Marcel Broersma
Biographic Data
| ID | 372997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcel Broersma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcel |
| FAMILY NAME | Broersma |
| SIGNATURE | BROERSMA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7342-3472 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 656 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Understanding young adults’ resilience to disinformation: A cross-national analysis of daily tactics and resources to navigate information
Little is known about how resilience to disinformation develops and manifests in people’s daily lives. Addressing this gap, our study investigates young adults’ tactics for navigating disinformation and the resources they draw from throughout this process. Based on 29 semi-structured interviews with young adults (aged 18–32) in Germany and the Netherlands, we develop a taxonomy of tactics for navigating disinformation. Our comparative analysis re…
Platform configurations and isomorphism: An analytical framework for longitudinal and comparative research of public service media
This article introduces and advances the Platform Configurations and Isomorphism (PCI) framework. It integrates the platform configuration concept with institutional theory to offer a framework for analyzing Public Service Media (PSM) interactions with social media platforms in the provision of news across national contexts and over time. Based on the PCI framework, we conduct a longitudinal qualitative document analysis of how PSM organizations …
News circulation on social media platforms: A longitudinal study of news sharing and source diversity
This study investigates the extent to which Dutch-language Twitter did reflect a diverse news ecosystem by examining how structurally distinct news sources were shared between 2016 and 2022. While platforms are often seen as democratizing news distribution, few studies have analyzed how different media categories adapt to the same infrastructural conditions over time. Drawing on a longitudinal large-scale dataset of tweets containing URLs, we mea…
So Emotional? The Role of Emotions for Young Adults’ Resilience to Disinformation
The chaotic information environment during (poly)crises, marked by urgency and heightened emotions, complicates truth assessments and provides fertile ground for the proliferation of disinformation. While the role of emotions in shaping disinformation beliefs and sharing is widely acknowledged, there is little empirical evidence on how and under what circumstances emotions impact responses to disinformation. To provide an in-depth understanding, …
Unconventional Practices and Boundary Work in Small Town Newspapers: The Case for a Rural Journalism Subfield
Local rural newspapers live a precarious existence in Alberta, Canada. In a declining economic situation, rural journalists have adopted unconventional practices to continue their work. Based on fieldwork in four communities, we show how rural journalists negotiate between the dominant metropolitan-based doxa and habitus of the journalistic field and their own position within communities. The analysis reveals rural-specific reporting practices, a…
Highlighting and downplaying subjectivity through ethos construction: Personal journalism as a pluriform epistemic practice
Individual experiences have gained more prominence as a reliable alternative source of knowledge in the last decades. This personalization of knowledge has far-reaching consequences for journalism. This article studies the rise of personal journalism, in which journalists play a central role in the stories they write, and analyses how this impacts the epistemological underpinning of journalism. Through a quantitative content analysis of tabloid a…
Understanding digital citizenship in everyday life: Tensions between digital inclusion policies and disadvantaged citizens’ experiences
This study examines how disadvantaged, low-literate adults experience digital citizenship to scrutinize digital inclusion policies and promote a more inclusive, diverse, and comprehensive understanding of digital citizenship and inclusion. Therefore, we ask: (1) What do disadvantaged, low-literate Dutch citizens consider digital citizenship? (2) How is digital citizenship practiced in everyday life by disadvantaged, low-literate Dutch citizens? (…
Devising DigiD: The performativity of sociotechnical imaginaries in national digital identity systems
Digital identity systems serve as essential gateways to public services in digital-by-default societies, yet they are often overlooked or regarded as ‘neutral’ tools. We argue, however, that these systems are shaped by sociotechnical imaginaries that influence both policy and technological design. This paper examines how such imaginaries inform and justify the development of national digital identity systems, using the Dutch ‘DigiD’ system as a c…
Who is sharing the news? Identity construction of news sharers on Dutch language Twitter
This paper examines how self-ascribed identity in Twitter biographies relates to news-sharing behavior on the platform. Drawing on a dataset of Dutch Twitter users who shared links to news articles in 2021, this study applies contextual topic modeling and clustering techniques to analyze identity patterns at scale. While prior research on online identity has often relied on manual annotation or focused on elite actors, this work leverages computa…
Directing Digital Citizenship: How Librarians Mediate the Dutch Digital Welfare State
Digital citizenship has emerged as a prominent concept in policy and academic discourse, broadly referring to individuals’ ability to access and use digital tools for public engagement. However, because its meaning varies between actors and across societal contexts, it is still an ambiguous term. This article considers how digital citizenship takes shape in practice by examining the everyday practices of librarians, the key mediators between citi…
The Regime of Self‐Optimization: Lived Experiences of Enforced Digital Inclusion by Low‐Literate Citizens
