The research on online journalism has been dominated by a discourse of technological innovation. The "success" of online journalism is often measured by to what degree it utilizes technological assets like interactivity, multimedia and hypertext. This paper critically examines the technologically oriented research on online journalism in the second decade of its existence. The aim is twofold: First, to investigate to what degree online journalism, as it is portrayed in empirical research, utilizes new technology to a greater extent than before. Second, the paper points to the limitations of the technologically oriented research and suggests alternative research approaches that to a greater extent might explain why online journalism develops as it does.
What is Digital Journalism Studies? delves into the technologies, platforms, and audience relations that constitute digital journalism studies' central objects of study, outlining its principal theories, the research methods being developed, its normative underpinnings, and possible futures for the academic field.The book argues that digital journalism studies is much more than the study of journalism produced, distributed, and consumed with the aid of digital technologies. Rather, the scholarly field of digital journalism studies is built on questions that disrupt much of what previously was taken for granted concerning media, journalism, and public spheres, asking questions like: What is a news organisation? To what degree has news become separated from journalism? What roles do platform companies and emerging technologies play in the production, distribution, and consumption of news and journalism? The book reviews the research into these questions and argues that digital journalism studies constitutes a cross-disciplinary field that does not focus on journalism solely from the traditions of journalism studies, but is open to research from and conversations with related fields. This is a timely overview of an increasingly prominent field of media studies that will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and students of journalism and communication.
Audience engagement has become a key concept in contemporary discussions on how news companies relate to the public and create sustainable business models. These discussions are irrevocably tied to practices of monitoring, harvesting and analyzing audience behaviours with metrics, which is increasingly becoming the new currency of the media economy. This article argues this growing tendency to equate engagement to behavioural analytics, and study it primarily through quantifiable data, is limiting. In response, we develop a heuristic theory of audience engagement with news comprising four dimensions-the technicalbehavioural, emotional, normative and spatiotemporal-and explicate these in terms of different relations of engagement between human-to-self, human-to-human, human-to-content, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. Paradoxically, this model comprises a specific theory of audience engagement while simultaneously making visible that constructing a theory of audience engagement is an impossible task. The article concludes by articulating methodological premises, which future empirical research on audience engagement should consider.
This article analyses the characteristics of digital journalism studies through an empirical investigation of all articles published in the journal Digital Journalism, from its launch in 2013 to issue 6, 2018. The aim of the analysis is to identify dominant themes and degrees of diversity and interdisciplinary in digital journalism studies, and to identify biases and blind spots. The article is based on analysis of keywords, abstracts and references used in all articles published in the journal. The findings suggest that while the research published in Digital Journalism is firmly situated within journalism studies, it has a stronger emphasis on technology, platforms, audience and the present. The article also finds that digital journalism studies, as seen in Digital Journalism, is dominated by perspectives from the social sciences, while largely ignoring digital journalism as a meaning-making system, and that the field of research could benefit from the application of theories and perspectives from the humanities and to some extent from theoretical computer science and informatics. Finally, the article argues that digital journalism studies suffers from a lack of connections between empirical research and the many conceptual discussions that dominate the (sub)field.
Journalism in many cultures is today in an epistemic crisis. The main drivers of this crisis are discourses of disinformation and the general datafication of society, which combined render dubious the ways in which journalism assesses sources and information in its production of knowledge. Basic journalistic competencies related to information literacy-which constitute a key prerequisite for journalism's ability to establish trust, authority and accountability-are out of tune with the challenges of modern information societies. If the institutions and professionals of journalism do not update their information literacy competencies, and if the public doesn't have faith in journalism's ability to master such competencies, journalism will lose its societal relevance, simply because it loses its ability to produce trustworthy knowledge. In this short essay, I will briefly discuss the challenges for journalism posed by discourses of disinformation and datafication. I will argue that these challenges push journalism towards an epistemic reorientation beyond the right/wrong and true/false dichotomies. Such a reorientation can begin with the further development and normalization of source criticism as attitude and practice in journalism. Being a common methodological and epistemic concept in historiography and information science, source criticism constitutes a more constructivist attitude towards information literacy, which, I will argue, is exactly what journalism needs. The problems of disinformation Since then-candidate Trump in 2016 started his campaign against what he derided as the 'failing' media, 'fake news', propaganda, media manipulation and other forms of disinformation have become a global phenomenon. This phenomenon is by no means new,
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