GROUP 4, A REVIEW OF THE HANDBOOK OF GLOBAL ONLINE JOURNALISM

DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY ZARIA

COURSE CODE: MCOM414

COURSE TITLE: ONLINE JOURNALISM

ASSIGNMENT

GROUP 4

QUESTION

Topic: Give a detailed review of Eugenia Siapera & Andrea Veglis edited “The Handbook of Global Online Journalism.”

AUGUST, 2017

GROUP FOUR (4) MEMBERS

S/N	NAME	REGISTRATION NUMBER
1.	PETER RONALD	U14MM2030
2.	ABDULLAHI HABIB	U13MM1162
3.	YUSUF GALI MUHAMMAD	U13MM1083
4.	SULEIMAN NAZIRU M.	U14MM2063
5.	ADEGWU OBUO JOHN	U14MM2066
6.	ABDULHAKIM MUSTAPHA	U14MM2042
7.	IDRIS FAISAL ABDULLAHI	U13MM1027
8.	ABUBAKAR ALIYU ALIYU	U14MM2013
9.	MUHAMMAD HAYATUDDEEN	U13MM1123
10.	YAKUBU ELKANAH	U13MM1130
11.	MUSA MUHAMMED BASHER	U13MM1073
12.	DANIEL FALMATA DAWHA	U13MM1101
13.	ADAMU ABBA MUSA	U13MM1055
14.	OLADEBO TAOFEEK DAYO	U13MM1169
15.	SAIFULLAHI LAWAL	U13MM1205
16.	MAISHANU AISHA MADINA	U12MM1153
17.	SHAMAKI AISHA ABUBAKAR	U12MM1109
18.	AJIBOYE OLUWAFEMI ADEOLA	U13MM1127
19.	MAIYAKI MUSA RABIU	U14MM2022
20.	MAMZA IJU-MDUYA SIMON	U13MM1008
21.	DANLADI EMMANUEL	U13MM1018
22.	DAHIRU ALIYU MUHAMMAD	U12MM1121
23.	SHEHU AUWAL S.	U13MM1039

MINUTES OF GROUP 4 (MCOM 414)

Minute of the 1st meeting (4/ 07/ 2017 )

The agenda of the meeting was how we would go about the appointment of group leader and the process we need to put into consideration on assigning responsibilities to members of the group. After much deliberation we all agreed that Abba Adamu Musa should be our group leader. However, we also agreed to assign responsibilities randomly. Also, we suggested reading on how to review prior to the next meeting. The meeting was later slated to hold the following day.

Minute of the 2nd meeting (05/07/2017)

Following the agreement on simple random sampling to assign responsibility, 26 chapters were randomly picked by different people in the group, those who were not around, it was chosen for them by proxy. Although the chapters of the book are more than the number of the group but some members voluntarily added to what they have chosen. Below are the breakings down of the chapters done by different members in the group:

Chapter 1 IDRIS FAISAL ABDULLAHI

Chapter 2 DAHIRU ALIYU MUHAMMED

Chapter 3 ABDULLAHI HABIB

Chapter 4 SAIFULLAH LAWAL

Chapter 5 PETER RONALD

Chapter 6 SULAIMAN NAZIRU M

Chapter 7 DANLADI EMMANUEL

Chapter 8 YAKUBU GOLD ELKANAH

Chapter 9 OLADEBO TAOFEEK DAYO

Chapter 10 DANIEL FALMATA DAWHA

Chapter 11 SHEU AUWAL. S

Chapter 12 ABUBAKAR ALIYU ALIYU

Chapter 13 MUSA MOHAMMED BASHIR

Chapter 14 SHAMAKI AISHA ABUBAKAR

Chapter 15 MAISHANU AISHA MADINA

Chapter 16 HAYATUDDEEN MUHAMMAD

Chapter 17 ADEGWU OBUO JOHN

Chapter 18 MAMZA IJU-MDAYA SIMON

Chapter 19 AJIBOYE OLUWAFEMI ADEOLA

Chapter 20 ABDULKAKEEM MUSTAPHA

Chapter 21 YUSUF GALI MUHAMMAD

Chapter 22 MAIYAKI MUSA RABIU

Chapter 23 HAYATUDDEEN MUHAMMED

Chapter 24 OLADEBO TAOFEEK DAYO

Chapter 25 ABBA ADAMU MUSA

Chapter 26 ABBA ADAMU MUSA

After everyone has been given a responsibility, we proceeded to discuss how we should go about the review. The members of the group made tremendous effort to explain how review should be done extensively. We later decided on the day of submission of our contribution. The meeting was adjourned till another day.

Minute of the 3th meeting (12/7/2017)

Although it was a brief meeting, people came with their contributions and submitted it to the group leader which is Abba Adamu Musa, he suggested we should pick a date to deliberate on final compilation of the assignment.

Minute of forth 4^th (15/7/2017)

The agenda of the 4^th meeting was tabled by Hayatuddeen Muhammad and Abba Adamu Musa after they had gone through the contribution people submitted to the group leader. Hayatuddeen said he discovered that some pages of the work were too voluminous that if there is a way each and every one can compress it to make it succinct. Some members of the group argued against that in the process of compressing we might lose some salient information; therefore we should leave it the way it is, as far as we didn’t go out of content. While some were in favor, after series of deliberation we resulted to voting and we all agreed to take the important points of the book into consideration not number of pages.

The group later set up a committee to work on the final editing of the work.

The work was compiled by group members who volunteered to do the so.

The financial contribution to be made by individual group members was arrived at by dividing the total cost of the entire work by the number of group members. This is to ensure prudence and avoid excess cash which often result to problems.

INTRODUCTION

The Handbook of Global Online Journalism is a compendium of contributions from erudite scholars of journalism from different continents of the world. The handbook itself was compiled and edited by two eminent Greek scholars namely Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis. They are both lecturers at the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

The topics discussed center on online journalism. The handbook looks into how online journalism evolved in the field of mass communication looking at the uniqueness of this evolution in different parts of the world. It consists of contributions that talked about the challenges the existing traditional media has been exposed to as a result of the emergence of online journalism. It looked at specific contexts and made references to various countries’ situations.

It also has contributions discussing on the nature of the online journalism and how free or restricted it is in terms of media control.

The handbook is rich in content and is useful to any professional or amateur who sees a carrier in online journalism. It is insightful and educative. Although the online mediasphere is broad and is difficult to be exhausted, this compendium has to a good extent touched on global issues concerning online journalism.

This review is done as a partial fulfillment for the course, coded Mcom414 and titled online journalism. The group members employing various methods have made an attempt to look at the perspectives of the contributors. Therefore, the group has come up with this work. It cannot be described as a perfect work though, because works like this may not go without challenges and limitations.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLUTION OF ONLINE JOURNALISM

Eugenia Siapera

Andreas Veglis

INTRODUCTION

Eugenia and Andreas provide that, the beginning of online journalism was the launching of an immobile website by university of Florida journalism department. Historical development and adoption of online journalism started as a gradual and slow process. The pervasive nature of online activities has now changed the history of journalism and has rapidly led to decrease of conventional media. The proliferation of online tools such as Facebook, Twitter; Blog among others had forced almost all the conventional media to register their presence online by opening an account with the aforementioned online collaborative tools. Eugenia and Andreas stated that “the relationship between the new media and journalism, which began its fits and starts, has become a close embrace to the extent that it’s difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism”. This is to say because of the prominence and importance of online journalism or online activities, traditional media boycott the obsolete ways of gathering, processing and dissemination of information.

On Dinosaurs, Extinction and Mutations

To understand the evolution of online journalism Eugenia and Andreas made a comparison between dinosaurs and traditional journalism. Dinosaurs are a diverse species which according to Eugenia and Andreas come to a mysterious end about 65 million years ago. And traditional journalism dominated for over 300 years. They further argued that, traditional journalism just like dinosaur is faced with a serious threat of extinction. The rise of internet activities has become a sudden threat to conventional journalism, which suggests that, if the traditional journalism did not adapt to a new changing environment, it will die as dinosaurs. “Looking at the theory of evolution, alongside the history of online journalism, we can argue that some species may become extinct, while others may adapt to their environment”. It’s now evident that newspaper and other print media cannot continue the same way before the launch of first web browser in 1993. The online journalism is more of interactive, two-way communication, multimediality and hepertextuality. Online journalism is following different paths globally. One of the greatest advantage of online journalism is immediacy, news is spread across the globe as it happens without any barrier, it breaks the constraints of time and space, there is no more international boundary, news reach everywhere, and people can immediately make their positions known by commenting below the story. To Eugenia and Andreas, the new media have altered journalism profession, journalists are more autonomous (Citizen Journalists), as they give the general public breaking news, because of the power of social media, and unknowingly they work as freelancers.

Reviewing online journalism research

Research on online journalism had dominated the field of journalism; researchers were trying to find out more about online journalism. According to Eugenia and Andreas “A search using online journalism as keywords in Google scholar returns over 30,000 results, while Google books returns about 2,500 results of books with online journalism in their title”. Accordingly, hypertext, interactivity and multimediality are considered as the three main features of new media. They highlighted how Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein wrote two informative articles, reviewing research on the production and consumption of online journalism.

Technologically Oriented Research

Research into new media tries to unearth the roles technology plays in both technological advancements and cultural shifts, how the world is now closely knit as a result of robust development in technology. According to Eugenia and Andreas most researchers now pay attention to technology-driven research, which led to the criticisms of the famous technological determinism (Domingo 2006), many of the researches focus on the features on new media and dwell more on their impacts on traditional journalism. The researches try to examine and establish the link between hypertextuality, interactivity and multimediality, how they are employed by journalism, and subsequently change the entire face of the profession. They provided proper comprehensive explanations of the aforementioned features to aid people’s understanding.

Research on production of online journalism

Eugenia and Andreas hinted that, journalism is still lagging behind new technologies; as such new developments cannot be derived from technology alone. According to them research on production of online journalism is to examine the condition of online journalism, which they believed could establish the gap between new technologies and online journalism, competitiveness of journalistic market has contributed largely to the expansion of online journalism, occupational and professional identity has been affected, the issue of gatekeeping is no longer attainable with online journalism. Online journalism now lead to co-creation of contents, users have access to the contents. They criticize the idea of user generated contents, according to them it’s a serious threat to journalism as a profession. But, accordingly many journalists accept that their work has now changed to a more collaborative one, as a result of users’ participation.

Online news consumption research

What links the world together is the consumption of news, people know what happens or may likely happen through news media, nevertheless, there is a paradigm shift, from consumption of traditional media contents to the consumption of new media contents. Accordingly, online media consumption pattern differs from that of traditional media. Many people believed that, generally newspaper and other print media outlets readership is in decline. Researches conducted in this aspect are aimed at finding the exact effect online journalism is having on conventional media through news consumption. Online news sites are the major sources of news; they are more accessible and user-friendly. According to Eugenia and Andreas online news consumption is mediated by intervening variables such as education, age and socio-economic status.

Research and Theory

Empirical studies have been undertaken in the area of online journalism, the field is sub-divided into three basic strands;

Sociology of journalism: This involves looking at the ways journalism is created as a product of historical, social and cultural circumstances.

Grounded theory: Eugenia and Andreas “describe the ways in which the polysemy of social media has made journalism so pervasive that it can only be understood as a medium, surrounding us all, all the time.

Theories of Technologies

This group of theories revolves around technological breakthrough and the relationship between technology, journalism and society. Online journalism largely depends on technology. The best known approach is diffusion of innovation theory.

Conclusion

Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis talked more on the positive impacts of online journalism and neglect the negative impacts. There is no doubt that this chapter is elaborative, comprehensive and unambiguous in explaining, the evolution and providing research-driven information about online journalism. Although online journalism has significantly changed information collation, processing and dissemination in a positive ways, and also breaks the monopoly of information through the concept of open source journalism. As we can see online journalism is heavily technology based, and requires special expertise from journalists. Online journalism brought into the limelight the issue of digital piracy and copyright issues. Also crowd of consumers who are empowered by new technologies have decided that traditional media are no longer relevant in today’s society. Another damming criticism is that, online journalism is not restrictive, anybody can use it. “Its all about the message not the medium” says Rose Nyondo. With online journalism, accountability, ethics and standards are at risk. Revenue base for media Houses has been at a one-time low.

CHAPTER TWO

MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Infotendentias Group

This chapter gives a detailed explanation on the concept of media convergence. It traces the root, gives a body of definitions, enumerates the forms of convergence and also shows the point of departure in the various definitions offered by scholars.

It began by looking at what Juan Luis Cebrian says about the survival of newspaper. He says it requires doing some rights to make it last. Luis the CEO of Prisa, a leading Spanish media group says that he is however not certain if they would exist in the form they were existing at the period of time he made the statement (January, 20^th 2009).

Internal reorganization according this work is a measure taken to reorganize the structure of the traditional media so as to cope with the challenges brought by ‘a media market with news rules’. The scholars noted that the media is going through a thorough change as the processes that characterized the journalist’s profession in the twentieth century has been superseded by new habits and demands among the newspaper reading public of the twenty-first century.

In this regard, the strategies employed by the media were a way of adapting to one of the major changes in journalism which is ‘convergence’. The work further states that “plagued both by external circumstances – the adverse financial situation around the world – and by structural difficulties – people turning away from the traditional media – media companies are seeking ways of maintaining their leadership in the news business. In this context, editors are talking of convergence and, more specifically, of integrating their editorial teams, as a solution that will enable them to extend their former hegemony in traditional media toward the Internet.

However, many journalists see these measures as risky, even though the aim was ‘supposedly intended to improve the quality and diversity of newspaper contents.’ Some critical minds see convergence as is a business manipulation to ‘prop up the dominant medium, motivated by by increasing journalists’ productivity while minimizing cost. In USA, financial crisis has made many journalists in the United States redundant costing up to 13,500 jobs between 2007 and 2010. By convergence at the early times of the process, it was an integration of the editorial teams.

The fast growth of the internet in the 1990s brought about coordination between workers of different media bringing changes and editorial activities.

“This trend to reinforce common identity across multiple platforms evolved into an innovative strategy: the merger of editorial teams. If a news business was already trying to coordinate its publications during the distribution phase, many editors came to think that it would be a logical corollary to extend coordination to the production process.”

The researchers pointed out that, “in the twenty-first century, it was essential to develop a production model that would meet the demand for news both in the traditional media and in the dynamic digital media.” Therefore, the “news corporations across the world gradually came to embark on “convergence processes,” which gathered momentum so that by the early years of the new millennium what was a trickle had turned into a roaring torrent. Earlier mergers between the traditional and digital or online team happened in the United States in 2000. That happened when the editorial teams of US group Media General were merged. It was a three-way convergence bringing together newspaper, internet and television.

In journalism, convergence have been seen (i) as a product, (ii) as a system, and (iii) as a process. Five factors were said to beset anyone who trying to formulate definition for convergence. They include, polysemy, polymorphism, complexity, instability and proximity.

Four types of convergence were identified to include, technological: multiple platforms, business convergence: concentration, professional convergence: polyvalence, convergence of contents: multimedia

“convergence in journalism is a multidimensional process that, facilitated by the widespread implementation of digital communication technologies, affects the technological, business, professional, and editorial aspects of the media, fostering the integration of 30 Infotendencias Group tools, spaces, working methods, and languages that were previously separate, in such a way that journalists can write contents to be distributed via multiple platforms, using the language that is appropriate in each medium.”

