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From Peripheral to Integral? A Digital-Born Journalism Not for Profit in a Time of Crises

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Abstract

This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada . Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.
Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183–2439)
2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102
DOI: 10.17645/mac.v7i4.2269
Article
From Peripheral to Integral? A Digital-Born Journalism Not for Profit in a
Time of Crises
Alfred Hermida * and Mary Lynn Young
School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1Z2, Canada; E-Mails: alfred.hermida@ubc.ca (A.H.),
marylynn.young@ubc.ca (M.L.Y.)
* Corresponding author
Submitted: 12 June 2019 | Accepted: 16 October 2019 | Published: 17 December 2019
Abstract
This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of
a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada. Much of the research on
peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed
to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role
of what we term a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and
network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and
dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing in-
terest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of
this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by
growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada,
in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors
are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism
content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.
Keywords
digital journalism; digital news; journalism; peripheral actors
Issue
This article is part of the issue “Peripheral Actors in Journalism: Agents of Change in Journalism Culture and Practice” edited
by Avery E. Holton (University of Utah, USA), Valerie Belair-Gagnon (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA), and Oscar
Westlund (Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway / Volda University College, Norway / University of Gothenburg, Sweden).
© 2019 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).
1. Introduction
This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the
production and circulation of journalism through the
case study of a North American not-for-profit, digital-
born journalism organization. A number of scholars have
charted the changing and porous boundaries in jour-
nalism given the increasing number of actors afforded
by digitalization (Bruns, 2018; Carlson, 2016; Hermida,
2016; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2016). These actors range
from technologists to non-human AI bots and novel pro-
fessional identities. This study is focused on what we are
calling a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ an emergent jour-
nalism organization that is peripheral on multiple lev-
els, from who creates and produces its content to how
it is distributed. Specifically, we follow The Conversation
Canada and its first few years after launch to explore how
it is taken up in a national media system undergoing eco-
nomic transformation.
Much of the research on peripheral actors (Ahva,
2017; Eldridge, 2017; Holton & Belair-Gagnon, 2018)
has examined individual actors, focusing on questions
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 92
of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to
emergent complex institutions with multiple interven-
tions in a time of field transition. In this article, we an-
alyze The Conversation Canada as a complex peripheral
actor that has emerged in a digital journalism ecosystem
(Bruns, 2018; Konieczna, 2018; Siles & Boczkowski, 2012).
In our definition, a complex peripheral actor is a jour-
nalism actor that may operate across individual, organi-
zational, and network levels, and is active across multi-
ple domains of the journalistic process, including produc-
tion, publication, and dissemination. What distinguishes
The Conversation Canada as a complex peripheral actor
is that it is peripheral at three levels in the journalistic
process—the production, publication, and dissemination
of journalism.
It produces explanatory journalism written by aca-
demics, who have historically participated as sources and
op-ed writers, and edited by journalists. The publication
level relates to The Conversation Canada as a novel edi-
torial actor funded largely by the higher education sector
but at arm’s length editorially that generates and shares
this content free for reuse under Creative Commons. The
dissemination level relates to the organizations that re-
publish the articles, which represent a mix of core and
peripheral actors in journalism from legacy journalism
organizations to universities. The Conversation model
provides for both on-site and off-site distribution with
the aim of maximizing reach, given an increasingly frag-
mented and distribution media environment, where au-
diences stumble across news content on a variety of
platforms, devices, and publications (Newman, Fletcher,
Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2017).
We approach this topic as co-founders, board mem-
bers of The Conversation Canada, and as a result, par-
ticipant observers and “reflective practitioners” (Iacono,
Brown, & Holtham, 2009, p. 39). Methodologically, we
contend this approach is an appropriate stance for
two reasons. First, it supports an examination of fast-
changing industries characterized by a largely implicit
professional knowledge system such that “little is done
to capture and retain the tacit knowledge of practition-
ers” in a systematic and contemporary manner (Iacono
et al., 2009, p. 44). Second, it supports the real-time
sharing of the problems, their context, and resolution
of professional journalism practice. Professional practice
development in general has been described as a pro-
cess with the “best professionals…able to make sense of
these ‘messes,’ discern patterns, identify deviations from
a norm, recognize phenomena and adjust their perfor-
mance” (Iacono et al., 2009, p. 42). The site is particu-
larly relevant for this kind of intervention and method-
ological approach as not-for-profit journalism organiza-
tions are increasingly being considered a model and an-
tidote to some of the economic challenges facing the
news business. We also have unique and timely access
to proprietary data (Iacono et al., 2009). In order to miti-
gate bias, we have drawn from comparative journalism
organizational data and external commentary on The
Conversation Canada in addition to internal contributor,
audience, and republishing data. Our goal is to support
knowledge generation in this emergent space. We have
not and do not earn any money from our participation in
The Conversation Canada.
Our study finds that, following an initial lukewarm re-
ception to its launch from within the field of journalism,
The Conversation Canada is gaining uptake from scholars
and republishers despite no paid advertising and limited
national knowledge of the brand. As of June 2019, after
24 months in operation, it had published 1,937 articles
by 1,558 scholarly contributors, recorded 31 million page
views on- and off-site, with articles appearing in 527 re-
publishers globally. That this complex peripheral actor is
integrating and growing is interesting for what it suggests
about the openness of the field of journalism in commer-
cial market decline. Surprisingly, we also find its content
being taken up by a growing number of peripheral jour-
nalism actors with the largest and most prominent non-
elite republisher, The Weather Network (Canada), which
is not conventionally considered journalism along with
programs such as The Daily Show, according to contem-
porary definitions (Zelizer, 2004).
Peripheral actors account for just under half (45%) of
the audience reached by the top 50 republishers, with
two thirds of the audience outside of Canada. The fig-
ures suggest demand for a certain kind of recognizable
free Canadian journalism content within the country and
globally (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). This evidence
is paradoxical given Canada’s highly concentrated com-
mercial journalism sector (Winseck, 2018), which has
been historically critiqued for its parochial approach to
journalism (Gasher, 2007), as well as its reliance on news
flows from the US (Davey, 1970; Kent, 1981), suggesting
that the field in transition is changing access to and inter-
est in peripheral journalism institutions.
2. Peripheral Actors in Journalism
The notion of peripheral actors is rooted in an under-
standing of journalism as an organizational field with
boundaries that serve to delineate what is journalism
and who is a journalist. As Grafström and Windell (2012,
p. 66) suggest, “the social sphere of journalistic practice
is permeated with a common meaning system that gives
field constituents a shared perception of who news pro-
ducers are, what constitutes news and how it is prac-
ticed.” The internet and digitalization have impacted the
relatively stable field of journalism of the 20th century,
with the emergence of actors outside the field of journal-
ism undertaking activities traditionally associated with
the profession.
