Understanding the Digital Newspaper Genre: Medium vs. Message

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the cultural and cognitive artifacts that information and communication technologies circulate have become entangled with human and technical actors to the point of inseparability. These entanglements are primarily driven by the proliferation and wide adoption of online and mobile technologies. As a result, we discern the migration of previously physical artifacts to the digital realm and a transformation of the relations between users, information, and technology. A prominent example of the shift from physical to digital is the transformation of the print newspaper genre to the digital newspaper genre. Adopting a sociomaterial approach and building on genre theory, this paper presents an investigation of the nature and emergence of the digital newspaper based on an ethnographic study of a major news and publishing company. We find significant changes in the context, the news offering, and the roles of actors involved with the newspaper artifact – emerging with the introduction and adoption of disparate media. Drawing on the empirical findings, we conclude that the digitization of the newspaper emphasizes the central importance of the medium and transforms the author-reader relations from interaction to intra-action. Hence, the print to digital shift is demonstrated to have profoundly altered the very notion of the newspaper genre.

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