CHAPTER THREE

CHALLENGING VALUES: THE “GOOD” JOURNALIST ONLINE

John O’Sullivan

In this chapter, the author, John O’Sullivan try to showcase challenges of values of the good online journalists in relation to argument raise by John Mulholland the editor of the British newspaper ‘The Observer’. O’Sullivan says “there was no assertion here of the high ideal of campaigning human rights journalism: rather, the production was offered as a demonstration of the value of interactive media in helping audiences understand complex events.”

Journalism as defined by the author is an amative assertion, explicitly, implied of what makes or would make good online journalist by academic, profession and media industries which is not based on objective. That is, journalism as a profession is not set based on objective evaluation rather it is defined based on what people want. Journalism is said to operate based on the criteria of human interest.

McQuail (1994) cited in O’Sullivan says that one of the role of online journalism is to serve human interest and this role has been reflected by various factors such as media ownership, commercialization, self-interest, cultural problem and cultural dependency. These factors call for concern not only for poor countries but also for Canada and smaller European countries where online journalism depends on these factors rather operate based on the principles of the profession. Thus, the principles give them media freedom, media equality (relating access), diversity of information (relating to objectivity), social order, soldiery and cultural order.

However it can be argued that, these principles have improved the work of online journalism where by power of information has shifted from the hands of the media elites such as journalists, editors, media owners to the hands of the audience and provide the free flow of information on the internet.

Therefore Herman et, al (2002) cited in O’Sullivan, posits that it can be argued that these principles have changed little, even at this remove, and even as later editions of the classic text have seemingly dispensed with the candid admission of being on slippery ground.

Despite the argument on the principles of journalism, the author further looks at the online news expectation and practice where he focuses attention on realization, or lack of it, objectivity, transparency, and changes in journalism that has been expected to occur in response to the emergence of online news. The claims for improvement or reform of journalism via the Internet and by this point, Interactivity is one of the responses which gives power to the reader, user, and citizens for participatory journalism and remedy the deficits of aloof traditional journalism and bring news closer to the lived realities of its audiences. Journalism has made news more engaging and more meaningful to audiences.

The job of real journalist is not a child’s play. It is more than the issue of just covering event and reporting it. It involves the proper security of materials, analysis, gate keeping and presentation of information to the public in an understandable manner filter, then published.

O’Sullivan cited that it is risky, if tempting, to frame ideas and observations of online journalism in terms of a dumb professional resistance to the new openness of the Internet. Such an approach tends toward assuming that the application of network technologies in itself can address clear deficiencies in news as a public good, capable of contributing to rational debate in the public sphere. Nevertheless, such has been the nature of a considerable segment of the research and commentary on online news, as if there is a contest in embracing of technologies that is separate to competition for readers and advertisers.

Lack of gatekeepers in online journalism causes several implications. First, the risk of overloading the system with unwanted, unrequested, trivial, irrelevant, worthless or inconsequential messages has increased tremendously. Gatekeepers also function as evaluators of information. Newspaper editors and television news directors consider the authenticity and credibility of potential news sources. If the system works properly, bogus news tips, unsubstantiated rumors, and false information are filtered out before they are published or broadcasted. Information obtained on the internet, however, comes without a guarantee. Some of it might be accurate, some of it you must use at your own risk.

However, everything that has disadvantage has advantage. Internet has enabled journalist to make deliberate and conscious efforts to gather information, collating and analyzing data for the purpose of informing, educating and entertaining the people with a view of making an appropriate decision and power shifting to hand of technical staff.

Recommendation

Ø Professional journalism should be independent and objective.

Ø Journalists should conduct research on the information source to verify and check the authenticity, trustworthy and reliability of the information source in order to ensure credibility of sources.

Ø Also institutions, media organizations, press bodies and government should provide facilities for training and retraining of journalists on the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in order to ensure professionalism and offer of quality services to modern and sophisticated media consumers.

CHAPTER FOUR

EXPERIENCING JOURNALISM: A NEW MODEL FOR ONLINE NEWSPAPERS

Sue Robinson

This theoretical essay puts forth a new model for news production, dissemination and consumption online. The essay is also able to highlight the incomparable power of web technology in news sourcing and news consumption and how it provides golden opportunities for news sources and audiences to participate and interact in news production.

Robinson (2012) says that scholars have begun calling reporters “gatewatchers” (Bruns, 2005 ) and information “monitors” Deuze (2003) insisting that they share authority willingly and embrace “citizen media”.

If the foundation of a building is not done well, the super structure is bound to collapse. Therefore, Sue Robinson was able to build his work upon the works of shoe maker and Reese (1949), Shannon and Weaver’s linear model of message transmission (sender – message - receiver) which is based on power structures to ideology. Others have explored the news as a reality representation that is constructed by journalists, sources and audiences in a way that perpetuates societal value (Carvey, 1989), (1992), Gons, 1978, Molotch and Lester, (1974/1997).

Tuchman, (1978), Westerstahl and Johanasson, (1994) etc., say it is interesting to note that over the years, scholars have documented cultural, economic, political, social and technological events that have forced modification in journalism practices and objectives. Scholars like Herbert (2000), Douglas (1987), Levy, (1989); Pavlik, (1996).

The model, however explains the characteristics of online;

i. Multi-media

ii. Interactivity

iii. Conveyance etc.

Multi-media indicates the integration of a variety of information methods from verbal cues to text – to – animation, multimedia comprises separate technology or technologies into one channel, such as both text and video or photography paired with audio. Interactivity according to this model therefore, Deuze surmised, concentrates on public connectivity as human as it does editorial content. It is termed “monitorial” and refers to when “a website can operate as a platform upon which citizens may voice their opinion and question regarding the issues about which they care.

This new model suggests profound changes for journalists’ roles and their ultimate control over news. Deuze (2003) suggested that information often takes on all or only some of these functional components at any given time, for any given individual at their core.

Deuze’s model of online journalism explains how traditional journalism orient an instrumental function. He also posits journalists’ roles and their ultimate control over the news. After Deuze’s article in 2003, Sue Robinson updated Deuze’s work. The revision acknowledged that traditional functions of the press as information vehicle – remain intact, that they continue to be a “closed journalistic culture” even as an open sources process becomes available.

Robinson’s model incorporates both contents and connective functions of journalism with a new content nation on public experience under content, connectivity there exists a dialogue between journalism and audience (Deuze, 2003).

Discussing Online journalism convergence, Robinson was thorough about newspapers convergence with the help of “new model”, how channel convergence (i.e television and newspapers) were before it morphed into story integration (i.e a reporter telling a story in multiple formats) convergence can be thought of either as a linear continuum or non-linear process happening at any stage of production from concept gathering to dissemination. By “convergence” Robinson means the flow of content across various media platform, the cooperation between multiple media industries and migratory behaviour of media audience who will go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want.

Participatory (an interactive experience) readers interact with the news sources and the information being given. Copy editors pair the newspaper story with messages to readers is little side boxes, urging them to visit the web where they can listen, watch, talk and view.

Lastly, Sue Robinson’s new model for online journalism is rich in content and contained clear message about world of online journalism. Furthermore, we would like to recommend this work for both professional and citizen online journalist.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FIELD OF ONLINE JOURNALISM: A BOURDIEUSIAN ANALYSIS

Eugenia Siapera

Lia-Paschalia Spyridou

INTRODUCTION

For most of the nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth century, journalism was steadily increasing its power and establishing itself as one of the main institutions of contemporary democracies. Yet the dawn of the twenty-first century sees journalism depleted of power, and journalists find themselves expendable in the wheels of the entertainment media industry. One of the most interesting approaches has been influenced by the sociology of professions, considering online journalism either as a new profession, or as changing the profession of journalism. For instance, in her influential article, Singer (2003) sought, on the one hand to outline journalistic claims to professionalism and, on the other hand, to find the extent to which online journalism can lay claim to professionalism. Thus, this work will begin with a discussion of the sociology of professions and its applicability to online journalism.

Is (Online) Journalism a Profession?

While there is a degree of agreement that a profession refers to an occupational body with some special skill (Abbott, 1988: 7), the details are still disputed. In this view, different groups compete for control over their realm of expertise and the professions emerge as the outcome of these struggles. Furthermore, in my own opinion to this question I will like to add by saying that online journalism indeed is a profession for one to practice. Looking at our society and the fast growth in terms of development in technology put in place, any one that did not adapt to the changes in the advancement in technology will completely be left out. For example Online journalism brings the news and information to us at our finger tips even when we don’t want to read or see them in fact even our email is not exempted.

Journalism’s Path to Professionalization

Historically, journalism was developed as part and parcel of modernity (Anderson, 1983) but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it assumed its current characteristics and outlook.

Jean Chalaby (1998), journalism emerged as a discursive field with its own principles, traditions, values, and so on, in concrete historical circumstances.

Thus, while the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) stands for journalists and their rights, the Chartered Institute is a broader organization representing also senior media managers and owners. In addition, we can also look at it from this angle, some say the online operation started with the military force in terms of making use of the Google map to trace a country or where terrors’ gather or for carrying out any operation without the concept of the people with the help of their satellite monitoring.

Field Theory and Journalism: Conceptual Tools

The review will be limited to the idea and that is of importance to retain the dynamics inside journalism as a profession and a field for practice. All studies have their fields. This field has its own resources, logic, and rules by which it abides. Specifically, a field is better understood as “a structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or ‘capital’’’ (Thompson, 1991: 14).

Society as a whole is dominated by the meta-field of power, which, in the present concrete historical circumstances, is dominated by capitalism and the class and economic relations it engenders. These struggles, which resemble the struggles over jurisdiction among professions discussed by Abbott (1988), introduce new elements in the field, enrich (or diminish) the field’s capital, and force it to reposition itself vis-a-vis other subfields, fields, and the field of power.

The Field of Online Journalism: An Empirical Sketch

The starting point of this empirically informed discussion is that fields are primarily defined by the amount and kinds of capital they possess. The first issue here is to estimate the amount of economic capital circulating in online journalism. Duvall (2005), in his analysis of economic journalism in France has used a series of indicators to measure this kind of capital, including the form of ownership, financial links to other media, size of audience, and percentage of revenues from advertising. When it comes to online journalism and its practitioners, it is difficult to gauge this level of detail. But given the links between this kind of journalism and technology, we may consider technical skills, use, and know how as part of this embodied cultural capital.

Social capital

If cultural capital refers to what people know, social capital refers to whom people know, to the kinds of social networks they are part of. Bourdieu has defined social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition or in other words, to membership in a group”. According to Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) suggested that social capital be operationalized as the sum of those resources that have emerged out of membership in particular networks. For journalists, such resources may be derived from membership in formal and informal networks, the former may include membership in professional and trade organizations, as well as membership of official press corps.

Symbolic capital

In conceptual terms, symbolic capital is not a separate form of capital, but rather a misapprehended or misrecognized form of economic, cultural, or social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). It is the kind of capital that is governed by the logics of knowledge and recognition. In his definition, Calhoun (2002) describes symbolic capital as the resources made available as a result of prestige or recognition.

Operationalization of symbolic capital is difficult as they mobilize knowledge that is often tacit. However, we can think of symbolic capital in online journalism in at least two ways: firstly, as the accumulation of prizes, honors, and awards that are clearly conferring recognition and prestige. Secondly, journalism contains certain ideals and ethics, which include the values of objectivity, impartiality, fairness, balance, a distinction between opinions and facts, which are enshrined in codes of ethics that journalists are expected to follow.

Conclusions

Thus, to understand online journalism we turned to Bourdieu’s field theory, and the conceptualization of journalism as a subfield of the field of cultural production. Online journalism could then be theorized as a subfield within the subfield of journalism. The discussion of the field on online journalism considered in a preliminary fashion its four forms of capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic.

However, as online journalism evolves, it generates and accumulates its own capital, slowly but surely establishing its own rules and logic. To the extent that online journalism operates also within the field of technology, this logic will be at least in part dictated by this field. Thus new values, combining or reinventing traditional journalistic values emerge. A future project may study in more detail the logic of the subfield, but we can venture here that such values may include immediacy, networking, and multimedia or multiplatform delivery.

CHAPTER SIX

ONLINE JOURNALISM AND CIVIC LIFE

Joao Carlos Correia

INTRODUCTION

Technological changes inside the media led to the emergence of “online journalism” that endowed civic potentialities, strengthen more dynamic forms of civic participation and promotion of deliberated Democracy (see Fenton, 2010:4). The chapter also emphasizes further on the nature of online journalism that warrant the existence of public sphere that satisfies the requirements of a strong democracy; public use reason rather than coercion.

COMMUNICATION MODEL OF DEMOCRACY

At the beginning, the author explained the relationship that exists between media in general and democracy, employing different scholarly explanations among others the well-known and most archetypal on the intensive discussion about the relationship between journalism and political system the Dewey and Lippman’s debate.

In this sense, the two authors share common differences where Lippman holds that the press has a powerful role in bridging the gap between the masses and powerful insider who help to formulate the policies of elected decision-makers. (see Publc Opinion, 1922) While on the other hand, Dewey opposed that the role of journalism is limited to enable citizens’ participation in Democratic society. (See The Public and its problems, 1927).

However, deliberative democracy model contrast sharply with some of the prevailing elitist political theories, this theory sees the individual act of voting as the central institution of democracy. Therefore, the relationship between media and democracy is inevitable. Whereby the media provide a network where the formation of democratic opinion takes place.

PUBLIC SPHERE WHAT IS IT?

In this aspect the author provide different understanding of scholars about the term called “public sphere” among other, the author sees public sphere as a sphere of identification and detection of problems, whose influence should continue to be reflected in the subsequent treatment of the issues that take place within the political system (Habermas, 1996:359). However, this entails the informal opinion rises within the public about matters of their concern in relation to their governance act. This comes into being due to the development of internet where every member of a particular society is given a chance to comment, observe, and suggest or criticize a particular happening in the political system. This is what enhances deliberative democracy.

Online journalism: a new way to increase citizenship?

The author identified some problems mated on democratic process by traditional media due to its nature of omniscience. In this respect the media are predominated by power and money away from their civic requirements. And the agenda setting is at the hand of politicians and journalists where there is strong dependency.

However, to solve these problems Reese (2001:9) suggests that media studies should accentuate ideology. This implies that there should be a conceptual and evaluative framework that map-out what, how, when and where the media should report issues of public concern.

More so, the Author suggests online journalism as an alternative to those undesirable features of mass media, therefore it is viewed from two angles:

Ø Citizen Journalism

Ø Participatory/public journalism

Public journalism seeks to encourage a more citizen-engaged press that increases the involvement of ordinary people with issues of public concern. This help democracy to connect to the community, engage individuals as citizens and to help public deliberation in search for solutions.

While citizen journalism or participated in by net-citizens and citizen reporters, appears as a second phase of public journalism. It allows everybody who has access to the net to produce, distribute and interact among themselves.

However, the difference between citizen and participatory/public journalism is the intervention or absence of professional journalist Nip (2006:14). That is to say, the participatory journalism is under the control of professional journalist while the citizen journalism is “professionalism free” practiced by members of particular community.

ONLINE JOURNALISM AND DELIBERATION: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES

Despite the hope brought about by online journalism due to its nature of simplicity, multimodality, immediacy, hypertexuality, hypermediality and interactivity, there are also many criticisms made pointing out its limitations as well.

LIMITATIONS

Scholars criticized participatory journalism that its supporters rely on a kind of dichotomy between journalist and the public, where they fail to consider other mechanism of power involved in the news making process. The reason behind formulating such kind of journalism is a move made by the professional journalists to maintain their hegemony over the citizens.