This article introduces the regime of self‐optimization, a theoretical framework to understand how disadvantaged citizens are compelled to continually improve their digital skills and capacities to meet the demands of an increasingly digital welfare state. Consequently, we ask: How do low‐literate Dutch citizens experience the regime of self‐optimization in their everyday lives? Drawing on historical and discursive underpinnings of governmentalit…
Digital Tactics of Refugee Women: Towards an Inclusive Framework for Digital Literacies
This article examines the complex relationship between online and offline inequalities for shaping refugee women’s experiences during resettlement. Refugee women have unique challenges during resettlement, yet the role of gender in shaping refugees’ experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and associated risks is often overlooked. Research into the role of digital technologies in refugees’ resettlement is fragmented, spread across disciplines, and th…
The Reporter as First-Person Witness: Eyewitnessing and Subjectivity in Epistemic Authority Claims in Personal Journalism
When Journalists Share Their Happy Feelings: Affective Connection as a Source of Reliability in Personal Journalism
Formation of social norms in location-based meso-spaces: A study of WeChat neighborhood groups during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown
Social norms shape and are simultaneously established through communication processes. While instant messaging (IM) groups are nowadays prominent spaces for daily communication, we have only little knowledge of how norms function within them. To address this gap, this study analyzes norm formation in WeChat neighborhood groups during the Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai. We conceptualize these groups as location-based meso-spaces ; situated between …
TikTok as a peer playground: Understanding how children in middle childhood use TikTok to shape their peer relations
Despite TikTok’s extensive popularity among children below the age of 12, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how they use this platform for social purposes. We therefore ask how children between the ages of 8 and 12 shape their peer relations through their uses of TikTok. Through longitudinal observations of children ( n = 84) in the context of afterschool care, we found that children use TikTok to develop and employ digital,…
Internet memes, populist campaigns: Nationalism, populism, and online visual protests in China
This study examines how socially and culturally ingrained visual semiotic resources are used to demonstrate netizens’ affinities with ‘the people’ and dislikes of ‘the elite’ in expressions of online and bottom-up national populism in China. Using a methodological framework that integrates multimodal discourse analysis with a study of ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality, we study ‘weaponized’ Internet memes that were generated during three D…
Tactics of Disconnection: How Netizens Navigate China’s Censorship System
This article explores the complex, multi-layered mechanisms of internet censorship in China, emphasizing its role as both a tool of control over public engagement and a mechanism for elites to disconnect themselves from spaces of public scrutiny, and avoid potential threats such as doxxing by bottom-up populist online movements. Through in-depth interviews with social media users, this study investigates how individuals perceive, assess, and navi…
Digital Literacies as Socially Situated Pedagogical Processes: Genealogically Understanding Media, Information, and Digital Literacies
Despite the increasing importance of digital literacies for citizens to be able to participate in society, there is little scholarly agreement over what digital literacies entail. This conceptual ambiguity hinders the translation of digital literacies into educational programs and policies that foster citizens’ digital literacies and inclusion. While various authors have attempted to define digital literacy separately and in relation to other con…
Digital In- and Exclusion in Everyday Life: Practices and Literacies Across the Lifespan
In this thematic issue of Media and Communication titled Practices of Digital In- and Exclusion in Everyday Life, we bring together insights from around the world to offer a diverse set of perspectives on digital practices and digital literacies across the lifespan. Moreover, emphasizing the development of digital literacies as a situated social practice, this thematic issue provides insights into the social contexts through which people develop …
Playfully building resilience: Dutch children’s risk-managing tactics in digital risky play
In this paper, we coin the concept "digital risky play" and conceptualize this type of digital play. By means of a taxonomy of tactics that children develop and employ through digital risky play, we explore how children build resilience. Risky play has been mainly studied in the outdoor context and has been found to have positive outcomes for children's risk-managing tactics and resilience. Based on longitudinal participant observations in combin…
The paradox of play: How Dutch children develop digital literacy via offline engagement with digital media
This paper considers how children develop digital literacy through offline practices of play.By inventing games, children rehearse and build up the competences, knowledge, and skills necessary to engage with online technologies in later life.While prior studies on digital literacy and play have explored children's digital interactions with media, children's play around media is increasingly traversing online-offline boundaries.Consequently, we ar…
Creative Autonomy in the Newsroom: How Hierarchy Impacts Innovative Behaviour
News organisations are in need of creativity to enable their own innovation. Yet "creative autonomy", the freedom to experiment, to be creative, and to investigate radical possibilities at work, which is conditional to innovation processes, is still underresearched in journalism studies. In this article we fill this gap by addressing creative autonomy in newsrooms in transformation from an organisational perspective. We do so by using "innovative…
