A. (Ansgard) Heinrich, Dr

“Who’s Breaking the News? Global Conflict Reporting in the Digital Age”

The project Who’s Breaking the News? analyses the fundamental transformations of global conflict reporting. Funded with the help of an NWO Aspasia grant, the project takes the digitization and globalization of societies as point of departure to explore today’s complex, digital information networks in which a variety of agents cover conflict.

We research how, in an age in which human suffering, abuse of human rights, terror and ongoing wars across the globe are prevalent, the communicative infrastructure to understand these issues is fundamentally disrupted. While legacy news media across the globe seem to struggle to define and to keep their audiences and while misinformation and outright propaganda appear to undermine democracies, a new information sharing sphere has evolved. Numerous agents are empowered by digital tools to take part in news production and dissemination. We research what such redistribution of conflict reporting means for the news and information supply that underlies public debate and decision-making on pressing social issues.

Overall, Who’s Breaking the News? aims to cater to the urgent need to understand the dynamics of (online) communication networks that shape our perception of conflict today.