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Professional routines and values in Catalan online newsrooms: online journalism in real contexts |
ABSTRACT
Online newsrooms are being closely analysed after a first wave of online journalism research centred in the products, news websites. This paper presents a case study comparing the professional routines and values in four online newsrooms, with the aim of finding the similarities and divergences among different media traditions: a national newspaper, a public broadcasting corporation, a local newspaper and a public-funded news portal. Observation of the participants at work and informal interviews on site were used to assess the routines and journalistic values of each newsroom. The methodological and theoretical approach is discussed and proposed as a way to explore the diversity of definitions and practices of online journalism. The paper defends the idea that a comparative perspective which acknowledges the existence of different media traditions is vital to draw a comprehensive picture of online media production. Some of the findings of the study include: beating the competence in publishing each piece of news is a professional value taken to obsessive rates by online journalists, with fatal consequences for the quality of their work; online journalists in traditional media environments tend to downgrade the value of their work in regard to their offline mates; news wire is the main (and almost only) source for most of online news, shortage of human team and the culture of immediate update discourage the journalists from going out or phoning first-hand sources, specially in traditional media online newsrooms.
1. Myth and utopia in online journalism
Every new technology is received by society with mixed feelings of fear and revolution. This was also the case of the Internet in media companies. Many predicted the death of newspapers and even more professionals and scholars stated that the features of the new medium would radically alter journalists’ work (Pavlik, 1999; Deuze, 2001). Multimedia, interactivity, hypertext... were technical and conceptual innovations that the Internet was putting together and suggested a new model of journalism based in a) the end of temporal and spatial limits of the news products, which allowed both permanent updates and in-depth reporting; b) the vanishing of media formats and the birth of multimedia storytelling, a combination of texts, photographs, animated infographics, and video and audio pieces; c) an active implication of the audience in the news consumption and production, through personalization of the product, opinion fora, journalists contact e-mails and open news publishing spaces in media websites (Jankowski and Van Selm, 2000; Hall, 2001).
In this scenario, many journalists would specialize in selecting relevant online sources and synthesise information to support users’ news pieces and debates. In a medium such as the Internet, where self-publishing is extremely easy and cheap, journalist would be less gatekeepers and more cartographers, pointing out interesting news paths online rather than filtering and packaging a closed news product (Singer, 1997; Giussani, 1997).
These statements are mostly utopian to anyone familiar to online newsroom routines. But they have deeply influenced both academics and professionals. The former have mainly concentrated in comparing media website features to the ideal model of online journalism described above. The results of these studies usually state that online publications have failed to take advantage of the Internet communication capabilities and tend to reproduce traditional media schemas. But they fail to explain the causes of this “poor” use of the Internet, because it is not possible to find the reasons exploring only the products (Jankowski and Van Selm, 2000). There is a technological deterministic approach in this research, because the ideal model is taken for granted as the only “appropriate” model for online journalism. Despite of this, professionals do also have the ideal model as a common reference. They justify many of their technological choices that do not fit the model by explaining its drawbacks or the limitations imposed by the social, economical and technical context of their media company. Many times, their vision of the future evolution of their website is close to the ideal model, while the present is defined as a limited version of what they would like to develop.
Therefore, we all, both professionals and scholars, have built a very strong utopia on what online journalism should be and this has led to prescriptive and prospective research, with little room to historical and causal analysis of current trends. It is time to deconstruct it and go beyond the evidence that online media are not what the ideal model expected them to be. An ethnographical approach, entering the online newsrooms, listening to professionals explaining their views about their job and their products and watching them at work, has already proved to be fruitful in exploring the social, economical and technical factors that shape the use of the Internet as a news medium in concrete case studies (Boczkowski, 2002, 2004). My proposal, similarly rooted to the sociotechnical change studies tradition as Boczkowski’s, stresses the need for a comparative perspective, based in case studies of online newsrooms in different media environments: TV and radio broadcasters, newspapers, purely digital outlets... The main hypothesis underlying this approach is that media traditions are one of the crucial factors that shape Internet adoption and use in news media companies. By media traditions I mean journalistic values, routines and product formats, the ways in which a news product is produced, which vary from company to company in detail, but are clearly standardized at large in the different traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) as the sociology of newsmaking has shown (Manning, 2001).
