The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies

Bob Franklin, Scott Eldridge II, Scott A. Eldridge II, Bob Franklin, Scott Eldridge II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367205027
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317499060
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies offers an unprecedented collection of essays addressing the key issues and debates shaping the field of Digital Journalism Studies today.

Across the last decade, journalism has undergone many changes, which have driven scholars to reassess its most fundamental questions, and in the face of digital change, to ask again: 'Who is a journalist?' and 'What is journalism?'. This companion explores a developing scholarly agenda committed to understanding digital journalism and brings together the work of key scholars seeking to address key theoretical concerns and solve unique methodological riddles.

Compiled of 58 original essays from distinguished academics across the globe, this Companion draws together the work of those making sense of this fundamental reconceptualization of journalism, and assesses its impacts on journalism's products, its practices, resources, and its relationship with audiences. It also outlines the challenge presented by studying digital journalism and, more importantly, offers a first set of answers.

This collection is the very first of its kind to attempt to distinguish this emerging field as a unique area of academic inquiry. Through identifying its core questions and presenting its fundamental debates, this Companion sets the agenda for years to come in defining this new field of study as Digital Journalism Studies, making it an essential point of reference for students and scholars of journalism.

Part I
Conceptualizing digital journalism studies

1
What’s Digital? What’s Journalism?

Asmaa Malik and Ivor Shapiro

This book offers several valuable perspectives on the continuing evolution of digital journalism. If you are holding it in your hands and flipping its pages, you are well aware of the limitations of ink and paper. If, however, you are reading it on a mobile device and swiping the screen to get to the next paragraph, you may wonder why this chapter is not being updated even as you read it.

Therein lie both the challenge and the promise of the field we are discussing—and a clue to its definition. The two words digital journalism contain at least two sets of definitional problems. First, the idea of journalism—as in something distinct from multiple alternative sources of information about news and public affairs—has become increasingly harder to pin down. As for the idea of digital, it must surely refer to more than merely the means by which information is disseminated, since printed pages and broadcast news have been available on digital platforms for several years.

Credible arguments could therefore be made that practically all journalism is digital today and that practically all nonfiction (or practically none of it) is journalism. In what follows, we will argue otherwise, on both counts. In our view, journalism continues to be distinguished from other nonfiction by a small collection of somewhat easily recognized characteristics. Meanwhile, digital refers not so much to means of production and reception but to content itself—its voice and reach, the manner and stages of its evolution, and its potential impact. Conversely, analog journalism, although in decline, lives on, in static productions for both print and audio-visual platforms.

Yet, we must concede right away that, just as the border between journalism and other nonfiction may be porous, so is that between digital and analog journalism. Some news begins digitally and either ends with production in a newspaper or newscast or treats that static production as a way station toward a further stage of evolution. Elsewhere, news that begins in legacy form ends up as social material to be fought over, corrected, or enhanced. Either way, as we will show, the shadow of that seemingly simple modifier, digital, extends over substantive transformations in the process, technique, and norms of journalism itself.

First, however, as with any modified noun phrase, we begin the task of definition with the noun. We cannot isolate what digital journalism is until we clearly understand what journalism is—and, thereby, what it is not.

Defining ‘journalism’

The idea of defining journalism has become increasingly controversial in this century, as the “boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication” become less intuitive (Deuze, 2007: 141). Much of the debate stems from a worry over according special status to a class of practitioners (Gant, 2007; Hartley, 2000: 41; Ingram, 2011; Rosen, 2011), which raises yet more problematic questions over whether or not journalists comprise a ‘profession’ (Allison, 1986, 1986; Banning, 1999; Deuze, 2005; Merrill, 1986). This knot is neatly sliced, however, when one restricts the project to defining a set of practices (journalism) rather than a class of practitioners (journalists) (Zelizer, 2004: 42–43). Shapiro, who described this practice-focused approach as ‘functional definition,’ proposed that journalism “comprises the activities involved in an independent pursuit of accurate information about current or recent events and its original presentation for public edification” (2014: 561).

