Journalism Online and Offline

I would contend that the situation has changed a great deal in almost ten years. In part due to the passage of time, in part due to the work of hundreds of scholars in the now mature field of journalism studies, it is far easier to write this essay than it would have been in 2010. The goal of any chapter on “journalism online and offline,” then, must be to combine stock-taking and intellectual table setting with some thoughts on what future research on digital news, and digital cultural production more generally, might look like. To accomplish this, the following pages are divided into three sections. The first section is historical, dividing the history of online news into four phases—what I can the “participatory era,” the “crisis era,” the “platform era,” and the “populist era.” The second section focuses more on the academic journalism research both to date and in the future, specifically looking at work from the sociology of the professions, science and technology studies, economics, history, political communication, and more humanities inflected research. The third and final section returns to more normative questions, specifically considering three areas: the relationship between the institutional press and the state, questions of what makes for good digital participation, and finally, the role of emotion and reason in journalism and in political life more generally.