1

DOKTORI DISSZERTÁCIÓ

The Shifting Roles of Journalists and Audiences: Experimenting with Participatory Journalism in

Hungary’s Constrained Media Environment

BARTA JUDIT

2020

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Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar

DOKTORI DISSZERTÁCIÓ

Barta Judit

The Shifting Roles of Journalists and Audiences: Experimenting with Participatory Journalism in

Hungary’s Constrained Media Environment

Filozófiatudományi Doktori Iskola, Prof. Dr. Ullmann Tamás, Dsc, egyetetemi tanár a Doktori Iskola vezetője

Film-, Média- és Kultúraelméleti doktori program,

Dr. György Péter Dsc, egyetemi tanár a program vezetője

A bizottság tagjai és tudományos fokozatuk:

A bizottság elnöke: Dr. György Péter Dsc, egyetemi tanár

Hivatalosan felkért bírálók: Dr. Müllner András PhD, habilitált egyetemi docens

Dr. Polyák Gábor PhD, habilitált egyetemi docens

A bizottság további tagjai: Dr. Hermann Veronika PhD, egyetemi adjunktus, a bizottság titkára

Dr.Csigó Péter PhD, tudományos munkatárs

Dr. Hammer Ferenc PhD, habilitált egyetemi docens, Dr.K. Horváth Zsolt PhD, egyetemi adjunktus (póttagok)

Témavezető és tudományos fokozata: Dr. Simányi-Pellandini Léna PhD, egyetemi adjunktus

Budapest 2020

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ADATLAP

a doktori értekezés nyilvánosságra hozatalához

I. A doktori értekezés adatai

A szerző neve:Barta Judit MTMT-azonosító:10065356 A doktori értekezés címe és alcíme: The Shifting Roles of Journalists and Audiences. Experimenting with Participatory Journalism in Hungary’s Constrained Media Environment DOI-azonosító:10.15476/ELTE.2020.169. A doktori iskola neve:Filozófiatudományi Doktori Iskola A doktori iskolán belüli doktori program neve:Film-, média-és kultúraelmélet A témavezető neve és tudományos fokozata:Dr. Simányi-Pellandini Léna, PhD, egyetemi adjunktus A témavezető munkahelye:Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Svájc II. Nyilatkozatok

1. A doktori értekezés szerzőjeként a) hozzájárulok, hogy a doktori fokozat megszerzését követően a doktori értekezésem és a tézisek nyilvánosságra kerüljenek az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban. Felhatalmazom az ELTE BTK Doktori és Tudományszervezési Iroda ügyintézőjét, hogy az értekezést és a téziseket feltöltse az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárba, és ennek során kitöltse a feltöltéshez szükséges nyilatkozatokat. b) kérem, hogy a mellékelt kérelemben részletezett szabadalmi, illetőleg oltalmi bejelentés közzétételéig a doktori értekezést ne bocsássák nyilvánosságra az Egyetemi Könyvtárban és az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban; c) kérem, hogy a nemzetbiztonsági okból minősített adatot tartalmazó doktori értekezést a minősítés (dátum)-ig tartó időtartama alatt ne bocsássák nyilvánosságra az Egyetemi Könyvtárban és az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban; d) kérem, hogy a mű kiadására vonatkozó mellékelt kiadó szerződésre tekintettel a doktori értekezést a könyv megjelenéséig ne bocsássák nyilvánosságra az Egyetemi Könyvtárban, és az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban csak a könyv bibliográfiai adatait tegyék közzé. Ha a könyv a fokozatszerzést követőn egy évig nem jelenik meg, hozzájárulok, hogy a doktori értekezésem és a tézisek nyilvánosságra kerüljenek az Egyetemi Könyvtárban és az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban.

2. A doktori értekezés szerzőjeként kijelentem, hogy a) az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárba feltöltendő doktori értekezés és a tézisek saját eredeti, önálló szellemi munkám és legjobb tudomásom szerint nem sértem vele senki szerzői jogait; b) a doktori értekezés és a tézisek nyomtatott változatai és az elektronikus adathordozón benyújtott tartalmak (szöveg és ábrák) mindenben megegyeznek.

3. A doktori értekezés szerzőjeként hozzájárulok a doktori értekezés és a tézisek szövegének Plágiumkereső adatbázisba helyezéséhez és plágiumellenőrző vizsgálatok

lefuttatásához.

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Kelt: Budapest, 2020 10.30. a doktori értekezés szerzőjének aláírása

ABSTRACT 6

I. CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION 12I.1.DILEMMASOFJOURNALISTICROLESINTHECHANGINGMEDIAENVIRONMENT 12I.2.THEDEMOCRATICPROMISEOFPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM 14I.3.RESEARCHGAPS:CONSTRAINEDMEDIAENVIRONMENTSANDTHECONDITIONSOFPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM 15

II. CHAPTER: LITERATURE REVIEW 23II.1.DEFININGWEB-BASEDPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM 23II.2.INDUSTRY-LEVELANDORGANIZATIONALAPPROACHESTOPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM 32II.3.NORMATIVELENSTOPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM 40II.4.THESOCIOTECHNICALENVIRONMENT 43II.4.1.TECHNOLOGICALAUTOMATICITY 43II.4.2.AUDIENCEMETRICSANDTHEROLEOFALGORITHMS 45II.5.THEORIESRELEVANTTOTHEHYBRIDSPACESOFUSERSANDJOURNALISTS 47II.5.1.THECONCEPTOFNETWORKEDGATEKEEPING 47II.5.2.THELENSOFBOUNDARYWORK 50II.5.3.THELENSESOFFIELD-ANDPRACTICETHEORY 55II.5.4.THELENSOFJOURNALISTICROLES 60II.6.SUMMARY 66

III.CHAPTER:THEHUNGARIANCONTEXT 69III.1.INTRODUCTION 69III.2.THEHUNGARIANMEDIASYSTEMAFTER1989ANDAFTER2010 69III.3.STUDIESONHUNGARIANNEWSROOMS’ENGAGEMENTWITHUSER-GENERATEDCONTENTANDWITHSOCIALMEDIAPLATFORMS 74III.4.SUMMARY 79

IV. CHAPTER: METHODOLOGY 80IV.1.CASE1JOURNALISTS’CURATIONOFSOCIALMEDIA 84IV.2.CASE2ORGANIZATIONALFACTORSINPARTICIPATORYJOURNALISM-ETHNOGRAPHYATORIGO.HU 86IV.3.CASE3WHATEXPLAINSTHEDIFFERENCESACROSSNEWSSITES’CROWDSOURCINGPRACTICES?AROLE-PERCEPTION-BASEDCOMPARATIVEANALYSISOFFIVENEWSSITES88IV.4.CASE4ADIFFERENTORGANIZATIONALSETUP:TOWARDSCOLLABORATIVENEWSMAKING 89IV.5.SUMMARY 91

V.CHAPTER:JOURNALISTS’ENGAGEMENTWITHAUDIENCES.THELASZLOKISSCASE(2016) 93V.1.THECASE 93V.2.THEINTERNATIONALCONTEXT:PARTICIPATORYJOURNALISMINTHE#METOOCAMPAIGN 94V.3.BOUNDARYWORKANDPARTICIPATORYTRAITSINHUNGARY:THEKISSCASE 95V.3.1.RESULTSOFTHEQUANTITATIVEANALYSIS 96V.3.2.THEBOUNDARYWORKOFWEB.2.0USERS 99V.3.3.THEBOUNDARYWORKOFJOURNALISTS 107

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V.4.SUMMARY 114

VI.CHAPTER:ORGANIZATIONALPROCESSESASFACTORSOFJOURNALISTS’ENGAGEMENTWITHTHEIRAUDIENCES:THEORIGO.HUCASESTUDY(2013) 116VI.1.INTRODUCTION 116VI.2.TELEKOM’SINDUSTRIALWORKFLOW 119VI.3.JOURNALISTICROLES 122VI.3.1.NEWSROOMCULTUREANDREPORTINGSTYLE 123VI.3.2.PROFESSIONALEXPERTISEANDWEAKNESSOFMEDIOLOGICALAGENCY 129VI.4.JOURNALISTS’PERCEPTIONANDENGAGEMENTOFTHEIRAUDIENCEANDOFUSERGENERATEDCONTENT 132VI.5.SUMMARY 138

VII. CHAPTER: EXPLAININGDIFFERENCESINCROWDSOURCINGACROSSTHEFIELD:ACOMPARATIVEANALYSISOFNEWSROOMS’ROLEPERCEPTIONSANDPRACTICES(2013-2014) 139VII.1.INTRODUCTION 139VII.2.SUMMARYOFTHEEVENTS 141VII.3.NEWSROOMS’ROLEPERFORMANCEANDJOURNALISTICCULTURE 143VII.4.DIFFERENCESINCROWDSOURCING 148VII.4.1.CROWDSOURCINGTYPE1:THEINFOTAINMENT-MINDEDCOLLABORATION 148VII.4.2.CROWDSOURCINGTYPE2:THECIVIC-MINDEDCROWDSOURCING 150VII.5.SUMMARY 155

VIII. CHAPTER: TOWARDS COLLABORATION? PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES IN A HYBRID ORGANIZATINAL SETUP. INDEX.HU AND FORTEPAN (2015) 157VIII.1.INTRODUCTION 157VIII.2.THEFORTEPANNETWORK 159VIII.3.FORTEPAN’SRELATIONSHIPWITHINDEX.HU:RECIPROCITY 160VIII.4.FORTEPANAS‘FRUSTRATEDGATED’ 161VIII.5.THEFIVE-STAGED-GATEKEEPINGPROCESS 162VIII.6.JOURNALISTICPERCEPTIONOFTHEBLOG 165VIII.7.JOURNALISTICPRACTICESONTHEFORTEPANBLOG 167VIII.8.SUMMARY 170

IX. CHAPTER: CONCLUSION 173

KÖSZÖNETNYILVÁNÍTÁS 180

APPENDIX 181

BIBLIOGRAPHY 185

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Abstract

The fragmentation and the participatory logic of the networked digital

media environment - based on shareability, interactivity, and always-on

ambiance (Hermida, 2010) - have challenged journalists’ role in the

public sphere in the last two decades. Real-time data about readers’

online behaviors have been influencing news judgment, while social

media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram) have become

the neo-publishers of news (Anderson et al., 2014), siphoning away news

outlets’ advertising revenues. Many newsrooms in this environment have

started to build a more direct relationship with their audiences, who at the

same time have become increasingly monitorial (Schudson, 2016),

publicly discussing and criticizing the news.

Participatory journalism is the result of the blurring boundaries

between journalists and their online audiences, carrying the potential of

invigorating the public sphere. The two decade-long scholarly discourse

about participatory journalism, especially in Western media contexts,

passed through the phases of laudation, skepticism, and disillusionment.

Early evangelists emphasized its potential to democratize and reform

journalism (Allan, 2006; Beckett & Mansell, 2015; Castells, 2011;

Deuze, 2003; Deuze & Bruns, 2007, Gillmor, 2004; Jenkins, 2006;

McNair, 2006; Pavlik, 2001; Rosen, 1999; Shirky, 2011; Vobič &

Dahlgren, 2013). Critics of neoliberalism instead saw user exploitation

and market-driven journalism in audience engagement and claimed that

newsrooms only ostensibly opened their gates, while in reality they set

up ‘walled gardens’ for limited participation (Domingo et al., 2008,

Hanitzsch & Quandt, 2012; Fuch, 2014; Robinson, 2010). Others

asserted that audience engagement simply served the aim of traffic

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maximization, strengthening the virality logic, eroding newsrooms’

professionalism, and resulting in tabloidization and homogenization of

news content, while users remained passive (Carpentier & de Cleen,

2008; Mancini, 2013; Van Dijk, 2009). More recently, within the

‘information war’ framework, the participatory environment’s threat to

democracy has been in the focus of attention, with the spread of fake

news and misinformation (Smith, 2017; Quandt, 2018). One could argue

that participatory journalism and media practices in general have been

increasingly regarded through the lens of critical cultural studies,

traditionally carrying an anti-neoliberal stance.

These discussions have several limitations. First, they focus on the

question of participatory journalism as being good or bad, rather than

examining the processes that make participatory journalism the vehicle

of a more democratic public sphere – or, conversely, its obstacle. Second,

most are based on Western liberal media systems, leaving out a rich

empirical context of non-Western, constrained media environments. This

has led to portraying the journalist-audience relationship in a rather one-

dimensional way. In addition, in this simplified narrative, the factors that

potentially derail participatory journalism remain black-boxed. In my

dissertation, I inquire into the conditions of “good” citizen participation

in newsmaking, framing my research question as “What micro- and

meso-level factors facilitate or hinder newsrooms’ shift to

participatory journalism with a democratic benefit in a constrained

media environment?” By micro-level factors, I understand individual

user and journalistic performance with regard to news narratives

(discourse and gatekeeping practices), while by meso-level factors I refer

to newsroom cultures (role conceptualizations) and organizational

processes.

To analyze these issues, I used four key conceptual lenses. The first

was boundary work, through which the user-journalist interactions

around news were investigated, and which assumes that specific

manifestations of participatory journalism are the temporary outcomes of

struggles and negotiations among the different but overlapping social

groups (users, bloggers, commenters, journalists). The concept of

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networked gatekeeping allowed me to clarify the relationship, power

dynamics and information control mechanisms between citizens (as

gated) and journalists or bloggers (as gatekeepers). The third lens, which

I used was field and practice theory. The technological disruption of

journalism is often interpreted as the dismantling of the field (Ryfe,

2012); and many of the practices that used to be ‘journalistic’, are now

widespread social behaviors (Couldry, 2012). The fourth one was

journalistic role typologies, which helped me to identify enabling and

disabling factors in the democratic outcome of journalist-audience

cooperation.

The dissertation examines and compares experiments with

participatory journalism in the post-socialist constrained Hungarian news

media field, focusing on the middle stage of the phenomenon between

2013 and 2016. The cases use mixed methods, ethnography at an online

newsroom in 2013, discourse analysis, trace ethnography and archive

research. In each case, I analyze key processes that allowed or hindered

the emergence of participatory practices and identify a different set of

factors.

I make the following claims based on my empirical findings:

1. The Laszlo Kiss case study, examining the boundary work of users and

journalists, revealed that users in web 2.0 platforms exemplified their

capability for deliberation, but journalists failed to engage with this kind

of content and instead resorted to curating user-generated content as mere

sources, subordinated to their traditional gatekeeping power. Hungarian

journalists (until 2016) tended to shun away from entering into dialogue

with the audience, and preferred to keep their distance from commenters.

One reason is that Hungarian journalists have been increasingly

threatened by the verbal abuse they experience on social media (Tófalvy,

2017), which also explains the lack of qualitative engagement with user

content. This neglect has generated a long process of dissociative

interactivity (Deuze & Fortunati, 2011), meaning that interactivity

(concerning opinions) has largely occurred within the audience, and not

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between journalists and the audience. Analyzing conversation threads of

blogs that functioned as alternative news sites, I found that as long as the

authors participated in the discussions, users were more civilized and the

chances of deliberative debate, supported by facts and information, were

higher.

2. In the origo.hu case study, through non-participant ethnography I

observed organizational routines, journalistic workflow and role

conceptualizations, especially with regard to the audience. I found a lack

of mediological agency (Boyer, 2011, 2013) to be paramount in

hindering sustained audience-newsroom collaboration. This suggests that

newsroom without a platform mentality and focused on orientating

journalism was less likely to succeed in engaging its users in news

production.Furthermore, the emergence of the deliberative aspect of the

participatory epistemology was hindered by the fact that journalistic

expertise was conceived of as ‘balanced and clever’ reporting, where the

journalists draw the conclusions. Participatory journalism requires a

certain amount of interventionist role conception. Examining further

causes of limited engagement, my ethnography found that the

organizational workflow with a lot of red tape inadvertently contributed

to it. This means that lack of audience engagement does not necessarily

stem from journalists’ lack of ideas or willingness, but from the

organizational workflow.

3. In the tobacco shop case study I focused on field dynamics guiding

how newsrooms tried to differentiate themselves and used the audience

to enhance their reporting with crowdsourcing. My findings showed that

the crowdsourcing modality is strongly connected to newsroom cultures.

What I labeled infotainment-minded crowdsourcing was realized by

newsrooms focused on instrumental journalism (Deuze, 2003), and –

judging from the outcomes of these collaborations – was limited to

sending photos. On the other hand, newsrooms with monitorial

journalism (Deuze, 2003) performed civic-minded crowdsourcing,

involving readers as co-creators in news production, and making them

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carry out more labor-intensive tasks, such as searching for information

from company databases.

4. In the Fortepan-index.hu case study I focused on the processes of

gatekeeping. I have identified a complex (five-staged) gatekeeping

process, which on the one hand entailed networked gatekeeping (on the

Index Forum) and index.hu journalists displayed gatekeeping functions

such as ‘selection’, ‘timing’, ‘withholding’, ‘shaping’ information. The

volunteer editors of Fortepan were working as ‘quasi-journalists’,

corroborating information and verifying them, but it was hidden from the

blog readers and it was the journalists who acted as the ‘trusted

storytellers’. I found that due to these controlling practices of the

journalists, the news organization gradually normalized the ‘innovative’

organizational setup into its habitual workflow and the collaborative

aspect with the networked gatekeeping processes remained in the

background, while participatory practices on a content level emerged

very weakly. Nevertheless, compared to the previous case studies, here

there was a higher level of reciprocity between the ‘outsider-contributor’

(Fortepan) and the newsroom.

5. The thesis makes three broader theoretical contributions. First, existing

studies that focused on the democratizing effects of participatory

journalism took the increasing audience engagement for granted, and

consequently, concentrated mostly on how journalists adapted their

discourses and methods to the new platforms. This assumption

downplayed the importance of professional journalists in mediating the

democratizing effects of web 2.0 contexts. The thesis showed that

journalists need to take an active part in engaging qualitatively with

discussion flows with their users, otherwise the deliberative aspect is lost.

Second, the thesis contributes to the existing literature by identifying

micro and macro-level processes that facilitate or hinder journalists’

engagement with the audience. Finally, while existing studies focused

primarily on Western, liberal contexts, this thesis joined the small group

of recent studies shedding light on how participatory processes play out

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in constrained media environments with different traditions of

journalistic roles. In sum, my dissertation calls for a more nuanced

approach to understanding the current challenges to participatory

journalism – one which is sensitive to its dynamic local context

(changing journalistic role perceptions, organizational settings, user

behavior, meanings attached to participatory practices), and one that

identifies the concrete processes through which its democratic potential

may be realized or derailed.

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“Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for

distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion,

change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The

radio would be the finest possible communication in public life, a vast

network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as

well as submit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring

him into a relationship instead of isolating him” (Bertolt Brecht, 1934, as

cited by Silberman, 2000).

“There’s a bunch of methods and pillars of engagement that I have but,

really, the biggest thing is to think deeply about who the community is in

the story. Who is it for? How does their voice/story/time contribute to

your journalism? In turn, how are you talking to them to make your

journalism accessible, usable, consumable — and ultimately a tool for

change within their community. Everything starts from there” (Au,

E.,Global Investigative Journalism Network, 2017, October 25).

I. Chapter: Introduction

I.1. Dilemmas of journalistic roles in the changing media environment

The roles of journalists and audiences have irrevocably changed in the

last two decades, but these roles have not yet crystallized. On September

21, 2020, in the closed Facebook group of a Hungarian (independent)

news outlet (444.hu), journalists launched a discussion on whether

commenting should be reinstated under articles. The post – sharing two

opposing positions from the newsroom –generated 284 comments in the

community of 6,200 Facebook members, showing that the issue stirred

intense reactions in users as well. The journalist, who was arguing for the

re-introduction of the commenting option on the news outlet, resorted to

a normative claim, saying that a digital news outlet, especially one with

audience subscription, must have a commenting option, since journalists

and readers form one community and commenting is a practical

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expression of that community. He added that readers must have their

voices heard and must be able to address both each other and journalists.

In other words, he contended that in the current media environment,

journalists’ role in maintaining dialogue, interaction, and communication

is just as important as providing information. The other journalist, who

was against commenting, argued that without adequate resources to

moderate comments, the newsroom should not take the responsibility to

handle trolls, malicious propaganda and misinformation. He stressed that

commenting must be civilized, but without moderation journalists cannot

guarantee this, so are entitled to exclude it from their territory.

Reader participants in the debate were similarly divided over

whether they wanted to have commenting and if so, how. At the same

time, many expressed a willingness to take over moderation

responsibilities, which in fact neither of the journalists wished to

relinquish. The journalist who was in favor of commenting asserted that

those reader comments should be ranked top that generated interaction

with the author as they had already proven to be on-topic and

informative, but he also claimed that authors must engage with the

comments under their articles. Some readers proposed up- and down-

voting options that could filter quality comments, while they also

expressed resentment that their favorite commenters had disappeared

since the news outlet ceased the commenting option.

This debate echoes the newsroom divisions of the 2010s, when

journalists in different media environments were faced with a similar

dilemma. Robinson (2010), in her newsroom ethnography, carried out at

a new site that had recently migrated online in the US, differentiated

between the “convergers” and the “traditionalists”, one propagating a

shared environment with readers, and the other wanting to keep the news

site as intact as possible. In negotiations over commenting spaces,

journalists highlighted values such as journalist control, rule following,

on-topic discussion, civility and volume (clicks), whereas users stressed

the importance of freedom, hierarchy (ratings), respect, credibility and

transparency (Robinson, 2010, p.132). The two positions represented in

the Facebook group debate of 444.hu also recalls the hegemonic and

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counter-hegemonic discursive identities of the news professional, as

explained by Carpentier (2005). The hegemonic articulation originates

from the liberal and social responsibility journalistic models, where

norms of objectivity and distance from the audience prevail, and where

the journalists, belonging to the professional elite, act as gatekeepers and

as responsible managers of resources. The counter-hegemonic

articulation is relevant in the alternative journalism models, such as the

public journalism, emancipatory and reform journalisms. The journalist

with a counter-hegemonic discursive identity regards himself/herself as

part or representative of the public, stresses partnership, shared

responsibilities, shared property, gate-opening and subjectivity. “In

contrast, two-way communication and the right to communicate figure

prominently in these models, ‘communication is . . . seen as a two-way

process, in which the partners – individual and collective – carry on a

democratic and balanced dialogue’” (McBride, 1980, 172, as cited in

Carpentier, 2005, p.203).

I.2. The democratic promise of participatory journalism

Carpentier’s (2005) journalistic identity model shows that online

participatory journalism, starting with mass-scale citizen journalism at

the end of the 1990s and early 2000s - when citizens, equipped with

mobile phones and low-threshold publishing, began to serve as

eyewitnesses in large numbers - is in fact strongly embedded in the

alternative model of journalism with a much longer history. This is the

reason why scholars who saw immense reform potential in online

participatory journalism (Allan, 2006, Beckett & Mansell, 2015, Castells,

2011, Dahlgren, 2009, Deuze et al., 2007, Gillmor, 2004, Rosen, 1999)

often applied the paradigm of deliberative democracy (J. Carey, 1989).

They argued that increased audience engagement in newsmaking

represented a civic value and a counterbalance to the neoliberal logic of

Western news media, focused on traffic maximization. They also claimed

that with the polyphony of voices, a radically different and more

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democratic public sphere could emerge, characterized by increased

engagement. “The plurality of discursive registers like witnessing,

narrativisation, polemic, conflictualisation and implication (Duchesne et

al., 2003b) are thus counterposed to rational argumentative competences

by scholars, as well as political activists who advocate alternative

conceptions of the public sphere to Habermas’s.” (Smith, 2017, p.21)

Industry publications such as the Columbia Journalism Review, Wanifra,

Nieman Lab, and Pointer, as well as scholars in the past two decades

(Allan, 2006; Deuze & Bruns; 2007, Gillmor, 2004; Russell, 2011;

Shirky, 2010; Singer et al., 2011, Woo Young, 2005), have attempted to

show how innovative news outlets managed to co-opt the public in

newsmaking and how that improved journalism.

Nonetheless, three main criticisms emerged in the last twenty years

about participatory journalism in the scholarly discourse. The first

criticism was that newsrooms only ostensibly opened their gates setting

up ‘walled gardens’ for limited participation (Domingo et al., 2008;

Hanitzsch & Quandt, 2012; Robinson, 2010). The second was that

increased catering to audience needs led to newsrooms’

deprofessionalization and the tabloidization of content (Carpentier & de

Cleen, 2008, Mancini, 2013; Van Dijk, 2009). The third was that with

social media platforms functioning as news publishers (Anderson et al.,

2014), the spread of viral messages and unverified misinformation

threatened the public sphere, coupled with doubts about the added value

of online discussion for news and democracy (Fuch, 2014, Smith, 2017,

Quandt, 2018). Quandt (2018) coined the phrase ‘dark participation’,

referring to misinformation, hate campaigns, trolling and cyberbullying

taking place in the participatory digital environment.

I.3. Research gaps: Constrained media environments and the conditions of

participatory journalism

While several early studies examined newsrooms’ experimentation with

participatory journalism (Bockowski, 2004, Klinenberg, 2005, Allan,

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2006, Hermida, 2010, Robinson, 2010, Russell, 2011, Anderson, 2013a,

2013b, Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013, Vobič & Dahlgren, 2013, Anderson

et al., 2014, Carlson & Lewis, 2015), they were predominantly conducted

in Western, free media systems. This leaves open the question of the

extent to which these models are specific to free media systems – and

how they play out in a constrained media environment. Focusing on the

past decade in the Hungarian media field, where experimentation with

participatory journalism did occur, but less visibly and pervasively than

in Western media, the first aim of this thesis is reveal hitherto unrevealed

processes that can facilitate or derail the collaboration between

journalists and amateurs.

Whereas in Western media, the answer of newsrooms to

proliferating audience engagement was gradual gate opening, in Hungary

newsrooms’ responses were ambivalent and gates were more rigidly

controlled. As a sign of gate opening and acknowledgment of the

increased power of the audience, Western news sites such as The

Guardian, the New York Times, BBC News and Le Monde started to

display the most read/most viewed/most shared box on their front pages

as early as the mid-2000s. The British Guardian editor-in-chief in 2010

contended that journalists in the digital environment were no longer the

truth tellers and sole conveyors of knowledge. “We are embracing a

world where we do not imagine that we, as traditionally trained

journalists, are the only experts or authorities. By harnessing the

expertise, knowledge and ideas of others we can build something richer

than we could alone. We can begin to think of ourselves as a platform for

others as well as a publisher of our own. (...) The resulting piece of

journalism is more fluid than its predecessors. It more closely resembles

the real world, which is rarely about neatly cut and dried events with only

one narrative version and a finite ending” (Rusbridger, in IPI-Poynter,

2010, para. 6).

By 2013, a large segment of the Hungarian news media was already

under the political and economic control of the government, a situation

which media theorists defined as media capture (Dragomir, 2019).

Therefore, the autonomy of the journalism field was highly limited, the

17

free flow of information was in peril, and public media ceased to

function as such. Hungarian journalists had fewer opportunities to

display their professional expertise, as the political elite did not even

engage in dialogue with them. The power of user-generated content was

potentially amplified in such a media environment, paving the way for

participatory journalism. Regarding the robust blog section of the now

ceased, then biggest Hungarian news outlet (index.hu), it seems that

newsrooms were opening their gates here, too, but as will be clear from

the findings herein, citizens were rarely regarded as partners in the

newsmaking process, let alone conversing parties.

While the transition to participatory journalism in Western contexts

seemed like an almost automatic response to the new platforms and

audience behaviours, in the constrained media environment of Hungary,

this response was far from automatic – and arguably, have never fully

taken place. This raises the further key theoretical question, rarely

addressed in depth by the current literature, of what the conditions of

democratically relevant audience participation in newsmaking are. In this

thesis, I set out to respond to this question, by addressing the following

research question: “What micro- and meso-level factors facilitate or

hinder newsrooms’ shift to participatory journalism with a

democratic benefit in a constrained media environment?”

To answer this question, I drew on the concepts of boundary work;

networked gatekeeping; and field and practice theory, which I detail

later. Boundary work (Anderson & Revers, 2018; Carlson & Lewis;

2015; Coddington, 2015; Domingo & Le Cam, 2015; Örnebring, 2013;

Revers, 2017; Smith, 2017) is rooted in the sociology of profession and

focuses on the jurisdiction and legitimate knowledge and practices of

journalists versus non-journalists (outsiders). Journalistic gatekeeping

(Bruns, 2005; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; Singer et al. 2011, Singer,

2014; Thorson & Wells, 2016) is mostly used in relation to the

sociomaterial infrastructures of social media platforms. Field and

practice theory (Anderson & Revers, 2018; Couldry, 2012; Brauchler &

Postill, 2010; Powers & Zambrano, 2016, Rao, 2010; Benson, 2006;

Fenton(ed), 2009; Klinenberg, 2005; Ryfe, 2012) looks at the social

18

power context of the institution and industry of journalism and its

transformations.

Methodologically, I used mixed methods, drawing on previous

studies that examined newsrooms’ experimentation and transition to the

practice. I conducted interviews with journalists, carried out a newsroom

ethnography (following Anderson, 2013b, Bockowski, 2004; Boyer,

2011, 2013; Robinson, 2010; Russell, 2011; Singer, 2013) and employed

archive research and trace ethnography (analyzing comment threads on

interactive platforms (Ford, 2015; Geiger & Ribes, 2011; Meraz &

Papacharissi, 2013; Tong, 2017). I designed case studies, each of which

allowed me to unpack different processes that facilitated/hindered the

participation of audiences and the realization of the democratic potential

of the practice. The following table (Table 1) summarizes the four case

studies’ foci.

Table1Casestudiesandtheirfindings

Cases Purpose of the case study

Key process analyzed

Methodology Findings

Kiss case (2016)

To measure journalistic engagement with user generated content, and users’ deliberative discourse

Journalists’ and users’ boundary work

Trace ethnography, software-assisted discourse analysis

Limited engagement with user generated content.

formation stage, audience content partially supplemented professional reporting

interpretation stage, discussion, qualitative feedback, comprehension of news was excluded from news sites

Dissemination stage, audience enhanced prominence of news on external platforms

origo.hu case study (2013)

Identify meso-level processes behind audience engagement

organizational routines and workflow newsroom culture

Ethnography

Archive research

Low level of mediological expertise, orientating journalism, top-down expectations towards

19

My case selection criteria were based on the specific processes that I

wanted to observe and which were taken from the existing literature on

participatory journalism. In the first case study, I examined the boundary

work of users and journalists, to see how users contributed to the news,

as well as to see how journalists engaged with them at large. In order to

see the ‘big picture’, here I relied on software-assisted content analysis.

The second study (a newsroom ethnography) investigated the

organizational processes that underpinned the participatory practices of

journalists. Newsroom culture, audience perceptions and organizational

processes were observed. The newsroom I selected was origo.hu, the

second most read news portal at the time (2013), yet independent. Little

did I know that within one year, the news site with the second biggest

readership was to be absorbed by the governmental media1. In the third

1 An investigative journalist of the news portal had issued a data request trial on the disclosure of information related to a top politician’s

spending on his business trips. Politicians made phone calls to the management of the newsroom to postpone the trial to after the

approaching elections, but the journalist was not willing to comply and the editor-in-chief stood behind him. When the story was published

on the lavish business trip expenses (almost 2 million forints in a week) of the chief of cabinet to the Prime Minister, the editor-in-chief was

user generated content hinder audience engagement

Tobacco shop study (2013-2014)

Reasons for differences in methods across newsrooms and outcomes of crowdsourcing information

Field positions, channeling practices

Trace ethnography/discourse analysis, content analysis

Field positions determine crowdsourcing:

monitorial journalism facilitates civic-minded crowdsourcing, instrumental journalism leads to infotainment-minded crowdsourcing

Fortepan - index.hu partnership (2015-2020)

How does participation emerge when a news site collaborates with a civic project with a large network of active users?

Gatekeeping practices

Discourse analysis of blog, interviews with journalists and Fortepan members

Citizens are allowed to produce entire news pieces, but voices carefully selected by newsroom

Reciprocity between Fortepan and newsroom

Lack of large-scale participation

20

case study, concentrating on the monopolization of the tobacco shop

market (2013-2014), I zoomed out again to explore what field-specific

factors determined the extent to which newsrooms allowed civic voices

in their news products in the formation stage. In particular, I compared

the crowdsourcing practices of four newsrooms - index.hu (the most read

news site at the time, also invaded by the government media six years

later); hvg.hu (a left-leaning news outlet); 24.hu (left-leaning and viral),

and 444.hu (blog-like, mainstream). The last case study (Fortepan-

index.hu, 2015) was chosen as an example of an alternative

organizational setup (where a mainstream news site, index.hu,

collaborated with a civic project, Fortepan). There I focused on

gatekeeping processes and analyzed how user participation played out in

the collaboration, and how journalists shifted their roles on the blog. The

collaboration in that form had to end in the summer of 2020, when

almost the entire newsroom of index.hu left the outlet in response to

government interference. The last post on the Fortepan blog is dated July

18, 2020, and was written by Tamási Miklós, the founder of Fortepan.

This dissertation highlights the conditions of democratically relevant

participatory journalism by identifying three main factors that shape the

engagement of audiences. The Origo case study showed that newsrooms

without mediological agency (Boyer, 2011, 2013) were less likely to

interact on an ad hoc basis with users who would provide them

information on a given topic. Consistently with previous studies, the

findings show that the so-called postindustrial workflow (Anderson et al.,

2014), with a focus on process instead of the product, and integration of

different organizational units, is a necessary precondition of successfully

engaging the audience in news production. A top-down relationship in

the journalist-audience collaboration hindered users’ willingness to

contribute (Origo.hu case ethnography). Infotainment-minded

crowdsourcing (characteristic of newsrooms with instrumental

journalism) only ostensibly engaged the audience (relegated to sending

photos to the newsroom), whereas civic-minded crowdsourcing

fired with the official reason given as the changed news consumption habits of users. Afterwards 40 journalists resigned out of solidarity, and

the news site was soon transformed into a governmental propaganda outlet.

21

(characteristic of newsrooms with monitorial journalism) involved

readers as co-creators in news production, relying on citizens to share

their stories (tobacco shop case study).

Secondly, the dissertation identifies processes shaping participation

that are unique to the constrained media environment and not captured by

the existing Western literature. First, the constrained media field yielded

unique clandestine crowdsourcing as opposed to Western examples. By

clandestine I mean that the newsroom symbolically distanced itself from

the crowdsourcing project and the journalist managing it worked under a

pseudonym. The most significant finding of the dissertation was that

Hungarian journalists were willing to employ the cybernetic aspect of

participating with their readers (regarding user-generated content as

information), but refrained from embracing the deliberative aspect of the

participatory epistemology (facilitating dialogue and conversing with the

readers). I suggest that both these practices (clandestine crowdsourcing,

lack of attention to the deliberative practices of web 2.0) hindered

journalists’ capacity to position themselves as trusted and legitimate

actors in the participatory environment.

The dissertation consists of six further chapters. Chapter II first

summarizes the definitions of participatory journalism, supplemented

with scholarly reflections on early experimentation with it and normative

debates around it. The chapter also outlines the sociotechnical

environment of the participatory journalist, which shows that this

journalistic genre requires a complex set of skills. The last three sections

of the Literature review set forth four theoretical approaches (boundary

work, field and practice theory, journalistic roles, networked

gatekeeping) that I will apply in analyzing my empirical data. Chapter III

introduces the Hungarian context by showing the formation of the

constrained media environment and by reviewing prior studies about

Hungarian journalists’ and newsrooms’ engagement with web 2.0.

Chapter IV presents the methodologies I designed for my four case

studies. The next four chapters contain my empirical findings, and in

Chapter IX I present my conclusion.

