*CFP* "COMUNICACIÓN POLÍTICA Y TECNOLOGÍAS APLICADAS: DESINFORMACIÓN, NOTICIAS FALSAS Y VERIFICACIÓN DE HECHOS", NÚMERO 112, REVISTA RAZÓN Y PALABRA

La facilidad de propagación de las noticias falsas en la sociedad digital constituye un peligro para la salud o la economía, pero también para la democracia en su conjunto. Esta es una consecuencia más de la popularización de la computación, de la robotización o de la segmentación algorítmica. En el marco de la Comunicación Política, sus consecuencias nocivas preocupan a instituciones, medios de comunicación y ciudadanía, muy especialmente en época electoral.

La crisis originada por la pandemia de COVID-19 ha generado un debate sobre la necesidad de establecer mecanismos de control que eviten la desinformación, así como el desarrollo de instrumentos que permitan verificar hechos. El “fact-checking”, pues, es una de las principales tareas de la comunicación, constituyéndose como pieza angular de la responsabilidad social: automatiza la corroboración de las noticias a través de la detección de la fuente, del análisis de contenido y de la dirección de los distintos flujos informativos. Y es que, en este contexto de miedo colectivo, la proliferación de datos inexactos y la utilización con fines de intoxicación de las redes sociales por parte de actores políticos erosiona la estabilidad social, la convivencia pacífica y las bases sobre las que se construyen las democracias liberales, también las iberoamericanas.

*CFP* "DISRUPTING AND RESETTLING THE LOCAL IN DIGITAL NEWS SPACES", SPECIAL ISSUE, DIGITAL JOURNALISM JOURNAL

We are inviting proposals to an exciting special issue on digital local news and journalism. Please consider to submit and/or forward to interested parties. Deadline for extended abstracts is June 30, 2021.

This special issue of Digital Journalism invites scholars to explore theoretically, conceptually and empirically the 'place', power and challenges of the local in digital news spaces. Both single-country and comparative research are welcome, as well as both theoretical and empirical manuscripts. The latter may involve quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods approaches. The issue particularly welcomes cross-national comparative analyses and non-Western perspectives.

Possible topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• How do journalists, audiences, policymakers and others define and shape understandings of the 'local' in digital spaces.
• What are the changing ways in which journalism reproduces, represents or builds notions of locality and location in digital space?

*CFP* “OVER FLOW: RESPONSES TO BREAKING TV & MEDIA NEWS”, NEW ISSUE, THE FLOWJOURNAL

FlowJournal formally invites contributions to our new space for responses to breaking TV and media news: OverFlow. This new feature allows time-sensitive, one-off pieces to be published on our homepage alongside our monthly columns. Past contributions that considered Black Panther’s Oscar nominations, the Game of Thrones finale, and discourse around the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s triumph in the World Cup have already been published as a part of this new initiative. 

We are most interested in pieces that provoke conversation around breaking TV and media news through industrial, cultural, political, economic, or national lenses. Contributors may consider the discourse surrounding popular programming, casting notices, industry announcements, awards season, policy and regulation developments, or media activism to name just a few areas of interest. Submissions will be evaluated based on timeliness, newsworthiness, and stylistic fit. 

*CFP* “THE STATE OF THE NEW BEATS: EXPERTISE AND DIVISION OF LABOUR IN CURRENT NEWSROOMS”, SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNALISM PRACTICE

More than hundred years after their inception, news beats reporting is facing transformative changes. The major roles they played in modern journalism – both on stage and behind the scenes – is now threatened by a series of layoffs and downsizing, growing reliance on a smaller workforce with fewer years of experience, who are expected to cover broader and growingly complex domains; the demise of older beats and the emergence of new ones, not necessarily along traditional thematic and geographical lines.

The existing scholarly literature doesn't supply a coherent and updated picture on current structures of newsrooms, the prevailing division of labor inside and outside them, and the social, cultural and epistemic consequences of these aspects on published and unpublished news contents. Interestingly, scholars agree that beats were born in late 19th century, culminated in the second half of the 20th century, and transformed since the beginning of the 21st century following trends of downsizing, restructuring, digitization and the rise of online sourcing and social media. However, the actual nature of this transformation remains unclear. While the classic studies that focused on entire beat system are growingly outdated, recent works cannot encompass the current state of the beat system due to their overwhelming focus on single beats.

*CFP* "REPORTING GLOBAL WHILE BEING LOCAL: LOCAL SOURCES OF NEWS FOR DISTANT AUDIENCES", SPECIAL ISSUE OF JOURNALISM STUDIES

There has been copious research over the years concerning foreign correspondents, but news professionals working in their "own" countries but for "distant" audiences only garnered passing attention of researchers. But such news-staff – who have been described as ‘local-foreign’ – have long played important roles within international news production. To gather news in areas considered difficult to access for foreign journalists, local people are engaged by foreign journalists as logistical and linguistic aides, known as ‘fixers’. Local journalists – including visual journalists – are also increasingly employed by global news organisations to produce news from their home countries for distant and diverse foreign audiences. Local activists and non-governmental organisations and foreign news organisations increasingly collaborate to produce international news. As the costs of international news production rise and budgets for foreign bureaus are cut, and as the protracted conflicts of the 21st  century have proved increasingly dangerous for foreign correspondents to navigate on their own, the importance of the local collaborators has grown. Consequently, ‘local-foreign news production’ can be understood as expanding in magnitude and in the kind of actors involved.

In light of these changes, scholars have argued, international news today needs to be understood as a chorus of voices – both foreign and local as well as professional and non-professional. Research has shown that these voices within local-foreign news production arise from distinct geo-cultural but comparable socio-economic backgrounds in different parts of the world. International journalistic processes can also be shaped by both local story-telling objectives as well as efforts to conform news narratives to those perceived as preferred by foreign clients and audiences. The growing importance of local-foreign news workers is also understood as giving rise to tensions between international news-staff and local news-staff who work side by side.