Journalistic Change in an Online Age: Disaggregating Visibility, Legitimacy, and Revenue

Abstract

Understanding the complexity of journalistic change in the emerging media environment requires attention to economic, technological, and cultural aspects without privileging one to the exclusion of the others. To engage each of these aspects both individually and simultaneously, this essay introduces an analytical approach to journalistic change that disaggregates journalism into three distinct yet overlapping characteristics pertaining to journalism as a public activity: visibility, legitimacy, and revenue. These characteristics, once tightly interlinked in the mass media era, now necessitate careful attention as distinct attributes whose correspondence cannot be assured. Evolving media production and distribution technologies increasingly alter the conditions of visibility, legitimacy, and revenue for news. This essay argues that furthering an understanding of the emerging news ecology requires sustained attention to such differences through a conceptual lens capable of assessing change diachronically and variety synchronically. Ultimately, this perspective helps make sense of the heterogeneous journalistic environment.