In this paper I explore how participatory journalism is changing organizational structure and production practices at the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto (CBC). Using practical action research I examine two sites of study that offer unique strategies on incorporating everyday citizens into the news production process: the use of citizen bloggers to supplement CBC’s coverage of the G20 summit in Toronto shows how diversifying storytelling improves the overall quality of news content; the mandate of Connect with Mark Kelly to democratize daily news by using ordinary people as sources and breaking traditional rules of production reveals a survival strategy for daily news shows. Through the lens of media logic, using the theories of convergence culture and the public sphere, I develop strategies to involve more citizens in the newsmaking process, thus invigorating public discourse and subverting news production that is designed to entertain instead of inform.

Uppsatsens syfte är att genom kvalitativa intervjuer, som ställs i ett jämförande perspektiv, för att svara på frågeställningen: Uppsatsen kommer att utgå från teorier som är applicerbara inom journalistyrket inom en organisation. Teorier kommer vara nyhetsvärdering, vad är det som gör en nyhet till en nyhet. Organisationer drivs framåt utav olika mål, ekonomiska och publicistiska. Hur arbetar dessa mål ihop med vad publiken vill få ut av en nyhetsorganisation, då publiken har helt nya möjligheter att bidra genom medborgarjournalistik och deltagarjournalistik. Ska man se medieanvändare som en extra tillgång, eller är det ett hot för nyhetsorganisationen, om det stämmer vad medborgarjournalistiken säger att vem som helt kan vara journalist? Det presenteras resultat från åtta stycken kvalitativa intervjuer med journalister på lokaltidningar i Sverige. Journalisterna får ge deras bild av hur de upplever yrkesrollen och dess förändringar. Vilken syn har de på medborgarjournalister och om det känner att det utgör något hot för journalistrollen. Efter guidning genom central forskning och metod kommer slutsatsen att journalistrollen inte är ett överflödigt yrke, arbetet som journalister producerar och att det finns vikt i vilken källa nyheterna kommer ifrån. / This essay is based on central theories within journalism in an organization. Highlighted theories will we news evaluation, what issues makes it into news. Organization is driven by different goals, the economic goal and the publicist goals. How does the organization work with these goals joined with what the audience want from the organization when the audience has new possibilities to contribute through citizen’s journalism and participatory journalism? Is it possible to se the media user as a threat to or an extra asses for the news organisation when, according to citizen journalism anyone can call them self a journalism without any specific education. The result will be presented from eight qualitative interviews with journalist on local newspapers in Sweden. This is to present how the journalist perceives the changes in journalism as a profession. How do they see the citizen journalists, as an extra recourse or a threat? After guidance through central research and preformed Interviews the essay comes to the conclusion that the role as a journalism in not an excessive role. The work that a journalist produces is important and it is necessary which source the news comes from.

The aim of our study was to examine Swedish crime reporters’ approach to the social medium Flashback. Our main focus was the crime reporters’ use of the medium Flashback, and attitude towards their own use of media ethics in relation to the medium Flashback. Flashback as a medium is not obliged to any media ethics and lacks a legally accountable publisher. In the search for information about committed crimes people tends to visit Flashback for the information that the traditional media cannot offer. In that sense Flashback challenges the foundation of media ethics today. That is why we found it interesting to study crime reporters in particular. The study used a qualitative approach and was conducted through interviews with eight crime reporters. We have used theories about media ethics, social media and participatory journalism to explore the development in the area and how journalists have adapted to this change. The result shows that there are journalists who use Flashback as a journalistic tool to find information, to save time and as a mean to keep up-to-date. And moreover, the study gives examples on how an online forum with anonymous sources can be used – like any other source, as long as you are source-critical.

