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Journal Article 1: Starr, P. (2012). An unexpected crisis: The news media in postindustrial democracies. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 17, 242.

Abstract: Social and political theory in the twentieth century envisioned the flourishing of both democracy and the information economy. But while the digital revolution has promoted freedom of expression and freedom of information, it has had mixed effects on the freedom of the press. Throughout the advanced democratic world –more acutely in some countries than in others –the rise of digital communications has undermined the financial condition and economic independence of the press. New media have not, as of yet, offset losses in more traditional media. With its high dependence on advertising revenue, American journalism has been especially vulnerable to stress. In the late twentieth century, observers expected the news media in Europe to evolve in an American direction; instead American journalism has been moving in a more European direction –more partisan and less financially secure –though public policy in the United States shows no signs of adjusting to the new realities.

Journal Article 2: Anderson, C. (2013). What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age. Journalism, 14, 1023.

Abstract: This article analyzes expertise in the digital age through an ethnography of an increasingly valorized form of newswork – ‘serious, old fashioned reporting’ – and its purported occupational opposite, news aggregation. The article begins with a content analysis of the 4 March 2010 Federal Communications Commission workshop in which journalists tried to draw a sharp boundary between reporting and aggregation. In the second section the article explores the actual hybridized practices of journalistic aggregation. The empirical investigation serves as a scaffolding on which to build a theory of digital expertise that sees the nature and struggle over that expertise as networked properties. Expertise, according to the argument advanced in the final section, is neither a fixed property that can be ‘claimed’, nor is it simply the inevitable outcome of a clear occupational struggle over a particular jurisdiction. Specifically, the networks examined here coalesce around different conceptions of ‘what counts’ as a valid form of journalistic evidence under conditions of digitization.

Journal Article 3: Dindler, C. (2014). Negotiating political news: The two phases of off. Journalism, 16, 1140.

Abstract: This article analyses the interference of political print journalists with the political process through off-the-record interaction with political sources and provides an explanation as to why ambiguity of meaning characterises this off-the-record interaction. The central claim is that the ideal – or ‘myth’ – of mutual distinction between journalism and politics in some situations constrains interactions between journalists and political actors, and in others is overruled by the same actors now attending more to their own organisational interests. The article thus demonstrates a loose coupling between back region behaviour and front region adherence to institutional myths. The empirical data comprise observation studies of journalist and political source interaction and qualitative interviews with political journalists, political press advisors and elected politicians. The article distinguishes between two different phases of news production in off-the-record interaction. In the explorative phase, journalists indirectly influence politics via the exchange of political intelligence with political actors. In the realisation phase, the journalist may orchestrate politics by inviting the political actor to political action on the record.