Journalists and news organizations have acknowl-
edged and incorporated the input of mostly individual
actors outside the profession, but by and large they have
been kept at arm’s length and cast as outside the core
of journalism (Nielsen, 2012; Singer et al., 2011; Tandoc
& Oh, 2017). Such an approach emerges in work on the
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 93
professional status of online journalists (Singer, 2003),
the occupational challenge from bloggers (Lowrey, 2006)
and audience participation in news spaces (Singer et al.,
2011), as well as the impact of technologies such as so-
cial media (Hermida, 2016) and web analytics (Belair-
Gagnon & Holton, 2018). The rise of these peripheral
forces, in the words of Lewis (2012, p. 838), strikes at
the heart of a model that was built on an implicit bar-
gain between journalists and the public—an assumption
about how society should handle the collection, filtering,
and distribution of news information.
Various terms have been used to describe individ-
uals as peripheral actors and their impact on the field
of journalism. In her work, Ahva (2017) uses the term
‘in-betweeners’ to refer to a range of citizens, such as
activists, academics, and artists involved in journalism.
She defines ‘in-betweeners’ as citizens who are not
professional journalists, yet play a greater role in the
journalistic process than mere receivers; they are not
the typical audiences, either” (Ahva, 2017, p. 142). In
his 2017 book, Eldridge examines the nature of emerg-
ing digital actors in journalism, describing them as inter-
lopers. For him, these interlopers embody a pushback
against an idea that ‘journalism’ rests solely with the tra-
ditional media field” (Eldridge, 2017, p. 184), further ar-
guing that these “bedeviling actors…indicate for schol-
ars and those invested in journalism a need to build a
more nuanced and analytically coherent argument to ex-
plore these emerging actors when and how they emerge”
(Eldridge, 2017, p. 15).
Building on past work, Holton and Belair-Gagnon
(2018, p. 70) propose a typology of “journalistic
strangers” to describe individuals engaged in journal-
ism. There are explicit interlopers, for example bloggers,
who “may not necessarily be welcomed or defined as
journalists and work on the periphery of the profession
while directly contributing content or products to the cre-
ation and distribution of news” (Holton & Belair-Gagnon,
2018, p. 73). There are also implicit interlopers, for ex-
ample programmers, “whose alignments with journalism
are less clear than explicit interlopers” (Holton & Belair-
Gagnon, 2018, p. 74) and do not necessarily contest jour-
nalistic authority. The third category are intralopers, for
example in-house developers, who are “working from
within news organizations without journalism-oriented
titles, they may be trained in journalism or be well versed
in the craft of the profession” (Holton & Belair-Gagnon,
2018, p. 75).
By comparison, Baack (2018) identifies four groups
of individual actors in his study of the interlocking prac-
tices of data journalists and civic technologists. For him,
the interactions between core actors, the journalists, and
those on the periphery, the civic technologists, run along
“a shared continuum that oscillates between practices
of facilitating and gatekeeping” (Baack, 2018, p. 688).
What is particularly applicable here to The Conversation
Canada is Baack’s argument that facilitation and gate-
keeping practices “mutually reinforce each other,” and,
as a result, make “journalism as a professional practice
more permeable to outsiders and allowed actors out-
side the field of journalism to increasingly engage in prac-
tices traditionally attributed to journalism” (Baack, 2018,
p. 689). The Conversation model of journalism fits on the
spectrum between facilitation and gatekeeping as it pub-
lishes explanatory journalism written by academics and
edited by journalists.
Academics have historically worked on the edges of
journalism, contributing as sources, experts, and op-ed
writers. In The Conversation model, researchers take on
the role of the journalist and the traditional roles of pitch-
ing and writing a story. In the words of the co-founder
of The Conversation model, Andrew Jaspan, “Why don’t
I just turn this university into a giant newsroom? Why
don’t I just get all these incredibly smart people within
their various faculties to become journalists and write for
the public?” (as cited in Rowe, 2017, p. 232). The model
relies on what Rowe calls a ready supply of donated aca-
demic labour” (Rowe, 2017, p. 232) as scholars are not
paid for contributions. The paid employees are the jour-
nalists who make up the editorial team.
In The Conversation model, scholars suggest stories
through an online pitch form and write 800- to 1,000-
word textual explanatory journalism articles that range
from commentary to analysis to educational ‘news you
can use. Prominent and popular examples include arti-
cles headlined “What is Neoliberalism?” These forms of
explanatory journalism would be considered established
forms of journalism that builds on their “symbolic effi-
cacy, that is, authority conferred by being recognized,
mandated by collective belief” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 251)
or as Donsbach (2010, p. 38) suggests that “the iden-
tity of journalism as a profession lives on the assumption
‘I know it when I see it’.
The scholars work in partnership with professionally
trained journalist-editors, who play a dual role. They act
as gatekeepers in many decisions of what to publish and
as facilitators to support academics in producing con-
tent in a journalistic style. The scholar as a peripheral
actor is not only at the core of the journalism of The
Conversation, but some degree of gatekeeping power.
Researchers retain final sign-off on publication, a prac-
tice that would not have been seen as aligned with jour-
nalism in a pre-digital era and that could be seen as chal-
lenging the autonomy of the newsroom.
The emerging scholarship on peripheral actors pro-
vides a number of approaches that are useful in under-
standing how powerful the impulse is within journalism
studies to narrowly define who are the authoritative jour-
nalism actors by using comparison techniques that frame
newer players as strangers’ and ‘interlopers’ such that
while their role identities and contributions are acknowl-
edged they are still located on the far and unwelcome
edges of the field. It is also valuable in considering how
far entanglements with peripheral actors, particularly at
an individual level, tend either towards opening up or lim-
iting the journalistic field (cf. Baack, 2018).
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 94
2.1. Impact of Peripheral Actors on the Field
A number of studies of peripheral actors have explored
the relationship of peripheral actors and the field. For
example, studies have focused on the gatekeeping and
framing effects of peripheral actors on journalism cov-
erage and reporting of protest movements such as
“Occupy Wall Street” (Bennett, Segerberg, & Yang, 2018)
and “Idlenomore” (Callison & Hermida, 2015), finding
an increasing role for peripheral actors as grassroots or-
ganizations and activists. Research on field transforma-
tion points to change through incremental processes
or more abrupt breaks (Schneiberg, 2007). An example
of incremental change comes in the study of the US
radio industry by Leblebici, Salancik, Copay, and King
(1991). They tracked how peripheral actors at the fringe
of broadcasting slowly gained more prominence within
the field, with the central actors taking on practices from
the edges.