22

23

II. Chapter: Literature review

II. 1. Defining Web-Based Participatory Journalism

In this section, I show the technological and cultural processes that

ushered newsrooms in many different media contexts to open their gates

and start collaborating with non-journalists. Bell and Owen (2017)

differentiated three waves in the evolution of the Internet and claimed

that “at its core and in its design” the web was “a democratizing

technology” (Bell & Owen, 2017, para. 4), however by 2017 it had

almost completely lost this potential. The first wave in their historicizing

fell between 1994 and 2004, when the commercial web was born and

broadband became widely accessible. The next decade as the second

wave was characterized by Web 2.0 technologies with a wider spread of

broadband access, with the emergence of the so-called interactive

journalism with features such as commenting on articles, podcasting and

crowdsourcing. They claim that journalism at the time flourished and

profited from these affordances, while the easier availability of databases

provided new opportunities for collaboration with the public. They

contended that the third wave of the web’s evolution, starting in 2014

was the era of the ‘privatized mobile web’, which meant a weakening of

democratization. “The principles of the open web, which held promise

for citizens and journalists alike, have given way to an ecosystem

dominated by a small number of platform companies who hold

tremendous influence over what we see and know” (idem, para.7)

Scholars making sense of the changed roles of journalists and

audience online often referred to the paradigm of the “convergence

culture” (Jenkins, 2006), which merged broadcast media with peer-to-

peer communication channels, giving rise to the so-called prosumers

(producers and consumers of content). “This circulation of media content

– across different media systems, competing media economies, and

national borders – depends heavily on consumers’ active participation. I

24

will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood

primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media

functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a

cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information

and make connections among dispersed media content” (idem, p.5).

This idea of a cultural shift was precisely what Deuze (2009)

attributed to the networked environment since the 2000s. “We have

suggested that the relations between journalists and the audience have

changed quite a bit in the last decade or so, where non-professional

practitioners have increasingly come to operate as in a “co-creative news

production” environment as journalists, and are beginning to develop a

sense of how to reinvent themselves as “co-creators of culture” (Deuze,

2009, np). Participation in the writings of these early scholars appeared

as a normative concept, implying that socially produced knowledge is

inherently better than expert knowledge, which had consequences to

journalistic work.

The prototype of decentralized, collaborative, transparent

newsmaking using digital technology was claimed to be the anti-globalist

radical project of Indymedia, launched in 1999 in Seattle (protesting a

WTO meeting), which itself grew out of the radical anti-capitalist

Mexican Zapatista movement (Anderson & Revers, 2018). Indymedia’s

audience conceived of itself as agonistic, witnessing, and as occupying

smaller public spheres, and its journalism was participatory, agenda-

setting, and designed to serve as “ammunition” to the people. Alternative

media had existed before, but it had been a niche cultural practice. In

1999, not only it became a global citizen journalism movement, but the

mainstream media took over Indymedia’s news reports, paving the way

for a countercultural practice (amateur media production) to develop into

a mass activity, as well as foregrounding the power of the internet as a

radical mobilizing tool. “The Independent Media Center

(www.indymedia.org), established by various independent and

alternative media organizations and activists for the purpose of providing

grassroots coverage, acted as a clearing house for information for

journalists and provided up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio, and

25

video footage. It also produced its own newspaper, distributed

throughout Seattle and to other cities via the internet, as well as hundreds

of audio segments, transmitted through the web and an internet radio

station based in Seattle. During the demonstration, the site, which uses an

open publishing system, logged more than 2 million hits and was

featured on America Online, Yahoo, CNN and BBC Online, among

others. The Seattle demonstration was one of the first indications of how

radical politics could mobilize participants in the era of the internet and

was heralded as a success for transnational internet activism (Fenton,

2016, p.34).

Before any professional news sites were doing it, Indymedia

archived and structured the news, which was open-source, meaning

anyone could upload breaking news and political commentary (C.W.

Anderson & Revers, 2018). Secondly, as Anderson (2011) argued, the

participatory epistemology epitomized by Indymedia was gradually

embraced by professional newsrooms. Journalists by definition are

cultural workers and, as we will see in the section on boundary work,

claim jurisdiction over a body of knowledge and practices. In the

networked environment, where non-journalists constantly chime in with

their own content, and share and comment on the news, the conventional

means and goals of knowledge acquisition transform. The ideology of

participatory epistemology served to explain why newsrooms were

meant to profit from engaging with their audiences.

Participatory epistemology, defined here as a form of

journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise was

modified through public interaction, was largely based on two

separate but related notions of how citizen engagement in the

news process could improve journalism. The first is largely

“cybernetic” in orientation and sees the relationship between

news producers, products, and consumers as part of a series of

feedback loops in which digital communication acts as a

functional bridge that improves the accuracy and relevance of

news products. The second is largely “deliberative”, in which

26

digital journalists are understood as embedded in a

“conversation” with citizens, one that produces a journalism

more likely to incorporate the perspectives and points of view

of ordinary people. Both these epistemologies functionally

denigrate traditional journalistic knowledge, seeing it as

inadequate or incapable of maintaining its relevance in the 21st

century digital media environment. (Anderson & Revers, 2018,

p.26)

The basic premise of participatory epistemology is that institutional,

professional, elite control of information is obsolete, and in this new

realm the public becomes empowered (Lewis, 2011). “News is no longer

naturalized. The ‘underlying arbitrariness’ of the news, as media scholar

Nicolas Couldry (2003) puts it, is no longer obscured by the symbolic

power of its representations, thus opening it up to increased scrutiny and

criticism.” (Russell, 2011, p. 66)

Another early example, often cited in the literature (Woo-Young,

2005) as a successful experiment of pro-am collaboration, was

OhmyNews in South Korea, founded in 2001. In this case, a robust crowd

of volunteer citizen journalists worked with a group of professional

journalists, who served as fact-checkers and secondary gatekeepers. The

news venture, aimed at counterbalancing the conservative bias of

professional news media, was facilitated by the interactive affordances of

the web. “Despite their capacity to efficiently mass-produce and transmit

messages, the existing mass media have been criticized on grounds of

their apparent inability to foster public discussions by espousing

divergent social opinions” (Woo-Young, 2005). It must be added that in

in South Korea in 2001, internet penetration was exceptionally high,

there was an economic boom, but the ruling conservative government

repressed the press. “The media was controlled by some leading families.

What is fascinating in South Korea is that the unchanged media situation

led to a mistrust of the audiences and a crisis of participation, alternative

media outlets and a special public sphere based on citizen journalism.

27

The internet newspaper OhmyNews is the best example.” (Dobek-

Ostrowska, 2010, np)

Both Indymedia and OhmyNews were alternative media projects

with political agendas. Later, from around 2004 and 2005, as mobile

technology and web 2.0 platforms (blogs, Reddit, Digg, Facebook,

Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr) gained momentum, ordinary users without a

necessarily activist agenda took on a more active role in news

production. Scholars noted how the massive flow of user-generated

content signaled a shift in the history of mainstream journalism itself.

“The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in

history where, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news

is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but, potentially,

by the audience it serves” (Singer et al., 2011, p.3). The year 2004 was a

symbolic moment in that respect, when citizens in unprecedented

numbers provided raw footage of the South Asian tsunami to news

outlets through their cell phones (Allan, 2006). One year later, the

London bombings were another breaking event when ordinary users

acted as ad-hoc eyewitness reporters of the tragedy, giving rise to what

became known as citizen journalism.

(...) citizen journalism may be characterized as a type of first-person

reportage in which ordinary individuals temporarily adopt the role of a

journalist in order to participate in newsmaking, often spontaneously

during a time of crisis, accident, tragedy or disaster when they happen to

be present on the scene. (Lewis et al., 2013, p.171)

Other symbolic cases of the ‘journalism’s transformation narrative’ are

for instance the leaked footage on the Abu Ghraib prison torture (2005),

or the Iranian elections in 2009, broadcast on Twitter. Some newsrooms

adapted their workflows earlier than others to diversify their reporting by

tapping into this new resource. Russell (2011) in her book, “Networked,

A Contemporary History of News in Transition” cited many cases from

different countries where she argued that pro-am collaboration

ameliorated news products. One of her examples was a Swiss newspaper

28

(L’Hebdo), which during the street riots in Paris in 2005 decided to

launch a citizen blog (BondyBlog) to bridge the gap between newsrooms

and the community they aimed to report on. The blog gave voice to

young people who lived in the area to share their perspectives, “people

who have been systematically excluded from public discourse” (idem,

p.60). The journalists trained the bloggers and the best articles were

published both in the print newspaper, and on the blog. “The bloggers

acted as local reporters interviewing and blogging about Bondy residents

and their perspectives; about local politicians and their proposed

solutions to what ails the banlieue, and about the views and stories of

their friends and neighbors who can give context to the banlieue.” (idem,

p. 60) Russell pointed out how the practice of employing local bloggers

was later imitated by Liberation and Le Monde. This was an example of a

professional newsroom opening its gates, not just co-opting citizens as

content producers to enhance its reporting, but also providing training to

amateurs as one form of participatory journalism.

Shirky (2010), demonstrating how digital platforms can be used to

collect public information from citizens, cited the project of Ushahidi in

Kenya in 2007. Ushahidi was launched by a political blogger to report on

incidents of post-election violence. “Even if the information that the

public wanted existed some place in the government, Ushahidi was

animated by the idea that rebuilding it from scratch, with citizen input,

was easier than trying to get it from the authorities” (Shirky, 2010, p.35).

Citizens used their mobile phones to report atrocities and human rights

violations by SMS, which were displayed on an interactive map almost in

real time.

Citizen journalism and participatory journalism have often been used

interchangeably, as the previous examples illustrate. “Participatory

journalism refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of

collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing and disseminating news and

information – a task once reserved almost exclusively to the news media”

(Lasica 2003, 71, as cited in Smith, 2017, p.10). Nonetheless, in this

dissertation, I would like to make a distinction between the two,

following Engelke (2019). “While the term participatory journalism – as

29

understood here – delineates audience participation in the professional

news production process, the term citizen journalism is most often

understood to describe autonomous audience production of news without

professional involvement (Engelke, 2019, p.32). Participatory journalism

is a vast field, with many different angles and theoretical frameworks. As

Vobič & Dahlgren (2013) pointed out, it needs to be examined in relation

to mainstream journalism, societal power relations, epistemic premises

and online media culture in general.

Alternatively Singer (2011) defined participatory journalism as the

overall process of audiences participating with journalists and with each

other in creating news and building community around news. Reflecting

on this community-building aspect of participatory journalism, a

different theoretical framework was offered by Lewis et al. (2013), who

suggested replacing the term with reciprocal journalism. “It points to the

unrealized potential for a participatory journalism that has mutual benefit

in mind, that is not merely fashioned to suit a news organization’s

interests but also takes citizens’ concerns to heart” (Lewis et al., 2013,

p.8). The authors claimed that with the acceptance of the ethic of

participation in newsrooms, journalists (not all of them) should serve as

community builders. In this sense, this framework contained normative

expectations regarding the relationship between the audience and

journalists in the networked environment. The authors pointed out that

direct, indirect and sustained forms of reciprocity (from a simple like to

regular contribution to a website) were emerging in the networked

environment, yielding instrumental and symbolic rewards for

participants.

Lewis at al. (2013) brought up two examples of well-known

American journalists, contributing to the formation of online

communities. One was the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof,

who had 1.4 million Twitter followers. As an act of reciprocity, Kristof

regularly re-posted the content of his followers, contextualized news

stories, and talked to his followers. Their other example was Andy

Carvin (National Public Radio, already cited) who became famous for his

‘broadcasting’ of the Arab Spring. As Lewis and his colleagues pointed

30

out, he responded publicly on Twitter to questions, asked his own

questions from his followers, and used hashtags to “build discourse (and,

potentially, communities) around certain topics, and consistently

provides sources for his followers to go deeper into those topics” (Lewis

et al., 2013, p.5).

Participatory journalism can also be categorized according to the

stages of user input to the newsmaking process. Domingo et al., 2008

and Hermida (2011) differentiated five such stages, namely (1)

access/observation, (2) selection/filtering, (3) processing/editing, (4)

distribution, and (5) interpretation. Access and observation entail

practices such as information gathering and finding source material for a

story, like eyewitness accounts and audiovisual content. Crowdsourcing

exploits that affordance. Selection and filtering refers to gatekeeping

practices, whereas processing and editing occurs when the story is

created, and distribution simply means dissemination of the story. The

interpretation stage means that when the story is published, it is opened

up for the audience to comment upon and discuss (Singer et al., 2011).

Supplementing these five stages with more indirect means of

participation, Engelke (2019) created a useful taxonomy to make sense of

users’ expanded roles in news production.

Table2:Taxonomyofuserparticipationinnewsproduction(Engelke:2019)

STAGES Forms of participation

Formation Audience finances news via

crowdfunding

Audience influences content

selection qualitatively

Audience influences content

selection quantitatively

Audience content supplements

professional reporting

Audience involved in writing,

editing and revision

Audience produces entire news

pieces

Dissemination Audience enhances prominence

31

of news on journalistic sites

Audience enhances prominence

of news on external platforms

Interpretation Audience checks comprehension

via interaction

Audience gives journalists

qualitative feedback

Audience gives journalists

quantitative feedback

Audience involved in discussion

of news

In the following Figure 1 I have listed the different forms that

participatory journalism related to online news can take.

Figure 1: Forms of participatory journalism (my collection)

To sum up, before professional news outlets started to open their gates to

user-generated content, the practice of participatory journalism -

facilitated by web technology - emerged in a counter-public sphere, with

Usergeneratedcontentonnewssites(separatesectionoras

comments,blogs)

Socialmediadiscussionsaround

newswherejournalists

participateornot

Newsroomspartneringwithnonjournalistorgs(e.g.archives,univs)LSE-Guardian

Leaks(Wikileaks,PanamaPapers).

Audience-journalistpanels(HuffingtonPost,Guardian,LeMonde)

32

political agendas. In the US, the prototype of web-based participatory

journalism was Indymedia, whose activists protested against the WTO

meeting in Seattle in 1999, whereas in South Korea, the pro-am news site

OhmyNews also had a political goal, besides providing an alternative to

the monolithic conservative mainstream media. Online participatory

media has precursors in development, reform, emancipatory and public

journalism, going back to the pre-web era; however, widespread access

to publishing technology generated the social practice of citizen

journalism, which is not to be equated with participatory journalism,

understood here as “audience participation in the news production

process within professional journalistic contexts” (Engelke, 2019). Forms

of participatory journalism can be distinguished according to the stages

of user involvement in the news production (formation, dissemination,

interpretation) and according to the means through which users shape the

news (via donation, sharing, feedback or content). Direct, indirect and

sustained forms of reciprocity were assumed to ensure that participatory

journalism served not only the interests of the newsroom but also

citizens, by forging communities around the news. Participatory

epistemology, with its cybernetic and deliberative aspects, serves as the

normative ideology of the practice, ostensibly better suiting the peer-to-

peer digital environment than traditional journalistic knowledge relying

on experts and exclusive professional jurisdiction.

Having reviewed the technological and cultural roots and definition

of participatory journalism, the next section summarizes early studies

about newsroom experimentation with participatory newsmaking mainly

from Western contexts.

II. 2. Industry-Level and Organizational Approaches to

Participatory Journalism

This section summarizes case studies focusing on news organizations

that began to prioritize audience engagement. Here I relied on scholarly

literature as well as trade journals, such as Nieman Lab, the Global

33

Investigative Journalism Network (gijn.org), Poynter (journalism training

center), and the World Association of News Publishers (Wanifra), which

showcased the operations of newsrooms they regarded as innovative in

adapting to the digital environment. Nieman Lab also published the

‘Leaked Digital Strategy of The New York Times’ in 2014, when it was

about to turn more radically towards its audience.

Economic hardship and downsizing occurred at many newsrooms in

the 2010s. Studies applying an organizational lens pointed out that

journalistic work on the web had become a postindustrial service, instead

of industrial assembly line production (Anderson et al., 2014; Jarvis,

2006; Schudson, 2016). In order to adapt to this fluid environment,

scholars claimed that the postindustrial news organization should employ

(1) a hackable structure/workflow; (2) iteration as a starting point

instead of a finished product; (3) a space for interaction; and (4)

partnerships (C.W. Anderson et al., 2014). These features are all related

to each other. “The organizational breakthrough of the hacker-journalist

lies not in being up to speed on the latest social media tools or even in

being able to manage a thousand-column Google Fusion Table. Rather,

the key insight of journalists raised on the rhythms of digital production

and programming languages is the understanding that ‘content’ is not

used once and then discarded. Rather, content is endlessly reusable and

should be designed for perpetual levels of iteration” (Anderson et al.,

2014, para.34).

Scholarly attention turned to how user-generated content was

integrated by news organizations already in 2007-2008. The BBC created

its User-Generated Hub in 2005, where content was categorized by

Harrison (2009) as (1) unsolicited reader stories; (2) solicited content for

extant stories; (3) expeditious content for special items and features; and

(4) audience watchdog content. An anthology textbook on participatory

journalism (Singer et al., 2011) contained case studies from ten different

(Western) countries. Most analyses in it regarded participatory

journalism as innovation within the organization, which was often

resisted by the staff. The authors differentiated between the following

journalistic tasks with user-generated content: fact-checking, policing,

34

curation, mixing and gatekeeping. Regarding general newsroom policies,

some newsrooms were willing to integrate user-generated content, others

wanted to segregate it, and a third type was ready to co-create with users.

Those newsrooms that segregated user-generated content (displaying the

playground strategy) did not use strict moderation, whereas those that

used UGC as a source, applied fact checking (Singer et al., 2011, p.86).

It was also pointed out that user engagement was generally a

manager’s role, assigned to an entitled community manager or

community moderator, who served as a bridge between users and the

newsroom and usually head a team. In the case of the British newspaper

The Guardian, this person also had to devise strategies of user

engagement. What will be shown as important in the Hungarian case

studies is that already at this early stage the curation of content emerged

as an alternative to content moderation, but neither was regarded as

“more participatory” than the other. Researchers identified top-down

relationship with users as opposed to mentoring journalistic roles.

Scholars and trade journals have brought up many examples of

digitally innovative newsrooms that were responsive to their audiences

and were regularly and successfully co-opting them for their stories. Here

I will summarize the strategies of five flagship online newspapers from

2012 to 2016. These are the American investigative news startup

ProPublica, the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza, the British The Guardian, the

Slovakian news portal Denník N (liberal) 2015, and The New York Times.

The selected newsrooms’ (1) workflow, (2) resources and recruitment

practices, and (3) audience engagement methods are highlighted.

Table3.Organizationalfeaturesofnewsroomsthatengagedtheiraudience

Newspaper

Newsroom’s workflow Audience engagement

Resources

ProPublica Non-profit (2012) Investigative Data journalism

Share collected human resources and raw data with other newsrooms Establish project-based partnerships with other newsrooms Use crowdsourced information before, during and after reporting

Callouts on different platforms to readers using data management software platforms to handle content from the audience find the community that is most affected

Supported by foundations Large resources, high salaries to journalists $2.2 million for audience engagement

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Have an engagement team that works closely with reporters

by the issue

in 2012. top journalists, large amount of symbolic capital, hire new talents (with engineering expertise)

Gazeta Wyborcza (2012)

Investigative Originally a print daily, which is a leading newspaper

forming partnerships with different groups and institutions for stories and campaigns

Using physical events and reaching out on the web 2012, "School 2.0" program 30,000 Polish teachers and over 7,000 schools participated (Nieman, 2012)

Since 2012 paywall option In 2014, 55,000 digital subscribers2 Publisher, Agora S A, with different business lines

The Guardian (2009-2015) Left-leaning, liberal, general news site, investigative and entertainment

Launched the Guardian Witness platform for reader-produced content 3

Crowdsourcing Use of widgets to outsource journalistic tasks, such as reviewing documents organize citizen debates

Owned by a trust global brand reader-funding in 2015 not yet sustainable4

The New York Times (2014)

Newsroom should be less defensive, risk-averse, wall between the newsroom and the business unit obsolete more experiments need for replicability in news formats

Facebook page is managed by the business unit, Twitter by journalists (more collaboration is needed)

Watching Syria War (2012) curating and fact-checking citizen videos

Huge company (3,588 employees at The New York Times Company in 20135)

2 https//www.wan-ifra.org/articles/2015/03/09/piano-media-customer-gazeta-wyborcza-quadruples-digital-subscriptions 3https,//www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2013/apr/16/introducing-guardianwitness-platform-content-youve-created4https,//www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine-viner-guardian-million-reader-funding5https,//www.statista.com/statistics/192894/number-of-employees-at-the-new-york-times-company/

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As far as the Polish news site Gazeta Wyborcza was concerned, it

had (and still has) a lot of symbolic capital in the Polish journalistic field

given its past history in the Solidarity movement. In a dominantly

Catholic country, it represented a secular, progressive voice that many

considered vital for democracy. Even back in the pre-web era, it strongly

relied on the help of its readers to produce stories. Most importantly, it

regarded reporting and investigation as equally important in changing

public opinion, hence it was interventionist. In 1994, it launched the

campaign “Childbirth with dignity” in which it crowdsourced thousands

of women’s personal reports from maternity wards where they gave

birth. “The aim was to initiate a public dialogue on the subject of

childbirth in order to transform a taboo topic into a positive one.

Thousands of women from all parts of the country shared with them their

experiences in letters and questionnaires. Numerous physicians and

midwives actively and positively responded to the call for change and

thus began a transformation in the field of obstetrics in Poland.”6

Eighteen years later, in 2012, it launched the “School 2.0” program,

involving 30,000 Polish teachers and more than 7,000 schools. Seeing

that Polish schools were underequipped with digital tools, it gave

comprehensive training to a large number of schools in digital literacy.

Besides reporting, it also produced live blogs.

The second example from 2015 was the American investigative

news site, ProPublica. As a non-profit startup, it could more easily

subscribe to the “ethic of sharing” (Schudson, 2016) since its founders

and donors were interested in seeing that the stories created an impact

and changed public opinion. It shared raw data and civic sources with

other newsrooms. ProPublica applied survey methods, frequently built

partnerships, and applied software technology in both finding stories to

write about and in crowdsourcing people’s experiences. They used

Screendoor, a software platform, to manage audience responses and to

find patterns in them. Their so-called engagement team worked closely

6 https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/11/the-newsonomics-of-aggressive-public-minded-journalism/

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with journalists. ProPublica always geared its crowdsourcing strategy

towards the issue it was investigating.

In an IPI-Poynter report, prepared in 2010, on how news

organizations needed to transform, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief

(Rusbridger) explained their methods of audience engagement. “The

rather clumsy name we’ve given this openness/collaboration theme at

The Guardian is mutualisation. It’s an attempt to capture the energy and

possibilities we can imagine from working with readers and others to be

a different kind of news organization” (Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief

of The Guardian, 2010). Media sociologist, Schudson (2016) also

claimed that web journalism is qualitatively different from offline

journalism, and he used the metaphor of the goldfish bowl to illustrate

this. Online, users constantly monitor the news, calling for the “opening

up of journalism” (Schudson in Alexander, J.C. et al., 2016, p.113). He

added that journalists must invent new genres and formats, to collaborate,

and move from the ethic of exclusivity to the ethic of sharing.

Participation and division of labor between amateurs and professionals

should characterize web journalism. Schudson also quoted Alan

Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian.

Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so

effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as

the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing

sources, allowing response - harnessing the best qualities of

text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a

route to building audience, trust, and relevance, it is by

embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling

yourself away from them. (idem, p. 109).

The Guardian in 2013 launched the Guardian Witness platform to host

reader-submitted content on breaking news stories and to serve as a

platform for users to suggest topics for journalists to pursue or to just

share their own stories. (It lasted for 5 years.) Up until 2013, The

Guardian had already run several collaborative projects with its audience

and with other organizations. The first major project was about the MPs’

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expenses scandal in 2009, when it uploaded 700,000 documents about

MPs’ receipts and claim forms to its servers and asked readers to review

them. Later it created a data-enhanced report on the issue.7 In 2011,

during a heavy four-day street riot, The Guardian collaborated with the

London School of Economics, carrying out a social research together and

organizing public discussions about the findings of the study8.

The New York Times, a huge corporate organization with a

workforce of 3,588 people in 2014, was not yet fully adapting to the

digital era, according to a leaked report back then. In 2012, it launched a

project where it curated amateur videos uploaded by citizens to show the

human toll of the War in Syria for two years, which proved that it was

integrating user-generated content into its product. The leaked report

pointed out that the organization needed to be more responsive to

readers’ taste for formats. “What readers see as innovation at the

Times — graphics and interactives — is not reflected internally, in terms

of workflow, organization, strategy, and recruitment (...) Everyone’s a

little paranoid about being seen as too close to the business side” (p.64).

“Discovery, promotion and engagement have been pushed to the

margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small

teams in the newsroom” (Benton, 2014). The report also mentioned that

the newsroom was too risk-averse, lacked strategic thinking, and did not

aim at replicability. “We just don’t do strategy. The newsroom is really

being dragged behind the galloping horse of the business side. (...) The

newsroom tends to view questions through the lens of worst-case

scenarios. And the newsroom has historically reacted defensively by

watering down or blocking changes ...The newsroom would never allow

that” (Digital Innovation Report, pp. 72-78). Given that data analysis and

visualization had become part and parcel of online journalism, journalists

needed to master different skills of programming and journalism if not in

one person, then in one team. This was not a self-evident process and

was not implemented in every newsroom. The New York Times,

launching an Interactive News Technology department in 2010, also

7 Before they started their crowdsourcing project, MPs’ expenses had already been on the media agenda due to leaks published by The Daily Telegraph. 8 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/01/introducing-phase-two-reading-riots.

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struggled with it. “The culture of technology is different than that of

journalism. They each carry different ideas about objectivity,

transparency, sharing of information and performance. By merging these

cultures, what emerges in terms of a hybrid dynamic? How do the actors,

their backgrounds and training, their processes and the organizational

structure affect the products they deliver?” (Royal, 2010, para.32)

The Slovakian news portal, Denník N, was founded in 2015 by

journalists who had protested against the sale of their newspaper to local

oligarchs. Here it was the management that “took a more programmatic

stance with regard to discussion” (Smith, 2017, p.36). “You won’t find

discussion below on all the articles on the Denník N website. But where

there are discussions, we’ll be discussing too. (..) There should be a place

which neither you nor your children are afraid to enter. Where not only

our readers can gather, but where we – the authors of articles, reporters,

editors, newsroom managers – will be too. We’ll be there so that we can

respond to your questions, explain things that are unclear, or add details

that you found missing in the article itself” (lead paragraph and extract

from newsroom blog published on January 5, 2015, cited by Smith

(Smith, 2017, p.37).

Lastly, The Washington Post is also mentioned here as a news outlet

that made extensive efforts to engage with its audience on social media

platforms. “The Washington Post account is an avid poster of some

pretty good memes and gifs. It’s got jokes. It’s also a sharer of

everything from polling stories to breaking national security stories to

lifestyle columns to geeky features to fact-checks, and a facilitator of,

and participant in, AMAs.” (Wang, 2017) In AMAs, Ask Me Anything

sessions on Reddit, someone volunteers to answer the questions of

Reddit users (Redditors), who can ask anything. The Washington Post

regularly sent there some of its journalists to participate.

In summary, the newsrooms discussed in this section all illustrated

what scholars have labeled the “postindustrial news organization”

(Anderson et al., 2014), willing to engage non-journalists in news work,

with hackable workflows. The ethic of exclusivity is replaced by the

ethic of sharing. Finally, the wall between the business unit and the

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newsroom is weakened. Hence, groups such as the engagement team

(from the business side) can help the work of the newsroom by finding

sources, by distributing content, and by connecting journalists with

readers. The fact that all of these news organizations, except for the non-

profit ProPublica, were moving towards a subscription-based model

explained why they had reconsidered the boundaries between themselves

and their new constituencies, the audience.

II. 3. Normative Lens to Participatory Journalism

Whereas the previous section looked at meso-level processes

(organizational processes and newsroom strategies) related to

participatory journalism, this section looks at macro-level considerations

that concern public communication and democracy (Quandt, in Singer

2011). These normative debates relate not only to journalism, but to the

internet and web 2.0 in general, and to how and with what consequences

users’ participation take place on these technological platforms.

As for the quality of user-generated content, some (often

journalists) denigrate it as pulp communication, which poses a threat and

legal risk to the journalistic profession (Quandt, in Singer 2011). Others

(in Western liberal media contexts) have claimed that it holds out the

promise of repairing the relationship between journalists and their

audiences.

Regarding web 2.0 platforms in general, one chief source of

normative disagreement has been the issue of plurality and how it has

affected the public sphere. “Greater pluralism is regarded by Habermas

as a risk for deliberative democracy rather than its savior. This concern is

echoed by Sunstein, who argues that the internet has spawned large

numbers of radical websites and discussion groups allowing the public to

bypass more moderate and balanced expressions of opinion in the mass

media (which are also, he argues, subject to fragmentation for essentially

technological reasons). Moreover, these sites tend to link only to sites

that have similar views.” (Fenton, 2016, p. 41) Habermas also pointed

41

out how personalization, dramatization and simplification, as well as

civic privatism, lead to the deterioration of the public sphere. (Fenton,

2016, p. 54) This echoes the neoliberal criticism of privatization,

deregulation and individualization. However, Smith (2017) saw a more

invigorated public sphere emerging, displaying the traits of polemic,

affect, emotions, a plurality of discursive registers, witnessing,

narrativization, conflictualization, and implication.

A related issue is the question of political change. The web, as

already pointed out, precisely due to its “connectivity and participation”,

“diversity and horizontality”, and “speed and space” (Fenton, 2016,

p.25), is conducive to radical politics, social movements and political

activism. “Digital media and the internet expanded the communicative

space available for radical politics to organize and campaign” (Fenton,

2016, p.50). Vobič and Dahlgren (2013) regard participatory journalism

as belonging to the counter-public sphere, and argue that this is where

civic empowerment can take form. Fenton (2016) admits that web 2.0

platforms can give room to acts of resistance, struggles over meaning,

and advocacy, but she accuses these places of neoliberal exploitation and

suggests that as a result they in fact weaken radical politics by

encouraging “pseudo-participation, easy-come, easy-go politics,

clicktivism” (Dean 2008, in Fenton, 2016, p.44).

Regarding the work of journalists some old debates have

resurfaced in the new environment. Should journalists limit themselves to

inform and observe or should they assume an active role in public life,

commenting on the news and taking stances? Should they provide a

platform for voices from outside the media? Some scholars (Deuze,

2003; Deuze & Fortunati; McNair, 2006, 2017; Lewis, 2011; Shirky,

2010; Anderson et al., 2014) have proposed that journalists need to get

rid of their professional distance, ‘objectivity’ and traditional modes of

fact-checking, and to opt instead for procedural transparency.

The use of metrics has also been a subject of normative debate.

According to one view, clicks have become all-important and market

success has superseded journalistic criteria, although journalists - using

their professional knowledge - should decide what is newsworthy. Others

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(Hermida, 2010; Luengo, 2016; Singer, 2014) have contended that

metrics should be regarded as making journalism more attuned to social

needs, to community and civic agendas. The civic code in Luengo’s

(2016) interpretation entails catering to community-driven needs, trust,

inclusion, and conversationality. This is in contrast to the traditional

code, which implies secrecy, detachment, objectivity, exclusion and

suspicion. “In the case of ambient journalism, the role may be designing

the tools that can analyze, interpret and contextualize a system of

collective intelligence, rather than in the established practice of selection

and editing of content through the prism of news values” (Hermida,

2010, para.5).

Another aspect of this dichotomy is the maintenance or obsoleteness

of the sacred wall between the business side and the newsroom

(especially in American journalism). The obsoleteness of this “dogma”

about the wall was argued by Coddington (in Carlson & Lewis, 2015),

who also said that this wall never really existed, but served as an

ideology for journalists to support their sense of professional autonomy.

To sum up, normative debates abound about the web, the web 2.0,

user-generated content and online journalism. Participation as a political

act versus pseudo-politics and clicktivism was raised, as well as the

controversial issue of external plurality. Regarding journalism in the

participatory environment, several normative/ethical expectations were

formulated, such as ‘procedural transparency’, ‘opening up’,

‘collaborating’, and the ‘ethic of sharing’. Normative debates surround

the use of metrics (as an indirect, quantitative means of user participation

in newsmaking) or as the commercializing of the public service function

of news. The next section describes the sociomaterial infrastructures

(web 2.0) where the participatory journalist operates. The concepts of

technological automaticity, as well as of mediological versus

praxiological agency, algorithms, and networked gatekeeping will be

explained.

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II. 4. The Sociotechnical Environment

In this section, I review three themes that are all related to the

sociomaterial conditions of digital journalism. One is the transformation

of the profession with the fusion of IT skills and traditional journalistic

ones that requires a new balancing between mediological and

praxiological agency (Boyer, 2011, 2013). The second is the quantitative

turn in journalism (via traffic numbers and algorithms). The third is the

new conceptualization of gatekeeping in the networked environment.

II. 4. 1. Technological Automaticity

Theoretical approaches driven by the Informational Science perspective

place participatory journalism in the sociomaterial infrastructure of the

web, emphasizing its lateral networks and dispersed power to generate

information. Terms such as hubs, node, information, flow, nonlinear,

peer to peer, sharing, process, power, control pop up in these discourses,

echoing the work of Manual Castells (1996) on the logics of the

Information Society. Castells himself was an avid proponent of citizens‘

involvement in newsmaking, as he and his colleagues believed that

journalism would finally get rid of its biased corporate control.

“Networked journalism refers to a diffused capacity to record

information, share it, and distribute it. In a world in which information

and communication are organized around the Internet, the notion of the

isolated journalist working alone, whether toiling at his desk in a

newsroom or reporting from a crime scene or a disaster, is obsolete.

Every journalist becomes a node in a network that functions to collect,

process, and distribute information” (van der Haak et al., 2012, p.2927).

In accordance with Castell’s theorizing of the information economy

(1996), where people navigate the space of flows with different amounts

of network-, networked- and networking power, Charlie Beckett, a

researcher at the LSE in 2010 also claimed that journalism as a

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profession needs to transform and acknowledge the changed information

ecology.

Networked journalism is creating – or some would say reflecting – a

new relationship between the journalist and the story and the public.

Newsrooms are no longer fortresses for the Fourth Estate, they are

hubs at the centre of endless networks. News is no longer a product

that flops onto your doormat or springs into life at the flick of a

remote control. It is now a non-linear process, a multi-directional

interaction. And journalism is no longer a self-contained

manufacturing industry. It is now a service industry that creates and

connects flows of information, analysis and commentary. (Beckett,

2010, para. 6)

The increasingly technisized aspect of newswork means that journalists

partially lose a sense of themselves as ‘praxiological subjects’, as

practice-centered craftsmen who assemble news products. Boyer (2011,

p.19) defined the figure of the journalistic newsmaker as a praxiological

subject “who possessed at least a significant degree of agency to shape

his/her social environment through his/her professional practices and, by

extension, who possessed a significant degree of influence over public

knowledge through the craft of journalism”. Examining the daily routines

of ‘slotters’ at German and American news agencies, he observed that

these screenworkers interchangeably think of themselves as

‘mediological subjects’, i.e. “operators within a complex, fast-moving,

conjuncture of information flows and intra-institutional relations. Theirs

was a life informatic and they struggled with the implications of digital

informational immediacy and automaticity for their decision-making”

(idem, p.20) and praxiological subjects. In other words, when journalists

reflected on their work and on news, they are acutely aware of the

medium that they work with. “The non-onliner is regarded as someone

whose expertise is imprisoned within a single configuration of medium

and content, whereas the very essence of online expertise seems to be the

ability to emancipate content from such medium dependency and instead

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to reimagine and repurpose content across a variety of different

“platforms.” (Boyer, 2010, p.86) What is more, as he argues, they must

constantly oscillate between the two (praxiological and mediological)

mindsets.

II.4.2. Audience Metrics and the Role of Algorithms

Faced with the flood of information on the networks, quantified audience

feedback served as legitimation for journalists. According to Boyer

(2013), the information abundance, the massive news flow and the afore-

mentioned technical automaticity all create a mediological anxiety in

journalists. Hence, audience clicks are the “steady pulse of the nation’s

beating heart, the response of the national audience (...) a pattern that

soothed if never fully silenced the murmurs of mediological self-doubt”

(Boyer, 2013, p.83). Real time audience behavior metrics do not only

serve as feedback to journalists, but also increases the agenda setting

power of the audience. Algorithms on web 2.0 platforms help to collate

the preferences of web publics through the long tail of citizen

participation.

Metrics elevate economic imperatives above all else by

enabling minute tinkering aimed at extracting larger

audience numbers. In another view, judgment is being

augmented, and audience feedback via metrics improves

the selection of news and builds better connections

between the audience and journalists. Journalists are able

to sharpen their reach, putting more news in front of

more people. Even more optimistically, measurable

journalism can provide novel ways to measure the

impact and social value of journalism. (Carlson, 2018, p.

