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Abstract
In recent years applications like CoveritLive have diffused with great speed throughout online newsrooms. Such technologies create an interface where audience participation and journalistic reporting potentially merge into a text-production system marked by a high degree of immediacy and interactivity. This paper investigates the consequences of such practices for the professional ideology of journalism. What norms and ideals do journalists who initiate and partake in such practices adhere to? To what degree does their practice conflict with traditional ideals of journalistic reporting? The paper analyses the “live” coverage of football matches in the two most popular Norwegian online newspapers, VG Nett and dagbladet.no. The findings suggest that the merger of audience participation and immediacy creates conflicts of ideals for the journalists involved, and that ideals of subjectivity and social cohesion are promoted by such practices of journalism.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank VG Nett and dagbladet.no for granting permission to reprint figures 1 and 2, and research assistant Maria Alming for transcribing the interviews.
Notes
1. Launched in 2007, CoveritLive soon became extremely popular with online newspapers. News sites like The Globe and Mail in Canada, Newsweek, Sky News, all the online newspapers of the British Trinity Mirror group, and leading Scandinavian online newspapers like Aftonbladet.se and VG Nett have all started using CoveritLive to cover not only sports events, but also other kinds of rolling news.
2. Interview with author, 29 April 2010.
3. Interview with author, 20 August 2010.
4. On the Sunday evening (25 April 2010) I was present in the VG Nett newsroom, five matches were covered live. The number of entries per match varied from 51 to 73, averaging 60 entries per match.
5. Quote from the coverage of the match between Vålerenga and Odd Grenland, 25 April 2010. The original quote in Norwegian read: “80 Shelton forsøker å slå gjennom Moa, men Odd-forsvaret får stoppet gjennomspillet denne gangen.”
6. All the quotes in this paragraph are taken from the five matches covered on 25 April 2010 and translated by me.
7. This quote and the following are all taken from the CoveritLive chat, Sunday 25 April 2010 and translated by me.
8. This quote and the following ones are from dagbladet.no “the studio”, 6 May 2010 and translated by me.