More contemporary research has examined the in-
teraction between bloggers and the mainstream press in
Sweden (Grafström & Windell, 2012). The study found
that bloggers did not challenge the dominance of the
key actors, in this case Swedish national dailies. Rather,
these peripheral actors served to strengthen existing
structures, with limited power to affect mainstream jour-
nalistic practices. Grafström and Windell conclude that
“even though novel actors are given access to and be-
come members of the field, the structures of domi-
nation are not altered” (2012, p. 74). Similar research
on the sub-field of data journalism surfaces the inter-
play between peripheral and central actors. In their
study of data journalism in Canada, Hermida and Young
(2019) suggested that data journalists, particularly in
well-resourced newsrooms, are operating as institutional
entrepreneurs through their contributions to important
discussions about journalism method and pressing epis-
temological concerns for the field.
There is less work focused on peripheral actors that
go beyond individuals. Some of this research explores
the impact of technologies, such as the interplay be-
tween web analytics and journalism (Belair-Gagnon &
Holton, 2018). Work that is relevant to this study is
the influence of funders, and funding models, of jour-
nalism as peripheral actors. Scott, Bunce, and Wright
(2019) examined how foundation funding affected jour-
nalistic practices and editorial priorities, leading to jour-
nalists extending their role definition and undertaking
an increasing range of activities such as administration
and marketing, and a greater focus on thematic content.
Another study of not-for-profits focused on data journal-
ism operating in the civic tech space in Europe and Africa
(Cheruiyot, Baack, & Ferrer-Conill, 2019) found these or-
ganizations were promoting and sustaining established
journalistic practices, especially in contexts where data
journalism was nascent. Still further research is exam-
ining the role of not-for-profit journalism organizations
and Indigenous journalists on the possibility of field re-
pair, reform, and transformation (Benson, 2017; Callison
& Young, in press; Konieczna, 2018).
3. Methods
Our study is an early descriptive analysis of the uptake
of a nascent complex peripheral actor in one national
context. Theoretically, our study seeks to build on ap-
proaches that: 1) explore peripheral actors beyond the
individual; and 2) examine the role of peripheral actors
in the changing field of journalism. Specifically, our re-
search questions are: 1) How does an emergent complex
peripheral journalism actor gain uptake in a national me-
dia system?; and 2) How does the media ecology affect
the actor’s uptake as journalism?
We use a single national site, The Conversation
Canada, as a case study to explore changes in a me-
dia ecology defined by the periphery-core metaphor. We
defined peripheral journalism actors, similar to Holton
and Belair-Gagnon (2018, p. 70), as “those who have
not belonged to traditional journalism practice but
have imported their qualities and work into it. The
Conversation Canada is both an early stage national
not-for-profit digital-born organization and part of the
global network that includes seven national partners
(Australia, Indonesia, France, Spain, UK, US, and South
Africa). As one of the group’s newest partners, The
Conversation Canada soft-launched in English in June
2017 with more than $1.5M (Cdn) in funding. The French-
language version, La Conversation Canada, was launched
in December 2018. For this study, we have focused
on the English-language site given the more extensive
amount of available data.
The study is based on a range of data sources related
to publication. Publication data was obtained from The
Conversations proprietary analytics software. Data for
on-site traffic is drawn from Google Analytics which pro-
vides details of page views, unique users, devices, and
other factors. Republishing data comes from an invisi-
ble 1 ×1 tracking pixel posted on third-party sites which
tracks the republishing site and the browser user-agent
version, which is aimed at excluding traffic from bots. The
tracking pixel does not collect user data. The researchers
were granted access to data to the analytics software,
which allows data to be selected according to readership,
article, author, and republisher, and downloaded as an
Excel spreadsheet. The data was collected for the period
from the launch of The Conversation Canada on June 24,
2017, to April 30, 2019.
Overall, The Conversation network of sites reports an
average monthly audience of 10.7 million users, and a
reach of 38.2 million through Creative Commons repub-
lication. The Conversation Canada was averaging more
than 1.4 million monthly page views monthly by April
2019, with a third of page views onsite and two-thirds
from republishers. The data on republishers is recorded
by The Conversations tracking software. Republishers
are asked to include a tracking pixel when they use
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 95
a story, which must be published in its entirety and
unedited from the original. The only aspect that can be
changed is the headline. The tracking pixel provides data
to The Conversation on the republisher and page views
for each article.
Page views are one measure of reach widely used
in the media industry (Groves & Brown, 2011; Usher,
2012), though we acknowledge that they have limita-
tions. Figures may be skewed by a small number of
users viewing a high number of pages (Krall, 2009). There
are concerns over automated bot traffic to a site, with
an industry report suggesting that bots accounted for
37.9% of internet traffic in 2018 (Distil Networks, 2019).
Moreover, we acknowledge that our data does not in-
clude other significant indicators such as time on site,
unique users, or bounce rate. Our sample may also be
missing some republishers that strip out the tracking
pixel on their websites.
Between September 2017 and April 2019, articles
had been published in 490 media outlets worldwide.
For this study, we analyzed the top 50 republishers of
The Conversation Canada from September 2017 to April
2019 in terms of reach using page views as a measure.
This study focused on the top 50 republishers as they
account for 74.8% of all the offsite page views for arti-
cles for the period June 2017–April 2019. The remaining
440 republishers account for the remainder of the 25.2%
of page views. Publications ranked at 115 and below ac-
count for less than 10,000 page views each, those near
the bottom in single digits. The figures point to a long tail
for the reach of articles (Anderson, 2006).
The republishing data was coded according to pub-
lisher, topic focus on the publication, and geographical
location. The top 50 republishers by page views were
coded as legacy/professional journalism organizations,
peripheral journalistic actors, and non-journalism orga-
nizations. The boundaries of the first category were set
by considering how far the organizations were staffed by
professional journalists who followed established profes-
sional norms and practices. Peripheral actors were de-
fined as those that have not traditionally been consid-
ered as belonging to journalism practice. The third cat-
egory included organizations not involved in journalism.
At a global level, the sample included The
Washington Post, CNN, The Daily Mail and Quartz. At a
national level, they include the National Post,Maclean’s
and Global News, while regional republishers include
the Winnipeg Free Press and SooToday.com. At the niche
level, they vary from sites focused on Canadian policy
issues such as National Newswatch, to parenting publi-
cations such as Today’s Parent, to science outlets such as
IFLScience. The outlets were also analyzed by the nature
of the publication, by topic, and by geographical location.
Republishers were coded by the topic focus of the outlet
to distinguish between general news and more specialist
publications—general news, business, science, lifestyle,
health, politics, arts and culture, weather, urban issues,
and explicit point of view. The coding was undertaken
by a research assistant and subsequently reviewed by
the authors.
For a further layer of analysis, the data on the arti-
cles republished by The Weather Network (Canada) was
also downloaded from The Conversations analytics dash-
board for the period June 24, 2017, to April 30, 2019. The
data included the headline, author, and page views per
article. The top 50 articles were coded for topic focus,
such as climate change, natural disasters, policy issues,
and animals. These included several related to climate
change including pollution, habitat, sustainability, and re-
source development.
This article also draws on data on the scholarly con-
tributors gathered through a survey of The Conversation
Canada readers and authors in the spring of 2019. 1,342
registered contributors were emailed, encouraging them
to take the survey. The survey was also promoted on the
The Conversation Canada website, and on social media.
Some 191 of the respondents identified themselves as
contributors to the publication. The data was filtered by
the number of contributors who said they had been con-
tacted by another publication or media outlet (114 re-
spondents) and by the type of media outlet/publication.
Additional data was obtained via The Conversations
proprietary analytics for the number of contributors and
author pitches for the two years since launch to pro-
vide a further measure of uptake. The data includes the
names of contributors, university affiliation, number of
stories published, page views, and comments. The data
on pitches includes the names of contributors, univer-
sity affiliation, number of pitches, and topic. It only cov-
ers scholar pitches to the editorial team via the website.
It does not include pitches by email to individual edi-
tors or by universities to editors on behalf of academics.
We were particularly interested in examining the num-
ber of pitches as pitching a story to an editor is a funda-
mental journalism skill, requiring “precision in identify-
ing the essential from inessential, the ability to synthe-
size and to systematize information and the confidence
to present it” (de Burgh, 2003, p. 100). With the growth
of philanthropic and crowdfunded journalism, there is
more of a direct connection between funding and pitches
(Aitamurto, 2011). Pitching is also considered an essen-
tial skill for PR professionals who will suggesta story idea
to a journalist in an attempt to persuade them it is rele-
vant and of interest to their audience, thus shaping what
issues are covered (Jackson & Moloney, 2016).
4. Findings
4.1. Production: Scholars as Journalists
As of June 2019, after 24 months in operation, 1,558
scholars and academics had written at least one arti-
cle on The Conversation Canada, with a total of 1,937
articles published over the two years, some with more
than one author. The majority of scholar contributors
wrote one article, making up 1,150 (73.8%) of the con-
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 96
tributors. Another 235 scholars, (15%), contributed two
articles over the two-year period. Some 77 (4.9%) con-
tributed three articles and 37 (2.4%) wrote four. A small
number, 59 scholars, (3.8%) wrote five or more ar-
ticles. The top three most prolific contributors were:
Michael J. Armstrong, Associate Professor of Operations
Research at the Goodman School of Business, Brock
University in Ontario, with 36 articles; Sylvain Charlebois,
Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab and Professor
in Food Distribution and Policy at Dalhousie University
in Nova Scotia, with 31 articles; and Joel Lexchin,
Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Management,
at York University, and Associate Professor of Family
and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, with
15 articles. The figures suggest that the majority of
scholars take on the role of journalist as a one-off
action, rather than as a consistent activity of moving
from the periphery to the core of journalistic produc-
tion, when measured in terms of articles written for The
Conversation Canada.
In addition, there are some indications of grow-
ing acceptance of The Conversation Canada from the
wider field of journalism as being published is rais-
ing the prominence of scholar-journalists through ex-
posure in the broader media. Our survey of authors
found that 59.7%—114 out of the 191 respondents who
identified as contributors—said they had received re-
quests to write or be interviewed by another publica-
tion or media outlet. The results are consistent with data
from the longest-running Conversation site in Australia,
launched in 2011, which found that 66% of Australian
authors were contacted by other media after publica-
tion (The Conversation Media Group, 2017). In terms
of media interest, the largest number of requests came
from radio and newspapers (23.2%). Self-reported data
from academic contributors suggests a significant inter-
est from the public service broadcaster, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. The next two highest num-
bers of requests came from online media (18.5%) and
from international media (11.4%) such as the BBC (UK),
NPR (US) and ABC (Australia). Television, magazines, and
podcasts made up the rest.
On top of acceptance from traditional journalism
organizations, the first two years of operation of The
Conversation Canada indicate a steady increase in
pitches submitted by academics via the website. There
were 1,370 pitches between June 25, 2017, and June 30,
2019. In order to obtain a sense of the pace of pitches,
the data was broken down into six-month periods. For
just over the first six months of operation, from June
25 to December 31, 2017, there were 171 pitches from
scholars. The number increased to 296 in the following
six months, from January 1 to June 30, 2018, for a total of
467 in the first year of operations. The number of pitches
rose to 399 for the six months of July 1 to December 31,
2018. There was another rise to 571 in the six months
January 1 to June 30, 2019, for a total of 970 in the sec-
ond year of operations. The data shows how the pace of
pitches has quickened, with the number more than dou-
bling year on year.
4.2. Publication: Organizational Structure
The Conversation Canada is a registered not-for-profit so-
ciety funded largely by a university membership model
that explicitly states it is editorially independent of the
university sector. The model is based on the mediatiza-
tion of academic knowledge work, with the university
sector as the newsroom (Rowe, 2017). It could be con-
sidered as a form of what Hepp and Loosen (2019, p. 2)
have defined as “a particular group of professionals who
incorporate new organizational forms and experimental
practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its struc-
tural foundations. They use the term ‘pioneer journal-
ism’ to describe journalism practices that involve efforts
to shift the field’s organizational foundations” (Hepp
& Loosen, 2019, p. 2). In this sense, The Conversation
model could be seen as reconfiguring the nature of what
is considered a journalism organization. The model has
been discussed by Pooley (2017) as the leading example
of a new category of media, the impact platform, defined
as “researcher-authored, professionally edited, openly li-
censed, and republication-friendly.
The Conversation model has faced critique and ques-
tions by some prominent journalists and journalism ed-
ucators in Canada over whether it aligns within a tradi-
tional definition of journalism. These concerns stem par-
tially from the funding model, with questions over edi-
torial independence and whether the publishing model
is different from established university communications.
The main federal journalism think tank doing research on
digital journalism and policy, the Public Policy Forum, in-
cluded The Conversation in a major report for the federal
government on the state of the media in Canada in a sec-
tion labelled “Citizen Journalism. The report went on to
note that “the Internet has thrown up a so-called second
layer of vibrancy’ by giving individuals a public voice on
blogs, specialized sites, social media-based community
billboards and academic sites such as opencanada.org
and The Conversation (Public Policy Forum, 2017, p. 76).
That it framed The Conversation Canada as citizen jour-
nalism and not among an increasing number of digital-
born news organizations suggests it was seen in 2017
as one of Ahva’s ‘inbetweeners, and part of a growing
journalism periphery in Canada. In addition, most of the
media coverage of The Conversation Canadas launch in
2017 was in higher education outlets and by university
members themselves. One exception was a largely posi-
tive article in the Toronto Star ahead of launch (Wallace,
2017), published as part of a series on the state of the
news and information landscape in Canada.
