Tamara Witschge

From Grand Narratives of Democracy to Small Expectations of Participation

This article critically examines the invocation of democracy in the discourse of audience participation in digital journalism. Rather than simply restate the familiar grand narratives that traditionally described journalisms function for democracy (information source, watchdog, public representative, mediation for political actors), we compare and contrast conceptualisations of the audience found within these and discuss how digital technologies impact these relationships. We consider how “participatory” transformations influence perceptions of news consumption and draw out analytic distinctions based on structures of participation and different levels of engagement. This article argues that the focus in digital journalism is not so much on citizen engagement but rather audience or user interaction; instead of participation through news, the focus is on participation in news. This demands we distinguish between minimalist and maximalist versions of participation through interactive tools, as there is a significant distinction between technologies that allow individuals to control and personalise content (basic digital control) and entire platforms that easily facilitate the storytelling and distribution of citizen journalism within public discourse (integrative structural participation). Furthermore, commercial interests tend to dominate the shaping of digital affordances, which can lead to individualistic rather than collective conceptualisations. This article concludes by considering what is gained as well as lost when grand visions of journalisms roles for democracy are appropriated or discarded in favour of a participation paradigm to conceptualise digital journalism.

Beyond journalism: Theorizing the transformation of journalism:

Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism – in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a post-industrial, entrepreneurial, and atypical way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move through and beyond journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad of practices that make up journalism.

Ideology as resource in entrepreneurial journalism: The French online news startup Mediapart

The emergence of a startup culture in the field of journalism is global: since the early years of the twenty-first century, new independent journalism companies have formed around the world. Although setting up ones own journalistic practice is not particularly novel in the news industry, the last couple of years have witnessed exponential growth in the startup space. In this context we chose to look more closely at one of the more successful recent online news startups: the French site Mediapart. We were interested in the factors involved in creating and running a journalism startup, and how the professionals involved give meaning to what they do in the fast-changing journalism field. We found that, although one of the main unique selling points of the journalism professed at Mediapart is that it challenges and provides an alternative to mainstream French press, at the heart of it is a strong traditional journalism ideology. While Mediapart has in many ways challenged and inspired the ways in which other French news organizations operate, it does not challenge our understanding of journalism, but rather reinforces a traditional and homogenous definition.

The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism

The production and consumption of news in the digital era is blurring the boundaries between professionals, citizens and activists. Actors producing information are multiplying, but still media companies hold central position. Journalism research faces important challenges to capture, examine, and understand the current news environment. The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism starts from the pressing need for a thorough and bold debate to redefine the assumptions of research in the changing field of journalism. The 38 chapters, written by a team of global experts, are organised into four key areas: Section A: Changing Contexts Section B: News Practices in the Digital Era Section C: Conceptualizations of Journalism Section D: Research Strategies By addressing both institutional and non-institutional news production and providing ample attention to the question ‘who is a journalist?’ and the changing practices of news audiences in the digital era, this Handbook shapes the field and defines the roadmap for the research challenges that scholars will face in the coming decades.

Passive accomplice or active disruptor: The role of audiences in the mediatisation of politics

Mediatization of politics in the institutional perspective is commonly taken to refer to the interactions between political actors and media actors, where the first become increasingly governed by media logic and the latter become increasingly independent from other institutions. Even though we could picture the relations between the different constituents as a triangle with audience, media and political actors as equally important corners, the institutionalist perspective does not give equal attention to the audience as actor in the process. In this article, I ask to what extent audience participation in news production affects our understanding of the process of mediatization of politics. I discuss both how audience participation can be seen as a challenge to medias role in politics (challenging the current conceptualization of mediatization of politics) as well as how the theory of mediatization can be seen to be confirmed by currently dominant audience participation practices. In the first understanding, we can argue that audience participation challenges independence of institutional media actors (to give more power to both audiences and politicians). In the latter understanding, audience participation can be seen to be governed by the same commercial interests as other media production and in addition that both mainstream and alternative media are subject to search engine logic. This article then calls for a critical examination of our understanding of mediatization of politics to do justice to the multiplicity of logics informing media practices, the multiplicity of actors producing news and, crucially, the interaction between those logics and actors.

Dealing with the mess (we made): Unraveling hybridity, normativity, and complexity in journalism studies:

In this article, we discuss the rise and use of the concept of hybridity in journalism studies. Hybridity afforded a meaningful intervention in a discipline that had the tendency to focus on a stabilized and homogeneous understanding of the field. Nonetheless, we now need to reconsider its deployment, as it only partially allows us to address and understand the developments in journalism. We argue that if scholarship is to move forward in a productive manner, we need, rather than denote everything that is complex as hybrid, to develop new approaches to our object of study. Ultimately, this is an open invitation to the field to adopt experientialist, practice-based approaches that help us overcome the ultimately limited binary dualities that have long governed our theoretical and empirical work in the field.

Impact as driving force of journalistic and social change

In this article, we explore how entrepreneurial journalists from a wide variety of national contexts present ‘impact’ as one of the aims in their work. By exploring the variety, incongruences, and strategic considerations in the discourse on impact of those at the forefront of journalistic innovation, we provide a much-needed empirical account of the changing conceptualisation of what journalism is and what it is for. Our data show how impact becomes an ideologically as well as strategically driven endeavour as the entrepreneurs try to carve out their niche and position themselves both in relation to traditional counterparts and other startups. Ultimately, we provide empirical insight into a number of tensions that remain underlying in the discourse on constructive journalism, an increasingly popular conceptualisation that refers to a future-oriented, solution-driven, active form of journalism. We show how our interviewees marry different, commonly-deemed incompatible practices and values, thus challenging binary distinctions at the heart of conceptualisations of journalism, also perpetuated in the discourse on constructive journalism. As pioneers in the field, startups can be argued to inspire journalistic as well as social innovation, and furthermore push for a more inclusive understanding of the divergent conceptualisations and practices that together make up the amalgam that we call ‘journalism’.