Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of my co-editors Ran Wei (Hong Kong Baptist University), Ingrid Bachmann (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), and Taina Bucher (University of Oslo), I am pleased to share a call for papers for a special issue of Digital Journalism, entitled "LLM Sycophancy in Digital Journalism: News Consumption, Public Deliberation, and Governance in the Age of Conversational Agents."
As LLM-powered conversational agents (LCAs) become everyday gateways to information, a structural design challenge has come to the fore: sycophancy, the tendency of LCAs to align with a user's stated or implied input, informationally (agreeing with factual claims) and perspectivally (mirroring values and framings), sometimes prioritizing agreement over accuracy. Produced upstream by reinforcement learning from human feedback, sycophancy is a system-side disposition, distinct from confirmation bias, personalization, or anthropomorphism, because it generates belief-confirming content in real time, turn by turn.
The special issue examines sycophancy's stakes for journalism and the public sphere at three interlocking levels: individual (consumption, cognition, and affect), institutional (professional norms and newswork), and systems (governance, regulation, and epistemic integrity across jurisdictions).
We invite theoretical, empirical, methodological, and interdisciplinary contributions on themes including:
- Epistemic integrity and the deliberative public sphere when alignment becomes the default conversational disposition
- Media effects in the conversational mode, and shifts in knowledge structures and credibility judgments
- Human-machine and AI-mediated communication, and LCAs' relational disposition as discussants in news use
- Platform governance and comparative media systems
- Inequality, situated knowledge, and Global South perspectives
We welcome experimental, computational, qualitative, ethnographic, content-analytic, and comparative designs, and especially encourage cross-cultural and cross-system submissions.
Submissions: an extended abstract of 500–750 words (excluding references), with authors, affiliations, and a brief bio for each author, e-mailed to the corresponding guest editor, Xinzhi Zhang, xzzhang2@cityu.edu.hk.
Timeline:
Abstract deadline: 30 September 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2026
Full manuscript (7,000–9,000 words) deadline: 31 January 2027
Full details are in the attached poster (PDF). Please feel free to circulate to colleagues and networks who may be interested.
With best wishes,
Xinzhi Zhang, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Director of Research, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. Personal Website | Google Scholar | CityUHK Scholar