The purpose of this study was to describe participation in a new context in which niche journalism is combined with online communities. The majority of past research regarding participation in journalism is focused on traditional journalism and the definition of the term needs to be updated. The aim of the study was to describe participation amongst niche pure players. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, a survey study and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The two empirical aspects resulted in a perspective of participation amongst five pure players, sharing a similar niche. The results of the study showed that niche pure players create user participation by combining journalistic participation with participation in online communities. Empirical data showed a correlation between user participation in the two different sections of the sites. Users with higher participation in one of the sections also partook more in the other. Furthermore, another correlation found was that users who considered it important to be able to partake in a discussion of the journalistic content, also considered the online community to be of great importance to the site. Additionally, the study showed that there is an exchange of information and knowledge, being regarded by the users as something of high value. By providing a platform for horizontal communication between users in the form of a forum, in which users are able to freely create and share content, a participatory culture is created. This participatory culture further increases the degree of user participation in the journalistic content.

No description available.

Dans ses premiers mouvements, la technologie du Web a fait éclater les structures traditionnelles du journalisme en plusieurs systèmes autonomes. Chaque internaute pouvait, en dehors des pilotages massifs des médias traditionnels, produire et gérer des circuits d’information alternatifs. Le courant du journalisme participatif est nébuleux, il décrit le passage d’un mode d’information standard à des modules numériques très dispersés. Ce projet collaboratif s’intègre donc mal au système global et institutionnel des grands médias. Il s’isole dans sa posture de perturbateur d’un ordre informationnel et se heurte à d’immenses failles architecturelles. Finalement, c’est l’ensemble de la structure Web qui va rencontrer des difficultés à se réaliser, à se finaliser dans un but commun d’information. Mais l’Internet n’a pas terminé sa progression. Tel un support jeune, il doit encore apprendre à organiser sa dynamique, à maîtriser le chaos de ses interfaces. Ainsi, quelques années après la version participative du Web 2.0, de nouveaux canaux apparaissent. Portés par la sociabilité des réseaux socio-numériques, les différents acteurs du journalisme participatif et traditionnel vont se regrouper sur d’autres plateformes. Généralistes et communautaires, à la fois interactives et sociales, elles vont construire un circuit d’information mieux agencé. Baptisé journalisme de lien, cet autre courant va combiner, hiérarchiser et mêler la variété des mécanismes des médias présents sur la toile. Le Web emprunte alors un autre passage, il fait transiter les fragments de son système chaotique vers un tout, un ensemble enfin organisé. Du dérèglement des machines médiatiques à l’apparition d’agrégateurs, la modélisation chronologique du Web laissera apparaître une évolution caractéristique des systèmes complexes. Autour d’un corpus issu du journalisme participatif et de lien, le regard croisé entre complexité, organisation et chaos des plateformes numériques tentera de dégager une pensée globale des médias, réinscrivant leur nouvelle connexité numérique comme un système compensatoire et créatif. / On its initial impulse, the Internet technologies have dispersed the professional and traditional journalistic field over fine particles of medias. Throughout the participatory theory, Internet’s users are now committed in a collaborative way. Therefore, information system is moving from a common standard of media to a wide variety of digital modules. With its scattered form, new journalism schemes do not fit within a global information environment and show difficulty inserting the institutional architecture. Finally, all the information circuits and mechanisms of Web 2.0 have become dissipated and disruptive. In their diverging characteristics, they cannot efficiently pursue a common objective of information. But online processes are still associated with the chronological changes of a medium always under development. The Internet has to learn to control its dynamics, making order from its chaotic interfaces. Thus, digital systems keep improving, producing new communicational instruments. Supported by the sociability of social networks, other uses appear. From now on, traditional and participatory journalism will regroup on uniform platforms. Generalist, both social and interactive, the link information will build a more organized circuit. This new specific form of media is going to combine, prioritize the variety of online media mechanisms. The Web then takes another way, it is passing on the fragments of its chaotic systems toward a whole, a housing scheme, which seems finally organized. This evolution maps different medias and describes a transition from a participatory information structure to a new order of link journalism. At the heart of several evolutionary stages, the chronological modeling of the Web brings out a development of a complex system. Around a corpus derived from the participatory and link journalism, the crossed perspective between complexity, organization and chaos of digital platforms will attempt to reach a global thinking of media, transforming their new digital connectivity into a compensatory and creative system.

