Promises unfulfilled? ‘Journalism 2.0’, user participation and editorial policy on newspaper websites

Abstract

The ideology surrounding Web 2.0 has been increasingly studied in a critical perspective (Zimmer, 2008). At the same time, several works have begun to give empirical results about the effective uses of Web 2.0 services, particularly online interactions on social networking sites (Aguiton and Cardon, 2007;Boyd and Ellison, 2007). In this article, we try to achieve both an ideological deconstruction and an empirical observation of a particular segment of Web 2.0. We will focus on digital journalism, a professional and academic field in which an internet-induced revolution is regularly predicted: with mass media defeated by weblogs, professional journalism turning into 'citizen' or 'grassroots' journalism and so forth (Gillmor, 2004). Placing this debate in an international perspective, we will first examine the ideological assumptions behind the work of two researchers on 'journalism 2.0', one writing in French, the other in English. Then we will try to explore the material concretization of these promises of 'a more participatory media culture' (Jenkins, 2002: 360) within a corpus of newsmedia websites in Europe and America.Through such analyses, our goal is to make a comparison between the ideological predictions of what Web 2.0 should bring about, and the actual realization of one of its central ideas concerning digital journalism: a large participation of internet users to newsmaking. The ideological dimension of Web 2.0 theorySince they appeared at the end of the 18th century, (material) communication networks have been accompanied by ideological views concerning their impact on society (Mattelart, 2000). These views were reactivated and renewed around the vision of a more participatory internet. Explicitly referring to the emerging success of sites like Wikipedia or Flickr and practices like blogging or tagging (O'Reilly, 2005), the buzzword Web 2.0 propagated worldwide. Studying a selection of press articles, essays

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