Interlopers are a class of digital-peripheral journalists and outlets who position their work as journalism, but who have struggled to be recognized as such. While we have long acknowledged ...journalism’s place online, as digital-peripheral journalists interlopers face challenges when it comes to appreciating their work as news and their contributions as journalism. This article argues their contributions warrant further evaluation as the journalistic field continues to confront change and engage new approaches to journalism, and as interlopers continue to produce news. Using Deadspin’s coverage of the Sinclair Broadcast Group as an exemplar of such contributions, this article details an approach which accounts for interlopers’ unique approaches to news, locating in broader news discourse measures of “journalistic realization” as a legitimating discourse. Its findings tentatively suggest a weakening of historically hardened boundaries between journalism’s core and its periphery, and argue for continued, nuanced exploration of the nature of the journalistic field.
Across the last decade, journalism has undergone many changes, which have driven scholars to reassess its most fundamental questions, and in the face of digital change to ask again: 'Who is a ...journalist?' and 'What is journalism?'. Bringing together scholars from across the globe, and highlighting leading work in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America, this companion aims to explore, analyse, and critique the issues that inform Digital Journalism Studies across national, historical and cultural settings. The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies offers an unprecedented collection of essays addressing the key issues and debates shaping the field of Journalism Studies today.
Journalism’s once-neglected periphery has been a focus of academic research in recent years and the urge to make sense of interlopers from the periphery has brought about many approaches to ...understanding these changes. In this essay I reflect on an ongoing research agenda examining one particular category of interlopers: provocative media actors who have openly challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field. These actors raise questions as to how to account for interlopers at the edges of the journalistic field, including whether we should extend the field to include them. In this essay I argue we should continue to see the field as complex, and maybe now a bit more so. Reflecting on field and practice theories and understandings of boundaries, I reengage the complexity that is a core demand of conceptualizing the journalistic field, while offering ways to consider interlopers’ journalistic identities within its boundaries. Emphasizing similarities over differences, I argue we can move beyond binary distinctions between a field’s core members and interlopers on the periphery by focusing on the nature of interloper work.
An innovation and change discourse has become central in journalism studies scholarship concerned with highlighting solutions to the many challenges confronting media in the digital era. Although ...with good intentions, these debates have been predominantly technocentric in their imagination of media’s future, inadvertently directing its development towards a preoccupation with mastering digital technologies. On the one hand, media have strategically appropriated and exploited such technocentric discourse to position themselves within the field as leaders with considerable prestige and status. On the other hand, however, journalists and media professionals have approached technological innovation with caution, demonstrating innovation to be a gradual process with incremental changes that need to align with or reimagine practices that support journalism’s core ambitions and public service ideals. Drawing on the scholarly work of colleagues included in this thematic issue, in this editorial we conceptualize media innovation as a fuzzy and contested concept and call for an expanded research agenda that redirects our attention more firmly towards: exploring organisational and institutional innovation; considering the role of ancillary organisations, collaborative projects, and the various newly emerging innovative actors within and outside of the journalistic field; adopting bottom-up approaches to examine societal innovation and its public value and scrutinize questions around who benefits from change; and finally, paying more attention to the transnational as well as culture-specific contexts in which media innovations happens.
Discerning what populists mean by the people is crucial for understanding populism. However, the appeals populists make to the people differ across political systems, with distinctions particularly ...evident between democratic contexts and one-party states such as China. Articulations of the people in Chinese populist communication remain underexplored, which is a gap this paper addresses by clarifying how the people is constructed in the discourses that underpin Chinese populism. A total of 61 populism cases were examined through discourse and meta-analyses, from which three manifestations of the people emerged. First, the Chinese nation serves as an ideological glue to mobilize people to protest against those seen as betraying their Chinese identity or violating the sovereignty and dignity of China. Second, the mass is associated with an affective aversion to scientists and experts, but also with mass support for a satirical subculture that challenges the hegemony of elite-dominated cultural production and cultural institutions. Finally, socially vulnerable groups assemble powerless people in situations of economic impoverishment, political marginalization, and social vulnerability. The analysis reveals how these three conceptualizations of the people drive online Chinese bottom-up populism, allowing netizens to serve as mediators and pitting the people against corrupt elites and the establishment.
This thematic issue sets out to explore the power relationships between journalism and social media. The articles here examine these relationships as intersections between journalistic actors and ...their audiences, and between news media, their content, and the functions of social media platforms. As the articles in this issue show, the emergence of social media and their adoption by news media and other social actors have brought about a series of changes which have had an impact on how news is produced, how information is shared, how audiences consume news, and how publics are formed. In this introduction, we highlight the work in this issue in order to reflect on the emergence of social media as one which has been accompanied by shifts in power in journalism and its ancillary fields, shifts which have in turn surfaced new questions for scholars to confront.
In his fictional story "The Interlopers", Saki tells of two men fighting over the rights to a wooded hunting land. While both have long claimed the right to the land, one holds the legal right and ...the other-the interloper-claims to belong (Saki 1930). This story forms the allegorical locus of this paper, examining the way a self-defined in-group of traditional journalism protects its perceived professional identity against entities-Interloper Media-who claim belonging. This is achieved through distinct processes that echo but diverge from traditional boundary maintenance. This paper argues subtle and nuanced language in news texts referring to WikiLeaks serves to invalidate WikiLeaks' extant and persistent claims of "being" journalism. These processes differ from boundary maintenance processes related to phone hacking, which serve as inwardly focused self-policing of the profession.
In this commentary, I look back on ten years of Digital Journalism, and our shared efforts to define a field of Digital Journalism Studies. In doing so, I reflect on the strengths of our field as a ...socialized space as it has matured, and address two focal points, balance and uncertainty, which have centered my thinking about Digital Journalism Studies research. I then offer three recommendations for our field going forward: to prioritize offering perspective over developing predictions; to foster awareness over awe, and to maintain a devotion towards unapologetic contributions, with humility.
PDF
