Online News Audiences as Co-Authors? The Extent and Limits of Collaborative Citizen-Professional Journalism on Newspaper Comment Threads

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated how comment threads published beneath online news articles are being transformed into fluid interfaces between professional journalists, their work and their audiences. Today's audience-members are not only able to respond to published narratives but to embellish and, potentially, contest them: by posting comments based on personal knowledge about an issue and even using eyewitness testimony to directly affirm or challenge a story's details. Though often stylistically "messy," such comment posts go beyond merely manifesting and magnifying news discourses-let alone simply reacting to them. Rather, as on social media, posters can publicly discuss and debate the meaning and significance of stories, with the more informed and assertive among them contributing content so significant that it reshapes the texts themselves. In so doing, such claims-makers and counter claims-makers become hybrids of journalists (news producers), audiencemembers (news consumers) and claims-makers (news sources). Drawing on the author's recent empirical findings, this chapter argues that online news has entered a dynamic but disruptive new phase in which journalistic authority may increasingly be contested, as "audience-members" begin to compete with "reporters" for authorship of news narratives.

“Scrounger-bashing” as national pastime: the prevalence and ferocity of anti-welfare ideology on niche-interest online forums

“…The findings support those of other studies from the period which have identified the prevalence of scrounger discourses in online spaces more directly and explicitly devoted to discussion of welfare, including comment threads posted beneath news articles and associated Twitter conversations (e.g. Morrison 2018 and. However, notwithstanding the (largely quantitative) British Social Attitudes surveys, and with notable exceptions (Paterson, Coffey-Glover, and Peplow 2016;Paterson, Peplow, and Grainger 2017), there remains a puzzling lack of in-depth qualitative research into public perceptions of the UK benefits systemand their origins.…”

“…However, in contrast to similar studies, which have generally focused on surveys (e.g. Taylor-Gooby and Taylor 2015), face-to-face dialogue (Valentine and Harris 2014), newspaper comment threads or self-supporting social media such as Twitter (Morrison 2018 andVan Der Bom et al 2018), the specific purview here is the encroachment of taken-for-granted scrounger discourse(s) into conversations between community members in "the third space" of "non-political" websites "where political talk emerges" (Wright 2012, 5). In this case, the chosen focus is inter-user dialogue on a purposefully unsystematic selection of niche-interest web forums the subjects of which have little or no obvious relevance to issues around welfare.…”

“…Commensurately, the few who have analysed discourses embedded in lay debates about poverty and welfare have tended to confine their purviews to below-the-line comment threads published beneath articles focusing on these issues and/or conversations about these stories on platforms like Twitter (e.g. Morrison 2018 andPaterson and Gregory 2020). This paper attempts to do something different, by purposely turning its attention towards online forums that have no obvious focus on politics or wider society: ones that are instead preoccupied with highly specialist pastimes, activities and other niche interests.…”

“…Comments were initially coded using a form of qualitative content analysis drawing on manual sentiment analysis techniques, as in other recent social media studies, including those focusing on online discussions about welfare and poverty (e.g. Lopez et al 2012;Serna et al 2017;Morrison 2018 and. The first stage involved identifying the range of discursive categories present in the sample (e.g.…”

“…Wood and Skeggs 2011;Jensen 2014;Patrick 2017), while the coincidence of timing of austerity politics with the mass-digitalisation of the press and surging social media use both encouraged and made more public the normalisation of scrounger discourses in everyday conversations, as recent qualitative analyses of comment threads and Twitter have shown (e.g. Van Der Bom et al 2018;Morrison 2018 andPaterson 2020).…”