413)

46

The quantification of consumer behavior and the commercial logic

sustained the “culture of click” at many newsrooms (Anderson, 2011;

Bockowski, 2010, p. 147), where journalists struggled to juggle between

what is public interest information and what helps them increase their

traffic and audience. C.W. Anderson (2013) contended that the internet’s

potentials actually changed from participation to traceability and

algorithmic news production. He does not say it explicitly, but it can be

inferred that algorithmic journalism in his understanding is weakly

serving the public interest. “These companies are learning what the

audience is searching online, they take into consideration which themes

bring the biggest income, and they base their decisions on these

computer-generated calculations” (Anderson, 2013, p.1010). In another

article, he explains how the incorporation of big data creates black boxes

in gatekeeping. “Algorithmic journalism embraces “big data,” drawing

on highly dispersed but massive data sets. In both the collection and

translation of this data, it blurs the line between human beings and

machines. Both human and non-human data are treated equally in the

data- gathering process (they are “flattened” or “reduced”), while

algorithmic computation promiscuously mixes the human and non-

human judgment” (Anderson, 2011, p. 542).

A related problematic area is the power of the technological

platforms where readers interact and meet with the news produced by

journalists on their news feeds and which are also dependent on

algorithmic operations. “Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target

content. They have not wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both

cost and the perception that humans would be biased. However, the

nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need

to reconsider their approach” (Bell & Owen, 2017, para.5). This

dissertation is not dealing with platform power in depth, but it is

important to mention that they have largely usurped the publishing role

and the monetization of the audience can themselves influence the types

of content news organizations produce. “The influence of social

platforms shapes the journalism itself. By offering incentives to news

organizations for particular types of content, such as live video, or by

47

dictating publisher activity through design standards, the platforms are

explicitly editorial” (idem, para.8). It is also argued by the same authors

(Emily Bell, the director of Tow Center and David Owen) that viral

content is encouraged by social media platforms, and hence quality

journalism is on the decrease. “the structure and the economics of social

platforms incentivize the spread of low-quality content over high-quality

material. Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates

power, or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated

against by a system that favors scale and shareability” (idem, para.12). In

the dissertation I am trying to argue that this claim is not entirely valid

and there are many instances when news organizations become more

civically relevant, exactly because of their presence on and engagement

with social media platforms.

In the next section, I list the major theoretical lenses that I used in

my analysis. First, I explain the concept of networked gatekeeping, which

was coined to describe the dispersed power to create news on the web,

especially with help of web 2.0 platforms.

II.5. Theories relevant to the hybrid spaces of users and journalists

II.5.1. The Concept of Networked Gatekeeping

Compared to traditional gatekeeping, which was the “manner in which

editors filter huge quantities of information to settle on a carefully

selected set of news reports on a given day” (Shoemaker, 1991), the

process of gatekeeping on the web became more complex and

collaborative, involving a larger set of actors of gatekeepers. Welbers &

Opgenhaffen (2018) provided a comprehensive summary of the various

concepts that emerged in gatekeeping literature in the 2000s to describe

how gatekeeping has transformed in the web2.0 era.

Gatewatching (Bruns, 2005) describes the activity of influential

bloggers, social media users and journalists, whose purpose is to provide

a ‘curated hub for their audience’. The audience is engaged in secondary

gatekeeping (Singer, 2014). “News has become ‘a shared social

experience as people exchange links and recommendations as a form of

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cultural currency in their social networks’”(Pew research, 2010, cited by

Singer, 2014, p.60) The curation of flows (Thorson and Wells, 2016)

referred to the collaborative practices of journalists, users, strategic

communicators, algorithms, and social others in relation to online

content.

The concept of networked gatekeeping is rooted in Informational

Science. Barzilai (2008) elaborated a model, where quite innovatively

she focused on the gated, instead of the gatekeepers and strove to

describe the power dynamics between the two in any networked context.

Following the seminal work of Lewin (1951) she defined gatekeeping as

the process of controlling information as it moves through a gate and

distinguished specific gatekeeping activities related to content, such as

‘selection’, ‘addition’, ‘withholding’, ‘display’, ‘channeling’, ‘shaping’,

‘manipulation’, ‘repetition’, ‘timing’, ‘localization’, ‘integration’,

‘disregard’, and ‘deletion of information’. An important element in her

model is the channeling mechanism that guides the gated to a

gatekeeper’s platform. Channeling mechanisms on the Internet can be

search engines or hyperlinks. In her model, four dimensions/attributes

determine the gated’s importance to the gatekeeper in networked

contexts. These are the gated’s political power, information producing

ability, provision with alternative gatekeepers and its relationship with

the gatekeeper. “Networked gatekeeping predicts that salience of a

particular gated to gatekeepers is correlated to the possession of these

attributes; that is, low if one attribute is present, moderate if two

attributes are present, high if three attributes are present, and very high if

all four attributes are present” (Barzilai, 2008, p.1506).

By information producing ability, she meant whether the gated could

independently produce information aimed at the public or not. The

gated’s relationship with the gatekeeper can be direct, reciprocal and

enduring.. Alternatives mean the possibility for the gated to choose

another gatekeeper. To show that gated-gatekeeper positions are fluid

and dynamic, she brought up Wikipedia as an example. The platform was

conceived as Dormant Gated with one attribute, namely the ‘alternative

gatekeeper’ next to the official encyclopedias. As soon as users could

49

produce information, they acquired two attributes, becoming Potential

Gated (Illusive Apprentice). Finally, getting criticism for the unreliable

information they produced, a small group of volunteering editors

emerged, who had political power, hence they became Threatening

Gated, or from another perspective, Wikipedia became a gatekeeper

itself.

Meraz & Papacharissi (2013) worked out a different definition of

networked gatekeeping, analyzing the user-journalist collaboration on

Twitter in 2011 during the Egyptian uprising. Their focus was also on the

gated, and on how they could help certain actors to rise to prominence

through the conversational markers of the platform (@, ≠, RT).The

researchers coded about one million tweets under the hashtag (≠) Arab

Spring from the conversation flow between local activists, Western

journalists, and members of the diaspora, and defined networked

gatekeeping as follows:

This process of emergent eliteness, which we refer to as networked

gatekeeping, is arguably different from how prominence was

achieved in pre-Web 2.0 newsrooms and news environments,

among other power contexts. We thus define networked

gatekeeping as a process through which actors are crowdsourced to

prominence through the use of conversational, social practices that

symbiotically connect elite and crowd in the determination of

information relevancy. (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013, p.158)

Their understanding of networked gatekeeping is in accordance with the

definition of Domingo & Le Cam (2015) who described it as the process

whereby a diversity of actors plays a role in the news narrative. Meraz

and Papacharissi (2013) observed that networked gatekeeping on Twitter

was characterized by collaborating filtering, co-creation of news content,

transparent subjectivity and heightened conversationality, which served

to legitimize and lend credibility to news-gathering practices (sharing

and storytelling) while enabling prominent actors to be promoted to elite,

influential positions.

50

To sum up, in this section, the socio-technical environment of

participatory journalists was described. The dichotomy of mediological

and praxiological agency of journalists was explained, where the former

one refers to the systematicity, automaticity and networked property of

the medium that journalists must navigate and the latter one refers to the

traditional authorial, practical, craft-like aspect of journalism. In the

technisized environment the platform-mentality is increasingly

important. Secondly, metrics and algorithms were mentioned as enabling

the work of journalists, but also exposing it to machine intelligence.

Lastly, gatekeeping was described in the networked environment, where

the power of the audience potentially increased. Barzilai (2008) defined

the gated as potentially possessing five attributes (alternatives, political

power, relationship to the gatekeeper, and information producing power)

which determine its power relative to the gatekeeper. Meraz &

Papacharissi (2013) defined networked gatekeeping as emergent

eliteness, which is made possible by the special conversational

architecture of web 2.0 platforms and where affect plays an important

role. Such networks are democratic as collaboratively determined

information relevance can make anyone become a prominent actor. In the

next section the sociological concept of boundary work vis-à-vis the

participatory environment of journalism is explained, which nuances this

interaction and which will be also used as a lens in the analysis of my

case studies.

II. 5. 2. The Lens of Boundary Work

Whereas the previous section looked at participatory journalism from the

perspective of information production in the networked environment,

particularly in the context of web 2.0 platforms, this section focuses on

boundary work, originating from occupational sociology. Boundary work

in the open and participatory digital environment is particularly useful as

an analytical framework. Journalism is a permeable occupation, with

traditionally weak boundaries (Abbott, 1988, as cited by Smith, 2017) or

as Bourdieu said, a weakly autonomous field (Bourdieu, 1998)

51

subordinated to the fields of power (political) and to the economy. The

so-called metajournalistic discourse is the “ site in which actors (inside

and outside journalism) publicly engage in processes of establishing

definitions, setting boundaries, and rendering judgments about

journalism’s legitimacy”(Carlson, 2016, p.350).

The issue of boundary work is closely related to ethics and more

generally to journalism culture, since practices relegated to the margin or

outside a profession are often considered unethical, i.e. non-professional.

“Journalists are concerned with how truth can be obtained and justified,

with some cultural norms foregrounding an empirical presentation of

facts and others highlighting analysis and evaluation of those facts”

(Singer, 2014. p62).

Journalism scholars working in the paradigm of boundary work

(Anderson, 2011; Carlson & Lewis, 2015; Revers, 2017; Robinson,

2010; Singer, 2014; Smith, 2017) start from the premise that there was an

inherent tension between the participatory logic of the digital media

environment and the professional control of journalists. They set out to

examine how journalists as a social group responded to the participatory

challenge/ideology/ethic and normalized emerging practices (blogging,

commenting).

As Lewis (2011) pointed out

professions—including journalism—articulate themselves

and their purpose, forge boundaries of jurisdictional

authority, and guard against external change they perceive

will threaten their autonomy. (...) Professions ‘possess a

certain degree of control over an information domain’

(Abbott, 1988) and to preserve that control they engage in

boundary work (Gieryn, 1983). This is ‘the process of

demarcating fields of knowledge relative to others, marking

who and what are ‘in’ vs. ‘out.’ Boundary work is a rhetorical

exercise taken up in all professions, but one in which

journalism, given its malleable character, is particularly

engaged. (Lewis, 2011, pp. 841, 843)

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As Carlson (2016) explained, also following Gieryn’s (1983) typology of

boundary work, in the digital environment the contest between outsiders

(amateurs) and insiders (journalists) took place over three domains - first,

with regard to ‘participants’ (e.g. who can produce news content).

Secondly, boundary work can center around ‘practices’ (e.g. what are

acceptable as new journalistic practices, such as blogging and tweeting.

Thirdly, boundary work may be directed at ‘professionalism’ (e.g.

expelling deviant forms and values). Carlson (2015) also explained that

boundary work in general could take the form of expansion (opening up),

expulsion (getting rid of unwanted behavior, norms, participants) and

protection of autonomy (e.g. to safeguard professionalism).

Commenting spaces are often treated as boundary objects (Smith,

2017, Robinson, 2010), i.e. different social groups have different

understandings of them, but they have enough commonality to function

as spaces of boundary work. Robinson (2010) looked at a small

American online newsroom in 2008 that had recently transitioned from a

print newspaper to the web. She observed how the commenting spaces

(reader content areas) became a place of struggle, between citizens and

journalists and between journalists. “Documenting the policy

development for reader-commenting on journalism, this research

considers user-generated content areas within news websites as places of

boundary work for the journalist-audience relationship” (idem, p. 126).

Readers eventually had a say in the formulation of the commenting

policies, which she thought meant a radical shift in the relationship

between journalists and their audiences. Under users’ boundary work she

understood their value preferences and demands regarding the

commenting spaces. These value preferences were freedom, hierarchy

(ratings), respect, credibility and transparency, whereas journalists had

textual privileges based on journalist control, rule-following, on-topic

discussion, civility and volume (clicks). (see Introduction). Readers

resented the censorship of journalists and wanted more jurisdictions over

content. Journalists within the newsrooms became divided. Convergers

(with more digital experience) viewed audience interactivity as a

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journalistic responsibility assumed in the digital age, whereas

traditionalists (mostly older reporters) preferred to keep a hierarchical

relationship between journalists and readers. In the end, commenting

places were separated from the editorial content, becoming walled

gardens.

News professionals in general show greater willingness to rely on

users for soft news, local information, and lifestyle material rather than

for hard news since they are worried that users would provide biased,

unverified and less credible content (Singer, 2014). Studies also showed

though that there were national differences in how rigid professional

boundaries were. Revers (2017) compared the German and the American

journalism fields and found that although for American journalists the

distance to politics was more important and occupational norms such as

objectivity were taken more seriously, professional boundaries were

more malleable than in the German field. He explained it with the

stronger presence of interventionism in American journalism. As a result,

in American journalism more journalistic roles are regarded as

acceptable, such as tabloid journalism, furnishing boundary work with a

smaller stake.

Examining a transition from a print to a news website in an Eastern

European media system, media ethnographer, Smith (2017) investigated

how Slovakian journalists engaged in discussions with their commenters

in 2015. The web site was launched by journalists who objected to their

newspaper being purchased by oligarchs and in order to preserve their

independence they started the news site, Dennik N with a subscription

model. (See II.2) The management actively pushed its journalists to take

part in the discussions in order to engage their readers. Smith (2017)

analyzed the comment orientations in discussion threads between the

authors of the articles and the readers. He also pointed out how in

newsrooms, comment administration and comment moderation were

those roles that were regarded as ‘peripheral and undignified’ (in

Western news sites it was not the case). So, boundaries in this context

signified the liminal territory of the profession, which he claimed are

fertile grounds for research purposes. Smith identified five categories of

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comment orientations or functions in the journalist-audience discussions.

These were information, interpretation, witnessing, metajournalism and

metadiscussion. In the Appendix of his book, he provided a definition of

each. Since I will be borrowing these coding categories in my first case

study, I include the explanations here.

1. Information: provides or requests specific information relevant to the

subject of the article

2. Interpretation: offers an interpretation of the subject of the article or

takes an argumentative position

3. Witnessing: describes a personal experience (not necessarily one’s own)

relevant to but distinct from the event described in the article, qualifies

another comment as personal experience, recalls a precedent from a

source �

4. Metajournalism: comments on the process by which the article was

produced, evaluates the author’s competence as a journalist, or comments

on the media in general

Metadiscussion: comments on the discussion itself or evaluates other

discussants’ competence, attempts to keep order in the discussion, phatic

comments (Smith, 2017, p101-102)

He interpreted the comment orientations as the boundary work of

readers and of the authors alike. He found that journalists were more

likely to respond to those reader comments that were about journalism

(metajournalism), such as opinions on editorial choices, mistakes,

headlines, accusations of bias than to comments about the subjects of the

articles. He also observed how journalists were enjoying the polemics

they had with the readers, but that they also felt threatened by them,

feeling that those criticisms challenged their authority.

To sum up, boundary work theory was applied to journalists’ and

users‘ jurisdictional struggles over truth claims and competences. All

professions engage in boundary work, but journalism even more so,

given its permeable character. There are differences in the malleability of

55

professional boundaries between different countries. American

journalists are the least rigid about it, which results in a relatively

powerful audience. Professional boundary work in general can play out

over participants, practices and professionalism, and it can take the form

of expansion, expulsion and protection of autonomy. Certain empirical

work in journalistic boundary work examined commenting spaces as

boundary objects and commenting policies as sites of boundary work and

found that both users and journalists displayed different value

preferences. Users demanded freedom, hierarchy, respect, credibility and

transparency, whereas journalists wished to maintain and increase

journalistic control, volume (clicks), and implement rule-following, on-

topic discussion, and civility. The boundary work of users and journalists

can be analyzed through discursive functions such as giving information,

engaging in interpretation, metajournalism, metadiscussion and

witnessing.

II. 5. 3. The Lenses of Field- and Practice Theory

Several scholars applied the lenses of field and practice theories

(Anderson & Revers, 2018; Benson, 2006; Couldry, 2012; Deuze, 2003;

Fenton (Ed), 2009; Klinenberg, 2005; Postill, 2010; Powers &

Zambrano, 2016; Rao, 2010; Ryfe, 2012) in analyzing the audience-

journalist relationship on the web, sometimes more so in their

terminology than as an explanatory framework. Studies using field- and

practice theory language often focus on the transformation of journalism.

Whereas for studies applying the sociomaterial lens the focus was on the

potential empowerment of the audiences, and for boundary work theory

the emphasis was on specific strategies by journalists and users to

negotiate their jurisdictional authorities, studies leaning on field and

practice theories are generally more holistic in their perspectives. These

authors are mostly interested in the distribution and reproduction of

social power. Field- and practice theories, albeit different in their scope,

often go hand in hand when applied to the media. This is partly because

both originate in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and partly because both are

56

concerned with social order and look at internalized rules and norms that

people obey even unconsciously. Here I introduce them in turns and

explain how they are connected in this perspective.

According to practice theory (Reckwitz, 2002, p.249) people think,

act and feel in specific ways by participating in practices. So practices

have cognitive, emotional and behavioral elements that people participate

in – or “carry” – when participating in practices. Practice theory is a

model of action, where subjectivity is secondary to the inherent rules of

the practice.

Couldry (2012) argued that everyday practices ultimately influence

peoples’ knowledge, agency and power vis-à-vis other actors. In contrast

to the earlier era of information scarcity, where memory and retrieval

were essential survival skills, amidst information abundance people need

to master the art of information selection and combination. A further new

and almost ubiquitous practice is showing, which “entails a whole chain

of re-showings” (Couldry, 2012, p. 47), like posting videos on Youtube.

Through practices aimed at the media, which are “the institutionalized

forms of, and platforms for, producing, disseminating and receiving

content” (idem) people compete for social power. Digital practices of

ordinary users and of journalists are to a large extent about identity work.

For instance, online presencing refers to “individuals’ and groups’ acts of

managing through media a continuous presence-to-others across public

space, sustaining a public presence” (idem, p50). The practice of

archiving refers to people’s attempt to manage their presence over time

and which overlaps with techniques of presencing. More elaborate media

skills are keeping up with the news, commentary, and keeping all

channels open, i.e. “permanently orienting oneself to the world beyond

one’s private sphere and the media that are circulated within it” (idem,

p.55). With the practice of screening out or “choosing from a vast range

of ‘apps’ people screen out much of the infinite media environment to

create a ’chosen’ interface a customized media manifold that is both

manageable and seemingly personal” (idem, p56).

Field theory views social life as a set of fields – arenas characterized

57

by specific stakes and ‘capitals’ – and qualities, resources that yield

power and recognition in the given arena. Fields are interconnected and

often nested (being part of larger fields) and almost always depend on the

more powerful, political field that Bourdieu refers to as the ‘field of

power’. Journalistic power exercises power across different fields, “all

fields of cultural production today are subject to structural pressure from

the journalistic field” (Bourdieu, 1988). Ryfe (2012) explained succinctly

how the field of journalism lost its foothold in the networked economy.

“Journalism gained coherence in the pushing and pulling between

professionalism, the economy, and the state. (...) Journalism succeeded

so well, because it meshed neatly with key strands of modern society,

with everything from the temporal rhythm of the eight-hour workday to

urbanization, to the increasingly bureaucratized, professionalized, and

consumerist world that came into being” (idem, p. 138).

Regarding participatory journalism, three of Bourdieu’s concepts can

be related to it: autonomy, homology and differentiation. Bourdieu’s

concept of autonomy refers to a field being able to define its own stakes

and field-specific capitals. In the context of the journalistic field, this

means the ability to define specific forms of cultural stakes and capitals,

which are independent of economic stakes and capitals (Couldry in

Fenton (Ed), 2009, p.55). Cultural capital in the journalism field can arise

from influencing the social and political agenda, or from providing

original stories, uncovering a scandal. Economic power means

commercial success, such as traffic number, and advertisement revenue.

Participatory journalism with its expanded toolkit can contribute to the

accumulation of cultural capital, but the engagement of the audience

itself primarily serves economic purposes, hence with regard to

autonomy, it is hard to situate it in the field.

Homology for Bourdieu means that producers of media content are

similar in social status and education as their consumers, so there is a fit

between the makers and readers of a media outlet. Participatory

journalism, which presupposes collaboration between journalist and

audience, seem to require such homology. Differentiation for Bourdieu

means that ‘in a field in order to exist’, one must carve out its places, i.e.

58

it must stand out, do something unorthodox and differentiate itself.

“Bourdieu (2005, 40) suggests that this need to differentiate is critical for

journalists’ perception of themselves and their control of, or at least their

role in the production of ‘symbolic capital” (Philips in Fenton (Ed),

2009, p.65). Seeing how newsrooms often copy each other’s

participatory practices in the same field, one can see a bandwagon effect

at play, where differentiation is a driving motive.

Revers and Anderson (2018) connected identity work on the media

to Bourdieu’s concept of distinction in the context of the meme-

community subculture.

Analogous to the pressure to refine cultural tastes in order to

maintain class membership (Bourdieu, 1984), status in meme

communities is elusive and members need to continuously refine and

perform their cultural proficiency since illiteracy and breaking of

conventions leads to scorns and exclusion”. The owner of the

American news site, Buzzfeed, which has both serious investigative

reporting and viral content early on realized that people participate

online to express their identities. “One of Jonah Peretti’s deepest

insights (one that influenced both the viral tendencies of 21st century

journalism as well as journalism’s relationship toward the platform

power of Facebook and Twitter) was the link he drew between

participation and identity. (Anderson & Revers, 2018, p.32)

Bourdieu’s field theory was also applied to innovation in journalism

in general. Powers & Zambrano (2016) compared the formation of online

startups in Toulouse and Seattle to see how the different position of

journalism in the field of power in the two countries influenced the

success of the phenomenon. They found that in the US, journalists with

higher level of symbolic capital were more willing to establish online

startups than in France, plus in France the journalism field was relatively

weaker in relation to the field of power (newsrooms were often

subsidized and less exposed to the field of economy) than in the US.

Hence in Seattle journalistic startups were more successful.

59

Speed, space, polycentrality and multiplicity became the key

characteristics of the digital environment, which radically transformed

the conditions of journalistic work (Fenton (Ed), 2009). A chief question

for scholars working in the paradigm of field theory was how this change

affected the public sphere and what it meant for the power dynamics

between publishers, journalists and the audience. (See II.3) “The overall

effect, certainly in relation to general reporting, is that the power of the

journalist has grown versus the power of other citizens, not the other way

around” (idem, p.100) Scholars in 2009-2010 claimed that user

participation in news making was limited to the post-production phase,

i.e. to interpretation and responding to stories. Smith (2017) challenged

the relevance of that argument, claiming that with regard to the public

sphere, interpretation of events was just as important as providing

witness reports or raw material to newsrooms.

Deuze & Fortunati (2011) on the other hand claimed that the power

of the audience did increase, since they became networked, acquired the

power to create content, plus had purchasing power. They also assumed

that vis-à-vis the news organization journalistic autonomy increased.

They argued that information, which is user-centered, needs to flow

freely and that it can empower journalists to “operate outside the

boundaries of a waged working environment”, contributing to a rich

intellectual commons, taking into consideration that user contribution

(sending photos, stories, information) is voluntary and free. Users

contribute in order to gain reputation, visibility, which can result in a job,

a contract or simply followers. Deuze & Fortunati (2011) saw the

audience as comprised of self-organizing, self-producing citizens and as

news communities. Nevertheless, they also observed that in some

newsrooms, interactivity between audience and journalists was not fully

exploited, which they labeled as “dissociate interactivity.” It meant that

the interactivity was intra-audience and not between users and the

journalists.

To sum up, in this section, I reviewed scholarly work that applied a

Bourdieusian framework – in particular, the field-, and practice theory. In

this approach, practice is strongly tied to status recognition. The field of

60

journalism is understood as a social microcosm, traditionally belonging

to the field of power. It has its set of norms and internalized doxa that

govern journalists in their daily work. Newsrooms and individual

journalists operate on the principle of differentiation, but we can also see

the rule of homology to apply between the makers and readers of the

news. With citizens acting as co-creators of the news, such a homology

can be exploited. With the journalistic field losing its modernist anchors

(which were the pulling of forces between the state, the economy and

professionalism) it seems that the heteronomous (exposed to the field of

economy and power) and the autonomous pole (purist) cannot so neatly

be separated anymore. In the next section, I turn to journalistic role

models and situate participatory journalism in those typologies.

II. 5. 4. The Lens of Journalistic Roles

The most widely used theoretical lens to new forms of digital journalism

is professional roles and identities. Hence in this section, I will introduce

three journalistic role models and will show where participatory

journalism fits in these models (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: my synthetizing diagram, based on Mellado-Lagos (2014),

Deuze(2003)andCarpentier(2005)

sharedpropertycreatingaccess

Subjectivitynarration,literarytechniques

Partorrepresentativeoftheaudience,gateopeningpartnership

Advocate,campaigner,educator

Interventionist

instrumental/Service

respondingtoquestionsfromthepublic

Dialogical,faciliating

participation

Civic,Protectorofuniversalvalues,

democracy,community

connectedness

61

Mellado-Lagos (2014) leaning on Hallin and Mancini‘s (2004)

classical media system theory identified three dimensions according to

which she categorized journalistic role perceptions. These were the

newsroom’s distance to power, the journalists’ implicating themselves in

the news story, and a conceptualization of the audience as citizens,

consumers or readers searching infotainment. According to these

dimensions, they differentiated between watchdog, loyal-facilitator,

infotainment, civic, service and interventionist- disseminator role models.

The most typical role conceptualization that we found in case studies of

newsrooms shifting to participatory journalism (II.2) was the

interventionist-disseminator role. Subscribing to the interventionist role

perception at the newsroom level means that journalists not only wish to

serve as mirrors to the events (Zelizer, 2004) but also try to induce

change with their work, which was traditionally associated with non-

mainstream, activist journalism. The American nonprofit investigative

news site ProPublica and the Polish online news portal, Gazeta

Wyborcza served as good illustrations for these role perceptions.

ProPublica on its website announced that it is “dedicated to carrying

forward the important work of exposing corruption, informing the public

about complex issues, and using the power of investigative journalism to

spur reform”. The Gazeta Wybortza, still one of the most widely read

newspapers in Poland, was founded as a platform for the democratic

opposition in 1989 as an underground print paper. This activist/civic role

has remained in the paper after the regime change and in the online

version as well. In 2019 they still encouraged their readers to be active in

the public sphere and step up for instance against homophobia or other

discriminative, unjust measures, which fits the interventionist role model.

Huffington Post was one of the first news sites to include search

engine optimization to boost their traffic, but at the same time, they were

also keen on including citizens’ perspectives. “HuffPost is for the people

- not the powerful. We are empathetic reporters and observers. We hold

power accountable. We entertain without guilt. We share what people

need to know to live their best lives. If something matters to our

audience, it matters to us. We're fast, fun and inclusive. And we'll always

62

make sure you know what's real”, stands in their mission statement.

Several studies (Russell, 2011; Michel, 2009) praising participatory

journalism highlighted their project in 2009, when they partnered up with

Jay Rosen’s NewAssignmentNet, the advocator of public journalism.

They covered the American presidential campaign with the help of

citizen reporters and one of their citizen contributors, who was present at

a meeting with Obama, held for donors, provided a scoop that later many

mainstream news sites picked up (Michel, 2009)

Another role model that can be of service in making sense of the

genre of participatory journalism was that of Mark Deuze (2003) with his

four (ideal)types of web-journalism (see Figure 3). He placed dialogical

journalism in the section where the journalistic culture is open and the

newsroom is concentrated on public connectivity. In newsrooms with

open journalistic cultures journalists perceive of the audience as

consumers/citizens, whose responses, questions, informational needs are

to be reckoned with as opposed to the closed journalistic culture’s

perception of an imagined and abstract audience, whose potential inputs

are treated with strict moderating policies and newsrooms prefer to use

experts as sources. By public connectivity he meant that editorial content

is increasingly supplemented with user generated content. “News

professionals will have to find ways to strike a balance between their

identities as providers of editorial content and the realities of public

connectivity (as in providing a platform for the discussion society ideal-

typically has with itself), as well as between its historical operationally

closed working culture, strictly relying on ‘experts’ and a more

collaborative, responsive and interactive open journalistic culture”

(Deuze, 2003, p. 219).

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Figure3:Ideal-typesofweb-journalism(Deuze,2003)

The third model (Figure 4) I am introducing here is the discursive

articulation of journalistic identities (Carpentier, 2005). The web-based

participatory journalism seems to fit the counter-hegemonic articulations

of the media professional, akin to public, reform or emancipatory

journalisms. The counter-hegemonic articulation means that the

journalist regards himself/herself as “being part of the audience,

displaying subjectivity and dependence” (idem, para.4). This is in

contrast with the two dominant models - the liberal and the social

responsibility media models -, which were anchored in objectivity,

autonomy, and a sense of belonging to the professional elite.

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Figure4:NicoCarpentier’s(2005)modelonthediscursiveidentityofthe journalistprofessional

According to Smith (2017) stepping away from the norm of

objectivity on the web was a newsroom response to incorporating

amateur voices in the journalistic products.

One of the characteristic features of participatory journalism seems

to be an accommodation of a far broader repertoire of

argumentation styles (not just from ‘citizen’ contributors). One of

its other characteristics is a reflexive, metadiscursive attention to

argumentation that one finds in the discussion itself, in the

discussion rules and in writing about participatory journalism. This

can be viewed as an attempt to come to terms with the problem of

65

accommodating new forms of audience participation within

existing journalistic paradigms” (Smith, 2017, p.16).

Dialogical journalism – realized in an open journalistic culture in

constant interaction with the users, and public connectivity, giving room

to citizens’ content without strict editorial control – fits the counter-

hegemonic articulations of the media professional’s identity. Hence, it

triggered resistance in the liberal and social responsibility media models,

where journalists derived their legitimacy from abiding by the norm of

objectivity and from being a gatekeeper and trusted truth-teller. “Coping

with the emergence of hybrid producer-user forms of newswork is easier

for some than for others, and tends to clash with entrenched notions of

professionalism, objectivity, and carefully cultivated arrogance regarding

the competences (or talent) of ‘the audience’ to know what is good for

them” (Deuze, 2005, para.5.).

A case study from India, where the media system is liberal,

illustrated the partial rigidity of the habitus journalists. In 2014, three

prominent TV anchors’ Twitter usage was examined for 13 months

leading up to the national election. “While journalists on the one hand

normalized the “technology of microblogging to fit existing professional

norms and practices, such technological adaptation, in turn, changed

some of these norms and practices (....) usernames, hashtags and URLs

were all used extensively by the TV anchors, signaling personality-

centeredness and newsworthiness. However, the TV anchors did not

exploit the dialogical potential of Twitter and instead resorted to a digital

monologue, where “journalists are more inclined to disseminate their

discourse than enhance communication with their constituencies. (...) so

they could not “deepen the quality of public debate” (Parthasarithi &

Mitra in Tong & Lo (Eds.), 2017, pp.282-283).

To sum up, in this section I showed how participatory journalism fits

the disseminator-interventionist journalistic role, and assumes public

connectivity and open journalistic culture. It falls within the counter-

hegemonic articulation of journalistic identity, hence originates in reform

and alternative journalism.

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II. 6. Summary

In this chapter, I defined online participatory journalism and explained

the theoretical contexts where it was dicussed. One group of scholars

(Anderson, 2011, 2013b; Carlson, 2016, 2018; Lewis, 2011; Revers,

2016; Smith, 2017) investigated the changing ideology and practices of

journalism in the context of participatory culture. Their inquiry was

directed at how news professionals are rethinking their roles in the digital

environment. In order to respond to that question, they applied the theory

of boundary work.

Another group of scholars (Hermida, 2010; van der Haak et al.,

2012; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; Singer, 2014; Welbers &

Opgenhaffen, 2018) explored the sociomaterial infrastructures of web 2.0

platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and made normative claims

about the democratizing potential of the public’s dispersed information

production and dissemination capabilities. They used the concepts of

networked gatekeeping and showed how the values of transparency,

emergent eliteness, collaboration, trust and community come to the fore

in these platforms, challenging the bias of proprietary forms of

commercial journalism, hitherto considered as mainstream news media.

A third group of scholars (Benson, 2006; Brauchler & Postill, 2010;

Couldry, 2012; Fenton (Ed), 2009; Freedman, 2015; Rao, 2010; Ryfe,

2012) approached the challenge of user-generated content for

professional newsmaking in the framework of field and practice theory.

Status recognition and identity work in the context of practices aimed at

the media, and as tools of symbolic capital, were investigated through

this lens. Lastly, a different set of scholars (Carpentier, 2005, Deuze,

2003, 2008, Mellado & Lagos, 2011, Russell, 2011, 2013a) focused on

the versatile role conceptualizations of the journalist as dependent on

their perception of their audience and on the journalistic norms they

subscribe to.

In all of these (mainly sociological) approaches, relatively little

67

attention was paid to the discourses of users and journalists or to the

meso-level processes of organizational routines. Hence, in my

dissertation, beyond analyzing newsroom practices, I decided to include

case studies where I focused on specific media events to see how user

engagement took place ‘in action’. My chief focus of attention was on

the spaces and manner of interaction between users and journalists in

assembling the ‘news’, following the actants (links, articles, bloggers,

comments). I understood news production as a fluid, iterative and

collaborative process, but treated the published articles as qualitatively

different from pre-production and post-production practices. This was in

line with how early theorists of participatory journalism (Singer et al.,

2011) differentiated between the stages in which journalists can co-opt

the user (see Chapter II.1). It is my hope that with these empirical

investigations in a relatively unexplored media environment, I can fine-

tune the scholarly claims about the empirical conditions of

democratically relevant participatory journalism.

Existing studies showed how the sociotechnical and cultural environment

ushered the emergence of participatory journalism on the web, and

introduced the processes related to it at various (micro-, meso-, macro-)

levels. Meso-level processes were observed at the industry and

organizational levels, while macro-level processes were interpreted in

normative frames. Studies analyzing best practices of journalistic

audience engagement pointed out how participatory journalism was most

likely to pop up in newsrooms with a postindustrial workflow, and why

the crisis of the industry pushed newsrooms towards subscription models,

which changed the allegiance of journalists and facilitated the process of

deinstitutionalization. The boundary work from professional sociology

showed how journalists try to defend their autonomy and how non-

journalists are pushing themselves into their territory, i.e. it tells us the

narrative of a struggle between social groups. The field-focus

concentrated on the social power of journalists and how it waned or

strengthened in the participatory environment. The theoretical approach

based on journalistic roles and identity was the most micro-level

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explanation as it showed how professional identity was in tension with

the participatory epistemology and how participatory journalism was

situated at its counter-hegemonic discursive articulation.

The literature review above was based on a mostly American news

context. This is partly due to the Western focus of journalism studies

(Engelke, 2019) and to the homogenization/globalization of media

systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2014). These approaches have several

limitations. First, they framed the question of participatory journalism as

being good or bad. Second, most empirically informed studies were

conducted in the early phases of participatory journalism, and the

temporal fluctuation of the practice was not examined. This dissertation,

keeping these blind spots in mind, explores a hitherto less exposed

journalism field between 2013 and 2016 to examine how newsrooms

navigated the participatory challenges and whether they managed to

convert it to a better functioning public sphere while the political field

increasingly threatened the autonomy of journalists. To reiterate the

research question: What micro- and meso-level factors facilitate or

hinder newsrooms’ shift to participatory journalism with a

democratic benefit in a constrained media environment? To answer

this question, in my dissertation I examine and compare four middle-

stage (2013-2016) experiments with participatory journalism - which

differ in the extent to which they led to a participatory outcome. In each

case, I apply a different theoretical lens to analyze key processes that

allowed or hindered the emergence of participatory practices and

highlight a different set of factors. Before outlining the findings of my

research, in the next chapter I summarize the local conditions of the

Hungarian journalism field to explain the formation and adverse effects

of the constrained media environment and to highlight those theoretical

questions that Hungarian media scholars focused on with regard to local

newsrooms’ interaction with the web 2.0 environment.

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III.Chapter:TheHungarianContext

III.1. Introduction

This chapter consists of two parts. In the first part I explain the

transformation of the Hungarian news media field in two waves. First the

process of Italianization after the regime change, then the media capture

from 2010, which is an ongoing phenomenon even at the time of writing.

The Italianization narrative helps to contextualize the role

conceptualization of Hungarian journalists, and their visions of their

audiences. Media capture is important to understand the local field

dynamics with the limited autonomy of newsrooms, the distortion of the

media market, and the precariousness of journalists’ working

environment. In the second part, I give a summary of what themes

emerged in Hungarian media studies in the 2010s, related to the

relationship of social media and online journalists.