Local Journalists as Brokers: Conceptualizing Information Relationships in Rural Communities
This paper introduces the concept of brokerage to the scholarship of local news. Drawing on anthropological conceptions of actors that bridge gaps in social structure and help information flow across such gaps, we propose that local journalists act as cultural brokers in rural towns. Building upon Gould and Fernandez (1989, “Structures of Mediation: A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks.” Sociological Methodology 19:89. https://d…
Playful Citizens: How Children Develop and Integrate News-Related Practices in Their Daily Lives
This paper studies children’s (aged 8–12) news-related practices and subsequent acts of lived citizenship in formal and informal social contexts. While children in this age group are increasingly exposed to various types of news that shape their understanding of the world, little is understood about their interactions with news. We employ the concept of “news-related practices’ to analyze how news is integrated into or excluded from their daily r…
Social Media as Beat: Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections
While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequent…
New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns
Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also mor…
Navigating cross-media news use: Media repertoires and the value of news in everyday life
The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres, and practi…
The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism: On Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth
Though the impossibility of a mimetic and purely objective representation of reality is commonly accepted, it is striking that journalism's claim to truth and authenticity is still so vivid in journalism and in public discourse. Its supposed ability to to mirror reality by verifying true facts remains the basic assumption underlying press critique, as becomes clear in for example the books of Nick Davies and Joris Luyendijk who both criticize jou…
Twitter as a News Source: How Dutch and British newspapers used tweets in their news coverage, 2007–2011
Twitter has become a convenient, cheap and effective beat for journalists in search of news and information. Reporters today increasingly aggregate information online and embed it in journalism discourse. In this paper, we analyse how tweets have increasingly been included as quotes in newspaper reporting during the rise of Twitter from 2007 to 2011. The paper compares four Dutch and four British national tabloids and broadsheets, asking if tablo…
De-converging the newsroom: Strategies for newsroom change and their influence on journalism practice
This article introduces the concept of de-convergence to analyse recent changes in the newsroom at the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. While the concept of convergence or multimedia journalism has been introduced worldwide, de Volkskrant decided to separate their print and online newsroom. In this de-converged model the traditional print journalist has made a comeback, no longer charged with multimedia tasks. De Volkskrant initially anticipated th…
Rethinking Journalism Again: Societal Role and Public Relevance in a Digital Age
It’s easy to make a rhetorical case for the value of journalism. Because, it is a necessary precondition for democracy; it speaks to the people and for the people; it informs citizens and enables them to make rational decisions; it functions as their watchdog on government and other powers that be. But does rehashing such familiar rationales bring journalism studies forward? Does it contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding journalism’s viabi…
A Question of Power: The changing dynamics between journalists and sources
News is born in a display of courtship between journalists and sources. The former have to seduce the latter to contribute to news stories, to give them information and to provide interesting and a
Activating the past in the Ferguson protests: Memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms
This article analyzes the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brown -set up during the 2014 Ferguson protests-in order to rethink the role of memory work within contemporary digital activism. We argue that, as a particular type of discursive practice, memory work on the page bridged personal and collective action frames. This occurred in four overlapping ways. First, the page allowed for affective commemorative engagement that helped shape Brown's pub…
Between engagement and ironic ambiguity: Mediating subjectivity in narrative journalism
This article explores how narrative journalism challenges dominant assumptions about objectivity by taking the mediating subjectivity of the reporter as a structuring principle for stories. By comparing the coverage of the Middle East conflict by British award-winning reporter Robert Fisk and Dutch novelist/reporter Arnon Grunberg we show how overt subjectivity is displayed in different manners and how this affects the persuasiveness of reporting…
Witnessing in the new memory ecology: Memory construction of the Syrian conflict on YouTube
With the pervasiveness of mobile technologies, witnesses have the opportunity to mediate up-close and seemingly truthful recordings of events. As such, “witness videos” have become prominent in news reports and serve as authoritative resources in the construction of memory. However, once they are uploaded to video-sharing sites and popular archives such as YouTube, they are being reassembled and remixed by distinct actors, along the lines of thei…
Convergence Culture in European Newsrooms: Comparing editorial strategies for cross-media news production in six countries
For two decades, convergence culture has been an important motivator for change in journalism worldwide. Journalism research has followed these developments, investigating the dimensions of change that define convergence as a cultural shift in the newsroom. Research in the European context has mostly been comprised of national case studies of flagship media outlets whereas comparative, let alone quantitative, studies are scarce. In response to th…
Shedding light on the dark social: The connective role of news and journalism in social media communities
Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These “dark social media” are important spaces for “public connection,” a means for bridging people’s private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks…
Political Interaction Beyond Party Lines: Communication Ties and Party Polarization in Parliamentary Twitter Networks
A growing body of research has examined the uptake of social media by politicians, the formation of communication ties in online political networks, and the interplay between social media and political polarization. However, few studies have analyzed how social media are affecting communication in parliamentary networks. This is especially relevant in highly fragmented political systems in which collaboration between political parties is crucial …
Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Journalism Students’ Interpretive Repertoires for a Changing Occupation
Amid ongoing disruption, discourse about journalism increasingly emphasizes innovation within the newsroom and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it. This article uses the concept of interpretive repertoires to explore how students enrolled in journalism programmes in Britain and the Netherlands understand innovation and entrepreneurialism in relation to changing industry circumstances and long-standing conceptualizations of occupati…
Journalism and Social Media: Redistribution of Power
This thematic issue sets out to explore the power relationships between journalism and social media. The articles here examine these relationships as intersections between journalistic actors and their audiences, and between news media, their content, and the functions of social media platforms. As the articles in this issue show, the emergence of social media and their adoption by news media and other social actors have brought about a series of…
Caught Between Innovation and Tradition: Young Journalists as Normative Change Agents in the Journalistic Field
The necessity of innovation within the newsroom, and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it, have become increasingly apparent. A common thread in this discourse is the desire for young journalists to be “change agents” who foster innovation and thus stretch existing boundaries in the profession. Employers hope new hires, seen as attuned to their generation’s news use and as offering fresh knowledge and insights, will be able to drive…
Bypassing digital literacy: Marginalized citizens’ tactics for participation and inclusion in digital societies
This article asks what digital literacy tactics low-literate Dutch adults employ to bypass their low-literacy to be able to participate in digital society, and what the consequences are for their socio-digital exclusion and inclusion. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of digitalization for low-literate citizens, and the linguistic and digital barriers encountered in everyday life. Drawing upon participant observations and sem…
Do Novel Routines Stick After the Pandemic? The Formation of News Habits During Covid-19
Over half of our news use is comprised of habits: routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life. Conversely, citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines rarely form novel patterns of news use. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being, especially in real-life situations. Previous research suggests that considerable life changes and disruptions in daily routines can give rise to th…
The Trust Gap: Young People's Tactics for Assessing the Reliability of Political News
In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges suc…
Platform paradoxes and public service media legitimacy: A Cross-National Study
The intricate relationship between public service media (PSM) and social media platforms has emerged as a critical factor significantly impacting the legitimacy of the PSM institution. This study adopts a discursive institutionalism lens to examine how six PSM organizations across Europe, Australia and Canada communicate their relationship and ideas about social media platforms via their annual reports over a 10-year period (2013)(2014)(2015)(201…
What feels like news? Young people’s perceptions of news on Instagram
What do young people consider “news”? Now that news is dislocated from dedicated outlets of news organizations, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from other cultural forms, including entertainment, advertising and misinformation. Especially on visual social media, where many different forms, topics and tones circulate, so-called “news feeds” offer blends of content that only partially match traditional journalistic conceptualiza…
The discursive logics of online populism: Social media as a “pressure valve” of public debate in China
This paper explores online bottom-up populism in China by examining the discursive logics of populism that emerge within expressions of populist discontent. Through a conceptualization of the affordances of social media that considers what they enable alongside what they constrain, it uses a computational grounded theory approach to examine individuals’ posts and the use of hashtags in online communication on Sina Weibo around the #DrivingIntoThe…
Informing the government or fostering public debate: How Chinese discussion forums open up spaces for deliberation
This article focuses on a popular form of civic practice in China: casual political talk that occurs in online spaces that are not ostensibly political. We investigate how Chinese citizens engage in politics through a comparative analysis of everyday talk on health issues across three popular online discussion forums: a government-orientated forum (Qiangguo Luntan), a commercial-lifestyle forum (Tieba), and a commercial-topical forum focused on p…