An emerging body of media scholarship has examined the changing norms and routines of professional journalists, suggesting they are slowly adapting their practice to meet changes in audience expectations brought on by the widespread adoption of social media. Much of this scholarship has focused on traditional news producers, giving attention to journalists and other news producers who work in newsrooms. However slowly, journalists are beginning to welcome more audience participation in the process of news creation, hinting at a more reciprocal form of journalism and a loosening of traditional gatekeeping practices. In an effort to advance the theoretically conceptual research of the moment, this study considers how the perceived journalistic norms and participatory and gatekeeping roles of an emerging journalistic actor may be aligning with and/or deviating from more traditional journalists. The work of entrepreneurial journalists, or those who are not affiliated with or tied to a single news organization but instead freelance their work, is helping to fill major content gaps left by staff cutbacks that came on the heels of news media’s economic downturn. Most notably, specialized areas of journalism such as health reporting are increasingly calling upon entrepreneurial journalists to work aside more traditional journalists. Against the backdrop of health journalism, this study advances by employing semi-structured interviews with traditional journalists, entrepreneurial journalists, and their editors, analyzing recent changes in their journalistic norms and participatory and gatekeeping roles. The findings suggest an ideological split between organizational and entrepreneurial journalists and indicate that organizational journalists and editors alike may be relying on entrepreneurial journalists as innovators. For their part, entrepreneurial journalists may demonstrating an extension of participatory journalism—reciprocal journalism—that could enhance network connectivity and community building for journalists, news organizations, and other mass media practitioners. Though traditionally perceived as outsiders, these journalists may be serving as intrapreneurials, informing innovation in journalism and beyond. The impact of this and other observations on mass communication theory and practice are explored. / text

Den 14 maj 2020 tillbringade Paolo Roberto kvällen i en lägenhet på Östermalm i Stockholm med en kvinna från ett av Europas fattigaste länder och greps på bar gärning i en polisrazzia. Stjärnkocken, skådespelaren och programledaren erkände sig skyldig till sexköp. I en intervju dagen därpå säger Roberto själv att kvinnan kanske var dittvingad. Nyheten väckte starka reaktioner i kommentarsfält på sociala medier. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur användare uttrycker sig i kommentarsfält under en kontroversiell nyhet om ett laddat ämne som skapar delade åsikter. Vi kommer därför att analysera hur användare i kommentarsfältet på Facebook reagerade på intervjun med Paolo Roberto i TV4. Det uppsatsen intresserar sig för är hur deltagarjournalistiken bidrar till den offentliga diskursen om det känsliga ämnet sexköp, samt andra diskurser som uppkommer. Studien har två frågeställningar; en som undersöker vilka reaktioner finns i kommentarsfältet och en som undersöker hur reaktionerna kan förstås i ljuset av diskurserna om sexköp och medieetik. Uppsatsens teoretiska ramverk baseras på deltagarjournalistik och diskursteori. Studien är en kvalitativ textanalys, och genomför den textanalytiska dimensionen av Anabela Carvalhos (2008) apparat för kritisk diskursanalys. Ur det empiriska materialet har mönster identifierats varav tolv stycken har analyserats djupare. Exempel på dessa är att många beskriver Robertos beteende som att ”gråta ut” och att styra narrativet. En stor del av kommentarerna lägger även skuld på TV4 för att de ”låter” honom göra detta. Vissa ifrågasätter TV4:s medieetik och publicistiska beslut medan några ifrågasätter sexköpslagen och den allmänna synen på sexköp vilket snabbt konfronteras av andra. Uppsatsen drar slutsatser som att diskursen om sexköp domineras av perspektivet att det är moraliskt fel att köpa någon annans kropp, att det inte är medieetiskt att intervjua en förövare på sättet TV4 gjorde och att det finns en efterfrågan på ställningstagande och/eller agendadriven journalistik. Till sist dras slutsatsen att uppsatsens författare sällar sig till den stora skara forskare som ser en demokratisk potential i deltagarjournalistik men känner besvikelse över att den i mångt och mycket går förlorad. / May the 14th of 2020 the Swedish celebrity Paolo Roberto spent the evening in an apartment in a fancy neighborhood in Stockholm with a woman from one of the poorest countries in Europe, and was caught in the act of purchasing sexual services from her. The star chef, actor and TV host confessed to the police later that night. In an interview the following day, Roberto himself says that he suspects the woman was not there willingly. The news of his crime generated strong reactions in comment sections on social media. The purpose of the study is to examine how users express themselves in comment sections under a controversial news article about an emotionally charged subject. We will therefore analyze how users in a particular comment section on Facebook reacted to the interview with Paolo Roberto in TV4. The thesis is interested in how participatory journalism contributes to the public discourse about the emotionally charged subject of sex purchases, as well as other discourses that we may encounter. The study aims to answer two research questions; one that examines what reactions the comment section contains and one that examines how these reactions can be understood in the light of discourses of prostitution and media ethics. The theorical framework of the essay is based on participatory journalism and discourse theory. The thesis is a qualitative text analysis and utilizes the textual analytical dimension of Anabela Carvalho’s apparatus for critical discourse analysis (2008). From the empirical material patterns have been identified and 12 of these were selected for deeper analysis. Some examples of these are that many describe Roberto’s behavior as “sobbing” and controlling the narrative. A large part of the comment section blames TV4 for “letting” him do this. Some challenge the ethics and editorial decision of TV4 while others disagree with the Swedish model for prostitution and the mainstream view on purchasing sex, which will quickly be confronted by others. The conclusions of the thesis are that the prostitution discourse is dominated by the perspective that it is morally wrong to purchase someone else’s body, that it is not ethical to interview a perpetrator the way TV4 did and that there is demand for agenda-driven journalism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that the authors of the essay are part of the large majority of scientists who see a democratic potential in participatory journalism but are disappointed by the fact that it is not harnessed.

