Exploring the boundaries of journalism: Instagram micro-bloggers in the twilight zone of lifestyle journalism

Abstract

The arrival of new actors in the journalistic field increasingly necessitates new conceptual approaches to better understand journalistic work in the digital age. Social network sites have played an important role in these processes, with the rapid emergence of non-traditional actors engaging in activities that may be classified as journalism. Yet, while scholarship on Twitter and Facebook has continually expanded, the visual platform Instagram has received comparatively little attention, despite being an important venue for new forms, particularly in lifestyle journalism. Through an examination of professional lifestyle Instagrammers’ discursive constructions of journalistic boundaries and their role perceptions, this article suggests that in their key values and functional understanding their approach resembles traditional journalistic occupational ideologies, and their role perceptions are very similar to those of lifestyle journalists. The findings contribute to our understanding of transformative processes in journalism more broadly, and their implications for journalistic values, ideals, and practices.

Processing news on social media. The political incidental news exposure model (PINE)

“…From a perspective of journalistic practice, many microbloggers and semi-professionals contribute to fulfill key democratic functions of journalism, most importantly by creating content that answers the informational needs of the public (Edgerly, 2017; Edgerly et al, 2009). In doing so, they also tend to ascribe to journalistic key values (Maares and Hanusch, 2018). To understand the full potential of SM, all of these different forms of news – defined as ‘new information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public’ (Stephens, 2007: 4) – have to be considered.…”

Peripheral news workers expelled to the periphery: The case of camera reporters

“…Lewis and Usher, 2016). Some work on the periphery of journalism and are termed peripheral actors (Maares and Hanusch, 2018: 3), in-betweeners (Ahva, 2017: 1), semi-affiliated professionals (Deuze, 2009: 85), journalistic strangers (Holton and Belair-Gagnon, 2018: 71), intralopers (Holton and Belair-Gagnon, 2018: 75), second-class journalistic citizens (Zelizer, 2004: 40) and unworthy others (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018: 147). These are workers who produce journalistic content but who do not belong to ‘traditional journalism practice’ (Holton and Belair-Gagnon, 2018).…”

“…The periphery description is nowadays used to contextualize non-professionals who produce content for (mainly social and online) media (e.g. Ahva, 2017; Ferrucci and Vos, 2017; Maares and Hanusch, 2018). But peripheral news workers have existed since the beginnings of the profession as journalistic teams evolved from the one-man-band in early newspaper history (Örnebring, 2010), to the one-man-band in the current, converged media newsrooms (Reinardy and Bacon, 2014).…”

Blurred boundaries: Citizens journalists versus conventional journalists in Hong Kong

“…A common way to explore current boundary work in journalism is through the study of journalistic role perceptions, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Empirical studies have been conducted both from the perspective of professional journalists (Hujanen, 2016; Örnebring, 2013; Tong, 2015) and citizen journalists (Kuś, Eberwein, Porlezza, & Splendore, 2017; Maares & Hanusch, 2018; Mapudzi & Osunkunle, 2017). Studies on professional journalists’ view of non-professionals still seem to dominate.…”