Interlopers are a class of digital-peripheral journalists and outlets who position their work as journalism, but who have struggled to be recognized as such. While we have long acknowledged journalism's place online, as digital-peripheral journalists interlopers face challenges when it comes to appreciating their work as news and their contributions as journalism. This article argues their contributions warrant further evaluation as the journalistic field continues to confront change and engage new approaches to journalism, and as interlopers continue to produce news. Using Deadspin's coverage of the Sinclair Broadcast Group as an exemplar of such contributions, this article details an approach which accounts for interlopers' unique approaches to news, locating in broader news discourse measures of "journalistic realization" as a legitimating discourse. Its findings tentatively suggest a weakening of historically hardened boundaries between journalism's core and its periphery, and argue for continued, nuanced exploration of the nature of the journalistic field.
This article by the Digital Journalism Editorial Team surfaces with the explicit ambition to reassess the field of Digital Journalism Studies and map a future editorial agenda for Digital Journalism. The article dissects two important and closely interrelated questions: "What is 'digital journalism'?", and "What is 'digital journalism studies'?" Building on the commissioned conceptual articles and the review article also published in this issue, we define Digital Journalism Studies as a field which should strive to critically explore, document, and explain the interplay of digital and journalism, continuity and change, and further focus, conceptualize, and theorize tensions, configurations, power imbalances, and the debates these continue to raise for digital journalism and its futures. We also present a useful heuristic device-the Digital Journalism Studies Compass-anchored around digital and journalism, and continuity and change, as a guide for discussing the direction of the growing field and this journal.
Journalism’s once-neglected periphery has been a focus of academic research in recent years and the urge to make sense of interlopers from the periphery has brought about many approaches to understanding these changes. In this essay I reflect on an ongoing research agenda examining one particular category of interlopers: provocative media actors who have openly challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field. These actors raise questions as to how to account for interlopers at the edges of the journalistic field, including whether we should extend the field to include them. In this essay I argue we should continue to see the field as complex, and maybe now a bit more so. Reflecting on field and practice theories and understandings of boundaries, I reengage the complexity that is a core demand of conceptualizing the journalistic field, while offering ways to consider interlopers’ journalistic identities within its boundaries. Emphasizing similarities over differences, I argue we can move beyond binary distinctions between a field’s core members and interlopers on the periphery by focusing on the nature of interloper work.
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