Digital Journalism

Historicising the journalist-audience relationships in the internet era: A case study of the Slovenian newspaper Delo

“…Various superficial generalizations in journalists' audience conceptions that span a wide range of options, from the refusal of audience members' relevance in news to the enthusiasm for closer journalist-audience encounters, indicates what Gitlin (2009) names journalism's "crisis of authority" implying difficulties to bring people closer to the news through interactive, let alone participatory practices. Journalism's troubles of (re)engaging with the people they are primarily responsible to, is particularly evident in the contemporary communication environment where "customization" and "multiplication" of news appear as prevalent trends (see Jones and Salter, 2012). In this context, journalists of traditional news institutions appear in need to rethink the services they provide to their clients.…”

“…In clear commercial motive is often at work, such as recruiting audience members as free labour, getting income from targeted advertising, and setting up online projects for niche audiences (Jones and Salter, 2012).…”

“…In this context, Joyce Y. M. Nip (2006: 216) discusses the agency of "interactive journalism", that is, mediated interpersonal communication between journalists and audience members prior to, or after, news publication. Despite many interactive modes that engage audiences in news, such as the "customization" of news relay (e.g., Jones and Salter, 2012), audience members' "gatewatching" practices (e.g., Bruns, 2009), or institutionalized "user-generated content" contributions (e.g., Singer and Ashman, 2009), journalists tend to retain control on the news production in order to maintain their power of primary negotiators of social reality (see Nip, 2010).…”

“…For instance, Wikinews, developed between 2003 and 2005, stimulates collaborative news making and open editing after publication, on the one hand, and is organized on the basis of horizontal structure in which formal hierarchy is rejected, on the other. (Jones and Salter, 2012) Despite substantial attention to the concepts of access, interaction and participation in studies concerning journalism and audiences, there appears to be a void in diachronic investigations of journalist-audience online encounters in respect to presence, their socio-communicative relationships, and co-deciding processes. Media and journalism research in Slovenia has dealt with the concepts of access, interaction and participation foremost in its theoretical investigations of public opinion (e.g., Splichal, 1999) and the public sphere (e.g., Splichal, 2012).…”

“…Namely, media and journalism scholars identify different modes of audience engagement in the news making processes (e.g., Deuze, 2007;Nip, 2010;Jones and Salter, 2012), find patterns of changes in the established notion of news toward multi-perspectivity (e.g., Himelboim and McCreery, 2012;Hermida, 2013;Barkho, 2013), and question the boundaries between conventional roles of journalists as authors and audiences as recipients (Bruns, 2009;Heinonen, 2011;Vobič and Dahlgren, 2013). These works signify a power struggle within the journalist-audience relationship, a struggle that pivots on the degrees of participation in respect to particular social, technological, and institutional settings -some newsrooms have been more open to changes, others more reluctant (e.g., Dahlgren, 2009;Thurman and Hermida, 2010;Robinson, 2010;Paulussen, 2011).…”