The digitization of media has undermined much of the social authority and economic viability on which U.S. journalism relied during the 20th century. This disruption has also opened a central tension for the profession: how to reconcile the need for occupational control against growing opportunities for citizen participation. How that tension is navigated will affect the ultimate shape of the profession and its place in society. This dissertation examines how the leading nonprofit actor in journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has sought to help journalism innovate out of its professional crisis. This case study engages a series of mixed methods—including interviews, textual analysis, and secondary data analysis—to generate a holistic portrayal of how the Knight Foundation has attempted to transform itself and the journalism field in recent years, particularly through its signature Knight News Challenge innovation contest. From a sociology of professions perspective, I found that the Knight Foundation altered the rhetorical and actual boundaries of journalism jurisdiction. Knight moved away from “journalism” and toward “information” as a way of seeking the wisdom of the crowd to solve journalism’s problems. This opening up of journalism’s boundaries created crucial space in which innovators, from inside and outside journalism, could step in and bring change to the field. In particular, these changes have allowed the concept of citizen participation, which resides at the periphery of mainstream newswork, to become embraced as an ethical norm and a founding doctrine of journalism innovation. The result of these efforts has been the emergence of a new rendering of journalism—one that straddles the professional-participatory tension by attempting to “ferry the values” of professional ideals even while embracing new practices more suited to a digital environment. Ultimately, this case study matters for what it suggests about professions in turbulent times. Influential institutions can bring change to their professional fields by acting as boundary-spanning agents—stepping outside the traditional confines of their field, altering the rhetorical and structural borders of professional jurisdiction to invite external contribution and correction, and altogether creating the space and providing the capital for innovation to flourish. / text

This report seeks to reflect on the challenges of building a transmedia narrative from participatory journalism proposal on television. It presents some notes about this new reality that is giving new meaning to the look of the viewer on the TV news. The reflection is based on bibliographic and documentary research on the subject, in addition to drawing up a proposal for structuring represented by flowchart that guided the production of audiovisual content for TV and web, discussing the issue of formatting a program along the lines flagged. / Este relatório busca refletir sobre os desafios de construir uma narrativa transmídia a partir de uma proposta de jornalismo participativo em televisão. Para tanto, apresenta alguns apontamentos acerca dessa nova realidade que vem ressignificando o olhar do telespectador sobre as notícias de TV. A reflexão se baseia em pesquisa bibliogr i documental sobre o tema, além de elaboração de uma proposta de estruturação representada por meio de fluxograma que orientou a produção de conteúdos audiovisuais para TV e web, discutindo-se a questão da formatação de um programa nos moldes sinalizados. / Mestre em Tecnologias, Comunicação e Educação