Digital journalism studies: what is it about?

Several scholars are arguing that digital journalism should no longer be considered as a subset of journalism studies. Instead, it should be a separate field of its own.

One of the primary rituals of any new area of academic inquiry is known as field building. This involves working to establish your field, through publishing for instance, so that it is recognised as its own thing. As such, this is what digital journalism needs right now. A journal dedicated to this topic advanced that their main concern is to lay down the foundations for this subject to exist within its own field and to move beyond the sphere of journalism studies. What are those foundations?

Digital Journalism should work to become an academic field that “critically explores, documents, and explains the interplay of digitisation and journalism, continuity and change”. It should further “strive to focus, conceptualise, and theorise tensions, configurations, power imbalances”. While these look at the scholarly approach to this idea, it would also be interesting to examine its position in the education sector. If universities offer courses on digital journalism, it would be more likely that graduates would be trained for a job market that is evolving and in need of employees. There would have been a better integration of disparate backgrounds and perspectives.

Digital journalism should become a field of its own