Abstract Summary
We investigate how collaborative journalism alters the news production process by “following the story” of a citizen science project on air quality set up by a newspaper, university and government agency. Combining linguistic ethnographic analysis and discourse analysis gives a dynamic view of the news production process in collaborative journalism.
Abstract :
Collaborative journalism –in which journalists work together with non-journalists to produce news– has become a way to perform rigorous investigative journalism in times that are financially challenging (Houston, 2010). It allows news-outlets to tackle increasingly complex issues by exploring large datasets and collaborating closely with data scientists and other experts (Heikkilä et al., 2010; Houston, 2010; Lewis & Usher, 2014).
Outsiders entering the news production process (NPP) can alter the way journalists and collaborators view their own professional practice and identity (Verkest & Jacobs, unpublished). In this paper we investigate how these adjustments affect the actual NPP by “following the story” in a collaborative journalism case (Boyer & Hannerz, 2006, p. 12; see also Van Hout & Jacobs, 2008, p. 60). More specifically, we look into a close-knit collaboration between a newspaper, university and government agency in which they set up a large-scale and highly mediatized citizen science project on air quality. The author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in which she observed seven meetings between the collaborators and followed the making of a special newspaper edition devoted to the publication of the results of the citizen science project. Our data also consists of a corpus of 29 newspaper articles that were published in this special edition and in the newspapers of the following week.
We start our analysis by looking at how our informants negotiate key elements of the NPP such as news values and story construction elements. From the inside out we continue by focusing on the 29 newspaper articles. By looking closely at how these stories are constructed, we intend to demonstrate the effect of collaborative journalism on the NPP and the news product. Combining an emic and etic perspective in an iterative analytical process, allows us to dig deeper into the dynamics of the NPP in collaborative journalism.