Also, they hold that ; participatory journalism due to its nature of immediacy and speed fetishism boosted by new technologies entail the risk in terms of accuracy “publish then filter” this act of immediacy logically stipulate that speed is more important than quality of information (Moretzsohn, 2007).

There are also a number of studies that shows how internet impacted on traditional media although its present in news making, it has not completely change the traditional routines Sonario(2004).

Also, another limitation is that despite the participatory and interactive nature of online journalism yet, many scholars are of the view that some people cannot voice out their opinion when they feel like they belong to minority group.

POSSIBILITIES

On the other hand, scholars also see the myriad of possibilities brought about by online journalism as follows:

--- the absence of social cues and the anonymity that one may have in online chat rooms, forums etc. could moderate the effect of isolation inherent to the effect of the spiral of silence.

--- Homophile in primary group (Wilhelm, 1999:161), this entails that people discuss comfortably with people they are familiar with.

SO, WHAT IS CIVIC IN ONLINE JOURNALISM

The Author views civic in online journalism as the technological nature of online journalism, which allows the cultivation of experimentalism and multimedia technique that may constitute the distinguishing feature of alternative forms of culture and representation of political identities. Online journalism enables public participation to interchange knowledge, opinions and feelings.

Online journalism gives the public a chance to question the mainstream media about their representation of issues of collective interest, through blogging and other online activities carried out by citizens.

Brian McNair(2008) talks about the tradition from a paradigm of control to a paradigm of chaos, where he explained the first one(paradigm of control) as a media culture which constitute strong manipulation, while the second one is marked by fragmentation and channels where everybody can consume as well as produce.

CONCLUSION

Having gone through this piece, it can be said that it is very exciting and interesting with the kind of treatment given to the TWO concepts “online journalism” and “Democratic society” in which the author writes about under different sub-topics. We recommend this content to students of online journalism or journalist in general. On the other hand, despite the strengths, it has weaknesses. The author fails to consider psychological influence instead he dwelt much on interpersonal and Technological influence. And also, the author is fails to see anything good about traditional media (see pg 104 to 108) despite all the contributions they gave in enhancing democracy since before the advent of new media, and also is not anything that is good in new technology in respect to democracy. It has negative impact also. (see Andrew keen, “Digital vertigo”)

CHAPTER SEVEN

DE-DEMOCRATIZING THE NEWS? NEWS MEDIA AND THE STRUCTURAL PRACTICES OF JOURNALISM

Natalie Fenton

Firstly, the title ‘de-democratizing the news? New media and the structural practice of journalism’ can be said to be filled with nightmare concepts, hence, understanding the anatomy of the concepts would throw more light to the full work of Natalie Fenton. The title carries a question whose answer can only be fully answered after reading the entire work. What does democracy have to do with news before the question de-democratizing the news arise? To democratize in a normal sense means to put a country under the control of its citizens by allowing them to participate in government or decision-making process in a free and equal way. Therefore to democratize the news in this context means allowing the people to participate in journalism activities; to collate, process and disseminate news.

It is crucial to note that the news media of then and to some extent today were and are under the control of few professionals, but the emergence of the new media (internet) and the structural practice of journalism have come with a new version of journalism where anybody can gather and disseminate news. The internet or new media style of journalism deals with interactivity, hypertextuality, immediacy and people or citizens participation. Because the new media tend to put the profession or freedom of journalism in the hands of both professionals and non-professionals, it is some time called the democratic media.

In this chapter, the relationship between journalism and democracy is considered. The work tries to clear the notion that it is in a democratic society that news tend to flow more freely. It also pointed that other intervening variables are also responsible for the amount and quality of news that flows in the society. These variables include or can be connected to marketization, globalization, deregulation and technological transformation.

For clearer adumbration, Fenton discusses the findings of some researches that dwell on the new media and structural practices of journalism in three concepts; new media and the news, local news and the democratic deficit and a new age of new journalism but in this review they are all summarized into the negative and positive effects of new media.

A lot of study have been done in UK concerning new media and journalism, and one of the largest research found that the new media has indeed modified news and journalism, that is, the structural practices of journalism has been modified (Fenton, 2010; Philips, Lee-Wright, and Witschge, 2011).

Some of the positive changes or modification based on the research is that new voices have found expression in blogs and alternative news sites operating out of civil society have found space and voice online; new means of brokering intelligent dialogue across nations (Coundry, 2010, Currant and Witschge, 2010, and Fenton, 2010). The import above is that there is a lot of space for news, instant speed in reporting and delivering by few technological equipped personnel.

Another positive effect of the new media is that it has brought increased possibilities for civil society to campaign and publicize their work (Fenton 2010). This means that there is now overabundance of media contents, and, people and civil society can publish media content more easily than ever.

Moreover, the digital age also has the potentials to save news (in archives), delivering a form of collaborative journalism more suited to the post-enlightenment period; it may be paper-less but it will be people-full, participatory, and as a result, more democratic.

Despite these positive modifications, the new media has brought several injuries and crisis to the news and structural practices of journalism as a whole.

Based on these researches above, the injuries caused by the new media on news and structure of journalism itself can be summarized as follows: reduction of news business, increase of news commercialization, changes of focus from public interest to organizational economic interest, devaluing in investigative reporting, foreign and local news.

It is pertinent to note that news is a business and the higher your audiences the higher the chances of getting more advertisers. Journalists are always in a haste to fill more space with stories with fewer sources online so they can get and keep their audiences; as a result, they sit in their offices and hardly dig deep into stories and sources of their news. Cut and paste is their new style of journalism (Philips, 2010) because they sit and monitor other media online, their news wires and user-generated content. The only thing they do best is to rewrite the same stories in another language and from the same angle. To put succinctly, this have to do with increasing marketization of news and the ruthless logic of economic system that demands ever-increasing profit margins and share returns resulting in fewer journalists doing more work, undermining the provision of news in the public interest.

A research by Franklin in 1988 on local news and the democratic deficit also shows that journalists rely on local government press release for their news because they are in hurry and thereby constantly repeating the news.

Digital age has reduced and made many journalists to be jobless. It also led to the closure of so many news organizations. For instance in the UK the newspaper society notes that 101 local newspapers industry were closed between January 2008 and August 2009 and many local newspapers have been merged due to economic and the new digital age (Newspaper Society Intelligence Unit 2010).

As of 2000-2011, the USA newspapers have experience 30% fall economically, the Eastern Europe and the commonwealth of independent States also recorded 30%-60% fall in income which forced them to adopt cost-saving measures, including reduced volume, staff layoffs, reduced investigative reporting, and cuts in international and provincial coverage (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2011, Open Society Institute, 2010). However, the shift from conventional news to online news did not affect other peoples’ choices, for they still love the conventional media (KPMG, 2012).

Another disadvantage is that a new age of new journalism has been introduced whereby the people involved don’t want to be called newsmakers or journalists and should not be seen as replacing journalists because they only want to fill in a gap in the provision of (hyper) local media content and strengthening of local democracy. The fact is that they are not journalists but they are doing the work of journalists so then what should they be called since they don’t want to be called journalists?

The abridge of the work is that new age journalism has no regard for secrecy and no democracy can succeed without secrecy. The people need privacy also, hence, democratizing the news is not only harmful to the people themselves but to journalists and journalism profession as a whole.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CRISES, RADICAL ONLINE JOURNALISM, AND THE STATE

Lee Salter

This chapter began by highlighting a major feature or characteristic of online journalism. Describing the internet as realm of freedom, john parry Barlow (1996) explains that the internet is illimitable and likened to the force of nature, this same characteristic is one of the major challenges when it comes to censorship and regulation of the internet medium cyber libertarianism.

Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives) should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online. Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some ambiguous “public interest” an all to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

“We did not invite [governments to the Internet]. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions… Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, there is no matter here.”

This comes in two fold contexts economic and social that Individuals should be granted liberty of conscience, thought, opinion, speech, and expression in online environments also that Individuals should be granted liberty of contract, innovation, and exchange in online environments.

He further reveals that the freedom afforded by the internet has been received or perceived differently depending on the society. The internet was created by United States for commercial purpose that is profit making but they are of the opinion that today the internet has gone beyond U.S financial ambition as it has not only serve individuals far and wide but nations.

Lee salter here in this chapter tries to draw perspectives and views of radical journalism and understanding the liberal state cooperate media and hegemony. Painting quite a clear radical picture of online journalism which is an extreme democratic form of communication or journalism where people who are usually denied access to mainstream media are given the platform to speak and express themselves regarding issues that concern them, usually characterized with counter-discussion to those found in the mainstream media and being used to question the hegemony of the state under the guise of maintaining the “public order”.

To this end, radical journalism can facilitate criticism of the institutional order as well as providing and facilitating examples of alternative practices. The online environment is said to better facilitate radical journalism as, compared with broadcast and print media, it is cheap, less regulated, and provides for multidirectional communication.

The problem here is that the state is unable to rely on whole-hearted consent of the people; governments perceive a permanent underlying threat to their legitimacy and their authority. This threat is evident, or at least becomes most notable, in times of explicit crisis, such as during war, uprisings, recession, constitutional crisis, major scandal, and so on. Furthermore, it is during such crises that systemic contradiction and political hypocrisy becomes most evident, further undermining the legitimacy of the political order, hence pose a threat the “public order”.

Indeed, whereas authoritarian states are concerned with the maintenance of “state security” and rely on a plethora of rules, regulations, and coercive laws for this purpose, liberal states are interested in “public order” and are apparently more permissive. Whilst there are more provisions for freedom in liberal states, such provisions are rather ambiguous. In a sense, the very freedoms on which liberalism is based can be used as a control mechanism.

Lee salter did a nice work describing hegemony and counter hegemony, he did explain that the dominant hegemony is maintained by the state power but the exercise differs from state to state, there successes of radical journalism or new media where revolution was achieved for instance Egypt, Libya, Arab Uprising e.t.c we are now speaking of a version of relationships yet another step further from the notion of dominant media, in which people using small-scale media prevail and large media institutions and undifferentiated content can no longer be found. (McQuail, 1987: 88)

The key terms or word that Lee Salter attempt to do justice to are crises, radical online journalism, and the state; online environment, as a realm of freedom; the state, hegemonic order, radical online journalism challenging; times of crisis, publics/radical and power of state/functions of corporate; consent, coercion in UK/Australia/USA, as opposed to authoritarian; understanding the liberal state; corporate media, hegemony, and counter-hegemony; spaces for “citizen journalism” online, detached, professional challenged; liberal paradox, media freedom as constraint for instance researchers pointed that most media outlets in Lebanon are funded by financiers who have ties to political parties. The expectation is that coverage offered by news outlets will reflect the political interests of their respective financiers.

Therefore the social media can be useful for alternative media practitioners and activists alongside various publics in society. Equilibrium on information inequality is being addressed by the free access of citizens to the field. In studying the political arena for example, bloggers and other users of the social media are allowed entry by raising issues and their understanding of equality. The access of social media is said to level the field of political players that are deemed to be dominated by good supports of mainstream media.

Social media users such as bloggers are said to address the inequality issue by being non- partisan or showing support for the opposition. The audience has the opportunity to listen to the debates by all parties and hence able to rationally decide for themselves. Many have welcomed the new information technology based on two assumptions. The first assumption was that the old media were seen to be against the cause of democracy with some scholars labeling the traditional mass media to be a vehicle for creating alienation. The second assumption is that the information communication technology would be able to compensate for the adverse condition created by the old media by allowing for a more direct form of democratic participation.

There is no doubt that radical journalism especially through the new media has offered platform and opportunities for the citizens to question the hegemony and dominance of the state which the mainstream media seemingly are not able to handle and has been instrumental to revolutions around the globe at different times like Arab Uprising, Egypt, Libya and the likes, let’s not also forget that the rate at which radical journalism especially through the new

CHAPTER NINE

FORMS OF ONLINE JOURNALISM AND POLITICS

Eugenia Siapera.

According to Thomas Jefferson if he were left to choose between the government and the media, he prefers the latter due to surveillance and watchdog roles it perform in the society. The media here does not only limit to radio, television and newspaper , it has extended to new media as a result of development of internet which has paved way for the voiceless to make their view known on certain decision made by political stakeholders and decision makers without any sort of intimidations.

It must be clearly stated however, that these roles entrusted in media most especially mainstream media have been compromised over time due to some legal and illegal measure taken by political actors, decision makers to compel press to dance to their tune. Nevertheless, with the aids of internet which has paved ways for online journalism, journalists are now becoming mediator of public opinion and watchdog of the political process. Little wonder, Thomas Jefferson opined that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government”.

However, this chapter written by Siapera extensively described the roles of journalism in politics and political activities which is solemnly centered on online fashion of journalism. How it has contributed to oversight and watchdog roles, how it has widen the participation of the people in decision making process, how online journalism is being used to dig deep and investigate into the affairs of government so as to make them accountable to the people, how online journalism is being utilized to write fair and accurate information as part of its normative requirement and structural position in the society.

Similarly, the chapter described journalism and democracy as biological relation insisting that without journalism democracy is incomplete. Hence, journalism’s role in democracy cannot be over- emphasized which are to inform, to guard, to analyze and to advocate. As part of prerequisite to perform this normative function, journalism should be independent from government and able to operate in a free environment. Its content should reflect the main journalistic value of accuracy and fairness, while readers are understood as rational beings, able and willing to make rational decisions on the basis of appropriate information.

However, going by the topic itself “form of online Journalism and politics” Eugenia Siapera, gave different type of online Journalism and how it is useful in politics. The section talks extensively about normative role it performs in politics of our society. The following are the explanation of each form of online Journalism and the roles it performs in politics.

CIVIL OR PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM

As the name implies participatory journalism, the unique features of this are that it allows for the active participation of readers. This is formally evidenced in providing the means by which citizens can post their own news articles, photo, opinions and so on. In this forms of Journalism readers have potentials to become Journalists due to the chance given to them to participate immensely. Typical example of participatory journalism is indymedia. Indymedia have features archived with global news themes, mostly on protest etc. Another unique feature of indymedia is the possibility to translate the contents and categories in different languages. Similarly, it also has a web radio, RSS feeds, and video projects where user can watch videos compiled by citizens. in nutshell, participatory Journalism help citizen to post news, opinions and articles, because it relies on readers’ participation and contribution through open publishing link and an invitation to contribute. Through civic Journalism we become the pilot of our affairs.

JOURNALISM BLOGGING

This is similar to participatory Journalism, the only slight difference is that, in Journalism blogging, those producing content perceived themselves as media professional who has undergone necessary training and also abide by the ethics. E.g. the Huffinton post is produced by a host of Journalists, some regular contributions, some invited Journalists. In a nutshell, Journalism blogging is similar to civil participation but differ in terms of contribution, Due to the fact that contributors are professional journalists not citizens. Typical example of journalism blogging is the popular website called Truthout, a U.S based journalistic blog run collectively by a group of journalists and professional writers. In terms of categories, the site contains features, opinion, articles, news and issues, all these covering a broad range of themes. However, readers of truthout are allowed to post comments on articles, which will be later moderated and also to submit articles for publication. Readers are also invited to become members by donating to Truthout. Its usefulness in politics is similar to civic journalism.

VIDEO JOURNALISM

Video journalism is a visual based decorated website, it is not text oriented. One unique features of video journalism is that, it can be produced by both professional journalists as well as citizens. The readers are addressed as audiences that are primarily as spectators, engaged through their senses rather than through intellect. However, typical example of video journalism is YouTube which allows participants to contribute and classify their video firstly in terms of categories which include different themes, such as activism and nonprofits, environment, art, experimental and so on. There is also the possibility to create high definition video by creators along with commentary, while contributors can generate their own project or produce /solicit video on certain themes. Video embraces creativity and self-imagination and it focus on certain location but accept contribution across the world. The role of video cannot be over-emphasized in political process. It supports and help tag and categories the various video on decision making process in the country.

