ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes examples from the Australian news media to illustrate how traditional norms of public and participatory communication are contested and negotiated by journalists and their audiences in online spaces. It deals with the conceptualizations of public dialogue in online spaces. The chapter describes the traditional legal and social frameworks for understanding defamation and its importance in journalism practice. It explores how these norms have been contested in social media spaces that prioritize particular communication cultures, including disruptions to public dialogue in the form of trolling and flaming. The chapter focuses on forms of defamation to understand how social media platforms simultaneously empower and limit the spaces for dialogue between journalists and news audiences. In the context of journalism, social media has assisted in creating seemingly 'unbounded spaces' for user participation where audiences are able to critique, re-present, dismiss, or even completely ignore the journalist.
