M.12. Science Communication and Scientific Information: actors, practices, and strategies in the Digital Era

The evolution of the digital media has profoundly reshaped the production, circulation, and consumption of information. The rise of platform-driven logics has redefined editorial practices, transformed traditional journalistic routines, and introduced new actors into the informational scenario (Witschge et al., 2016; Boccia Artieri & Marinelli, 2018).

Social media have become pivotal arenas for news access, fostering hybrid models of content production in which legacy media outlets, digital-native publishers, and non-journalistic creators coexist and compete for user attention. These transformations have been further accelerated by the adoption of mobile devices and the algorithmic-driven information flows, which collectively challenge established notions of authority, professional boundaries, and gatekeeping (Newman, 2022; Nielsen & Ganter, 2022).

The Covid-19 served as a stress test for this evolving ecosystem, particularly in relation to scientific information and science communication. The simultaneous demand for reliable scientific content and the proliferation of misleading or inaccurate information exposed structural vulnerabilities associated with information overload and the dynamics of the “infodemic”. At the same time, the crisis renewed public interest in scientific expertise and reconfigured the visibility of experts across both traditional and digital media—positioning them, on the one hand, as new mediating actors between scientific institutions and society and, on the other, as emerging educational and informational sources in the digital age (Campus & Saracino, 2022; Cataldo et al., 2024).

This panel collects theoretical and empirical studies on the evolution of editorial and business models, communication strategies, and production practices that characterize emerging forms of science communication in the platform society.