Toward New Journalism(s)

AbstractResearch indicates that information sharing and conversational uses of online media by journalists, news organizations, and individual users render complex and networked social awareness systems that evolve beyond traditional ecologies of journalism. This essay examines the form of news "prodused" through networked platforms that converge broadcast and oral traditions of storytelling into contemporary news practices. Synthesizing existing research, I argue that the shape news takes on is affective, the form of production is hybrid, and that spaces produced discursively through news storytelling frequently function as electronic elsewheres, or as social spaces that support marginalized and liminal viewpoints. Affective news streams are defined as news collaboratively constructed out of subjective experience, opinion, and emotion all sustained by and sustaining ambient news environments. They provide liminal layers to storytelling, but also a way for storytelling audiences to feel their own place into a developing news story.KEYWORDS: affective newshybridityjournalismnetworked journalismnewsnews storytellingsocial media Notes1. For more on homophily, see Lazarsfeld and Merton (Citation1954) or McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook (Citation2001). For a more focused analysis on how homophily drives information sharing, structures of influence, and behavioral contagion or information cascades, see, for example, Aral, Muchnik, and Sundararajan (Citation2009) or Watts (Citation2002).