ABSTRACT

The digital infrastructure of media production, dissemination and consumption is becoming increasingly complex, presenting the challenge of how we should research the digital journalism environment. Digital journalism takes many forms – we therefore need to revise, improve, adjust and even invent methods to understand emerging forms of journalism.

In this book, scholars at the forefront of methodological innovations in digital journalism research share their insights on how to collect, process and analyse the diverse expressions of digital journalism, including online news, search results, hyperlinks and social media posts. As digital journalism content often comes in the form of big data, many of these new approaches depart from the traditional methods used in media research in significant ways. As we move towards new ways of understanding digital journalism, the methods developed for such purposes also need to be grounded in scientific rigour. This book aims to share some of the emerging processes by which these methods, tools and approaches are designed, implemented and validated. As such, this book not only constitutes a benchmark for thinking about research methods in digital journalism, it also provides an entry point for graduate students and seasoned scholars aiming to do research on digital journalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Research methods in an age of digital journalism

chapter |16 pages

Taking stock of the toolkit

An overview of relevant automated content analysis approaches and techniques for digital journalism scholars

chapter |17 pages

Tracing online news in motion

Time and duration in the study of liquid journalism

chapter |14 pages

Word counts and topic models

Automated text analysis methods for digital journalism research

chapter |18 pages

Googling the news 1

Opportunities and challenges in studying news events through Google Search

chapter |17 pages

Grasping the digital news user

Conceptual and methodological advances in news use studies

chapter |18 pages

Same, same but different

Effects of mixing Web and mail modes in audience research

chapter |17 pages

Action research

Collaborative research for the improvement of digital journalism practice

chapter |16 pages

Content analysis and online news

Epistemologies of analysing the ephemeral Web