ABSTRACT
Drawing on empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, authors have examined how developments in interactive digital technologies are redefining traditional journalistic cultures, culminating in practices that are transforming journalism both structurally in terms of established routines and normatively in terms of the resulting professional and ethical dilemmas. They have broadly adopted a social constructivist approach, which emphasises the social shaping and 'interpretive flexibility' of technology particularly how technologies should be understood as continuous with and embedded in the social realities and dynamics in which they are deployed and appropriated. Contrary to cyber-optimistic accounts about the end of gatekeeping in the digital age, they have broadly argued that content moderation or digital gatekeeping remains very important as it was in the analogue era.
