What Makes for a Good News Experience: Developing a UX Perspective to Advance Audience Studies in Journalism

This article by the Digital Journalism Editorial Team surfaces with the explicit ambition to reassess the field of Digital Journalism Studies and map a future editorial agenda for Digital Journalism. The article dissects two important and closely interrelated questions: “What is ‘digital journalism’?”, and “What is ‘digital journalism studies’?” Building on the commissioned conceptual articles and the review article also published in this issue, we define Digital Journalism Studies as a field which should strive to critically explore, document, and explain the interplay of digital and journalism, continuity and change, and further focus, conceptualize, and theorize tensions, configurations, power imbalances, and the debates these continue to raise for digital journalism and its futures. We also present a useful heuristic device—the Digital Journalism Studies Compass—anchored around digital and journalism, and continuity and change, as a guide for discussing the direction of the growing field and this journal.

This article by the Digital Journalism Editorial Team surfaces with the explicit ambition to reassess the field of Digital Journalism Studies and map a future editorial agenda for Digital Journalism. The article dissects two important and closely interrelated questions: “What is ‘digital journalism’?”, and “What is ‘digital journalism studies’?” Building on the commissioned conceptual articles and the review article also published in this issue, we define Digital Journalism Studies as a field which should strive to critically explore, document, and explain the interplay of digital and journalism, continuity and change, and further focus, conceptualize, and theorize tensions, configurations, power imbalances, and the debates these continue to raise for digital journalism and its futures. We also present a useful heuristic device—the Digital Journalism Studies Compass—anchored around digital and journalism, and continuity and change, as a guide for discussing the direction of the growing field and this journal.

In this introduction to the special issue Design + Journalism, we present a manifesto about the future of design and journalism. This manifesto discusses the key areas that need attention in order to develop a more robust bridge between design and journalism. The manifesto is structured by the following three notions: (1) Recognizing design contributions in the field; (2) Integrating design into digital journalism studies through cultural shift; and (3) Widening the scope of the journalism design industry-academia interface. First, we argue that design artifacts, requirements, methods, and implications ought to be recognized as scholarly contributions in digital journalism studies. Second, we need a profound cultural shift in digital journalism studies, which entails conceptualizing design as a cultural practice, understanding design as a continuous process of shaping, and updating pedagogical approaches. Third, we argue that transversal integration between academia and industry should be more heterogeneous in terms of geopolitics, cultural norms, and values. A varied set of industries should be engaged beyond North America and Western Europe. We argue that integrating these three aspects in digital journalism studies will strengthen the understanding of design as an integral part of journalism and digital journalism studies.

What is Digital Journalism Studies? delves into the technologies, platforms, and audience relations that constitute digital journalism studies’ central objects of study, outlining its principal theories, the research methods being developed, its normative underpinnings, and possible futures for the academic field. The book argues that digital journalism studies is much more than the study of journalism produced, distributed, and consumed with the aid of digital technologies. Rather, the scholarly field of digital journalism studies is built on questions that disrupt much of what previously was taken for granted concerning media, journalism, and public spheres, asking questions like: What is a news organisation? To what degree has news become separated from journalism? What roles do platform companies and emerging technologies play in the production, distribution, and consumption of news and journalism? The book reviews the research into these questions and argues that digital journalism studies constitutes a cross-disciplinary field that does not focus on journalism solely from the traditions of journalism studies, but is open to research from and conversations with related fields. This is a timely overview of an increasingly prominent field of media studies that will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and students of journalism and communication. URI

This article analyses the characteristics of digital journalism studies through an empirical investigation of all articles published in the journal Digital Journalism, from its launch in 2013 to issue 6, 2018. The aim of the analysis is to identify dominant themes and degrees of diversity and interdisciplinary in digital journalism studies, and to identify biases and blind spots. The article is based on analysis of keywords, abstracts and references used in all articles published in the journal. The findings suggest that while the research published in Digital Journalism is firmly situated within journalism studies, it has a stronger emphasis on technology, platforms, audience and the present. The article also finds that digital journalism studies, as seen in Digital Journalism, is dominated by perspectives from the social sciences, while largely ignoring digital journalism as a meaning-making system, and that the field of research could benefit from the application of theories and perspectives from the humanities and to some extent from theoretical computer science and informatics. Finally, the article argues that digital journalism studies suffers from a lack of connections between empirical research and the many conceptual discussions that dominate the (sub)field.