4.3. Dissemination: Republishers
Our analysis of the top 50 republishers in terms of reach
found articles from The Conversation Canada were pre-
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 97
dominantly republished by what would be considered
professional news publications. Of the top 50 repub-
lishers, 33 (66%) were categorized as professional jour-
nalism, 15 (30%) were peripheral journalistic organiza-
tions, and two were non-journalism organizations. The
professional journalism organizations include Maclean’s
magazine, The Daily Mail, Global News (Canada), and
Salon. Peripheral republishers include Sci Fi Generation,
Alternet, and The Weather Network (Canada). The two
non-journalism actors (4%) were University of Toronto
News and the World Economic Forum.
Geographically, the largest number of republishers,
20 out of 50, were from the US. Perhaps this is unsur-
prising given the population size of 327 million in the US
compared to 37 million in Canada. Canadian media ac-
counted for 12 of the sample, with the UK third at nine.
The rest were made up by Australia, India, New Zealand,
South Africa, Southeast Asia, Spain, and Switzerland. The
geographical spread can also be explained by the net-
work with The Conversation affiliates in Australia, the UK,
and the US.
The most common type of republisher was the gen-
eral interest journalism publication, which accounted for
42% of the sample. All 21 of them were professional jour-
nalism publications. The second-largest contingent in-
cluded 19 specialist publications (38%), with 11 being pe-
ripheral actors. News, commentary, and analysis outlets
account for 12%, evenly split between mainstream and
peripheral outlets. There was one legacy hyper-local out-
let and one international non-journalism organization.
In terms of topic, more than half of the republish-
ers provided general news. Of these, 25 were legacy
outlets and two were peripheral actors—the aggrega-
tor Flipboard and Qrius, a news and analysis site based
in India. The second highest topic was science, account-
ing for just under 10% of media. More significantly, two
thirds of these republishers focused on science were pe-
ripheral actors such as Sci Fi Generation, IFLScience, and
Phys.org. Among the other results were 8% of publica-
tions focused on business, with three legacy actors and
one non-journalism. Another 8% were publications with
an explicit point of view, made up mostly by peripheral
actors such as Alternet and The Raw Story. Health only
made up 4% while arts and culture, lifestyle, and weather
were each at one publication (2%).
An analysis of the data by the number of page views
surfaced the significant reach of peripheral actors even
though they only made up a third of the sample. In
terms of audience, legacy media accounted for 51% of
page views compared to 45% for peripheral actors and
4% for non-journalism outlets. The largest republisher
in terms of reach was The Weather Network (Canada),
which would not be considered a legacy or elite news or-
ganization. It accounted for 9% of all page views. Second
was the news aggregator, Flipboard, which accounted for
7.3% of page views. The highest mainstream republisher
was Maclean’s magazine, which made up 4.7% of page
views. For comparison, The Weather Network (Canada)
published 133 articles from The Conversation Canada.
Flipboard published some 1,614 articles and Maclean’s
published 116.
An analysis of the content published by The Weather
Network (Canada) shows a focus on substantive issues.
There are some articles on popular topics such as bed
bugs and crop circles. But almost half of the pieces re-
published focused on climate change, sustainability, re-
source development, and pollution. These include arti-
cles from the future of the Arctic to the impact of road
salt on the environment to the potential benefits of
green roofs. The analysis and commentary on environ-
mental issues suggests that, as a peripheral actor, The
Weather Network (Canada) could be addressing an in-
formation need left by the mainstream media (Schäfer,
2015) on arguably some of the most pressing and impor-
tant national and global concerns.
5. Discussion and Conclusion
Our research is intended as an exploratory study that
contributes to the emerging body of literature on periph-
eral actors, addressing the call by Grafström and Windell
“that future research should continue to explore when
and how novel actors are incorporated into organiza-
tional fields, and under what circumstances they have
less or greater possibilities to alter established struc-
tures of domination” (2012, p. 75). Our findings point
to early uptake of a complex peripheral actor initially
identified as an ‘inbetweener’ in a field that is under-
going commercial market decline. A 2017 government-
initiated and funded report described legacy media in
Canada as “once indispensable agencies of information,
the 20th-century news media are less and less promi-
nent, except to provide grist for a public conversation
they no longer control” (Public Policy Forum, 2017, p. 17).
In a sign of the economic headwinds in the news media,
the federal government has earmarked more than $600
million to support journalism, largely through tax cred-
its for journalism jobs and news subscriptions. It is also
extending the definition of charitable status to include
journalism organizations.
Our results point to an increasing uptake in the num-
ber of scholars contributing as peripheral actors to The
Conversation Canada. They also highlight more scholars
seeking to write for the site, given the increase in the
number of pitches submitted to the newsroom via the
web. The findings show demand for content from The
Conversation Canada from legacy journalism experienc-
ing increasing market pressures in Canada and a grow-
ing number of peripheral journalism actors. It is both this
institutional recognizability along with decline of legacy
journalism actors—the largest legacy republisher has
seen multiple layoffs over the past few years (Watson,
2017)—and rising numbers of digital niche peripheral ac-
tors that have contributed to its growth. Perhaps one of
the most powerful indicators of its shifting status as a
journalism producer is the 2018 Public Policy Forum re-
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 98
port, which upgraded The Conversation Canada from citi-
zen journalism inbetweener to playing a role “in strength-
ening journalism and local news” (Public Policy Forum,
2018, p. 19) and the entire “media system” (Public Policy
Forum, 2018, p. 12) in the course of a year.
The backdrop is a media landscape in Canada that
is dominated by a handful of legacy commercial and
public broadcasting journalism actors, such as the CBC,
The Globe and Mail,The Toronto Star, Postmedia, CTV
News, and Global News, which continue to enjoy sig-
nificant reach (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, &
Nielsen, 2019). Of these, Global News, the Postmedia
network, and The Toronto Star have taken articles from
The Conversation Canada. We find this gap worthy of
further exploration. Out of the 12 Canadian republish-
ers in terms of reach, 10 were legacy players. The
Weather Network (Canada) was the only peripheral jour-
nalism player and one was a non-journalism outlet, the
University of Toronto. The prominence of The Weather
Network (Canada) as the largest single republisher in
terms of audience reach signals how the field of journal-
ism is encompassing novel actors. In 2004, Zelizer talked
about the Weather Channel in the U.S. as not being con-
sidered journalism despite its popularity, and the fact
that it has consistently been a feature in news output,
particularly in weather forecasts on television and radio
(Henson, 2010; Zelizer, 2004). She links it to other periph-
eral actors at the time:
Consider a repertoire of candidates that would not
currently merit membership under the narrowed
definition of journalism: A Current Affair, MTV’s
The Week in Rock, internet listservs, Jon Stewart,
www.nakednews.com, reporters for the Weather
Channel…are but a few that come to mind. (Zelizer,
2004, p. 6)
Zelizer’s opinion was however contested among contem-
porary scholarship such that the cable channel prompted
observations that it “seemed more like news than
‘weather’ in the traditional sense” (Seabrook, 2000).
