“Going Offline”: Social Media, Source Verification, and Chinese Investigative Journalism During “Information Overload”

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with 25 investigative journalists in Beijing, China, this study suggests digital journalists may be increasingly challenged by a sense of “information overload” as they navigate social media and online environments crowded with dis- and mis-information, fake profiles and sources, and massive amounts of opinion journalism that is presented as professional journalism. This overload has reinforced Chinese investigative journalists’ dedication to a conventional form of verification: meeting face-to-face with sources. This study contributes to scholarship on Chinese journalism by expanding knowledge about investigative journalists in the country and by complicating understandings of how journalists there work in an age of social media, disinformation, and increased interests in verification.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• disinformation
• “information overload”
• investigative journalism
• social media
• sources
• verification

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the journalists who participated in this study; please note we take responsibility for the views shared. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their suggestions that improved the submission.

Disclosure Statement

Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. is Associate Editor of Journalism Practice.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Cyberspace Administration of China is also known as the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission.

2 Participants mentioned microblogging, instant message applications, forums (BBS, bulletin board system), Weibo (Chinese Twitter), WeChat, Tianya, Baidu Tieba, and Zhihu (Chinese Quora). News aggregators also have public accounts on social media; these also have public accounts on social media where journalists find news and sources.

3 Jiaozhen, for instance, is fact-checking platform established by Tecent and is for the public to check rumors about social issues and science.

4 Despite this message of ideological control over the news, journalism scholarship discussed above suggests that Chinese journalists operate within degrees of editorial autonomy and certainly with greater agency than depicted in much Western journalism research about Chinese media.

5 While Chinese journalists faced economic pressures to reconfigure the organizational resources and increase the revenue or some newspapers decrease the financial support on investigative reporting this form of journalism remains throughout the society (Wang and Sparks 2019).