The aim of this approach is to build a comprehensive and non-deterministic description of the directions which online journalism is really leading. I assume that there is not only one model of online journalism and the methodology I will outline in this paper wants to help in picturing this diverse landscape. Transnational comparative studies would deepen the comprehensiveness of this aim, but the first empirical test of this research concentrated on four online newsrooms in Catalonia (Spain), linked to a national newspaper, a public broadcasting corporation, a local newspaper and a public-funded news portal. I will first describe the theoretical framework and the methodological design of the study and then synthesise the main results of the comparison of the four case studies, demystifying the ideal online journalism model with the analysis of the actual journalistic values and routines of professionals in the newsrooms, stressing the differences among media traditions.
2. Sociotechnical change: an interpretative framework
In communication studies there is a strong tradition in researching media producers. Since the end of the 1960s, sociologists conducted participant observation inside newsrooms in order to explain how working routines biased news (Tuchman, 2002). These studies, usually known as “sociology of newsmaking” described the mechanisms used by journalists to overcome uncertainty and to gain productivity, explained how this routines affected sources access to media and news formats, and demystified the most sacred word in journalism: objectivity. But this research tradition paid little attention to the role of technology in the newsrooms and thus it does not give us any theoretical framework to analyse the process of a new technology entering the communication arena (Cottle, 1999). Another important research tradition in the discipline, history of communication, has thoroughly described the technological evolution of media (Winston, 1998). However, it has a macro point of view that makes it very difficult to use it as a methodological referent for a research project based on present newsrooms.
The research in technological innovation has been addressed from several perspectives (Lievrouw, 2002). Reviewing the bibliography of the field I found common ground with the constructivist approach of newsmaking research in sociotechnical change studies, a multidisciplinary tradition born in the mid 1980s with roots in sociology, anthropology and history (Bijker and Law, 1992). This discipline states that technologies are a social construction of evolving nature that necessarily have to be analysed in the social context where they are invented or adopted. The main implication of this approach is that the same technology can be used differently in different social groups (Lemonnier, 1993). Internet uses can vary from one media company to other, and its adoption is a process where the technology and the social group mutually shape each other until a minimum stability is found. The result can be a different use of the one initially defined or even the rejection of the technology (Kline, 2000). And this closure of a technological model can be reshaped once and again upon technical innovations or organizational changes.
The social context where a technology develops is defined as a group of actors with different levels of knowledge, converging or conflicting interests, and evolving social relations. These factors influence actors’ definitions of a technology, which may be contradictory, and the adoption process is usually related to the negotiation or imposition of one definition over the other. Power relations inside the group shape this process and end up shaping the tools, routines and roles associated to the use of the technology (Callon, 1987; Latour, 1993). In the case of online newsrooms this means defining not only the website layout and the content management system, but also the journalistic criteria for news selection and updates, the use of links and multimedia elements, the role of the audience and the tasks of the different professional profiles in the newsroom. In a fairly stabilized technological set, users tend to think of these rules as objective and assume that there is no other way to use the technology (Lemonnier, 1993). In the online newsrooms I visited, the initial definition phase was over in 2003 but the technology model was not stabilized enough to avoid conflicts between different views of the news product and the production roles.
Ethnography, document analysis and in-depth interviews are the main research methods of sociotechnical change studies. Their constructivist definition of the object of study asks for qualitative approaches able to gather data about social relations, actors' actions and discourses, work environments. This is similar to the sociology of newsmaking, but the research in technological change includes a historical perspective that the former seldom has (Boczkowski, 2004). To fully understand the factors, conflicts and decisions that made up the current use of the Internet in a concrete media company it is sensible to reconstruct the evolution of the company prior to new media explorations and its steps in the new arena. Document analysis and in-depth interviews serve this aim, building on the findings of the present routines and definitions in the newsroom, retrieved by participants observation.
3. Research design
Four cases where chosen for the research, with the criteria of selecting different media traditions in order to compare their similarities and differences:
A purely online project
A newspaper online venture
A broadcaster online portal
A local newspaper online version
Each of the chosen projects is regarded to be one of the best news websites of its kind by Catalan online journalism forums. The common ground is that they are devoted to general interest news with a quasi-permanent update of information. This sameness in scope and objectives would help in finding differences based on media tradition.
