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Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface: Acknowledgments and reflections -- 1 Disrupting journalism -- 2 Changing audiences -- 3 Overlapping fields -- 4 Journalists adapting -- 5 Changing journalism -- 6 Journalism disrupted -- Index.

AbstractThis article offers a review of scholarly research on the phenomenon of fake news. Most studies have so far focused on three main themes: the definition and the scope of the problem; the potential causes; and the impact of proposed solutions. First, scholarly research has defined fake news as a form of falsehood intended to primarily deceive people by mimicking the look and feel of real news. While initial research has shown that only a small fraction of the online audience is exposed to fake news, for this small group of individuals, the impact of fake news can be quite substantial. Second, studies have identified cognitive processes that make individuals more prone to the influence of fake news, such as confirmation bias, selective exposure, and lack of analytical thinking. Fake news also derives its power from its appeal to partisanship, perceived novelty, and repeated exposure facilitated by both bots and human users that share them in the online sphere. Finally, while fact checking has also risen in response to fake news, studies have found that corrections to wrong information only work on some individuals.

The increasing influence of actors who might not fit into traditional definitions of a journalist but are taking part in processes that produce journalism has attracted scholarly attention. They have been called interlopers, strangers, new entrants, peripheral, and emergent actors, among others. As journalism scholars grapple with how to refer to these actors, it is important to reflect on the assumptions that underlie emerging labels. These include: 1) what journalistic tasks are involved; 2) how and why these journalistic tasks are performed; 3) who is making the definition; and 4) where and when these actors are located. However, journalism being the centre of our investigation should not automatically assume that it is at the centre of social life. So, it might also be that for the technological field, journalism is at the periphery; that for these technology-oriented actors whose influence across fields is increasing, journalists and what they do are at the periphery. For a field that supposedly plays an important role in public life, this has important implications.

This study found divergence in how online journalists and student-audiences rated articles with varying popularity, as measured by audience metrics, and quality, as operationalized by winning a journalistic award. The findings revealed that while metrics and awards did not matter for young online news audiences, they were important for online journalists. But even among journalists, the importance of metrics and awards varied depending on whether the journalists were evaluating stories or their peers. For online journalists, popular stories were more newsworthy than those that were not. Awards did not influence their judgment of newsworthiness. But when evaluating the authors of the articles, online journalists rated authors of articles that won awards more favorably than authors of articles without awards. The popularity of stories did not matter in their evaluation of the authors.

New communication technologies have allowed not only new ways in which the audience interacts with the news but also new ways in which journalists can monitor online audience behavior. Through new audience information systems, such as web analytics, the influence of the audience on the news construction process is increasing. This occurs as the journalistic field tries to survive a shrinking audience for news. In this study, I argue that how journalists conceive of the audience as a form of capital influences the extent to which journalists integrate audience feedback from web analytics in their news work. I developed this theoretical framework through case studies of three online newsrooms that included a total of 150 hours of observations and 30 respondent interviews. The findings showed the extent of influence of web analytics on traditional gatekeeping processes and on a new gatekeeping practice online, which I call the process of de-selection.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre has been enshrined in the collective memory of different social groups globally in various ways, while the Chinese government enforces its own memory of Tiananmen through censorship and revisionism. These result in numerous memories of Tiananmen. Through a qualitative analysis of 27 TikToks posted on 3–5 June 2022, this study examines how Tiananmen is commemorated on TikTok on Tiananmen's anniversary and what is remembered about Tiananmen. This study found that commemoration posts on TikTok remember the protests, casualties, the Chinese Communist Party leaders' role, and the historical contexts, oft using the Tank Man image. The posts also remember the remembrance and memory formation of Tiananmen. Through commemorations, memes, and humor, some posts remember the Chinese government's attempts to recreate the collective memory and other commemoration events. This is best described as meta-memories, where people remember the remembering and possess memory of the memory of events.

This article explores the influence of social media giant Facebook on the journalistic field by examining how news organizations responded to Facebook's algorithm tweak, announced in June 2014, that prioritized videos directly uploaded to the social media platform. In announcing the tweak, Facebook, an agent external to the journalistic field, did not just change its own internal rules but also imposed them on users, including news organizations traditionally governed by the journalistic field's own set of rules. Based on large-scale posting activity data collected from 232 Facebook Pages operated by major news organizations in the United States, this study found that most news organizations complied with Facebook's updated rules on Native Videos by significantly increasing their social video production, opening up the journalistic field to the influence of an agent external to journalism. But while digital-native and broadcast news publishers were more responsive in adapting to the tweak, print brands were slower to respond.

Abstract
Based on a survey of 114 news editors in the United States, this study classifies the use of web analytics in the news construction process into: using it to plan coverage and deployment of resources; and using it to determine placement and packaging of story elements in the website. How much influence web metrics exert on these two stages of the non-linear gatekeeping process depends on work practices and the role conceptions that organizations embrace.

Gawker ignited a controversy when it published an article about a married Conde Nast executive who allegedly sought the services of a gay escort. The popular blog eventually removed the article following condemnation from readers and other journalists. Guided by the frameworks of boundary work and field theory, this study analyzed 65 news articles and 2203 online comments and found that journalists and audiences problematized Gawker's identity as a journalistic organization and evaluated the article based on traditional standards of newsworthiness, audiences asserted their role in journalism's larger interpretive community, and that the larger interpretive community assessed the article based on the ethics of outing. Investigating the discourse generated by this critical incident is important because it identifies where journalists and readers draw the boundaries of legitimate journalism, specifies the place of ethics in boundary discourse, and informs journalistic practice about the phenomenon of outing in the news.

This study explores the use of Facebook for collective coping in the immediate aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest storms ever recorded on Earth, which hit the Philippines in November 2013. When traditional communication channels became non-operational, non-traditional information sources and communication platforms, such as Facebook, became salient. Drawing from interviews with 29 individuals from various groups—government officials, local journalists, and residents—this study found three collective coping strategies facilitated by Facebook. First, social media became a platform for survivors to tell their friends and family they survived. Second, social media provided a means for residents to participate in the social construction of their experience. Finally, social media also became a venue for survivors to manage their feelings and memories by documenting—and memorializing—what they experienced and how they are moving on.

Scholarly work on journalistic role conceptions is growing, but the assumption that what journalists conceive of as their roles depends in part on what they believe audiences expect from them remains underexplored. Through a nationally representative survey (N = 1,200), this study sought to understand journalistic role expectations in Singapore, a country with a unique media system that brings together a highly developed information and communication infrastructure with media regulation. The study found that Singaporeans expect their journalists to serve the public, the nation, and the government—and in that order.

Abstract
In this study we present an exploratory comparison of environmental journalists and environmental bloggers. Using a web survey, we compared environmental journalists and bloggers across a range of different variables that the literature shows matter in understanding the environmental discussions that they produce. This study offers important insights about the people behind the mediated messages we get about the environment. We found that environmental journalists and environmental bloggers are similar and different at the same time. They have the same level of concern and perceived knowledge about the environment. But they also conceive of different roles in society and source their information differently. We discuss the implications of these findings on the evolving nature of environmental reporting and discourse.