NEWS AGGREGATORS

News aggregators are otherwise known as multiplicity of news sources. It is a process of getting news from different media outlets. News aggregators is a process of getting news on various sector ranging from economy, politics, sports, entertainment, art and culture etc. this is mostly achieved through Google news. Users can subscribe to Google news to get news on politics, sports and so on. In terms of location, for example news occurring in Nigeria or Ghana in terms of the main news outlets they are interested in. It must clearly state however, that none of the news items are produced by Google they are collected by a host of media and aggregated by Google. This is clearly a customer based take on journalism as service provision, a depoliticized understanding that pretend to service the customers even as they strip them of any potentials contribution. Meanwhile, Redden and Witschge’s (2010) argue that depoliticize and personalize journalism thereby stripping if from its potential role. This has shown that information about political decision in the society is subjected to individual will rather than consensus of the people. Therefore if we accept that democracy is more than aggregate of individual preferences, this kind of journalism is detrimental to democratic process.

MAINSTREAM ONLINE JOURNALISM

Apparently, mainstream media such as radio, television, newspaper and magazine are now moving and shifting their operation to online fashion. They produce well-baked and professional publishers, editors and journalists who are well paid for their work. Readers are passive before the introduction of mainstream online journalism with its intervention, it has introduced a few changes such as news content and readers. News content is considerably expanded while readers are allowed to actively participate on news stories through comment and posting news stories.

We can clearly see examples of this in most of our notable Nigerian newspapers before, they were known to be hot media where readers are very passive and vulnerable but with the introduction of online fashion, people can post their comments on comment box, they contribute to sourcing and posting of news happening within their vicinity and many others. Mainstream online journalism plays vital roles in political process of any society through participation of the readers. As such, its position toward the political process in one in which journalism is mediating between politicians and the public, seeking to retain its independence and to safeguard the mediating role.

OPEN OR CROWD SOURCED JOURNALISM

The term open or crowd sourced journalism is a process of giving chance and opportunity to those who have something spectacular to share on a given issues. It is known as multiplicity of ideas by the users. The news stories emerging from this kind of production tend to include a lot of data are seen to be investigative. Readers are typically placed in the position of both users/readers as well as contributors and co-authors of news stories.

However, to have better understanding of crowd sourced journalism we need to take a look at wikileaks. Wikileaks has very simple interface, including few if any categories, which include requests to donate, as well as to submit materials. Wiklleaks has issued open calls for contributors, who may have access to information that the public may have an interest in. such contributors may contact wikileaks and offer information in ways that will not compromise them.

SOCIAL MEDIA JOURNALISM

It is more or less like summary of the above forms of online journalism we have been discussing from the onset of the discussion. This form of journalism is collectively produced by professionals and amateur journalists, in a distributed manner similar to open source journalism. Its content are primarily characterized by a personalized take on events are ranked in terms of personal interest rather than their news value. Readers are not only active producers in this form of journalism but they are also understood as” friends” or” followers” that is, as forming networks clustering around specific issues or keywords and/ or persons. To exemplify this we need to take a look at Twitter, which is understood as a micro- blogging site or platform for user-generated content, allows users to post short messages of a maximum of 140 characters. Its contents are entirely produced by users, who see a rolling line of new tweets as they come in. Twitter users are both producing and reading tweets, in a pattern that we have seen repeatedly in all forms of online journalism. Most people, news agencies have official Twitter handles e.g. Reuters has over 1 million followers, and GorgeMonbiot, a respected commentator and guardian contributor has about 25 000 followers. The immediacy of the information on Twitter allows and enables political action, while the possibility of citizen contribution widens participation.

CONCLUSION

Unarguably, it is a known fact that the role of journalism in political process cannot be over-emphasized ranging from educating, informing, mobilizing, persuading the people about what is happening in decision making process in various places. Journalism serves as mediator between political stakeholders and the public. Going by what Thomas Jefferson said if he were left to choose between the media and newspaper he prefers the latter in relation to the above explanation on forms of online journalism and politics, it is clearly stated that democracy without journalism is incomplete due to the normative roles it performs in political process.

CHAPTER 10

BRIDGING THE GAP: TOWARD A TYPOLOGY OF CROSS-MEDIA NEWS PRODUCTION PROCESSES

Ivar John Erdal

This chapter started with an introduction that sought to establish the facts that very few modern media houses publish only on one platform therefore highlighting the fact that most media organizations are now in the business of publishing on more than one platform. The chapter tried to look into how a single news story on the several platforms i.e. cross media news production, it also considered the distinction between cross-media communication which is the textual perspective and cross-media production process that is the work perspective.

The chapter also gave a background by reviewing existing research on how technology which has led to convergence has affected the production process, at this point it is important to note that the author used the NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting corporation) as a case study due to the fact that it is now a cross-media institution therefore a suitable place to carry out his research. Analyzing different works, he found out that some researchers argued that technology has affected journalism. Journalists now rely on the use of online tools for research, and also technology has made the flow of news very fast, it has also led to the development of multi-skilled journalists. However, some argue that technology has only complemented the work rather than changing it completely, others tried to see if convergence has a negative influence on journalism and came up with the conclusion that it has not. Studies have continued to evolve on convergence and have shifted from the effects of technology on media works and production to those stumbling blocks on convergence. In regards to stumbling blocks, time constraints, market pressure and cultural differences can be considered to have hindered convergence. However with all these findings the author argued that studies have shown little on bridging the gap between the organizational and textual perspectives of convergence, therefore his work is to fix this and also he provided a model which would analyze the relationship between changes in journalism practice and development of news production.

This research was carried out at the Norwegian public service Broadcaster NRK, he used the qualitative method: field observation qualitative interviews and textual analysis to gather his data. He proposed that “multiplatform news production involves a range of intertwining forms of cooperation and reproduction. He defined the concept of cross-media as where two or more platforms are involved in an integrated way. He analyzed some models of convergence, “convergence continuum” by Dailey, Demo and Spillman. Where convergence was seen at different level of integrations, the first level is cross promotion where there is no cooperation or interaction between the different parts of the organizations or platforms, the second is cloning where sharing occurs only after the content has been produced while the third is competition where the platforms promote each other but are competitive, the fourth is continuum where the different part share content while the fifth is full convergence. However the author argued that this model has its shortcomings that it does not describe the production processes sufficiently. He also looked into Boczkowski’s model but argued also that the model lacked nuanced concepts. Thus he proposed his model which sought to supplement the other existing models. His model consists of four different parts:

a. Multiplatform journalism: this is where one or more reporters produce the same story for two or more platforms and the stories are the same on all platforms

b. Hard-drive journalism: here a single reporter creates another version of an already existing story for a different platform.

c. Intra-platform coordination: this is when both reporters and editors of different platforms share their stories together either during editorial meetings or informally.

d. Intra-platform production: here reporters for different platforms cooperate together to cover the stories, share contents and more materials.

This author finished by saying that he is sure others can develop different categories to refine this model meaning that he does not suggest that his work is the ultimate.

CHAPTER 11

TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEWS WORK: ARE LABOR CONDITIONS IN (ONLINE) JOURNALISM CHANGING?

Steve Paulussen

Of course, it is very apparent that the advent of the modern day sophisticated technologies brought about so many effects in the journalism profession. Ornebring (2010) opined that “technology and technological development is inevitable, impersonal forces that directly cause many of the changes taking place within journalism.”

This chapter therefore looks at how working conditions for journalists are changing in the context of ongoing digitization and commercialization of the media.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that the advancement of technology to journalism profession has been a welcome development because it aid journalists to carry out their news work efficiently. With the aid of technology, journalists now improve their speed ability in providing news and also verifying the accuracy of any information.

But, in the economic aspect, the technology tends to favor only the management. They spend less and generate more. To the journalists, it is completely unfavorable and often makes others to loss their jobs as they lacked the technical knowhow of the trend. Journalists often laid their bitter complain over low salary payment, workload, job insecurity and producing more content with fewer staff all because of the advancement in technology. This and many reasons force other journalists to become freelancers.

Also, media scholars observed how technology has always been used by management as a tool to increase the productivity and cost-efficiency in the newsroom, which suggests again that changes in journalistic labor “are not so much driven by technological necessity as by capitalist necessity to reduce overall labour costs” (Ornebring, 2010 : 64). Therefore, instead to promote division of labor amongst staff, the technology ended-up leaving individual doing the work of many (individualization of labor).

In addition, the advancement in technology has also change the way journalists select, gather, and tells their story. The present day technology demand journalists to have entrepreneurial mindset; a high degree of adaptability and creativity is needed to handle the wide range of tasks and responsibilities of the job (Beam and Meeks, 2011; Jarvis, 2009; Gillmor, 2010).

Journalists working in online newsrooms take on more tasks and responsibilities than others working for a single medium. Their tasks include covering breaking news stories for the web site, writing blogs, capturing audio and video, creating podcasts, participating in live chat sessions with their audience, and taking photos but still, earned low salary.

It is therefore importance to pay attention to the economic impact on journalistic labor, especially since recent developments in newsrooms continue to go in the direction of doing more with fewer staff.

CHAPTER 12

JOURNALISM AND CROSS MEDIA PUBLISHING: THE CASE OF GREECE

Introduction

Andreas Veglis

Andreas veglis is the author or the contributor of this chapter and here, tries to explain how the information and communication technologies are dramatically changing the traditional methods of news collating, processing and distribution by conventional media. He is trying to highlight the changes in production, processing and distribution of media contents like images, audio and videos. Veglis therefore uses the terms “journalism and cross-media publishing “to describe the multimedia nature of the so-called online journalism. This has become a trending development to almost all media companies ranging from newspaper, radio, and television stations. Before, media only produce, package and distribute their contents in a single format but now it's much more than that. It goes beyond by providing multitudinous formats for different publications channels which helps in reaching larger audience needs.

CROSSMEDIA PUBLISHING DEFINED

The terms cross-media publishing as coined by veglis can be defined as a process of producing any content like images, audios, videos, and text in a single medium for more than one media platform. It includes the techniques of producing more than one format of content for multiple distributions.

THE CHANNELS FOR CROSS-MEDIA PUBLISHING

What enhances the potential of cross-media publishing is the application of various channels as identified by the author. These channels have for long been adopted by media companies and are employed in Cross media publishing but the author argues that such channels do not represent different categories of technologies but simply various methods of publishing news. These channels are world wide web ( www), webcasting, smart phones, tablets, e-mail, short message services(SMS), portable document format( PDF), really simple syndication ( RSS), Twitter, (Vigils, 2008b) social network and blogs.

These channels have been categorized into so many ways by the author. For example, www and e-mail are internet services, others are mobile telephone services or devices like SMS and Smartphone, and some fall into other categories like PDF that is file format. We can therefore from the above understand that these channels can be viewed from three groups namely: file, internet and mobile formats. However, some of these channels may fall under two or three formats while some are only under one category. For instance, www, email, RSS, Twitter, webcasting blogs, etc. fall under internet, Smartphone and Twitter fall under both internet and mobile categories while SMS falls under mobile category only. Meanwhile, such channels can be classified as more or less pull or push oriented. A channel is defined as push oriented when forced upon the end users without a specific request from him/her. On the other hand, a channel is defined as pull oriented when the end users make a deliberate action to access the information (Sabelstrom, 1998).

CONTENT ELEMENT

This is a terms used by the author to explain the different nature of the content each channel of cross media publishing consists. Content elements can be categorized into static and dynamic elements. According to him, textual matter, still images, and graphics are considered to be static content elements that can be created and edited independently of each other and later compiled and logically connected in an article. Video and sound are characterized as dynamic content. So, as far as online journalism is concerned, pictures, audio and video are very crucial because they help in explaining the content easily. The cannels that can be considered as static include email, SMS, PDF, RSS, and Twitter. On the other hand, WWW, blogs, webcasting, smart phones, social networks, and tablets include both static and dynamic content elements. But dynamic channels are more time consuming than for static channels. That is why the fastest channels are always static channels.

In another development, the author uses another parameter to determine how the media will employ channels in cross-media publishing which is time to be spent in production. So, time is very important. That is why the author uses the term “publishing speed” to explain time each channel consumes during the production.

There are various reasons for deploying cross-media publishing which include: additional materials, multimedia feature, interactive characteristics, competition, advertising, broadband connection which is a term for high-speed internet and data connections.

In understanding the concept of journalism and cross-media publishing, you have to consider what the author calls the “modeling cross-media publishing”. The models of cross-media publishing guide you in determining the process of selecting channels to be used during the production of media content. These models are related to the type of the media company ranging from newspaper, radio and television station.

For newspaper, the www version of the newspaper is the first alternative that the newspaper and some magazines employ when it deploys cross media publishing. Another alternative channel implemented that enriches the newspaper’s web is PDF.

For radio, like the case of newspaper, the www is the first alternative channel that a radio station implements when it deploys cross-media publishing. The next is webcasting channel, the transmission of the radio programmes in real time via internet.

For television, the process is entirely different from those of newspaper and radio station. It is mainly caused by different products as they offer sound and video. In essence, www is the first stage of alternative channel, but preferably, webcasting is the most attractive channel for television station since it allows them to reach remote viewers.

In conclusion, I can say the idea of cross-media publishing is a welcome idea that needs to be deployed by media houses especially in this era of news and information globalization. The cross-media publishing is however having some challenges especially in the aspect of employment opportunities. This can be attributed to the fact that the level of man power employed by the conventional media will be right-sized and the vacancies will be reduced. But to be factual and precise, the advantages of cross-media especially in the aspect of news production and dissemination cannot be overemphasized. This is because, before, the content is only produced and distributed in a single format, but now with the emergence of cross media publishing, the process has been categorically changed in the sense that it provides audience with a content using various formats and channels for multiple uses and understanding.

CHAPTER 13

THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE JOURNALISM

Richard van der Wurff

This chapter provides explicit details on the economics of online journalism with utmost priority on the news industry’s search for a possible business model. This is because it is no longer news that print are shutting down publications due to lack of adequate funds to sustain their activities.

The advent of internet technologies offers numerous advantages to online news providers to enhance the provision of news in the society. Still, these technologies posed a threat to the news providers by breaking the monopolistic activity of the news providers as the only medium providing information to the society. It empowers the users to become content creators, and disseminators. With this effect, the online news providers are left with the option of looking for a way on how to address and respond to these challenges.

Many news consumers see news as just any other product or services. But, looking at the economic system of every media house, news has peculiar economic features and these features buttress why it is difficult to produce and sell news as a commercial product. These features are: a) high first copy cost, i.e. producing news is expensive and it required human skills and labor.

b) Non payer excludability- this explains that it is difficult to prevent non payers from using it. People often go the extreme mile of sharing it in their personal blogs and other platforms. This limits the opportunities to make news a profitable product.

c) Merit Good and Positive Externalities- news stories educate and inform the general society about government policies and how it affects them. Also, when citizens are informed, they do not only profit personally, but society as a whole benefits, too.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TRADITIONAL NEWSPAPER AND TV NEWS BUSINESS MODELS

Magretta (2002) explains that a business model describes how a firm strives to satisfied their customers’ needs and in return, the firm, too, makes profit. Socolow and Van Tuyll (2010) further buttress that many decades ago the traditional business models of the newspaper and TV yield fruitful results. Then, they enjoyed the monopoly of being the primary sources of public affairs information. That eventually helps them into profitable business (Johnson, 2009).