Weather reporting has also evolved with the advent of
digital media, so that “news stories about the weather
have gained a prominence in online media that they
never attained in print” (Zion, 2019, p. 3). This promi-
nence is reflected in organizational growth with the
Weather Channel in the U.S. expanding its digital news-
room from 10 in 2012 to more than 60 by 2018, becom-
ing “a destination for narrative storytelling and investiga-
tive reporting on everything from climate change to toxic
algae to immigration” (Willyard, 2018).
The number and reach of peripheral actors such as
The Weather Network (Canada) in this case study indi-
cate how novel actors can gain an increasingly central
role in stimulating access to evidence-based explanatory
journalism at a time of commercial journalism decline.
Similar to studies of The Weather Channel, the material
republished by The Weather Network (Canada) suggests
that audiences are encountering research and analysis
on a key policy issue without either intentionally seek-
ing it out or trying to avoid it. They are an inadvertent
audience who are exposed to news and information as
a by-product of the medium, much as television during
the 1960s and 1970s was seen as a way for audiences to
“fall into the news” (Robinson, 1976, p. 426).
As a result, we argue that scholars need to take com-
plex peripheral actors seriously as they appear to be
growing in prominence and reach. Complex actors op-
erate across multiple stages in the production, publi-
cation, and distribution/dissemination of news and in-
formation. For example, Google, Facebook, and Apple
News could be considered complex peripheral actors
given how they act as hosts for, and gateways to, news.
Such complex peripheral actors are benefitting from a
global platform technological environment, the prolif-
eration of free content and increasingly multiple jour-
nalisms (Callison & Young, in press; Papacharissi, 2015).
The study contributes to the emerging literature on pe-
ripheral actors by going beyond individual and mostly hu-
man, actors, adding considerations of the organizational
model and distribution/dissemination. Our results sug-
gest a need to consider how different peripheral actors
operate at different steps of the journalistic process to
acknowledge the complex forces at work.
The case study of The Conversation Canada surfaces
how it operates as a complex peripheral actor. It pro-
vides an analysis of the interactions of peripheral ac-
tors within one institution in a national journalism field,
in this case a mature Western media system (Fletcher
& Nielsen, 2017) characterized largely by commercial
media with a respected but comparatively underfunded
public broadcaster. In today’s high choice media envi-
ronment with multiple actors—and concerns that “infi-
nite choice equals ultimate fragmentation” (Anderson,
2006, p. 181)—some newer players are benefitting from
this environment depending on the nature of their in-
tervention and in this case, their recognition as jour-
nalism. Our findings are particularly interesting given
that Canadian journalism organizations have tradition-
ally been critiqued for a “pernicious ethnocentrism
which fails to recognize, perhaps even denies, the cos-
mopolitan nature of the news audience and its place in a
globalized and networked world” (Gasher, 2007, p. 316).
In closing, Eldridge has suggested that embracing
newer journalism actors available via digital and social
media risks diluting the “cultural and symbolic capital of
being a journalist” (2017, p. 186). This approach how-
ever neglects the existence of a global context of multi-
ple journalisms and media systems that are increasingly
in relationship to each other in a digital landscape, as
well as the fact that definitions of journalism change over
time and place. A key area for further research, then, is
how to gauge who matters, as this has been traditionally
based on circulation and audience numbers. The emer-
gence of novel actors and studies of their contemporary
trajectories do not merely prompt an examination of the
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 99
changing media landscape. Rather, these new entrants
contest an entrenched view among journalism studies
scholars that the notion of a single journalism matters,
and that it can be understood outside of its historical and
systemic context.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors
would like to sincerely thank the reviewers and editors
of the thematic issue for their insightful comments that
have strengthened this paper.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare no conflict of interests.
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About the Authors
Alfred Hermida (PhD) is Associate Professor and Director of the School of Journalism at the University
of British Columbia, and Co-Founder and Board Member of The Conversation Canada. He does not
own shares in or receive funding from The Conversation Canada. With more than two decades of
experience in digital journalism, his research explores the transformation of media, emerging news
practices, innovation, and social media. His most recent book, co-authored with Mary Lynn Young, is
Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News (Routledge, 2019). He was aBBC journalist for 16 years.
Mary Lynn Young (PhD) is an Associate Professor, Co-Founder and Board Member of The Conversation
Canada. She does not own shares in or receive funding from The Conversation Canada. She has
held a number of academic administrative positions at UBC, including director of the UBC School of
Journalism (2008–2011). She has two recent co-authored books: Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and
Possibilities (Oxford, 2020), with Candis Callison; and Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News
(Routledge, 2019), with Alfred Hermida.
Media and Communication, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 92–102 102
... In order to mitigate bias, we have built on an unpublished study of not-for-profit journalism start-ups by Taylor Owen (2017), and research on local news outlets by April Lindgren (2019). We also integrate other national comparison data to assess The Conversation Canada in its early development stage, as well as to locate it within larger changes in the journalism landscape (Hermida & Young, 2019b). Our goal in being transparent is to support knowledge generation and capacity building in this space. ...
... In this vein, we find evidence of innovation in the model of The Conversation Canada in three ways. First, The Conversation Canada has been able to increase global and non-elite dissemination of its journalism (through dissemination by global actors as well as peripheral journalism actors) in what has been considered a parochial national journalism landscape (Gasher, 2007;Hermida & Young, 2019b). Second, it has been able to experiment with notfor-profit democratic organizational models, which is an addition to the Canadian commercial journalism landscape. ...
... As co-founders, we had a number of experimental questions and commitments going into this project alongside initial goals of economic survival and sustainability, including: capacity building in journalism innovation and academic explanatory journalism within the national journalism ecosystem; experimentation with democratic not-for-profit governance models for journalism organizations; and commitments to an inclusive and equitable labour context. Looking forward, our research examines whether the model of The Conversation advances journalism epistemology through scholarly research (Hermida & Young, 2019b), and whether it can participate in repair and reform in the journalism ecosystem in Canada, and more broadly, within conversations about the emerging role of journalism in a networked and increasingly contested space for citizenship in a digital context. ...
... In order to mitigate bias, we have built on an unpublished study of not-for-profit journalism start-ups by Taylor Owen (2017), and research on local news outlets by April Lindgren (2019). We also integrate other national comparison data to assess The Conversation Canada in its early development stage, as well as to locate it within larger changes in the journalism landscape (Hermida & Young, 2019b). Our goal in being transparent is to support knowledge generation and capacity building in this space. ...
