Pre-Conference: Journalism, Platforms, and Public Interest Technologies

Name: Pre-Conference: Journalism, Platforms, and Public Interest Technologies
Start: 2026-04-08T09:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-04-08T18:00:00+02:00
Location: University of Groningen

Schedule

Wed Apr 08 2026 at 09:00 am to 06:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

University of Groningen | Groningen, GR

Registration is for audience members only. Presenters and panellists are already accounted for and do not need to sign up.
About this Event

Conference Topic

In recent years, Public Interest Technology (PIT) has emerged as a field devoted to rethinking the institutions, infrastructures, and technology-embedded services that shape society for the common good. Defined by Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank (2021) as “the application of design, data, and delivery to advance the public interest and promote the public good in the digital age,” PIT has largely concentrated on governmental and nonprofit contexts. Yet journalism and media studies are increasingly recognizing the value of this framework for interrogating—and redesigning—the technological systems that underpin news production, distribution, and engagement.

This turn is overdue. Journalism’s long-standing mission to hold power accountable has been widely understood as foundational to democracy (Helberger, 2019; Hampton, 2009). But that mission is under strain. Privately controlled digital infrastructures (Luitse, 2024; Simon, 2022), opaque platform architectures, metrics-driven newsroom cultures (Dodds et al., 2023; Schaetz, 2024; Christin, 2020), and rapidly advancing automation systems are reshaping the conditions under which journalism can operate in the public interest (Sevignani et al., 2025). These shifts raise urgent questions about how journalists might adopt PIT principles to critically assess the technologies they depend on and how the field can imagine alternatives that better serve democratic needs.

This conference invites scholars, practitioners, and technologists to examine what is working, what is changing, and what tensions arise as journalism adapts its public mission through the lenses of design, data, and delivery. How might PIT reshape journalistic practices, media organizations, platform relationships, and collaborative models within newsrooms, across media systems, with platforms, and alongside public and civic actors?