Editorial: Diversity in Digital Journalism

Abstract

This editorial intends to shine a spotlight on diversity in Digital Journalism scholarship. In celebration of International Women’s Day this year, the Digital Journalism editorial team led an initiative involving some of the world’s leading journals in journalism, communication, media studies, and media management, to provide free access to a series of important articles by female authors. In continuation of what was started on International Women’s Day, this editorial and this virtual special issue presents a collection of research providing some of the best examples of groundbreaking, leading research in Digital Journalism Studies by women. These articles have been selected because they represent different cultural perspectives and/or offer excellent theoretical or empirical scholarship for us to utilize and extend as a global network of scholars. They show why we need to embrace, not ignore, our full community of researchers and their work, as they make it clear that doing so will only enrich the quality of research and encourage a more global, inclusive conversation about digital journalism in these times.

Keywords:

• Diversity
• digital journalism
• gender equality
• reflexivity
• mindfulness
• digital journalism studies compass

Introduction

This editorial intends to shine a spotlight on diversity in Digital Journalism scholarship. We begin with a vignette to highlight both the importance and urgency of our discussion. In late 2018, Kristy travelled to Vietnam as part of a university marketing trip where she worked with mostly female post-graduate students and academics to discuss how leading international journals “work” and, more importantly, how to get published in top-ranked publications. The audience reinforced the all-too-familiar pressure from academic institutions and governments to build international impact from home-grown scholarship. Some of the women she met were incredibly talented, bright, and optimistic about their scholarly ideas. And yet many spoke quietly afterward of feeling deflated by the challenges and barriers they feared were too difficult to overcome: English-language competency; juggling family, work and study; and the fear of having their scholarship - germinated in a Communist system - being judged by those in the west. Kristy passed on her contact details to those who wanted advice (or encouragement) in their publishing journey. The only people to take her up on the offer were men. In a room full of at least 60 people – most of them women - it was just three men in the audience who were willing to put themselves forward.

In celebration of International Women’s Day this year, the Digital Journalism editorial team led an initiative involving some of the world’s leading journals in journalism, communication, media studies, and media management, to provide free access to a series of important articles by female authors. This was not the first time Digital Journalism has provided free access to articles that we felt deserved more recognition and attention that they may not have otherwise received - and it won’t be the last.

This editorial was not designed to imply that great ideas and scholarship cannot gain traction on merit alone. They certainly can, and certainly do. Rather, it was a recognition and response to so many factors that affect how research gains momentum, and the degree of resonance research might have within its own field of inquiry and beyond. This initiative was also not seen as addressing a new challenge. Inequalities from gender to geography, age, culture, and ethnicity have long existed and can be more or less pronounced depending on where we stand in the world (in both place and social space). Scholars too, have rightly highlighted that as the speed and quality of material flows, so too does the potential for controlling space and new forms of spatial differentiation. As one researcher put it, the more the world shrinks, “what matters more is access to the right places and spaces and the right people”.

Towards reflexivity and intersectionality

In continuation of what was started on International Women’s Day, this editorial and this virtual special issue are also not designed as tokenistic celebrations of diversity. Rather, the collection of research gathered here is the result of an ongoing exercise of mindfulness through reflexivity. In her own commentary which appears at the end of this issue, Shakuntala Rao refers to the importance of mindful inclusiveness and intersectionality as guiding frameworks if we, as a scholarly community, are to truly elevate a diversity of voices and ideas. The Digital Journalism editorial team itself is a manufactured team with diversity front and centre in its creation and perhaps strives to serve as an exemplar to what Rao means by intersectionality – which demands that scholarly power nodes are mindful of locational politics in their representation. The Editor-in-chief and Associate Editors of this journal were carefully chosen to reflect the diversity in our field. We represent both the Global North and South, and there is a mix of gendered representation and ethnicity. We acknowledge in our editorial practices and meetings that there may be ongoing perceptions around power imbalances within and across the digital journalism network and that we indeed serve a privileged academic publishing house that has the power to shape citation metrics and influence scholarly careers in some parts of the world. In response, as a team we are determined to be reflexive – and that starts with holding ourselves to account. We have agonised, for example, over decisions about accepting scholarship with poor English fluency, identifying ways to boost female representation, and initiatives aimed at generating more research from the Global South.

Of course, this takes time and commitment to overcome and a wider embrace of the same goals by the academic community. In a previous issue, we unveiled our Digital Journalism Studies Compass as one way to move past pre-existing measures of excellence, to instead focus on quality of scholarship and suitability for publication in Digital Journalism (Eldridge, Hess, Tandoc, and Westlund 2019). In doing so, we intentionally described the circular base underpinning our metaphorical compass as representing the wider social space in which we as scholars exist - where issues of symbolic violence and inequality still uncomfortably plague the institutions and social systems, we are a part. We also designed this metaphorical guide as an invitation for scholars to consider positionality not only within the scholarship we create, and how this aligns with Digital Journalism Studies but also in terms of how we can use such a heuristic device to look reflexively at ourselves as researchers – to pause for thought about who we are; who we are aligned to socially, culturally, and economically; and the issues of competition and ego that shape the decisions we make in order to consider who might be left behind, silenced, or ignored, whether as authors or in the topics covered by Digital Journalism Studies research.

