While engagement with social media audiences has become an increasingly central part of contemporary journalism, this labour can impact on journalists’ personal and professional wellbeing. Recent research has outlined the detrimental impacts of social media work on journalists and other online media producers, including online harassment, unmanageable workloads and burnout. Both journalists and online content creators have also reported lack of support from platforms and news organisations to foster better professional wellbeing online. This article explores how professional wellbeing for social media journalism can be supported through some of the social infrastructures of online labour – in particular, frameworks of enacting “care” online. Journalists and content producers care for themselves online using practices such as curating social media consumption and time online. However, we argue that practices prioritising both individual and community care are key to fostering improved professional wellbeing in online labour. Using interviews with both journalists and online content creators, we conceptualise how social media practices centred on “care for self” and “care for others” support professional wellbeing on social media. Perspectives on different modes of care indicate how journalism’s professional logics are being negotiated on social media and developing into practices that prioritise improving wellbeing in online labour.

The increasing centrality of eyewitness images in news coverage has necessitated the development of advanced visual fact-checking practices, frequently devised by actors outside traditional journalism. This article presents a model of the transfer of such external knowledge practices into journalism, relying on a framework that combines concepts from sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina with economist Roger Koppl’s model of epistemic systems. Drawing on 13 in-depth interviews and participant observation of Faktisk Verifiserbar, a collaborative visual fact-checking unit established by Norwegian news organisations in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the article demonstrates that adopting external epistemic practices facilitated the introduction of what is here termed “substantiated verification” in Norwegian journalism. Substantiated verification offers a nuanced assessment of visual material that transcends journalism’s prevalent true/false paradigm. While integrating external epistemic practices enhances journalistic rigour by leveraging outside knowledge, it also represents a potential challenge to journalism’s authority and autonomy. The article contributes to the understanding of visual media in the field of fact-checking, as well as to that of the relationship between journalism, the intelligence community, and hybrid investigative actors engaged in open-source intelligence.

With the proliferation of commercial social networks, public broadcasters face significant challenges, including a growing dependence on these platforms for audience interaction. Algorithm logics, oftentimes ascribing high visibility to emotional contributions, could influence discourse and dialogue on social media to become more uncivil, and undemocratic. The Public Spaces Incubator (PSI) is an international research and development initiative by six public service media (PSM) organizations in different countries, in response to the growing need for constructive public dialogue and a disentanglement from commercial platforms. PSI aims to develop debate spaces that facilitate public engagement, strengthen journalistic audience engagement and reduce dependencies, by offering new tools for audience interaction directly linked to journalistic output. To gain insights into PSM’s goals surrounding these interactions, a case-study using qualitative interviews with journalists, community managers, strategic management and programmers working for the German PSM ZDF was conducted. By interviewing journalists about their experiences when testing three prototypes at an early stage of the project, we were able to analyze the aspirations, predictions, and hopes of those involved surrounding the new conversational tools. The study underscores the need for a respectful communication culture to counteract the detrimental effects of sensationalism and division prevalent on commercial platforms. By shaping self-owned infrastructures for value-oriented digital communication tools the involved PSM are trying to become more independent from social networks and to avoid normative failure-effects of innovations. By actively promoting their values, PSI seeks to redefine the role of PSM in fostering deliberative discourse.

Amid the audience turn in digital journalism studies, one question has been left largely unanswered: What makes for a good news experience? In this paper, we first define news experience as a dynamic and temporal interaction with content as well as a sensemaking activity, one that is situated within the personal, social, and cultural contexts of the user, and influenced by the available technological resources and affordances. We then argue that, despite the increasing application of user- and design-centered approaches in the field, there remains a need for theoretical frameworks that explain what it means to experience news. To stimulate these conversations, we introduce and elaborate on Morville’s Honeycomb model from UX studies. This model, applied to journalism, illustrates how an optimal news experience should be useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable. Ultimately, this research aims to guide both scholars and practitioners toward user-centric approaches in journalism that may contribute to a more sustainable future for news.

This study extends peace journalism (PJ) to audiovisual reporting by analyzing 405 TikTok videos from six news outlets during the Israel-Gaza War that began on October 7, 2023. A content analysis revealed a strong emphasis on elite-captured perspectives that often eclipsed narratives of peace. TikTok users engaged more with war narratives due to their emotionally charged and visually resonant nature. Our findings highlight the need for news organizations to leverage TikTok’s visual storytelling potential to make complex geopolitical content more engaging, fostering empathetic and inclusive dialogue regarding conflicts. Overall, this work offers significant theoretical and practical contributions to peace journalism, platform affordances, and user engagement.

