Space for the Liminal

Abstract

This essay considers how social actors in news have come to shape the contours of news and journalism and what these changes may suggest for other industries. It looks more specifically at the question of who does journalism and news and what that may signal for power dependencies, status, and norms formation. It examines how authors who contributed to this thematic issue define who gets to decide what is news and journalism, what forms of power are exerted amongst groups, who gets to claim status, and how norms and epistemologies are formed. Ultimately, this essay illustrates how conformity to groups and organizations varies with the investments that these social actors have to core and more peripheral journalism and media groups.

Why Can’t We Believe in That? Partisan Political Entertainment in the Mexican YouTube Sphere

“…The conditions of journalistic work have also changed: the global flexibilization of work has had an impact by decreasing wages and the proportion of permanently employed media workers, while the number of journalists who are employed in multiple jobs and/or casualized positions has increased (Deuze and Witschge 2018). Both developments have opened the doors to a variety of emerging forms of public discourse, opposed to, external to, or alternative to journalism (Belair-Gagnon et al 2019; Eldridge 2019; Gollmitzer 2014; Oller et al 2019).…”

“…A second conceptualization of emerging forms of public discourse has distinguished between the journalistic core and its periphery (Belair-Gagnon et al 2019; Eldridge 2019; Oller et al 2019). From this perspective, the news production process focuses on “disseminating accurate information” and goes beyond fulfilling the function of sharing opinions and presumed facts with “participants-consumers” (Oller et al 2019, 12).…”

Advancing Research into Dark Participation

“…What is news is crucially important for assessments of financial subsidies (such as in Scandinavia), and authoritarian regimes enforce rules for defining who has the right to work as a journalist, and in such ways controlling who gets to scrutinize the authorities (Badr, 2020). Journalism studies scholars have advanced diverse conceptualizations of emerging social actors associated with journalism, such as so-called interlopers (Eldridge, 2017), in-betweeners (Ahva, 2017) and peripheral actors (Belair-Gagnon, Holton, & Westlund, 2019). In this context, and for this thematic issue, von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw (2021) have added "parasites," discussed here as a subsystem that act in ways relating to and even threatening journalism as the primary system.…”

Securing Whistleblowing in the Digital Age: SecureDrop and the Changing Journalistic Practices for Source Protection

“…Pierre Bourdieu's "Field Theory" (Bourdieu 1996) and Thomas F. Gieryn's notion of "Boundary-work" (Gieryn 1983) both offer insights into these changing journalistic practices and how encryption-based technologies are entering the journalistic field to become common practices among reporters (Russell 2016, 161;Hartley and Ellersgaard 2020). These theoretical frameworks are particularly fruitful in analysing the adoption of newer journalistic practices in the digital context, where the boundaries of journalism are even more visibly in a constant process of negotiation; also, thanks to "liminal" actors that may function as drivers of innovation (Belair-Gagnon, Holton, and Westlund 2019). For instance, the aforementioned data journalism has shown some of the most evident instances of nontraditionally intended practices becoming routinized in reporting, thanks to its combination of data analysis, computing, and information design (Splendore 2017, 41-43).…”