Frankenstein journalism

ABSTRACT

Confronted with circumstances altered by the Internet, professional working practices have the option to change or to stay the same. This paper looks at how newsworkers in the new form of digital newsrooms have adapted the old location- or topic-based ‘beat’ system; now that they are called upon to curate or aggregate news stories which arrive fully formed from legacy news websites or emerge from social media. Stories like these are often valued for their virality – that is, how far and fast they have already spread – and their power to attract clicks from readers. Today, a growing number of news websites aggregate or curate such stories as part of their own news offerings. Yet curating these stories bring challenges to journalists’ identities and work practices, which demands a response. Based on an ethnographic study of eight digital newsrooms, we report how newsworkers use journalistic rituals to legitimise these second-hand stories flowing into the newsroom. We observed the use of rituals of objectivity, multiple sourcing and comparison with other news outlets as mechanisms that newsworkers used to validate and justify their use of second-hand content.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritual
• gatekeeping
• gatewatching
• journalism
• newsroom
• aggregation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The authors would like to thank the staff of the eight newsrooms studied, which generously allowed access to their professional activities. Names have been changed in this article, for anonymity.

Notes on contributors

Andrew Duffy (Ph.D., National University of Singapore) is an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Previously a journalist in the UK and Singapore, he has worked for the past 10 years at NTU, where his research interests include online travel media and the identity of the next generation of digital journalists [email: [email protected]].

Edson C. Tandoc Jr. (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is an Assistant Professor at WKWSCI in NTU. His research focuses on the sociology of message construction. His studies about influences on journalists have focused on the impact of journalistic roles and audience feedback on the various stages of the news gatekeeping process [email: [email protected]].

Rich Ling (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at WKWSCI in NTU. His work has focused his work on the social consequences of mobile communication. Ling has been the Pohs Visiting Professor of Communication Studies (2005) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has an adjunct position [email: [email protected]].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore.