How Soon is Now? Normative, historical and critical approaches to the study of digital journalism

• In Event: Dialogues in Journalism Studies: The Pressures, Possibilities, and Perils of a Future-Focussed Scholarly Field

Abstract

When inviting authors to prepare chapters for the Handbook of Digital Journalism (forthcoming), we explicitly challenged them to prepare a roadmap for future academic research in their area of specialization. This has risks, as the panel description makes clear, but we believe it is necessary when engaging with a research object as tenuous and indeterminate as ‘journalism’ in the 21st century. This paper will propose two antidotes against the ‘perils of prospective’ in research that is future-oriented: a socio-historical perspective and an explicit embrace of normativity. First, we should adopt methodological strategies that historicize, as much as is possible, current developments in news production on order to understand what is truly at stake today. Second, we also argue that researchers should be explicit in acknowledging that we too have normative expectations of journalism, and that our future orientation is inevitably bound up in these normative goals.

Authors

• C.W. Anderson, College of Staten Island- CUNY

• David Domingo, U Libre de Bruxelles

• Alfred Hermida, U of British Columbia

• Tamara Witschge, U of Groningen