Digital Journalism

Hermida, Alfred

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.808456pmid: N/A

Scholarship about social media in general, and Twitter in particular, has increased dramatically in recent years as adoption by individuals and institutions has burgeoned; especially by journalists and media organisations. Much of the journalism research on Twitter has focused on the dynamics of professional news practices on the social media platform, with journalism considered as a cultural field of production. This paper considers Twitter as a networked communication space that results in a hybridity of old and new frames, values and approaches. It highlights research that points to the hybrid and innovative forms of news production on open, networked platforms, suggesting new paradigms of journalism at play that break with classic narrative structures and deviate from long-held and fiercely defended norms.

Lynch, Lisa

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.816544pmid: N/A

Though stories of WikiLeaks have largely vanished from the pages and screens of the world’s media, the legal, ethical and definitional quandaries raised by the site’s actions during 2010 and 2011 continue to shape popular and scholarly discussion of journalism. This article considers how WikiLeaks—and Cablegate in particular—has shifted the understanding and practice of journalism by synthesizing press discourse and scholarship on WikiLeaks. The author finds that WikiLeaks’ lasting impact on journalism has been on forcing the profession to confront its own definitional crisis; drawing awareness to persistent legal issues facing journalists in the digital age; and in revealing the complexity of global information flows.

Usher, Nikki

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.801690pmid: N/A

Al Jazeera English is the Arab world’s largest purveyor of English language news to an international audience. This article provides an in-depth examination of how its website employs Web metrics for tracking and understanding audience behavior. The Al Jazeera Network remains sheltered from the general economic concerns around the news industry, providing a unique setting in which to understand how these tools influence newsroom production and knowledge creation. Through interviews and observations, findings reveal that the news organization’s institutional culture plays a tremendous role in shaping how journalists use and understand metrics. The findings are interpreted through an analysis of news norms studies of the social construction of technology.

Kristensen, Nete Nørgaard; Mortensen, Mette

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.790610pmid: N/A

This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and convergent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemination within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well as media professionals and amateur sources. On account of their proximity to unfolding events, amateur sources often break the news by means of raw and fragmented bits of visual and verbal information. Elite sources rarely possess the same exclusive access to information from war zones, but are instead brought in to comment on, validate and grant legitimacy to amateur sources as a form of explicit source criticism that we would like to term metasourcing. This new pattern of information gathering and sourcing within war reporting manifests itself most clearly in cases of major international news events, which render visible the multitude of sources and the speed of information production and distribution. A recent example is the capture and subsequent death of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sources included by selected newspapers to report on this event, the current article investigates the following research questions: Which types of sources are brought into play in the news coverage of Gaddafi’s death, and which forms of interplay between sources in today’s globalized and convergent media landscape are indicated by this case?

Hedman, Ulrika; Djerf-Pierre, Monika

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.776804pmid: N/A

The ongoing social media hype puts pressure on journalists to be active in social media 24/7. In this process professional values and journalistic norms are put to the test and not all journalists are equally keen to embrace the “social media life”. So far, few studies have examined the differences between categories of journalists when it comes to social media use. Based on a representative large-N survey of Swedish journalists conducted in 2011/2012, this paper examines journalists’ professional and personal use of social media. The study analyzes the level, purpose and evaluation of usage among different categories of journalists. The broad finding is that there are three main categories of users: “skeptical shunners”, “pragmatic conformists” and “enthusiastic activists”. Furthermore, there exists a professional digital divide between the “skeptical shunners” on one side and the “enthusiastic activists” on the other. The differences in social media use are mainly associated with journalists’ age and type of work but also with professional attitudes towards audience adaptation and branding.

Segev, Elad; Blondheim, Menahem

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2012.744560pmid: N/A

This article measures the relative attention given to Israel and Palestine in 37 leading news sites in 10 languages over two years. Findings clearly show that the Palestinian entities and Israel are the world’s most prominent polities after the United States in top news stories of international online coverage. Most news attention is given by Middle Eastern news sites, and only then by European and American news sites. During periods that attention to Israel decreases, attention to China increases. After presenting these rather surprising findings, the study considers a number of directions for interpreting them.

Bødker, Henrik

doi: 10.1080/21670811.2013.801692pmid: N/A