Online Boundary Work: Performing Participatory Practices in News Production

Abstract

In modern democracies, the journalistic profession has traditionally been organized to maintain an exclusive jurisdiction over the mandate to watch democratic processes in the service of citizens, hold the powerful accountable and inform citizens. This exclusivity has been possible by upholding a solid boundary between journalists and readers through mass news production and distribution and in practice exercising every citizen’s freedom of expression. Over the last 25 years, digitization has made possible for many to take part in news production, in different ways questioning the role and boundaries of the journalistic profession. This paper analyzes the online boundary work performed by journalists and readers in the development of an online participatory news practice. The ethnographic study of the French news website Rue89 shows the role of digital technologies as boundary infrastructures where organizational, professional and political boundaries between journalists and users are configured, collaborated across and contested in an ongoing and recursive process. The analysis of this case shows how the participatory digital infrastructure lasted over a long period of time and was made transparent, but never finished nor invisible. We thus suggest the notion of boundary infrastructuring to capture the performative role of digital technologies in online boundary work.