III.2. The Hungarian media system after 1989 and after 2010

A decade after the transition, in 2001, Hungarian media scholars were

optimistic about the future of news media, even if the prolonged media

war and a palpable weakness of journalistic professionalism made them

cautious. “In the 1990s, for the first time in the 20th century it was

possible to enjoy the practice of censorship-free media and modern, free,

Western-style journalism for a longer period (...) Series of generations

learned: “the press is the most potent weapon of The Party” (Sükösd-

Csermely, 2001, p. 9), they wrote about an era, seemingly gone.

In the scholarly literature the transformation of media systems in

post-Communist countries after the regime change was labeled with the

term Italianization (Splichal. 1994 in Örnebring: 2009), in order to

integrate them into the Hallin-Mancini comparative model (2004). This

meant the implementation of the Mediterranean/Polarized Pluralist

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model, where political parallelism was high and journalists tended to

regard spokesmanship and influencing public opinion as indicators of

professionalism.

According to the classic work of Hallin and Mancini (2004), the

three dimensions of journalistic professionalism were autonomy (from

the state, and political and market constraints), the existence of

professional norms (formal and informal), and public service

orientation.9 Although in Hungary there were attempts at creating a new

journalistic ethical code, such as in 2000 with the Visegrad protocol

prepared for online journalists with the assistance of the BBC, new

consensual norms did not crystallize.

The post-transition journalism fields of the Visegrad countries

showed many parallels. Here I will highlight three. First, in the whole

region, there was a wave of deprofessionalization after 1989. “Since the

collapse of the communist regime in 1989, the journalistic field in

Central Europe has undergone significant structural transformations. The

initial effect was to open the field to new entrants and bring in a period of

post-revolutionary innovation and experimentation when ‘journalistic

practices and routines appear to have been guided more by civic than by

professional values’ (Metyková and Waschková Císářová 2009: 728),

due to a high turnover of personnel and the foundation of many new

titles, but also due to the engagement of journalists in the struggle to

establish democratic institutions” (Smith, 2017, p.32). The online news

scene in Hungary fits this refoundation myth, as mostly young and

inexperienced journalists, or those freshly graduated from new

journalism programs, went to work at the new web outlets. Secondly, as

a European tradition and as a trait of the Polarized Pluralist model,

serious press in the eyes of the public largely equaled opinion-forming

press. Thirdly, foreign investors entered the media market in great

numbers in the 1990s, only to leave gradually, passing on their media

9 Benson (2006), comparing the new institutionalism of Cook and Sparrow and Bourdieu’s field theory, suggests that the state as a civic actor has a potentially positive role to play towards the journalism field by buffeting it against political and market constraints, hence facilitating its public service orientation. “Between two poles of the state, one constituting market power, the other constituting nonmarket (or even anti-market) civic power, journalistic professionalism plays a mediating role”.

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outlets to local investors and oligarchs.

Media capture, a “situation where most or all of news media

institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that

controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of

protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources”

(Dragomir, 2019), took place in subsequent phases in Hungary.

First, the regulatory environment was modified, together with a

complete (pro-government) overhaul of the public media. In 2010,

starting the second term of the Orbán regime, new media laws10 were

adopted, known as the Media Package, replacing Hungary’s previous

media legislation (Law I of 1996 on Television and Radio). This

regulation seriously eroded the media system. A study prepared by

CMCS (Brouillette, 2012) compared the media regulations of countries

cited as blueprints for the Media Package, and found several

inconsistencies related to the extensive power given to the Hungarian

Media Authority, which ranged from tendering and licensing to

appointing directors to public media outlets and also the management of

funding for public media. In 2012, the media laws were amended after

receiving extensive criticism from the European Commission, but even

afterwards “excessive content restrictions exerted a chilling effect on

media outlets” (Mertek, 2015).

Public media should ideally serve as a facilitator of civic

engagement in the public sphere. Whereas the BBC already embraced

citizen journalism in 2005 (with its UGC Hub), the Hungarian public

media moved in a very different direction, as signaled by the Press Law

of 2010. In the Hungarian Press Law of 2010, under § 10 and § 11 we

find the following “rights of the audience”: “Everyone has the right to be

sufficiently informed on issues of local, national and European public life

and on issues that are significant for the citizens of the Hungarian

Republic and the members of the Hungarian nation. It is the task of the

10Act CIV of 2010 on Freedom of the Press and on the Basic Rules Relating to Media Content (Smtv.) includes all fundamental regulations on media content and provisions for the legal status of journalists. Act CLXXXV of 2010 on Media Services and on the Mass Media (Mttv.) fundamentally includes the regulation on the formation of the media system’s structure. (Mertek, 2016)

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entire media system to provide credible, fast and precise information on

these issues and events.” Apart from the fact that nothing is said about

the digital audience, it is telling that both the Hungarian nation and the

Hungarian Republic are mentioned, showing how ideological

considerations were stressed besides the democratic ones. §11 detailing

the responsibility of the public media reinforces this assumption. “In the

Hungarian Republic there is a public media service for the purpose of the

preservation and strengthening of the national identity and of European

identity, national, family, ethnic and religious communities, for the

cultivation and enrichment of the Hungarian and minority languages, and

the provision of the informational and cultural needs of citizens.” It is not

that these goals are not important, but the centrally defined and rather

outdated national identity-formation is visibly overemphasized, without

any mention of its responsibility to ensure a diversity of viewpoints,

internal and external plurality, education, and innovation. This was in

sharp contrast to how the BBC conceived of the role of the public media

since the 1990s, being an innovative professional actor in the news media

field. “The BBC holds a license from the government that enables it to

experiment with citizen journalism and social networks. As a public

broadcaster, funded by the license fee every homeowner with a TV has to

pay, its focus is on providing value to its audience – even in small

communities. This circumstance allows it to try things that commercial

broadcasters, with an eye to the bottom line and share value, would not

attempt. The BBC has long been expected, by virtue of its public

funding, to innovate and lead industry developments. During the 1990s,

the BBC was swift to move its news coverage onto the internet and has

since consolidated that early lead” (Sambrook, 2005, para.5).

After the end of the second term of the Orbán government, the

Fidesz party won with a great majority in the next election, and the media

became the field of renewed political struggle. The beginning of 2015

brought in the emblematic year of the “Simicska-Orbán war.”11

11Lajos Simicska used to be a close friend and ally of Orbán, who had acquired substantial wealth from public tendersand was the most prominent right-wing media owner (he had a radio, a TV channel and a newspaper).

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The next step in media capture was the indirect restructuring of the

media market through taxes and strategic placement of state

advertisements. “State advertising is a powerful tool of political

favoritism as well as an instrument of market distortion, censorship and

building an uncritical media empire aligned with the government.”

(Bátorfy & Urbán, 2019, p.44) The two authors found that state

advertising was more balanced before 2010 under the center-left

government.

As the last step of media capture, prominent critical legacy media

outlets ceased or became part of the government propaganda machinery.

The first blow against independent media was the dismissal in 2014 of

the editor-in-chief of origo.hu (the site of my ethnographic research), the

second largest mainstream news site at the time. The second was the

abrupt sale and closure in 2016 of Népszabadság, a left-wing daily with a

60-year history. The third blow was the eventual colonization of

index.hu, the most read and “flagship” online news portal in July 2020.

All these cases triggered public scandals. Heavy artillery was how one

journalist described the government attack against independent media. In

order to control the information flow in the country, and to further

centralize the pro-government media, the Central European Press and

Media Foundation (KESMA) was established in 2018, which acquired

altogether 476 media outlets (many of them “donated“ by their owners,

(Mertek, 2006-2017). This pro-government foundation now owns all the

regional media outlets, a commercial television channel (Echo TV),

origo.hu (pro-government portal), Magyar Idők (right-wing print and

online portal), and many others. Against charges of media

monopolization, the government declared KESMA to be of National

Strategic Importance.

Currently, there is a highly centralized information flow from public

institutions to the press. People in responsible positions are forbidden to

communicate independently with journalists. As a result of the stalled

The final straw in their conflict was the 5% television advertising tax introduced by the government. Eventually, Simicska lost his media outlets and as a result, not only the public media, but regional outlets, TV and radio channels, and several newspapers all became absorbed into the monolithic pro-government media machinery.

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information flow, the news media are becoming more and more

opinionated, which results in readers turning away from news outlets as

they become saturated with such content. Political parallelism is also

increasing, since resources from advertising are declining. At the same

time, a shift to subscription-based models is on the rise, which gives

room for moderate optimism for a sustainable independent press.

III. 3. Studies on Hungarian newsrooms’ engagement with user-

generated content and with social media platforms

A unique development in the Hungarian online ecosystem was a

Hungarian social media platform, iwiw, starting in 2002 (preceding

Facebook, which was launched in 2004). “In the Hungarian media

market, the fact that in the fight between Facebook and iwiw, Facebook

came out as winner, a global factor also played a role: from the mid-

2000s, social networks gradually changed into content distribution

companies, Facebook becoming the largest among them and the chief

engine behind the trend with the newsfeed feature. The operation of

Facebook is now densely intertwined with traditional media, with the

news media entirely exposed to it.” (Tófalvy, 2017)

Hungarian media scholars did not extensively analyze newsrooms’

strategies and presence on social media platforms. One such early study

nevertheless described the strategies of the left-leaning nol.hu on

Facebook, which in 2009 was the first and only news site that visually

displayed audience consumption metrics about its articles (Hirmatrix) on

its news site, acknowledging public endorsement. The news organization

strategically built its relationship with its audience on Facebook and had

one dedicated journalist who managed its Facebook page using Facebook

analytics, surveying likes, comments, and (un) subscribings. (Ferencz &

Retfalvi, 2011)

Blog readers and journalists regarded the blogosphere and

mainstream news as complementary (Bodoky, 2008), but blogs were

often seen as more free. In 2008, a large proportion of Hungarian

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bloggers regarded their activity as citizen journalism and many agreed

with the proposition that the latter changed the media and that it was

more important than the professional press (idem). One fifth of blog

readers and blog writers felt that the mainstream media and the

blogosphere competed for their attention, while three-fifths thought these

two subfields complemented each other. In 2009, the blogging platform

of index.hu (blog.hu) was the biggest Hungarian site. As a radically

innovative step, they mixed editorial and amateur content, which as yet

had no precedent in Western media.

A journalist-blogger in 2012 argued that the blogosphere was

capable of shaping public opinion, and exerting a permanent effect on

online journalism in terms of expressing strong and characteristic

opinions. “The Hungarian political blogosphere, which according to

many by 2012 had risen from a subculture-existence to become part of

mainstream media - a sign of which is that its own underground has

evolved: the “insiders” must be looked for on Tumblr.” (Panyi: 2012) He

also added that in order to avoid court trials and self-censorship because

of their owners, newsrooms sometimes aired sensitive information to

bloggers, and then linked them to publish the same stories.

Harassment of online journalists was discussed as a pervasive

problem (Tófalvy, 2017, IPI). The empirical data was collected in 2016

from personal interviews and from focus groups with online journalists

working at conservative-leaning, liberal-leaning, and investigative news

outlets. The authors found that online harassment of journalists fell into

eight types, including trolling, public shaming, bullying, threats,

violation of personal privacy, rhetorical aggression, cyber attacks, and

site hacking. The most severe messages were sent in private messages.

The study’s most interesting findings related to this dissertation were the

effects of harassment on journalists, such as the soft-chilling effect, which

means that journalists and readers wall themselves off from each other;

desensitization (journalists treating it as normal and shrugging it off); and

that among journalists traditionally oppressed groups were the most

frequent targets of harassment. Despite the presence of trolling, rhetorical

bullying, and public shaming, a study by Babarczy (2018) showed that in

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web 2.0 discussions there were signs of deliberative debates (where

commenters engage in dialogue with people with opposing viewpoints)

and that there was no extreme selectivity in information reception (echo

chambers are not hermetically sealed). Babarczy (2018) carried out a

content analysis-based study on Facebook debates to test the theories of

selective filter bubbles and of polarization spiral. She focused on the

Facebook disputes on the initiative to provide holidays for migrants in

Őcsény, a politically divisive issue in light of the government’s extensive

campaign against migrants. She found that there was a significant

overlap between commenters belonging to pro- or anti-government news

portals and that the debates had a dominantly dialogical structure, even if

they were highly emotional and strongly polarized. A further finding of

her study was that participants in the debates resented the strong

polarization of the public sphere and of their debates, which they

attributed to the behavior of the political elite and to the news media.

Regarding the factors of political virality on social media platforms

in the Hungarian context, Bene (2017) showed that personalization and

negativity (conveying anger) were the two most significant factors in

predicting the high virality of political messages in social media.

“Virality is a network-specific distribution pattern that both depends on

and causes user behavior.” In the Hungarian context, looking at the

virality of politicians’ Facebook posts in the 2014 campaign, he found

that negativity played a prominent role, which is “dominated by

morality-based and targeted criticisms, while policy and substantive

criticisms hardly occurred” (Bene: 2017, p.43). He also found that users

who shared politicians’ posts seldom commented on them and positivity

as emotional charging did not cause virality.

Tófalvy (2015) analyzed journalistic boundary work in the context

of user-generated content, but this did not trigger a wider scholarly

dialogue, unlike in Western media literature. In accordance with the

platform-based boundary work of journalists, he claimed that outsiders,

such as citizen journalists publishing on blogs, were treated as inferior,

even when professional journalists started to publish on blogs. “The

demarcation strategies in these periods (when a new technology appears

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in media production) try to disqualify, delegitimize, and treat as inferior

the people, professional groups, institutions, deemed undesirable in the

profession, and the communication and media platforms connected to

their activities: this phenomenon I will be calling platform-based

boundary work.” (Tófalvy, 2015, p.54) In other words, the internal

hierarchy and the boundaries of the profession are shaped by what values

are attributed to emerging platforms, or rather to the newcomers who use

them. Those spaces or technologies can become boundary objects that

carry different meanings for different social groups. In the article it was

mentioned that in the pre-digital era, participatory journalism already

existed in the form of fanzines (a Western example), but also as

underground press (Sükösd, 2013).

Social media platforms as mobilizing tools (Bolcsó, 2013) and also

as potential sources of misinformation (Janecskó, 2011) were analyzed

after Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring was extensively researched in

Western media studies. At the end of 2012 and in 2013, large-scale

student demonstrations were taking place in Budapest and in the country

and the respective role of the social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube)

as a tool of coordination and broadcaster was identified (Bolcsó, 2013). It

was at this time that index.hu started to experiment with a new live

format called from minute to minute, which combined live broadcasting

with archiving (Bolcsó: 2013), mirroring the swiftly updated feeds in

social media and responding to people’s changed information

consumption habits.

The danger of unverified spread of information on social media

platforms was thematized in mainstream media itself in 2011 (index,

Janecskó, 2011, cited in Bolcsó, 2013, Rényi, 2011). The case not only

demonstrates how newsrooms picked up unverified pieces of information

from social media and published them as facts, but also the challenges of

their commenting policy when mass hysteria spreads. The event that

triggered the discussion was the West Balkán tragedy, when three

youngsters were killed in an overcrowded dance club at a techno-party

when a mass panic broke out and the three victims were trampled over

and suffocated. Immediately during and after the incident, messages

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appeared on Twitter that “some Roma were behind the stabbings.” News

sites and even the official news agency (MTI) published the false

information despite the fact that the police had refuted it.

Hundreds of posts flooded the Facebook pages of NNL (the

organizer) and West Balkán. Many were trying to discover the

identity of the victims, others talked about an organized hush-up

and “Hitler’s unfinished work.” Desperation, threats, and racist

hatred erupted in a matter of seconds with elementary force.

When on Facebook pages the comments were deleted, it provided

new ammunition to conspiracy theories. Kuruc.info (a far-right

portal) wrote about news outlets’ censoring “Gypsies wreaking

havoc at Nyugati.” At hvg.hu they confirmed that in the early

morning they had to withhold the option of commenting and the

proliferation of hate speech was just one reason. “Since far-right

portals quoted from our news feed, their commenters immediately

appeared on our site. Then they did scaremongering and shared

unverified information, which only fuelled the sentiments and

increased panic.” (Renyi, 2011, para.5)

With the strengthening online presence of far-right organizations in

2013, scholars’ attention also extended to the online networks of these

groups. Scholars examined the links between the web pages of radical

organizations and those of Hungarian politicians (Malkovics, 2013).

Social media were also discussed as a postmodern panopticon versus

online agora in Hungarian media studies. The challenge of social media

for the public sphere as a subject of scholarly work was approached from

the perspective of the relationship between public participation, the new

technology and the responses of power (Iványi, 2014). The question that

was posed was how much the public sphere served as a tool of

surveillance (a postmodern panopticon) or as the electronic agora of the

public sphere.

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III. 4. Summary

In this chapter the contours of the constrained media environment and the

unique features of the local journalism field were described in order to

explain its difference from the Western media environments dominating

scholarly discussions of participatory journalism. The shrinking

autonomy of Hungarian journalists in the face of government media

policy and market intervention partly explains their ambivalent reactions

to the participatory culture of the web. The Italianization narrative

explained that even without media capture, political parallelism,

journalistic spokesmanship and a weaker level of professionalization

characterize this field. At the same time, the role of blogs in this

constrained media is enhanced, providing a channel for freedom of

expression, with which newsrooms have established a unique and

symbiotic relationship - working there under a pseudonym or airing

sensitive information to bloggers and then linking to them to avoid legal

consequences. Explaining the less prominent role of individual

journalists on social media platforms (than in Western media), a study

about the online harassment of journalists was cited, which also

explained the relative distance of journalists from the online public. As

for the untapped potential of the deliberative aspect of participatory

epistemology (which will be demonstrated from the case studies), it was

also shown that Hungarian social media users were engaged in

deliberative debates (conversing with people with opposing viewpoints),

but in political virality negativity and personalization played a prominent

role. In the next section, in light of the identified gaps in the literature, I

explain my rationale for selecting my four case studies and the methods I

used to analyze them.

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IV. Chapter: Methodology

Ethnographic methods in studying the profession of journalism date back

to the late 1970s, early 80s, with the seminal work of Herbert Gans’

Deciding what’s news (1979). “This ‘ethnographic’ approach has gained

popularity in both ‘critical’ media studies and ‘mainstream’ mass

communication research (Ang, 1991, in Durham & Kellner, 2001,

p.177). Not only the audiences were observed in how they consumed

media content – in what social and cultural contexts – but journalists as

well in how they produced it. Researchers, working in this paradigm

dealt with the newsroom as the main site of research, putting journalistic

production in the focus of analysis (unlike previous approaches, which

focused on the journalist as gatekeeper with heightened agency) and

while paying attention to editor-reporter relationships and news routines,

approached the newsroom from an organizational and occupational

perspective. One takeaway from these works – relevant to this

dissertation – was that journalists mainly wrote for their own colleagues,

almost rendering the audience irrelevant. In the 80s and 90s, media

consumption studies dominated the research field. Anderson (2013)

points out that the ethnographic phase in journalism studies was followed

by an interest in its ideologies and institutions (Anderson, 2013, p.168).

With the digital environment though, there seems to be a revitalization of

the ethnographic interest, which had some methodological challenges.

The digitization of news content and the rapid creation of an

“interpenetrating communications environment” means that the

production of news no longer occurs at single central site. Instead, it “has

become increasingly dispersed across multiple sites, different platforms,

and can be contributed to by journalists based in different locations

around the world. This clearly poses challenges for today’s ethnographer

(Anderson, 2013, pp.169-170).

Even acknowledging that news production never was as newsroom-

centric as the studies in the 70s, 80s made them look, the method of

multisite ethnography was invented to account for the increasingly

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networked and decentralized nature of news making. Anderson,

researching the local news ecosystem in Philadelphia between 2008 and

2011, in order to answer the question of how the economic crises and the

digital newsgathering techniques changed news production routines,

organizational structures and the authority of journalism, did exactly that,

conducting research at mainstream news sites and observing the

blogosphere simultaneously. As he explained his methodology at the end

of his book, he relied of Philip Howard’s network ethnography and on

Actor-Network-Theory’s flat ontology, reframing news production as

assemblage. This concept served to reflect the postindustrial nature of

news making, as opposed to the assembly-line type of news production,

suggested by earlier ethnographies.

Deciding on my methodology, I was inspired by Anderson’s

multisite network ethnography, but made more modest aims than

describing an entire news ecosystem at a particular turning point in its

history. I was also interested in how news production changed in the

context of the digital environment, but my chief focus of attention was

on the spaces and manner of interaction and lack of interaction between users and journalists in assembling the ‘news’. I understood

news production as a fluid, iterative and collaborative process, but treated

the published articles as qualitatively different from pre-production and

post-production practices. This was in line how theorists of participatory

journalism (Singer et al, 2011) differentiated between the stages where

the journalists can coopt the user in news production (see Chapter II.1).

They still called it that.

Two of my units of analysis were a media story, one a pro-am

project and a third a newsroom, to be able to apply all the explanatory

lenses explained above (the organizational and the networked, multisite

approach). So I followed the ‘actants’ (links, articles, bloggers,

comments) in the stories and in the collaborative project (in the case of

Fortepan) in order to investigate the extent of audience-journalist

collaborations.

As I explained at the end of my literature review, the majority of

works with empirical data on participatory journalism were conducted in

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the early phases, when newspapers were freshly confronted with the

challenge of what to do with user generated content and with audience

feedback in the form of comments. Secondly, they were carried out

mostly in Western news context. It was less highlighted how newsrooms’

role positioning influenced their willingness and efficiency to practice

participatory journalism. In order to contribute to these points to the

literature, I posed the research question of “What micro- and meso-

level factors facilitate or hinder newsroom’s shift to participatory

journalism with a democratic benefit in a constrained media

environment?”

Here I explain how I selected my case studies analyze the local

experiments with participatory journalism. Table 4 provides an overview

of them. Regarding the different forms of audience participation in

newsmaking, there are three main stages where newsrooms can allow

users to contribute: (1) formation (2) dissemination and (3) interpretation

(post-production) (see Engelke, 2019 and Figure 2). In the first case

study, I used the concept of boundary work, investigating the deliberative

potential of participatory journalism through the discursive strategies of

journalists. The second case study focused on newsroom-specific factors

(organizational workflow, company structure, role perceptions), which I

regarded as causative variables of the adoption of participatory

journalism. The third case study was selected to investigate the effects of

field positions and role perceptions of newsrooms on how they realize a

specific form of participatory journalism in the formation stage. The

fourth case study was designed to observe an alternative organizational

setup (mainstream news site partnering with a civic project) and the

gatekeeping practices and how these factors affected the collaboration’s

participatory outcome. Table4Casestudiesandtheirfindings

Cases Purposeofthecasestudy

Keyprocessanalyzed

Methodology Findings

Kisscase(2016)

Tomeasurejournalisticengagement

Journalists’andusers’boundarywork

Traceethnography,software-assisteddiscourseanalysis

Limitedengagementwithusergeneratedcontent.

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withusergeneratedcontent,andusers’deliberativediscourse

formationstage,audiencecontentpartiallysupplementedprofessionalreporting

interpretationstage,discussion,qualitativefeedback,comprehensionofnewswasexcludedfromnewssites

Disseminationstage,audienceenhancedprominenceofnewsonexternalplatforms

origo.hucasestudy(2013)

Identifymeso-levelprocessesbehindaudienceengagement

organizationalroutinesandworkflownewsroomculture

Ethnography

Archiveresearch

Lowlevelofmediologicalexpertise,orientatingjournalism,top-downexpectationstowardsusergeneratedcontenthinderaudienceengagement

Tobaccoshopstudy(2013-2014)

Reasonsfordifferencesinmethodsacrossnewsroomsandoutcomesofcrowdsourcinginformation

Fieldpositions,channelingpractices

Traceethnography/discourseanalysis,contentanalysis

Fieldpositionsdeterminecrowdsourcing:

monitorialjournalismfacilitatescivic-mindedcrowdsourcing,instrumentaljournalismleadstoinfotainment-mindedcrowdsourcing

Fortepan-index.hupartnership(2015-2020)

Howdoesparticipationemergewhenanewssitecollaborateswithacivicprojectwithalargenetworkofactiveusers?

Gatekeepingpractices

Discourseanalysisofblog,interviewswithjournalistsandFortepanmembers

Citizensareallowedtoproduceentirenewspieces,butvoicescarefullyselectedbynewsroom

ReciprocitybetweenFortepanandnewsroom

Lackoflarge-scaleparticipation

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IV.1. Case 1 Journalists’ curation of social media

For the first case study, which served to give a general ‘big picture’ of

Hungarian journalists’ engagement with users and user-generated

content, I selected the scandal of the national swimming coach, Laszlo

Kiss in 2016. The audience enhanced the prominence of news stories on

external platforms and on new sites; the audience content supplemented

professional reporting (news sites repeatedly quoted posts from Facebook

during the case). The Kiss case in 2016 was one of the first instances

when social media played a prominent role in the spreading of a media

event.

My specific research questions with this case study, tied to the overall

inquiry of how the Hungarian journalism field responded to the

participatory challenge were,

RQ How did online users display boundary work vis- á-vis the

newsrooms?

RQ How did journalists engage with social media content during the

story?

In this case study I used discourse analysis, content analysis and

interviews. With the content analysis software (Neticle) I examined the

spread of the news story. The program, using lexical analysis, also

measured the opinion polarity of each piece of content (negative, neutral

and positive on a scale of +/-20).

I examined users’ boundary work on web.2.0 platforms, such as

posts on Twitter, Facebook, forum discussions and comments under

articles. Trace ethnography was particularly useful here, which as Geiger

and Ribes (2011) explain is particularly applicable to web 2.0 platforms

with its detailed and heterogeneous data, which can “provide rich

qualitative insight into the interactions of users, allowing us to

retroactively reconstruct specific actions at a fine level of granularity.

Once decoded, sets of such documentary traces can then be assembled

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into rich narratives of interaction, allowing researchers to carefully

follow coordination practices, information flows, situated routines”

(Geiger and Ribes, 2011, p.3). Two blogs were particularly popular

during the scandal - OrulunkVincent and Kettosmerce. Also, the news

portal, 444.hu, generated a lot of comments, and the bulk of user

discussions concentrated on Facebook. Using discourse analysis, I

examined the rhetorical strategies of users on these platforms.

For the content analysis, I created a small sample of mainstream and

web 2.0 content, consisting of 9 front-page articles and blog posts in

leftist, conservative, tabloid, mainstream news outlets and blogs. 1 Nol.hu

2 Index.hu

3 Wmn.hu

4 Kettosmerce.hu

5 Orulunk,Vincent? + 628

comments

6 168 óra

7 Valasz.hu

8 Wmn.hu

9 Atv.hu

Using content analysis exploring journalistic boundary work

(boundary expansion versus professional control), I analyzed 48 articles

about the case, published on index.hu, the most read mainstream news

site, focusing on the sourcing and the presence of absence of the

citizen perspective. If they used more outward links than inward

(linking to their own previous content), and used citizens as sources, I

coded it as boundary expansion. On the other pole, I measured signs of

“traditional” reporting, where journalists relied on documents, public

figures and organizations as sources. (boundary work/ professional

control). In order to gain more insight about journalistic boundary work,

I also interviewed the editor-in-chief and the content strategist of

index.hu about their perceived roles and about the role of social media in

the evolution of the story.

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IV.2. Case 2 Organizational factors in participatory journalism -

ethnography at origo.hu

Tied in with the main research question of “What newsroom-specific

factors facilitate or hinder the emergence of participatory journalism

in a constrained media environment?”, this case study looked at the

organizational practices that influence newsrooms’ audience engagement

practices. My specific RQ with this particular case study centered

around the newsroom’s organizational workflow, its work routines,

journalists’ perceived expertise and perception of the audience and

how these hindered or facilitated their shift to participatory

journalism. I conducted an ethnographic fieldwork and supplemented it

with archive research. The newsroom I selected was origo.hu, the second

most read news portal at the time (2013) and was yet independent. The

ethnographic part of the research lasted for two months and consisted of

observations and interviews. Access to the field was provided by an

informal contact of mine. I happened to know the recently nominated

editor of the economy section and he connected me to the deputy-editor-

in-chief, who was also the head of the news section - the most read part

of the news portal. For the archive research I used the resources of the

Hungarian Online and Digital Media History (MODEM). This archive

contains interviews with the main actors of the dawn of the Hungarian

online media, and a report from 1997, which contained the original plan

and vision for the origo.hu news site.

In my newsroom ethnography, I approached the field as a “social

environment, whose history, culture, codes, slang words” I sought out to

learn (Spradley, 1980). I was eager to hear about journalists’ “native

language explanations” (Bryman, 2012, p.426). Meanwhile, subscribing

to the theory of postmodern reflexivity, I was constantly aware of the

effect of my presence in the newsroom, plus I knew I filtered my

experiences, so I tried to consistently verify and double-check my

findings. In the interpretation stage, I paid attention to those interview

snippets that were “repetitions, indigenous typologies, metaphors,

analogies, similarities and differences.” (idem, p. 623). The thematic

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blocks I found in the interviews will be illustrated with selected quotes in

the discussion of my findings.

During my fieldwork I conducted 19 interviews (see the Appendix)

when journalists had the time for me (after work or during the day). Most

interviews took about 40 minutes and with some journalists I talked

several times (such as the head of the news section). The interviews were

semi-structured and journalists were helpful and willing to openly

discuss how they saw their tasks and work at origo.hu. I recorded the

interviews and made field notes during the editorial meetings, which I

had the permission to attend. Most interviews proceeded in the following

order. I first asked the interviewee about their career trajectory, education

and current working conditions. A discussion about the role of

technology in newswork followed, and how their work had changed in

recent years. If they did not bring up issues I was interested in, I probed

more specifically (for instance, how social media affected their work,

how they interacted with their readers, how automation affected their

work routines, how they coped with screenwork, how often they planned

to experiment with infographics or other innovative news presentation

techniques. I tested what I had learnt from others on my new interview

subjects. I used descriptive, contrast, structural and example questions. I

also asked my interviewees ‘grand tour questions’ (Spradley, 1980) such

as how they typically spent their working days.

I also talked to three journalists from the economy and sports

section. My interviews either took place in the meeting room or we went

to a coffee house to chat more informally. I also met three times with the

first editor-in-chief (W. B) of Origo and I learnt a lot from him about the

formation of the newsroom culture and of its changing position within

the MATAV, then Telekom Company. I was particularly interested in the

blog section of the newspaper, so I also talked with the journalist who

was curating it. Inquiring about the wall between the business side and

the newsroom, I learnt about the existence of a particular team

(Kontaktszerk) mediating between journalists and the sales, and their

ambivalent role proved to be significant in the final analysis.

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Mingling in and observing in a computer-filled open space, where

everyone was sitting in front of a screen was not easy. Apart from

attending the morning editorial meeting and the individual interviews, I

once accompanied a journalist to a press event at the Parliament. At

another time I observed a journalist at how he was doing his morning

news wire filtering. I also sat next to a journalist editing the front page

(címlapozás), one of the most important tasks, as I learnt. During these

shadowings they explained why and what they were doing.

Regarding the archive research, I used the MODEM’s Oral History

section, where now there are 32 lengthy interviews with notable figures

of the early web era. I applied discourse analysis on three interviews with

journalists, treating them as texts about journalists’ role-

conceptualizations. Four additional interviews with former MATAV

people and intellectuals were regarded as descriptions of the field culture.

From the ‘Origo Study’, I analyzed two chapters, one, which dealt with

journalistic norms and another, which described the planned engagement

of readers in newsmaking.

IV.3. Case 3 What explains the differences across news sites’

crowdsourcing practices? A role-perception-based comparative

analysis of five news sites

The origo.hu case allowed me to zoom into the organizational processes

that facilitate or hinder audience participation. In Case 3, in turn, I sought

to zoom out from a specific newsroom, and use a comparative approach

to understand how newsrooms use the audience if they involve them in

their reporting and with what democratic benefit. To answer this

question, I used journalistic role models and focused on the following

questions:

R1 Based on their used sources, what role perceptions guided

newsrooms’ reporting during the coverage?

R2 What types of crowdsourcing can we differentiate according to

the role perceptions of the newsrooms?

The case study selected for news crowdsourcing was the national

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tobacco shop scandal in 2013 when the government monopolized the

tobacco shop small retail market and redistributed licenses.

In this case, I used trace ethnography and discourse analytical

methods focusing on the interaction between users and journalists, and

on the content of the published articles. The sample of the articles

included five news sites (origo.hu, index.hu, hvg.hu, 444.hu, 24.hu) and a

blog (trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu), launched by 24.hu. Since all newsrooms

had tags with the tobacco shop scandal, I prepared my sample searching

the articles under the tags of trafik, trafikmutyi, trafikterkep, trafiktörveny

from 2013 Jan 1 to 2014 January 1. Hvg.hu had 202 articles (under

trafikmutyi) on 444.hu I analyzed the articles under “trafikmutyi” and

“trafikterkep” (tobacco shop map). On Index.hu I looked at 117 articles

published between 2013 January 1 and 2014 January 1. On 24.hu under

the tag, Trafikmutyi Blog I examined 16 articles, mostly written by the

journalist who managed the trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu. I also interviewed

her, because her blog gained high visibility during the scandal (news sites

also linked to it). In the first stage, I analyzed the articles according to

their sources and placed them in the online journalism field (2003), then I

used discourse analysis to capture the differences in the different stages

of crowdsourcing (callouts, integration of crowdsourced information).

The analysis helped to show which newsroom positioning led to the

‘most participatory’ practice i.e. yielded the biggest engagement from

readers and demonstrated a civic/democratic shift in reporting.

IV.4. Case 4 A different organizational setup: Towards collaborative

newsmaking

Cases 1-3 focused on how the traditional journalistic organizations and

the journalist field facilitated or hindered the engagement of audiences.

In these cases, audiences were the ‘intruders’, the newcomers to be

reckoned with. In order to gain a better understanding of the processes

that may facilitate participatory journalism, in my final case study I

focused on a different organizational set-up, where audiences are not

‘intruders’ but potentially equal partners. This case focused on a

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partnership between a commons-based photo archive, Fortepan, and the

then biggest and most read mainstream news site, index.hu, which since

then was deprived of its independence. Here I focused on the gatekeeping

processes (Barzilai, 2008) by the journalists and analyzed how these

processes influenced the outcome of the participatory practices.

My research questions were the following:

R1 Compared to the cases described before, how could we describe

the gatekeeper/gated relationship in this (supposedly) more equal

organizational setup? Was the relationship hierarchical? Was it

reciprocal?

R2 How did journalists use the archive and what stylistic differences

they displayed on the blog compared to their usual reporting? Did

they facilitate communal storytelling?

I used the combined method of interviewing and content analysis. I

analyzed 36 articles, published in 2015 during the first eight months after

the blog was launched on index.hu and the official collaboration started.

(four/five articles were published on the blog per month). I paid special

attention to those articles that received higher than average likes (11.000-

16000) to examine which stories were receiving audience recognition.

For the content analysis I used rhetorical analysis, looking for signs of

conversational, narrative or empathetic discursive styles, as indicators of

the civic code of journalism and typical of participatory journalism.

“Conversationality and subjectivity can be identified by journalists

“introducing implicit evaluations of social actors’ intentions and

attitudes, or by making themselves in the reported situation, journalists

(….) assume a more assertive discursive identity than they admit when

declaring adherence to the objectivity norm”(Smith, 2017, p40). I also

identified the types of sources journalists included in their articles on the

blog to examine the openness and multiplatform-mentality of the

journalists and to see how much space they gave to civic voices.

Additionally, I conducted 7 interviews. I talked to three journalists from

index.hu, primarily involved in the Fortepan blog (the photo editor, a

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freelance journalist, and a staff journalist). The main themes that the

interviews with the journalists centered around were:

(1) Fortepan’s significance for their newspaper

(2) How they used the archive, which articles they were particularly fond

of and how they interpreted their own professional roles vis-à-vis the

photo archive?

(3) Could they imagine new formats for showing the photos to their

readers?

4) Could they imagine transferring the collaborative practices they used

in relation to Fortepan to other areas of the newswork, such as hard

news?

Besides, I interviewed the founder of Fortepan and talked with a full

time volunteer editor of the archive. I also interviewed two photo donors.

In 2019, the Hungarian National Gallery organized an exhibition of the

Fortepan photos, and published two video-interviews with the head of

Fortepan, an index.hu journalist, a historian and donors, so I also used

those sources in my analysis.

