Painting the postfoundational picture: Participation, engagement and collaboration as a new foundation for newsmaking

This introductory chapter lays the ontological and epistemological groundwork for this book, by providing a review of its key themes and concepts, and outlining the book’s theoretical and methodological position. More specifically, the book’s topic is introduced based on a number of data points from the contributing chapters. These point to the ubiquity of participation, engagement and collaboration, but also to the tension they potentially create, including in the context of newsmaking. To understand the key concepts in this central argument, two bodies of literature are discussed. We first delineate how we understand newsmaking, and focus on a number of recent changes in this domain that are relevant for our central argument, such as that newsmaking is increasingly engaging with a number of communities and professional stakeholders, and that user-generated content and audience feedback have become central. Second, the literature on participation, engagement and collaboration is reviewed, exploring how predominant these concepts have become in many realms of life, and how they are often related to democratic ideals. Subsequently, we argue for the relevance of a postfoundational perspective, and for the value of fieldwork approaches.