“Possibility Generator”: A Study of Hearken As Expansion of Journalism Boundaries

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the expansion of journalism boundaries and explores a new type of company in the field. For that, the case of Hearken is taken as an emerging category of enterprise in journalism related to interloper media [Eldridge 2014. “Boundary Maintenance and Interloper Media Reaction: Differentiating Between Journalism’s Discursive Enforcement Processes.” Journalism Studies 15 (1): 1–16; Eldridge 2017. Online Journalism from the Periphery: Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field. Routledge], which does not produce content, but still influences the field. The investigation addresses the following research questions: RQ1: What is the nature of Hearken as a company connected to journalism?; RQ2: How do its workers contrast their skills and experiences with journalism?; RQ3: what does this mean for the ecosystem of post-industrial journalism? A participant observation was conducted along with staff interviews. Hearken provides a new model for a journalistic company, which is not involved with content directly, organizes itself differently, but seeks to affect journalism and its ecosystem. It evidences the expansion of the skillsets related to journalism, unveiling different career paths and conceptualizations. Finally, Hearken and its employees seem to embody a journalism definition based on impact, not on method.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• boundaries
• digital journalism
• post-industrial journalism
• hearken
• journalism startups
• audience engagement
• news ecosystem

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Software As a Service,” a common model of commercialization among software companies. In this modality, providers are responsible for the necessary structure, and clients access the service via the internet.

2 https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/denmark-76affe8656b6

3 https://www.nashvillepublicradio.org/post/curious-nashville-cu-l-es-la-diferencia-entre-refugiados-asilados-e-inmigrantes#stream/0

4 Some of the cases are here: https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/receipts-1bc3d35a88bf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (Capes) under Finance Code 001.