What is Digital Journalism Studies?

Steen Steensen, Oscar Westlund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429535208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

What is Digital Journalism Studies? delves into the technologies, platforms, and audience relations that constitute digital journalism studies' central objects of study, outlining its principal theories, the research methods being developed, its normative underpinnings, and possible futures for the academic field.

The book argues that digital journalism studies is much more than the study of journalism produced, distributed, and consumed with the aid of digital technologies. Rather, the scholarly field of digital journalism studies is built on questions that disrupt much of what previously was taken for granted concerning media, journalism, and public spheres, asking questions like: What is a news organisation? To what degree has news become separated from journalism? What roles do platform companies and emerging technologies play in the production, distribution, and consumption of news and journalism? The book reviews the research into these questions and argues that digital journalism studies constitutes a cross-disciplinary field that does not focus on journalism solely from the traditions of journalism studies, but is open to research from and conversations with related fields.

This is a timely overview of an increasingly prominent field of media studies that will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and students of journalism and communication.

1 The introduction

The premises and principles of digital journalism studies

On 11 April 11 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, sat before the US Congress for a hearing following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He had already survived 10 hours of questioning the previous day. The session chair, Republican congressman Greg Walden, leaned forward in his large, black leather chair, his stare alternating between his paperwork and Zuckerberg, who sat behind a long but modest desk, several feet below him. Walden said:

Welcome, Mr. Zuckerberg, to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. We’ve called you here today for two reasons. One is to examine the alarming reports regarding breaches of trust between your company, one of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and its users. And the second reason is to widen our lens to larger questions about the fundamental relationship tech companies have with their users.

Walden then laid out in more detail the background for these two concerns, before focusing on the questions he wished Zuckerberg to answer:

There are critical unanswered questions surrounding Facebook’s business model and the entire digital ecosystem regarding online privacy and consumer protection. What exactly is Facebook? Social platform? Data company? Advertising company? A media company? A common carrier in the information age? All of the above? Or something else?

Zuckerberg was not allowed to answer, yet. He sat there quietly behind his desk, occasionally sipping water out of a white paper cup, while looking at Walden like a school boy paying attention to his teacher. It was not until a couple of hours later, following a series of questions from other congress members, that Walden returned to the questions regarding what kind of company Facebook actually is and asked Zuckerberg a direct question: “Is Facebook a media company?”

Zuckerberg did not take his eyes off Walden and answered, with a steady voice:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I consider us to be a technology company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people. There are certainly other things that we do, too. We – we do pay to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although I don’t consider us an enterprise software company. We build planes to help connect people, and I don’t consider ourselves to be an aerospace company. But, overall, when people ask us if we’re a media company, what – what I hear is, “Do we have a responsibility for the content that people share on Facebook?” And I believe the answer to that question is yes.¹

This answer – in fact the whole Facebook hearing, the scandal that led up to it, and the line of questions regarding what kind of company Facebook is in reality – is important for anyone who wants to understand the contemporary media landscape and the information ecosystems that make up the public spheres not only in the US, but almost everywhere. Consequently, Walden’s questions and Zuckerberg’s answer are important when trying to understand the nature of digital journalism studies. This field of research – digital journalism studies – has become an important area of study within communications during the last decade because it addresses core questions related to the economy, technology, sociology, culture, language, psychology, and philosophy of what journalism is. It comes at a time when older demarcations – like those between different institutions and companies, between audiences and professionals, practices and perceptions, production and consumption, technologies and humans, physical and virtual, private and public, facts and fictions, truth and lies, and many more – no longer seem valid.

The significance of Facebook and other global platforms and tech companies unknown to the world before the turn of the millennium cannot be overestimated. They constitute a major reason why digital journalism studies is heavily influenced by what Ahva and Steensen (2017) label a “discourse of deconstruction”, in which it has become essential to ask fundamental questions concerning what journalism is. Let us offer a few examples of how this discourse of deconstruction has been articulated during the formative years of digital journalism studies as a research field. Anderson (2013) argued that the classical newsroom is no longer the epicenter of newswork and that bloggers, citizen journalists, and social networks are, alongside journalists, important actors in the new “news ecosystem”. Peters and Broersma (2013) argued that the problems facing journalism are far more structural than previously suggested, requiring a fundamental rethink about what journalism is. Carlson and Lewis (2015) argued that journalism’s demarcations towards other professions and businesses are deconstructed, as are previously established internal boundaries between for instance different journalistic genres, and groups of journalists. And Boczkowski (2011, p. 162) argued for a need to shift “the stance of theoretical work from tributary to primary” in studies focusing on journalism in digital times.