The most tenuous part of Shapiro’s proposal is the phrase independent pursuit and particularly, in a digital context, the word pursuit. Not one but at least two distinct types of activity may be encompassed under the heading of journalism, and they are classically referred to as reporting and commentary. Many legacy newspapers, especially in the anglophone tradition that Hallin and Mancini (2004) termed the North Atlantic or liberal national media systems, divide editorial teams, workflows, and products into ‘news’ and ‘opinion,’ with different editorial standards and workflows pertaining to each. The degree to which political ideology shapes journalists’ activities varies widely across the globe, mirroring a range of culturally oriented professional identities that Hanitzsch (2011) classified under four headings: populist disseminators, detached watchdogs, critical change agents, and opportunist facilitators—with Anglo-American cultures leaning toward the second type. In addition, journalists’ autonomy will naturally be constrained by the sensibilities and power of their bosses, the publishers. But, whatever the degree of alignment between practice and ideology, journalists’ work will at various times be concentrated either on description (as performed by reporters, editors, and chase producers, for example) or on commentary (columnists, reviewers, op-ed editors). The latter group does not so much pursue information as analyze and opine on the information that colleagues, competitors, or other discoverers have brought to light.

We therefore adopt Shapiro’s definition with the addition of three words, thus: “Journalism comprises the activities involved in an independent pursuit of, or commentary upon, accurate information about current or recent events and its original presentation for public edification.” This definition contains five complementary tests that must all be satisfied to achieve its definitional purpose.

First, is the work independent? We distinguish this idea from one with which it is commonly confused, objectivity, by focusing on economic interests in the relationship between author and content. The root idea is that a direct material interest in a certain outcome should not drive what is deemed to be interesting or truthful. This is, by far, the most controversial of the five tests in an age which tends to think of independence as epistemologically impossible. Yet, many journalists continue to recognize themselves by self-imposed ethical constraints or ‘ideal-typical traits’ (Deuze, 2007: 163) that include the core idea that journalistic public service is something distinct from public relations, or propaganda.

Second, is a concern for accuracy central to the project? Whether pursuing information or commenting on it, does the work show evidence of an aspiration (at least) to factual truthfulness? The degree of rigor in verification may vary greatly depending on the work’s authorial approach, medium, purpose, and subject matter (Shapiro et al., 2013), but absent a clear interest in accuracy, it will be difficult to make a claim that the work is journalistic in any accepted sense.

Is the subject matter current or recent events? Although past events form part of the context of many works of journalism and may even inspire such works (e.g. on significant anniversaries), it is this test, above all, that draws a line between works of journalism and of historiography.

Is the presentation original? The measure here is not subjective or form-focused (as art reviewers might use the word) but rather quite literal: has the work involved new thinking, research, or creative effort, or is it merely a collection (aggregation) of others’ work? This test is, of course, highly relevant in defining journalism in the age of the social Web: a news organization like Reported.ly—which actively curates and verifies social media posts to construct breaking news narratives—will make a better claim to creating journalism than, for example, Google Search.

Finally, is the content presented for public edification? The word journalism is not fitting in reference to communication among experts within their private areas of expertise. Rather, journalism seeks, by definition, “to broaden the boundaries within which information is known and understood” (Shapiro, 2014: 560).

In our view, a work that passes all five of the above tests is, by definition, journalism. But is it digital? That depends on a whole other set of questions.

Finding ‘digital’ journalism

The first appearance of journalism in online form has been attributed to Canada’s The Globe and Mail, which in 1979 began publishing news electronically on the same day as its print edition; the next year, the Columbus Dispatch published the United States’ first online newspaper (Zelizer and Allan, 2010: 104). Today, the digital dissemination of journalism is ubiquitous (Barthel, 2015), but, in order to get beyond a merely technological definition, we will use our exploration of the various spaces in which we intuitively recognize ‘digital’ journalism to note common features that appear to be defining.

Charting this rapidly shifting landscape carries the risk that many of the examples we cite might be mere memories by the time this book is printed! But for now, at least, we find ourselves able, relying largely on our own experience, to distinguish seven types of manifestation in which journalism seems a way that, at least intuitively, seems distinct from legacy or analog forms. We will list each of these digital spaces with, in each case, a few implications that begin to distinguish the nature of digital users’ and creators’ experience.

Web publications are both digital journalism’s stalwarts and harbingers of its broader nature. Starting from the first attempts of news organizations to publish ‘shovelware’ on the Web in the late twentieth century, the online experience offered users new opportunities to curate their own news experience using topical headline lists and intertextual links to previously reported material (Scott, 2005: 93). Today, the multimedia site of a typical large news organization serves as a hub for the latest news and feature coverage with a view to further distribution via cross-platform channels and social networks. It includes blogs and live blogs, digital-only videos and newscasts, podcasts, and photo galleries. The New York Times website, for example, is not only home to breaking news text and multimedia content but also features information-rich, interactive graphics that help readers understand everything from presidential campaign tactics to real estate investment strategies.

