ROBINSON: Who was once the purveyor of information dissemination is now the facilitator of information exchange.

Traditionalists vs. Convergers : Textual Privilege, Boundary Work, and the Journalist —Audience Relationship in the Commenting Policies of Online News Sites
Sue Robinson
Convergence 2010 16: 125
DOI: 10.1177/1354856509347719
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Abstract

As newspapers move toward web platforms, journalists struggle with their authoritative role in society. A documentation of policy development for commenting on news articles, this research considers these reader-content areas as places of boundary work for the journalist-audience relationship in interactive news environments. 

This ethnographic examination demonstrated significant internal conflict among both journalists and readers. The ‘traditionalists’ - those who want to maintain a hierarchal relationship between journalists and audiences - clashed with the ‘convergers’ - those who felt users should be given more freedoms within the news site. 

The resulting policy privileged journalism by relegating reader input to specific, structured spaces. But for the first time, audiences participated in that policy development, asserting their own textual privilege according to a value system apart from journalistic norms. The result was a grand identity complex for the news profession characterized by interrupted information flow patterns and diffused power over knowledge. Institutional hierarchies for policymaking and execution are radically changing.

Conclusion

It should be noted that all these observations and interviews were recorded during the industry’s identity complex, a backdrop of strife and confusion when owners, publishers and editors were looking to the web as a vehicle to redefine themselves for new economic climates and audience expectations. I see these online spaces within the confines of the news organization as a site of struggle for maintaining journalistic authority: Who are we? What is our role in this new environment? 

The process of building this policy represented an exploration of the tension inherent in the reconfiguration of the reporter–audience relationship. This ethnography and in-depth interviews showed how journalists are conflicted about the evolution of their role. 

Even as they make concessions to digital culture, they strive to recast their authority in new ways via comments policies. Newsrooms drew from offline notions of journalistic boundaries by not only implementing restrictive commenting policies but also virtually bordering their ‘journalism’ by dedicating separate spaces for audiences.

Nonetheless, this particular research puzzle illustrates a fundamental change in the infrastructure of news production, which is moving from a hierarchal, centralized, one-to-many, unidirectional information flow to something more distributed, decentralized, poly-directional, many-to-many, pattern. 

Who was once the purveyor of information dissemination is now the facilitator of information exchange – at least in these spaces. ‘When distributed construction initiatives happen within traditional media operations, they result in the co-existence of diverse organizational forms’ (Boczkowski, 2005: 165). In this data, we can see a multiplicity of philosophies operating in these spaces, mirroring the industry turmoil and identity battles.