Abstract
The link between journalism and participation has since long been envisioned and argued to be an important one. However, it is also a complex link. It encompasses how the news media and their social actors actively work towards enabling and engaging citizens as active participants through the digital infrastructures of their proprietary platforms, as well as the ways citizens potentially make use of such opportunities or not in their everyday lives, and how this affects epistemologies of news journalism. However, to date, journalism studies scholars have mostly focused on positive forms of participatory journalism via proprietary platforms, and thus fail to account for and problematize dark participation and participation taking place on social media platforms non-proprietary to the news media. This introduction, and the thematic issue as a whole, attempts to address this void. The introduction discusses three key aspects of journalism’s relationship with participation: 1) proprietary or non-proprietary platforms, 2) participants, and 3) positive or dark participation.
Highlights
Let us begin by borrowing the concept of ‘taken for grantedness’, as sociologically developed in a book focusing on how clocks, cars and mobile phones over time have become taken for granted aspects of everyday life and society (Ling, 2012)
Research into participatory journalism has often departed from an assumption that it will be closely linked to civic engagement and democracy
We argue that news journalism is based on what diverse social actors or technological actants do in the processes of making news
Summary
Let us begin by borrowing the concept of ‘taken for grantedness’, as sociologically developed in a book focusing on how clocks, cars and mobile phones over time have become taken for granted aspects of everyday life and society (Ling, 2012). Research into participatory journalism has often departed from an assumption that it will be closely linked to civic engagement and democracy It has focused on the ways in which news media and journalists enable (as opposed to disable) active forms of participation in the news through proprietary digital platforms (especially the news site). Journalists who have many ‘followers’ on social media platforms like twitter are likely to attract audiences for their news material, and may as Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim (in press) shows, enroll them into the news production processes This thematic issue addresses the role of platforms, that there are many participants in diverse forms of contemporary journalism, and that the subsequent outcomes of participation are not necessarily positive and take shape as ‘dark participation’. Throughout the article we discuss key findings and contributions from the articles in the thematic issue, by way of relevance to these key aspects (as opposed to the running order conventionally used in an editorial)
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