Journalism and Social Media as changing domain(s): Understanding behaviors and role-based emotions

Abstract

The journalism domain continues to be redefined due to changes brought about by social media and digital technologies. The generation and production of news via contemporary journalism is partly characterized by negotiated balances across traditional practices and integrated participatory approaches. The changes in journalism are not simply driven by technologies, but by the extent of knowledge about domain tasks and professional behaviours. For these ends, this paper identifies domain vocabulary and journalism processes alongside tasks and role-based emotions. It brings to the foreground vital intersections across journalism, social media and online technologies, notably mainstream journalism practices that include crowdsourcing, editors' blogging, live-sites and semantic search optimization. These and other practices are explored in this paper via game design and ontologies and may inform future policy and guidelines as well as system ideas for training journalists. This paper was developed via data from participatory workshops with journalists and public relations professionals. It highlights journalism's unique function in society, partly reflected in new ideas for intelligent synthetic players that have knowledge of journalism processes and offer possibilities for exploring role-based emotions. A lite ontology approach also improves descriptions across the domains of journalism and social media, and this is also useful for contemplation of future systems.