ABSTRACT
Journalism is in transition, there is no question about it. The online environment has substantially shaken up long-held beliefs about the nature of news and over-pampered practices of journalism, even to the extent that the future of professional news-making has become a matter of concern. Crisis narratives are thriving in the literature, with some scholars already proclaiming the ‘death’ or ‘end’ of journalism (McChesney and Nichols, 2010; Charles and Stewart, 2011). Deuze (2006a: 2) has called journalism a ‘zombie institution’, and the University of Bedfordshire devoted an entire conference to ‘The End of Journalism?’ in 2008. In this volume, too, McNair (Ch 5) diagnoses an ‘existential crisis’ of journalism, while he concedes that new communication technologies do not necessarily reduce the need for professional journalism but actually enhance them. All these contributions clearly seem to suggest that journalism as we know it is in search of a redefinition of its purpose and social contract, as well as a reconstitution of its boundaries, which have become alarmingly fuzzy with the rise of participatory modes of communication.
