Hybrid Engagement: Discourses and Scenarios of Entrepreneurial Journalism

Abstract

Although the challenge posed by social media and the participatory turn concerns culture and values at the very heart of journalism, journalists have been reluctant to adopt participatory values and practices. To encourage audience participation and to offer journalism that is both trustworthy and engaging, journalists of the future may embrace a hybrid practice of journalistic objectivity and audience-centred dialogue. As innovative and experimental actors, entrepreneurial journalism outlets can perform as forerunners of such a culture. By analysing discourses in the “About Us” pages of 41 entrepreneurial journalism outlets, the article examines the emerging journalistic ethos of entrepreneurial journalism and its participatory tendencies. The results show a conception of journalism that is a hybrid of the journalistic ideals of dialogue and objectivity. This kind of hybrid journalism and adjacent “hybrid engagement” can offer an answer to the dual challenge of how to make journalism more participation-friendly while at the same time hold on to the defining values and criteria of journalism. Drawing from futures research, the article concludes by sketching four scenarios of how entrepreneurial journalism and participatory hybrid engagement may develop in the future.

Networked News Participation: Future Pathways

“…In the introductory piece, Lewis and Molyneux (2018) suggest social media are ephemeral, uncertain things that demand highly contextualized research. Other articles in this thematic issue put forth new theories around the anti-system nature of alternative media regardless of their political stances (Holt, 2018), brief case studies to recount the historical trajectory of an evolving "participatory epistemology" as a new form of journalistic knowledge (Anderson & Revers, 2018), a hybrid model of audience engagement adopted by entrepreneur journalism (Ruotsalainen & Villi, 2018), a typology of "peripheral workers" who innovate or disrupt traditional news production inside and outside of the newsroom (Holton & Belair-Gagnon, 2018), and a deep dive into the German Spiegel Online to understand how comment moderation decisions are made (Boberg et al, 2018). In aggregate they provide both a taking stock of participation research to date in journalism studies as well as an interrogation of participation's status in the field as a construct and phenomenon.…”

“…Holton and Belair-Gagnon (2018) describe the peripheral workers in journalism, including citizen bloggers, programmers and analytical professionals, and rebels and reformers within institutional journalism, as "strangers" to disrupt the established rules of journalism. Ruotsalainen and Villi (2018) notice that a hybrid practice of both journalistic objectivity emphasizing professional fact-gathering and open-ended dialogism featuring audience interaction emerge in the form of "entrepreneur journalism". And Hermida suggests we are heading toward a mass collaboration of citizens participating on a large scale with journalists (2010; Garcia de Torres & Hermida, 2017).…”

The Midlife Crisis of the Network Society

“…Participation and participatory journalism are words that scratch the surface of the myriad conceptions of what it means to shift the modes and terms of engagement, as Anderson and Revers (2018) discuss here, as they try to unravel a "participatory epistemology" to describe "journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through public interaction" (p. 26). The hybridity of journalism today recalls some sort of mutant mix of journalist plus something else, or what we think of as a standard news outlet plus some other, not always desirable enhancement, as Ruotsalainen and Villi (2018) discuss. When new modes of online participatory media can be thought of as Holt (2018) puts forward, as "anti-systemness" and when even the most ordinary commenters on news outlets swear, a lot, creating all sorts of new swear words that AI content analysis must be taught capture, as Boberg, Schatto-Eckrodt, Frischlich and Quandt 2018do, what are scholars, not to mention the public, supposed to do?…”

News and Participation through and beyond Proprietary Platforms in an Age of Social Media

“…Altogether Ruotsalainen and Villli (2018) conclude that there is a form of 'hybrid engagement', essentially translating into the difficulties of simultaneously adhering to traditional values and criteria of journalism on the one hand, and maintaining a participation and dialogue friendly approach on the other. Ruotsalainen and Villi (2018) proceed by sketching out four different possible scenarios for entrepreneurial journalism for the future, some which entail a dialogue with the public, and others which put little emphasis on such elements. While Ruotsalainen and Villli (2018) approach participation as a mostly positive phenomenon that news media industries may choose to work with or not, other articles in the thematic issue have critically examined the more heterogeneous nature of participation, and especially, the darker sides of it.…”