ABSTRACT
In the digital environment, news is more popular than ever. Links are forwarded through email and posted on Facebook. Tweets alert us to new information online and blog postings and comments proliferate in specialized and general publics. Taken together, these forms of online communication emulate forms of news production that used to be an exclusive domain of journalism. Although many of these forms of news would not qualify as speaking to “a public” in general, they are still public because they can be accessed through links. In networked and digital public communication, every message is exactly one link apart. The difference between the institutional news communicators and the private tweeter, blogger or YouTuber is that the latter will have less visibility, less impact and thus less relevance for the wider debates in society. However, this difference in impact should not deter us from finding a new conceptual basis for defining journalism. This paper argues that journalism is too narrowly defined in terms of occupational routines, professional standards or institutional parameters.