This article analyses the characteristics of digital journalism studies through an empirical investigation of all articles published in the journal Digital Journalism, from its launch in 2013 to issue 6, 2018. The aim of the analysis is to identify dominant themes and degrees of diversity and interdisciplinary in digital journalism studies, and to identify biases and blind spots. The article is based on analysis of keywords, abstracts and references used in all articles published in the journal. The findings suggest that while the research published in Digital Journalism is firmly situated within journalism studies, it has a stronger emphasis on technology, platforms, audience and the present. The article also finds that digital journalism studies, as seen in Digital Journalism, is dominated by perspectives from the social sciences, while largely ignoring digital journalism as a meaning-making system, and that the field of research could benefit from the application of theories and perspectives from the humanities and to some extent from theoretical computer science and informatics. Finally, the article argues that digital journalism studies suffers from a lack of connections between empirical research and the many conceptual discussions that dominate the (sub)field.

This essay applies six commitments for journalism studies to research involving digital technologies, namely: contextual sensitivity, holistic relationality, comparative inclination, normative awareness, embedded communicative power, and methodological pluralism. We argue that the emergent characteristics of digital journalism – as reflected in algorithms, automation, networking tools, and mass posting, sharing, and production with a click of a button – bring on transformations that must be theorized holistically, contextually, and relationally as part of a subfield of journalism studies called “digital journalism studies.” Spatial and temporal considerations inform this argument and complicate how the field of journalism studies examines news production and consumption. It is within the studies of “transformation” that we as researchers find an emergent theory that not only reveals the disruption of norms and introduction of new developments, but also exposes enduring power dynamics. By locating the “digital” in digital journalism studies through the lens of these six commitments, scholars can better identify evolving and blurring boundaries of news content and its production, distribution, and consumption processes.

A paradigmatic shift is sometimes revealed by an unanticipated and extraordinary event, and so it was with Edward Snowden in 2013. A National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Snowden was so appalled at the exponential expansion of covert digital surveillance that he decided it was his moral duty to inform the public, indeed the world. This he did from a hotel room in Hong Kong when he gave a small group of selected journalists access to 1.7 million classified documents taken from the NSA. These documents revealed the global snooping capabilities of the NSA and its ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence agency partners (ASIO in Australia, CSE in Canada, GCSB in New Zealand, and the GCHQ in United Kingdom). The Five Eyes can vacuum up just about all digital communications anywhere, anytime, and much else besides if they are so minded. Many who take a deep interest in signals intelligence thought these Anglo-Saxon agencies had probably increased their capabilities since 9/11, but even they were shocked when Snowden revealed the sheer scale – it far exceeded any estimate of capability.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies offers an unprecedented collection of essays addressing the key issues and debates shaping the field of Digital Journalism Studies today. Across the last decade, journalism has undergone many changes, which have driven scholars to reassess its most fundamental questions, and in the face of digital change, to ask again: ‘Who is a journalist?’ and ‘What is journalism?’. This companion explores a developing scholarly agenda committed to understanding digital journalism and brings together the work of key scholars seeking to address key theoretical concerns and solve unique methodological riddles. Compiled of 58 original essays from distinguished academics across the globe, this Companion draws together the work of those making sense of this fundamental reconceptualization of journalism, and assesses its impacts on journalism’s products, its practices, resources, and its relationship with audiences. It also outlines the challenge presented by studying digital journalism and, more importantly, offers a first set of answers. This collection is the very first of its kind to attempt to distinguish this emerging field as a unique area of academic inquiry. Through identifying its core questions and presenting its fundamental debates, this Companion sets the agenda for years to come in defining this new field of study as Digital Journalism Studies, making it an essential point of reference for students and scholars of journalism.

In this commentary, I look back on ten years of Digital Journalism, and our shared efforts to define a field of Digital Journalism Studies. In doing so, I reflect on the strengths of our field as a socialized space as it has matured, and address two focal points, balance and uncertainty, which have centered my thinking about Digital Journalism Studies research. I then offer three recommendations for our field going forward: to prioritize offering perspective over developing predictions; to foster awareness over awe, and to maintain a devotion towards unapologetic contributions, with humility.