Social networks

The internet homepage, once considered a news organization’s most valuable digital asset, has lost its prominence as people turn to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat for links to news and information (Thompson, 2014). These networks allow readers to use lists, feeds, tags, and other devices to tailor the information they receive by interest and by influencer and allow publishers to reach directly into users’ feeds to provide information of predictable interest (Evans, 2015; Shaw, 2015). Digital journalism on social platforms has unprecedented potential for wide distribution of content, as users not only share curated and recommended information within their personal and global networks but also use them to comment and share their takes on the news of the day. Conversely, journalists often tap into the discussions and debates that take place on social networks to take the pulse of audiences.

Search results and the complex search engine algorithms behind them affect the ways that people find news online. Several factors, including keywords and headlines, can contribute to the algorithmic ranking of search results (Richmond, 2008). And when they turn up false reports and questionable or reputation-damaging information, search results can have lasting consequences, for example, on news subjects’ attempts to restart their lives.

Mobile web and publications

Responsive design allows websites to change in layout and architecture depending on viewers’ devices, without changing the content available. However, some organizations have created unique web- and application-based publications for mobile devices, allowing journalism content to morph as it moves across platforms. The Montreal Gazette, for example, convened a smartphone team dedicated to creating and repackaging stories, breaking news alerts, and multimedia based on the habits of mobile users. By 2015, two of Canada’s largest newspapers, La Presse and The Toronto Star, had launched tablet publications to package and display news and feature stories that maximize the platform’s visual impact. Still other news organizations have entered into exclusive relationships for their content. In 2015, Vice magazine’s newscast, Daily Vice, first became available in its entirety to customers of a specific mobile carrier, with only an abridged version online (Dobby, 2014).

Mobile and desktop applications

Another way readers and viewers engage with digital journalism is through applications that aggregate content and push notifications on mobile and desktop devices (Weiss, 2013). Applications such as Circa offer readers a rewritten take on developing stories using several online sources and notify them of any updates to stories they indicate an interest in. Others, such as Al-Jazeera’s AJ+, use a strong sense of graphic design to share information via ‘cards,’ featuring facts, data visualizations, and conversation-starting questions, which prompt users to comment on trending news topics. Most mobile and desktop applications are native, keeping users within the boundaries of one news organization and its content, relying on user loyalty and personalization to drive engagement (Newman, 2014).

Wearable technology offers emerging platforms for digital journalism. Increasing functionality allows physical data and location information to dictate the content delivered to users. In that sense, they may be able to detect a need for news and information before it has even been articulated. The now-discontinued Google Glass prototype delivered headlines of geo-located news as wearers walked through a city (Cellan-Jones, 2015). This was succeeded by wrist-worn devices including the Apple and Android watches which capture a snapshot of the user’s vital statistics and use that data to deliver information tailored for that person in that moment. The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset promises to deliver immersive journalism experiences, such as The Des Moines Register’s ‘Harvest of Change’ project, which deposits the viewer into a 3D version of an endangered Iowa farm, replete with hay bales, animals, and tractors (Gayomali, 2014). Other interactive clothing-related technologies seem likely to follow.

Commenting

As with the previous examples, comments on digital news stories and multimedia are not limited to the originating news organization’s website. The conversation is carried through social media networks and mobile publications and applications. When it comes to digital journalism, the potential for immediate engagement cannot be underestimated. Users not only comment on news and multimedia, but they can point out inaccuracies and bring additional expertise and context to the stories. Some news sites use Facebook plug-ins, for example, to ensure commenters use their real identities; others have turned off commenting features on controversial stories or have done away with them altogether, citing concerns about incivility and cyberbullying (Hochberg, 2014). Still other outlets, such as the New York Times, use active moderation to post only the most germane comments on original stories (Sullivan, 2012).

Distinguishing characteristics

Having identified where digital journalism is currently found, we are in a position to begin isolating features that distinguish this univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Defining Digital Journalism Studies
• PART I Conceptualizing digital journalism studies
• PART II Investigating digital journalism
• PART III Financial strategies for digital journalism
• PART IV Digital journalism studies: Issues and debates
• PART V Developing digital journalism practice
• PART VI Digital journalism and audiences
• PART VII Digital journalism and social media
• PART VIII Digital journalism content
• PART IX Global digital journalism
• PART X Future directions
• Epilogue: Digital journalism: A golden age, a data-driven dream, a paradise for readers—or the proletarianization of a profession?
• Index