Digital Journalism

News media organisations have turned to social media platforms to engage with younger audiences who mainly consume news through these channels. This article focuses on news production on Instagram and explores visuality as a necessity and an affordance in producing journalistic content to the platform. Our data comprises of thematic interviews with social media professionals as well as Instagram Posts and video Reels from news media accounts from Finland. Through qualitative content analysis we have recognised three thematic categories that are connected to visuality guiding the professional decision making: 1) adaptation (strategic adaptation to the platform), 2) condensing (simplifying and shortening the news content) and 3) attention gaining (a strong selectivity targeting specific audiences). Finally, the identification of image-dominated news suggests that visual social media news stories possess characteristics of a new journalistic genre.

Understanding journalists’ methods to acquire and validate their knowledge has been a key focus in journalism studies. From a sociological viewpoint, journalists are crucial knowledge creators, as their main tasks involve gathering, assembling, and disseminating news. However, technological disruptions in the twenty first century have posed significant challenges to journalistic ways of knowing. This Special Issue aims to rethink digital news production through the lens of power, by theoretically reexamining changes in journalistic epistemologies, describing these changes (such as those affecting epistemic practices), and placing them in context (such as through the influence of resource access, political contexts, or the adaptation of digital technology throughout socio-cultural environments).

Existing journalism scholarship has raised the concern of people’s limited news exposure on algorithm-driven social media. Using a series of novel agent-based testing (ABT) experiments, this study collects data from Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and attempts to capture the dynamics of news diversity with complex interaction of algorithm and human agency. Results indicate that the personalized news consumption on Douyin is more diverse in news categories than it would be when occurs by chance. Additionally, algorithmic decisions more than human choices promote exposure to diverse topics in news consumption. We have further quantified whether users can obtain a more balanced news consumption through modifying their interest scope and tendency to engage with unmatched content. These findings are crucial for us to grasp how algorithms shapes users’ news consumption and determine the effectiveness human users can adjust their exposure to a more diverse, opinion-challenging news environment.

The rising prevalence of white nationalism necessitates an evaluation of the tactics of journalists employ to manage digital hostility. Through the lens of Bourdieu’s field theory, the present study reflects a two-step interview procedure with 31 North American journalists, followed by participant observation and long-form depth interviews with four North American audience editors. The study argues that managing hostility is rooted in the habitus of North American journalists, with audience editors in particular offering layered mitigation tactics that work like second nature. Yet this mitigation hardens field boundaries and discourages journalists from digital connection with audiences.

Hybrid advertising, such as native ads or advertorials, is a vital revenue stream for digital news media, but is normatively challenging, since it blurs the boundaries between advertising and journalism. We lack an overview of the types of hybrid advertising that news organizations deem acceptable, and insight into how they discursively legitimize blurring boundaries by publicly promoting such advertising. News media list and promote the advertising forms they offer to advertisers in their media kits, but communication scholars have overlooked this rich information source. In a quantitative content analysis of media kits, we examined portfolios of hybrid advertising offered by digital news media and how openly they promote the hybrid nature thereof. The results show that digital news media most commonly offer sponsored editorial content mimicking articles but also various other forms. We develop a taxonomy of the types of hybrid advertising based on their label, media format, and type of hybridity. News organizations openly promote the boundary-blurring nature while rarely highlighting disclosure policies. The bold promotion of ever-more forms of hybrid advertising discursively contributes to normalizing transgression of the iconic wall separating journalism from advertising and makes it increasingly difficult for audiences, regulators, and scholars to keep track.