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PN 248 Journalism-as-a-Service: Amplifying Public Intellectual Contributions Through the Conversation
A. Bruns1, F. Hanusch1
1 Queensland University of Technology, Digital Media Research Centre, Kelvin Grove, Australia
The boundaries between entirely professional, distinct news organisations on the one side and amateur, distributed citizen journalism on the other are
softening and dissolving. At the point of convergence between professional journalism and amateur news engagement, a variety of new models for news
are emerging, exploring diverse organisational configurations and drawing on a range of expertise across journalism, marketing, digital media and other
fields. This paper examines one of the most remarkable, internationally successful new platforms for the publication of news from outside conventional
journalistic Conversation. Initiated in Australia and now operating across the US, UK, France, and southern Africa, this platform is financially
supported by a coalition of academic institutions around the world and provides what can be understood as ‘journalism-as-a-service’(JAAS): a small team
of journalistically trained staff are working with a large community of scholars from participating institutions to convert their research findings and other
evidence-based interventions in current public debate into formats that are more closely aligned with conventional news writing, and thus more accessible
to non-expert readers. As a result, these articles stand a greater chance of being recognised and used by other news organisations as well as by the general
public. Further, by publishing under Creative Commons licences, The Conversation facilitates the broad re-publication of its content in conventional news
outlets, news and science blogs, and other online sites. This substantially increases the circulation of such scientific insights; for the academics involved,
such exposure also frequently leads to added exposure in the news media through follow-up interviews and other engagements. Overall, this JAAS model
has been remarkably successful at inserting scholarly knowledge into public debates. As a born-digital platform, in addition to staff-led content sourcing
The Conversation invites scholars to initiate the process by submitting their draft story ideas for development by TC staff; this crowdsourcing-inspired ap‑
proach generates considerably more breadth and depth of coverage than a reliance on conventional science journalism. But this paper highlights the ways in
which a considerable level of journalistic control is still being maintained at sites like The Conversation, with traditionally-trained journalists acting as gate‑
keepers in soliciting contributions from academics as well as in helping them to construct their articles. At the same time, this model is also giving up some
aspects of journalistic control and relies on experts to produce the majority of information themselves, rather than merely being questioned by journalists.
Documenting the impact of this site on the visibility of scholarly work in public debate, and the take-up of Conversation content by the general public,
the paper also presents an in-depth analysis of social media-based dissemination of Conversation stories, drawing on a multi-year study of news-sharing
practices in Australia. Read against the context of what is known about overall news engagement practices through social media in this country, such
detailed quantitative data provides compelling evidence for the impact of The Conversation in inserting scientific findings into the national conversation, as
well as identifying areas requiring further development.
PN 249 The Adjustment of Channel Repertoires Between Journalism and Its Audience
W. Loosen1, C. Neuberger2
1 Hans-Bredow-Institut für Medienforschung an der Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
2 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung, München, Germany
Today, journalistic content is produced and distributed via multiple platforms while social media increasingly complement traditional mass media and
expand the communicative options between journalists and their audiences. This expansion of journalism towards new channels has stimulated various
processes: it encourages manifold novel news practices, fosters new patterns of news consumption and networked audiences and also opens an important
space for audience participation. Altogether, social media use in journalism and of (its) networked and partly participating audiences lead to something we
could describe as a clash of the mass media paradigm inherent to the institution of journalism with a social media paradigm inherent to a new“networked
architecture of journalism” (Bastos 2014: 18) – a paradigm which to date we are only able to describe in its contours. To better understand these devel‑
opments we see the need to a) address uses of social media in journalism as multichannel communication as typically users and producers use a number
of social media and other internet channels in parallel; b) consider the multifunctionality of social media as journalists and users alike use them to the end
of manifold purposes like research, participation, and monitoring (Neuberger, Langenohl & Nuernbergk, 2014); c) acknowledge that affordances of social
media (boyd 2010) also emerge from mutual expectations and adjustment processes between producers and users as particular media channel qualities
not only result from technical boundaries and opportunities, but also from their subjective perception and adoption. Against this backdrop, we suggest to
analyze the use of social media in journalism with the help of a theoretical framework from the field of audience research, the media repertoire approach
(Hasebrink & Popp, 2006; Hasebrink & Domeyer, 2012). Whereas media-centered audience research usually considers the usage of single media, the start‑
ing point for a repertoire-oriented approach is the specific combination of different media as arranged by a single user to the end of different gratifications.
We expand this audience-centered approach by also integrating the journalism perspective, that is looking on both sides (Loosen & Schmidt, 2012). That
is, we have to ask for the social media repertoires of users and journalists alike, and, moreover, to which extent these repertoires differ. These theoretical
considerations will be illustrated by the results of two empirical studies which shed light on how journalism and audiences deal with that multichannel and
multifunctional communication. The journalism side is represented by a newsroom survey in Germany in 2014 (n=105, response rate=69,5%), the audi‑
ence side by online surveys among audiences of four different German news outlets (with samples ranging from n=321 to 4686 and subsamples for active
users ranging from n=41 to 390). It is shown that newsrooms use social media for 24 different purposes and that actively participating users in part exhibit
different motivations to participate with respect to different participatory channels.