ABSTRACT
In the past 15 years or so, journalism research has paid much attention to how
digitisation is changing journalistic practices, cultures and institutions. Early discussions
revolved around the question of whether digitisation was bringing about radical
changes or minor variations to journalism. However, recently there has been a move
beyond discussing the symptoms of the alleged crisis of journalism towards more fun-
damental issues of digital journalism, such as what “the changing nature of the object
itself” is (Broersma and Peters 2013, 2). Consequently, we see today the emergence of
what we might call a “fourth wave” of research on digital journalism. This wave
—succeeding the normative, empirical and constructivist waves (Domingo 2008)
—theorises the field beyond the traditional institutions and understandings of journal-
ism. It investigates, for instance, the “news ecosystem” (Anderson 2010), the “news
landscape” (Peters and Broersma 2013), “ambient” (Hermida 2010) and “networked”
(Heinrich 2011; Russell 2013) journalism-all of which have emerged because of prac-
tices predominantly related to social media.
