ABSTRACT
This chapter presents rethinking research methods, takes the need for new methods as its point of departure. It argues that there are at least two interconnected dimensions in digital journalism—consequences of digitization and digital objects per se—with ramifications for digital journalism research methods. The first dimension is related to consequences of digitization. The second dimension of digital journalism research relates to the 'digital objects' themselves, such as news aggregators, search engines, content management systems, third-party intermediaries, liquid content, and hyperlinked interconnectedness. In analyzing links in digital news texts, researchers already approach links as objects, usually combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, content and network analysis, looking for the intention of the link as a citational, navigational, social, or commercial object. Thinking of digital news features as objects or a collection of objects enables the researcher to create new structures of data that can be analyzed using digital objects of the researcher's own making.