In this book we interrogate the nature of digital journalism studies. We probe the roots from which the field has grown, the technologies, platforms, devices, and audience relations that constitute central objects of study, the theories from which research embarks, the (sometimes) innovative research methods being developed, and the normative underpinnings and possible futures of the field. It is our early contention that digital journalism studies is much more than simply the study of journalism produced, distributed, and/or consumed with the aid of digital technologies. Digital journalism is not defined by its relation to technology alone; such a definition “short-circuits a comprehensive picture of journalism”, as Zelizer argues (2019, p. 343). The scholarly field of digital journalism studies is built on questions that disrupt everything previously taken for granted concerning media, journalism, and public spheres: What is a media company? Who is responsible for what is published in a public sphere? What is the difference between those who produce, those who distribute, and those who consume media content, including journalism? And indeed who is a journalist and what is journalism in this complex media and information ecosystem of the 21st century? In search for answers to such questions, digital journalism studies also moves beyond journalism studies and constitutes a cross-disciplinary field that does not focus on journalism only from the traditions of journalism studies, but is open to research from, and conversations with, related fields.

In this introduction, we first look at four structural premises for why questions such as those posed in the previous paragraph are relevant today, and why they matter for digital journalism studies. These structural premises are related to the economy, audience relations, and the networked distribution and consumption mechanisms of digital journalism. We then argue that a fundamental development for digital journalism studies is the way in which news has become separated from journalism since the 1990s. The chapter outlines some empirical characteristics of what digital journalism studies looks like today, as it is presented in the most important arena through which the field materialises, namely the journal Digital Journalism. Finally, we present the outline of the book.

1.1 Four structural premises for digital journalism studies

The 2018 Facebook hearing offers an interesting way to begin exploring the topics introduced briefly above not only because it was such an exceptional example of how older and familiar categories of – and demarcations between – different types of companies seem no longer valid, but also because of the scandal leading up to it, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This revealed the disruptive changes around how information flows in our digital age – changes that have severe consequences for journalism.

The scandal revealed that Facebook had provided access to personal data from 87 million Facebook users to the Cambridge Analytica political consulting and data analytics firm. It also highlighted the enormous potential for how user data can be exploited for both commercial and political gains without users’ knowledge or consent along with the ensuing privacy protection issues (Isaak & Hanna, 2018). The scandal was a demonstration of the consequences of what Manovich (2018) has labelled the media analytics stage of modern technological media. It has become evident that the real value of global platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as Asian platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, lies in their sophisticated methods for harvesting, analysing, and capitalising from tremendous amounts of big data on user behaviour. These methods empower the platform companies with knowledge and insights advertisers are willing to pay for, but also with a wider control over cultural and social networks (Taplin, 2017). The implications of this for journalism have been:

1. 1 A massive shift and crisis in revenue models because advertisers have migrated to platform companies (see for instance Kaye & Quinn, 2010), while news publishers nowadays typically get most of their revenue from their readers.
2. 2 An increased emphasis on user data and audience analytics and metrics in journalism (Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018; Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016; Ferrer-Conill & Tandoc, 2018).
3. 3 Shifting patterns of distribution in which companies non-proprietary to institutions of journalism have gained dominance (see for instance Kalsnes & Larsson, 2018; WAN-IFRA, 2019; Westlund & Ekström, 2018).

These three implications are important structural premises for digital journalism studies as an academic field. Moreover, the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted another aspect that has dominated much of recent debates in public, industry, and academic discourses on journalism and news; namely problems related to disinformation, “fake news”, and trust in the media. Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook data and other data to target US citizens with bespoke political propaganda during the 2016 presidential election campaign and in other elections around the world, including the UK Brexit vote. Reports following the scandal revealed that the company had included disinformation and other forms of information manipulation in their propaganda campaigns, and a tsunami of revelations of similar disinformation campaigns followed (Posetti & Matthews, 2018). This has become a severe problem for journalism, not only because fake news is difficult to disentangle from real news, but also because in another dimension of fake news discourse, ...