Participants observation was conducted from January to June 2003, consisting in 5 stages of 3 days in each of the four newsrooms. Approximately each week of the month three days were spent in one of the newsrooms. Longer stages (weeks and even months) in a single spot are common in ethnography. Nevertheless, I decided to limit them to 3 days and scatter them in 6 months because of logistic and epistemological reasons. Having four observation locations, I could have spent some weeks in each of them. But I wanted to have a time perspective in the ethnography, as in the whole research. This weekly rotation allowed me to visit every media company from month to month, and this helped to detect more easily if the product or the routines were evolving. The stages consisted in observing journalists at work, usually without interrupting their duties to ask questions. Informal conversations were undertaken in the newsroom to make explicit journalists definitions on their work and the technologies they used. During this phase documents defining the news websites and routines were retrieved in the field, specially the ones of the first stages of the projects.
In a second phase, over 20 in-depth interviews where conducted with people related to the news websites in the past and present: editors, reporters, technical managers, marketing managers... They were asked to reconstruct the evolution of the project from their point of view and their definitions of online journalism in general and their online venture in particular were extracted. This paper presents a very synthesised and preliminar outcome of the analysis of the gathered data.
4. The endless update
The ability to update the home page of the news website at any time and as many times as current events require is the foremost assumed Internet feature among online journalists in all the analysed newsrooms. They state that this is one of their main differences to “traditional media” and believe that online publishing is more quick and efficient than radio or TV to offer up-to-the-minute breaking news or following the evolution of an ongoing event.
Content Management Systems (CMS), the web-based software that reporters use in online newsrooms to publish their news pieces, allow any journalist in the newsroom to have a piece on the website in a matter of seconds and, in most of the cases, select it to be the main headline in the home page. This is not only because of the technical design of the CMSs, but mainly because of the mostly horizontal organization of the online newsrooms. The role of news editor is present in a way or another in all cases, but he/she is more concentrated in mid-term planning than in up-to-the-minute decisions about the home page headlines. Only in the case of hard decisions reporters ask for his/her advice, and the editor always has the last word: if he/she suggests an issue the reporters follow the instructions. This means that in normal situations each journalist is autonomous to select an issue, write the news piece and publish it on the website without any filter. Only in the broadcaster there is a sub-editor that reviews all pieces (as well as producing herself) and a linguistic editor who works for style homogeneity. While this is a model basically taken from the TV newsroom, in the two analysed newspapers the model radically counters the hierarchies of the traditional newsroom: online journalists are completely autonomous in the daily routine (they even work alone parts of the day) and only have the slight supervision of a member of the paper staff who has other duties related to the paper newsroom besides this. A piece in these websites would hardly be re-read by anyone in the newsroom before publication, meanwhile the pieces in the print newspapers are reviewed at least by the section head and a person in the closing edition shift.
The lack of pre-publication reviews for online news pieces is not by itself a problem for the quality of the product. In fact the CMS allows the journalist to correct any mistake and update the piece with new information at any time. What really puts in risk the quality of the news is that the permanent updating capabilities of the Internet has been assumed as one of the main journalistic values by the online newsrooms. This makes them try to be as quick as possible in getting a news piece online and they visit their main competence websites to check who has been the first in getting a breaking news piece on the home page. The underlying journalistic argument is that “we shall inform the audience of any event as soon as we know it”.
This culture of the constant update is more dominant in online newsrooms linked to a traditional media company. As the newspaper or the TV will be explaining the news in more detail in few hours or next day, online journalists have persuaded themselves that their main duty is to “fill in the gap”, i.e. offering small pieces of news between two editions of their main media referent, therefore letting the audience have a quick idea of what is going on right now until the moment they will be able to get the full report in the form of a newspaper or a TV news bulletin. This is taken to a really astonishing limit in the case of the newspapers websites: the news updates produced by the online newsroom during the day are deleted by midnight when the digital version of the print edition is put on the website. The online journalists in this newsrooms state that their pieces are a kind of “provisional” product that is replaced by the “real news” (the ones produced by the traditional newsroom) when they are available.
To keep up with the pace of events with the limited human resources of an online newsroom (form 2 to 12 reporters in the studied cases) the reporters put their trust in the news wires. At present the feeds provided by news agencies are digital and the journalists can access them online and print out, copy and paste the wire texts to work on them for their news pieces. The less people in the newsroom, the more they depend on the wires. In the case of the local newspaper, with only one person per shift, most of the times the work of the reporter was limited to copying and pasting the text of the wire into the CMS, without even editing it. The main task of the journalist was selecting which news wires where worth to publish and they could easily miss an important one because the rhythm of publication could be as fast as a piece each 5 minutes.