Digital technologies, especially social media platforms, are crucial to journalism’s engagement with audiences. Journalists depend on these information technologies to distribute news, while users largely rely on social media platforms for informing themselves. However, research on the role of platforms in journalism appears to have mainly focused on the risks they pose to the profession with little attention given to how platforms’ affordances facilitate engagement. The aim of this study is to examine how the expectations of journalists and users about the role of digital platforms coincide or differ in terms of the affordances for engagement with each other. We conducted in-depth interviews with 31 news users and 10 professional journalists in Chile, focusing on their use of social media related to news. Our study reveals some alignments and misalignments on the platforms’ digital affordances in three dimensions: contextual flexibility, informational access and use, and interactive communication. Journalists primarily focus on mobile use on the go, while users often access news at home. Both groups align on the exposure function of platforms but differ in their perceptions of content personalization and availability. Additionally, while journalists encourage interaction, users are often reluctant to engage deeply or are unaware of these expectations.

Local news on social media usually attracts a translocal audience beyond geographic boundaries, raising questions about its impact on news engagement. Prior studies have examined the structural role of geography in online discussions, but little is known about its influence on the quality of news comments. Drawing on the issue public literature and the framework of locality in digital public spheres, this study examines the impact of translocal audiences on the quality of local news comments (civility, rationality, relevance, justification, constructiveness, and message length). Combining automated and manual content analysis, we analyzed domestic news comments from five major local media outlets on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In general, our results suggest a “local advantage”: compared to local users, translocal users contribute lower-quality discussions on local news, but it is less pronounced in hard news discussions. Besides, we found little evidence to support the effect of translocal ties. This study highlights how geography shapes the discursive aspect of public communication and the formation of online issue publics at the local level, offering insights for local media and platforms to foster public-friendly discussions.

In the Philippines, disinformation and authoritarian rhetoric and governance accompanied a sharp decline in the respect for civil liberties and democratic institutions. This persistent culture of impunity doubly impacts journalists. This article asks: Despite a persevering culture of impunity and violence against media, low public trust, and authoritarian governance coupled with authoritarian nostalgia, why is it that journalists continue to lead the charge in the anti-disinformation movement? Subsequently, how do journalists persist in their efforts in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges? We found that journalists grappled with issues of (1) sustainability in fact-checking and (2) safety and security due to state repression and adjusted by pursuing collectivized operations and collaborative endeavors. They remain in the anti-disinformation frontlines and respond to these extrinsic challenges by drawing from passion and personal interests (intrinsic motivations). This mismatch between the extrinsic nature of challenges and intrinsic motivations to stay renders journalist resistance as volatile and unsustainable. This article provides empirical evidence to support diversified anti-disinformation spaces addressing disinformation simultaneously across multiple fronts by showing how sole reliance on journalist-centric approaches can harm both anti-disinformation movements and journalists themselves.

Understanding journalists’ methods to acquire and validate their knowledge has been a key focus in journalism studies. From a sociological viewpoint, journalists are crucial knowledge creators, as their main tasks involve gathering, assembling, and disseminating news. However, technological disruptions in the twenty first century have posed significant challenges to journalistic ways of knowing. This Special Issue aims to rethink digital news production through the lens of power, by theoretically reexamining changes in journalistic epistemologies, describing these changes (such as those affecting epistemic practices), and placing them in context (such as through the influence of resource access, political contexts, or the adaptation of digital technology throughout socio-cultural environments).

Digital longforms have been viewed as more engaging and pushing the boundaries of digital journalism by including a large amount of visuals, yet it remains unclear whether the inclusion and placement of visuals in digital longforms attracts or diverts attention to textual information. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the Cognitive Load Theory, two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine the effects of the number of visuals, the type of visuals, featured image inclusion, and issue involvement on attention to digital longforms. The results suggested increasing the number of visuals increased attention to textual information. However, changing the number of visuals did not affect all readers uniformly such that issue involvement and featured image inclusion moderated the effects of the number of visuals on attention. The type of visuals also affected selective attention, such that infographics were the most effective in grasping readers’ attention than photos and banners. However, such advantage of infographics occurred at the expense of diverting attention away from the text following infographics.