IV.5. Summary

To sum up, my first case study served as a general diagnosis (with

quantitative methods) to measure the extent of mainstream media’s

engagement with web 2.0 content. Also, the discursive strategies of

users and journalists were analyzed (interpreted as boundary work). The

second case study looked at the organizational practices that underpinned

the above processes, focusing on newsroom culture and organizational

routines. The third case study took on a wider perspective again, seeking

answers to why specific newsrooms from the same field show differences

in how they use the audience in their reporting, possibly changing some

of their professional norms. Here I relied on the theoretical concepts of

field theory and journalistic role models. In the fourth case study, in

order to capture the processes that may facilitate participatory journalism,

I focused on an organizational set-up, where amateurs are potentially

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equal partners to journalists. Here my theoretical lens was the

gatekeeping model, taking into account variables such as relationship

between gated and gatekeeper, information producing power,

alternatives. The findings from these four case studies were supposed to

complete the puzzle of the main research question of the dissertation on

the micro- and meso-level factors that facilitate or hinder

newsroom’s shift to participatory journalism with a democratic

benefit in a constrained media environment.

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V.Chapter:Journalists’engagementwithaudiences.

TheLaszloKisscase(2016)

The main research question of the dissertation was to identify the micro-

and meso-level factors that facilitate or hinder newsroom’s shift to

participatory journalism with a democratic benefit in a constrained

media environment. In this first case study, I wished to gain a general

picture of how newsrooms engaged with user-generated content. I

focused on users and journalists’ boundary work, “as outsiders assume an

ever-larger role in the creation and circulation of news and information”

(Carlson, 2016, p. 11) In order to do that, following the ethnographic

work of Smith (2017) I looked at the performativity of user discourses. In

the Kiss case, there was a prolific flood of information on web 2.0

platforms.

V.1.The case

The Kiss story in 2016 was the first media scandal where social media

platforms played a prominent role in providing new directions of the

media event. The sports of swimming is traditionally a field that has

national and economic significance, and Kiss as a former Coach of the

National Swimming Team for decades enjoyed high prestige, but before

the scandal he had a public conflict with Katinka Hosszú, the Olympic

champion, while the Swimming Federation itself was the terrain of

complex lobbying and strategic struggles. The royalties, approved by the

government for the 2017 Water Olympics, held in Hungary, amounted to

HUF 1,45 billion. According to many commentators, the president of the

Swimming Federation was the real target behind the personal elimination

of Kiss. The case erupted, after a peripheral news site, specializing on

criminal stories published a 1961 court sentence of Laszlo Kiss,

convicted of gang-raping an 18-year-old girl in the vicinity of the Sport

Swimming Pool. This information was not at all known by the public and

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the Swimming Federation was trying to whitewash the scandal - alluding

to the gang rape as a “young man’s mistake”, “some kind of woman

case”, that those within the Swimming circles had heard about. Later, as

the ≠MeToo campaign erupted, the public connected it with the Kiss

case.

V.2. The international context: Participatory journalism in the

#MeToo campaign

It is useful to analyze the participatory traits of the Kiss case of the

Hungarian, constrained media environment through a comparative lens,

by comparing it to the global viral online movement #MeToo. In the

online viral movement of ≠MeToo it was the micro-blogging platform,

Twitter that played a major role. “Though many of the stories that have

shocked and horrified the entertainment and media worlds originated at

storied publications like The New Yorker and The New York

Times, Twitter was where the discussion gained steam, where women’s

outrage coalesced into something stronger.” (Vanity Fair, 2018, March).

Nonetheless, some scholars claim that the campaign, as a participatory,

grassroots event would not have become successful without powerful

actors taking part. “However, such a grassroots movement also embodies

contestation among structural powers. Transnationally, information elites

were instrumental in making this movement go viral in Western

democratic countries. In just a few weeks in the fall of 2017, the hashtag

#MeToo found its way to 85 countries. These women ran the gamut in

terms of fulfilling different and complementary roles in global media

ecologies, with many serving as ‘community bridges’ that spanned

continents” (Robinson & Wang, 2018).

Other scholars viewed the movement as a promising sign that they

do not have to bury the idea of citizen participation in the media as at

least a partially positive phenomenon. “With the impact of the #MeToo

movement—effectively consolidated attention around the prevalence and

persistence of sexual harassment and assault, encouraging mostly women

to speak out about their experience, and holding sexual predators

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accountable—participation may be viewed again in a more nuanced, if

not completely redeemed way.” (Revers & Anderson, 2018, para.8)

V.3. Boundary work and participatory traits in Hungary: The Kiss

case

My research questions, investigating the causes of Hungarian citizens’

subtler and more indirect role in the Hungarian news ecology were the

following,

RQ 1 How did online users display boundary work vis-à-vis the

journalists during the story’s evolution? RQ 2 How did journalists engage the audience? Which aspects of the

participatory epistemology (cybernetic, deliberative?) surfaced in

their articles and in their discourses?

In the literature review it was explained how participatory epistemology

had a cybernetic aspect, based on the idea that “feedback loops on

interactive platforms automatically generated more accurate and more

relevant information than purely editorial content. And it also had a

deliberative aspect, suggesting that conversation helped to amplify and

channel the different viewpoints and perspectives of ordinary people into

the news products” (Anderson & Revers, 2018, para.12). In this case

study, where civic discussions about the case abounded on social media,

an issue to examine was the surfacing of deliberative epistemology. Let

us recall that Babarczy (2018) found that signs of deliberative debate

culture in Hungarian social media could be identified on Facebook even

if heavily polarized.

As it was explained in the Methodology Chapter, for this case study,

I used a software-assisted content analysis to gain cumulative data on

both user generated and mainstream news content. The content analysis

software, Neticle allowed me to identify (1) the spreading and

distribution of the story and (2) the user and journalistic framings

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(through lexical maps) as well as (3) to have a broad sense of the

opinion-polarization of the produced contents. My findings are presented

in the following structure. First, I show the extent of the participatory

engagement through the quantitative analysis of mainstream and social

media content related to the case. Then, I focus on users’ boundary work

to show that they displayed signs of deliberative debates plus had their

own framings and interpretations about the case. Then as the third step, I

focus on journalists’ discourses (via the interviews) and produced content

(via the articles) to see which aspects of the participatory epistemology

they subscribed to.

V.3.1. Results of the quantitative analysis

On April 5, 2016, a marginal online newspaper (privatkopo.hu)

specializing on criminal stories published the 1961 court sentence of the

national swimming team head coach Laszlo Kiss. In a few hours, the

story got into the bloodstream of social media, and then picked up by the

mainstream news media. Firstly, Blikk, a tabloid daily published it, then

444.hu. The (late) print newspaper, Népszabadság was the first to make a

telephone interview with Kiss, who said there had been a fake trial.

Immediately after the scandal broke out, a former swimmer launched a

petition campaign on Peticiok.hu12 to make Laszlo Kiss and Tamas

Gyarfas, the president of the Swimming Association resign, which was

signed by 5000 people. Members of the swimming association and

leading coaches publicly defended Kiss. The former victim of the rape in

the fist two months of the media scandal was alleged to be dead, but at

the end of May 2016, she stepped into the limelight (because „so many

lies were spreading”). Kiss only then did publicly admit his past crime

and apologized to her on television. Subsequently he resigned from his

position as national head captain, and was deprived of his honorary (vice-

mayor) title in his hometown.

To understand the evolution of user engagement, as a first step, I

analyzed the volume of content related to the story in social versus in

12 https//www.peticiok.com/kiss_laszlo_es_gyarfas_tamas_mondjon_le

97

mainstream media. I used the categories of channel use and channel

distribution. Figure 5 and Figure 6 show first that the volume of

mainstream news media articles (green) was roughly the same as the

Facebook conversations (dark blue) in the first month. They also show

that comments below articles (yellow) outnumbered both over time.

Comments, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook posts, which I all categorized

as web2.0 content, i.e. participatory forms in the almost two months

amounted to about 18.000 posts. It seems that users herded around the

news outlets, see the large number of comments (Figure 7). It can also be

observed that the more articles were published on a particular day, the

more discussions were driven to Facebook (see April the 17th and 18th).

The biggest number of comments was made under 444.hu, which

was also one of the leading news portals in following the case. The

second largest category of user-generated comments was concentrated on

Facebook (1901 during almost 2 months), since this is the most used

social network site in Hungary.

Figure5Distributionofcontentfrom5Aprilto31May

Forum-discussion posts (505) were also significant and there were

157 blog posts. Tumblr, a niche blog platform, and highly popular among

Hungarian journalists generated 40 posts. The fifth most read blog was

kettosmerce.blog.hu that at the time ran on the blog engine of index.hu

but since then developed into an autonomous crowdfunded news site.

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OrulunkVincentblog.hu was also active during the scandal, one of its

posts generated 696 comments.

This means that, on the one hand, mainstream media played a

leading role in shaping the discussions. On the other hand, it means that

these mainstream media forms gave rise to participatory forms –

including comments and social media posts –, which grossly

outnumbered the original mainstream appearances. This suggests a

dynamic relationship between the two, social media started the scandal,

mainstream media took it up and put it into the limelight and then again

participatory forms, including social media provided the channels for

discussion. Figure6Channeldistributionfrom5,Aprilto6,May

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Figure7ChannelDistributionfrom5Aprilto6,Maywithbubbles

V.3.2. The boundary work of web.2.0 users

The numbers presented in the previous section give a quantitative,

temporal overview of the use of different channels. However, they reveal

little of the content of discussions. In this section, I turn to this with the

aim of analyzing users’ boundary work and turning to journalists’

boundary work in the subsequent section.

In the first step, I compared the topics on social media conversations

with mainstream media to understand whether there was just

regurgitation of content, users had focused on specific issues or had

agendas independent from the mainstream media. This analysis revealed

some thematic differences. The mainstream media had a clear focus on

the institutionalized actors and consequences. For instance, in April,

journalists dealt much more heavily with “resignation” than civic users.

In contrast, blogs and amateur Facebook posts used more moralistic

framing. In these channels, the word “violence” most strongly correlated

with morality, victim and sports. Looking at the lexical-maps after the

victim stepped into the limelight (on May 14), we could see similar

differences. In the mainstream media on that specific day words such as

proof, criminal record, council, president appeared on the lexical map,

showing that the media retained an official, institutional lens. The civic

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conversations included words such as truth, violence, morality, trial,

victim and sports, adding a new layer, again suggesting a potential for

meaningful civic discourse about the moral and social aspects of the

story. (See Figures 8 and 9)

Figure8LexicalmaponBlogs,Twitter,FacebookandcommentsonMay14

Figure9LexicalmapofnewsarticlesonMay14

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In summary, the snapshots of aggregated thematic differences

between civic conversations and articles showed that citizens had their

own agendas, which were obviously influenced by mainstream media,

but were more susceptible to moral and social dilemmas.

In the second step, I analyzed specific comment threads (trace

ethnography) to identify key features of users’ boundary work. As I

explained above, users’ boundary work can consist of discursive

strategies when they comment on the story, when they express their own

interpretations of the news fed to them, or when they directly challenge

the facts, framings, articles or the media’s performance in general. From

Smith (2017) I borrowed the comment orientation categories of

metadiscussion, interpretation, metajournalism, witnessing, and

information. To recap, this is how Smith (2017) defined them.

1. Information: provides or requests specific information relevant to the

subject of the article

2. Interpretation: offers an interpretation of the subject of the article or

takes an argumentative position

3. Witnessing: describes a personal experience (not necessarily one’s

own) relevant to but distinct from the event described in the article,

qualifies another comment as personal experience, recalls a precedent

from a source �

4. Metajournalism: comments on the process by which the article was

produced, evaluates the author’s competence as a journalist, or comments

on the media in general

Metadiscussion: comments on the discussion itself or evaluates other

discussants’ competence, attempts to keep order in the discussion, phatic

comments (Smith, 2017, pp.101-102)

I chose the comment threads of two most active sites, 444.hu and at

the discussion thread under a blog post on ÖrülünkVincent, where the

blogger from time to time participated in the discussions. Beyond

identifying features of boundary work, I sought to compare the civility of

discussions on the two sites, as a pre-condition of deliberative debates.

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Plus, since the Neticle program allowed for the analysis of opinion

polarization of specific content, I complemented this with checking

whether the web 2.0 content was significantly more negative (potentially

hindering civilized discussions) than the mainstream content (subdivided

into groups according to their political orientation) produced by

journalists.

I found, first, that on 444.hu, the commenters were more aggressive

towards each other than on the blog. Second, on the blog in the

discussion there were more instances of concrete factual information, and

more types of news items that users shared with each other. Apart from

users‘ boundary work (when they asked questions or expressed their

opinion), bullying (personalized negative comments) and jokes were also

present on both platforms, but on 444.hu more so. That seems to suggest

that as long as the author also participates in the discussion (the blogger

did, whereas the journalist did not) users are more civilized and there the

chances of deliberative debate, supported by information are higher.

In the third step, as I mentioned, I compared quantitatively the

opinion polarization of mainstream (professional) content (divided into

right-wing, left-wing, independent news outlets) versus mainstream

content and web 2.0 content. This analysis showed that the proportion of

negatively coded content in the latter category was indeed higher, and

positive ones lower. However, the differences were not so significant that

would prevent the emergence of deliberative debates.

Outlets negative Positive

(web.2.0 + articles from 444.hu,

index.hu, 24.hu)

61.3% 2.7%

Mainstream Independent,

444.hu, index.hu, 24.hu

55.3% 4.01%

Mainstream Right-wing,

Origo.hu, valasz.hu, 888.hu

55.2% 6.8%

Mainstream Left-wingAtv.hu,

nepszava.hu, klubradio.hu

51% 9.1%

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In the next step, I categorized user-generated content (collected from

444.hu, blogs and from Facebook posts) based on a similar discourse

analysis by Smith (2017), who analyzed the public-journalist interactions

on comments on Dennik N in 2015, a Slovakian news site.

The most frequent category was interpretation (1)

Boundary work of users, Interpretation Comment thread - 444.hu Think about it. To a certain extent it can be a payback for the victim that Laszlo Kiss in

front of the public was humiliated and apologized to her face to face after doing

everything to hide the case with lying constantly. This is absolutely the moral victory of

Zsuzsanna Takats over a figure thought untouchable and dear to power. 13

Taking advantage of the fact that a woman, feeling helpless stand in front of the public is

almost just as cruel as the rape. Now there is verbal abuse against her, they use her

person as an object, her case, which she does not want to.. .Good, dont’t hear her word,

NO (as Kiss and his friends did not either) and just rape verbally ZSUZSA TAKATS, no

matter that for her the case was closed.... He cannot make it undone, of course. But in this situation almost EVERYTHING could

have been handled better. What is more, it could only have been made better, that is for

sure. 1. admit the facts which cannot be disputed. 2. Resign immediately (possibly

Gyarfas as well) Be as happy as a monkey for the 55 years that he got as present (...) If

victims generously forgave, then society needs to get over it.

User, Facebook post

As far as I am concerned, the story is over. Kiss deserves more punishment, but I don’t

want to see him anymore. But we also know about at least two more victims (Marianna

és Júlia), and who knows how many we don’t and they would also need some moral

payback. Not in front of the cameras, but they would. Lantos and Varszegi could also

apologize, which I also do not want to see, but that would be the minimum. And to have

a progressive result of the scandal, there should be a permanent sign on each school,

church, sport facility that nobody is allowed to be abused, and whoever knows about it,

call this and that number and check your rights on this webpage, etc.

The second most frequent category was metadiscussion (2)

comments on the discussion itself or evaluates other discussants’

13 https//444.hu/2016/05/11/kiss-laszlo-es-gyarfas-tamas-egy-egy-csokor-viraggal-kertek-bocsanatot-az-aldozattol

104

competence, attempts to keep order in the discussion, phatic comments.

These types of comments appeared under the new articles in the

comment section and more frequently on blogs or as Facebook posts.

Boundary work of users, Metadiscussion

Commenter - 444.hu

If you watch a little this http,//beszeljrola.hu/ or read this

article http,//hvg.hu/itthon/201605... you might realize that in this country children and

women are abused at a brutal rate, which is partly the side effect of the many alcoholics.

There are several reasons why it is important to talk about this case, because while we

peacefully lay our heads down to the pillow, thousands of children and women don't‘.

They do not dare to and cannot ask for help and the similar worms rarely get caught;

what is more even if they ask for help, they do not get it. I have reported on mothers at

the Child Protection Agency and then I was informed that they thought that „everything

was ok“, because the kid was only under “emotional terror” and was not beaten up. (....)

What is more in professional swimming in recent years there were several molestation

cases that were made public. There should be changes in this area, such as,

- faster and more professional police reactions

- courts specialized on these cases, so that verdicts can be reached fast, which is good for

both parties, real victim and a person accused falsely (maybe a dad)

- visible sanctions against perpetrators

- an investigatory and support group would be established where those victims can go,

who so far have been silent

A user called Periferia (444.hu 5, April)

I think that nobody is whitewashing him. But it is not fair to hold against him something

for which he was duly punished according to the rules of the society. It is one thing that

the society would expect sexual abusers to tell it to others. In the US, this is the custom.

If you are a registered sex offender, you must inform your neighbors about it. In

Hungary we prefer hiding and suppressing such information. This is what we could talk

about, whether it is a problem that this is how we relate to this criminal case.

Blogger on Orulunkvincentblog.hu.

It would have been better to have a Hungary, where both Lukacs and Hamvas could

work, where court decisions can be acknowledged after half a century, where we can at

least try to settle our common things, where white means white, maybe light grey, but

definitely not black. We did not have such a Hungary and I cannot hope that we ever

will. We need catharsis and not moral panic. We need thoughts with the possibility of

being wrong. We would need to doubt our truths, precisely for the sake of our truths.

(…) We must tolerate ambivalence, even if it is more convenient to leave behind careful

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considerations and judgments are expected. This is not that age, but an age of quick

moral victories, where every sentence can become part of a big battle, and big battles

justify a lot of things. Tomorrow there will be a new scandal, a quick scandal, and

we can write a post, opinion piece, article, quickly, not to be left behind. Kiss is a

role model for professional swimmers for what he gave them in the last half century. He

received the awards for what he achieved with his own work. (let me add very quietly,

he could even be the role model of young delinquents of serious crimes that there is hope

and they can stand up. Society does not need to outcast criminals, but people who can

change their lives.)

444.hu commenter What would you suggest?

444.hu commenter hahahaha! Have you ever tried to turn to the police with such a thing? Have you ever been told that as long as there is no evidence, blood, they cannot do anything?

444.hu commenter How much is your life better thanks to the national Olympic champions, considering how much it costs to you and to everyone?

444.hu commenter I did not exempt him, I just listed the events. By doing nothing useful they just cause pain to the victim ( if you had an experience, you need to know that) This is all I hinted at. Our moral condemnation does not change anything.

The last category for which examples were found was (3)

metajournalism, comments on the process by which the article was

produced, evaluates the author’s competence as a journalist, or comments

on the media in general.

As the quotes will demonstrate, it was either criticizing specific

journalists (what they said, wrote), the press in general for its agenda

biases, a specific news program or how the news race for visibility

resulted in crude schematic framings.

Boundary work of users, Metajournalism

Facebook post

This was such a boring interview, all Friderikusz episodes are like this? I could

watch 23 minutes of it and I think that makes me a record breaker, the long time does

not force him to reporting bravura... he makes a mistake when he does not make it

clear that it cannot be regarded as a youthful mistake. (...) Doubt is necessary, but

not one-sidedly. they could have gone into interesting discussions about the

Hungarian society. So Friderikusz made a lot of mistakes in this interview but not as

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much as to be cast with stones.

Commenter, 444.hu I would emphasize that the problem is much larger than the role it gets in the

press and the Kiss case is more significant than Kiss Laszlo. When will there be an article on the fact that men are “transported” to villages

inhabited by poor Roma in countries such as Borsod, Szabolcs, Nógrád and Heves to

buy the favors of teenage girls and boys for HUF2000-3000? Commenter on blog (Orulunkvincentblog.hu) I think it is not a generational question, the media culture is like that, the most

general, most coarse schemas are prioritized in the bid for visibility If there is no

counter-schema, similarly crude, behind which an opposition camp strong enough

can be stood

(such as the fake trial of the communists ..) then it is easy to lose on it.

Commenter, 444.hu The RTL report annihilated the counter attempt; what is more, it disclosed the

narrative-making conspiracy and has made it clear that the crude opinions about Kiss

and his friends were true (I agree actually). Such loss of war on the part of the

media is rather rare. Blogger - (Orulunkvincentblog.hu) Blikk simply called him Gyorgy Aczel (not intentionally, they really did not pay

attention) Commenter, 444.hu Andras Stumpf’s argumentation, signaling the conservative moral cultural

superiority. “Kiss received a prison sentence, fro which he sat 1 year and 8 months.

In Prison. It would be too short? Go there for half a year or just for a month, if you

think it is too short!” There is no topic, on which these can write down a sane or

morally sound sentence. Commenter, (Orulunkvincentblog.hu) What informational frills or moral lessons are left, let us munch on it, but not labeled

with Kiss, but by itself (swimming pool situation, security, protection against

violence, journalistic ethic (see death rumour) etc.

Instances of metadiscussion, metajournalism, and interpretation all

appeared in the contributions of ordinary users, who thus discursively

assumed a role in the newsmaking process. This suggests that seeds of

deliberative discussions existed in the Hungarian web2.0, which means

that there were untapped resources for facilitating public discussions. It

could also be seen that users were not simply following the events.

Rather they were able to contextualize it themselves, to synthesize

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information and were even critical of the news media’s schematic

interpretations. What is more, commenters often revealed personal

experiences of abuse, which journalists with a civic sensitivity could

have dealt with in one form or another.

V.3.3. The boundary work of journalists

In this section I present my findings related to journalistic boundary work

during the Kiss case from my four sets of empirical data. Journalistic

boundary work, as explained above, refers to rhetorical strategies where

journalists display their professional authority and control and possibly

limit user input.

This section is based on a mixed method research. I used (1)

quantitative analysis of mainstream content (with Neticle) (2) qualitative

content analysis of 41 articles on index.hu focusing on their sources and

reporting style (3) qualitative content analysis of 7 articles from

independent, left-wing, right-wing, tabloid news outlets; and conducted

(4) two interviews at index.hu with the editor-in-chief (D.G) and with the

content strategist (Sz.Z).

In the first step, I analyzed the references in the published articles to

social media content and ‘linking practices’ in order to gauge their

embracement of the participatory epistemology (cybernetic and

deliberative) in the case. I found that during the coverage of the scandal,

all the news sites performed aggregation, linking to each other and

sporadically to Facebook. 444.hu used a lot of outward links in line with

their curatorial approach and instrumental journalism. Index.hu used

links to its own site as often as possible. The number of outward links

indicates a certain level of boundary expansion and acknowledgement of

a participatory environment.

It was Blikk.hu, a tabloid daily and Origo.hu, which asked their

readers‘ opinions, but only through voting-type of questions, phrased by

the newsroom. Origo.hu conducted this poll early on, two days after the

story began. They incorporated the result of their poll into a traditional

article (the presentation of the data with infographic was more tech-savvy

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than their usual practice). The style of the article was serious, which gave

weight to that audience-related information (7152 votes were

registered)14. The high number of votes indicated that readers had strong

views on the case. The newsroom asked its readers if they would make

Kiss resign or not. They could have asked why for instance, which would

have indicated the embracing of the deliberative aspect of participatory

epistemology. Blikk.hu asked their readers three closed questions after

the former victim revealed herself. It again shows that the newsroom did

not see added value in eliciting the views of the audience and also

assumed that whatever the audience could think of, the journalists

already knew, revealing a paternalistic, top-down attitude.

The polling questions of Blikk.hu (tabloid)

Will there be others who step forward as victims in the Kiss Laszlo case? 1.Certainly. 2.

Even if there were more, they will not. 3. There are no more victims.

Which opinion do you agree with? Rape is 1. Unforgivable. Since the victim suffers all

her life, the perpetrator must be stigmatized for life. 2 is a severe act of crime, but if the

perpetrator served his sentence, he cannot be blamed anymore.3. in these cases the

victim is often at fault.

Why now? 1. By accident. 2.Surely there is conspiracy.

In the next step, I analyzed the variety of sources of 47 articles on

index.hu. I found that they mostly quoted public figures, but there were a

few examples of civic focus. In one opinion article, the journalist-blogger

for instance mentioned a civic initiative, where volunteers attended court

trials on abuse to see how biased the rulings are. Another instance was

when the news outlet wanted to interview a father who in the 80s claimed

in a book that Kiss protected a swimming coach, who gave dope to his

teen daughter. This suggest that journalists saw added value in the civic

perspectives, displaying some level of adoption of the participatory

epistemology, but it did not become a general strategy of the newsroom.

In the third step, I deepened the analysis by comparing the framings

used by different news outlets. This analysis was necessary because

14 http//www.origo.hu/itthon/20160407-az-origo-olvasoi-lemondatnak-kiss-laszlot.html

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framing is a key form of journalistic boundary work that Carlson &

Lewis (2015) refer to as the ‘control’ dimension. Comparing news sites

along the political spectrum allowed me to study how this control

dimension differed along political affiliation. For this step, I used in-

depth qualitative analysis of selected news sites.

This analysis revealed that the mainstream media offered four

interpretative framings for the media scandal, corresponding to different

types of journalistic boundary work, but all fitting in the professional-

hegemonic journalistic identity (Carpentier, 2005). Index.hu in its regular

articles framed it as a (1) system failure, „to what extent the system of

professional sports, especially swimming was corrupted and full of

abuses that are accepted as “normal“, plus as a (2) legal issue. “We tried

to make order amidst the legal chaos surrounding the case”, “How can

someone get a certificate of good conduct after a gang rape?” For

index.hu, opinion-forming is a prominent means of professional

control/boundary work. (the interviews with the editor-in-chief and

content strategist will confirm that)

P.SZ. journalist, index.hu

The public has not radically changed its convictions about sexual assault, only has

started to punish a different conviction than before. Those who in 2016 do not

automatically start to defend the perpetrator, often do not keep silent because they would

be on the side of the victim. They are just afraid of the anger, which they would call

upon themselves with their unchanged beliefs. Because it is unbelievable, but the anger

of the press hyenas and of the revengeful public opinion has consequences.

Another opinionated article was published on a tabloid-subpage of

Index.hu, Divany.hu, by a journalist, who was also a contributor of an

activist Facebook page, launched to shape public opinion about abuse

against women. She shared a reader-letter she received to her article on

Divany.hu on this Facebook page. It is significant how she subscribes to

the participatory ethic on Facebook, while displays “opinion-forming”

identity on Divany/index.hu.

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F.E.L. Journalist Divany/index.hu

Our article is for those, who don’t understand why this case had to be “unearthed”

after 50 years since Kiss once already “served his sentence and deserved a second

chance!” At the same time, it is also instructive, how in the public opinion, belittling,

victim-blaming has immediately started against the former victim.

The same journalist on Facebook, I thought I would throw in the commons this short

letter that I received to my article written about the Kiss case.

http,//divany.hu/ego/2016/04/08/masodik_esely/ I would not comment on the 10

commandments of the male reader, which if we kept, he thinks, we would not have to be

afraid that we will be properly raped.15

Right-wing conservative papers tended to frame the case as a (3)

moral dilemma as well, “Does the public have the right to condemn

someone who once stood trial and was brought to justice? Kiss Laszlo,

the crime that was paid for and the verbal lynching. A sportsman, at the

age of 21 behaved like a sick animal. …I don’t join the camp of the anti-

Kiss purifiers.” (Mandiner, 2016, May) Here the journalist is less

distanced, and implies himself discursively in the article. (4) Tabloid

papers and left-wing papers framed it as a window into how the

communist system worked and also as a current political game issue.

“Was Kiss co opted by the communist power in exchange for his early

release and for receiving a clean slate? Whose interest is to weaken the

leadership of the Swimming Federation in light of the coming Olympics?

Kiss Laszlo and the swimming sports, a penny here, a penny there.”

“Silence at the bottom. The background of the Kiss Laszlo case.” This

suggests some level of political parallelism as the basis of

control/boundary work.

Smith (2017) claimed that in the Slovakian press opinion-forming

journalism was traditionally equated with serious journalism. This was

also true for the Hungarian news field. At the same time, dialogue and

debates among journalists were not surfacing, which I attribute to the

sharp boundaries within the journalism field itself. A well-known

15 https,//www.facebook.com/anemaznem/photos/gondoltam-bedobom-a-közösbe-ezt-a-pár-soros-levelet-amit-a-kiss-ügy-kapcsán-%C3%ADrt-/474183326116992/

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journalist in his television program accused the press with ‘moral

nihilism’ and called them ‘press hyenas’ to finish off Kiss in 3 days and

to erase his lifetime achievement. The press reacted by expelling this

journalist in turn. In a closed professional Facebook group, one

journalist, who did not agree with F. S. asked fellow journalists why

instead of a debate and discussion, only an uproar followed. He did not

get any reactions.

Journalist - closed Facebook of journalists

Now that F. within seconds became a substandard, prehistoric, outcast news anchor (or

“disgraceful” , a pretty word for a different viewpoint) among groups with different

ideologies) let me ask very softly, is it impossible that he has that opinion and I have

something else? This is his reading, and I have a very different one? What’s more, one

can argue why his is wrong (if wrong at all?) I am not thinking about absolving sexual

violence a la comrade Aczél, but about the interpretation of the whole phenomenon. To

talk about it with more patience and more depth, without quick stigmatizations, almost

sweep it away, quasi censor certain opinions as “embarrassing” - it is hopeless, right? I

am asking while I am not on the same page with my colleague.

This quote shows that journalists perform boundary work among each other as well and

that there is a lack of meaningful dialogue among professionals. The opinion also

corresponds with a blogger’s cited opinion about quick judgments and schematizations

in the media.

In the next section, I present my findings from the interviews with

the editor-in-chief and the content strategist of index.hu. The content

strategist told me that the very reason why they started to write about the

Kiss case was that it had already been spreading in social media, where

different actors added to it. He also explained that they contributed to the

whole story as professionals, but the story was running simultaneously

on different media platforms, and these threads were influencing each

other. It seems to suggest that collaboration between mainstream media

and social media in his perception remained on the level of polyphony,

where engaging the public in dialogue, bringing the audience into a

reciprocal relationship was not an option. The content strategist also

explained how difficult it is for journalists to come up with strong

opinion pieces that go against the tide of the general public sentiment,

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without coming through as provocative or artificial. From their discourse,

it was evident, that keeping professional control is of paramount

importance, even if they acknowledge the presence of the participatory

environment. At the same time, traditional professional values based on

economic imperatives (news race) and enshrined journalistic norms such

as ‘public service‘ and ‘truth-telling’ dictate their work. To answer more

directly the research question, journalistic curation of social media (a

type of boundary expansion) remained within the traditional code of

journalism - primarily driven by the economic imperative of keeping

pace with the news flow. Agenda setting and controlling the information

flow (boundary work) was the chief reason why they engaged with social

media in the first place. They both considered social media as an

unavoidable element in the news ecosystem, but regarded ‘synthetizing’,

‘analyzing’, ‘contextualizing’ as solely professional jurisdictions, even if

from the previous section it was apparent, that users are also capable of

doing that. Index ceased the option of allowing commenting on its main

news site and banished the practice to its outsourced blogs or to its

Facebook pages.

Sz. Z. Content strategist , index.hu

People are interested in my opinion, in the story. However difficult it is to admit,

journalism is a little like tabloid, the soap opera, where we tell stories. These stories are

more important than Friends, but they are still just stories. (...) It often happens that we

merely clumsily walk behind the events. But as journalists we must somehow hold the

news in our hands and from time to time run forward with an opinion peace or a

synthesizing article. In the Kiss case for instance by writing down what is going on in

professional sports. The potential advantage of Index in relation to social media is that

it can give context and point at deeper connections. The social media is not about

that, because the users can basically only follow the events. (...)„In Hungary, there is a

great tradition of opinionated journalism, but it is starting to get devalued, because today

everyone has their own opinion.

(...) Content production has become a collaborative process. Aczél Endre and Sándor

Friderikusz had nothing to do with the Kiss case, but became communication hubs and

then actual actors in the story because they expressed their opinions on Facebook. What

is new is that people do not have to turn to the mainstream media to become actors.

Everything is collaborative. In the Kiss case the novelty was that each actor had the

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same value. An opinion piece by Index has the same value as the drunken blurting

of Aczél on Facebook. The person who lost on it was Aczél, because he did not

understand that social media and the mainstream media in this case totally merged.

(...) Often we just clumsily trudge after the events from behind and this is why we do

curation, to keep the events in our hands. The web curator is kind of organizing the

whole thing from the background and it is due to his image and brand name that he

built, that he is known as the curator in the profession, that people know what to

expect more or less. If you take out every added value from a news item, in the end you

simply write that it is damn good, you publish the link and post it on Twitter. You are

curating, because it is you who found it, validated it, judged it interesting and

important, and that’s why they are following you. At the same time we have more

and more articles that we take from other papers or from Facebook, give it some context,

opinion, something. News competition dictates that first we publish a lot of content

from elsewhere and then publish our big analytical articles.

D.G. Editor-in-chief, Index.hu

We were able to get back the leading role for a while. Toth-Szenesi had one of the

most important opinion pieces, saying that Kiss should resign in the beginning, which

triggered things.

What is negative for me and what I do not willingly talk about in public, although it

happens, was that we were not so much in the lead as I wanted to in this story. We

did not immediately pick up the story, which was a huge mistake, and for a half a day we

did not write about it. And then I came in and said that we immediately had to put it in

the newspaper, so we were late. (...) But from then on in Index.hu the whole case was

covered. And this is a very important thing. Index cannot be the leader in every story,

but we always go on it and try to show every aspect even if we have to link to

sources that are ahead of us and with the Kiss case it happened more frequently

than I wanted. (...) With the László Kiss case, what the press did, I think was basically

the maximum that it could do. There was a scandalous case, and as a consequence, not

so evident in Hungary, the culprit resigned. It took a long time, but all the details of the

case became known, with different outlets adding to it in turn. All in all, I think the

Hungarian media performed very well in the Kiss case despite the fact that several actors

tried to create a smoke screen around it.

The words of the editor-in-chief also revealed the dimension of

mediological expertise (Boyer, 2011, 2013) in journalists’ daily decision-

making. He accused himself for not being alert enough and not riding the

wave when it started in social media. Curation as a practice that the

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content strategist also highlights is an example of how mediological

expertise gains importance over praxiological one, as the “index pledge”

on curated content is enough as contribution.

V.4. Summary

In this chapter, I analyzed how Hungarian online users displayed

boundary work vis-à-vis the journalists and how journalists engaged with

social media during one of the first web 2.0 scandals. I analyzed users’

boundary work drawing on Smith’s (2017) concepts of metadiscussion,

metajournalism, and interpretation. The analysis revealed that instances

of metadiscussion, metajournalism, and interpretation were all observed

in the contribution of ordinary users, who thus assumed a role in the

information circulation process. Users criticized the news media’s bias,

schematization, quick judgments and individual journalists. They also

provided their own interpretative frames, which albeit based on the

mainstream media, were more focused on social and moral issues. As the

example of a popular blog (Orulunkvincentblog.hu) demonstrated, when

the writer engaged in dialogue with commenters, the conversation was

more civilized and showed deliberative signs. Analyzing journalistic

boundary work, I found that social media played a major role in the

development of the story as news sites started to deal with the case after

it was already spreading in the social media. So, journalists

acknowledged the symbiosis between social media and mainstream

media, and interpreted their role as curators of the polyphonic newsflow.

At the same time, they remained within the traditional code of journalism

- primarily driven by the economic imperative of keeping pace with the

news flow. Agenda setting and controlling the information was the chief

reason why they tapped into the social media in the first place.

Subscribing to the cybernetic aspect of the participatory epistemology

was observed in journalistic discourse and in the articles. They used a lot

of outward links; two newsrooms polled their readers (in closed

questions). Journalists regarded ‘synthesizing’, ‘analyzing’,

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‘contextualizing’ as solely professional jurisdictions, although we could

see that users also did these.

Further, I found that the mainstream media offered four main

framings for the media scandal (not as subject to contestation or debate).