Subsequently, the introduction of advertisements in newspapers and TV news casts into products that are sold on dual product markets, makes the news providers to rely so much on advertising revenue and that eventually reduced the efforts of the audience to pay for the costs of news production (Picard, 1989). Apparently, that explains the business success of newspaper and TV news.

Meanwhile, the advent of internet affected the newspapers and TV news business models (Lewis, Williams, and Franklin, 2008; Meyer, 2004). The internet turned into a global mainstream multipurpose communication and distribution platform. It allows organizations and individuals to become content creators, disseminators and users at virtually no costs. Advertisers can bypass news media and communicate directly, and on their own terms, with their audiences. News media now lost their monopoly on public communication and also begin to experience low patronage and low income.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR ONLINE JOURNALISM

In an online community, competition is very stiff and challenging. Also, online visitors spend less time on an online news site. For these reasons, online advertising generates less revenue per user than print or television advertising. Observers argue that one newspaper reader brings as much revenue as between three and 10 online readers (The Economist, 2006; Kuttner, 2007).

In their attempt to enhance their economic prowess, some online news providers started offline print editions to generate more advertising revenues. An example is the Politico web site, which started “a weekly print product, which is responsible for much of its revenue” (Clark-Johnson, 2009: 24).

Another strategy adopted by online news providers to enhance their economic dexterity, is production of low cost news where they relied on the free services by volunteers, citizen journalists, experts and users. The Huffington Post in the USA is one example of a successful and profitable news and commentary blog that relies for its content on more than 6000 volunteers and not more than 53 paid editorial staffers (Lee, 2010), reaching a similar online audience to The New York Times and The Washington Post (Sherman, 2010).

THE VALUE OF ONLINE JOURNALISM

To end the persistent obstacle often revolved in developing online business models, the author suggested that providers of online services should inculcate the habit of value added services for users. These services includes: reduction of transaction; adhering to traditional journalistic values; easy access to local, national and international news stories and creation of local forum where members of that community would come together to discuss issues affecting them politically, socially and culturally.

THE FUTURE OF THE ONLINE NEWS BUSINESS

One can see that the same technology that offers tremendous business opportunities for online news providers is the same technology that complicates and posed a threat to the same opportunities. Producing news is quite a complex and challenging task. But the inability of the consumers to pay for the service is the biggest challenge faced by the online news providers.

In finding solution to the aforementioned issue, we agree with some scholars who are of the view that the only panacea to this problem is for all media (online and offline) to stop giving out free news services. Only then would the users realize the economic value of news and would begin to understand the costs attached in producing them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CROWDSOURCING INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM:

HELP ME INVESTIGATE – A CASE STUDY

Paul Bradshaw

Andy Brightwell

Crowd sourcing investigative journalism in simple terms is allowing individuals to partake in the process of achieving a common goal by a news organization or a formal organization.

Some of the key elements which made crowd sourcing investigative journalism successful are:

· It was found to make “dry” subject matter more appealing.

· Subject matter: it appeared that crowd sourcing model of investigation might provide a way to investigate stories that were in the public interest but which commercial and public service news organizations would not consider worth their time.

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM: ITS HISTORY AND DISCOURSES

According to De Burgh (2008:10) Investigate Journalism is as “distinct from apparently similar (work of discovering truth and identifying lapses from it) done by police, lawyers and auditors and regulatory bodies in that it is not limited as to target, not legally founded and usually earns money in the sense that some argue that all journalism is investigative or that the recent popularity of the term indicates the failure of “normal” journalism to maintain investigate standards. This disagreement is a symptom of the various factors underlying the growth of the genre, which range from journalists’ own sense of their democratic role, to professional ambition and publishers commercial and marketing objectives (De Burgh, 20008).

In more recent times investigative journalism has been used to defend traditional print journalism against online publishing, with publishers arguing that true investigative journalism cannot be maintained without the resources of a print operation. However, this point has been argued due to the increasing numbers of awards that online journalists get for achievements recorded in investigative work in journalism practice. Example includes Clare Sambrook in the UK, Voice of San Diego.com and so on.

Computer assisted reporting has been part of journalism for as far back as the 1960s. Increasing processing power and connectivity has played an increasingly important role in print investigative journalism. Also, the success of Wikipedia inspired a raft of example of “Wiki Journalism” where users were invited to contribute to editorial coverage of a particular issue or field (Bradshaw, 2007) with varying degrees of success.

Although, in recent times crowd sourcing has been adopted by investigative journalists such as the Guardian’s Paul Lewis, he also sounds a note of caution in its vulnerability and therefore stressed on the need for verification.

‘Help me investigate’ was a project created to aim at providing ease for members of the public and journalist to investigate issues of public interest. This was done in two main ways by providing technological platform that made it easier for a community of interested parties to collaborate and secondly, providing journalistic support as they did so.

This project was conceptualized by Paul Bradshaw, web developer Stef Lewandowski and community specialist nick booth joined the Help Me Investigate team in 2008, funding for the project was provided by channel 4’s iP fund and regional development agency, Screen West Midlands. It was launched at http://helpmeinvestigate.com in July 2009.

By the end of the 12-week plan proof of concept, the site had completed a number of investigations that were not “headline markers” but fulfilled the objective of informing users. The site happened to uncover some promising information that could provide the basis for more stories.

The site had an estimated 275 users (whose backgrounds ranged from journalism and web development to locally active citizens) and 71 investigations’ exceeding project targets after its initial 12 weeks.

A success rate percentage was achieved by the ‘Help Me Investigate’ site which can be attributed to the hypothesis that the nature of the investigation provided a natural cue to interested parties.

Hickman describes the site as a “centralized sub-network that suits a specific activity” (2010:12). It is important to note that this sub-network forms part of a larger “network of networks” which involves spaces such as users’ blogs, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and other platforms and channels.

A regular supply of updates provided the investigation with momentum. The accumulation of discoveries provided valuable feedback to users, who then returned for more. One problem encountered however, was that the number of diverging paths led to a range of proverbial avenues of enquiry.

CONCLUSION

After the study of this site and the whole idea of crowdsourcing it is discovered that one of the reasons given by users of the site for not contributing to an investigation is “not having enough time”. Although at least one interviewee in contrast highlighted the simplicity and ease of contributing, it needs to be as easy and simple as possible for users to contribute (or appear to be) in order to lower the perception of effort and time needed.

The second biggest reason for not contributing given was “Lack of personal interest or lack of personal connection with the issue or investigation” bringing out the importance of individual and social dimension of crowd sourcing.

Although positive feedback formed part of the design of the site which is encouraged, no consideration was paid to negative feedback. Talking about “failure for free” maybe easy but more could be done to identify and support failing investigations.

Five qualities can be identified in the research of “Help Me” investigate which made investigations successful namely” Highly active users, ability to break down a large investigation into smaller discrete events. Ability for others to find out about an investigation game mechanics and the pleasure of using the site and lastly diversity of users.

A key learning outcome of the project of separation of technology from community suggests that future journalism crowd sourcing projects focus on the brakes and accelerators on connecting communities and expertise as the bases of any technical development.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MEDIA ACCOUNTABILITY PRACTICES IN ONLINE NEWS MEDIA

David Domingo

Heikki Heikkila

This chapter focuses on the issue of mass media losing its privileged position as hubs of public communication. So it is trying to make reason why and how that has happened and also it suggests methods for journalists and news organization to gain back their credibility.

The main organizations suffering this are the new and upcoming media organizations, because even the old organizations find it hard to meet the standard of credibility, relevance and quantity of public communication, then how are news rooms and journalists supposed to convince the audience that the new organizations or institutions will be most adapt to those journalistic quality.

This chapter also mentioned the report of Hutchins commission in the USA in the 1910s where a number of institutional arrangement and practices were setup fostering media accountability. Codes of ethics have been framed for informing the work of individual journalist and self regulatory bodies such as press councils and men. They were established to deal with complaints about the editorial content of newspapers and broadcasters. In addition regular channels have been maintained.

“Between systems and instruments” “online practices”

It focuses on how the awareness of the complexity of media accountability mechanisms within specific media systems and the diversity of solution.

“A typology for online media accountability practices”

This part proves that the fundamental means for media accountability are evaluation, feedback and discussion. Thus, holding the media accountable presumes communication between news producers and users or recipients of media. In order to keep it going, these pleas need to be responded to or elaborated by other stakeholders, instead of assuming ideal typical circular accountability processes; it seems more viable to pay attention to how media organization facilitate activities for media accountability processes with regard to different phases of news production.

“The inventory of online practices for media accountability”

This part focuses on the fact that even if nowadays there are not insurmountable technical obstacles for sharing information, fostering actor transparency with news audiences, their inventory suggests that only a few practices are wide spread amongst online organizations.

Toward Comparative Research of Online Journalism

Here, the authors talk about how strong dose of universalism is often attached to our assumptions about how uses of the interest and the World Wide Web are diffused across the world. It was also stated that a well-known and useful starting point for any comparative study on journalism cultures may be drawn from “Hallin and Mancini’s, (2004) typology of media systems. In their levels, Hallin and Mancini demonstrate that historically, four general variables have tended to be crucial determinants of media systems: the size and reach of news market, parallelism between political parties and newspapers, the degree of professionalism amongst journalists and the role of state intervention in media policies.

“Tensions in the Journalists Fields

This heading focuses on how the relationships within a journalistic field are manifested in ways whereby dominant ideas about journalism and its environment are made sense of in a given news culture. In order to illustrate these dynamics, this part analyzes why the current situation in journalism and online media accountability appears quite different in the USA and Finland. The USA ideas of professionalism predominantly emphasize the competence and integrity of individual journalist. In Finland on the other hand professionalism is traditionally collectively organized.

Conclusion: So this chapter emphasizes on how media accountability tend to be of general interest for 3 reasons. From an ethical and philosophical perspective, it is important to discuss why public institutions such as journalism should be accountable in the first place.

In a more pragmatic sense, it is relevant to ask what are the appropriate means of implementing accountability treated as an appropriate object for studying changes in journalism and particularly in online news. The discussions point two particular questions:

- How does media accountability configure in the current developments in online journalism?

- What sorts of practices have been introduced to news web sites and how do these practices in varying journalism cultures from USA to Europe and Arab countries?

CHAPTER 16

TECHNOLOGY AND JOURNALISM: CONFLICT AND CONVERGENCE AT THE PRODUCTION LEVEL

Andreas Giannakoulopoulos

Iraklis Varlamis

Stelios Kouloglou

This article by Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, Iraklis Varlamis,and Stelios Kouloglou, seemed to have set its goals towards investigating and highlighting the intersection between technology and journalism in daily life as well as how the internet unprecedentedly provided the profession with a very wide range of resources and technological capabilities to exploit.

With the emergence of this modern technology and the proliferation of internet network, the concept of journalism and its traditional roles has been subjected to modification and transformation, concurrently producing a new dimension to journalistic practice at the production level, news sourcing and dissemination of information. This however was as a result of internet capability of convergence and multimediality.

In the course of this transition, not only was the journalistic production process challenged, but also the traditional agenda setting and gatekeeping functions of the media. These roles are no longer monopolized by the media practitioners alone, but shared the control with the other self- acclaimed information disseminators popularly known as “citizen journalists”

To buttress the above point, Tilley and Cokley (2008) highlighted that the number of citizens who provide material from events with which editors or journalists do not have direct contact is increasingly daily and, in many cases, these sources override the information that can be provided by journalists. This was possible following the availability of online web pages such as blogs, social media platforms etc. where anybody with an idea, no matter ill informed, create entries for public consumption. But the implication of this may lead to what Andrew Keen in his book “the cult of the amateur” called Digital Darwinism that is the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. And according to him, under this framework, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.

With respect to the traditional gatekeeping role as illustrated in the conceptual model of Westley and Maclean (McQuail and Windahl, 2001:68), the role has been challenged by the alternative online media. The impression is that the role of the gatekeeper ceases to exist on the internet. Users are able to find the information they want, and furthermore, they have no need for someone else to choose what is important and what is not. Nevertheless, no one can argue that this is entirely valid (Singer, 2006). On the contrary, Cecay as cited in (Harper,2008:5) believe that gatekeeper role is still maintained in the online journalism. From the aforementioned therefore, it can be deduced that the role of gatekeeper cannot be totally overruled in the internet environment as pocket of its parts still apply to the online platform.

Another argument is on the agenda setting function of traditional media as to whether it is still maintained in the alternative media. In view of this, many believe that such role has been jeopardized by the internet users since people can now have access to the initial material and can seek information from different sources. On the other hand however, Pew Research Centre (2008) reveals that even when people seek news online, they turn to a large extent to dominant media. Similarly, the survey conducted by Messner and Distaso’s (2008) confirmed the above revelation.

This sudden paradigm shift, which results in traditional media losing its roles to alternative media, was not, but as a result of technological capabilities brought forth by web 2.0 like television without frontiers (TVXS), which allows interaction between the public and the journalists on the basis of hypertextuality, technological convergence and content customization (Osborn, 2001:6).

Still on the existing framework, technology has revolutionized almost every aspect of journalism, including content production and distribution. This impact however is not detected in functionality or in the software but rather in the structure of content and was mainly due to the native hypertext of the web and the new distribution channel that web 2.0 introduced. This explains why TVXS among the host of other media exploit the use of syndication technologies with particular reference to RSS feeds and other advanced techniques for sharing in the social media.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SOCIAL JOURNALISM: EXPLORING HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS SHAPING JOURNALISM

ALFRED HARMIDA

‘Social Journalism: Exploring how Social Media is Shaping Journalism’ is a 19 paged contributory research paper written by Alfred Harmida, a renowned and award winning online pioneer who transposes his wealth of experience in online journalism and as a lecturer at the University of British Colombia, Canada into the comity of the excellently written Handbook of Global Online Journalism, edited by Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis and published in 2012 by A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication. The work is a guide to understanding the new practices of journalism at the wake of web 2.0 technologies, contained in the part IV of the book.

The article is broadly divided into two main aspects of burning issues in modern journalism practices: the positive gains of using web 2.0 technologies to enhance journalism practices or what Harmida describes as Ambiance Journalism-an ecosystem of participatory journalism with audience cum journalist co-creating news and the challenges that come with the same. This participatory journalism has broken the barriers of the long dissatisfaction of traditional, passive and one-way communication process of the mass media.

At the introductory level, Harmida, the former BBC correspondent in the Middle East explores how global events such as July 2005 London bombings, the 2009 Twitter photo of the airplane in the Hudson River, and YouTube videos of the protests in Egypt in 2011 turned out to give a new paradigm to journalism practices. He explains that news organizations and their reporter turned to the eyewitnesses to these events as the last resort to get the latest to satisfy the curiosity of their ever waiting audience. It was a global coincidence however that these events happened at the same time the social media communication technologies were advancing at geometric space and also a time when Tim O’Reilly was popularizing web 2.0. This made it possible for citizens to use their mobile devices to capture newsworthy events and upload them into social media platforms that became irresistible for news organization to utilize. Harmida argues that media has become a space shared by journalist and citizens. This digital and interactive community has altered the way news is collated, processed and disseminated, breaking the jinx of professional gatekeeping and ethical journalism. As the social media become unstoppable, Harmida opines that it has been embraced by news organizations across globe.

