Here some of the projects are presented. Please contact us for more information.
Principal Investigator: Jaana Hujanen
The multidisciplinary project produces novel and holistic insights into the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) into newswork. The focus is on how AI related processes partake in transforming and reshaping the norms, ethics, and practices of journalism. Since AI is a rapidly developing field, visions of AI futures are an essential dimension of its development. By considering potentials and expectations, the study bridges current uses and perceptions of AI with future projections of actors envisioning AI into journalism practice. The main contribution of this project to the research field is two-fold: i) an increased understanding of the actors involved in teams deploying editorial AI, and ii) providing a non-deterministic, normative, and critical understanding of the technology in newsrooms. The project is funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö), 2024-2025.
Principal Investigator: Jaana Hujanen
The project examines the dynamics of crises news and information ecosystems during Covid19 pandemic where information production and information dissemination were increasingly complex and included multiple different actors. The project produces new information and understanding about the roles of information providers in a crisis and the ways citizens acquire and make sense crises news and information and the roles of information providers. The project is funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö), 2022-2024.
National coordinator: Jonita Siivonen
The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is a global research network, which has monitored news media in a gender perspective every fifth year since 1995. Finland has been a part of GMMP from the very beginning as one of the 71 countries that have participated in the monitoring. Finland also takes part in 2020 when the monitoring takes place for the sixth time, this time in over one hundred countries. GMMP Finland is a cooperation between the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, which is funding the monitoring. GMMP Finland works closely with the other Nordic countries’ GMMP groups. Jonita Siivonen is national coordinator for GMMP in Finland and a member of the GMMP advisory group.
The share of women as news subjects has slowly increased from 17 percent in 1995 to 24 percent in the two latest monitorings. in 2015, the share of women in Finnish news media content was somewhat higher than the global percentage – 27 per cent – but lower than the percentage of women news subjects in the Finnish material five years earlier. The website Who makes the news contains global and national reports on the monitorings. The monitoring takes place every five years. The next round — the 7th — will take place in 2025.
Principal Investigator: Jaana Hujanen
The project examines how local communication and journalism operate in the same field but according to different principles in Finland in the beginning of the 2020s. The main question is what are the ethical principles and practices local media and other operators rely on when producing and creating information. This is being studied from the perspectives of makers’ self-perceptions, cases and future of journalism. The project relies theoretically on journalism, communication and future studies. The project is funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö), 2020-2023.
Researcher: Jenny Stenberg-Sirén
In her postdoctoral research Jenny Stenberg-Sirén analyzes the linguistic norms and practices of the appgeneration. The project is a comparative study of young people’s (15-19 years old) multimodal communicative patterns in social media (Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp). The study is based on two types of data: social media posts and interviews. In the project Stenberg-Sirén analyzes which linguistic norms are communicated on the different platforms, in relation to the degree of publicness of the posts as well as to the social media platform per se. In addition, she analyzes the linguistic attitudes and the linguistic awareness of the respondents, by examining how aware they are of their communicative choices and how they explain them. During this project Jenny Stenberg-Sirén is working at the Swedish literature society in Finland. The project was funded by Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland in 2020-2023.
Researcher Carl-Gustav Lindén
Here we explore new forms of journalistic work in an increasingly digital environment in a series of workshops. We analyse how technical solutions augment and enchance different work processes and aim at developing a research agenda for a new theoretical concept, augmemted journalism. The project is a collaboration between University of Helsinki, University of Bergen and Södertörn University and is funded by Nordforsk, 2020-2022.
Researcher Carl-Gustav Lindén
EMBEDDIA is a research collaboration between six European universitites as well as four media partners and tech companies. In Europe, access to fundamental resources such as local news and government services is limited by the great diversity of the EU’s 37 languages. For the EU to realise a truly equitable, open, multilingual future internet, new tools allowing high quality transformations between languages are urgently needed. The project seeks to address these challenges by leveraging innovations in the use of cross-lingual embeddings coupled with deep neural networks to allow existing monolingual resources to be used across languages, leveraging their high speed of operation for near real-time applications, without the need for large computational resources. The project is managed by the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana and funded by EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, 2019-2022.
Principal investigator Carl-Gustav Lindén
This project is based on the book ”Silicon Valley och makten över medierna” (Nordicom, 2020) written by the PI and applies action research methods to explore how newsmedia and journalists can decrease their dependency on Silicon Valley’s tech giants, namely Facebook and Google. Media managers, policy makers and advertisers are engaged in a series of workshops. The project is funded by Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, 2021.
Principal Investigator: Jaana Hujanen
The project has examined the emergence of hyperlocal media in Finland as a part of a larger transformation of Finnish news media and journalism. In the empirical analysis, the focus was set on initiatives, which have emerged during the 2000s. However, the existence of older and established forms of local media were also taken into account. We have found that the hyperlocal field in Finland is inherently diverse and emerging at a leisurely pace. We found approximately 30 hyperlocal publications active in 2017. In line with previous studies, Finnish hyperlocal media originate online, pertain to geographically defined communities and aim to fill perceived gaps in local news and information sharing, as well as discussion. The study also shows that “hyperlocal publishing” is a wide notion; the content published can vary from news to genres that are not traditionally seen as journalism, such as baking recipes, personal blog postings and native advertising. Accordingly, it is not easy to classify the publications into some clearly defined groups. Not only their contents but also their goals, makers, practices and business modelsvary a lot. An amateur or voluntary background characterizes many of the Finnish cases. Most of the production teams consist of the amateurs or "enthusiasts", while there are only a few semi-professional operations. Hyperlocal initiatives typically aim at contributing to developing local grassroots reporting since they see that the local media scene is weak or the level of reporting low. The majority of hyperlocal media included in the study lacked business goals and had problems with profitability. The project was funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Helsingin Sanomain Säätiö) in 2017-2018.
Researcher: Camilla Haavisto
Camilla Haavisto’s postdoctoral research project has focused on the claims-making of civil society actors in and through the media, particularly when questions of racism and anti-racism are concerned. For her project, Haavisto has studied the communication of established NGOs, and she has also examined seemingly spontaneous campaigns on Facebook and other social media that strived to increase the attention for anti-racism and pro-humanitarianism. Her interest has also been directed towards the claims-making of the Right to Live-collective consisting of protesting asylum seekers and Finnish allies. The collective organized a five-month-long sit-in demonstration for migrants’ rights in 2017. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative analyses of media material and analyses of big data, the project has produced new knowledge on how exclusionary practices and structures in the Finnish media landscape are constructed, copied and circulated, but also challenged. The outcomes of the project have also contributed to more theoretically driven discussions on agency and organizing in relation to communication and multiculture. This work comes together in articles and book-chapters that Haavisto has produced individually and together with other scholars. The project was funded by the Academy of Finland 2013–2016 with a prolongation until 2018.
Principal investigator Carl-Gustav Lindén
In the cross-disciplinary project Immersive Automation, journalism researchers, computer scientists linguists and UX designers from University of Helsinki and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland developed a system for automatically generated content in three languages, Swedish, Finnish and English. The project included close collaboration with five media partners and two technology companies. We also provided training in computational thinking for journalists. The main source of funding was the state innovation agency Tekes (now Business Finland) with financial contributions also from the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland as well as the partners, 2017-2018.
Researcher/PI Carl-Gustav Lindén
In a series of research projects a group of four Finnish researchers from three universities studied media business models in in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the United States and Germany to explore innovations and new development. The project resulted in three reports and a number of scientific articles and book chapters. The projects were funded by the newspaper association of Finland, 2016-2018.