Journalists did not engage in a reciprocal relationship with web 2.0 users,

and largely ignored the deliberative aspect of the participatory

epistemology, treating user-generated content as sources. User

interactivity remained dissociative. (Deuze & Fortunati, 2011) i.e. the

audience interacted with itself. Additionally, the interviews revealed that

opinionated journalism was regarded as self-legitimation, with the chief

goal of shaping public opinion and generating traffic to their own sites,

instead of at least partially exploiting the participatory logic of the

networked environment for facilitating dialogue in the public sphere.

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VI. Chapter: Organizational processes as factors of

journalists’ engagement with their audiences: the

origo.hucasestudy(2013)

VI.1. Introduction

Tied in with the main research question of “What factors facilitate or

hinder the emergence of participatory journalism with democratic

benefit in a constrained media environment?”, this case study was

designed to capture the organizational practices that underpin the

participatory processes. My specific research question with this particular

case study was:

How does a newsroom’s organizational workflow, its work routines

and role perceptions hinder or facilitate its shift to participatory

journalism?

I conducted an ethnographic examination of a newsroom and compared

my observations at origo.hu with the “good practices” of the showcased

newsrooms from the literature review. (ProPublica, The New York Times,

Gazeta Wybortza and the Guardian). Spending two months at the

origo.hu newsroom, I mainly observed the workdays of the News

section. The rational for opting for an ethnographic observation for my

research was explained in the Methodology chapter. In my data analysis,

as I explained, I also used the interviews of the MODEM project16, which

retraced the Hungarian media web history, which coincided with the start

of the Origo. Figure 10 shows the themes I gleaned from my field

research.

16 https,//www.mediatortenet.hu

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Figure10Newsroomvariablesofaudienceengagement

My findings confirmed and nuanced the propositions of the

literature. Origo.hu proved to employ a heavily industrial workflow

(assembly-line fashion, separating the different units of the news

organization from each other instead of integrating them and creating

synergies, cherishing the firewall between the business unit and the

newsroom. Plus, in 2013 its newsroom culture was still entrenched in

traditional orientating journalism (Deuze, 2003), which was

implemented in the 90s. It resulted in a closed journalistic culture with a

focus on editorial content, explaining issues to an abstract audience. At

the same time, they also made it a priority to distance themselves from

the elite and the ‘consecrated experts’, which in fact matched the

deliberative ideology of participatory journalism and public journalism.

Apart from early attempts in the 2000s, the newsroom from 2010 did

not experiment with participatory journalism. Nonetheless, from the

interviews it was also found that journalists individually - from the staff

to the deputy editor-in-chief - had an aspiration to become more

responsive to their audience, but the organizational set-up locked them it

Organizationalworkflow

Relationship between the different units Wall between the newsroom and sales

Journalisticroles

Perceived journalistic expertise Reporting style Newsroom culture

Audienceengagement

Audience perception Participatory practices

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their routine practices. In other words, Origo.hu journalists were aware

of the clash between the logic of the participatory environment, and their

own (inherited) newsroom culture, which in fact eroded their

professional self-legitimacy.

The case study showed that organizational workflow - depending on

the interaction between the units and the maintenance of the ‘wall’

between sales and newsroom - shape the journalistic roles (newsroom

culture, sense of expertise, and reporting) and vice versa. This in turn

affect how the newsroom conceptualizes its audience and how it engages

with it; whether it treats the audience as customer/partner or member of

an as abstract audience.

The story of the origo.hu started in 1998 within MATAV, a formerly

socialist Telecom company. In 2006, MATAV, merging with T-Mobile

became Telekom, where Deutsche Telekom had a majority share. Given

that a comparison with the then rival news site, index.hu - launched

almost at the same time - often came up in the interviews with

journalists, in the table below I show the major milestones of the two

news sites (with regard to the participatory challenge of the web).

Table5Milestonesofindex.huandorigo.huontheweb

Index.hu Origo.hu

Started in 1999

1998 (Internetto)

1998

Blogging platform 2007 2010

Facebook page 2013 2013

Youtube channel 2011 No

Youtube

channel

Twitter page 2013 2014

Commenting policy From 2011

commenting in certain

columns ceased, then

only allowed on its

Facebook page)

2008 -

Komment.hu -

for registered

users (opinion

articles for

journalists and

readers)

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Origo.hu, within MATAV by 2001 had a revenue of HUF 100

million, 4-500 000 readers and its newsroom culture had been formed.

Between 2001 and 2004, a period of professionalization and extensive

expansion began, and it was during this time that they started to work as

a company (Axelero.Rt). Their readership increased fivefold, their

weight in the parent company was 10% with revenue of HUF21 billion.

MATAV, a mammoth company was making several 100 billion HUF.

Origo’s content was successful, and the goal was to exploit the synergies

of access and content, so they were keen on developing further services

besides the news site. They offered an e-mail platform, a search engine

(Altavizsla), and as the ADSL emerged at that time, they provided extra

services, video and music downloads and photo storage places. Within 13

years, origo.hu had seven CEOs, because “change was encoded in the

system” (S.G), which did not necessarily help foster a healthy newsroom

culture, I was told by the deputy editor-in-chief in 2013.

VI.2. Telekom’s industrial workflow

Instead of integrating the different units of the company, as ProPublica

and Gazeta Wybortza did in 2014-2015, and The New York Times was

about to in 2014, Telekom in 2013 went in the opposite direction,

separating the departments neatly and each organizational unit was

focused solely on the single type of work they were doing. So, whereas

news organizations in other journalism fields were moving towards

integrating their organizational units to be able to respond as quickly as

possible to the changing habits and needs of the audience and to the

shifting dynamics in the market, Telekom was separating them more and

more.

In the Literature Review it was mentioned how according to the

Leaked Digital Report of The New York Times in 2014, the newsroom‘s

adherence to the dogma of the wall hindered innovation, risk-taking and

experimentation. At MATAV/Telekom they put a large emphasis on the

autonomy of the newsroom, making it a priority to distance it from sales.

Back in the 2000s the newsroom enjoyed a good reputation within the

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company, and was involved in many different projects and decisions. As

W.B., the first editor-in-chief told me, as long as they produced good

numbers, all was well; the content was not exceptionally significant for

the management.

In 2012, a team called the ‘Kontaktszerk’ (Newsroom Contact) was

formed, whose task was to mediate between the sales and the newsroom.

It consisted of a small team that worked directly under the CEO. The

direct cause for the establishment of the team was the transformation of

the advertisement market. Given that the display market was decreasing

(prices dropped) the newsroom was no longer sustainable on banner ads.

At the same time, the advertising market moved towards content

integration and native ads. The team managed the smaller ad

developments, designs for sponsored content, voting, prize games, micro

sites for campaigns. I learnt that their role was not regarded with utmost

satisfaction by the newsroom. The deputy editor-in-chief thought that

they should be working under the newsroom and not directly under the

CEO, because in that setup they could not see the issues from a

journalistic perspective. He said the same about the programmers. The

project manager of the ‘Kontaktszerk’ was aware of the distrust of the

newsroom, but thought that it was part of the job and was about lack of

money.

The separation of the organizational units

Sz. Project leader of the ‘Kontaktszerk’ (mediators between the sales and the newsroom)

We merge the possibilities in the various products - Life, Newsroom, Postr, and Videa.

If you imagine that work you can see a goddess with six arms, who is juggling and

spinning the plates on a rod and if any of them slows down, she runs there and spins it a

bit more. So it is quite hectic but a lot of fun at the same time, with a lot of creativity.

You need to brainstorm, talk to journalists, see what is out there in the market and it is

great to see when a new section is created.

She was also the project manager of the redesign project. She had worked at the

company for many years, starting as a journalist and then shifting to project

management. She explained to me that their work had two main components. One was a

sort of internal PR agency or producer work, asking the newsroom what content they

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were planning to do that was beyond their budget or they had no time for it. Then she

tried to sell it to the sales to find matches with the needs of the advertisers. The other

component was product development - helping to launch new sections in the portal. One

recent example she gave was a new column for geeks, with a blog structure in the

Technology column. After she had it developed she sent it to the sales with audience

metrics to offer it to advertisers.

S.G. Deputy editor-in-chief about Kontaktszerk

They do things for us, which we ask for, so they should be employed here in the

newsroom. They should live here with us, know about problems, learn about our

priorities. Then they could mediate better, but in its current form it is dead. So a lot of

energy goes into the thin air.

Sz. Project leader of the ‘Kontaktszerk’

It is a difficult meditator role, and a bit ungrateful. If I go up to the newsroom, they say

you are from the sales, and they don’t trust me, saying that I want to spoil their content.

If I go to the sales, they say that I am with the content jugglers and that I always say no

to them, because I want to keep the content free and do not want the advertiser to

interfere with it. But the revenue that I drive to the newsroom columns increases their

budget, which determines whether they will be closed or not.

There were also security concerns behind the implementation of

bureaucratic protocols that hindered journalistic freedom. Journalists also

mentioned the lot of red tape when I asked them about their workflow

but they accepted as something that they had to live with.

Industrial workflow

S.G. deputy editor-in-chief

Telekom is a multinational company, and it enters public tenders, which puts a lot of

senseless administrative burden on each board, on ours as well. I will give you a

technical example. What would be more natural with a genre that is so alive as online

journalism, to send in stories, information from anywhere anytime - on Twitter,

Facebook. Unfortunately this is not feasible, because of data security reasons that

Telekom must follow. You can only send in your article by email, which is uploaded by

someone who is physically in the newsroom. It is uncomfortable, inefficient; a pain on

the neck and it creates a bad working mood among journalists. (... ) Journalists work in

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the newsroom; sales are in sales, programmers and designers in the development, who

put the programs under us with which we work, and the graphic solutions, when this is

not separable like that. Those people who work on the visual content - be it graphic or

video - should be part of the newsroom.

He also pointed out how the horizontal, parallel structure of the company did not make

sense. The management was on the same level as the editorial board, even though the

management should have defined the financial limits of the newsroom.

UP former editor-in-chief of Index.hu (the excerpt is taken from the MODEM project)

We believed that being an Internet company, our journalists must be comfortable with

the web, they should know what HTML is, to be able to change a video card, and install

a driver, copy suitable files to suitable places even on ftp, etc. They do not have to make

programs, but at least understand what is going on. The programmers on the other hand

had to think with a journalistic logic [...] I was shocked to see that even in 2011, at

origo.hu, the IT division and the journalists lived in two very separate and even

antagonistic worlds.(...) we felt it much more what the reader needed and could react

more quickly and change the system accordingly. I did not have to correspond by email

with the IT department, when I wanted something, and then if I am lucky they respond

in a month that they could not do it. Instead I sat next to K. or K. sat next to me and in

two hours it was done. Or in two weeks, but I spent that much energy on it. At origo.hu I

saw that every process like that was painstakingly slow and full of red tape.

To sum up, the insulation of the newsroom/journalists from product

development and audience engagement had two consequences. One, that

journalists retained their notion of an abstract audience, instead of

thinking of them as citizen-consumers (Deuze, 2007), two that their

platform mentality, i.e. mediological agency (Boyer, 2011,2013) was

weaker than that of the Kontaktszerk people, who were more acutely

aware of market dynamics and consumer behavior. So, it was found that

the way the organization was structured, influenced journalists’ affinity

for technology and their relationship with the audience, which ultimately

affected their willingness and ability to experiment with non-traditional

reporting, such as participatory journalism.

VI.3. Journalistic roles

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VI.3.1. Newsroom culture and reporting style

My first day at origo.hu was on the 12th, December 2012, and I stayed

there until February 2013. When I arrived, the story of the day was the

demonstration wave of university students for reforming higher

education, expanding the student quota, and giving back autonomy to

universities. Demonstrations, spontaneous and organized by student

lobby group networks were held all over the country of such scale that

was last seen in the 90s. The news section at origo.hu was moderately

excited by the events, and sent its youngest journalist to report from the

scene.

During my fieldwork, the news site was in the last phase of a major

site redesign project, which started in 2011. One day when I stepped out

of the elevator on the third floor, where the newsroom was located, I was

surprised to see U.P. the recently resigned editor-in-chief of index.hu, the

main rival news site. He was going in the office of the relatively new

editor-in-chief, who used to work at Index.hu as well. Later I learnt that

they had hired U.P. to assist in the redesign project. During the 2 months

I conducted my fieldwork, I never heard journalists discuss the redesign

project, which was managed (behind closed doors) by a small team

without the newsroom‘s input, requests or feedback. That showed how

insulated the journalists were from development, programming and that

the interface was basically put under them.

One day I went to have lunch with the head of the economy section,

and at one point he referred to origo.hu as the ‘factory’. Recalling the

classical work of Gans (1979) who wrote that newswork is like screwing

nuts on a bolt, as on an assembly line, I was surprised that journalists in

2012/2013 used the phrase themselves, when the digital environment was

supposed to liberate them from the constraints and monotony of desk-

bound work. However, talking to more and more journalists in the

subsequent weeks, it seemed to me that screenwork ‘bound’ them even

more.

The original headquarters of origo.hu was in the outskirts of the

town, in a multi-story office building. In the beginning they had cubicles,

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but then some journalists initiated the removal of the folding screens, and

the ‘folding-screen war’ broke out. Eventually the screens were removed.

The new headquarters were downtown (this was where I conducted my

fieldwork), already starting with an open workspace, and only the editor-

in-chief was sitting in a different room from the rest of the staff.

Similarly to other newsrooms in the age of screenwork, not much

discussion was taking place, if any. A journalist who in 2013 had been

recently hired from a smaller online economic news site told me that this

work environment was much more alienating than his former workplace,

where the whole news team sat around a table, talking to each other.

The newsroom was not overly decorated. There were two posters -

one of Ahmadijenad and one of Viktor Orban - and a red flag, all hinting

at a rebellious spirit in the otherwise neutral office space. A TV was on

the wall, but it was never switched on during the two months I spent

there.

Normally it was the head of the News section (he was also a deputy

editor-in-chief) led the morning meetings (sometimes his deputy or the

head of another section, or the editor-in-chief). The editorial meetings

were conducted in a smooth but a bit tense fashion, where journalists

gave a status report on their current assignments or presented ideas for

new stories. The head of the news section (S.G.) decided which idea was

worth following up and gave them directions on how to proceed. From

his feedback it was apparent that the norm of “balanced reporting” was

still highly respected. “What is against it? What is for it?” - he would ask

about any issue at hand. Stories that did not require too much journalistic

work but had a news value were sent to the “newsroom”, managed by

two journalists, which functioned like a news feed on the site - with links

to other news sites.

Mild swearing during morning meetings was very frequent. (Who

fucked it up? Let’s fuck with it at a slower time, that’s a sucker,

etc.)Typical slang phrases of the young generation could be heard, such

as “We should ask some right-wing faces” (jobboldali arcokat) or “push

that story” (nyomassad), we push a video story on it (videó anyagot

tolunk róla, “let’s pull another skin down from it” (húzzunk le róla még

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egy bőrt). It all created an atmosphere of macho easy-goingness, but also

tenseness and a sense of urgency. Borrowed words from English also got

into the lingo of the team (I am in the fact check phase, or “we can make

it into a top”, hinting at the homogenization of newswork in the same

technological environment. (Hallin & Mancini, 2004)

Telephone interviews were regarded as having more value than

email correspondences, so when a topic was important, the head of the

news section encouraged journalists to find informants who they could

talk with over the phone. When the meeting was over, the regular

sarcastic phrase of the head of the news section was “Good vegetating to

everyone”, which kind of set the mood for the screenwork ahead of the

staff.

In the four months I observed the processes at the newsroom, I never

heard any loud debates between journalists on any issues, everything was

toned down, the large space was always relatively quiet apart from the

clicking of the computers and some random chats between journalists.

This collective habitus matched the objective, neutral, distanced, cynical

traditional code of journalism (Luengo, 2016). From the interviews and

from my observations it was clear that Origo.hu in 2013 adhered strongly

to the model of orientating journalism (Deuze, 2003), as they decided on

in the 90s, which meant a closed journalistic culture and a focus on

editorial content, explaining issues to an abstract audience. At the same

time, they also made it a priority to distance themselves from the elite

and the “consecrated experts” which in fact matched the ideology of

participatory journalism. See the Deuze (2003) quote here.

(...) news professionals will have to find ways to strike a balance

between their identities as providers of editorial content and the realities

of public connectivity (as in providing a platform for the discussion

society ideal-typically has with itself), as well as between its historical

operationally closed working culture, strictly relying on ‘experts’ and a

more collaborative, responsive and interactive open journalistic culture

(Deuze, 2003, p. 219)

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S.G., the deputy editor-in-chief told me that Origo journalists

privately resented that in Budapest they were much less popular than the

rival Index.hu, but that whenever they went to the countryside, they had a

little comfort in learning that they were the number one online news

source choice there. However, he dryly admitted that in fact both news

sites became kind of grey in their own way, Origo in its distanced and

neutral tone, and Index playing the funny lad all the time. The journalists

themselves partly blamed their outdated editorial system, which they

inherited from the 90s without any major overhauls, and partly their own

newsroom culture for not being able to innovate.

It seemed that the initial strategy to become the Hungarian BBC

(balanced, neutral, sensible) gradually became an obstacle of adapting to

the participatory news environment. Journalists in 2013 still valued

telephone conversations to other means of data gathering (see the

literature review for the source gathering strategies of ProPublica or

Gazeta Wybortza, or the Guardian). They retained a cynical, detached

analytic attitude to the events and actors they reported on. The

newsrooms had a palpable anti-elite mindset, and from the interviews

(see in the box below) it was apparent that journalists individually

wished to have more experiments and to be more in tune with the events

and with their audience.

All journalists agreed that the online text had to be more informal

than the print. One journalist, who used to work at an economic print

daily, told me that anyone can sit in front of the Internet, and the goal is

to get as many clicks as possible, so they must tailor their language to

that. It shows that the newsroom’s audience perception was abstract, and

traffic numbers reassured them that they had a good hunch about it. First,

I show quotes from the interview that revealed traits and journalists’

perceptions of their own newsroom culture.

Newsroom culture

Zs. Journalist (female, 30s)

In 2004, the online press was much more exciting than the print. New winds were

blowing, many young people were working in one place and there were people who you

could learn from.

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She told me how after university it was beyond question for her to search work at an

online newsroom.

W.B. (first editor-in-chief)

In 2005-2006 I noticed that the paper was not good at all, it was crap and I wondered if I

should just leave the whole thing. The paper had no character; there were a lot of slap-

dash, and a lack of problem focus. The journalists were obsessed with the page

impressions of their articles, which was partly my fault, as I wrote them each week,

which story received the most. A competition started and with it came the silly titles

After that the newsroom was transformed, some people were fired, which W.B.

remembered as a tough task he undertook mercilessly, but others recalled him as being

too soft-hearted and not dismissing enough useless people. New journalists were

recruited, and the first editor-in-chief was called back in 2008 as senior editor and the

news site began going uphill. According to the editor-in-chief by 2011 it performed as it

should have, but a new CEO was appointed and the two iconic heads of the newsroom

were abruptly fired for having too much informal power over the newsroom that could

block new directions planned by the management. From hindsight it was clear that it was

the first step to politically control the portal.

Zs. Journalist (female, 30s)

There are very few papers that can call themselves independent and in our newsroom

this is totally true. They do not really interfere with anything.

It did not mean that they never heard about the phone calls coming from the

management, but considered it as being part of the normal.

Zs. Journalist (female, 30s)

Those who were too open about their political views soon left the newsroom; they just

did not fit in. We rarely speak with temper on any issues; we take them with a pinch of

salt, viewing things from a distance.

G.A. Editor-in-chief

Stress is encoded in the system here, in the decade-long culture and in the people. At

Index it was much harder to edit a weekend paper, where people were much lazier. To

put it bluntly, at Index there were 50 artists, here there are 50 hardworking people, if it

was 50-50 here, we could make the ideal newspaper. At origo, there is a much greater

control over the journalist.

S.G. (deputy editor-in-chief)

Through this, it is quite clear what differentiates origo.hu from index.hu and the other

news sites. I consider it the worst journalistic routine to have a problem and then ask the

experts about it, assuming that there is a superior group who are really knowledgeable in

something and meanwhile we ignore that they might have vested interests, they might be

hurt. It is not the problem that we dissect, but we collect opinions about the problem.

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(…) From that respect, origo.hu is really punk, we don’t give a damn about what

someone thinks, only care about the causes and the solutions of problems. I think this is

really important and in that respect origo is still the best among the Hungarian

newspapers. (..) I think it is a very healthy gesture to say that we do not necessarily try to

meet the expectations of a certain group, but instead start from the sum of the audience’s

judgment.

He added that they could not always avoid relying on analysts, because of the weak

news gathering skills in the Hungarian press in general. “Journalists should build their

networks more strategically. We need more concrete facts.”

Reporting style

W. B. (first editor-in-chief)

We wanted to provide a neutral, fundamental news service, using common,

straightforward language for the masses and not for the intellectuals, which was a good

fit with the culture of the MATAV company.

He led the newsroom for 11 years and his visions, struggles and ambitions all left their

mark on the newsroom’s culture, which I encountered in 2013. The model that they

tried to implement was the objective reporting style of the BBC.

G.A. Editor in chief

I just want to have clear, clever, straightforward and shorter texts that readers

comprehend immediately, read from beginning till the end and recommend it to their

friends, so that they do not have to go anywhere else to learn more about it. If the reader

finds those things that she wants, if you offer her the possibility to step forward, if you

can constantly push out new content or publish new information, then the reader will

stay or come back and the Sales is happy, and everybody is happy.

When I talked to the relatively new editor-in-chief of origo.hu in 2013, he explained

how he wanted to change the style of the articles, which he felt were heavy and

roundabout. He also felt that the news product should be more attractive, but thought

that the staff was lacking creativity because of the inherited newsroom culture.

G. journalist (male) early 30s.

Origo is only dealing with conflict situations; it feeds on conflicts. It is much more

depressing than index. Let’s assume that there is a conflict between the Roma and the

police. I go there, I speak with different actors, I look at it from many different

perspectives, and I make a balanced report, adding a little color here and there to make it

readable. There’s so much more out there that we do not discover. We always follow up

things instead of being more proactive. (..) Index is living in the present much more.

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Let’s say that they built a transformer house at an impossible location. Index publishes it

and 5000 people like it. We go there two days after and ask five people why they did it.

Even hvg is more attuned to the public sentiment. We are thinking in a very one-

dimensional way. There is this cynical Origo voice, which is far too negative, and the

topics we cover are boring.

The young journalist added that they should do more experimentations, even if they fail

a few times. Another journalist told me that she thought that over the years the ‘direct

relationship of the source with the story got devalued and they do much less features and

local reports’.

In this second step, the newsroom culture was analyzed as a

hindering or enabling factor of the participatory engagement of the

audience. It was found that origo’s newsroom culture was in part the

outcome of its organizational setup (our neutral style matched the

corporate culture of MATAV). Being politically independent, having a

distance from the stories and politics, having a problem focus as the chief

norms embraced by the newsroom, on the one hand resulted from the

adoption of the Anglo-Saxon liberal journalism model, on the other hand,

served the interest of the company behind the newsroom. Interview

subjects in senior positions pointed out the high level of stress, caused by

a constant attention to traffic numbers, legitimating the newsroom’s

secure position within the multinational company. All this suggests that

the shift to the new practice of participatory journalism in an

organizational setup, which subordinates newsroom’s priorities to the

interest of the mother company, and values reliability, consistency and

‘screwing nuts on a bolt’ type of work, is effectively hindered.

VI.3.2. Professional expertise and weakness of mediological agency

As a next step, a specific aspect of the newsroom culture, i.e. journalists’

understanding of their professional expertise is discussed as enabling or

hindering the shift to participatory journalism. As it was mentioned in the

previous section, an important dimension of the Origo journalists’

professional identity in 2013 was their sense of independence from

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political influence and politics in general. They claimed that it was a

general advantage of the online outlets as opposed to the print ones then.

During my ethnographic fieldwork, I noticed that journalists did not

overly appreciate technological skills. This was probably the result of the

fact that they were embedded in a Telecom company, where it was the

task of the IT department to solve technological issues for them, with

which they did not have much contact. In 2013 one could be a senior

editor without much affinity for technology. During my observations in

the morning meetings I sometimes heard ideas about perking up a story

with an infographic, but these ideas never materialized. For instance on

my first day, there was talk about the government and the state gradually

absorbing and centralizing more and more fields by sending chancellors

to schools, centralizing the funding and overseeing of kindergartens,

pensions, hospitals. The head of the section threw in the idea of making it

into an infographic with different sizes of circles, showing “how much

each field was worth for the government” and to show how the state

grew compared to a year ago. Journalists grew moderately excited, but

no one signed up for managing the project, which would have required

the cooperation of the IT department.

Industrial associations, such as the National Association of Hungarian

Journalists, or the Forum of Editor in Chiefs (until 2016) were

established to nurture and enforce common (ethical) norms for the

profession. During one of our talks, the deputy editor-in-chief (S.G.) told

me that he thought that the internal rules of journalism were arbitrary and

almost impossible to pin down, which he did not relate to the local

journalism field but to journalism in general as a profession. In the

informal discussions, it was clear that the dogma of journalists as

society’s truth-tellers, and the first drafters of history (McNair, 2006,

Zelizer, 2004) was very strong in Origo journalists‘ professional self-

understanding. A tacit principle of newsworthiness was whether the story

was concrete and real enough or not. If it was too abstract, it was

normally discarded and was not dealt with. It has “to smell of real life”,

the head of the news section said. Stories had to have obviousness to

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them in order to get published. If “the seed of truth” in them was not

straightforward, the journalists had to work more with them.

Journalistic expertise

G.A. Editor-in-chief

We do not have to be a microphone stand, but we have to find the place for everything.

It is not always easy; in fact it is quite difficult. We slide from side to side, and I do not

mean politically but that we push less what we should and push more what we should

not. But this is a constant juggling and it is not within an hour that you have to be

balanced and clever, but in the long run.

S.G. Deputy editor-in-chief

Journalism cannot be simplified to --this is a good article and that is a bad one‘. The

judgment will always be a bit opinionated, so there is no canon to which articles can be

compared. This is why I think that the Forum of Editor-in-Chiefs is a dead end street. I

mean we need something to replace the National Association of Hungarian Journalists,

but it is an illusion to think that journalism will one day be distilled to a communal

experience that can become a benchmark. It will never happen, because there are so

many ways to look at an issue, and the rules are far from obvious.

S.G. Head of the section

Where does Hungarian tax evader go? Tax paradise interests me more than the media in

the Middle East.

Foreign stories were more likely to go in the paper if they had a local relevance.

In this section professional expertise was discussed as enabling or

hindering the shift to participatory journalism. On the one hand, the

relative lack of technological know-how hindered the shift, as

participatory journalism’s cybernetic aspect (based on feedback loops

and iteration) requires a familiarity with platforms and management of

big data. Furthermore, the emergence of the deliberative aspect of the

participatory epistemology was hindered by the fact that journalistic

expertise was conceived of as ‘balanced and clever’ reporting, where the

journalists draw the conclusions. This type of reporting did not leave

room for procedural transparency and collaborative framing. In the next

section, audience engagement and audience perception are discussed, the

most directly related factor of participatory journalism.

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VI.4. Journalists’ perception and engagement of their audience and

of user generated content

In this section, I review how journalists’ discourse about the audience

and the content produced by the audience enabled or hindered the shift to

participatory journalism and how it changed over time. First I will go

back to the very beginning of origo.hu, as the news site’s relationship to

its audience can be more easily understood in that larger perspective.

In Hungary, the two pioneer online news outlets (index.hu and

origo.hu) had a prominent mediating role in bringing the Internet to the

public. For this new generation of journalists in the 1990s, the Internet

represented a new frontier of the free market that they could conquer,

where the better wins. Journalists looked at their audiences as traffic

boosters that legitimated their presence in that free market arena. In that

context, any audience activity was regarded as a potential source of profit

and not as a potential to instigate change. A sort of digital commons

around issues, hobbies emerged in web forums, but journalists (judged

from their discourses on the Oral History of MODEM) regarded them as

an almost threatening, golem-like by-product of the news sites and did

not necessarily link them to their reader base in their head. In other

words, in the local journalistic imagination the audience as citizens was

not particularly strong at the dawn of the online news field.

The online news field in the 90s

U.P. Former editor-in-chief of Index.hu (MODEM project)

The whole Internet had this free market ethos, and in this thing we felt as the real

trustees of this culture, and mentality, who on a market basis, freely started this whole

thing.

The whole thing (blog.hu) came from the Forum, which we had built a huge

community, but we also saw that it started to grow really big, that there is something on

us, which had become a burden so to say. We are doing the newspaper, whose content

we take responsibility for, and here is this dangerous, enormous thing, which neither

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brings income, nor can be sold, and it does not add to content, cannot be managed and it

has become completely independent.

Searching for participatory projects from the early phases of Origo, I

reviewed the Origo Report, prepared by the four founding figures (2

journalists, 1 sociologist and 1 programmer) in the 1990s, commissioned

by MATAV Zrt. before giving a green light to launching the news site. In

it among other strategic issues it was explained how they conceived of

their relationship with their audience. They planned a magazine called

‘Human factor’ with IRC chat/real time interviews and crowdsourcing

user questions (only registered users could pose questions, moderated by

a journalist). In 2004, the newly elected Prime Minister, Ferenc

Gyurcsany was invited and in 2008, just before the elections, Viktor

Orban. This practice was very similar to what the Washington Times did

on the social news site, Reddit many years later in 2017 the AMAs

(AskMeAnything) sessions.

In 2006 a participatory project was carried out, which was the idea

of a journalist, who enjoyed relative freedom due to his common past

with the founding members in alternative and community media projects

such as the Tilos Radio or Magyar Narancs. The project, entitled

Szabadnet.hu was pseudo-broadcasting live the events leading to 23,

October, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution.

Two journalists were working on it collaborating with the 56’ Oral

Archive Institute, the National Archive and the Hungarian News Agency

(mti). They published cultural, sports, foreign affairs, home affairs news

to show what led to the revolution and how life went on after the Soviet

troops entered Hungary on 4th, November. The journalists planned to

engage the audience as well by calling out to users to share with them

their personal documents.

Incaseyouhaveastory fromtheperiodthatyouwould liketosharewithother

readersandwiththescienceofhistory,pleasesendittotheeditorsofSzabadNet

(FreeNet).Ifyouhaveaphoto,object,memorybook,newspaper,drawing,notes,

diarythatcanhelppreservethepast,pleasesendthemthoseaswell.

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In 2008, the news site launched a hybrid platform, called

Komment.hu, with the aim of publishing opinion articles by users and

journalists alike17. N.G., the editor-in-chief at the time explained in the

moderating policy of the page that they wanted it to be a place of “cool

and rational debates” about “causes and nature of problems and about the

goals of public good”. He also made it very clear that he expected a

certain level of argumentation, and not ideas guided by “superstitions and

low-minded instincts”. So, the newsroom was inviting user-generated

content, but it was managed in a rather top-down manner. The callout

sounded like the newsroom was looking for potential freelancers, whose

articles were either accepted or not. Nonetheless, the goal of mixing

editorial and user generated content fit the criteria of participatory

journalism.

Journalists in 2013 at origo.hu unanimously told me that attracting

bloggers to their site had not been successful, mostly because of their

belatedness. It might be added that they had quite high expectations

towards user contribution. Another reason my informants mentioned was

that they were not able to create a community around the newspaper, and

in that respect a lot of them felt that the rival news site, index.hu

performed much better.

Another field where journalists interact with readers is in comment

threads. From the interviews I could discern three different journalistic

usages of reader comments. (1) to get story ideas or additional

information. (2) as feedback on their work. “If they berate it, it is funny,

if they praise it, it is flattering.” (3) as an opportunity to interact with the

readers and readers to interact with each other. One of my informants

told me that minority topics were a buzzword for particularly mean

commenters. The reservations they expressed towards reader comments

confirmed the findings of Tófalvy (2017) that online harassment

(trolling, bullying against journalists) had a soft-chilling effect

(journalists and readers walled themselves off from each other) and a

desensitization effect (where journalists treat harassment as normal and

17http,//www.komment.hu/tartalom/20081121-kommenthu-velemeny-celok.html

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shrugged it off) Some journalists told me that technical barriers also

made it difficult for users to become commenters. Plus, as in other media

fields, Hungarian journalists also found conversing with commenters too

time-consuming.

Reader letters, addressed to journalists provided another platform

where journalists and readers could engage with each other. Journalists

said that it was often those people who wrote letters to them who were

knowledgeable about the topics and sometimes they pointed out mistakes

in their articles. Sometimes they directly addressed their readers in

remote places/abroad to ask them what is happening, typically in case of

a breaking news or natural disaster. One example I heard was a hurricane

event in New York, when they asked readers who lived there or in the

vicinity to send them letters. They received more than they expected.

In contrast to a large segment of American journalists, who tend to

engage in dialogue with their followers on Twitter, journalists at origo.hu

monitored the social network sites (Facebook, Twitter mainly) for

information gathering, story ideas and to reach sources. The journalists

never engaged in dialogue with users of the social network sites and

when I was there they did not consider creating a position for audience

engagement.

One tangible means of gauging audience preferences was through

metrics. It was the task of the “front page manager” (on a rotating basis),

to upload incoming articles, give them titles and constantly monitor the

page impressions to remove content, which was not performing well. A

frequent question I heard in the mornings was “Who is doing the front

page?” The person on duty had to do it at night or early in the morning

by around 6am. “This is our Bible” - explained the journalist whom I

observed during work. The importance they attached to it echoed back

the “mediological anxiety” concept of Boyer (2013), who said the online

journalists’ chief task was to “tame” the robust information flow.

“Audience clicks are the steady pulse of the nation’s beating heart, the

response of the national audience....a pattern that soothed if never fully

silenced the murmurs of mediological self-doubt” (idem, p.83)

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Audience perception

The editor-in-chief pointed out that it was very important to find a balance between

those types of content that they know would pull in a lot of readers and those that they

deemed newsworthy based on their own professional judgment. When I attended the

meetings, I sometimes heard journalists or the head of the news section to decide against

a story if “it was not in the air”, i.e. they relied on their intuition to judge whether for

instance the issue of Hungarians over the border was something that was already a hot

issue or it was too cold to put in the paper. “How much does this have a peak right

now?”

U.P - former editor-in-chief of Index.hu about origo.hu referring to 2011-2012

(MODEM project)

I went there, and I did not believe what tools there were. It is a miracle that they

survived until then. They did not have a clue about what was happening to the readers at

the time.

N.G. former editor-in-chief of origo.hu (MODEM project)

Today it is very hard to imagine, but despite being a print paper, it (Magyar Narancs)

existed in a continuous feedback state. However, when Origo started, the majority of

my acquaintances did not use the Internet at all, so it was not a high visibility thing. If at

that time someone asked me where I worked and I said I was a chief editor at Narancs,

then within a large circle everyone knew what it was. They did not necessarily respect

me for it, but I didn’t need to explain further. If one and a half years later they asked me

what I did and I said that MATAV has this website, and I am the editor-in-chief, they

were like.....oh so you work with these computers...?‘

Zs. Journalist 30s

Gypsy topic is a typical field for those lunatics who appear in the comment box.

I also learnt from her, that in 2010, the newsroom was quite enthusiastic about being in

constant contact with their readers, but then they realized that it was too time-consuming

and they stopped conversing with them.

P.Sz. R. Journalist, editor of Postr

When Weyer asked me to do it, I told him to leave me alone, bloggers are idiots, I don’t

want to deal with them. I had been in the blogosphere before; I was also in the jury of

the Golden blog. But then I started to like it. I had to decide whether to put a blog to the

front page or not and to write a lead to it. Basically this is what I do.

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Audience engagement and integration of user generated content

G.A. Editor-in-chief

It is Origo-characteristic. There is very little or no dialogue with our readers. It is also a

result of the paper’s positioning. Our neutral style does not evoke a lot of emotions.

This is depressing, because there would be a need for that, but we don’t get many letters

from our readers.

Zs. Journalist, 30s Female

A lot of stories come out of comments and they make my job easier. I can learn what is

going on and what readers are interested in. There is one problem that you don’t know

who is writing those comments. So, we never write an article based on comments only.

(...) Sometimes, if there are comments under my article, which have an information

value, I ask the commenter if she/he would like to talk about it in more detail and that

they can contact me via my email address.

G.A. Editor-in-chief

I want to reach subcultures with high quality content. This is why we made the gastro

section, the travel, and our music, Quart was renewed, while we reorganized our culture

column going into a blog-like direction, where we not only give what is obvious in the

online world, but classical music as well. Index also had an experiment with it, but I

think ours is more successful. And it was in this spirit that we pulled in the ice hockey.

