ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art: the main empirical results of over a decade of studies, the theoretical and methodological developments, and the open challenges for future research. Participatory journalism, “the idea that digital technologies enable the audience to get involved in making and disseminating the news”, has been the key underlying conceptualization for the study of social media. Social media are an important research object for journalism not only because news content produced by professional media organizations is shared on them, but also because news emerges and may be shaped through interactions within social media amongst citizens, politicians, journalists, and other organized social actors. Journalism studies have embraced the “computational turn” that characterizes the evolution of quantitative methodological approaches to the study of the internet, aided by the automated, algorithmic capturing and processing of social media data.
