“Journalism as Process”: The Organizational Implications of Participatory Online News
Abstract
This Monograph will explore the empirical and theoretical ramifications of journalism as social media, specifically “journalism as process.” The piece calls for an end to thinking about news as a discrete product and the beginning of considering news production as a shared, distributed action with multiple authors, shifting institution-audience relationships and altered labor dynamics for everyone involved. Using the exemplar of one Midwestern city - Madison, WI - and its information-production/consumption community, this research stems from a newsroom ethnography and 100 interviews with journalists, bloggers, and members of the socially mediating public. It puts forward the idea that news has become a transportive, transactional object of professional, social and civic work for both journalists and audience members.
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Biographies
Sue Robinson is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she researches online journalism. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University in 2007, after a 13-year stint as a reporter. She acknowledges the feedback she received on this manuscript from Robert Asen, Hemant Shah, Greg Downey, Lewis Friedland, the journal editors and anonymous reviewers, and also thanks the Madison, WI, journalists and residents who spent hours participating in this research. In addition, she could not have completed the data collection without the help of her graduate students: Kim Ukura, Simone Warrack, Jill Hopke, and, especially, Cathy DeShano.
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