Technology, Monitoring, and Imitation in Contemporary News Work

Abstract

This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has been an increase in journalists’ use of technology to learn about the stories competitors and other players are working on and a parallel decrease in the reliance on face-to-face encounters with colleagues to gather this information. Second, this greater technology use has been tied to an intensification of monitoring and an expansion of imitation in the newsroom. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of editorial work in the leading online and print newspapers of Argentina, these changes are analyzed to make scholarly contributions about the role of technology in monitoring and imitation. This analysis also provides a window into the intersection of communication, culture, and critique in contemporary journalism by showing how recent forms of technological appropriation in the newsroom have shaped how journalists gather information and make meaning out if it in a way that affects their ability to be critical.

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