A book… and a network
This website is the virtual home of a research project that started many years ago as separate efforts to understand a new phenomenon: Media all around the world have been exploring the Internet as a news medium for more than a decade now, creating a new breed of journalism. Online journalism is here to stay, and we, as media researchers, were excited to observe the development of a new form of newsmaking.
In different countries, from Germany to the US, from China to Argentina, different researchers started to investigate the trends. And we ended up getting to know each other in conferences and through papers. What we had in common was the willingness to understand how media dealt with innovation, with new languages and logics. And each of us was convinced that the better way to explore this was to step into the online newsrooms and live with the journalists, their expectations and their worries.
Chris Paterson had the idea of putting together a book based on this ethnographic research of online newsrooms back in 2003, as a spin off of the Media Production Analysis group at IAMCR. In the last four years we have invited pioneers and new scholars interested in online newsroom research to summarize their findings to generate the first collective exploration of online journalism from the inside, a critical look at the routines and values of the new frontier of news production.
And as the book becomes a reality (will be published by Peter Lang in May 2008), we would like it to be a starting point: An invitation for much-needed ethnographic research in the newsrooms of converging media in a moment of profound transformations. This website wants to turn the book into the core of a network of researchers that will share their experiences through this blog. You are invited to join the conversation in the comments section below each story or sending an email to info [at] makingonlinenews.net.