In other to understand the concept of social media, Harmida delves into history of social media by tracing its root to thousands of years with the advent of letter writing till the time of more advanced technologies of web 2.0 invented by Tim O’Reilly in 2006. He reviews some important literatures about the definition of social media and finally opines that social media is defined by the characteristics of participation, openness, conversation, community and connectivity with web 2.0 technologies becoming paramount for its possibilities. Harmida called this new evolution of journalism an “Ambience Journalism” which he conceptualizes to mean a telemediated practice and experience driven by networked, always-on communication technologies and media system of immediacy and instantaneity. Through it, “journalism itself becomes fragmented, omnipresent and ingrained public spare online in the everyday media experience from both professional and non-professionals.

Harmida’s contributory piece is a panacea to abundant but unscholarly explorations into understanding the forms at which journalism today needs to be practiced. The author simplifies the linkage between social media and journalism by examining the positive contributions of social media to modern journalism practices, ranging from the wheels of utility of audience participation in the news productions through “photos shared on Flickr to 140 characters eyewitness comments on breaking news on Twitter and the whole involvement of audience in content generation”. This process has reinforced the values of audience to news organization in what Bruno (2011) described as “Twitter Effects”.

Another significant values of social media to journalism practices today as raised by Harmida is the news gathering process which has redefined, enhanced and promoted research in a better way to get the scoop by journalists. He reminds us of the eyewitness contributions to giving photos, videos or account especially when journalists are yet to be at the venue of events.

As the new paradigm of social media is sweeping fast across global journalism practices, media organizations who are laggards to accepting the innovations of social media technologies should prepare to fold-up as warned by Rodger Fiddler in his Mediamorphoses propositions. Harmida understood this and thereby elaborates the imperative of reporting the news on social media in his contributory piece. He argues that news organizations themselves have taken up social media as a way to expand and enhance their reportage especially to reflect fast-moving, multifaceted events taking place over a period of time and across a broad geographical space. He explains that big media like BBC, Guardian, and New York Times etc. have embraced these technologies of live blog or live pages, providing a constantly updated stream of text, audio, video form both journalist and “amateurs.” Harmida describes this process as “pro-am’ journalism. Through this, the practice of journalists monopolizing news sourcing is broken.

Another advantage Harmida elucidates is how news organizations are using social media as a mechanism to extend their reach with Facebook and Twitter championing the course. Harmida says “social media offers news organizations new ways to promote content, increase audience reach and potentially build up brand loyalty” through technologies that was not possible in the mainstream media.

How is social media potentially wreaking havoc to journalism practice with the technologies of web 2.0? Harmida argues that it poses financial and editorial challenges as well as eroding the gatekeeping function of the media usually championed by what Andrew Keen called Cult of the Amateurs, “weakening the hierarchical relationship between the mass media consumers and producers of media”.

Harmida did not just stop there; he also addresses the problems of verification of news by journalists as a problem which according to Kovech and Roseustail (1999) undermines the classical function of journalism which is providing a reliable account of events.

The most hit dark side of social media is the erosion of objectivity which Harmida describes as one of the key values in journalism. This tension keeps growing between objectivity and opinion as we witness today in blogs and other social media platforms-a negative side that news organizations are battling to curb.

As a professor of online journalism, Harmida raises alarm on the danger post by social media to journalist with regard to personal and professional identity especially between reporters’ opinion on their Facebook pages, Twitter retweet and the objectivity of the news organizations they work for. To address these challenges, Harmida argues that news organizations are seeking to balance the personal aspect of social media with long-held professional rules designed to protect journalists’ reputation.

To draw the curtain on the piece, Harmida reemphasizes on the values of social media and audience co-creation of news in journalism practices and the essence to which journalists are embracing the technologies of the web 2.0 to enhance their daily task of news production and dissemination.

Social Journalism: Exploring how Social Media is Shaping Journalism written by Alfred Harmida, is a fine recipe piece that should be utilized by bloggers, news organizations, advertisers, public relations practitioners, and anyone in the job of using social media to reach large audience which will help them to understanding the antics of web 2.0 technologies and its resources for effective practices of online journalism. However, there are huge security challenges such as scam, identity cloning, malwares, viruses, and privacy concerns etc. that come with the gains of using web 2.0 for journalism practices that the author did not address. Therefore, it is recommended that further reading is done by the readers of this piece to expand their knowledge on the threat pose by using social media technologies for journalism practices.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

OLINE NEWS REPORTING OF CRISIS EVENTS: INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF CITIZEN WITNESSING

Stuart Allan

Every individual is involved in what is known as citizen witnessing in one way or the other (Allan, 2012). The idea of eye-witness report appears as a means to express personal experience of public events. It is regarded as a way of connoting the mark of authenticity and credibility news photography, in particular offering an alternative way of claiming eye-witness status.

However, the coming of technology especially the social media has metamorphosed the journalism profession in terms of news reporting, crisis are reported through social media like twitter, facebook and so on. It is now transforming people into potential reporters, making everybody to be seen as a potential journalist. What calls for crisis and carnage calls for the attention of eye-witnessing. An eye witness would want to be the first to tell the story. Just like the 27year old citizen journalist, Ranganathan Vinikunar, who reported the mumbai's bomb explosion scenario and was credited by London's Daily Telegraph for providing perhaps the most amazing and horrowing first-hand account of the attack in a reportage, passing his series of photos on blog and twitter, showing mangled cars, blood stained roads and fleeing crowds (Beaunwat,2008).

Subsequently, as crisis keep prevailing, people are continuing to engage in not only performing the role of eye-witnessing but also the reportage of armature still photographs and videos, without minding the ethical conduct of journalism. like the public demonstration that happened in the aftermath of Iran's disputed presidential election with many young humans performing roles akin to citizen journalists in other to document what was happening (western journalists having been barred from reporting the protest) the images were those taken from grisly mobile telephone footage of 27year old Neda Agha Soltan, bleeding to death on the street (she had been shot in the chest, reportedly by a Basij paramilitary). Relayed to the world's news media, this "amateur" footage captured by a bystander and uploaded to the web, transformed Neda into a symbol of opposition, galvanizing support in Iranian diasporas as well as focusing international attention. The killing of Neda Agha Soltan, the grisly images of blood spreading across her face, became perhaps the defining sequence in the 10 days uprising against the regime in Tehran. Robert et al (2009) which led to a rallying call for a protest movement in need of a hero.

Furthermore, professional journalist, whom have studied mass communication and obtained a degree certificate in mass communication or journalism must work with ethics of journalism. That is what differentiate professional journalist and a citizen journalist. In terms of crisis report; professional journalist is conscious of the rules guiding crisis reporting but a citizen journalist is ignorant of such rules. All what they are after is to be credited by the world as an eye-witness reporting amateurly as well as having a first-hand information. They are not mindful of the future melee that may occur in the unspecialized and amateur method of crisis report they are doing. The role of eye-witnessing which has turned into citizen journalism has greatly mitigated the credibility of crisis report. The coming of internet and the advent of different social media platforms are also prime factors that are aggravating the activities of citizen journalists. Therefore, the extinction of internet/social media would not solve but setback the profession as such, it would not be the best solution but rather, when the principle of online censorship is deployed, it would to a great extent reduce amateur reportage of crisis stories by eyewitness/citizen journalist and increase the credibility in crisis news writing and reporting.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CONTRIBUTION TO AN ONLINE JOURNALISM LANGUAGE: MULTIMEDIA GRAMMAR

João Canavilhas

Internet has been of help to the work of journalism right from its creation to the extent that journalists cannot deviate from it. With the success of World Wide Web massive amount of information is available; journalists have the ability to create global information in a simple and inexpensive way. With the anticipation “innovation in Newspapers World Report that in the 2012 internet would be the major source of information” and this come to pass because both the journalism practice and the audience vividly source for information through the internet.

The aims of this chapter is to describe a multimedia grammar as Salaverria (2005) identified three characteristics to web journalism, which are: hypertextuality, multimediality and interactivity. Bardoel and Deuze (2001) added the fourth: customizing content (or personalization). To these four characteristics, other scholars later added some. They include: Memory (or archive), by Machado and Palacios; instantaneity (or continuous update) by Diaz Noci (2002) and Hal l(2001) and Zamith (2008) added Ubiquity. With the attribution of different characteristics to web journalism, all the authors agreed on the first three characteristics identified by Salaverria. The explanation of this characteristics will be given bellow:

Hypertextuality: with the use of hyperlinks linking two stacks of information, which allow the readers to surf within a story and give them the feeling of being in charge, also might reflect in the readers’ satisfaction and the website’s sense of trustworthiness (Berger 2001).

Multimediality: this is the ability to include the diverse contents such as video or audio as part of the news story, applying this in a story will bring more understanding and satisfaction level of the readers. (Zerba, 2003).

Interactivity: this has to do with the readers’ ability to build up a relationship with the contents of the news story. Bordewijk and Van Kaam (1998), identified four levels of interactivity (conversation, consultation, transmission and registration). The important level to this content is consultation because it is simple interactivity (the use of hypertext) increases the remembrance of news contents (Mesbah 2005).

Memory (or archiving): this is the capability of creating a permanent accessibility stock of information for internet users. Ubiquity is the capacity to make some content available at a global scale and accessed simultaneously from any place connected to the internet.

Argument has been going on in the literature, these features are hardly used by online media, thus frustrating the user who wants a news story tailored to web expectations, that is, with the use of hypertext and multimedia content (Vector 21; WSJ), which allows users to choose their own reading path (Canavilas, 2006).

Academic research argues that the systematic use of hypertext, multimedia and interactivity is fundamental to the improvement of web journalism (Hall,2001, Marco, 2003; paul,2005, Edo, 2002; Bryant, 2006, Fredin, 1997).The challenges of web journalism is to identify a hypertextual and multimedia language that allows differentiation from journalism in traditional media.

LANGUAGE FOR WEB JOURNALISM

The awareness of the unique language has been the major road-block for web journalism development. There can be change only by following what Salaverria (2005) identified as characteristics as mention above, this will distinguish web journalism from models of shovelware, also, it will bring forth gross to empower online business according to Sylvie (2008), “quality creates values, and value creates demands, something of which newspapers could use more”.

Lawrey and Choi (2006) argued that, online news stories should be less linear, more interactive, and more connected with other web sites with the use of hypertext to create several reading paths which the audience will find it easy to get what they want. It is understandable that, readers have a specific search goal and they tend to create their own reading patterns while some do not have these goals and they will be guide by the structural qualities of the format itself. Despite the possibilities offered by hypertext, it is important to consider the writing technique that will suit a particular story and the general technique is inverted pyramid. However, other authors posited that there are specific techniques for web journalism (Canavilhas, 2001, Garci, 2002; Salaverria 2005, Martinez and Ferrerria 2010). They posited that information must be provided in single text but the lead must be distributed along the story and the journalists should include an interesting element such as (who, what, when and where) that will keep the readers busy reading the story. However, Rich (1998) with other scholars argued that different technique should be adopted based on the type of news, that is, the nature of the story should determine the style that should be used.

WRITING TECHNIQUES WITH HYPERTEXT

It is understand that readers are always seeking connection that will suit their own interest online and individuals have their own paths of reading, due the individual interests, choices and decision. Journalists must adopt different news writing technique that is, providing a connecting thread that will allow the reader to know more about the context of specific paths of the story. Using hyperlink will serve as a guide that will offer different alternative reading in online news when links are presented they read the linked information set and go back to the original level when they realize the deeper level of information. Journalists must make sure they balance the size and scope of whatever article they give and its distribution in the media.

Still on the style of writing, Canavilhas (2006) suggested that, the traditional inverted pyramid of writing should be forgotten and the horizontal pyramid method be adopted. He argued that less important information should come first and the most important at the bottom. To him, the increase of information offered by each of the ‘W’ (who, what, why, when, where and how) will turn the graphic representation of web news into a horizontal pyramid, where the larger width of its base means more information. Following this technique to him, allow each reader to build their own story according to their information need. He suggested that information should be organize in four levels starting from less important to the most important. The first level is called ‘the base unit’, the second ‘explanation level’, the third ‘contextualization level’ and the forth ‘exploration level’. The base unit answers the essential, what, when, who, and where questions and the explanation level seeks to answers the why and how questions, completing the essential information of the news story. At the contextualization level the semantic resolution of the story increases to fulfil one of the distinctive features of web journalism: contextualized information and the last level of the story is the exploration level, which deepens certain details, trying to provide the most demanding readers with some answers.

LINK USAGE AND MARKING

Every journalist goal is to provide the readers with a quick and efficient understanding of his message; in this case, your writing style must be clear and concise. For online journalist, marking and linking of messages is very crucial because it gives the readers more information, increases citizen journalism participation, make work easier for the journalist and provide the readers with more sources of information within a brief message.

It is important for online journalists to know all the nitty-gritty of linking stories on the net. For instance, linked words are usually typed in different colors like a graphics mark. A link can be marked by icons or labels. Links serve as reading clues to readers within the text. However, too much of links is bad because it can cause distraction to the readers either in times of confusion or even leaving the site and never return. It is advisable that links should be written in active verbal form, acronyms or words with strong semantic connection to the linked information site.

INTEGRATING MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

There are some certain rules in which the integration of multimedia contents in the story should follow, the multimedia usage in web news include the videos, sounds, and graphics complement the text information. In multimedia content, photos should be used to illustrate the “who” of a news story. Thus, justifying a link placed on the main news character.

Moving image (video). This is different from photos because photos occupy just small portion of newspaper pages, where the text is dominant; images use all the available space on television, reducing the amount of text and sub-titles. This moving images produces reality more accurately. However, videos used as a complimentary feature cannot produce a complete story as is done in television, but is used as a fragment adding to the news story. Thus, motion picture should be use when there is doubt over interpretation, not only that but also where a written explanation of events would be too long.

CHAPTER 20

THE PARADOX OF PERSONALIZATION: THE SOCIAL AND REFLEXIVE TURN OF ADAPTIVE NEWS

Neil Thurman and

Steve Schifferres

INTRODUCTION

The chapter is basically talking about personalization of information and how effective the internet will be to its consumers in the future. Some argued that it will be revolutionary. This means consumers will no longer be seen as passive would instead use the tool to interact and produce their own quota to the masses.

The internet is believed to be a tool that will bypass conventional channels of information such as TV, Radio and Newspapers etc. Negroponte's (1995), prediction that newspapers could be replaced with “Daily me," where individuals shaped the news to their own taste and preferences by creating customized news sites, each different from the other. Even though, the utopian idea came under attack by those who believed that the idea is wrong. After all this argument, Blog appeared to be a way of bypassing Journalist and other gatekeepers and it seemed to confirm the hopes and fears of commentators.

PERSONALIZATION

Personalization is seen by the following scholars or authors (Deuze, 2003:68; Meikle, 2009: 178; Singer, 2003:147) as part of surveys of interactivity." The features include “moving images", “audio”, and “hyperlinks”.

Building on the work of Bucy (2004), they see personalization as a form of user to user and system interactivity that uses a set of technological features to adapt the content, delivery and arrangement of communication to individual users explicitly registered and or implicitly determined preferences.

The Longman Dictionary defines personalization as an act of putting your name or initials on something or decoration of something on your own way. So when viewed from the angle of this chapter it is seen as a way of making news and information of others your personal property using internet-enabled system to adapt the content. However, we have two types of personalization: explicit personalization and implicit one. The explicit is the one that uses direct user imputation while the implicit is the one which infers preferences from data collected, e.g. Via a registration process or via the use of software’s that monitors users’ activity ( Gauch et al. 2007) and a table was given by Thurman ( 2011) which was recorded by the 2010 content survey.

