Reflexivity and Negotiation in Collaborative Journalism on air Quality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper sheds new light on collaborative journalism and investigates how this innovative newsroom practice affects the news production process and product. More particularly, we focus on a collaborative project on air pollution involving a newspaper, university, and environmental government agency and examine how journalists and professionals within the fields of science and policy-making interact within this collaboration. We draw on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes of the collaborative project as well as a comparative multimodal discourse analysis of news items produced within the collaboration and similar news items produced a year earlier outside the collaboration. In our study, we analyse how the act of collaborating blurs boundaries between the traditional professional identities for the three categories of actors involved and urges them to reflect on their own and each other’s discursive practices. Our study demonstrates the added value of a linguistically sensitive analysis of both the discursive processes behind the scenes of the news production process as well as the news product itself, in revealing how innovative newsroom practices like collaboration between journalists and expert sources shape the (language of) news.