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One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles in social media practice is that the profession’s conceptual boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Social media has developed as a space used by audiences to consume, share, and discuss news and information, offering novel locations for journalists to intervene at professional and personal levels and in private and public spheres. This article takes the “journalistic ego” domain as its starting point to examine how journalists perform three specific roles on social media: the promoter, the celebrity, and the joker. To investigate these roles in journalistic performance, the article situates their emergence and operationalization in a broader epistemological context, examining how journalists engage with, contest, and/or diverge from different professional norms and practices, as well as the conflict between traditional and social media-specific roles of journalists.

This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada. Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.

This study investigates how Google is shaping journalism innovation, particularly in business models, through an analysis of one of its global funding competitions, the Innovation Challenge. It adds to an understanding of the impact of platforms on journalism through a descriptive analysis of 354 projects funded between 2018 and 2022 in 78 countries and five regions. Grant recipients were largely for-profit journalism organizations, with a significant US focus. Projects related to audience engagement, business models and distribution dominated the published winning innovation proposals, accounting for 72.6% of funded projects. The three areas were closely connected as they were mostly related to plans to increase reader revenue. Findings suggest that the Innovation Challenge validates reader revenue as the key innovation in business models through a funding competition aligned with Google’s global industry and government relations interests. The orientation is problematic as it narrows journalism innovation to a financial issue, with audiences as the answer, even though people are largely unwilling to pay for news and journalism is considered a public good rather than simply a commercial product.

Esta exploración del impacto de la inteligencia artificial (IA) en el periodismo establece paralelismos con los autómatas del siglo XVIII, rastreando una fascinación histórica por la vida artificial hasta las tecnologías de IA generativa actuales. Se discute cómo la IA está transformando las prácticas periodísticas, desafiando las nociones tradicionales de la profesión. En lugar de adoptar una posición binaria que enfrenta a humanos contra máquinas, se propone un marco de «tareas pendientes» para entender el papel de la IA en el periodismo. Este enfoque destaca cómo la IA puede servir mejor a las necesidades de las comunidades y las organizaciones mediáticas, alejándose de un enfoque centrado en qué tareas periodísticas pueden o no ser reemplazadas por la IA. Se sugiere un futuro híbrido en el que humanos e IA colaboren en el periodismo, con roles y responsabilidades que evolucionan según el trabajo a realizar para la industria, la profesión y el público

Authority and influence are negotiated through the interactions taking place in the sociotechnical architectures of social media. Established elites transfer their institutional power to social media. But they operate alongside emergent, networked-sourced nodes of influence as ad hoc publics elevate certain actors on specific issues at specific times, within specific contexts and domains. A greater understanding of what forms of power play out on social media is essential to illuminating processes of networked gatekeeping, networked framing, and networked sourcing.

Developing successful innovations in journalism, whether to improve the quality and reach of news or to strengthen business models, remains an elusive problem. The challenge is an existential concern for many news enterprises, particularly for smaller news outlets with limited resources. By and large, media innovation has been driven by never-ending pivots in the search for a killer solution, rather than by long-term strategic thinking. This article argues for a fresh approach to innovation built around the “jobs to be done” (JTBD) hypothesis developed by the late Clayton Christensen and typically used in business studies of innovation. However, attempts to bring the JTBD framework into the news industry have never taken hold, while scholars, too, have largely overlooked the framework in their study of journalism innovation. We argue that the JTBD approach can foster local journalism that is more responsive and relevant to the needs of local communities. It reorients journalism by focusing on identifying and addressing the underserved needs of communities, as understood by the communities themselves. It suggests that a bottom-up approach to appreciating the “jobs” that community members want done offers a model that supports both the editorial and business imperatives of local news organizations.

Esta exploración del impacto de la inteligencia artificial (IA) en el periodismo establece paralelismos con los autómatas del siglo XVIII, rastreando una fascinación histórica por la vida artificial hasta las tecnologías de IA generativa actuales. Se discute cómo la IA está transformando las prácticas periodísticas, desafiando las nociones tradicionales de la profesión. En lugar de adoptar una posición binaria que enfrenta a humanos contra máquinas, se propone un marco de <> para entender el papel de la IA en el periodismo. Este enfoque destaca cómo la IA puede servir mejor a las necesidades de las comunidades y las organizaciones mediáticas, alejándose de un enfoque centrado en qué tareas periodísticas pueden o no ser reemplazadas por la IA. Se sugiere un futuro híbrido en el que humanos e IA colaboren en el periodismo, con roles y responsabilidades que evolucionan según el trabajo a realizar para la industria, la profesión y el público.

   

This study investigates how Google is shaping journalism innovation, particularly in business models, through an analysis of one of its global funding competitions, the Innovation Challenge. It adds to an understanding of the impact of platforms on journalism through a descriptive analysis of 354 projects funded between 2018 and 2022 in 78 countries and five regions. Grant recipients were largely for-profit journalism organizations, with a significant US focus. Projects related to audience engagement, business models and distribution dominated the published winning innovation proposals, accounting for 72.6% of funded projects. The three areas were closely connected as they were mostly related to plans to increase reader revenue. Findings suggest that the Innovation Challenge validates reader revenue as the key innovation in business models through a funding competition aligned with Google's global industry and government relations interests. The orientation is problematic as it narrows journalism innovation to a financial issue, with audiences as the answer, even though people are largely unwilling to pay for news and journalism is considered a public good rather than simply a commercial product.