The Internet and professional journalism: content, practice and values in Irish online news

Journalism’s encounter with the Internet has engendered a multi-layered debate concerning the place of established news media and its practitioners in public communication.\ud The Internet and its affordances re-animate familiar themes in discussions of journalism, not least concerning power relations, gate-keeping and objectivity claims. In many popular and some academic analyses, so-called ‘traditional’ journalism is under examination because of economic forces driving the development of digital networked media, but also because the univocal nature of older media, with its\ud enclosed culture, is considered at odds with the potential of a reconstituted public sphere founded in the open, interactive system of emerging spaces.\ud This study, related to a wider European research project, investigates the intermeshing of Irish journalism’s professional output, practices and normative values, as\ud materialized online and as expressed in the opinions and attitudes of practising journalists as expert respondents, with the potentialities of the Internet.\ud Where much of the discourse to date is framed in a narrative of progress or, similarly, posits a research timeline maturing from examination of outputs to constructivist investigation of news work processes, this study seeks to find commonalities between professional journalism, as expressed in print, and the evolving online information ecology, and to critically examine claims of advancement