Pablo J. Boczkowski

Between tradition and change A review of recent research on online news production

Online news media have become a key part of social, economic, and cultural life in many societies. Research about these media has grown dramatically, especially in the past few years, but there have been few reviews of this research and none of the most recent scholarship. This article reviews scholarship on online news production published since 2000. It examines research on five key topics: historical context and market environment, the process of innovation, alterations in journalistic practices, challenges to established professional dynamics, and the role of user-generated content. A tension between tradition and change emerges from this discussion and is evident at two levels. First, the world of practice seems to straddle the re-enactment of established forms and tinkering with alternative pathways. Second, the modes of inquiry oscillate between using existing concepts to look at new phenomena and taking advantage of these phenomena to rethink these concepts and come up with new ones. The article concludes by identifying shortcomings in the existing scholarship and suggesting avenues for future studies to overcome them. It suggests how scholarship on online news production could contribute to rethinking some of the fundamental building blocks of understanding communication and society in the contemporary media environment.

Online News Consumption Research: An Assessment of Past Work and an Agenda for the Future

This article assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on online news consumption. The findings suggest that the consumption of news on the internet has not yet differed drastically from the consumption of news in traditional media. The assessment shows that the dominant modes of inquiry have also been characterized by stability rather than change (because research has usually drawn on traditional theoretical and methodological approaches). In addition, these modes of inquiry exhibit three systematic limitations: the assumption of a division between print, broadcast, and online media; the notion that the analysis should treat media features and social practices separately; and the inclination to focus on ordinary or extraordinary patterns of phenomena but not on both at the same time. On the basis of this assessment, this article proposes an integrative research agenda that builds on this scholarship but also contributes to solve some of its main limitations.

Making sense of the newspaper crisis: A critical assessment of existing research and an agenda for future work

This article analyzes recent research on the newspaper crisis. It discusses how authors have examined the sources, manifestations, and implications of this crisis, and the proposals to resolve it. In addition, the essay critically examines this body of work by assessing the main spatial and temporal contexts that researchers have studied, the theories and methods that authors employ, and the analytical tropes they have deployed to make sense of the crisis. Building on this assessment of existing research, the article outlines an agenda for future work that fosters an analysis of the process, history, comparative development, and manifold implications of this crisis, and advances various empirical strategies to examine some of its most under-theorized dimensions.

The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge

The sites of major media organizations -- CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others -- provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine this gap and consider the implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age. Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture. They show that it narrows in times of heightened political activity (including presidential elections or government crises) as readers feel compelled to inform themselves about public affairs but remains wide during times of normal political activity. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein also find that the gap is not affected by innovations in Web-native forms of storytelling such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Keeping the account of the news gap up to date, in the books coda they extend the analysis through the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Drawing upon these findings, the authors explore the news gaps troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.

Understanding the Development of Online Newspapers Using Computer-Mediated Communication Theorizing to Study Internet Publishing

The central argument of this article is that the social study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has generated knowledge about at least four issues that have figured prominently in the development of online newspapers. Thus, CMC scholarship becomes relevant to analyzing the electronic version of a medium that has traditionally been the almost exclusive province of mass communication theorizing. Four issues are identified: (1) the social consequences of the increased anonymity of interlocutors; (2) the reconfiguration of territorially- and interest-based associations; (3) the processes that mediate between the introduction of new artifacts and their social outcomes; and (4) the mutual shaping of consumers and technologies. The role each has had in the construction of online newspapers is explicated and potential avenues for further research are suggested. Finally, Boczkowski maintains that the work outlined in this article fosters two dialogues crucial to the future of communication in increasingly networked societies: those between CMC and mass communication scholarship, and between media theory and practice.

Multiple Media, Convergent Processes, and Divergent Products: Organizational Innovation in Digital Media Production at a European Firm

This article addresses the intersection of two underexplored themes in studies of cultural production in traditional and digital media: the role of technology in news work and the processes that shape media convergence. The authors analyze organizational innovation in digital media production at GMS, a European firm that operates print and broadcast outlets in several specialized news markets. Between 1994 and 2003, GMS went from a phase of digital media experimentation under-taken by teams located within each existing newsroom, to the creation of a separate unit handling the online content of all print and broadcast newsrooms, to the ongoing integration of news production into a single newsroom per specialized market that generates different products for the various outlets in each market. This analysis illuminates how adopting online technologies has involved shifts in the locus of content creation in a path of increasing convergence in production processes but continued divergence of media products.

Convergence Across Divergence: Understanding the Gap in the Online News Choices of Journalists and Consumers in Western Europe and Latin America

This article contributes to understanding whether there is a thematic gap between journalists’ and consumers’ preferences, and whether the media converge or diverge across nations. The concurrent news choices of journalists and consumers in 11 online newspapers from six countries in Western Europe and Latin America were examined. A comparison of the most prominently displayed stories on the homepages of each of these sites and the most frequently clicked stories on these sites shows a pattern of convergence across divergence: A thematic gap in the online news choices of journalists and consumers that is shared by all sites despite different levels of preference for public affairs reportage (news about political, economic, and international topics). The theoretical implications and social relevance of these findings are discussed.

THE CONSUMPTION OF ONLINE NEWS AT WORK: Making sense of emerging phenomena and rethinking existing concepts

This paper examines the consumption of online news at the place of work and during work hours, which are relatively new temporal and spatial coordinates of news consumption for large segments of the population. This novel phenomenon is analysed to make descriptive and conceptual contributions to scholarship on news consumption, in particular, and technology and society, in general. Descriptively, the analysis reveals the emergence of discontinuous features of online consumption ‘at work’ within the context of continuity in some elements of news consumption in print and broadcast media. Conceptually, the analysis underscores the continued relevance of the notions of routines, space, time, and sociability to make sense of news consumption. But, it also shows the need to renew the understanding of how each of these conceptual tools matter when the media change from print and broadcast to digital and the practices of consumption coincide with those of work. The paper also suggests revisiting the boundaries between work and home and between the instrumental and leisure purposes of consuming communication technologies.

Is There a Gap between the News Choices of Journalists and Consumers? A Relational and Dynamic Approach

This article examines whether there is a gap between the news choices of mainstream journalists and those of their public. It looks at the choices of both groups in relation to each other and explores whether these choices vary in connection with the occurrence of major political events. The heuristic value of this approach is demonstrated through a mixed-method study of the news choices of journalists and consumers in the main Argentine online sites. A content analysis of the top stories chosen by journalists of that country’s two leading sites and the stories that consumers of these sites click most often yields two key results. First, during periods of relatively normal political activity, journalists choose stories about political, international, and economic subjects substantively more than consumers. Second, during periods of heightened political activity, consumers increase their interest in these stories, and the gap with the choices of journalists either disappears or narrows. Furthermore, interviews with journalists and with news consumers show that the presence of this gap during ordinary political times and its change during extraordinary periods are shaped by divergent and dynamic interpretive logics.

The material turn in the study of journalism: Some hopeful and cautionary remarks from an early explorer

This brief article presents some remarks about the material turn in journalism studies. It argues that this turn might push these studies in a more cosmopolitan theoretical direction by inviting analysts to engage with a wide array of fields of inquiry. It also contends that this turn might unsettle two major common methodological practices in studies of newswork: a focus on journalists and on newsrooms as the critical actors and locales. Looking at the objects of newsmaking might reveal the broad spectrum of actors implicated in this process—not just journalists—and the spatially distributed network of connections—that include the newsroom as one key locale, but not the only one—from which the news emerges.