery dynamics of media culture.

For media law and ethics licensing and rights graphs raise questions about privacy and cross-jurisdictional compliance. Provenance frameworks aim to restore trust, yet their governance determines who can certify whom, under what terms, and at what cost. Finally, a public value perspective to media infrastructures asks how these infrastructures can be designed as durable, fair, and pluralistic, especially for small languages and small markets where linked openness may be the difference between invisibility and participation.

This thematic issue takes linked data not as a niche technique but as a constitutive feature of contemporary media. We invite contributions from all the perspectives discussed above to open up the phenomenon and to illuminate the diverse implications that linked data has brought to contemporary media.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The role of linked data in organizing contemporary media ecosystems.
  
• Governance models for media knowledge infrastructures and their societal impacts.
  
• How linked data adoption reshapes news and platform discovery.
  
• How interoperability standards shape collaboration across media institutions.
  
• Cross-ID interoperability among broadcasters, archives, and streamers.
  
• Economic consequences of open vs. proprietary media metadata.
  
• Linked data, cultural diversity, and the visibility of small languages and regions.
  
• Audience trust and transparency in graph-enabled discovery and curation.
  
• Legal and ethical frameworks for graph-based media production and reuse.
  
• From catalogues to knowledge graphs: historical trajectories and lessons.
  
• Research methods for studying media with graph-based datasets.
  
• Public value and policy approaches to sustaining linked media data.
  
• Fan wikis as co-curators: aligning community and institutional graphs.
  
• Graph-aware recommenders and explainability in public service media.
  
• Mapping intertextuality and transmedia worlds via entity-relation graphs.
  
• Ontology politics: who defines genres, roles, and identities.
  
• Privacy-preserving linkage of audience data with content graphs under GDPR.
  
• Media archaeology of metadata: reconciling legacy catalogues into RDF.
  
• Event knowledge graphs for breaking-news verification.
  
• Authority alignment between knowledge graphs and cross-border memory.
  
• Knowledge graphs as coordinators in media innovation systems.
  
• Ethical risks of automated ontologies: bias, erasure, contested identities.
  
• The use of graphs for AI training.
  
• Media data spaces (e.g., European initiatives): architectures, incentives, and competition effects.
  

Submission Guidelines

We invite scholars, practitioners, and interdisciplinary researchers to contribute original research articles, theoretical essays and industry case studies. Submissions should not exceed 8000 words and must adhere to the journal’s formatting guidelines. All manuscripts will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

- Abstract Submission (400 words) Deadline: October 15th 2025

- Full Paper Submission Deadline: January 23rd 2026

- Publication Date: August 20th 2026

Please submit your abstracts and papers by email to (bsmr/at/tlu.ee). For any inquiries, contact the editorial team at indrek.ibrus/at/tlu.ee.

We look forward to receiving your contributions to this timely discussion.

Issue editor: Indrek Ibrus, Tallinn University

The Baltic Screen Media Review is a free-to-publish open-access peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the analysis of audiovisual media and screen culture, particularly in the Baltic Sea region and its surrounding areas. It seeks to address media transformations within broader European and global contexts, emphasizing both regional specificities and transnational connections. Published by Tallinn University's Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, the journal serves as a forum for interdisciplinary research, offering insights into film, television, new media, and related cultural phenomena. Find out more: https://sciendo.com/journal/bsmr

Edited by: Ashley Riggs, Lucile Davier

Constructive news is an alternative to the negativity of if-it-bleeds-it-leads journalism but still unfamiliar to some audiences and still relatively under-researched, particularly by news translation scholars. And yet, it is “done” across cultures and, therefore, languages. This innovative book contributes to filling that research gap and raising awareness of the phenomenon by showcasing cross-cultural research on constructive news, including in the Global South – a region that has traditionally received less scholarly attention than the Global North.

 Constructive news is resolutely multimodal, and so a number of chapters analyse it from that perspective. The chapters also tackle such topics as audience attitudes, service to the local community, pedagogy, financial news, and religious news. This book will appeal to journalism studies and translation scholars, applied linguists, lecturers, journalists, editors, and members of the public who consume, study, or teach news but are looking for alternatives.

https://www.routledge.com/Constructive-News-Across-Languages-and-Cultures/Riggs-Davier/p/book/9781032849058?srsltid=AfmBOoonvJjJkgamIQsQsfWj-aAl21GLE8VANPlLbYNr_YUot9nGm_J2