Social media is inherently a system of peer evaluation and is changing the way scholars disseminate their research, raising questions about the way we evaluate academic authority

Continuing with our focus on the merits of social media for making academic impact, Alfred Hermida, award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator, argues that social media is inherently a system of peer evaluation, where participation and engagement are recognised and rewarded through dynamic social interactions

From Peripheral to Integral? A Digital-Born Journalism Not for Profit in a Time of Crises

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

Google's Influence on Global Business Models in Journalism: An Analysis of Its Innovation Challenge

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

Jobs-to-Be-Done and Journalism Innovation: Making News More Responsive to Community Needs

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

Back to the Future: How UK-based news organisations are rediscovering objectivity

The emergence of 'fake news' during the tumultuous Brexit referendum and Trump election campaign has sent news organisations scurrying to set up special teams of journalists to debunk deliberately misleading stories and verify facts. This paper examines the steps being taken to counter the spate of false news stories being spread through social media and asks whether normative values of objectivity are about to enjoy a comeback. Typical markers of objectivity such as freedom from bias, detachment and fact-based reporting date back to the late 19th Century and, despite being deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American news culture, have always been subject to criticism and challenge. Most recently, the growth of openly partisan or populist media has illustrated a deep distrust in traditional news outlets and is overtly questioning whether it is time to jettison objectivity. The increasing use of emotive (and often unfiltered) user-generated content and the rise in citizen journalism appear to have undermined the concept even further. But are we now experiencing a backlash? Through a series of interviews with editorial policy makers at major UK and US news organisations, the paper explores how fake news and other concerns around the impact of social media are leading to fresh debate about objectivity and its potential to make quality journalism stand out

Users, content and platforms: A multidimensional approach to the research of news sharing

The sharing of news on the internet and social media has been a growing area of research for scholars. As early as 2011, the Pew Research Center in the U.S. suggested that “if searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next” (Olmstead, Mitchell & Rosenstiel, 2011, p. 10). Just a few years later, a review of the literature identified 461 peer-reviewed articles on the topic from 2004 to 2014 (Kümpel, Karnowski & Keyling, 2015). No doubt that number has risen since then, particularly given concerns about the circulation of mis and dis-information on social media. It is important to note that the sharing of news is a 21st century online phenomenon. Through the ages, people have found ways to disseminate, discuss and dissect the news, from adding their own commentary to the blank pages of eighteenth-century newspapers in England (Singer et al., 2011) to meeting in parks in Paris to hear about the latest scandals at the court of Louis XV (Hermida, 2014).Ciencias de la Comunicació

Citizen participation in news

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply

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