Reflexivity is a simple but powerful theoretical tool. And yet the term “reflexivity” appears in just 34 of the articles that have been published in Digital Journalism since its inception in 2012. It can also sit as an uneasy bedfellow alongside of the more revered notion that guides western journalism practice – objectivity. The idea that both the journalist and the digital journalism scholar might somehow sit above the social spaces they serve so as to cast an objective critical eye can generate blind spots which we must be mindful of in our editorial decision making.

Among these blind spots, we are concerned, for example, by the trend that scholarship authored by men tends to be downloaded and cited at a much faster rate and higher volume. We can also see that research produced by all-male teams far outweighs the number of all-female research teams. Preliminary research being prepared by Edson and Kristy also shows that scholarship from the Global North dominates journalism scholarship not only in Digital Journalism but also in leading journalism journals across the field. For ourselves, this signals that truly reflexive editorial practices require we question our everyday thoughts and actions that may shape or reinforce issues of inequality in order to address these trends. Grand, tokenistic gestures will not suffice. It’s time to turn these statistics around.

The papers in this virtual special issue are, to us, some of the best examples of groundbreaking, leading research in Digital Journalism Studies by women. These articles have been selected because they represent different cultural perspectives and/or offer excellent theoretical or empirical scholarship for us to utilize and extend as a global network of scholars. They show why we need to embrace, not ignore, our full community of researchers and their work, as they make it clear that doing so will only enrich the quality of research and encourage a more global, inclusive conversation about digital journalism in these times.

Returning to the commentary authored by Rao (Rao 2019), we are reminded of how a neo-liberal agenda shaping journalism studies means that fewer voices are being heard at key conferences, as a lack of resources and funding opportunities but also, she argues, because existing white and privileged power structures continue to reinforce the status quo.

Our issue then shifts to feature the work of Sara De Vuyst and Karin Raeymaeckers who explore the role of digitalization in both shaping and reproducing gender relations in journalism. Through interviews with participants they showcase strategies as to how digital capital can be better utilized to increase the status of women in the field of journalism (De Vuyst and Raeymaechers 2019). We then turn to the Global South, where Shixin Ivy Zhang’s provides a thoughtful study on the business models developed to support journalism start-ups in China (Zhang 2019). She offers a fresh analytical framework to consider the various components of business models that have relevance for Chinese start-ups and other parts of the globe, emphasizing the importance of state media policy, market conditions and technology as driving forces behind how news sustainability is generated. Following on from this is a study by German scholars Annett Heft and Leyla Dogruel who also draw on the experiences of those who have been involved in news startups (this time in Germany) to consider how digital entrepreneurism impacts journalistic autonomy across organizational and individual levels (Heft and Doggrel 2019).

It is at this point we momentarily pause to acknowledge that even in a virtual special issue showcasing female researchers, we are mindful that the papers tend to be dominated by scholarship produced from the Global North. There remains a limited selection of work within our journal from continents including Africa, parts of Asia and South America. In the UK, Catherine Adams, nonetheless, demonstrates the importance of a trans-national multiple case study as part of her investigation into the role of drones in journalism (Adams 2019). She examines footage from the United States, Kenya, South Africa, Syria, and the Philippines to provide insight into the value of aerial footage to the storytelling process, such as its use in bringing audiences both closer to a story and creating distance. You Li then compares the role and performance of native advertising on the websites of legacy news media and digital only-news media in the Unites States, highlighting problems with a lack of independent, transparent sources of information in this space (Li 2019). Next, we have fascinating research by Bingjie Liu and Lewen Wei on the world of news-writing bots to consider how machine authorship is received by readers. They highlight that machine written news tends to induce less emotional involvement and perceived as more objective, yet perceived to have less expertise compared to a human journalist. From this study, they contend audiences see value in machine authorship as enhancing news credibility, when writing a genre that demands more information processing (Liu and Wei 2019).

Nicole Cohen closes this virtual special issue with a study of digital journalists in Canada and the United States that considers their working conditions and experiences of working in digital-first newsrooms. Her research draws on a critical political economy framework, to examine how a range of dynamics shape daily working conditions in digital news, including issues of control, speed, analytics and measurement, intensification, commodification and resistance (Cohen 2019).

At face value, the difference between tokenism and a truly mindful reflexive and inclusive approach to strengthening diversity in Digital Journalism Studies can be difficult to differentiate, especially given that the way we ‘measure’ diversity at a glance remains via metrics such as representation on editorial journal boards, as Rao highlights. These types of metrics can tell us where we are overrepresented and that is certainly a valuable starting point. We do know that those in positions of power and the wider scholarly community must all make a concerted effort to lead change and move beyond the status quo, from editors, conference conveners, and research institute directors, to the big publishing houses that drive citation metrics and have generated their own extraordinary funnels of knowledge in the digital era.

And we need you. We need scholars who are prepared to engage with scholarship beyond their familiar patch and scholarly comfort zones to elevate voices that offer difference. Let us view this virtual special issue as a chance to celebrate and showcase some of the outstanding scholarship produced by women researching digital journalism. We do hope you can give these articles the promotion and admiration they deserve.

Kristy, Scott, Edson and Oscar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.