Working the News: Preserving Professional Identity Through Networked Journalism at Elite News Media

The concept of journalism as a profession has arguably been fraught and contested throughout its existence. Ideologically, it is founded on a claim to norms and a code of ethics, but in the past, news media also held material control over mass communication through broadcast and print which were largely inaccessible to most citizens. The Internet and social media has created a news environment where professional journalists and their work exist side-by-side with non-journalists. In this space, acts of journalism also can be and are carried out by non-journalists. Through the new news distribution channels offered by social media, non-journalists are potentially able to disseminate their texts to wide audiences. In practice this means that journalism is no longer exclusively the domain of the journalist, and has led to the adoption of collaboration as a journalistic convention that presents opportunities but also serious challenges and risks for the professional community. My research aims to contribute to the news discourse concerning emerging professional practices in networked journalism with a focus on how journalistic authority is reasserted within a collaborative news environment. Rather than looking at networked journalism as primarily participatory, this research explores collaborative newswork as a means to carry out professional boundary work and to articulate this to audiences. I argue that the act of collaboration in newswork at times becomes a quasi-ideological project to protect journalism as a profession that lays claim to ethics, norms and routines. The research comprises three case studies of news stories covered by the BBC World Service and the English-language services of France 24 and Al Jazeera. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, they explore how social media was mobilised in the newswork. The aim was to explore how sourcing practices affected the power relationships between primary and secondary definers, and how journalists create and articulate professional boundaries in collaborative newswork. These research findings were triangulated with interviews with social media editors at the three news organisations

Old and New Media Logics in an Electoral Campaign: The Case of Podemos and the Two-Way Street Mediatization of Politics

In Spain, the 2014 European Elections saw the unexpected rise of a new party Podemos, which obtained five European Parliament seats only three months after its formation. In the Spanish National Elections in December 2015, this party obtained 20.66 percent of the votes, which made it the third biggest party. Our objective was to analyze the old and new elements of Podemos’ communication and campaign strategies. The methodology followed here used this new party as a strategic case study by a qualitative approach. The analysis focused on three key fronts: (1) the role of communication, (2) mediatization of politics, and (3) use of digital media. The results suggested that Podemos’ 2014 electoral campaign combined presence on broadcast television and use of intense digital media to boost citizens’ engagement and self-mediation. Accordingly, it was established as a new transmedia party. This case also demonstrates that mediatization can also occur in two-way street dynamics, that is, from politics to the media, where the former generates an influence on the latter. This finding opens the door to help overcome the media-centric vision. Finally, we discussed future questions about the influence on other political actors’ communication strategies in different parts of the world from an international perspective.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is part of the research project CSO2014-52283-C2- 1-P, and FI2013-47136-C2-2-P funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (State Plan of Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2013-2016)

The new media designs of political consultants: Campaign production in a fragmented era

New media technologies have been lauded for their potential in de-monopolizing gatekeeper power and rejuvenating democracy. This research inquires into how those changes in the media environment are affecting (and being affected by) consultants involved in the production of political communication. Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with these elite operatives, this study highlights how strategies are developed, practices are executed, and messages are encoded given increasing fragmentation and narrowcasting. It examines these consultants\u27 roles in managing the news agenda and political discourse by expanding partisan spaces online for content creation and narrowcasting more nuanced, flexible messages to targeted niches. This study concludes with consideration given to how these efforts might hinder certain public sphere ideals

The Challenges of Democratizing News and Information: Examining Data on Social Media, Viral Patterns and Digital Influence

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of the social Web. What do the data indicate about changing news flows and access/consumption patterns in the United States? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift yet, or are legacy patterns reasserting themselves? This paper brings together media industry data and perspective—from NPR, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal—with a growing body of social science and computational research produced by universities and firms such as Microsoft Research and the Facebook data science team, as well as survey findings from the Pew Research Center. The bulk of the evidence so far complicates any easy narrative, and it very much remains an open question if we can expect a more radically democratized media ecosystem, despite promising early trends and anecdotes. As I review the evidence, I aim to highlight lessons and insights that can help those thinking about and operating in the social media space. This paper also aims to serve as an accessible survey of news media-related topics within social science and social network analysis scholarship