The chapter goes on by giving us some examples of user adapted programmes and applications like Adobe flash player, audio visual slides shows, twitter “RSS feeds" etc. By looking at the few listed above categories particularly in explicit personalization where users can get special email, Newsletters with information of interest to them, syndicates dress that cover particular categories of news, SMS alerts or their mobile phones or widget to put on their homes or office computers that flash up breaking news. That is to say with that they can shape, change and adapt news to suit their interest.

KEY DEBATES

The key debates examined the growth of personalized news and went straight to ask the following question:

1) As we have seen, of how active media audiences are in the consumption of news, or whether they are just passive consumers, happily to accepting contents determined by editors.

2) Why do mass media organizations adopt such strategies? Are they profitable and consistent with their normal ways of doing things or have they required

3) To what extent does personalization challenge the widely accepted theory that journalist act as gatekeepers for the public, limiting their access to news?

To briefly explain the above debates, it is not out of place to say that adapting new technology in disseminating news and technology in disseminating news and information to the public is commendable due to the fact that people today can receive and comment on news via their cell phones. Taking into consideration Marshall Mcluhan's assertions that "the medium is the message",” the massage", and “Hot and cool model " that is to say technology is a major determinant of news and it is profitable and very easy to access by everyone.

However, a pew survey of America revealed that 15% received news via email, 7% via an RSS reader and 22% via a customizable web page. By looking at this figures and survey we will tend to go back to Negroponte's (1995) prediction that newspapers could be replaced with a " Daily me" where individuals shape the news in other to suit their interest by creating customized sites. News today is filtered using facebook, twitter, whatsapp etc. using various types of devices like Blackberry, iPhone, Tecno, Sony Ericson etc. FT.com, Guardian.co.uk, Mirror.co.uk etc. are all sites that are personalized and filtered using different devices.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this study demonstrates or shows that “personalization" is a fluid rather than fixed concept in the online news environment. Our media organization world wide has been adapting to so many strategies in other to personalize media content.

However, the data in this chapter explore the evolution of personalization strategies from active audience to passive audience reflecting a more general reflexive turn in online news provision. The entire work of the two authors or scholars Neil Thurman and Steve Schifferes is to tell us what personalization of media content is and why it came to existence and how it is been used in practice. It is also noted that the migration of newspapers readers to the web, ramping up the size of an online audience are cruel in trying to maintain revenue, particularly through advertising.

The main focus of this chapter is about how media content are personalized by technological advancement which as a result of that journalist are no longer considered as gatekeepers but rather considered as news filters.

CHAPTER 21

BRAZILIAN NEWS BLOGS AND MAINSTREAM NEWS ORGANIZATION: TENSION: SYMBIOSIS OR INDEPENDENCY?

Olga Guedes Bailey

Francisco Paulo

Jamil Marques

This chapter was a contribution written by Olga Guedes Bailey and Francisco Paulo Jamil Marques. In this chapter the authors discussed on how (ICT) advancement alter journalism practice. They specifically focused on the impact of blogs on mainstream media in Brazil and how it changed the news collection, processing, dissemination and even reception.

However, they argue that other factors should be considered beyond advancement in technology such as cheap and easy access to information to know what is happening around the world. As a result of this ugly trend, the primary functions of journalist as information provider become somehow and news market competition.

CONTEXT OF BLOG IN BRAZIL

The creation of blogs in Brazil by independent journalists and news organization become alternative to reach large audience. Blog is easy medium to use and enable independent journalists to get their stories published instantly without restriction enshrined by traditional media. One can open blog without having technical knowledge on journalism. Blog enable readers to contribute and comment on news content. Blog became popular in 2008 where 133 million open blog account with 900 million post daily( De zuniga, puig-i-Abril and Rojas, 2009).

In the case of Brazil, blogs became relevant during the last presidential election in 2010 which enabled public to obtain information beyond the views of traditional news organization. The authors cited a report published by comscore company: “One of the main reason for blog popularity in Brazil was presidential election conducted in October and November 2010 where 39.3 million people accessed blog and visited 2.25 billion blog sites during the election”. Many organizations noticed that blog can be used to attract vast audience and also help to create closer contact between organization and the public by giving them updated information and maintain their present to maximize profit. For instance Brazilian Federal Senate and Petrobras lunched blogs to provide updated information and respond to inaccurate information published by mainstream news organization. These examples highlight the effects of blogs on mainstream news organization in Brazil.

Traditional news media understood that creating blog is the only solution to them. Creating news blog will alter the relationship between journalist and mainstream organization. This is because the independent blogger will demand for editorial independence.

HOSTORY OF BLOGS AND JOURNALISM IN THE BRAZILIAN CASE: FROM RESISTENCE TO COLONIZATION.

Many scholars thought that blog will alter journalism practice. For instance changes in term of news production, distribution and consumption. This led to the practice of citizen journalism. Blog will offer information and important topics that were not discussed in mainstream news media. It enabled participation between content producer and the audience. Blog employed different method of telling stories because of multimediality and hypertextuality.

Popularity of news blogs in Brazil is motivated by plurality of voices or view point since the mainstream news organizations are controlled by few individuals. According to (Lima, 2001; Ramos and Santos 2007) “ mainstream media had been criticized regarding frame and focus in their news coverage, lack of plurality of views and minority voices. From these views, blog reduce the power of mainstream media. However, mainstream media colonized blogs in Brazil because most of popular blogs based in portal of mainstream media. Also these mainstream news media created their own blogs to expand audience.

NEWS BLOGS: RECONFIGURING JOURNALISM?

The rapid increase of news blogs has brought about reconstruction of news published by mainstream news organization to serve the interest of their readers. This led to the change in journalism practice. However, the change in journalism practice isn’t solely brought by the technological advancement instead other factors should be considered, for instance, cheap and free access to information around the world. According to Postman (1992) “the change brought about by technology is ecological changing meaning that when you remove one house in an environment. You are left with the absence of one house and also if you build a new house in an environment.

The reason why blogs reproduced news published by mainstream media is because of immediacy of update, hypertext link and interactivity. This method demand new approach to structure information. The implication is that the mistake avoided by mainstream news media is now common in blogs.

Moreover, the trust between journalists. bloggers and readers is based on two factors. The first is positive image of the blogger while working in mainstream media. The personality of journalist blogger enables him/her to provide opinion on issues relevant to the readers. Secondly the readers hope that the blogs offer accurate information and opinion from the journalist they trust. The readers always dwell on the position of journalist’s news blogs on political issues.

BLOGS, JOURNALISM AND NEWS ORGANIZATIONS: TENSIONS, SYMBIOSIS AND INDEPENDENCE?

Most of the popular news blogs in Brazil are based in the portal of mainstream news media. A lot of blogs were created by independent journalists. This is also an advantage to independent journalists and also helps mainstream news media to attract advertisers.

Despite this symbiotic relationship, a blogger might decide to change to other news portal competitors and the readers might follow him because of the trust they have in him. For example in 2007 Richard Noblat moved from Estado newspaper portal to O Globo online portal. Prominent journalists news bloggers are not subjected to the restriction enshrined by mainstream media. They have editorial independent.

The tension in the relationship between journalist, news bloggers and news organization is obvious, for example, editorial independence demanded by the blogger. The mainstream media might lose control over the blogger. However, the relationship is symbiotic, meaning both of them benefit from each other.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

A CHANCE FOR DIVERSITY? AUSTRALIAN ONLINE JOURNALISM

Axel Bruns

This article snaps a close-up shot at the journalism practice within the Australian online and mainstream media landscape. It highlights the tension disrupting the reporting and publishing techniques of journalistic writings, resulted from the over concentration of media ownership among the Australians. This control therefore led to the emergence of proprietors’ ego-centric analysis of happenings in the media repertoire, rather than professionally-guided and people-centered discussion of events. Popular among the papers and magazines attuned to this tradition include The Australian, Brisbane Times, The Bulletin, Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL), Newsweek etc.

Until the establishment of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Australian media industry operated as status symbols of its owners and politicians, who struggle to establish an imprint of their ideologies within the framework of public discourse. This ABC, under the leadership of its Managing Director mark Scott, came on board to protect the open media market from the undue influence of government-funded broadcasters through unbiased analyses of events by dispassionate observers. According to focus (2010)

The ABC now provides rapid online transcript and podcasts for a large number of its key news bulletins and current affairs shows in both television and radio, as well as significant online only-coverage. Additionally, it has also followed the BBC iPlayer example by offering iView, a multimedia application that allows for online catch-up viewing of its news and entertainment shows as well as providing access to online only content.

Despite this giant effort to provide free access to society-rooted news stories, the ABC was questioned by its commercial rivals for distorting the market. This challenge therefore, opened up a fresh edition of debate over who takes the lead in informing the society about their political, economic and social endeavors. The debate escalated even beyond the axis of ABC and its mainstream commercial counterparts, it sets up a breeding ground for the establishment of smaller, independent news and commentary sites, all simultaneously trying to assume the leading position in setting agenda within the Australian media landscape.

As this competition become very stiff, there was a paradigm shift to a politicization of journalism practice in Australia. Politicization here refers to a perceived gradual shift from a straighter forward reporting of the facts to a focus on political-and politically partisan-interpretation of the news stories, even within the news report itself.

However, what is problematic is not the Politicization of the media but the inability of the various media outlets to guarantee free flow of information in the market place of ideas within the confine political discourse of Australians. This shackle can be eliminated if the various news sites would rise above their personal interest and allow the ethical provision of the profession to reign.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Online Journalism in Germany

Thomas Hanitzsch

Thorsten Quandt

Over the years, studies upon studies have been conducted to review the state of German online journalism, its development, potential, and current challenges in relation to traditional mainstream media. The German online journalism, though stuck at the first two stages of online journalism-shovelware and interactivity (as classified by Pavlik, 1997), have redirected the face of journalism by shifting control over public communication from media institutions to users by means of social networking, collaboration and participation (Paulussen et al, 2007). This therefore generated tension between professional journalists and their online counterparts. The mainstream media according to Bruns (2005) may have to rethink their social roles, from acting as gatekeepers to serving communities as gate watchers.

With this debate gaining popularity, scholars discovered significant similarities alongside substantial differences with respect to questions of performance between mainstream and alternative online media. To the similarities, Neuberger, Nuernbergk and Rischke’s (2009) research identified striking similarities in the type of qualification that ranked highest among the interviewed chief editors, which include excellent general education, writing and editing skills, sound professional education in journalism and a willingness to communicate with users. This indicate once again that online journalism do not differ from their colleagues working for traditional media in terms of their professional views. Others went further to view online journalists to even be more attuned to the ideals of neutral and speedy dissemination of information.

However, striking differences emerged with respect to questions of performance. While traditional journalists are bound with the principles of objectivity, accuracy, credibility and thoroughness, bloggers are associated with other principles such as partiality, subjectivity, open to participation and discussion. These dividing lines were further confirmed by the Rischke’s (2009) survey in which significant number of the population studied agreed that weblogs have nothing to do with journalism.

However, online journalism and-perhaps journalism in general- has been faced with various challenges, which constrains its proper functioning in Germany. These challenges, among other things, are presumed to have emanated from the participatory potential of the internet. The erosion of traditional boundaries between producers and users, which is referred to as “produsage”, has opened up new means of interaction between writers and producers, while the inclusion of multimedia promised to herald innovative forms storytelling (Bruns, 2005).

Other challenges, as identified by scholars, are that most content produced by German online media are second hand, which emanate from the material offered by their parent media and news agencies. More so, online journalist are described as much younger breed of media professionals, with less experience in handling news content compared to their counterpart in the mainstream media.

Similarly, another factor that is militating against the activities of online journalism is the issue of credibility, especially on stories that have political undertone. Von Pape and Quandt (2010) carried out a representative survey of 999 audience members shortly after the German general election in 2009. The findings indicated that Germans still refer back to credible (traditional) news sources when it comes to relevant political content.

Standing on the basis of the facts highlighted above, one can conclude that online communication has drastically revolutionized journalism profession in Germany. However, German media when compared with other countries can be said to be lagging behind as it’s very skeptical in their effort to implement participative features of online environment.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

THE EVOLUTION AND CHALLENGES OF ONLINE JOURNALISM IN NIGERIA

Farooq A. Kperogi

As Nigeria’s independence was aided massively by Nigerians in diaspora, so is it in the evolution of the Nigerian online journalism. Though the first online newspaper to shift its content to online was “post express” by Stanley Macebuh, subsequently other notable newspapers in Nigeria began to follow the suit. The Guardian, Punch, Vanguard and This Day newspapers all had their website in early 2000s. However, the operations of these homeland newspapers online were not encouraging due to the fact that they lack investigative spirit and advocacy journalism coupled with unsophisticated web to upgrade their activities.

Thus, these deficiencies in homeland online fashion of journalism prompted Nigerian migratory elites in the diaspora to see the establishment of online journalism as inevitable to enhance accountability of Nigerian politician. Meanwhile the first online publication by Nigerians in diaspora was Elendu Report.com owned by Jonathan Elendu, permanent USA resident. Sahara reporter owned by Sowore Omoyele, new york based activist. It grew up from Elendu.com, time of nigeria.com was established by Maryland based Nigerian journalist called sunny offili. Nigeria village square.com was established in 2003 by a group of immigrant Nigerians based in the USA and many more.

However, the popularity and acceptance of the aforementioned online publications was increasing tremendously due to their credibility and non-involvement in political affairs of their homeland, not being loyal to homeland politicians unlike homeland media. Another problem that led to the establishment of online publication was that Nigerian mainstream media lack interactivity, multimediality and hypertexuality. Some newspapers are even demanding for money before readers can register with them, some are requesting for readers’ personal details as a form of censorship before you can register with them. “When big media companies consider having a conversation with their audiences, they tend not to push many boundaries” (Gillmori, 2004:)

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that diaspora online publications have contents that is real, active and updated in real time due to the fact that they access to some hidden information about Nigerian politician coming to embark on illegal activities in foreign countries. Some examples include coverage of a governor dancing with prostitutes in Dubai hotel about something prohibited in the state he is governing. Similarly, there is freedom of information act that gives chances to foreign online journalists and such liberty is not available to mainstream media in Nigeria.

Despite the enormous role played by diaspora online publications in democratization of information it seems all are not well between them and homeland journalists. Nigerian journalists believe that the activities of diaspora online journalism is undermining their surveillance and watchdog role people entrusted in them therefore, it led to losing of credibility and reliability in the mind of their audiences. This can clearly be seen when a foreign online journalist was arrested by Nigerian police for blackmailing. Pathetically, it was only punch newspaper that gave the story prominence. Other newspapers showed less concern and pretend as if nothing happened.

PERCEPTION OF GOVERNMENT AND TRADITIONAL MEDIA ON DIASPORA CITIZEN MEDIA

A lot of reactions have been made by Nigerian government and unscrupulous politicians, policy makers, and political stakeholders to put an end to diaspora media due to the fact that they embark mostly on investigative journalism. They term diaspora media as blackmailers, opposition bloggers that is inciting insurrection, rebellion, contempt, chaos, and infidelity of citizens to Nigerian government.

Going by the letter written by Ochonu 2008, it is clearly seeing how Nigerian government has been making effort to hack the radical website of Sowore omoyele, sahara reporters. The letter goes thus, “we are aware that domain by proxy is a reputable company. We are worried that website http://www.saharareporters.com/ hosted with domains by proxy is being used for subversive dissemination of information against the president and the people of the federal republic of Nigeria. We have read the terms of registration of websites which say that any website used for illegal purposes morally objectionable defamatory libelous articles will be closed down. Please note that http://Saharareporter.Com has violated the laws by writing articles that are treasonable offence in Nigeria. We therefore request that as a company you are to shut down http:// saharareporter.com immediately to avoid any illegal proceeding which may affect your company and affect your business”.

