An endless struggle between discourses: How Italian journalists have been claiming their jurisdiction in the digital era

Abstract

The article describes the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy since 2008 by drawing on a database consisting of extracts taken from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 15 years (from 2008 to 2021). The study identifies three fundamental phases in the development of Italian digital journalism: the birth of the first online newsrooms; the spread of social media; and the data/platform turn. The article applies a new institutionalism discursive approach to investigate the impact of macro-level forces on micro-level journalists’ accounts. For this purpose, it considers excerpts from interviews in which journalists talk about change and professional jurisdiction. The following three main results emerge. 1. Political parallelism and resistance to technology have ceased to be the most prevalent features of Italian journalism; 2. In the first two periods identified, the clash of discourses is more oriented to identifying practices that may be identified as ‘journalism’ (e.g. the newcomer is a journalist who does the job differently). (C) Much of what is regarded as an uncertainty has been incorporated over time and no longer appears to be a threat, but awareness of the power of online platforms is growing.