The role of a new form of dynamic interaction is explored in a network of generic identical oscillators. The proposed design of dynamic coupling facilitates the onset of a plethora of asymptotic states including synchronous states, amplitude death states, oscillation death states, a mixed state (complete synchronized cluster and small amplitude desynchronized domain), and bistable states (coexistence of two attractors). The dynamical transitions from the oscillatory to the death state are characterized using an average temporal interaction approximation, which agrees with the numerical results in temporal interaction. A first-order phase transition behavior may change into a second-order transition in spatial dynamic interaction solely depending on the choice of initial conditions in the bistable regime. However, this possible abrupt first-order like transition is completely non-existent in the case of temporal dynamic interaction. Besides the study on periodic Stuart-Landau systems, we present results for the paradigmatic chaotic model of Rössler oscillators and the MacArthur ecological model.

The relationship between journalism and social marginalization is a relatively understudied area in digital journalism studies. Our case study of Dalit Camera (DC), an online news archive and chronicle based in India, examines how historically disadvantaged Dalits, or “Untouchables,” are leveraging digital tools to narrate their oppressive past to the outside world parallel to the rise of political censorship in India. As part of its archiving process, DC is preserving footage of Dalit resistance against hegemonic domination by caste Hindus. Through their grassroots network of citizen journalists, DC is also engaged in reporting caste-based discrimination and violence today, contributing to the Dalit social movement for equality and justice. Our study provides the first examination of Dalit social protest as a function of digital news archiving, in the process bringing a non-Western subject typically reserved for Subaltern Studies to digital journalism studies as a potent example of citizen journalism and participatory online culture in a censorious media climate. We argue that the growing field of digital journalism studies must leverage productively with area studies scholarship, such as Subaltern Studies, in order to advance a deeper understanding of journalism cultures in the Global South.

The relationship between journalism and social marginalization is a relatively understudied area in digital journalism studies. Our case study of Dalit Camera (DC), an online news archive and chronicle based in India, examines how historically disadvantaged Dalits, or “Untouchables," are leveraging digital tools to narrate their oppressive past to the outside world parallel to the rise of political censorship in India. As part of its archiving process, DC is preserving footage of Dalit resistance against hegemonic domination by caste Hindus. Through their grassroots network of citizen journalists, DC is also engaged in reporting caste-based discrimination and violence today, contributing to the Dalit social movement for equality and justice. Our study provides the first examination of Dalit social protest as a function of digital news archiving, in the process bringing a non-Western subject typically reserved for Subaltern Studies to digital journalism studies as a potent example of citizen journalism and participatory online culture in a censorious media climate. We argue that the growing field of digital journalism studies must leverage productively with area studies scholarship, such as Subaltern Studies, in order to advance a deeper understanding of journalism cultures in the Global South.

The title of this article is a pun referencing Howard Becker’s classic 1967 essay “Whose side are we are on?” – a call to sociologists to question their allegiances and acknowledge their involvement in bolstering the institutional processes they research. By bringing existing perspectives from within digital journalism studies into conversation with Becker’s central argument, this article aims to identify tools both inside and outside of the field that encourage greater engagement and conceptual refinement with what is labeled here as a “politics of digital journalism studies.” Two such analytical tools that encourage a politics of digital journalism studies are the accentuation of complexity within media systems and a recognition of the positionality of research. After engaging with barriers to a politics of digital journalism studies, two broad pathways are suggested around digital journalism studies as a space of critique and a space of possibilities. Our impact as scholars may be limited, as some scholars have argued, but the conclusion warns of our irrelevance as a field if we ignore our potential to contribute to the broader meaning making taking place around the topics we study.

In a recent commentary, Seth Lewis calls for a “rethinking” of the “objects and objectives” of journalism studies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst not underestimating the significant effects of this ongoing global health crisis, the authors of this commentary do not share the sense of urgency for revising the field on such a broad scale. We wish to raise three key points that criticize and supplement Lewis’ reflections in light of existing debates in and beyond journalism studies and digital journalism studies in particular. These concern (1) the assumption that news journalism is relevant independent of its orientation towards audiences, an assumption that is problematized especially in digital journalism studies, (2) the overlooked importance of journalism education in a global perspective to create impact of research, and (3) the problematic assumption of a common identity of journalism studies scholars across the field as such. In this reply, the authors wish to make a pledge towards a greater importance of diversity in relation to global journalism studies and the importance of the field of digital journalism studies to realize such an ambition.