Guest Speaker - Nick Hagar

“Complexity in the Digital News Media Ecosystem”

Abstract

Structures drive the macro-level characteristics we observe in digital news media. Complex interactions among news production, distribution, and consumption create emergent structural pressures, shaping the system as a whole in unpredictable ways. In this work, I aim to highlight consequential emergent characteristics in familiar news processes. I argue that blending communication theory with complexity science provides a powerful analytic lens, revealing novel explanations for long-observed behaviors in journalists, platforms, and audiences. Using a case study of news dissemination on TikTok, I further explore the implications of this complexity framework for designing real-world platform interventions.

Bio

Nick Hagar is a PhD candidate in the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern University. He researches collective attention problems on digital platforms, with a focus on news media. His current projects include auditing news prevalence on TikTok and developing a framework for robust sampling of digital news archives. He recently completed research internships at Patreon and Meta Core Data Science.