The above letter has clearly shown how Nigeria government has been doing everything within her capability to bring down the radical website which is yet to achieve up to this moment. Similarly part of the effort employed by Nigerian government to stop diaspora online media was arrest of founders when they traveled to Nigeria. The case of Elendu was a best example to buttress this. He was arrested and accused of being the sponsor of a “guerilla news agency” and he was charged of sedition by state security services (SSS). Surprisingly none of the mainstream home land media gave the arrest of Elendu prominence in their reports. This has clearly shown how jealousy and hatred mainstream media have towards diaspora online media. The arrest of Emmanuel Asiwe the founder of Huhu online’s edition when he travelled to Nigeria was another measure taken by Nigerian government to put an end to diaspora online media.

Despite all these threatening measures to stop the activities of diaspora media, they are becoming more powerful and influential virtually every day to the extent opposition politicians get fed up with domestic media’s double standards and timidity. Once a story is given prominence in diaspora media, it becomes an agenda for domestic mainstream media even if they are reluctant to cover the story before, to exemplify this, Dino Melaye certificate saga by sahara reporters, it later became daily agenda among domestic mainstream media. Despite the fact that diaspora media serve as source of news to domestic mainstream, the hatred between them still continue to grow tremendously as mainstream media is calling diaspora online media all sort of name to show their jealousy such as “online news agency” “offshore news site” “guerilla sites” and so on. Meanwhile, with the activities of diaspora Nigerian online media, they are able to expose and embarrass some unscrupulous politicians who are going abroad to carryout hiding agenda which is very difficult for homeland media due to the fact that their investigative, surveillance and watchdog roles have been compromised overtime.

ONLINE MEDIA AND THE 2011 GENERAL ELECTION

Prior to 2011 election, rigging was part and parcel of Nigeria election, flashing back to 2007 general election, it is a known fact that the election was massively rigged coupled with snatching of ballot boxes, killing of INEC staff, intimidation of electorates, inflation of election figure to favor the party in power and many more. Therefore, these were able to be achieved as inactivity of social media and lack of sophisticated internet facilities. Things were not the same again in 2011 general election as citizens are exposing themselves to internet. Internet and social media aid citizen participation in the election. Thousands of web based citizens initiatives quickly sprouted. The most popular initiatives were “reclaimnaija: election incident report system (www.reclaimnaija.net), it was an activist citizen initiatives that was formed to ensure transparency in the conduct of 2011 general election through citizen reporting. Many citizen reports captured the video evidence of election rigging in many part of the country and aggrieved politicians who were at the receiving and electoral victories of their opponents.

It must clearly state however that, virtually every citizen is now journalist due to the opportunity given to them by online journalism, therefore, Nigerian government should promote online journalism rather than pose a threat to it, authoritatively speaking, whether government assists or is against online journalism, it has come to stay because it aids democratization of information and serve as a platform for the voiceless to air their views without subjecting them to any form of intimidation, prosecution, persecution and harassment

CHAPTER 25

DOING JOURNALISM ONLINE: HOW UK NEWS ORGANIZATIONS HAVE ADAPTED IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET

Kostas Saltzis

Kostas Saltzis’ paper looks at how the emergence of online journalism in the United Kingdom has posed threats to existing media thereby forcing the traditional media to think through ways to adapt to the changes brought about by the internet. However this was not the perception media owners had. It was thought that the emergence of online journalism in the United Kingdom first explored by ‘electronic telegraph’ was going to bring development to the newspaper business.

The new medium which has made possible the practice of journalism has frightened traditional media owners in the United Kingdom. There was this fear that online journalism was going to ‘cannibalize” the traditional newspaper, magazine. By ‘cannibalism’ Saltzis (2012) explained that it was feared that the new medium was going to take away newspaper readers by offering news stories that were hitherto sold, free, on an online website.

Saltzis (2012) noted that “the initial approach of traditional media organizations toward the internet was at best cautious and at worst driven by fear”.

Therefore, to adapt to this threatening changes brought by the internet, the traditional media organizations took adaptive measures that “led to radical restructuring, new working cultures, and new forms of journalism, while it created the conditions for a re-evaluation of the role of journalists”.

Furthermore traditional media like BBC, The Guardian and later Mailonline, created an online presence, invested early and heavily in the new online business ventures to attract traffic to their websites. However, no picture was painted about what commercial gain this would result to.

As part of the adaptive measures, media like the Guardian, BBC, Sky News, etc. described their online websites as multimedia instead of single media. This thus has brought about the concept of multimediality in online journalism where a number of media content formats like sound, pictures, videos and electronically written texts are combined to tell stories online. This was “based on media-neutral competitive advantages and to share resources between their online and ‘offline’ outputs”.

The emergence of online journalism has also redefined the skills a journalist needs to possess. A journalist now needs to be versatile, possessing multiple skills to cope with the multimedia nature of the online practice of journalism. A print journalist now needs to possess skills in video and audio editing, photography etc. Hence, works earlier done by technicians are now done by journalist who now handles the works of more than one person.

Moreover, the gate-keeping role of the journalist has been limited with the ever increasing alternative news sources online and competition. This can be seen even today, as a lot of novices and amateurs have flocked into the online media to practice journalism by the use of blogs or the social media.

Subsequent emergence of social media platforms blogs and other interactive media has offered journalists the opportunity to know their audience through feedback.

In this work, Kostas Saltzis has made an effort to chart the major changes in the traditional news media and journalism in the United Kingdom as a result of the ever increasing importance of the internet.

In a comparative analysis between the new media and old media, Saltzis (2012) implied that the emergence of radio and television has threatened the existence of newspaper. The broadcast media received the blame for the fall in the level of readership. More so, the threat became more serious with the commencement of 24-hour broadcasting of television stations. Television broadcasting has provided services provided by newspaper, regularly and faster than newspaper and that has made newspaper inessential.

Due to the threat the newspaper industry has experienced from the emergent broadcast media, particularly television, the newspaper industry was quick in creating and online platform when the internet evolved, so as to prevent been left behind in the new development. “This was partly due to the fact that the Internet represented a far more threatening challenge for newspapers” Saltzis (2012). Going details into how the threat is posed, Franklin (1997) cited in Saltzis (2012) says “virtually everything that newspapers provide, information and entertainment, is now offered more readily, cheaply, efficiently and interestingly by some other news medium” and because of this, “the demise of newspapers seems inevitable”.

Looking at why the audience would consider the online news product instead of the offline newspapers, Fidler (1997), cited in Saltzis (2012) explained that the internet is cheaper in production and distribution since there is no need for printing on paper or physical transportation/distribution of the news product. Bell (2005) cited in Saltzis (2012) also added that online journalism has more future because of its “searchability”, immediacy and “permanence”.

It is not only the newspaper industry that the internet has threatened. The television industry has also been intimidated. Although the challenge was similar to that of the newspaper, it was less intense. Mason (2006) says “…the Internet has challenged television in the crucial area

of speed, by matching or even beating it”. More so, it has the capacity to archive more information than television. Moreover, that the internet has the speed to stream videos has also made the internet and its websites competitors to television (Saltzis, 2012 pg464).

In consequence, the United Kingdom has experienced a decline in readership of newspaper and viewership of television. This has been blamed on the emergence of the internet and its multimedia nature. However, although it has played a significant role in this decline, Saltzis (2012) says “the Internet has not been the only reason behind this so-called “crisis of journalism””. Resistance to change was partly the reasons.

Also discussing on the change the media ecology has experienced, Saltzis (2012) described the new media as a “multimedia”. This is different from the old or traditional media which is “single”. This change has brought about both cultural and media convergence. News providers have now been globalized and competition is done between traditions and cultures that have different geographical location. Moreover, “diverse online news market brings together broadcasters, newspapers, news aggregators, news blogs, tweets, and so on, all of which may be based anywhere around the world” (Saltzis, 2012).

The shift of focus from offline to online media in the United Kingdom has not provided financial gains or “revenue model” for the newspaper at the beginning. The market being an open market place where advertisers can target their audiences directly has not been financially productive to the newspapers in their online ventures. Although newspapers like mailonline and the guardian.co.uk having millions of people visiting their sites daily which was far more than their daily circulation, the revenue generated from advert is nothing compared to the one generated offline.

Google as a search engine has hijacked most of the revenue for advertising in the United Kingdom and that has been an issue of concern to online media owners. Their grievance was that Google only offers services provided by others. The providers have to pay money and make less. Google therefore by offering what others are providing makes much more than the original information providers. ”Particularly newspaper managers have criticized Google for not spending “a penny on any kind of journalism at all and yet they are making money out of our journalism” (Bailey quoted in Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2010)”. All attempts by the media owners to curtail this through legislation proved futile.

To cope with the inability to generate adequate revenue online, various online media like FT.com made their websites ones for subscription. That people have to subscribe. However, this still did not get them out of the woods.

One of the major things experienced in journalism in the United Kingdom as a result of the emergence of the online media made possible by the internet was the change that has occurred in the news room. The online digital newsroom was converged with the offline and conventional newsroom; “The main idea behind newsroom convergence has been to “write once and publish everywhere”” (Saltzis, 2012). Therefore publication is done once and for all for media houses that have both online and offline media platforms. This has eliminated the problem of duplication of work that was experienced when writing and distributing separately on the two media forms. The changes in newsroom have been observed in media houses in the United Kingdom in houses like, Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, and the BBC.

(Saltzis, 2012) concluded by saying this:

From the perspective of the news industry, however, the key question remains whether

what we call “news organizations” will continue in their existing forms, mainly because

the old business models seem doomed in the current state. The picture that is emerging

is that of underfunded online journalism being challenged by citizens and bloggers

around the world, news aggregators stealing revenue, and an ultra-competitive news

market. This might just be a transition moment for those traditional businesses trying to

find new ways of becoming profitable in a new environment. But news organizations as

the locus where professional journalists come together to share and process information

will always be relevant irrespective of business models.

CHAPTER 26

J-BLOGGING IN CHINA: DEVELOPMENT, SIGNIFICANCE, AND CHALLENGES

Jin Shang and Hao Zhang

This chapter looks at the development of journalism blogging in China with a focus on its significance and challenges. According to the authors, Shang and Zhang (2012) the internet has made significant improvement in information interactivity in China. The new media they further said has informed people through stories that are not within the scope of traditional mass media. One of these new media channel is what they referred to as journalism blogging or j-blogging for short. The new media called journalism blogging has increased in popularity in China because of the opportunities it offers for both journalists and the citizens to express themselves. Its emergence has given the people of China more sources of news and its participatory features have made the audience to participate not only as consumers but producers or contributors.

To have a light that would shine the path to understanding the historical development of blogging, Shang and Zhang (2012) gave the definition of blogging according to some scholars. Cited in Shang and Zhang (2012), Blood (2003) defines blogging as “the production of easy-to-create online web pages with short but regularly updated items of information and commentary, usually with links to information and commentary on other web sites”. Blogging are classified based on the nature of their contents and how the contents are delivered.

Initially, blogs were managed by professional Journalists who publish news stories and other ‘trivialities, including their personal lives and opinions.

Using blogs for journalism has been advanced greatly with the surfacing of the term blog or weblogs in the 1990s. One of the early bloggers is Paul Andrews who in 2001 open a blog. He was a well-known IT journalist and columnist for the Seattle Times who officially became a journalism blogger in 2001. According to him, blogs give voice to the voiceless and a room for the amateur to practice journalism.

Blogs are of different types. Some report on wars, blogs created by mainstream news media, video blogs.

Christopher Allbritton who is a former Associated Press (AP) and New York Daily News reporter used his blog ‘back to Iraq’ to report the wars in Iraq in 2003. After he raised US$15 000 from his readers, he became the Internet’s “first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger” (POV, 2004).

Many other media organizations and individuals later saw blogging as a worthy and necessary venture and decided to own a blog.

Associated Press, (AP) launched its news blog “Far and Wide” in April 2007, CNN established a video blog called iReport, Los Angeles Times blog under Tony Pierce and most remarkably the blog opened by BBC.

The relationship between journalism and blogging implicitly is that of check and balance. Bloggers challenge journalists to improve on the standard of their practice by providing detailed and balanced information on events. This is ensured by the nature of reports of bloggers who go far and wide to gather reports and present sides not captured by journalist. Therefore, if journalist do not capture, bloggers would.

“The impact of blogging on journalism is reshaping the professional process. In fact, blogs have some advantages: they are relatively inexpensive to produce and have the power to reach large audiences quickly in a way more traditionally associated with the large, complex news organizations that were considered essential for disseminating messages under the traditional definition of “mass communication” (Severin and Tankard, 2000 cited in Shang and Zhang,)”.

The emergence of journalism blogs in China is the consequence of the growth of blogs in China with the emergence of blogchina.com created by Fang Xingdong in 2002. The goal of Fang Xingdong according to Shang and Zhang (2012) is “to use this new method to encourage Chinese intellectuals to share opinions and other relevant information with the public in order to further promote China’s democratic reform”.

Although journalism blogging has been in China, it first came to the Chinese Public during “Liang Hui” period in 2006 (Zeng and Xie 2006 cited in Shang and Zhang 2006). Subsequently, more and more people began blogging. The blooming of j-blogging in China has prompted the development of various groups of journalism blog circles pertaining to different regions or professions (Hu, 2007) cited in Shang and Zhang (2012). Although there was good level of involvement in journalism blogging in China because of good network, the internet web server on which the journalism blogs are based, located in China mainland restricts a number of posts. This is because the posts are been censored to ensure that there is compliance to the strict censorship. The posts are censored for security reasons.

Hu (2007) cited in Shang and Zhang (2012) says Chinese journalism blogs can be categorized into six. The first is that of unpublished works, the second category is for ‘stories behind the news’, the third ‘is to add fresh content or other related information to the already existing newspaper reports or television programs’ the fourth is for disseminating news already on the mass media for wider reach, fifth is used for getting feedback from the audience through interaction, and the last is used for publishing things about the journalist to increase their celebrity status.

Looking at what effect blogging has had on journalism, Feng (2006) cited in Shang and Zhang (2006) says the effect in China context is positive, that unlike other countries, blogs in China are maintained by professional journalists who employ every professional code and skill in collating, processing and dissemination of information through blogs. They do thorough investigation and also use mobile devices in their work. ‘Journalism blogs often show extraordinary insight and wisdom that can demonstrate the authenticity and objectivity of news, and therefore have won the trust of Internet users in China’ (Shang and Zhang, 2012).

Journalism blogs have been significant in China in that they “act as a bridge linking the media and web sites to their audience. Additionally, plenty of visits and clicks by Internet citizens bring considerable social and economic benefits for web sites.”

To some extent, j-blogs help to ameliorate the limits on freedom of speech and expression in mainland China (Hu, 2007 cited in Shang and Zhang 2012). It has also given the journalists and the audience a medium for self-expression. Even those things that the traditional media consider trivial are given adequate spaces on blogs.

When compared to that of the ‘West’, journalism blogging in China is freer. An investigation conducted by Pang concluded that there are no written rules to restrict journalists from writing blogs. This implies freedom in the practice of journalism blogging. This is not so in the ‘West’ ‘where there are often very detailed regulations for journalism blog publications. Much of the western media has very specific restrictions on journalism blogs’.

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