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Participatory Journalism as a Way of Knowing

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Discussing the News

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy ((SKP))

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Abstract

Disappointment increasingly characterises academic and professional interpretations of participatory journalism, but accounts of ‘failure’ say little about how participation works. Smith treats commenting on news as a socio-technical dispositif configured by situated actors through the performance of routines, the enactment of arguments and the recognition of social and discursive competences. This makes it possible to ask, empirically: to what extent do today’s commenting sections carry the original participatory ideals? Laying the theoretical groundwork for the empirical chapters of this book, Smith sets out a conceptual framework derived from pragmatic socio-linguistics and actor network theory that enables participatory journalism to be described as a locally constituted, more or less stable arrangement oriented towards the production of news and the animation of the public conversation that news generates.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The second case study organisation was actually called Project N during its pre-launch phase.

  2. 2.

    Such an assumption would be equally reductionist on both sides of the equation.

  3. 3.

    I use Foucault’s term (1977: 299), which is sometimes translated as ‘arrangement’ or ‘apparatus’, neither of which quite captures the heterogeneity that he insists on in his definition.

  4. 4.

    In Chapter 4 we will see how discussion administrators are far from neutral about the registers of justification that, when allied to a proposition, confer argumentative status, distinguishing, for instance, between justifications that are purely value-based and those grounded in factual evidence or logical reasoning.

  5. 5.

    http://tech.sme.sk/c/7057850/preco-budu-diskusie-pod-textami-o-vede-na-sme-moderovane.html [accessed 8.7.16].

  6. 6.

    Comprehensive pre-moderation, even within a single rubric, was a short-lived experiment.

  7. 7.

    The most active 200 discussants on each portal were solicited by email in the same random week in late 2015. Fifty-seven questionnaires were returned at Case Study 1 and seventy-five at Case Study 2. The results are available (in Slovak) here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3_fNKXr3DkMLUNhRzhMLTFaMkU/view (for Case Study 1) and here: https://a-static.projektn.sk/2015/12/Dotaznik_N_vysledky.pdf (for Case Study 2).

  8. 8.

    Many of the active discussants at Case Study 1 have accounts that are more than 10 years old, and have written several thousand discussion contributions.

  9. 9.

    For a more extended discussion of how civic competence has been reconceptualised in response to the challenges of e-democracy I refer the reader to her review.

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  1. Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Simon Smith

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Smith, S. (2017). Participatory Journalism as a Way of Knowing. In: Discussing the News. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52965-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52965-3_2

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