The Digital Journalist: the journalistic field, boundaries, and disquieting change

This chapter looks at WikiLeaks and other ‘Interloper Media’ (Eldridge 2013, 2014) to explore the boundaries and identity dimensions of ‘being’ a digital journalist. Media technologies have long been connected with a disruption of journalism’s norms, and this disruption has been pronounced with digital technologies (Eldridge 2015). As much as technological shifts have allowed the form and function of journalistic products to change and develop, the way new actors are embracing these digital technologies have exposed a particular disruption around understandings of what a journalist is and how that too might be changing. In this disruption, the boundaries of journalistic identity have been irritated by outspoken claims of belonging from new actors such as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Going beyond WikiLeaks, questions of journalism’s normative ideals, the domain of the ‘Fourth Estate’, and journalism’s role as a legitimating authority continue to be the focus of discursive reactions to a range of new media actors and their journalistic claims. As platforms, content, and media spaces where journalism occurs change at a rapid pace, questions of what it means to be a journalist are ever present. This chapter reflects on these debates to discuss whether a more expansive and flexible definition of a digital journalist can be developed. In identifying key elements of journalistic identity, this chapter will draw on the literature of ‘boundaries’ around that identity, steep these within a discussion of journalism’s self-defined profession and maintenance of its identity, and posit a definition of the digital journalist fit for modern media realities