ABSTRACT
In our current digital news environment, journalistic production is no longer the sole product of professional journalists as “members of various publics make journalism material that intersects, mixes and is distributed to a new heightened degree” (Russell 2011, 1). In this context, news users claim an ever-more important role in the way journalism is shaped. Picard (2010, 20) observes that behind the many shifts in the media sector today lies the fact that the “locus of control over the content [has shifted] from communicators to audiences” and continues stating that this “fundamental power shift in the public communication sphere … requires all of us concerned with the broader needs of society to alter our ways of thinking about audiences, the role of media and society, and how we seek to develop informed and active citizens”. The changing ways in which media are consumed should therefore be at the core of our understanding of journalism in the digital news environment.
