ABSTRACT
Activists, hackers, citizen reporters, algorithms, public relations professionals. The voices in the networked public sphere (Benkler, Roberts, Faris, Solow-Niederman, & Etling, 2013) multiply, but their role regarding journalism tends to be analyzed as the contours and the context of professional news production. This chapter proposes to look beyond the newsrooms (see Anderson, 2011a) in order to put the concept of journalistic roles and its performance in direct dialogue with the increasing engagement of a diversity of social actors in the production, diffusion, and usage of newsworthy materials (Domingo, Masip, & Costera Meijer, 2015). This chapter argues that to understand journalism today it is not only relevant to explore how journalists adapt to the changing digital media environment of public communication (see chapter 8, this volume), but it is also crucial to understand the motivations and practices of those other social actors, how they relate to journalistic roles, and how they interpret the news-oriented tasks they perform (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2015). This requires setting aside the debates about the boundary work (Carlson and Lewis, 2015) done by journalists to distinguish themselves from the multiplying online communicators; moving the focus away from the “redenition of claims to professionalism” (Waisbord, 2013, p. 232) that journalists are doing in the new context.
