Normative Theories of Digital Journalism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

There has been an explosion of work on digital journalism over the last two decades. While there are a number of implied normative roles for digital journalism in this literature, to-date there has been a general lack of focused and sustained discussion about what ends journalism should serve in democracies in an era of digital, networked media.

This panel will bring together an international group of scholars to discuss a number of strains of normative argument present in the literature, including claims that journalists should provide accurate and reliable information and a diverse set of viewpoints to the public, monitor the state and other powerful interests in society, represent the public to elites and serve as a proxy for public opinion, facilitate governance and serve as institutional conduits between elites and citizens and elites themselves, and provide forums for debate and discussion of public issues. Panelists will consider whether journalism can, and should, still do these things, as well as discuss what appear to be distinctly new normative arguments among scholars for journalism in the digital age, which involve furthering the ends of a participatory citizenry through the embrace of new technologies. Much of the literature values citizen participation in the process and products of journalism given the underlying norms, values, expectations, and knowledge of what scholars suggest are the formerly passive consumers of news. Many scholars have also embraced the value of deinstitutionalization – the undermining of the gatekeeping power of the legacy press, challenges to organizational hierarchies and distinctions between producers and consumers, and disaggregation and decentralization of the process and products of journalism.

Panelists will discuss these trends, and more importantly make arguments about the normative values that should animate journalism in a digital age. In doing so, panelists will consider normative democratic and media theories from a wide range of traditions, including critical theories that contrast a right to speak with a right to hear, articulate both the need for and value of a socially responsible and professionalized press, stress the need for journalists to have autonomy from both the state and the market, and argue that market and voluntaristic mechanisms do not provide for the inclusion and diversity democracy needs in its public communication. Even more, panelists will fashion their arguments, and debate, the possibilities, and more saliently the limitations, of journalism in an age of the undermining of the institution’s cultural, social, and economic power.

Sub Unit

• Journalism Studies

Chair

• Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• The Digital Journalism Literature and Normative Democratic Theory - Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jonathan Scott Brennen, U of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• What the Concept of Boundaries Brings to the Study of Norms - Seth C. Lewis, U of Minnesota

• A Public Right to Hear and the Networked Press - Mike Joseph Ananny, U of Southern California

• Digital Journalism, Neoliberal Journalism? - Isabel Awad, U of Rotterdam

• The One Thing News Might Just Do for Democracy - Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, U of Oxford

Respondent

• Beate Josephi, The University of Sydney