Glancing at the home page of the competence to check if “you have miss anything” is a common practice in online newsrooms. Even though online journalists in the newspapers work inside the traditional newsroom, among their print outlet counterparts, there is very little contact with the traditional newsroom mates. They would rather check other news websites than asking a paper journalist which is his/her take in one issue. This does not mean that they don’t do this, but is an infrequent routine, overwhelmed by the pace of constant updates. The broadcaster online newsroom is located two floors over the TV newsroom and the only moment the TV staff sees a person of the online staff is in the morning meeting that prepares the midday TV bulletin. The online sub-editor that goes to this meeting almost never talks, she just listens to the news items discussed by the TV people. For her is a mostly “symbolic” act to avoid that the TV journalists completely forget the existence of the online newsroom. In comparison to the newspaper digital outlet, the broadcaster online newsroom has an advantage: they have access to the radio and TV news texts and therefore can compare wires to pieces produced in-house. But many online reporters feel that this texts are not very suitable for the website because they are designed to be read and have references to voice inserts and images that usually will not be on the website. Therefore, although the TV and radio pieces are a good reference for them to select news items, the wires are their main source for news texts. Phoning or going out to interview a direct source to have a balance to the wire version is not in the online journalists routines: there is no time for that and they admit that they have to blindly trust news agencies.
In the news portal, independent from any traditional media, they believe they are not able to compete with big media companies in political and international news. Therefore they have chosen to concentrate in specific interest areas (environment, technology, culture) and offer service news, rather than event news: they usually highlight a forthcoming event than going to it and report what happened, which would be difficult with just 8 reporters in the newsroom. Therefore, they explain people things in which they can engage, rather than telling them what happened. Nevertheless, the portal newsroom cannot completely get rid of the constant update culture. Despite they say they cannot compete with big media, they usually cover the main political and international news, stating they cannot be out of the world. When dealing with this “hard” news the “be first to publish” motto also spreads in this newsroom. In fact, paradoxically enough, they almost have the same elements as the traditional media online newsrooms to follow this events and sometimes even beat them in speed and accuracy of their reporting. The journalists in the portal are more advanced Internet that most of the online reporters in the other newsrooms and this helps them to access other sources on the Internet different than the wires.
The consequences of permanent updating in the material conditions of the studied newsrooms are mainly negative to the journalistic quality of the product: inaccuracy, arbitrarity in news selection, lack of text adaptation to a read-on-screen environment (long paragraphs and phrases from the wires), lack of context and balance. This is not the case of all the news pieces published by these newsrooms, but it is quite common due to the low grade of control over the webs content. It is more critical in the online newsrooms with less personnel and no supervising role within the online staff.
The most clear side-effect of the continuous update culture is a productivity-driven conception of news: at work, online journalists feel they ought not stop publishing news pieces during they shift, and for them one of the best indicators of a good job is a high number of pieces produced in a row. The limitless Internet is not used to accumulate in-depth information about an issue, but to accumulate short pieces as fast as possible. In fact, having the wires as the main and almost only source directly disallows the deep journalism model.
Nevertheless, when asked for an analysis of the journalistic model of their website most of them are aware of the risks to product quality of the endless update culture and state that they would rather do less news and work on them better. Some of them claim the right to go out to the street and do original reporting, but at the same time they say that is impossible because they are concious that the website is not earning money for the company and therefore they cannot ask for more. There is sharp lucidity and self-criticism in most of the interviewed professionals, but also a deeply rooted sense of conformism. The distance between the utopia and the reality. This does not mean that street reporting is not possible in online journalism: the professionals in the portal do not usually go to press conferences, that they see as a waste of time, but they actually work in original interviews and reports and go out of the newsroom for that. It is a little proportion of their production, but they do it. In traditional media online newsrooms this are tougher: the “real” reporters, the ones that go out to the street, are the main medium counterparts.
5. The material limitations for experimentation
There is an exception for the permanent update routine, a sub-product in news websites that is not under the pressure of daily events: specials. This are stand-alone mini-webs usually about a predicted and important news issue. Newsrooms usually plan in advance the production of the special and devote a team of reporters and technicians to devise and develop it. The ideal model of online journalism is an intense referent for these specials: deepness, multi-perspective voices, multimedia integration, users participation... are core values in most of the cases. Specials become the antidote for professional frustration. They break the daily routine several times a year and let the reporters experiment with things they consider closer to what online journalism should be. Planned development and the fact that specials are punctual make this model possible. It is not transferable to daily news, it would not be sustainable. Specials are the experimental corner of news websites.
