Welcome to this 13th volume of the #ISOJ Journal!

We are delighted to present this edition of #ISOJ Journal with five research articles that reflect some of the most pressing issues of journalism in 2023. The papers, which were accepted in a very competitive blind-review process, are attuned to the International Symposium on Online Journalism’s tradition of bridging the gap between academia and the news industry.

The first article, “News You Can Use: Pragmatic Solidarity as a News Value in Online Community Journalism,” is a case study of the Milwaukee-based Neigh- borhood News Service. The authors, Ayleen Cabas-Mijares, Joy Jenkins, and Laura Nootbaar, show how the NNS deployed the news value of pragmatic solidarity to cover historically excluded communities.

In “Architects of Necessity: BIPOC News Startups’ Critique of Philanthropic In- terventions,” Meredith D. Clark and Tracie M. Powel analyze the data from 100 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) news media founders and pub- lishers. They focus on the publishers’ efforts to balance “the constraints of digital news production with the information needs of the communities they serve and the demands of the philanthropic support that make their work feasible.” Their research opens up key insights into this field and looks at where support and re- sources are needed for the evolution of BIPOC news startups moving forward.

The third article comes from the Philippines. In “Of Media Shifts and Crises: Mapping Digital Journalism and Online News Deserts in the Philippines,” Maria Raizza Renella P. Bello and Robbin Charles M. Dagle identify regions in the Philippines that can be considered “online news deserts.” They also analyze contemporary challenges and characteristics of digital journalism in the country.

In the fourth article, researchers from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and Department of Computer Science and Engineering Santa Clara Univer- sity — Subramaniam (Subbu) Vincent, Xuyang Wu, Maxwell Huang, and Yi Fang — study if the journalistic routine of quoting sources can help people and machines to identify authentic journalistic content online. The article, “Could Quoting Data Patterns Help in Identifying Journalistic Behavior Online?,” shows that “journalistic sourcing routines are deeper in the reporting practice, and their manifestations may be harder to game by inauthentic journalistic and/or news actors.” As AI technology continues to evolve, the news practice of reporters’ sourcing remains a crucial element in journalism to help challenge the ever- changing digital space that poses existential questions of truth, validity and authenticity with news content today.

Finally, the fifth article dives into thousands of reviews of news podcasts. In “Five Stars Because They Tell It Like It Is: A Parasocial Examination of Main- stream, Conservative and Far-Right Reviews on Apple Podcasts,” Marcus Funk, LaRissa Lawrie, and Burton Speakman conclude that “Para-social phenomena appear to be an essential part of podcast loyalty and listening habits; reviews of mainstream news podcasts overall express that loyalty with less frequency and emotional intensity than reviewers of a spectrum of other non-fiction podcast content, including far-right podcasts that are deeply toxic.”

We are very grateful to the fourteen researchers whose articles are published in this 13th Volume of #ISOJ Journal and to all other researchers who participated in the competitive call for papers launched at the 24th ISOJ. We are also grate- ful to the panel of international researchers who helped us with the selection

of the five papers of this volume of the journal and, anonymously, helped the authors with constructive critique and edits. Finally, we want to thank the team at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin for its support of this journal, especially Mallary Tenore, Filipa Rodrigues and James Ian Tennant.