Digital Journalism Studies

The Key Concepts

Bob Franklin, Lily Canter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138223066
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315406084
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital Journalism Studies: The Key Concepts provides an authoritative, research-based "first stop-must read" guide to the study of digital journalism.

This cutting-edge text offers a particular focus on developments in digital media technologies and their implications for all aspects of the working practices of journalists and the academic field of journalism studies, as well as the structures, funding and products of the journalism industries.

A selection of entries include the topics:

• Artificial intelligence;
• Citizen journalism;
• Clickbait;
• Drone journalism;
• Fake news;
• Hyperlocal journalism;
• Native advertising;
• News bots;
• Non-profit journalism;
• User comment threads;
• Viral news;
• WikiLeaks.

Digital Journalism Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible read for students, academics and researchers interested in Digital Journalism and Digital Journalism Studies, as well as the broader fields of media, communication and cultural studies.

DIGITAL JOURNALISM STUDIES

The Key Concepts

Actants

DOI: 10.4324/9781315406107-1

In a special issue of the journal Digital Journalism, focused on reconceptualizing key theoretical changes reflecting the development of Digital Journalism Studies, Seth Lewis and Oscar Westlund seek to clarify the role of what they term the “four As” – namely the human actors, non-human technological actants, audiences and the involvement of all three groups in the activities of news production (Lewis and Westlund, 2014). Like Primo and Zago, Lewis and Westlund argue that innovations in computational software require scholars of digital journalism to interrogate not simply who but what is involved in news production and to establish how non-human actants are disrupting established journalism practices (Primo and Zago, 2015: 38).

The examples of technological actants that they offer embrace algorithms, networks and content management systems. Their broader concern is to create a research agenda with a “sociotechnical emphasis” which more fully emphasizes the role of technology in news production processes not by downplaying the role of human actors but by foregrounding “technologies and technologists as key aspects of study.” Such an emphasis does not imply a technologically determinist view, however, since the technological actants are programmed by human actors who are “socially constructed” to meet journalistic, commercial and technological purposes within news organizations (Lewis and Westlund, 2014.

See also actor network theory.

Key Sources

• Lewis, S. C. and Westlund, O. 2014 “Actors, Actants, Audiences and Activities in Cross-Media News Work: A Matrix and Research Agenda” Digital Journalism 3(1): 19–37
• Primo, A. and Zago, G. 2015 “Who and What Do Journalism?” Digital Journalism 3(1): 38–52

Actor Network Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315406107-2

Actor Network Theory (ANT) emerged in the 1980s through the work of Bruno Latour (1987). Concerned with examining technological innovation and broader sociotechnical processes, ANT emphasizes the historical context in which scientific innovations emerge and, significantly, it assigns agency to human and non-human actors in networks where non-human agents or actants include machines, animals, networks, texts and algorithms. Actors and actants are assigned equal agency and integrated into the same conceptual framework. John Law describes ANT as,

… a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations.

(Law cited in Banks, 2011)

ANT is often counter posed to accounts of scientific development that overemphasize the role of individual human actors while disregarding actants and their network context. Attributing the theory of gravitation to Newton, for example, ignores his social context, his scientific colleagues, his use and reliance on “Euclidean geometry, Kepler’s astronomy, Galileo’s mechanics, his tools, the details of his lab, cultural factors and environmental restrictions on him” (David, 2007), along with a host of other technical and non-technical elements which ANT would describe and consider closely.

ANT has been “scathingly criticized” for: assigning agency to nonhuman actors; assuming that all actors are equal within the network: being anti-humanist; being managerialist; and representing the powerful while ignoring the impact of race, gender and class (Crawford, 2004).

Key Sources

• Banks, D. 2011 “A Brief Summary of Actor Network Theory” Cyborology 21st December https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/02/a-brief-summary-of-actor-network-theory/
• David, L. 2007 “Actor-Network Theory (ANT)” Learning Theories 23rd March https://www.learning-theories.com/actor-network-theory-ant.html
• Latour, B. 1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Advertising

DOI: 10.4324/9781315406107-3

Until early in the new millennium, advertising revenues provided the life blood for all commercial media and constituted an essential resource to finance the researching, writing and distribution of news and other editorial content. By offsetting production costs, advertising also reduced the price of access to media for audiences. Across the 20th century, legacy media enjoyed expansive advertising revenues to fund their activities; advertising, for example, accounted for an average 80 per cent of local newspapers’ revenues and 100 per cent of the burgeoning free local newspapers (Franklin, 2006: 8). Advertising constituted the crucial element in the profitability of national, regional and local newspapers, delivering profits of 25–35 per cent on investment; exceptionally high rates of return compared to many other industries (Franklin, 2008: 13).