Unlocking the Newsroom: Measuring Journalists’ Perceptions of Innovative Learning Culture
Thorough understanding of how “outside the box” ideas in the newsroom can be triggered and fostered is fundamental to grasp innovation in journalism, but is still largely uncharted territory. Comprehension of its key elements would enable news organisations to reinvent themselves and improve chances for survival. In this article we develop an instrument to investigate if and how newsroom workers and management perceive an Innovative Learning Cult…
The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism: On Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth
Though the impossibility of a mimetic and purely objective representation of reality is commonly accepted, it is striking that journalism's claim to truth and authenticity is still so vivid in journalism and in public discourse. Its supposed ability to to mirror reality by verifying true facts remains the basic assumption underlying press critique, as becomes clear in for example the books of Nick Davies and Joris Luyendijk who both criticize jou…
Social Media as Beat: Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections
While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequent…
Between Broadcasting Political Messages and Interacting With Voters: The use of Twitter during the 2010 UK general election campaign
Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n = 26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal…
Twitter as a News Source: How Dutch and British newspapers used tweets in their news coverage, 2007–2011
Twitter has become a convenient, cheap and effective beat for journalists in search of news and information. Reporters today increasingly aggregate information online and embed it in journalism discourse. In this paper, we analyse how tweets have increasingly been included as quotes in newspaper reporting during the rise of Twitter from 2007 to 2011. The paper compares four Dutch and four British national tabloids and broadsheets, asking if tablo…
A Question of Power: The changing dynamics between journalists and sources
News is born in a display of courtship between journalists and sources. The former have to seduce the latter to contribute to news stories, to give them information and to provide interesting and a
De-converging the newsroom: Strategies for newsroom change and their influence on journalism practice
This article introduces the concept of de-convergence to analyse recent changes in the newsroom at the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. While the concept of convergence or multimedia journalism has been introduced worldwide, de Volkskrant decided to separate their print and online newsroom. In this de-converged model the traditional print journalist has made a comeback, no longer charged with multimedia tasks. De Volkskrant initially anticipated th…
New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns
Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also mor…
Between engagement and ironic ambiguity: Mediating subjectivity in narrative journalism
This article explores how narrative journalism challenges dominant assumptions about objectivity by taking the mediating subjectivity of the reporter as a structuring principle for stories. By comparing the coverage of the Middle East conflict by British award-winning reporter Robert Fisk and Dutch novelist/reporter Arnon Grunberg we show how overt subjectivity is displayed in different manners and how this affects the persuasiveness of reporting…
Tipping the Balance of Power
This chapter argues that the rise of social media has extended and simultaneously changed the playing field for political reporting. The possibility of direct and open communication with and to citizens, even when it is unidirectional, has changed the power structures in political communication for better and for worse, as becomes clear from the Twitter gaffe of Emily Thornberry, an avid tweep. Based on a meta-analysis of Twitter research, the ch…
Witnessing in the new memory ecology: Memory construction of the Syrian conflict on YouTube
With the pervasiveness of mobile technologies, witnesses have the opportunity to mediate up-close and seemingly truthful recordings of events. As such, “witness videos” have become prominent in news reports and serve as authoritative resources in the construction of memory. However, once they are uploaded to video-sharing sites and popular archives such as YouTube, they are being reassembled and remixed by distinct actors, along the lines of thei…
Impartial reporter or écrivain engagé? Andrée Viollis and the transformation of French journalism, 1918–40
This article argues that French journalism, which historical development has often characterized as backward in comparison to its Anglo-American counterpart, changed more profoundly in the interwar years than is often acknowledged in scholarship into journalism history. Based on a textual analysis of the reportages Andrée Viollis wrote about her 1931 trip to French Indochina and China, situated against the background of French journalism history,…
Negotiation Games: Play metaphors in the journalist–source relationship between political PR and talk shows
This study analyzes the interpretive repertoires used by public relations (PR) advisors of Dutch politicians to describe their relations with talk show journalists. A qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed that the dominant repertoires come from the realm of play. PR advisors downplay the power struggle to position politicians on talk shows as a competitive game while at the same time they legitimize their close relationships…
Convergence Culture in European Newsrooms: Comparing editorial strategies for cross-media news production in six countries
