One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles in social media practice is that the profession’s conceptual boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Social media has developed as a ...space used by audiences to consume, share, and discuss news and information, offering novel locations for journalists to intervene at professional and personal levels and in private and public spheres. This article takes the “journalistic ego” domain as its starting point to examine how journalists perform three specific roles on social media: the promoter, the celebrity, and the joker. To investigate these roles in journalistic performance, the article situates their emergence and operationalization in a broader epistemological context, examining how journalists engage with, contest, and/or diverge from different professional norms and practices, as well as the conflict between traditional and social media-specific roles of journalists.
This study investigates how Google is shaping journalism innovation, particularly in business models, through an analysis of one of its global funding competitions, the Innovation Challenge. It adds ...to an understanding of the impact of platforms on journalism through a descriptive analysis of 354 projects funded between 2018 and 2022 in 78 countries and five regions. Grant recipients were largely for-profit journalism organizations, with a significant US focus. Projects related to audience engagement, business models and distribution dominated the published winning innovation proposals, accounting for 72.6% of funded projects. The three areas were closely connected as they were mostly related to plans to increase reader revenue. Findings suggest that the Innovation Challenge validates reader revenue as the key innovation in business models through a funding competition aligned with Google’s global industry and government relations interests. The orientation is problematic as it narrows journalism innovation to a financial issue, with audiences as the answer, even though people are largely unwilling to pay for news and journalism is considered a public good rather than simply a commercial product.
This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The ...Conversation Canada. Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.
The factors that shape the news that citizens are exposed to and act upon are a growing area of research. This article advances a framework to examine how issues and topics rise to prominence and ...gain attention following publication in a digital hybrid media ecosystem. The four elements (publics, platforms, paraphernalia, and practices) extend previous work by accounting for the actions of individuals in aggregate as publics, the impact of platforms as institutionalized spaces for news, the objects of media consumption and exposure, and the temporal and spatial contexts for practices of news circulation and consumption.
TWITTERING THE NEWS Hermida, Alfred
Journalism practice,
08/2010, Volume:
4, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper examines new para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as "awareness systems" that provide journalists with more complex ways of understanding and reporting on the subtleties of public ...communication. Traditional journalism defines fact as information and quotes from official sources, which have been identified as forming the vast majority of news and information content. This model of news is in flux, however, as new social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, online dissemination of short fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources. This paper draws from computer science literature to suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that the paper describes as ambient journalism. The emergence of ambient journalism brought about by the use of these new digital delivery systems and evolving communications protocols raises significant research questions for journalism scholars and professionals. This research offers an initial exploration of the impact of awareness systems on journalism norms and practices. It suggests that one of the future directions for journalism may be to develop approaches and systems that help the public negotiate and regulate the flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection and transmission of news.
JOURNALISM Hermida, Alfred
Digital journalism,
10/1/2013, Volume:
1, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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.
In light of concerns about decreasing news use, a decline in interest in political news or even active avoidance or resistance of news in general, the idea of ‘incidental news’ has been seen as a ...possible remedy. Generally, ‘incidental news’ refers to the ways in which people encounter information about current events through media when they were not actively seeking the news. However, scholars studying incidental news through different theoretical and methodological perspectives have been arriving at differing evaluations of the significance and implications of this phenomenon – to the extent of downright contradictory findings. This introductory piece posits the aim of this special issue on Studying Incidental News: a conceptual clarification of incidental news exposure. In this issue, scholars coming from different approaches, ranging from cognitive processing, ecological models, emergent practices and a focus on platform affordances, show how different theoretical perspectives help account for various dimensions of incidental news consumption, and thus help explain the often conflicting findings that have been suggested so far.
Power Plays on Social Media Hermida, Alfred
Social media + society,
04/2015, Volume:
1, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Authority and influence are negotiated through the interactions taking place in the sociotechnical architectures of social media. Established elites transfer their institutional power to social ...media. But they operate alongside emergent, networked-sourced nodes of influence as ad hoc publics elevate certain actors on specific issues at specific times, within specific contexts and domains. A greater understanding of what forms of power play out on social media is essential to illuminating processes of networked gatekeeping, networked framing, and networked sourcing.
Developing successful innovations in journalism, whether to improve the quality and reach of news or to strengthen business models, remains an elusive problem. The challenge is an existential concern ...for many news enterprises, particularly for smaller news outlets with limited resources. By and large, media innovation has been driven by never-ending pivots in the search for a killer solution, rather than by long-term strategic thinking. This article argues for a fresh approach to innovation built around the “jobs to be done” (JTBD) hypothesis developed by the late Clayton Christensen and typically used in business studies of innovation. However, attempts to bring the JTBD framework into the news industry have never taken hold, while scholars, too, have largely overlooked the framework in their study of journalism innovation. We argue that the JTBD approach can foster local journalism that is more responsive and relevant to the needs of local communities. It reorients journalism by focusing on identifying and addressing the underserved needs of communities, as understood by the communities themselves. It suggests that a bottom-up approach to appreciating the “jobs” that community members want done offers a model that supports both the editorial and business imperatives of local news organizations.
TWEETS AND TRUTH Hermida, Alfred
Journalism practice,
01/2012, Volume:
6, Issue:
5-6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper examines how social media are influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over the ability to ...objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status. Social media question the individualistic, top-down ideology of traditional journalism. The paper considers journalism practices as a set of literacies, drawing on the theoretical framework of new literacies to examine the shift from a focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked. It explores how news organizations are negotiating the tensions inherent in a transition to a digital, networked media environment, considering how journalism is evolving into a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time.
PDF