... In this vein, we find evidence of innovation in the model of The Conversation Canada in three ways. First, The Conversation Canada has been able to increase global and non-elite dissemination of its journalism (through dissemination by global actors as well as peripheral journalism actors) in what has been considered a parochial national journalism landscape (Gasher, 2007;Hermida & Young, 2019b). Second, it has been able to experiment with notfor-profit democratic organizational models, which is an addition to the Canadian commercial journalism landscape. ...
... As co-founders, we had a number of experimental questions and commitments going into this project alongside initial goals of economic survival and sustainability, including: capacity building in journalism innovation and academic explanatory journalism within the national journalism ecosystem; experimentation with democratic not-for-profit governance models for journalism organizations; and commitments to an inclusive and equitable labour context. Looking forward, our research examines whether the model of The Conversation advances journalism epistemology through scholarly research (Hermida & Young, 2019b), and whether it can participate in repair and reform in the journalism ecosystem in Canada, and more broadly, within conversations about the emerging role of journalism in a networked and increasingly contested space for citizenship in a digital context. ...
... The main objective of this research is to explore the emergence of communicative actors in Twitch in the Spanish media sphere, both from journalism and from the margins of traditional media. Such research is carried out through the approach of studying the frontiers of journalism and peripheral actors (Hermida & Young, 2019;Schapals, 2022), as well as from the field of journalistic quality (García-Ortega & García-Avilés, 2018;Gómez-Mompart, 2013). ...
... Web users can organise themselves outside the traditional media (Schapals, 2022) and address issues of news interest as successfully or more successfully than professional journalists. However, some of the fears of many journalists are also replicated (Hermida et al., 2019). The fieldwork of streamers is nonexistent, the content usually lacks a defined structure, and opinion and entertainment predominate over informative rigour. ...
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Las formas en las que el periodismo y las redes sociales se relacionan se han vuelto cada vez más complejas. En este contexto, destaca un fenómeno que ha auspiciado la participación de los usuarios en el debate público: la retransmisión en directo de contenidos informativos por parte de actores periféricos en Twitch. El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas y análisis de contenido el lenguaje, formato y estructura de cuatro streamers en Twitch y medir la calidad, las similitudes y las diferencias en función de si intervienen periodistas profesionales o no. Las cuentas de Twitch analizadas muestran diferencias formales y de enfoque entre los periodistas y los actores periféricos. Sin embargo, es posible identificar un cierto grado de continuismo entre ambos. Asimismo, las características propias de la plataforma, así como sus códigos y lenguajes, condicionan la actividad periodística, promueven la participación del público y la dotan de un carácter más informal, en ocasiones, incumpliendo los criterios de calidad en la labor informativa.
... Their motivations include a desire to reshape the journalistic field or revive its "original" ideals. The concept of "complex peripheral actors" (Hermida & Young, 2019) refers to journalistic players who operate at individual, organizational, and network levels, bringing new practices into the field of journalism, including production, publication, and distribution activities. Other frameworks view these new digital actors as "pioneers" and define them as a "particular group of journalists that incorporate new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations" (Hepp & Loosen, 2021, p. 577). ...
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Podcasts have established themselves in the digital media landscape as an integral part of information gathering and opinion formation for many users. The number of podcast users has stabilized at a high level in recent years. However, podcast producers, including podcast journalists, remain a largely unexplored group. This study focuses on podcast journalists and aims to identify the perceptions, motivations, and quality standards relating to their roles in podcasting. It is based on the results of an online survey of 378 podcast journalists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Against a background of the concept of pioneer journalism, this article argues that podcast journalists are innovative contributors to the journalism ecosystem and have positioned themselves as new actors within the field. The findings of this study show that podcast journalists create, produce, and present journalistic content, for instance news or background stories, in the form of audio episodes, and see themselves as both educators and entertainers. They use the creative freedom of podcasting to engage deeply with their audiences and achieve high levels of listener loyalty. While financial gain is not their primary motivation, they have innovated new revenue models. They are committed to the quality of their content and emphasize comprehensibility and accuracy of information.
... Their motivations include a desire to reshape the journalistic field or revive its "original" ideals. The concept of "complex peripheral actors" (Hermida & Young, 2019) refers to journalistic players who operate at individual, organizational, and network levels, bringing new practices into the field of journalism, including production, publication, and distribution activities. Other frameworks view these new digital actors as "pioneers" and define them as a "particular group of journalists that incorporate new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations" (Hepp & Loosen, 2021, p. 577). ...
Article
In Zimbabwe, the comatose economy has had an impact on the media industry. Since 2000, media houses have been shutting down due to lack of financial support or poor business environment. For some news organisations, they have been retrenching their staff as a cost cutting measure. This has also led to retrenched journalists to write for other publications as freelance journalists. This study examines the state of freelance journalism in Zimbabwe. It aims to assess their role and contribution to the media industry, challenges they face, and also the survival strategies they are adopting. This qualitative study is informed by Bourdieu’s field theory. It used in-depth interviews while thematic analysis was employed in analyzing data. Findings demonstrates that freelance journalists are contributing to the growth of media industry in Zimbabwe by writing on specialised beats like science reporting. Besides such contributions, findings further demonstrated that freelance journalism is seen as ‘curse’ as journalists are easily harassed by the state agents who rarely recognizes someone not working for an established organisation.
Article
Across a number of disciplines, hybridity is regularly invoked when two previously distinct elements – whether objects, concepts, frameworks, practices, models, mediums or institutions – are brought together. However, this is often done with a vague theoretical nod. Labeled a hybrid and left at the level of broad theory, scholarship has tended to ignore a critical issue: what happens when the disparate elements of a hybrid are introduced in practice? This conceptual paper takes the case of academic explanatory journalism, a nascent intentional collaborative practice between academic authors and journalist editors, in order to illustrate how the theoretical concept of hybridity plays out in practice. This particular case presents a number of opportunities and benefits within a Western democratic context. However, our examination highlights that without a more nuanced discussion of how hybridization plays out in real life, its potential benefits are compromised. We propose a five-step framework that can be applied to other examples of hybridity, across varied disciplines beyond media and communication studies. This five-step framework helps uncover the complications that might arise when disparate elements are hybridized, moving from theory into practice. The approach helps create the space and understanding needed to design solutions pre-emptively.
Chapter
The social actors, technologies, affordances and business models behind digital media and platforms, such as Facebook, X (previously Twitter), YouTube and Weibo, have changed the practices of science/health reporting. Platformisation offers new opportunities to bring valuable health/science news to audiences with limited access to and low interest in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. In addition, the networked environments where science/health news circulates make it easier, and more likely, for scientists and medical experts to fact-check science and health stories, thus potentially increasing the likelihood that audiences will receive more accurate information. However, digital media innovation and platformisation have also created new pitfalls, given that science/health journalists may find themselves competing with science and health ‘storytellers’ who have far less ability for, or interest in, communicating accurate information.
