Making News Outside Legacy Media

Abstract

One of the recurrent questions in journalism scholarship is whether journalism as a profession and institution can grow and thrive outside the traditional newsroom (especially, with the dominant agenda-setting media in most African countries being either state-or privately run press). In introducing this special issue, we revisit this pertinent question, while also considering the implications of today's digitally networked continent, and the question of the ever-expanding communication ecology that is a dynamic space for media production by both human and nonhuman actors. First, we acknowledge that the current peripheralization of journalism is a global phenomenon, and that digital technologies seem to reproduce similar trends and patterns in various journalistic cultures across the world, and therefore the increasingly connected continent cannot be understood in isolation. The case studies featured in our special issue show that digital technologies have clearly fast-tracked the changes in media production and intensified the disruptive effects of the operations of non-journalistic actors within the continent's communication ecology. We then argue that when carefully considered, these changes in media production and journalistic practices are merely part of a continuation of trends that preceded the digital age. Non-traditional ways of making news have been driven mainly by non-journalistic actors' perpetual need to challenge or question traditional actors, in media and politics, as the exclusive disseminators, the dominant voices, or the sole arbiters in spaces of deliberation within the communication ecology.

When fact-checking is not WEIRD: Negotiating consensus outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries

“…However, a sizable number of interviewees from Africa, Asia, and to some extent Latin America described their work in opposition to or as an alternative to mainstream media and journalism (Medeiros and Badr 2022). This is particularly salient in contentious political contexts where local elites and governments have historically controlled or held the press financially or legally captive (Akser and Baybars 2022;Cheruiyot et al 2022; Lanuza and Arguelles 2022; Mesquita and de-Lima-Santos 2023), a development that compels journalists to refrain from confronting domestic powers (Ong and Tapsell 2022). Consistent with findings from Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill (2018), factcheckers in these circumstances have to paradoxically situate their practices at the periphery of journalism to avoid partisanship and political polarization.…”

Meso News-Space in China: Peripheral News Production of Platform Journalism

“…As a social practice, peripheral news production is context-specific. In the West, from the perspective of professional boundaries and identity legitimacy, legacy media can be regarded as core actors and the emerging social media and digital news organizations as peripheral actors (Belair-Gagnon, Holton, and Westlund 2019;Cheruiyot, Wahutu, Mare, et al 2021). As newcomers to the journalistic field, such organizations attempt to obtain identity legitimacy from social acceptance as professional journalists, which legitimizes them to offer the public goods of informing the public (Murschetz 2013).…”