He also explained that niche topics still generated lively discussions, but political articles

did not produce as many comments as they used to.

In this last section the newsroom’s perception and long-term

engagement with its audience was discussed in how it affected the

emergence of participatory journalism. The archive research revealed

that readers at the start of web journalism were considered more as tools

in a traffic competition and less as consumers/citizens. This mindset

hindered the deliberative aspect of participatory journalism to emerge. At

the same time, in the late 2000s, Origo was very proactive in engaging its

readers in news production - via chat room interviews or inviting opinion

pieces (komment.hu). There were technical barriers of commenting,

therefore communities did not evolve around the paper.

Later, the audience influenced content selection quantitatively

(through metrics) and qualitatively as well via journalists’ monitoring of

social media content and via reader letters and reader comments.

Journalists were reticent about engaging with the commenters because of

the online harassment they experienced.

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VI.5. Summary

The case study analyzed in this chapter was designed to explore the

conditions of participatory journalism by focusing on the organizational

processes. In particular, I examined three factors, organizational

workflow, journalistic norms and audience engagement. The analysis

highlighted that Origo‘s audience engagement and audience perception

cannot be described as a linear process leading from little to high

engagement. Rather, it adopted a participatory ethos in some periods in

its history, which yielded a few participatory projects, with periods of

backtracking from participatory engagement again. Specifically, the

deliberative aspect of the participatory epistemology did appear in a

project where opinion articles were invited from readers, to be published

on the same platform with journalists. However, from 2013, orientating

journalism persisted and the audience was again conceived of as an

abstract entity, in need of news fed to them. Nonetheless, though metrics,

the audience quantitatively and qualitatively kept on affecting the content

selection, which is a weak form of participatory journalism (Engelke,

2019). Examining the causes of this limited engagement, my

ethnography found that the organizational workflow with a lot of red tape

inadvertently prevented the newsroom’s leverage in experimenting with

participatory journalism - not having the flexibility to experiment with

technological solutions on an ad-hoc basis. This means that lack of

audience engagement does not necessarily stem from journalists’ lack of

ideas or willingness, but from the organizational workflow – which

seems to be a key factor in affecting the emergence and sustained

presence of the practice.

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VII. Chapter: Explaining differences in crowdsourcing

across the field: A comparative analysis of newsrooms’

roleperceptionsandpractices(2013-2014)

VII.1. Introduction

The origo.hu case allowed me to zoom into the organizational processes

that facilitate or hinder audience participation in news production. In

Case 3, in turn, I sought to zoom out from a specific newsroom, and use a

comparative approach to understand why some newsrooms are more

participatory than others. The tobacco shop scandal (which erupted a few

months after I finished my fieldwork at origo.hu) generated a particular

type of participatory practice in several Hungarian newsrooms, namely

crowdsourcing. My research questions for this case study were the

following:

RQ1 Based on their used sources, what role perceptions guided

newsrooms’ reporting during the coverage?

RQ2 What types of crowdsourcing can we differentiate according to

the role perceptions of the newsrooms?

I used trace ethnography and discourse analytical methods focusing on

the interaction between users and journalists, and on the journalistic

voices in the published articles. From the literature I leaned on

journalistic role models related to participatory journalism. I explained in

the Methodology chapter my sampling rationale and the procedure of my

content analysis. To recap, four newsrooms’ articles and a blog, which

was specifically launched for this project, were analyzed. I prepared my

sample based on tags from 2013 Jan 1 to 2014 January 1.

Scholars claimed that on the web, with its dispersed information

control and collective intelligence, journalists need to shed their

professional distance, objectivity and traditional modes of fact-checking

to opt instead for procedural transparency (McNair, 2006, 2017, Lewis,

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2011, Shirky, 2010). Journalists are also supposed to leave their

institutional walls and interact with the public in a reciprocal manner,

asking questions, acknowledging ignorance and answering queries as

well, which according to these scholars meant that journalism

unavoidably becomes more honest, fluid and transparent. “News is no

longer naturalized. The “underlying arbitrariness” of the news, as media

scholar Nick Couldry (2003) puts it, is no longer obscured by the

symbolic power of its representations, thus opening it up to increased

scrutiny and criticism” (Russell, 2011, p. 66). Hungarian journalists

embraced this participatory epistemology and asked their readers to share

with them their observations and knowledge. The only exception in the

sample was origo.hu, with its orientating journalism, which relied on

scoops and confidential sources, but linked to other news sites during the

coverage. 24.hu (with monitorial journalism and strong on virality)

decided to create an anonymous blog, where one of its investigative data

journalists subscribed to dialogical journalism and employed networked

gatekeeping and crowdsourced a lot of local information related to the

case, which otherwise would have been very difficult to obtain.

Nonetheless, it did it in a clandestine (non-transparent manner). Hvg.hu -

left leaning with monitorial journalism - crowdsourced a lot of personal

stories. 444.hu with its instrumental/ service type of journalism

crowdsourced photos mainly. Index.hu - instrumental, closer to

orientating than 444.hu- also invited readers to send them letters and

asked its readers to sift through the winning tenders. Three newsrooms

asked users to send them their concession applications if they had not

won. Index.hu, 444.hu hvg.hu, origo.hu, atlatszo.hu, TASZ (HUCLA),

Transparency International Hungary and K-Monitor (NGO and blog)

turned together to the National Development Agency in the name of the

Freedom of Access to Information of Public Character to request the

right to see the application evaluations, the evaluators and winners’ data,

displaying some level of inter-newsroom collaboration.

The findings suggest that different positions in the journalism field

affected the democratic outcome of crowdsourcing, since newsrooms

focused on monitorial journalism trusted their readers with providing

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them with data and stories, while newsrooms in a more heteronomous

section in the field (focused on instrumental journalism) relied on the

audience for softer content (photos). Further, in the constrained media

context, it was safer for a newsroom to manage crowdsourcing on an

external platform and users were willing to contribute, even if they did

not know who was behind the project. It can be assumed that the less free

a journalism field is, the more citizens see democratic value in

participatory journalism. The chapter consists of three parts. First I

briefly explain the case, then I place the newsrooms in the journalism

field according to their reporting style, and type of sources during the

story), and in the third part I analyze their crowdsourcing - the

‘channeling in mechanisms’ (callouts to readers) (see Barzilai, 2008)

and the incorporation of the crowdsourced information in their news

products.

VII.2. Summary of the events

The tobacco shop licensing monopolization in 2013-2015 was a major,

extended media story. It was a rare instance when a relatively long-term

and persistent cooperation between amateur users and journalists could

be observed, and where news outlets in general displayed more open

practices than normally. Political actors (from the opposition parties)

were also active on social media. In September 2012, the parliament

approved of the Law CXXIV (2012) on the suppression of smoking

among youth and on the retail trade of tobacco products, proposed by the

Minister of Prime Minister’s Office (János Lázár). The new law

nationalized the tobacco small retail market (42.000 retail places), i.e.

brought it under state monopoly and established a public organization,

the National Non-profit Tobacco Trade Ltd., which was to distribute the

new 5415 concessions for the tobacco shops. The lawmakers stated in the

new law that in the concession distribution they would give preference to

people who had a disadvantaged position in the labor market

(handicapped people or women returning from maternity leave).

According to the new law, the trade margin was increased to 10% (from

the previous 4%), so that the new businesses would guarantee a solid

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income for their new owners. The first suspicious event to leaked out was

that the draft law, sent to Brussels for approval, had been last modified

on the computer of Janos Santa, the head of Continental Group, the

largest Hungarian Tobacco maker company (rival of Philip Morris

International Hungary with a production plant in Eger and of BAT,

British American Tobacco company with a production plant in Pecs).

Santa was also a close acquaintance of the Minister of the Prime

Minister’s Office. It soon became clear that new law was meant to give a

competitive edge to the Continental Group. The next breaking news was

that high-ranking Fidesz members sent the lists of applicants for the

concessions to the local representatives of the Fidesz party, in order to

screen them according to their loyalty to Fidesz. New companies were

registered and store-floors were purchased even before the official result

of the tender was announced. The mayors or local Fidesz leaders were

explicitly told to remove those applicants who in any way supported

opposition political parties. A politician who participated at a local

council’s meeting (in Szekszard) leaked a recorded audio material to

hvg.hu, which proved that political screening of the applicants took

place. The evaluations of the proposals were kept secret even though it

was a public tender. Journalists later revealed that more than 500

concessions (10% of the total number) got in the hands of the Continental

Group-circle. Besides the illegal tendering procedure, regulatory failures

also happened. “One and a half thousand settlements were left without

points for making tobacco sales, the lower-than-expected number of

applicants, the greater-than-expected number of loss-making new

businesses forced the initiation of the rapid feedback and continuous

correction processes that were managed by the regulatory state or by

National Non-profit Tobacco Trade Ltd.” (Laki, 2015). In 2015, another

business concern of Janos Santa, who actively participated in

constructing the new law, won the right together with BAT (without the

notification of other market players) to become the wholesale distributor

of tobacco products. (Prior to that tobacco manufacturers distributed

themselves the products to the retailers).

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VII.3. Newsrooms’ role performance and journalistic culture

In the first step, I categorize newsrooms according to their role

performance. Based on their reporting style in general, and the diversity

and type of sources during this particular case, I placed the news sites I

included in the case study on the typological map of Deuze (2003). This

served as the explanatory framework for comparing their manners of

crowdsourcing.

444.hu in 2013 was launched by the ex-editor-in-chief of index.hu

(U.P, quoted several times in the previous chapter), a charismatic leader

who to a large extent forged the newsroom culture of index.hu. During

the tobacco shop case, in one month (from May to June 2013), it was

apparent how frequently 444.hu referred to their readers as sources.

Besides that hvg.hu was a prominent source and once they linked to a

Tumblr post, which suggested their open journalistic culture. Because of

their curatorial practice and service-type of reporting I placed them in the

instrumental journalistic segment. (Figure 11)

444.hu’s sources during the scandal

governmental sites

Facebook pages

readers

commenters

nol.hu

hvg.hu

index.hu

Constitutional Court

Tumblr

Blikk.hu

Companies‘ Gazette

their own observations

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24.hu, which was the news site that launched the

trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu, which will be analyzed later, was linking more

frequently to tabloid outlets, mentioned readers as sources, who were

often celebrities in line with their goal of producing viral content.

Compared to 444.hu, they more often reported on politicians’ statements,

and showed more openness to citizens’ perspectives (reporting on

demonstrations, a representative survey). Launching the blog on an

external platform to crowdsource user-generated content separated them

from 444.hu, index.hu and origo.hu, illustrating public connectivity and

closed journalistic culture (they distanced themselves from the blog);

hence, I labeled the newsroom monitorial. (Figure 11)

24.hu’s sources Politicians Citizens demonstrating Representative survey blikk.hu Bors hirado.hu hvg.hu vg.hu Nepszava.hu mti.hu Celebrities Readers

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index.hu’s sources index.hu Politicians (Parliamentary sessions) Demonstration (losers of the concession tender) Trafikterkep.com Hirtv magyarnemzet.hu hirhataronline.hu varosszíve blog hvg.hu Company Video report (Szekszard, locals) trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu Gfk (Market research institute) Facebook Celebrities

A unique feature of the source-types of Index.hu was how frequently

they linked to their own previous articles compared to the other 4 news

sites. They also prepared a video report in Szekszard, where a politician

recorded an audio material proving the corruption. They linked to right-

wing portals as well and to local news outlets. They linked to blogs and

very frequently reported on parliamentary sessions. All that suggests that

they were focused on editorial content (linking to their own site often)

but, the diversity of their sources show an open journalistic culture, so I

placed them in the section of instrumental journalism. (Figure 11)

Hvg.hu was the news outlet that published the highest number of

original articles during this scandal and their sources were the most

diverse. Hvg.hu is a medium-sized newsroom, with smaller resources

than origo.hu or index.hu. It was relatively strong on public connectivity

(had the strongest presence in the social media) and enjoyed higher brand

trust than the competitors. (Bognár, Reuters Institute, Digital News

Report, 2019). The newsroom culture was closed; meaning that the user

generated content underwent careful moderation. In this particular

scandal, hvg.hu clearly and more strongly than the other news sites sided

with the losers of the tender, expressing empathy with the lost livelihood

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of former tobacco owners. It made the biggest attempt at exposing in

detail (supported with data) the acquisitions of the biggest winners of the

corrupt tender (hvg.hu, 2013, June). They linked to right-wing and left-

wing outlets; they used web 2.0 platforms, investigative blogs and

mainstream news sites as sources. They published lengthy reports with

former shop owners. Plus, they wrote a number of editorials during the

scandal. So, they thoroughly followed the story and unlike the viral

tendency and more tabloid orientation of 24.hu, their audience perception

was more clearly civic. I placed it in the Monitorial segment. (Figure 11)

hvg.hu’s sources Politicians Former shop owners Readers Participants at demonstrations Parliament Opinion pieces K-Monitor.blog.hu Máté Szabó (Ombudsman) Teol.hu Politologist’s blog Atlatszo.hu Hir24 Cink.hu 444.hu Representative telephone survey Mti.hu Vg.hu Peterfalvy Attila (chairman of the Authority of Data Protection and Freedom of

Information) Kossuth Radio Origo.hu Press Conference Prime Minister’s Facebook page

Lastly, origo.hu also frequently linked to its own site. They also

talked to former tobacco shop owners, but did not conduct lengthy

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interviews with them. In line with their objective reporting style, they

published an article where they mentioned the ‘trafikmutyi’ but also

acknowledged the Fidesz (governmental party) for reducing the rate of

smoking in the country, citing a World Health Organization report. They

also used their own confidential Fidesz sources (origo.hu, 2013, April).

The articles were factual, as two-sided as possible - often publishing the

governmental positions during the scandal, linking to mti, the daily news

service, and to index.hu and hvg.hu and other newspapers to report on the

oddities around the tender procedure, such as the disproportionate

winning of people connected to the Continental Group. At the same time,

they did not shun away from juxtaposing the case to similar instances of

the state monopolizing formerly private assets (private pensions),

businesses. Therefore, as it was also explained in the previous chapter, it

displayed a closed journalistic culture and was focused on editorial

content; belonging to the Orientating segment.

Origo.hu’s sources Origo.hu Nol.hu Hvg.hu BAT (British American Tobacco Company) Nielsen, Gfk (market research) Mti.hu

Tobacco shop owners WHO Pulmanologist Napi.hu Politicians

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Figure11Newsoutlets'relativepositionsinthefield(mymapping)

In the next section I show how these field positions influenced the

type of crowdsourcing each newsroom applied and their democratic

benefit.

VII. 4. Differences in crowdsourcing

VII. 4.1. Crowdsourcing type 1: The infotainment-minded

collaboration

It was apparent how 444.hu and index.hu regarded the collaboration of

the press and web 2.0 users as part and parcel of their work, which

proved that they subscribed to the cybernetic aspect of the participatory

epistemology (Anderson & Revers, 2018). Index.hu shared a

governmental link of the concession winners on their news site and asked

readers to sift it through (index.hu, 2013, April, 23), but judging from a

lack of follow-up, it might not have been a successful attempt. With their

open journalistic cultures, both newsrooms invited their readers to send

them information, mainly photos of prospective shops to open, when the

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winning concessions were not made public yet. 444.hu (probably due to

its recent launching as well) celebrated the collaboration with their

readers as the “most successful community article series” they had ever

had. The photos were useful to show the absurdity of some of the

locations, next to schools, kindergartens, clinics, going against the spirit

of the law (suppressing smoking among the youth), but they served

infotainment purposes mainly. Both newsrooms placed the newly

opening stores on an interactive map, displaying platform mentality and

technological expertise. During the scandal 444.hu also tested three apps

for finding tobacco shops in the user’s vicinity, in line with its service-

type, instrumental journalism.

444.hu - callouts and results of crowdsourcing We received several letters from our readers that the local tobacco stores will open

directly next to schools. Such a store will open in Kismaros, as can be seen in the photo.

The newsroom at 444.hu is very proud about the popularity of the Tobacco Shop Map.

On Facebook the National Tobacco Shop is also using it. The map is easy to recognize,

because Tbg’s great icons are on it.

444 is expecting losing applications as well. The Ministry of National Development

returns the losing tenders to their applicants - wrote hvg.hu last week, although they

promised the complete opposite when they announced the invitation to the tender, wrote

Index today. Something is amiss - writes everyone today except for the spokesperson of

Fidesz. Hence, it remains to the press, bloggers, the Facebook users, Instagram users

and letter-writers to sift through the applications one by one. Why is it important?

Without the losing applications, the winners can neither be judged, it is impossible to

know whether they performed better in a real competition or other factors played a part

in announcing the results - wrote the Atlatszo.hu, which similarly to Index asked the

readers to send them applications with which they lost. This is a good idea; so we also

ask everyone, if they receive their tender application, send it to us. Either scanned

to szerk@444.hu or by post addressed to 1027 Budapest, Margit krt. 5/b., Magyar Jeti

Zrt. We of course do not promise to save the world with it. But at least the picture will

perhaps be clearer.

Thanks to our vigilant reader, we have found the record-breaker at the border of

Kőbánya and Rákoskeresztúr. On the two sides of Pesti út one can spot precisely 6

tobacco stores. If you know a place in the world, more crammed with tobacco shops,

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send it to us, because until then it is the official world record. Our panorama photo from

the place. The national tobacco shops have already bestowed upon the people a legendary design,

hair-raiser gangsta videos, and now here are the heart-wrenching photo arts with

children. Our readers sent us the following photos about children waiting for their

parents in front of the tobacco shops.

We still expect the spotted National Tobacco shops to szerk@444.hu.

In the most successful community article-series a lot of people sent us tobacco shops. So

many, that we might not even be able to put them all on a map. (....) If you have spotted

a tobacco shop, but it is not on our map, or just want to help with the expansion, we are

expecting the mails with “tobacco shop” to ed@444.hu.

Index.hu’s callouts and results of crowdsourcing It was until the middle of February that it was possible to apply for the 20-year

concessions. The government has made its decision now. On this link, you can see the

lucky winners in specific settlements. (....) On the list there are several peculiarities. In

Újfehértó two people share seven concessions. (...) From the names it seems that in a

large part of Esztergom, it will also be one family who will be the tobacco lord.(.. ) If

you see other peculiarities, write it to economy@mail.index.hu!

A grocery store, a clothes shop, and a bakery will all transform into a national tobacco

shop according to our reader and in Kenyermezo street a peepshow place will. One of

our readers sent us a photo about a store to be opened in Jokai Mor street. (...)

Several readers of ours wrote that in the 11th district, when they reconstructed the Match

to CBA, they already separated a tobacco shop space, although the evaluation of the

applications has not even taken place yet. (...) If you know of tobacco shops to be

opened in Budapest, write it to us to tema@index.inda.hu

The first type of crowdsourcing hence I call infotainment

collaboration, where the newsroom invites and values the collaboration

with the public, but the type of crowdsourced information (photos),

besides proving the corruption, serves infotainment purposes mainly.

VII.4.2. Crowdsourcing type 2: The civic-minded crowdsourcing

24.hu with its focus on public connectivity also invited readers to send

them letters during the scandal. After a while, they noticed that so many

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letters came, that the editor-in-chief decided to launch a blog (on an

external platform) to manage crowdsourcing. They symbolically

distanced the blog from the news site and the journalist was writing

under a pseudonym. As far as the news outlet was concerned, they were

in a news race and the blog with the crowdsourcing served the purpose of

producing as many new stories as possible.

“It was a sudden idea” - told me the journalist, who was asked to

manage the blog and had been covering the story. The story was

particularly suitable for collaboration with the audience, where “the little

citizen stood against the powerful state”. Envy, hurt and justified anger

played a role in citizens’ willingness to share the information they knew

with the journalists.

The journalist enjoyed the ease with which she received relevant

information, provided by the readers. She had a sort of double identity

during the project. On the blog, she relaxed her professional norms and

interacted with the community that provided her pieces of information.

She received 5-6 letters a day. She displayed dialogical journalism and

on the blog networked gatekeeping took place, as the readers provided

the scoops and issues, while she continuously verified the information.

Both collective wisdom and the affective nature of the public sphere

manifested. Readers not only shared their knowledge but also their anger

and frustration with what they experienced in the newly opening tobacco

shops.The trace ethnography revealed that the value of reciprocity

emerged in the interaction between journalist and users, where users

expressed gratitude for the journalist-blogger for giving them visibility.

24.hu’s callouts and results of crowdsourcing

It was the first time that I felt the community of readers behind me. It was a good

cooperation. We focused on those winners who were involved in politics. At last it was

not me who had to track down a story, but it was lying right there in front of me. It is a

great pain to make people find me with real stories“. (O. B.)

If you have a story that reinforces the suspicion of corruption, share it with the blogger

of Trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu.

As we already reported, based on Trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu, a relative of András Cser-

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Palkovics has won the tobacco shop tender. His mother is called Mária Zsuzsanna

Szigli, and the winner is Szigliné Pongrácz Anita Cser-Palkovics. Our source told us

that the mother of the mayor will also run a tobacco shop, but as it turned out the

concession winner is not the mother of the mayor, “only” a relative.

Click on the photo to the gallery! (If you see anything similar, send it to

Trafikmutyicafeblog.hu!

Have you got a similar story? Share it on Trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu!

As we wrote about it earlier, we have found a weird advertisement, reading the posts of

Trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu. In it they are looking for cashiers, sales clerks in national

tobacco shops, altogether 84. This is in itself exciting, since one person could only win 4

concessions, but in the ad they are looking for staff in huge numbers all over the country.

The ad was published by one person, who gave office@trakk.hu e-mail address as

contact.

Trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu

A commenter on the blog (replying to the question of the journalist)

It is possible to find it, but it is not easy.

Here are the business partners in the AMERICARD Kft (the source is the public

company database),

1/1. Gyulay Zsolt

HU-1037 Budapest, Máramaros köz 7.

effective, 1998/04/28 – 2000/05/02

Commenter on the blog (personal story, illustrating the affective dimension of web 2.0.

environment)

Today in the afternoon, in district XIV. , corner of Erzsébet – Nagy Lajos we were hit by

the rain. I pulled in below the roof with the kid, but within seconds there was a thunder.

We were standing next to a NATIONAL TOBACCO SHOP, so I had to flee inside with

the 2.5 year-old kid!!! There the clerk, referring to the law, with a stern face, sent us out

of the store, no matter how I pleaded with him not to send me out in the rain with my

child. But he insisted that we had to leave at once. So, I had to go out in the storm to find

another shelter. (...)

Blogger-journalist’s post,

If you click on the settlements, you learn who won the concessions, what interest group

they belong to and how they are related to Fidesz. From the database that was mostly

based on the information of the readers, it can be seen that companies without prior

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experience in the tobacco business won frequently, and if local people got the

concessions, then mayors, deputy mayors and their relatives became the winners. If one

wins a lot of concessions, he can make a revenue of a HUF hundred million without ever

selling one single cigarette.

What happened after this was beyond belief. To our call about sending us which „friend“

won in which place, letters flooded in. So many came, that I had trouble processing

them.

Help us to make tobacco concession transparent

Blogger-journalist’s post (an example of reciprocity)

One of my dear readers, the editor-in-chief of vagy.hu expressed his gratitude to me for

recommending two of their articles related to Debrecen. He also called my attention to

their new series, called the “Big National Tobacco Shop Gallery” (Nagy Nemzeti

Trafikos Látványtár ) where they publish reader-photos of incriminated stores and

related local information. It can be read here, ...

During the scandal, the journalist managing the blog went to work at

Atlatszo.hu, an investigative news portal with a platform where citizens

can securely send in confidential information. There she wrote an article

where she revealed that she was behind the blog, but she did not state

that 24.hu was behind the project. At Atlatszo.hu she continued covering

the story and invited those who did not win concessions to send her their

tender dossiers to compare them with winning tenders to reveal further

anomalies.

Atlatszo. hu - procedural transparency I prepared a table about the tobacco shop network connected to Zoli Vu, where I

included all important data ranging from the ownership structure to the profit of the

companies. You can see the table on that link, (excel). I extracted the list of the tobacco

shops from the database of NAV (National Tax and Customs Administration of

Hungary) (....) I collected the owners of the companies operating the tobacco shops with

the help of Opten, where I also collected the financial data of these companies, such as

their revenues. I found Ibolya and Magdi on Facebook, when I browsed the 2013 posts

of a group „Harmed by the Tobacco Shop“. To discover the names of the concession

owners I used the National Non-profit Tobacco Trade Ltd. (...)

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The rhetoric hvg.hu employed to make readers contribute to their

reporting was empathetic. Instead of specific information, they asked

people to tell them their personal stories (like ProPublica) and asked for

the possibility to get contacted by the journalists. So, one could claim

that they were more transparent in their crowdsourcing than 24.hu.

Hvg.hu’s callouts and results of crowdsourcing

We continue processing the data and publishing the stories. If you applied in vain,

although this is your livelihood, or you won and you didn’t even have a tobacco shop,

write us your story or how we can contact you to duty@hvg.hu. Write “national

tobacco” to the subject.

As a result of the list, and the articles about it, we have received a lot of letters. Stories,

explanations about how many practices, experience, and livelihoods must be dropped in

the dustbin and because of whom. We are constantly updating our list.

How do we work?

This year between the first of January and the end of May, according to Opten’s

company information database, altogether 1180 limited partnerships were registered that

marked tobacco-product retail as their main activity. (....). Most business concentration

behind the operations of tobacco shops and the limited partnerships can be detected from

former business relations of the general partners and limited partners of the companies

(..) We have examined each registered company one by one, and saw a concentration of

tobacco companies with several members. (...) It is not the Continental Group alone

where company networks are being built (CBA, COOP and the Vimpex -group also

collect a considerable number of tobacco shops), but Continental is the biggest so far.

For verifying the members and relationships of the companies, we also used social

media sites and informal sources.

The second type of crowdsourcing I called civic-minded

crowdsourcing, managed by newsrooms categorized as monitorial

(closed newsroom culture, public connectivity). Reciprocity, affect,

procedural transparency was observable in these journalist-user

collaborations. The crowdsourcing could be either transparent or non-

transparent. In the second case, it yielded more information; in the first

case, the articles had a more civic orientation, showing the effect of the

corruption on the victims.

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VII.5. Summary

In this case study, using a comparative approach, I sought to understand

why and how newsrooms with different positions and role

conceptualization engage the audience in their reporting. To do that I

chose a case where different types of newsrooms simultaneously engaged

their audience and tapped into the wisdom of the crowd to diversify and

enhance their reporting when local information was difficult to obtain. In

the case analyzed here, all newsrooms launched crowdsourcing to

perform well in the news race - and to be able to churn out as many

articles as possible. However, they did so through different types of

crowdsourcing. Understanding these differences has been the core focus

of this chapter.

First, I categorized the newsrooms and placed them on a typological

map. Then I compared how they managed the crowdsourcing. Finally, I

analyzed the civic shift and the quality of information they yielded. I

found two relatively distinct types of crowdsourcing. The first type I

called infotainment-minded collaboration. Newsrooms with instrumental

journalism realized this type. Infotainment-minded collaboration served

the viral logic, but also exploited the cybernetic aspect of the networked

environment. However, overall, it had little expectations from the

audience and it placed the same value on entertainment as information

gathering. As such, it had only minor benefits for the public sphere.

Newsrooms I identified as monitorial realized what I called civic-minded

crowdsourcing. I found that values such as reciprocityand procedural

transparency surfaced in these and the audience displayed quasi-

journalistic skills - e.g. digging out information from company databases.

The audience in this second type was treated as a real partner in the

newsmaking process, and reporting was greatly enhanced. Hence, this

type of crowdsourcing was comparatively better serving the public

sphere. As an idiosyncratic feature (unlike in Western journalism field)

the most effective crowdsourcing (yielding reciprocity between the

journalist and the user contributors and making users perform quasi-

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journalistic practices) was non-transparent. In other words, the newsroom

decided to launch a crowdsourcing blog on an external platform, where

its journalist did not reveal which newsroom she collected the

information for and she did not use her own name, but a pseudonym.

Interestingly enough, users did not mind this anonymity on the part of the

blogger; they trusted her, provided her with a lot of information. This

suggests that web 2.0 has its own system of credibility and legitimacy

and “field-specific capital”. It also suggests that in this secondary public

sphere it is not ‘the journalist’ who is considered as the ‘trusted

gatekeeper’, but basically anyone, who stands behind an issue, creates

conversation and produces value for the interested community (here the

blogger built an interactive map with all the local information that she

crowdsourced). In that sense, it reinforced the statement of the literature

(Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013) that web 2.0 can be meritocratic and

democratic.

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VIII. Chapter: Towards collaboration?

Participatory practices in a hybrid organizatinal

setup. Index.hu and Fortepan (2015)

On Index, collaborating with the editors of Fortepan we show the most

exciting collections from the heritages of Hungarian amateur

photographers

VIII.1. Introduction

The first three cases focused on how the traditional journalistic

organizations and the journalist field facilitated or hindered the

engagement of audiences. In these cases, audiences were the ‘intruders’,

the newcomers to be reckoned with. In order to gain a better

understanding of the processes that may facilitate participatory

journalism, in my final case study I focused on a different organizational

setup, where amateurs were a partner in the process. Here I examined an

institutional partnership between a commons-based photo archive,

Fortepan, and the then biggest and most read mainstream news site,

Index.hu. The collaboration in that form ceased in 2020, July, when

index.hu as an independent news portal became the victim of political

maneuvering. Now Fortepan collaborates with Robert Capa

Contemporary Photography Center to publish its weekly articles

connected to the photos under a Creative Commons license.

I focused on the gatekeeping processes (Barzilai, 2008) of the journalists

and Fortepan contributors in 2015, when the partnership began and

analyzed how gatekeeping processes influenced the projects’

participatory outcomes.

My research questions were the following:

R1 Compared to the cases described before, how could we describe

the gatekeeper/gated relationship in this (supposedly) more equal

organizational setup? Was the relationship hierarchical? Was it

reciprocal?

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R2 How did journalists use the archive and what stylistic

differences they displayed in their stories compared to their usual

reporting? Was there a move towards more civic tone,

conversationality, subjectivity, procedural transparency? Did they

facilitate communal storytelling?

For analyzing the dynamics of networked gatekeeping between the

journalists and the Fortepan I used Barzilai-Nahon’s theoretical model of

networked gatekeeping (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) I also relied on Benkler’s

(2006) theory of altruistic content production in a networked

environment and on Maria Luengo’s (2016) theory of civic versus

traditional code of journalism.

The method I used I explained in the Methodology Chapter. To

recap briefly, I used a mixed method of content analysis and semi-

structured interviews. I analyzed the sources and the rhetorical strategies

of journalists in 36 articles on Fortepan blog (2015, during 8 months). I

paid special attention to those articles that received higher than average

likes (11.000-16000) to examine which stories were receiving audience

recognition. I interviewed 3 journalists, who wrote on the Fortepan Index

blog, the founder of Fortepan, a volunteer editor and two photo donors.

My findings with the case study were the following. (1) In terms of

the gated/gatekeeper relationship, Fortepan fell to the ‘Frustrated Gated’

category (Barzilai, 2008), which is rather powerful, almost a gatekeeper

itself. (2) Regarding reciprocity, I found that both journalists and

Fortepan profited from the collaboration, but index.hu presented itself as

the ‘giver’/’helper’, downplaying the benefits it received from the

collaboration. (3) Journalists noticeably relaxed their professional norms

(which also came from the fact that it was a blog on the news site),

implying themselves in the articles, using more subjective phrases and

relied heavily on affect (nostalgia, anger, pain). In the beginning, they

used more outward links in the articles, displaying openness (to lyrics,

videos, books, blogs, the archive itself), and gradually the articles

became more authorial. They did not embrace the database logic, i.e. the

articles were not searchable. (4) Non-journalistic voices were allowed on

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the blog as ‘authors’, but carefully selected (the Fortepan main editor,

Fortepean cultural manager, and also a blogger who gained prominence

on the Index Forum. (i.e. emergent eliteness appeared to a very limited

extent, see Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). (5) Journalists regarded

Fortepan as a valuable, but unique and separate segment of the news site,

however the experiences gained from amateur-professional collaboration

were not transferred to other areas of the news site.

The chapter has the following structure. First I show the different

platforms of the Fortepan project, which became the basis of its

networked power. Then I analyze the relationship between Fortepan and

Index in light of the gated-gatekeeper relationship and break down the

complex gatekeeping process that took place. Lastly, through the

interviews and discourse analysis I analyze journalists’ perception of the

blog and their practices.

VIII.2. The Fortepan network

The Fortepan website itself, was launched in 2010 as a subjective

homepage of 5000 ‘foraged’ (from garage sales) analogue photos

digitized by two enthusiastic archivist with the aims of creating ‘virtual

flaneurs’ who can “view the whole 20th century with one click” to show

history from the ‘ground level’. They strove to link history with spaces of

the familiar. Prior to the official partnership, Fortepan already entered the

Index’s universe. In 2010, September, a chat forum on Index forum

started for the solutions (what was on the photo, where and when it was

taken) as a collective puzzle game. In 2014, January, the chatforum

composed of 70 people created 82.721 tags for 31420 photos (10.762

free word tags). The Forte blog (also ran on the Index blog engine),

sharing stories around photos and news about the archive was launched

in 2012. In December 2013, they started to collaborate with the

newsroom, 444. hu. By the same year Fortepan grew to a database of

34877 photos and Summa Artium, a cultural foundation, took over its

financial management. Fortepan wikia was launched on how to use the

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database, whereas Fortepan’s Facebook page functioned like a PR

channel, sharing news about Fortepan and articles from different outlets

that used or described Fortepan photos. The popularity of the archive

seemed to prove that “The computer age brought with it a new cultural

algorithm, reality-> media-> data - we may even call the database a new

symbolic form of a computer age” (L. Manovich, 1999).

The official partnership with Index.hu started in 2015, 18, April.

Index.hu announced the news to its readers as follows, “We have good

news, the Fortepan blog started on Index! For the occasion we collected

our favourite Fortepan stories in this article, unseen photos of ‘56, the

nostalgic photos of the building socialism. Apart from the unique

heritage of Uva-plan, the Mahart and Vati, what else did we get from

Fortepan? The question is rhetorical of course.” Two important elements

can be observed here. First, how the role of affect (Meraz & Papacharissi,

2013) emerged in the journalistic discourse in relation to the participatory

project (“favorite”, “nostalgic”), secondly the importance of reciprocity

(“what we got from Fortepan”) in the collaboration. They agreed to run

the Fortepan blog in the photo section of Index.hu (co-written by

journalists and Fortepan) with a weekly content, where Fortepan would

provide story ideas and photos.

VIII.3. Fortepan’s relationship with index.hu: reciprocity

In Barzilai-Nahon’s (2008) model of networked gatekeeping, the

relationship between the gated and the gatekeeper depends on whether it

is ‘reciprocal’, ‘sustained’ or ‘direct’. Given the long-term nature of the

partnership, we can claim that the relationship was sustained, the

founder-editor of Fortepan (T.M.) regularly communicated with Index

journalists. The photo editor (who was supervising the project as he was

the head of the photo section and was also fond of Fortepan) told me that

they to a large extent conceived of the partnership as “help” for Fortepan,

because it not only provided them visibility but also a source of regular

revenue. (“it was important that Fortepan should stay sustainable”). In

the contract they also stipulated that they had exclusive right to publish

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the newly arriving photo collections. The Fortepan founder-editor

pointed out the huge quantity of readers’ letters that the blog received

after the articles each week. In Table 6 I show the elements of

reciprocity. It seems that both parties profited from the collaboration and

Index even more so.