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Research has paid relatively little attention to two aspects that are increasingly important in understanding data journalism as a maturing field: (a) journalism today is increasingly provided by a diverse set of actors both inside and outside of legacy media organizations, and (b) data journalism has become a global phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped within national contexts only. Our article brings both of these aspects together and investigates the roles and practices of peripheral actors in European and African contexts. We engage with research on the role of non-profits and civic technologists in journalism to interrogate further the entanglements between civic technology organizations and data journalism. Following in-depth interviews with 29 practitioners of data-driven non-profits in Europe and Africa, we conclude that practices and roles of these non-profits in relation to journalism are similar, but transcultural and contextual influences shape how they complement or expand data journalism.
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Recent journalism research often argues that it is high time that we moved beyond the newsroom and begin asking who it is that is stimulating transformation and not what it is, as individual journalists, entrepreneurs, technology firms, and startups assume an increasingly critical role in the development of the field. This article introduces the concept of ‘pioneer journalism’ to provide just such an analysis across different organizational contexts. Pioneer journalism is understood as a particular group of journalists that incorporates new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations. To introduce this concept, the article argues along three stages. First, it develops a theoretical basis on which to pin our understanding of pioneering practice by reviewing previous research into journalism’s transformation beyond the newsroom. Second, it extends the theoretical discussion into the empirical realm by looking at five extreme cases of pioneer journalists through an explorative interview analysis. Third, and to conclude, an integrated concept of pioneer journalism is outlined as a point of departure from which to further consider journalism’s re-figuration more generally.
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Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This argument is based on 74 interviews with the most active foundations funding international non-profit news and the journalists they support. In general, we found that these foundations did not try to directly influence the content of the journalism they funded. However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, “impactful” news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. We argue that these changes are the result of various forms of “boundary work”, or performative struggles over the nature of journalism. This contrasts with most previous literature, which has focused on the effects of foundation funding on journalistic autonomy.
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The contours of journalistic practice have evolved substantially since the emergence of the world wide web to include those who were once strangers to the profession. Amateur journalists, bloggers, mobile app designers, programmers, web analytics managers, and others have become part of journalism, influencing the process of journalism from news production to distribution. These technology-oriented strangers—those who have not belonged to traditional journalism practice but have imported their qualities and work into it—are increasingly taking part in journalism, whether welcomed by journalists or shunned as interlopers. Yet, the labels that keep them at journalism’s periphery risk conflating them with much larger groups who are not always adding to the news process (e.g., bloggers, microbloggers) or generalizing them as insiders/outsiders. In this essay, we consider studies that have addressed the roles of journalistic strangers and argue that by delineating differences among these strangers and seeking representative categorizations of who they are, a more holistic understanding of their impact on news production, and journalism broadly, can be advanced. Considering the norms and practices of journalism as increasingly fluid and open to new actors, we offer categorizations of journalistic strangers as explicit and implicit interlopers as well as intralopers. In working to understand these strangers as innovators and disruptors of news production, we begin to unpack how they are collectively contributing to an increasingly un-institutionalized meaning of news while also suggesting a research agenda that gives definition to the various strangers who may be influencing news production and distribution and the organizational field of journalism more broadly.
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Networked content flows that focus or fragment public attention are key communication processes in multimedia ecologies. Understandings of events may differ widely, as networked attention and framing processes move from core participants to more distant spectator publics. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests, peripheral social media networks of public figures and media organizations focused public attention on economic inequality. Although inequality was among many issues discussed by the activists, it was far less central to the protest core than problems with banks or democracy. Results showed how public attention to inequality was constructed through pulling and pushing interpretive frames between the core and periphery of dense communication networks. Various indicators of public attention—such as search trends, Wikipedia article edits, and legacy media coverage—all credited the protests with raising public awareness of inequality, even as attention to problems with banks grew at the protest core.
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Amid the increasing use of web analytics to gage the success, present and future, of news content and related news products, this article focuses on in-depth interviews with the suppliers of those analytics: web analytics companies. Drawing on the concepts of boundary work and interloper media, this article examines how managers for these companies understand and position their work in relation to news production as a boundary object. The larger finding of this article is that while web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists, they foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective, and routinized in news production. By offering a product that they (i.e. web analytics companies) need to modify on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, they foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This and other findings provide a portrait of the development of norms and values in journalism as these companies gain a greater acceptance in newsrooms and increasingly influence news production.
Book
The book is about how journalists know what they know, who gets to decide what good journalism is, and how we know when it’s done right. Until a couple decades ago, these questions were rarely asked by journalists. When journalists were questioned by malcontented publics and critics about how they were doing journalism, these questions were easily ignored. Now, if you’re on social media, you’re likely to see multiple critiques of journalism on a daily basis. It seems not only convenient but pragmatic to give most of the credit to digital technologies and/or market failure for how relationships between journalists and diverse audiences have changed. This book rests on a different assumption, however. We contend that technologies offer a diagnostic to understand much deeper, persistent, and structural problems confronting journalism. Counter to much of the recent journalism scholarship, we argue that you can’t talk about the role journalists and journalism organizations could, should, and have played in society without talking about gender, race, other intersectional concerns—and settler-colonialism. Drawing on mixed methods and ethnography as well as interdisciplinary scholarship, this book examines the reckoning under way between journalists, their methods and their audiences in sites as diverse as social media, legacy newsrooms, journalism startups, novel forms of journalism memoir, and among indigenous journalists. The book explores journalism’s long-standing harms alongside repair, reform, and transformation. It suggests that a turn to strong objectivity and systems journalism provides a path forward.
Book
Online Journalism from the Periphery looks at how a range of new media actors, communicating online, have challenged us to think differently about the journalistic field. Emerging from the disruption of digital technology, these new actors have been met with resistance by an existing core of journalism, who perceive them as part of a 'digital threat' and dismiss their claims of journalistic belonging. As a result, cracks are appearing in the conceptual foundations of what journalism is and should be. Applying field theory as a conceptual lens, Scott Eldridge guides the reader through the intricacies of these tensions at both the core and periphery. By first unpacking definitions of journalism as a social and cultural construction, this book explores how these are dominated by narratives which have reinforced a limited set of expectations about its purpose and reach. The book goes on to examine how these narratives have been significantly undermined by the output of major new media players, including Gawker, reddit, Breitbart, and WikiLeaks. Online Journalism from the Periphery argues for a broadening of ideas around what constitutes journalism in the modern world, concluding with alternative approaches to evaluating the contributions of emerging media heavy-weights to society and to journalism.