ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the relationship between Facebook and journalism may lead to an overstatement of the direct, visible, and short-term impact of social media, but at the same time also to an understatement of the role of technology in reshaping journalism in the long term and in less tangible ways. It presents a review of the literature on the role of Facebook—as a tool, as a social space, and as a company—in reshaping the processes of news selection, news presentation, and news distribution in the digital media ecology. The chapter also presents most fruitful theoretical approaches to the analysis of digital journalism: the first one is the social shaping of technology (SST) perspective and the other one is the perspective of critical political economy (CPE). SST is arguably the dominant paradigm in the current literature on digital journalism. CPE is based upon a concern with the structural inequalities of production and the consequences for representation and access to consumption.