Table6.Elementsofreciprocitybetweenindex.huandFortepan

Journalists Fortepan Exclusive content (freshly donated photo

collections first appeared there) Visibility

Potential interview sources Regular revenue Loyal readership, traffic increase Readers‘ letters - feedback Crowdsourced knowledge of Fortepan

community

VIII. 4. Fortepan as ‘Frustrated Gated’

Fortepan had three attributes - (1) sustained/direct/reciprocal relationship

with the gatekeeper, (2) information producing power and (3)

alternatives (in 2013 they had partnered up with 444.hu). Using the

model of Barzilai-Nahon (2008) they fell into the category of ‘Frustrated

Gated’, where

gatekeepers rely on gated’s ability to produce information as

well as their participation and involvement in networks and

also are aware of the ability of the gated to switch patrons if

needed. Therefore, there is a sensitive balance in trying to

satisfy gated needs to ensure that they will stay in the

boundaries of control of the gatekeeper and also promote

gatekeepers’ goals. This enforces gatekeepers to fulfill a more

active role of guardian/protector and ensures that their social

networks or platforms are operational and satisfy all

constituencies. (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008, p1505)

As an illustration for the Frustrated Gated category, Barzilai (2008)

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brought up the minors’ community on MySpace. She explained how

MySpace as a result of the parents’ outrage over sexual predators on the

platform implemented special measures (self-regulating content and

rules) to protect their ‘gated’. Given the gatekeeping practice of the Index

journalists (they did not give room to free dialogue on the blog) such a

guardian/protector role could not surface, but they were keen on keeping

Fortepan on their site. In the next section, I show how the gatekeeping

process took place.

VIII.5. The five-staged- gatekeeping process

First (1) the new photo donor met the editor-founder (T.M) who selected

the photos he put in the archive and also listened to stories to learn about

their contexts. So, he was the first gatekeeper (selection or disregard).

Explaining his decision-making process, he said that he wanted to

digitize photos that were “positive” and “unofficial”. Hence, he

disregarded those that did not fit these subjective requirements.

Whenever a new photo collection arrived, it was immediately

announced on the forum when they would upload it to create suspense

and excitement. The first period was the most thrilling for the community

when the collection was still “bare” without any tags. This was the time

when the forum members were particularly active sending in their

solutions, and comments and took part in networked gatekeeping (2).

The different platforms (wikia page, blog forums, Facebook) facilitated

the process. The forum members helped to find out where the photo was

taken, on what formal occasion if there was any. Among the tags, there

was a high frequency of brand names, mood descriptions, object names

and place names. The networked gatekeeping was supervised by the

volunteer editors, who transferred the solutions to the administrative

interface (3), which contained an excel table with different categories,

such as ID, the date of the uploading, modification, picture, name of the

file, year, owner, description, search words, tags. These three editors

applied quasi-journalistic practices to verify the crowdsourced data, such

as offline research and corroboration (checking facts and hypotheses in

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different sources and attached a tag only if there was foolproof evidence.

One of the volunteer editors was sixty-three, having a full-time job in

commerce with a strong interest in history and photography. His chief

motivation for working for Fortepan was to learn and he dedicated a

considerable time of his to this project.

The three volunteer editors met once a month, but on screen they

watched each other’s work and often had debates and arguments.

Benkler’s (2006) interpretation of online civic content production could

be observed in the behavior of the forum users and of the donors who

gave over their collections. Benkler claimed that connectivity and

membership, as well as sharing and generosity would be the driving

forces of online participation.

The volunteer editors of Fortepan and journalists strongly relied on

the crowdsourced wisdom of the forum members, who were particularly

good at spotting tiny details that the editors would have overlooked, and

their greatest assets were having multiple viewpoints and local

knowledge. A historian, who was interviewed for the Fortepan exhibition

in the Hungarian National Gallery in 2019, also expressed his awe at the

crowdsourced wisdom of the community. The cybernetic aspect of the

participatory epistemology surfaced as well in journalists’ discourse. The

altruistic, hobby-like participation of the Forum members and also

readers of the blog in the decoding of the photos fit the paradigm of

Manovich, who said that “Once it is digitised, the data has to be cleaned

up, organised, indexed. (….) It gave millions of people a new hobby or

profession, data indexing” (Manovich, 2010).

Krisztián Ungváry, historian (MNG, Your past is my past18)

For example, in some photos there were bombed out buildings, whose

locations were a complete mystery to me. A reader however, was able, in a

matter of moments, to identify the scene as Kiev, even giving the name of the

road and the number of the house.

Forum member, volunteer tagger

This is not a market, but might be some kind of street vendor

18 https,//www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0I23F6F2zU&t=44s

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K. E. freelance journalist, index.hu

They help immensely. Data indexing is their volunteer work and they also

have a web forum. They can often identify the location based on a tiny street

detail, it is incredible.

Journalist, index.hu

And there is such a communal experience that if you look at the forums, it`s

mind-blowing. From a totally off the map place by looking at the corner of a

windowpane, they can tell you where it is, when it is, it`s brilliant.

Journalist Index.hu

They (readers, Forum members) will correct me if I write a wrong location.

The next step was what photos were published on the index.hu blog

(4) (selection), where the gatekeepers were the Index journalists, mainly

the photo editor. By writing and publishing the articles around the

photos, they also shaped and displayed the content. Here, classical

indicators of newsworthiness dictated the photo and story selection

process - such as novelty, connection to a current anniversary or event,

being funny. Sometimes they kept a story on hold (withholding, timing)

until newsworthiness could be attached, such as the birthday of the

person who was on the photos. The Fortepan editor acknowledged and

subscribed to the news sites’ preferences, but occasionally they were

allowed to present their own agendas (crowdsourcing knowledge,

publishing a story that they personally felt engaging, advertising their

merchandise to raise funds.

Lastly, (5) random users of Fortepan also acted as gatekeepers,

when they shared the photos with their friends and colleagues.

T. M.Fortepan founder We wanted to select photos - neither brutal, nor nostalgic - that pull in the viewer as

if they were right there. We need to digitize photos to be able to share and not because we need to preserve. Volunteer editor You will think me crazy but when a new package of photos arrive, I spend eight, ten,

twelve hours a day selecting and filtering out the mirrored images. User-donor woman, in her 40s I normally browse and watch it as a movie. I click on a random date and allow

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myself to flow with it. I often recognize household objects, look at the dresses,

hairstyles. I like to share some photos with my colleagues, and we laugh together. I

try to create a mental shortwave to the minds of those people in the photos.

Figure12Levelsofgatekeeping(myflowchart)

VIII.6. Journalistic perception of the blog

In the box below I collected those quotes from my interviews with

journalists that expressed what value the archive represented for them.

We can see that accessibility, the communal nature, the traffic it

generated on Index, its reflection on Hungarian history, the connection

to sources and stories it offered, and the mood (affect) that photos could

add to articles were emphasized. The journalistic roles of “story-teller”

and “truth-teller” also emerged from their discourse.

Fortepan’s perceived journalistic value

B. Sz. Index photo editor, journalist

Fortepan I think, well, you feel that it is yours, that you can also add something to it.

And it's not locked up somewhere so that only the privileged or those with money can

have access to it.

FirststepSelection, disregard, addition (Fortepan founder meets the photo

donor )

Secondstep

Networked gatekeeping, localization (Fortepan Forum members)

Thirdstep

Verification, transferring data (Administrative interface, Volunteer editors)

Fourthstep

Selection,withholding,timing,shaping,displaying(index.hujournalists)Fortepanblog

Fifthstep

Sharing,disregard(users)

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Fortepan is a mixed collection of private photos and the photos of big photographers,

such as Mór Erdélyi. There are countless photo collections that are not open for research

with the argument that they should not lay around without interpretation. Public

collections rot in the cellars. Fortepan in contrast is accessible and is a common treasure,

an exciting visual documentation of the whole twentieth century, which existed hand in

hand with professional photography. The archive is relatively structured and its appeal is

that it contains only minimal information for basic usability. The photos are

metaphorically scattered on a table saying to the viewer/user “you are free to do

anything’” with them.

I think that Fortepan on Index is the only content that consensually represents value and

I think that many people read only that.

It is important; it has a weekly section with slower content with a significant loyal reader

base. Some articles reach page impressions like 100.000 or 200.000, but usually 10.000.

K.Á (journalist, Index.hu)

It is a grateful material. People can feel that it is not only their private history. There are

also those problematic issues, which are more connected to macro history, starting with

the photos of 1956. People can recognize that tragedies they though were their own, are

in fact very much common, and that 100 000 people, or several 100 thousand families

went through similar experiences - from the Holocaust to the expulsion of ethnic

Germans. A lot of examples can be cited. Social memory-work was for a long time about

privatization, about enclosing memoires in a dark room, and about silencing. Now, after

a few decades there is a recognition that these are common stories. The photos provide

an important aspect of this, but the main issue is society’s reflection to its own history.

K.E. freelancer journalist, Index.hu

The communal usage is the most important thing in it and that’s why Fortepan decided

not to make it for profit, and that photos can only be donated. Fortepan should at least be

attributed as source, preferably with the name of the donor and with the index number of

the photo. Hence, it can grow, and those who have participated are acknowledged for

their work. There are a few archives now, going against the normal trend that digitalized

and uploaded their photos, and hopefully others will follow suit. Museums by the way

have a strange attitude to Fortepan - they easily use their photos without proper

attribution, and at the same time are protecting their own pictures very strictly.

I mostly write family histories, where I need to investigate or dig out something; I really

like this. Sometimes we can meet the owner of the heritage or with the descendants of

the photographer, which can make the process alive and intriguing (...) We still keep in

touch and correspond, we became sort of friends. Then she sent me another album, and a

second article was born. I love it when there is a continuation, when a reader writes to

me that she/he recognizes the place and was there as well. This connection part is very

important in Fortepan.

This resonates with what Benkler (2006) said about the networked environment, where

connectivity, altruism and trust drives users’ activities.

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Journalist, index.hu

I wanted to show how pathetic all this was. Some people must feel nostalgia towards the

1st of May, well I don’t.

When there is a well-known person, such as a politician, a sportsman, or it just reflects a

mood, Fortepan is great and can be used very well.

VIII. 7. Journalistic practices on the Fortepan blog

Examining the actual articles on the blog (and not the journalistic

discourse), in this section I show the findings of the content analysis. In

2015 the following topics interested journalists, the turn on the century/

the Kadarist and the Rakosi era/ the WW1/ the high bourgeois/elite

lifestyle at the turn of the century, weird sports/ the pioneer movement/

studio portrait photos/ the lake Balaton/ Csontvary paintings in a private

flat/ the Democratic opposition’s Santa Claus/ Christmas photos from the

century/ photos with dogs from the century/ football fans and

constructions of bridges/ the metro line/the National Theatre,

anniversaries. Apart from these, they also selected photos that had some

connection with current affairs. For instance in 2015, during the migrant

crisis a journalist showed photos with border crossings from 1961-81 to

Yugoslavia and from the Eastern block to the Western one.

The number of outward links used in articles showed the openness of

the journalistic practice. It was apparent that in the beginning, journalists

crammed their stories with links to film reels, youtube songs, blogs,

books, lyrics, videos, but later, the number of links diminished, giving

way to more authorial prose. To give an example, in an article on the

tourism to lake Balaton in the 60s, 70s, 80s there were links to a music

clip, a reader’s blog, four newsreel archives to another blog on index,

(totalkar) to a history news site (multkor.hu), a pop song from the 60s, a

reader’s blog (Timelord) a documentary film (Papp Gábor Zsigmond

Balaton retro, 2007) and another video clip with singer Ferenc Demjén in

1975. In the article on the border crossing, there was a reference to seven

books. As a stylistic experimentation, they illustrated the photos of a

cadet school with quotes from a well-known Hungarian novel by Geza

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Ottlik (School at the frontier) With time passing, less and less links

appeared and if so more and more linked to previous Index articles.

I examined journalists’ discursive strategies on the blog, whether

there was a shift to more subjectivity (when they implicate themselves in

the articles) and to conversationality, i.e. the adoption of the civic code

(Luengo 2016). A “diversity and creativity of introductory verbs in

reported speech or the prominence given to scene-setting elements in a

text, by introducing implicit evaluations of social actors’ intentions and

attitudes, or by making themselves present in the reported situation,

journalists at both papers assume a more assertive discursive identity

than they admit when declaring adherence to the objectivity norm”

(Smith, 2017, p 40).

Journalists’ and blog contributors’ conversational tone and implication in the

articles

Article 1

I am particularly happy that this photo of 1956 made it into the selection a propos of

the Árpád bridge (on the pavement of the Pest side) because I have never in my life

seen a 2-wheel baby carriage. I and the mother like it very much, but the kid

apparently does not so./ If this Dacia was driving alone now and not in 1984, we could

actually see it from the window of the Index, because it is on Florian square/ from

today the interior looks super-retro.

Article 2

In the Eastern-European comings and goings, the traces of the Germans from Bessarabia

would soon disappear, and their fate will be one like episode among many others among

the Saxons of Transylvania, the Ethnic Germans in the Banat, the Tatars from Crimea,

the Lemkos from Galicia, the Romanians Csernyivci and the Hungarians from Upper

Hungary. Let their memory be blessed.

Here the role of affect was particularly observable.

Article 3 (TA. Contributor)

The reader will surely reply in a second. Wow, a Concorde - in Pest! And no, if we zoom

into the picture (and the reader currently cannot, only when the picture will be on

Fortepan).

Article 4 (TA. Contributor)

They are probably Math majors. This wild guess is based on the fact that the student girl

on the left is extremely similar to the highly esteemed Math teacher of Radnoti Miklos

High School, whose hair style and figure have not changed since her college years.

Article 5 (TA. Contributor)

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We reached our final destination, the riverbank with the Hagenmacher and the Pannonia

steam mills, looking at it from the Margaret bridge in 1890. Thanks, for joining us!

Article 6 (T.M.Fortepan founder)

We can get an answer to one question though, who took these pictures? Who can be the

mysterious meat trader in Mester utca? Dear Reader, could he be your family member?

They addressed readers to ask their help to find information.

Callout to readers

Do you think that only famous people have interesting stories? You are wrong! If you

recognize someone on a Fortepan photo and you would like to share with us your

discovery, do write to us.

There were examples where journalists and the Fortepan members

were co-authors of the articles, or only the Fortepan editor appeared in

the byline. When Fortepan and Index journalists co-authored a piece, it

was also noticeably more conversational than when journalists were the

authors.

In 2015, out of the 36 articles in the sample there was one case when

the author was the owner of the foundation that managed the finances of

Fortepan and his article was recognizably more civic than that of the

journalists, and he also addressed the readers more directly. Another

example of a case where the journalists allowed a civic voice to appear

was when they asked a professional photographer, whose photos were

also put into the Fortepan archive, to comment on his own photos. The

founder-editor of Fortepan in 2015 published two articles, where one

advertised the Fortepan calendar to raise money for the foundation, but

we can also interpret it as a sign of reciprocity from the newsroom. As an

example of “emerging eliteness” (Meraz-Papacharissi,2013) once the

author of the article was a car historian, who acquired prestige on the

Fortepan Forum. Index asked him to select 13 pictures that were his

favorite and write about them. Journalists from time to time addressed

their readers and asked them to share their stories - but solely in the form

of reader letters. Index with the Fortepan blog expanded its boundaries,

and shifted towards dialogical journalism, but selected very carefully

whose story/voice it allowed on its site and did not experiment with

communal storytelling nor allowed public comments under the articles.

They limited the scope of interactivity to readers’ letters.

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One of the two articles that received the highest reader endorsements

(11.000 likes and 16000) was about a man living in great luxury at the

turn of the century and the other one was about holiday photos at lake

Balaton from the Kadarist era with iconic objects, such as Junoszty Tv,

Trabant, Ostyapenko. Both showed the role of nostalgia (affect) playing a

role in user engagement.

The photo editor acted primarily as a curator, and procedural

transparency surfaced in the discourse of the journalists. Regarding the

question whether engagement, participation and collaboration should be

transferred to other sections of index.hu, the interviewed journalists were

quite resistant and said that since this was not the profile of the news site,

so it would be odd. Journalists on the blog appreciated community

connectedness, and experimented with subjectivity and literary

techniques but refrained from treating the blog as shared property,

creating access or facilitating participation.

To conclude, self-implication, outward links, procedural

transparency, increased role of affect and conversationality, some

stylistic experimentations were observed in journalists’ practices (mainly

in the year when the blog started). However, in contrast to case studies

from the literature, index.hu journalists more strongly controlled the

content of the blog, and were highly selective in what civic voices they

allowed there as ‘authors’. They did not allow commenting on the blog

and communicated with readers in emails. In contrast to the New York

Times, which in 2012 already decided to serve not only as a newspaper,

but as a digital library, the Fortepan blog’s articles were not made

searchable, although as sources of micro-history it would have been

highly valuable.

VIII. 8. Summary

This last case study was designed to examine how participatory

journalism emerges in an alternative organizational setup, where instead

of the newsroom collaborating with individual readers or curating social

media, it establishes a sustained partnership with a civic project. The

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question was whether the result is qualitatively different and how that

collaboration affects the parties (journalists, audience) and ultimately the

public sphere.

The analysis suggested some key differences. The most significant

difference from previous cases was the higher level of reciprocity

between Fortepan and Index. I have identified a complex (five-staged)

gatekeeping process, which on the one hand entailed networked

gatekeeping (on the Index Forum) and Index journalists displayed

gatekeeping functions such as ‘selection’, ‘timing’, ‘withholding’,

‘shaping’ information. The volunteer editors of Fortepan were working

as ‘quasi-journalists’, corroborating information and verifying them, but

it was hidden from the blog readers and it was the Index journalists who

acted as the ‘trusted storytellers’.

On the blog, the journalists, in the first few months displayed highly

participatory practices, shifting to the ‘civic code’ (Luengo, 2016) and

were experimenting with different styles. They implicated themselves in

the articles, appreciated the communal, accessible, connective nature of

the archive and of the community. Benkler’s (2006) notion of the

altruistic content production was highly apparent in this participatory

journalism project, i.e. connectivity, membership, sharing and generosity

appeared both in the discourse of journalists and in the networked

gatekeeping process on the Forum. This was the democratizing benefit of

the practice.

However, the analysis also revealed that journalists were constrained

by their organizational role perceptions - and tightly controlled both the

published content and the discussions around it (interacted with readers

only via reader letters). Hence, neither communal storytelling, nor public

discussions were facilitated on the blog. The data-logic of the photo

archive called for a similar data logic in the blog articles, but this did not

happen. This suggests that journalists were more ‘loyal’ to the

organization than to the actual project that they were doing. With the

collaboration they temporarily changed their routines, but gradually

returned to their habitual ones - keeping control of the content and

making the Fortepan blog more self-referential (linking to prior index.hu

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articles). That suggests that institutional partnership in itself does not

guarantee the emergence of more participatory practices as long as the

value of audience engagement is not obvious for journalists.

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IX. Chapter: Conclusion

When I started my fieldwork at origo.hu in 2013, and asked the deputy

editor-in-chief and other journalists whether they could imagine moving

behind a paywall, they were all rolling their eyes in disbelief and claimed

that this was impossible in the small Hungarian media market. Now in

2020, after a persistent, multi-year-long politically orchestrated campaign

against the independent press, and further transformation of media

consumption habits, many online news outlets have shifted towards this

model, relying more and more on audience support. Recalling Engelke’s

(2009) typology of participatory journalism, where one stage is when the

“audience finances news via crowdfunding”, we can claim that

participatory journalism is on the rise and possibly enjoying its

renaissance. The question again is whether it is solely an economic

necessity or it carries democratizing potentials with regard to the public

sphere.

The introduction of the thesis started with the summary of a debate

from the closed Facebook group of the news site, 444.hu on the question

of reinstating commenting under their articles. The example showed how

newsrooms even two decades after migrating to the web are divided and

unclear about how to negotiate audience participation in their news

production practices. Now, in the conclusion I return to that news portal.

The ≠metoo-type case of Laszlo Kiss in 2016 was preceded by a similar

story in 2014, when 444.hu published an investigative report about a

teacher (giving only the acronym of his name), who in one of the elite

Budapest high schools created a cult around himself and sexually

molested students at the end of the 1980s. In 2020, inspired by the article,

a documentary was made about the same story and the filmmaker made a

lengthy interview with the 444.hu journalist on why and how he worked

on the story. The interview itself was not included in the documentary,

but was broadcast on HBO and 444.hu published the link with the title,

“This is how ‘Utána minden állat szomorú’ (Afterwards every animal is

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sad) was written-”19 This is important for several reasons. First, it shows

how convergence (the merging of different platforms and genres on the

web) transforms the rules and practices of each. It not only transforms

journalism into a genre of edutainment, but it also affects the professional

identity of the journalist, who in this environment often turns out to

become an important protagonist of his/her reports. In the cited interview

for instance, the journalist revealed his moral dilemmas about his work.

“I knew that he knew that when the article gets published next day, I will

ruin his life. It was not a comfortable feeling at all.” The journalists also

explained how he had rehearsed the interview situation and how nervous

he was when the actual meeting with the ‘predator’ took place. This

example also showed how the journalistic ‘product’ in the digital

environment is hard to circumscribe, since its boundaries are fluid and

one story can have multiple digressions, which are often beyond the

agency of the journalists. Here a documentary filmmaker helped to pull a

further skin off the same story, recirculating the original article in the

news ecology. So the boundaries of news are becoming more porous,

unpredictable and fluid. Thirdly, the example showed the emerging value

of ‘procedural transparency’ (how we acquired the information we

provide, ‘how the article was made’), which some scholars (McNair,

2017) claim will replace the norm of objectivity on the web. Others

(Carpentier, 2005) propagated the concept of ‘pluralist objectivity’.

This dissertation contributed to the scholarly discourse about the

changing professional roles of online journalists, especially with regard

to their audiences in the fragmented news environment. Participatory

journalism, based on collaboration between users and journalists, goes

hand in hand with the changing concept of news (understood as a

nonlinear process and multidirectional interaction). Participatory

journalism with the oversight of professional journalists offers one of the

best ways to channel in the dispersed knowledge of the audience. This

has both positive and negative potential. The greatest promise of

participatory journalism was to make more engaged citizens and to

invigorate the public sphere, making news more accurate and relevant to

19 https://444.hu/2020/10/20/igy-keszult-az-utana-minden-allat-szomoru

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people’s realities. At the same time, it also raises concerns that with the

weakening gatekeeping role of professionals, unverified and manipulated

information spreads freely on social media platforms, which to a large

extent took over the publishing role of the press. While understanding

these negative outcomes of participatory journalism is of central

importance, this dissertation took a step back and focused on what makes

the emergence of participatory journalism possible and on the processes

that allow for more democratic outcomes to emerge. It explored the

meso-, and micro-level factors that enabled or hindered journalists’

ability to engage the audience in assembling the news between 2013 and

2016.

Scholarly literature theorized about the boundary work of

professional journalists faced with the participatory logic of the digital

environment, claiming that their sense of professional control is in

tension with the participatory logic of the networked environment. In this

simplified narrative, the factors that potentially derail participatory

journalism remain black-boxed. Hence, I chose versatile case studies to

look at the phenomenon from different angles with magnifying glasses. I

spent three months at an online newsroom, observing journalists in their

work and interviewing them about their role conceptualizations. I

selected media events that triggered widespread discussions in web 2.0

platforms and examined how they influenced mainstream news, and

lastly I observed a partnership between a news portal and a civic project

to examine whether the collaboration carried civic values or not.

To analyze these issues, I used four key conceptual lenses. The first

was boundary work, through which the user-journalist interactions

around news were investigated. The concept of networked gatekeeping

allowed me to clarify the relationship, power dynamics and information

control mechanisms between citizens (as gated) and journalists or

bloggers (as gatekeepers). The third lens, which I used was field and

practice theory, while the fourth one was journalistic role typologies,

which helped me to identify enabling and disabling factors in the

democratic outcome of journalist-audience cooperation.

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From my first case study I concluded that the audience in the

Hungarian online news media field did display deliberative competences

by offering arguments, sharing their experiences, criticizing the reports

and the media’s bias in general, thus assuming and demanding an active

role in the newsmaking process. They also displayed their boundary

work through the framings they provided, which – albeit based on the

mainstream media news -, were more focused on social and moral issues.

Journalists on their part acknowledged the collaboration between social

media and mainstream media, and understood their role as curators of the

polyphonic newsflow, however, striving to be the agenda setters, they

strictly controlled the information flow. They regarded ‘synthetizing’,

‘analyzing’, ‘contextualizing’ as solely professional jurisdictions, even if

users were also capable of doing that. Journalists largely dismissed the

deliberative aspect of the participatory epistemology, treating user-

generated content as sources. It seemed that the top-down, opinionated

journalistic culture hindered effective collaboration with engaged

members of the audience. It was also observed that bloggers who

participated in discussions under their post, generated more informative

and rational debates than journalists who failed to interact with

commenters.

The second case study, designed to explore the organizational

processes underpinning journalists’ willingness to engage the audience in

newswork, yielded the following findings. Origo.hu journalists

experimented with participatory journalism in 2006-2008, and even

embraced the deliberative aspect of the participatory epistemology

(when opinion articles were invited from readers to be published on the

same platform with journalists in 2008). Nevertheless, I found that the

bureaucratic organizational workflow prevented the newsroom’s

experimentation with more audience-centric practices. First, commenting

on the site was made difficult because of security reasons. Secondly,

journalists had very limited flexibility in using different platforms. The

newsroom was insulated from technological processes, so journalists’ so-

called mediological agency (Boyer, 2011, 2013) was limited to curating

news feeds in the mornings and to paying attention to front-page articles’

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page impressions. The main requirement towards journalists was to write

balanced, problem-focused articles (praxiological agency) instead of

building communities around the newsroom. To compare, when in 2011

after a four-day long heavy street riot, the Guardian partnered up with

the London School of Economics for a collaborative project for a social

research study, they interviewed 270 youngsters (in the first phase),

many of whom had been arrested during the riots and analyzed more than

2,6 million riot-related tweets. They “hosted a number of community

conversations across the country to allow people in riot-affected areas to

respond to the findings of the first part of their study. Their goal was to

stimulate discussion.”20 This project showed how a mainstream news

outlet in a liberal media system could reinterpret its role in the public

sphere by not only exploiting the proliferating sources available but also

lending its expertise of interviewing to social research. Meanwhile it

became a participant in the public dialogue and by subscribing to the

deliberative epistemology facilitated debates on controversial social

issues.

During the tobacco shops’ monopolization scandal, different types of

newsrooms simultaneously engaged their audiences for crowdsourcing. I

found two relatively distinct types of crowdsourcing. The first type,

realized by newsrooms with instrumental journalism (Deuze, 2003) and

which I called infotainment-minded crowdsourcing exploited the

cybernetic aspect of the networked environment, but overall it placed the

same value on entertainment as on information gathering, so I judged it

as being of minor benefit to the public sphere. Newsrooms with

monitorial journalism realized what I labeled as civic-minded

crowdsourcing where values such as reciprocity and procedural

transparency surfaced and the audience displayed quasi-journalistic

practices - e.g. digging out information from company databases. The

audience in this second type was treated as a partner in the newsmaking

20 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/01/introducing-phase-two-reading-riots. As the Guardian explained, the collaboration was inspired by a similar initiative after the 1967 Detroit riots, when journalist, Philip Meyer and Nathan Caplan, a psychology professor launched a project with ’citizen journalists’ to understand the perspectives of the rioters.

178

process. Hence, this type of crowdsourcing was serving the public sphere

comparatively better.

The last case study was devised to examine how participatory

journalism emerges in an organizational setup where users are not

“intruders” but actual partners. The chosen case was the Fortepan blog on

the late-index.hu, the biggest mainstream news site at the time. The

question was how that collaboration affected the parties (journalists,

audience, Fortepan members) and the news content. The most significant

difference from previous cases was the higher level of reciprocity

between Fortepan and index.hu. There was a complex (five-staged)

gatekeeping process, which on the one hand entailed networked

gatekeeping (but only on the Index forum). Benkler’s (2006) notion of

the altruistic content production was highly apparent in this participatory

journalism project, i.e. connectivity, membership, sharing and generosity

appeared both in the discourse of journalists and in the networked

gatekeeping process on the Forum. The volunteer editors of Fortepan

were working as ‘quasi-journalists’, corroborating information and

verifying them. Journalists on their part performed gatekeeping functions

such as ‘selection’, ‘timing’, ‘withholding’, ‘shaping’ information and

acted as the ‘trusted storytellers’. On the blog, the journalists initially

shifted to the ‘civic code’ (Luengo, 2016) and implicated themselves in

the articles with personal comments, evaluations and outward links to

user-generated content as well. Nonetheless, journalists were constrained

by their role perceptions and they gradually normalized the blog into

their general workflow. Hence, neither communal storytelling, nor public

discussions were facilitated on the blog.

Based on my findings, I propose that the collaborations of

newsrooms with the audience is likely to have a democratizing effect on

the public sphere if (1) journalists embrace both the deliberative and the

cybernetic aspects of the participatory epistemology and (2) if there is

reciprocity between the citizens and the journalists during the

collaboration.

In sum, my dissertation calls for a more nuanced approach to

understanding the current challenges to participatory journalism – one,

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which is sensitive to its local context (journalistic role perceptions and

organizational settings); and one that identifies the processes through

which its democratic potential may be realized or derailed in the

increasingly chaotic and fragmented information environment. These

processes can be the channeling mechanisms of crowdsourcing, the

discursive orientations of user-journalist interactions, and the presence or

absence or reciprocity in their relationship, as well as the newsrooms'

workflows, which may extend or limit the freedom of journalists to

experiment with more participatory practices at different stages of their

work.

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Köszönetnyilvánítás

Először is hálás vagyok azért a három, intellektuálisan gazdagító évért, amit a

Film-, Média-és Kultúraelméleti Doktori Programon tölthettem. Külön

köszönöm dr. Hammer Ferencnek, hogy segített mederbe terelni a kutatási

témámat, és, hogy nemzetközi konferenciákra küldött, ahol az újságíráskutatás

kurrens témáiról hallhattam. Hálás vagyok Dr. Müllner Andrásnak is, hogy

előopponensként segítette a disszertációm megírásának a befejezését.

Szakmai köszönettel tartozom a Lex CEU miatt nagyrészt már Bécsben

működő Central European University (CEU) médiakutatási intézetének

(CMDS), hogy kutatói ösztöndíjasukként évekig hozzáférést kaphattam az

egyetem fantasztikus könyvtárához és a közösségük tagjaként részt vettem

számos inspiráló előadáson. A CMDS-en belül külön hálával tartozom Bognár

Évának és Marius Dragomirnak az értekezésemhez nyújtott tanácsaikért.

Szintén köszönettel tartozom dr. Sükösd Miklósnak, aki sokat segített a

disszertáció megírásának az utolsó fázisaiban. De legnagyobb hálával

témavezetőmnek, dr. Simányi-Pellandini Lénának adózom, aki segített az

összegyűjtött információkban rendet tenni és tudományos keretekbe helyezni

azokat.

Nagyon köszönöm a kutatásom újságíró alanyainak, hogy válaszoltak a

kérdéseimre és megosztották velem a szakmáról való gondolataikat. Név

szerint kiemelném az indexes Szabó Zoltánt, Dudás Gergelyt, Kiss Esztert (aki

már nincs közöttünk), Barakonyi Szabolcsot, és a hvg.hu-tól Kiricsi Gábort. Az

online újságírás gyakorlati folyamatáról rengeteget megtudtam a szerkesztőségi

etnográfiának köszönhetően. A terephez való hozzáférésért örök hálával

tartozom az egykor még független origo hírportál újságíróinak: Weyer

Balázsnak, Gazda Albertnek, Sáling Gergőnek, Dull Szabolcsnak, Galambos

Marcinak, Wirth Zsuzsának, Fabók Bálintnak, Pálinkás Szüts Róbertnek és az

origo.hu többi munkatársának.

Személyesebb vizekre evezve köszönöm Zagyi Veronikának, hogy okos

meglátásaival, szakmai elhivatottságával segített az értekezés megírásában.

Simonovits Zsófinak, aki segített önbizalmat gyűjteni, bátyámnak, Andrisnak,

aki bátorított és noszogatott felváltva. A szüleimnek is köszönöm, hogy a

tanulást, tudásra való nyitottságot megszerettették velem, s lámyomnak,

181

Szonjának is köszönöm a türelmét. És végül a barátaimnak/rokonaimnak –

Simonovits Borinak, Schneider Csabának, Varga Jutkának, László Flórának,

Szemerédi Katinak, Benedek Áginak – is köszönöm a biztatásukat.

Az empirikus anyagok gyűjtése óta rengeteg átalakulás történt a

hírmédia piacán, ikonikus újságok/hírportálok tűntek el, de ezáltal sok energia

is felszabadult a szakmai megújulás, újrapozícionálás irányába. Mindeközben a

hírportálok közösségi finanszírozása is egyre elfogadottabbá vált, ami a

nyilvánosság politikai kisajátítása ellenére is azt sugallja, hogy az újságírói

munka társadalmi szerepe még egy meggyengített demokráciában is nemhogy

csökken, hanem növekszik.

APPENDIX

Table 7 INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Name Date of the interview

Position Newspaper Case study

Sz Z 2016 Content strategist

index.hu KISS CASE

D G 2016 Editor-in-chief

index.hu

S. G. 2013 Deputy editor-in-chief

origo.hu ORIGO.HU ethnography

W. B. 2013 Editor-in-chief (until 2011)

origo.hu

D. Sz. 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

W. Zs 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

B. 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

F. B 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

Sz. 2013 Sales-newsroom mediator

origo.hu

P. Sz R

2013 Postr blog editor

origo.hu

G A 2013 Editor-in-chief (2011-

origo.hu

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2013)

B R 2013 Journalist (economy)

origo.hu

A 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

E 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

G M 2013 Editor (economy)

origo.hu

G 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

Á 2013 Journalist (economy)

origo.hu

R A 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

F T 2013 Journalist (news)

origo.hu

G 2013 Journalist (sports)

origo.hu

O B 2020 Journalist 24.hu/atlatszo

TOBACCO SHOP CASE STUDY

B SZ 2018 Photo-editor index.hu FORTEPAN- INDEX.HU COLLABORATION

KE 2018 Journalist index.hu T M 2018 Fortepan

editor (founder)

Fortepan

Volunteer editor

2018 Volunteer editor

Fortepan

K Á 2018 Journalist index.hu

Interview guideline with the editor-in-chief at Origo.hu (2013)

MEDIA MARKET

Who are the chief rivals of Origo apart from Index? (Print dailies,

Facebook, international news sites, blogs?

How did the new Media law influence the newsroom’s life?)

183

What are the added values of journalists in the news flow today in your

opinion?

What is the function of a general news site necessary when the public

sphere is so fragmented?

MANAGEMENT & NEWSROOM

What expectations have you received from the management since you

became the editor-in-chief?

What are your goals as editor-in-chief?

You are currently redesigning the news site. What priorities do you have

with this? What are your visions, goals with the new interface?

In what ways does the company help the newsroom in its daily routine

work and in launching new projects?

In what ways does the company hold back the newsroom in launching

new projects and in its daily routine work?

AUDIENCE PERCEPTION

How has the relationship of origo.hu with its audience has changed in the

last 10 years?

Do you see room for more interactivity with your readers?

To what extent do Hungarian readers influence the direction of online

journalism? Do you think that crowdsourcing can work here the same as

in the US or in Germany? How receptive are Hungarian readers to data-

journalism and interactive features?

What are your experiences with the online audience? Are there too many

trolls and cyberbullying compared to other countries?

NEWSROOM CULTURE

What forms/types of reporting do you want to strengthen? (Interactive

data-enhanced, investigative journalism?

Do you plan to hire people with more technological expertise?

Do you plan to make the newsroom more diverse by hiring Roma people

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or immigrants?

What are the best ways of storytelling? Does origo.hu live with these

techniques? Do journalists possess the necessary skills?

Tobacco Shop scandal - URL links for trace ethnography

https,//444.hu/2013/05/30/iskolak-mellett-is-lesznek-majd-trafikok

https,//444.hu/2013/05/27/magyarorszagon-vilaghiru-a-nagy-trafikterkep

https,//444.hu/2013/07/09/a-444-is-varja-vesztes-trafikpalyazatokat

https,//444.hu/2014/10/08/figyelem-egy-kislany-varja-szuleit-a-bejaratnal

https,//trafikmutyi.cafeblog.hu/2013/05/15/kilo-a-klolab/

https,//atlatszo.hu/2018/04/05/trafikbarok-budapesten-vu-quy-duong-mar-92-

nemzeti-dohanyboltban-erdekelt/

https,//atlatszo.hu/2013/07/08/visszakuldtek-kuldje-be-nekunk-felhivas-a-

trafikoncesszio-veszteseinek/

https,//hvg.hu/gazdasag/20130620_500_trafik_egyetlen_kezben_trafikmutyi

https,//www.origo.hu/itthon/20130429-pofonegyszeru-ukazt-kaptak-a-

trafikokrol-a-fideszesek.html

https,//index.hu/gazdasag/2013/04/23/ok_arulhatnak_majd_csak_cigit/

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