Challenges to journalistic professionalism: on technological change and epistemologies of journalism

This paper focuses on how new media technologies, in generating new participatory opportunities, might challenge journalistic paradigms and epistemologies central to professionalism. It takes a particular interest in how long-standing notions of journalistic objectivity might be under fire at a time of shifting relationships between journalists and, as Rosen (2007) put it, “the people formerly known as the audience.” The paper seeks to position the study of journalism with respect to arguments around an “affective turn” across social sciences and humanities disciplines. With the increased prevalence of user-generated or amateur content, the emotional stories of ordinary people, told in new and non-objective forms, are no longer physically and spatially marked off as exceptional through their location in specific sections or pages of a newspaper, and hence “ghettoized” or “segregated” (Coward 2013; Wahl-Jorgensen 2008). Instead, they have become part and parcel of news content, challenging epistemologies of journalism