In Service of News Subscribers: Exploring Belgian Journalists’ Perceptions of Stakeholder Relations in the Digital News Ecosystem

This qualitative paper contends that as news media are faced with growing commercial pressures and changing news consumption habits, they need to rethink their relationship with two of their main stakeholders: readers and advertisers. Multi-stakeholder marketing provides a useful conceptual framework for such an exercise, since it invites media practitioners to reconcile the conflicting interests of different stakeholders. This study aims to understand journalists’ levels of multi-stakeholder thinking regarding advertisers and readers. To explore how contemporary journalists see their role with regard to distinct stakeholders in the news ecosystem, we interviewed 14 Belgian journalists working for legacy and digital native news media. The goal of this exploratory study is to examine (1) how journalists perceive and rethink their dependence on readers and advertisers in the digital news ecosystem and (2) how their perception of the digital news ecosystem influences their attitudes towards these stakeholders. Findings indicate that journalists tend to see the value of readers in monetary terms and believe increasing reader revenue will help journalism survive. Other types of reader value (feedback, expertise, and content) are peripheral. This focus on subscribers also seems to coincide with a devaluation of other stakeholders like advertisers and non-paying readers.

Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stance markers are central for readers to build authority and produce content. Depersonalised and heteroglossic markers are also resorted, reinforcing readers’ authority with external information that mirrors expert scientific communication. Conclusions suggest a strong citizen agentive power that can either support news articles, spreading parascientific information, or challenge them, therefore, contributing to produce pseudoscientific messages.

Komunikacija hrvatskih političara na Instagramu za vrijeme pandemije COVID-19

Kad pogledamo medijske navike korisnika, posebno mladih (Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 2020), onda možemo vidjeti sve veći utjecaj društvenih medija u njihovu informiranju i komunikaciji. Značaj društvenih medija još je dodatno ojačan s početkom globalne pandemije bolesti COVID-19. U tom kontekstu društvena mreža Instagram proteklih godina postaje sve popularnija platforma na globalnoj razini, a posebno kod mlađe populacije. No, i dalje ostaje neiskorišten alat u približavanju politika, političkih aktera i važnih društvenih tema mlađoj populaciji. Cilj je ovog rada ispitati kako su ključni politički akteri u Hrvatskoj komunicirali putem Instagrama za vrijeme pandemije COVID-19 te utvrditi jesu li koristili ovu društvenu mrežu kako bi se približili publici na toj platformi, odnosno mladima. S druge strane, ovaj rad će ispitati kako komunikaciju političara na društvenoj mreži Instagram percipiraju i ocjenjuju mladi praktičari odnosa s javnošću i jesu li njihove poruke prilagođene mlađoj populaciji. Svrha će rada biti na temelju dvostruke analize donijeti zaključke i dati preporuke za unapređenje komunikacije političara na društvenoj mreži Instagram. Koristeći metodu analize sadržaja analiziran je sadržaj na Instagram profilima dvojice ministara i članova kriznog stožera za pandemiju COVID-19 te hrvatskog premijera i predsjednika. Analizom je utvrđeno na koji način političari komuniciraju, je li sadržaj prilagođen mladima i potiču li angažman u svojim objavama. Metodom strukturiranog intervjua s odabranim praktičarima odnosa s javnošću komunikacija je ocjenjivana trodimenzionalno: u sadržaju, javnom nastupu i karizmi političara na Instagramu. Na temelju dobivenih rezultata u zaključku rada sažete su preporuke za daljnju praksu u komunikaciji političara na društvenoj mreži Instagram.

Funding Sustainable Online News: Sources of Revenue in Digital-Native and Traditional Media in Spain

Digital news publishers strive to balance revenue streams in their business models: as standard advertising declines, alternatives for sustaining digital journalism arise in the forms of sponsored content, user donations and payments—one-off purchases, subscriptions or memberships, public or private grants, electronic commerce, events and consulting. An exhaustive study found 2874 active online news publications in Spain, and it observed the adoption of such models in early 2021. Advertising remains the most popular source of income for digital news operations (85.8%) and most sites rely on just one or two revenue streams (74.5%). We compare the cases in our census by their origin (digital-native or non-native), geography (local/regional or national/global) and topic scope (generalist or specialized). We find that traditional, national and specialized online media have a broader and more innovative revenue mix than digital-native, regional or local and general-interest news outlets. The comprehensiveness of this pioneering study sheds light for the first time on the risk that the lack of diversification and innovation in funding sources may imperil the financial sustainability of some online news operations in Spain, mostly those with a smaller scope and no backing from a traditional business, according to the results we present here.

TAKING INTERDEPENDENCIES SERIOUSLY: THE CASE OF MOZILLA’S ENTANGLEMENTS WITH JOURNALISM

Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in society today requires us to more broadly ask how imaginaries about journalism influence all kinds of actors that make up our digital public. In this paper, we therefore discuss how imaginaries about journalism shape the practices and identity of Mozilla, an organization best known for the development of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla currently explores collaborations with, or support of journalism, and we argue that this exploration is shaped by imaginaries about journalism. Using a Mozilla project as an example that seeks to support alternatives to advertising as the dominant way to finance journalistic content online, we show how Mozilla is trying to support its own mission by supporting organizations whose practices and values are considered compatible with this mission. We argue that Mozilla is not aiming to support ‘journalism’ as such, but a particular and rather traditional idea of fact-oriented journalism that facilitates political deliberation. Our findings suggest that studying how particular imaginaries about digital journalism influence non-journalists can help illuminate journalism’s role in today's digital news ecology beyond its ‘democratic function’ and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the digital transformation as a whole.