Digital tools are reshaping who holds power in newsrooms
A new study of Swedish journalists reveals that algorithmic metrics and engagement tools are fundamentally reordering the newsroom hierarchy—creating new forms of professional status that override traditional journalistic values. For media companies and regulators, this signals a critical shift in how editorial decisions get made and who influences them.
Originaltitel: Digitalizing the journalistic field: Journalists' views on changes in journalistic autonomy, capital and habitus
<p>Bourdieu-inspired journalism scholarship, and journalism studies at large, could benefit from an approach that can holistically explain how journalists make sense of technology-related change in the journalistic field. By merging key insights from field theory with philosophy of technology, and by analyzing 40 qualitative interviews with agents across a wide range of positions in the Swedish journalistic field, we uncover how journalists view technological change in relation to the field's autonomy, capitals and habitus. At the macro-level, the analysis shows how technology is constructed in the journalistic field at large, indicating a digital heteronomy. At the meso-level, findings indicate that positions become rearranged when new skills such as metrics and engagement management become collectively recognized as capital. Field-specific, journalistic, capital is supplemented with a virality capital. At the micro-level, we unravel an emerging journalistic habitus formed in relation to structural transformations in the field – the feel for engagement.</p>