Rethinking Research Methods in an Age of Digital Journalism

Providing an entry point into the emerging methods in digital journalism research, this book describes, discusses and exemplifies ways to collect, process and analyse digital media data, moving the methodology of digital journalism research forward. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

The digital infrastructure of media production, dissemination and consumption is becoming increasingly complex, presenting the challenge of how we should research the digital journalism environment. Digital journalism takes many forms - we therefore need to revise, improve, adjust and even invent methods to understand emerging forms of journalism.

In this book, scholars at the forefront of methodological innovations in digital journalism research share their insights on how to collect, process and analyse the diverse expressions of digital journalism, including online news, search results, hyperlinks and social media posts. As digital journalism content often comes in the form of big data, many of these new approaches depart from the traditional methods used in media research in significant ways. As we move towards new ways of understanding digital journalism, the methods developed for such purposes also need to be grounded in scientific rigour. This book aims to share some of the emerging processes by which these methods, tools and approaches are designed, implemented and validated. As such, this book not only constitutes a benchmark for thinking about research methods in digital journalism, it also provides an entry point for graduate students and seasoned scholars aiming to do research on digital journalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

Autorentext

Michael Karlsson is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Helle Sjøvaag is a Research Professor in Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Inhalt

Introduction: Research methods in an age of digital journalism 1. Taking Stock of the Toolkit: An overview of relevant automated content analysis approaches and techniques for digital journalism scholars 2. Tracing Online News in Motion: Time and duration in the study of liquid journalism 3. What is the meaning of a news link? 4. Chances and Challenges of Computational Data Gathering and Analysis: The case of issue-attention cycles on Facebook 5. Word Counts and Topic Models: Automated text analysis methods for digital journalism research 6. Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling 7. Googling the news: Opportunities and challenges in studying news events through Google Search 8. Grasping the Digital News User: Conceptual and methodological advances in news use studies 9. Same, Same but Different: Effects of mixing Web and mail modes in audience research 10. Action Research: Collaborative research for the improvement of digital journalism practice 11. Content Analysis and Online News: Epistemologies of analysing the ephemeral Web