Ethnic news media in the digital age: the impact of technological convergence in reshaping journalists’ practices in Pakistan

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the theory of technological convergence, this study primarily investigates how technological convergence is reshaping the journalists’ practices of news production and distribution in Pakistan’s ethnic news media. This study also comparatively analyses challenges and constraints experienced by the Pakistani journalists from mainstream and ethnic news media to use digital technology (i.e. the use of computers, multimedia, the internet, mobile phones, digital journalism tools, algorithmic or computer-assisted reporting). To achieve these objectives, this study uses the qualitative methods of document-review, in-depth interviews and focus group discussion. Finally, this study offers a thematic analysis of qualitative data.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic news media
• mainstream news media
• technological convergence
• digitalization
• digital journalism tools
• the Pakistani journalists’ practices

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Dr. Sadia Jamil is a postdoctoral fellow at Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi. In July 2015, she has received her PhD degree in Journalism at the University of Queensland, Australia. She also holds postgraduate degrees in the disciplines of Media Management (University of Stirling, Scotland) and Mass Communication (University of Karachi). Dr Jamil is currently serving IAMCR as the Co Vice-Chair of Journalism Research and Education Section.

Notes

1 Digital journalism tools, in this study, refers to the use of: (i) social media tools, (ii) blogging tools, (iii) data and statistics websites, (iv) data visualization tools, (v) web scraping tools, image and audio editing tools.