Changing news values? An integrated approach to meaning co-creation in digital journalism stories.

Anderson, Bissie

Abstract

The visual storytelling turn in digital journalism requires a critical investigation of its performative power. The vivid, emotive, empathy-framing qualities of visual content in journalism have been well documented (Robinson 2002; Powell et al 2015), and so has the rising importance of UX design in response to audience expectations (Borges-Rey 2016). But how do these developments affect news values, traditionally regarded as "maps of meaning" (Hall et al 1978)? Are the news selection criteria changing, and what role does the "imagined audience" (Litt 2012) play in the journalistic reconstruction(s) of reality? This paper argues that the increased prominence of "measurable" journalistic audiences (Carlson 2018) require that we revisit traditional notions of news values by examining the process of meaning-making as: cultural production, audience agency and interpretation, and the tensions between the two. Following calls for multimodal studies of digital journalism (Hiippala 2016), I present an integrated methodological framework to investigate meaning (co-)creation – by combining producer, artefact, and audience perspectives. I will demonstrate how an integrated sociology, multimodality and HCI approach can shed light on the way producer-audience tensions are negotiated in, and beyond, the interface of digital journalism artefacts, and how this leads to the need to reconceptualise news values.

Citation

ANDERSON, B. 2019. Changing news values? An integrated approach to meaning co-creation in digital journalism stories. Presented at the 2019 Approaches to multimodality in the media (AMiM 2019): reading beyond words, 12 April 2019, London, UK.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 2019 Approaches to multimodality in the media (AMiM 2019): reading beyond words
• Conference Location: London, UK
• Start Date: Apr 12, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 12, 2023
• Keywords: Digital journalism; Cultural studies; Critical theory; Postmodernism; Metamodernism
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1752929