But developments in digital media technologies disrupted (see disruption) this “advertising led” business model and created intensely competitive pressures for advertising revenues from news organizations publishing online, news updates on mobile devices, news aggregators such as Google News and micro blogging sites such as Twitter – and all this in the context of declining circulations and readers, as well as growing concerns with the legitimacy and credibility of news organizations and fake news (Chyi, Lewis and Nan, 2012; McNair, 2018; Starr, 2009: 28). These trends have been exacerbated and accelerated by the economic recession beginning in 2007. Pew’s State of the News Media 2013 report optimistically suggested that newspapers’ advertising revenues were “stabilizing but still threatened” despite a fall in print advertising for a sixth consecutive year and by a substantial $1.8 billion (8 per cent) in 2013. Measured by revenues, the newspaper industry in the USA has shrunk to 60 per cent of its size a decade ago (Edmonds, Guskin, Mitchell and Jurkowitz, 2013: 8).

Despite this sustained decline in advertising revenues since the emergence of online news media, there seems to be no consensus within the academy or journalism industry about advertising’s role in resourcing a viable journalism or the consequences of declining advertising revenues for such a prospect. Picard, for example, celebrates the massively enhanced plurality of revenue sources which have replaced or supplemented advertising as news providers become “less dependent on any one form of funding than they have been for about 150 years” (Picard, 2016: 12–22). These multiple revenue streams include “readers and advertisers, events and e-commerce … foundations and sponsors, and from related commercial services such as web hosting” (Picard, 2016: 12–22). By contrast, Bakker argues that the much diminished revenues from advertising oblige news organizations to produce cheaper news content using “aggregation, content farms and Huffinization” which have given rise to a new “low pay and no-pay journalism” staffed by “part timers and amateurs” (Bakker, 2012: 627).

One unequivocal trend since the decline of media reliance on traditional advertising has been the rapid growth of native advertising, although this raises serious journalistic concerns about the proximity, independence and veracity of editorial when the “wall” between advertising and journalistic content collapses so totally (Lynch and Sirrah, 2018).

See also native advertising.

Key Sources

• Bakker, P. 2012 “Aggregation, Content Farms and Huffinization: The Rise of Low Pay and No-Pay Journalism” Journalism Practice 6(5–6): 627–637
• Edmonds, R., Guskin, E., Mitchell, A. and Jurkowitz, M. 2013 “Newspapers: Stabilizing but Still Threatened” The State of the News Media 2013 PEW Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-still-threatened/
• Franklin, B. (Ed) 2008 Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism . London: Routledge
• Lynch, L. and Sirrah, A. 2018 Native Advertising: Advertorial Disruption in the 21st Century News Feed . London: Routledge
• Picard, R. 2016 “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism? Evidence from the Changing News Ecosystem” in Franklin, B. (Ed) The Future of Journalism: In an Age of Digital Media and Economic Uncertainty . London: Routledge, 12–22

Advertorial

DOI: 10.4324/9781315406107-4

The word Advertorial is a neologistic hybrid formed from the words “advertising” and “editorial.” Advertorial is a paid advertisement that is disguised as editorial copy by adopting the house graphic and layout formats. On occasion it may also use a journalistic byline. In this way, advertorial misrepresents the nature of the text and suggests to readers that they are reading a news story or feature researched and written by a journalist and therefore constrained and shaped by the journalist’s ethical and professional commitments to objectivity, impartiality and truthfulness.

The mutual advantages for both parties are obvious. For the organization, company or individual buying the advertising space, the advertorial, with its allusions to journalistic authorship, confers authority and credibility on the arguments and claims made in the advertisement which advertising copy could not match (Franklin and Murphy, 1998: 245–247). For the newspaper, advertorials enable editors to allocate a greater part of the editorial space to advertising copy which, in pre-digital times, generated the majority of many newspapers’ revenues and which remain a significant revenue source for digital media. Given the mutual benefits enjoyed by advertisers and media owners/managers, it is perhaps unsurprising that the popularity of advertorials grew rapidly during the 1980s, although they also triggered conflict between the journalistic and advertising sections of the news organization because they seemed to breach the “firewall” which journalists believe should separate advertising from editorial (Carlson, 2014; Eckman and Lindlof, 2003: 66).

More recently, scholars of journalism studies have raised objections to the practice of native advertising, which similarly blurs the strict division between advertising and objective news reporting (Carlson, 2014; Ferrer Conill, 2016; Lynch, 2018).

Key Sources

• Carlson, M. 2014 “When News Sites Go Native: Redefining the Advertising–Editorial Divide in Response to Native Advertising” Journalism doi:10.1177/1464884914545441
• Eckman, A. and Lindlof, T. 2003 “Negotiating the Gray Lines: An Ethnographic Case Study of Organisational Conflict between Advertorials and News” Journalism Studies 4(1): 65–79
• Lynch, L. and Sirrah, A. 2018 Native Advertising: Advertorial Disruption in the 21st Century News Feed . London: Routledge

Affordances

DOI: 10.4324/9781315406107-5

The concept of affordances (Hutchby, 2001) has its origins in the conscious attempt to construct a conceptual middle ground between the “rock” of technological determinism and the similarly “hard place” of technological constructivism. The former views new social relations as a consequence of the emergence of particular forms of technology, while the latter assumes technological artifacts to be entirely socially shaped. To find a way forward, Hutchby defines affordances as the “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object.” Consequently, new technologies become artefacts which are “both shaped by and shaping of the practices humans use” in their interactions with them (Hutchby, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of key concepts
• The Key Concepts
• References