From newsroom to newsroom this general overview of specials has nuances, and economical and organizational factors also end up limiting in a way their development. In the bigger newspaper, there is a team of reporters devoted to specials development, forum supervision and print-to-digital processes. Thus, the online journalists working in the up-to-the-minute news have little involvement in specials production. In the broadcaster, editors are responsible of specials design and the technical development is done outside of the newsroom by the web programmers that manage the rest of portals produced by the company (devoted to entertainment, TV and radio programs, specific targets...). Online newsroom reporters mainly take part in content production for the specials, primarily background texts and news pieces. In the news portal they start by a collective brainstorming of what the special could include and then a reporter assumes the direction of the project each time, coordinating with the in-house graphic designer and the web programmer, who works from another building of the company, because he also develops other websites. The local newspaper has design and programming outsourced and such a small online staff that many specials fail to be ready at the time of the event because of poor planning and communication with the technical provider. Some times content was ready (written by the online reporters or repurposed from the print edition) and the special mini-site was not, but also the other way around.
The communication flow from the online newsroom to the staff in charge of the technical matters of the websites is viewed as problematic by many of the journalists. Having the programmers out of the newsroom in most cases obliges the reporters to pass through intermediaries before their ideas get to the programmer who actually will develop them. There are heads of the technical departments and project managers who analyse the journalists’ proposals and decide the cheapest and quickest way to turn them in an actual web environment. Journalists have the feeling that many times they are told that what they want to do is too complex or directly impossible, and have to review their design into a less ambitious special. In the bigger newspaper, the online editor and the specials reporters have learnt programming concepts by themselves in order to be able to talk to technicians in their own language and ask for the features they want to develop in a very concrete way, to avoid refusals. They have even programmed little applications by themselves when programmers where overloaded.
In the daily routines the relationship between journalists and programmers is also conflicting. Reporters often complain about the design of the CMSs, because there are fields in the forms or action paths that make their work less efficient or limit their ability to find concrete solutions when they have to improvise in pieces that, by any reason, go out of the standards. Journalists believe that the CMSs are very rigid and where not designed with the daily work in mind and therefore force many routines that would be easier if some CMS forms where revised. Some of the changes may be really hard to do, because they affect the core of the systems, but many would just need little reprogramming: extending a field in a form, putting a convenient shortcut to a feature in the place where the reporters always need it... Reporters also find bugs in the CMS that alter the resulting web pages, sometimes affecting the quality of the product. The reaction of programmers to all of this journalists’ complaints is usually derogatory. They say that journalists do not understand the system and tend to underestimate the necessity of changes. Only critical bugs receive immediate attention, the rest of complaints usually fall into the programmers to-do list, an ever growing document that journalists do not trust at all.
The main material restrictions are found in multimedia integration. The factors involved in the use (or lack of use) of multimedia (videos, audio, Flash animations) vary depending of the newsroom. The regional newspaper CMS has full support to attach multimedia files to news pieces. In the in-house design process of the CMS they decided this was an important feature for the website. But they have never used this feature: as a newspaper, they do not produce audiovisual materials and Flash is only applied to specials, where custom programming is usually needed besides of the CMS. The local newspaper online newsroom never thought of publishing video online, but during the first two years of the project they worked with the external technical provider to produce a weekly Flash infographic, really competing with the main newspapers in Spain who had a bigger budget for this multimedia developments. Later on, the aim of redesigning the website to turn it in a subscription platform compelled the online editor to choose: with the same budget for design there was not room enough for redesign and animations, and he decided to stop offering infographics.
The other two outlets have more chances to publish audiovisual materials. The one related to the Catalan public broadcasting company has in-house audiovisual news production, with 24 hours TV and radio channels besides of the bulletins. The stand-alone online portal has an agreement with the local TVs association in Catalonia and they feed videos for the portal twice a day. Problems in this cases are due to deficient technical equipments in the online newsroom. Video capturing, digitizing and compressing hardware and software is not very expensive, but it asks for a dedicated computer with enough processing power and proper access to the video sources. Conditions for this process have improved slowly in the newsrooms because of economical reasons backed with the argument of audience stats: very few users actually watch to the videos in these websites. Broadband connections in Catalonia are growing fast in the last two years, but still many users have slow modem connections which make streaming or downloading a video a painful experience. This is a good reason to prevent investments in technical equipment, but the editors also accept that video content should be rethought to increase their audience. “Putting TV news on the website without any change is not the best way to get people using video online”, admitted one editor. The online staffs do not think about producing videos themselves, but they think they have to select for the web only those videos where images are spectacular, self-explanatory... The rest of the news are more easily consumed by reading the text piece.