For two decades, convergence culture has been an important motivator for change in journalism worldwide. Journalism research has followed these developments, investigating the dimensions of change that define convergence as a cultural shift in the newsroom. Research in the European context has mostly been comprised of national case studies of flagship media outlets whereas comparative, let alone quantitative, studies are scarce. In response to th…
Rethinking Journalism Again: Societal Role and Public Relevance in a Digital Age
It’s easy to make a rhetorical case for the value of journalism. Because, it is a necessary precondition for democracy; it speaks to the people and for the people; it informs citizens and enables them to make rational decisions; it functions as their watchdog on government and other powers that be. But does rehashing such familiar rationales bring journalism studies forward? Does it contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding journalism’s viabi…
Navigating cross-media news use: Media repertoires and the value of news in everyday life
The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres, and practi…
Personal Branding on Twitter: How employed and freelance journalists stage themselves on social media
Social media are increasingly embedded into everyday communication. This challenges journalism to anticipate the changes that social media trigger in the use and production of (news) media. In this paper, we focus on personal branding on Twitter. Journalists are increasingly encouraged to develop a personal brand on Twitter. This offers them the opportunity to become news and opinion hubs and to increase their “market value”. Erving Goffman’s the…
The Unlovable Press: Conversations with Michael Schudson
The saving grace of journalism. This is what Michael Schudson called objectivity in a video portrait shown during the ceremony in which he was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Gronin
Activating the past in the Ferguson protests: Memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms
This article analyzes the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brown -set up during the 2014 Ferguson protests-in order to rethink the role of memory work within contemporary digital activism. We argue that, as a particular type of discursive practice, memory work on the page bridged personal and collective action frames. This occurred in four overlapping ways. First, the page allowed for affective commemorative engagement that helped shape Brown's pub…
Repositioning news and public connection in everyday life: A user-oriented perspective on inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness
News has traditionally served as a common ground, enabling people to connect to others and engage with the public issues they encounter in everyday life. This article revisits these theoretical debates about mediated public connection within the context of a digitalized news media landscape. While academic discussions surrounding these shifts are often explored in terms of normative ideals ascribed to political systems or civic cultures, we propo…
Epilogue: Situating Journalism in the Digital
This chapter discusses the rise of a decentralized informational ecology in which journalism is only one cultural form among many others. It considers increasingly less sense to study journalism as an isolated object. The chapter illustrates three research venues that might be helpful to situate journalism firmly in the digital but also to reconnect it to the social structures it simultaneously thrives on and produces. It suggests that focus on n…
Shedding light on the dark social: The connective role of news and journalism in social media communities
Messaging apps and Facebook groups are increasingly significant in everyday life, shaping not only interpersonal communication but also how people orient themselves to public life. These “dark social media” are important spaces for “public connection,” a means for bridging people’s private worlds and everything beyond. This article analyzes how people perceive news on such platforms, focusing on the different roles it plays in key social networks…
The legitimacy paradox
Fusion cuisine: A functional approach to interdisciplinary cooking in journalism studies
Journalism studies as an academic field is characterized by multidisciplinarity. Focusing on one object of study, journalism and the news, it established itself by integrating and synthesizing approaches from established disciplines – a tendency that lives on today. This constant gaze to the outside for conceptual inspiration and methodological tools lends itself to a journalism studies that is a fusion cuisine of media, communication, and relate…
Sharing and Discussing News in Private Social Media Groups: The social function of news and current affairs in location-based, work-oriented and leisure-focused communities
Social media platforms are an increasingly dominant medium through which people encounter news in everyday life. Yet while we know more-and-more about frequency of use and sharing, content preferences and network configurations around news use on social media, the social experiences associated with such practices remain relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap to consider if and how news facilitates conversations in everyday contexts …
Disintermediation in Social Networks: Conceptualizing Political Actors’ Construction of Publics on Twitter
While often treated as distinct, both politics and journalism share in their histories a need for a public that is not naturally assembled and needs instead to be ‘constructed’. In earlier times the role of mediating politics to publics often fell to news media, which were also dependent on constructing a ‘public’ for their own viability. It is hardly notable to say this has changed in a digital age, and in the way social media have allowed polit…
Sociology (61 works) · Political science (54 works) · Media studies (49 works) · Social Media and Politics (39 works) · Media Studies and Communication (38 works) · Journalism (33 works) · Computer Science (30 works) · Public relations (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (25 works)