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By engaging with journalists in the networked media environment, audiences can play a role in shaping the epistemologies of journalism: how journalists know what they know, and communicate knowledge claims. While audiences have been offered opportunities to engage in news-production processes, ongoing reciprocal relationships between journalists and audiences online are rare. This study shows how sustained reciprocity takes place in a large-scale WhatsApp group opened by an Israeli journalist/blogger for her audience. Based on an analysis of group conversations, blog posts, and interviews, we demonstrate how a continuous conversation between the journalist and her loyal audience members allows the co-construction of journalistic knowledge across the news-production process. The online space that affords ongoing reciprocal exchanges is termed here a meso news-space, occurring between the private and public realms. This study contributes to understanding how sustained reciprocity can be accomplished and how it can promote shared benefits for journalists and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Internet users' participation and the ways in which it is framed by journalists, with a particular focus on the Live Blog format. It provides a case study of the online media coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York in May 2011, by the highly respected media Le Monde.fr. A lexicometric (statistical) and discourse (qualitative) analysis of two sets of corpora (Corpus 1 being composed of all the comments submitted by Internet users throughout the live blogging process and Corpus 2 of the few which were finally published on the Live Blog) will highlight the nature and the various forms of audience participation as well as the ways in which they are framed by journalists. The article aims to investigate the representativeness of the published messages and the participative audience profile which journalists foreground within this media space of multiple voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines ‘participatory journalism’ from the perspective of participants. Through a series of in-depth interviews with 32 participants from two different participatory journalistic environments set up by professional news organizations, we investigated how participants view and evaluate their participation in journalism. We propose that participants views progress through a series of four stages: anticipation, participation, evaluation and reconsideration. A clear breach is observed between the stage of anticipation and evaluation. We propose that this breach could be couched in terms of both a need and a wish for reciprocity, but also a lack of it. The term ‘reciprocity’ is inspired by Lewis et al.’s notion of ‘reciprocal journalism’ and Loosen and Schmidt’s conceptualization of journalism as a ‘social system’. Implications for the study of participatory journalism and journalism practitioners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has been paid to the role of the audience in online news production. However, very little research has addressed how the audience understands this participation. Using the theories of affect and fandom, this paper will investigate the most popular form of online participation – comments. Based on a case study of Australian alternative journalism site, New Matilda, it will argue for a broader understanding of participation online, one that incorporates those who ‘internalise’ their participation and in particular the role emotion plays in audience engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called 'grassroots' or 'citizen journalism', which uses the world wide web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organizational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. The article uses qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of nine major British news websites to reveal the debates journalists are having about their changing roles, the challenges of meeting commercial expectations and legal obligations, and the innovations taking place in online newsrooms. It provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in journalism's relationship with its consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]