Digitalisation of the TV newsroom in the broadcaster and the internalisation of the TV-to-web process in the local TVs association have improved the quality of life in the online newsrooms regarding audiovisual content processing. Before this improvements, an online reporter had to learn the technical procedures to convert analogue video to a digital file and he/she would lose an important amount of time in doing a process that was not journalistic at all. Now they just have to select the already digitised videos and put them online through a CMS form. Nevertheless this has not changed the kind of videos that they put online. Their good intentions about having more relevant videos online is, as many other good intentions, mysteriously diluted in the daily routines.
6. Active audience: threat or opportunity?
Online journalists in the studied newsrooms have mixed feelings about their audiences. They all welcome the huge amount of feedback they receive by e-mail (in most cases a general e-mail for the online newsroom), but when evaluating the participation spaces in their websites journalists differ in their positions. While the ones linked to traditional media companies think that users participation has to be closely monitored to track and delete offensive content, the people in the online news portal have a very different motto: “Our work is just 70% of the portal content, the rest, a very important part, is produced by our users”. They really appreciate that users correct, extend, criticise and comment on their news pieces.
In fact, these different attitudes materialise in different strategies for users participation. In the websites of traditional media companies the audience can engage in forum discussions clearly separated from the news content. In the portal, forums are only used in very specific cases and the main participation feature are the comments right below each news piece. The difference is philosophically relevant and quite evident to the user experience. In the first case, users are invited to chat between them, with no relationship with the journalists. In the second, they are invited to add value to a concrete news piece, to collaborate with the journalist in a way.
This also affects the way that the online newsroom manages users participation. In the traditional media online forums one of the tasks of some reporters is to carefully read each message in the forum throughout the day and delete any offensive post. In the broadcaster website they have decided to oblige the users to register before being able to post messages, as a way to promote respectful interventions. All the reporters involved in these tasks tend to think about the users as a problem they have to manage. They have even considered moderating the forums (i.e. that any post has to be reviewed before being public), but in the trials they realised that users participation dropped dramatically and declined this possibility. In the online portal, in contrast, reporters have the policy of not deleting any message. The users of the portal act themselves as watchdogs and criticise any offensive post. This way, online journalists concentrate in reading the content of the messages as positive inputs to their work, not threats they have to control. This ideal situation may be possible because of the design and philosophy of user participation in the portal, but another important factor is the profile of the portal users: meanwhile traditional media websites have a very broad audience (with a large number of visitors and from a wide social spectrum), the online news portal does not have the brand presence of its competitors and is mainly visited by advanced Internet users with a high degree of fidelity to the portal, therefore becoming a very cohesive community.
7. Online media diversity
The four case studies of this research clearly suggest that there are multiple factors that shape the use of the Internet as a news publication channel. They also highlight that there are common values and routines in online newsrooms and at the same time important differences. Each context (each company, in this case) develops concrete strategies, definitions, tools, routines and roles which only can be explained by a deep analysis of the actors and material conditions in each environment.
The utopian online journalism model is part of the shared values of online newsrooms. But the daily life in these newsrooms is far from the ideal model. The work of the online journalists is poorly considered by their traditional counterparts and by themselves. The daily routines help in this, by forcing the online reporters to produce fast short news pieces.
The main factors influencing the product definition and routines in online newsrooms seem to be organizational (labour conditions, relationship to traditional newsrooms, relationship to technical staff), economical (low product profitability), cultural (online journalism values and definitions) and material (technical equipment, software design). All this factors are interrelated and mutually influence each other. We find the origins of each of this parameters in the attitudes, strategies and knowledge of the actors involved in the decision making processes that define and re-evaluate the online product and its production process.
A more comprehensive map of the actors, their relationships and their decisions would give us a sharper view on the reasons that configure the models of online journalism that media companies are offering. The initial picture is not very positive from the point of view of the quality of journalism, a concern that is not only constrained to online journalism: the debate is wider, but the fact is that the promises of the online journalism utopia are being buried by the weight of the media companies logics.
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