ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a closer look at how researchers can approach and measure journalistic role performance in a digital news environmentrestricted to the output in news content. Journalistic role performance can be understood as, following Mellado’s and van Dalen’s description (2014), a “journalistic collective outcome” where outcome is the news product (e.g., content) itself (Mellado, 2015). The chapter argues that the digital setting leads to some comprehensive changes for journalists as well as researchers. Although the actual impact remains to be determined, as other contributors in this volume highlight (see, for example, chapter 8, this volume), the principal issues are still prevalent. For the sake of advancing the argument and proposing a method to study role performances and other dimensions of online news, the differences vis-à-vis analogue media and potential changes due to digital media will be underlined here. In addition, the chapter focuses on journalists in mainstream media rather than citizen initiatives that offer additional methodological challenges.
