Abstract
The article describes the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy since 2008 by drawing on a database consisting of extracts taken from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 15 years (from 2008 to 2021). The study identifies three fundamental phases in the development of Italian digital journalism: the birth of the first online newsrooms; the spread of social media; and the data/platform turn. The article applies a new institutionalism discursive approach to investigate the impact of macro-level forces on micro-level journalists’ accounts. For this purpose, it considers excerpts from interviews in which journalists talk about change and professional jurisdiction. The following three main results emerge. 1. Political parallelism and resistance to technology have ceased to be the most prevalent features of Italian journalism; 2. In the first two periods identified, the clash of discourses is more oriented to identifying practices that may be identified as ‘journalism’ (e.g. the newcomer is a journalist who does the job differently). (C) Much of what is regarded as an uncertainty has been incorporated over time and no longer appears to be a threat, but awareness of the power of online platforms is growing.
Keywords
Italian journalism reloaded
Two highly debated plus one underestimated main characteristics are paramount in defining Italian journalism. The first one is shared from journalism studies: Italian journalism is entangled with and affected by a high degree of political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Notoriously, political parallelism indicates the degree to which media outlets tend to support and/or are linked to different ideas that play some role within the political arena (see Mancini 2016). The trajectories of many Italian news outlets have been embedded in various political ideologies or specific political parties. The closeness between journalism and politics depends not only on the fact that, historically, many news outlets have adopted an explicit or implicit political position on different issues (Forno 2012), but also on the fact that politics is the most important issue with which Italian journalism generally deals (Cornia 2015; Mancini 2009; for a comparative view see Hanitzsch et al., 2019).
One of the paramount keys to reading the bond between Italian journalism and politics is the use of sources (Cornia 2014; Splendore 2020; Tiffen et al., 2014). As Cornia notes (2014), the particular use of political sources also determines the fact that Italian journalism is highly opinionated, that is, it heavily relies on ‘the opinions of political sources’ (2014: 54). According to Cornia (2014) the result is therefore the proposal of the points of view of the various politicians that journalism uses as a source, who generally offer partial and highly opinionated points of view.
Italian journalism is driven by politics not only when it deals with issues typically related to politics (like corruption: see Mancini et al., 2017), but also when it deals with more popular issues (Ciaglia and Mazzoni 2015). This discourse about the inseparable link between journalism and politics also affects Italian citizens’ folk theories (Nielsen, 2016; Garusi and Splendore, 2023). It also reflects on people’s trust in Italian news media: The less the ideological proximity between a citizen and journalists, the lower the trust in the press reported by the former (Splendore and Curini, 2020)
Italian journalism has another important feature, which is less known at an international scholarship level: Italian journalists and news outlets have been historically quite resistant to technological innovation (Forno 2012; Murialdi 1995; Sorrentino 2008): Italian journalism (in terms of both news organizations and journalists themselves) was reluctant from the introduction of computers into newsrooms during the 1970s (Agostini 2004) to the spread of native digital news enterprises at the beginning of this millennium (Splendore 2013).
The third feature is related to the Ordine dei Giornalisti in Italia (see Malavenda et al., 2012). This is a guild that has the power to identify who the professional journalists are and which their jurisdiction (see Abbott, 1988) is. Enrolment on it is subject to fixed criteria and procedures: it depends on the recognized (mainly paid by established news media organizations) news items that a potential journalist produces. For decades, being enrolled on one of its lists (three different ones exist) was the main step to be considered a journalist. The digitalization of journalism has altered this situation. Due to the economic crisis of journalism, mainstream media have been increasingly unable to hire who would become journalists legally recognized by the Ordine dei Giornalisti; many small (often local) news organizations have instead been able to hire journalists with a different background. 1 This means that the discursive struggle about what constitutes journalism in Italy is often an issue related to who is legally considered to be a journalist.
Employing a neo-institutional discursive approach (Carlson and Lewis 2015; Schmidt 2008; Ryfe 2019) and using a unique database comprising more than 1000 extracts collected from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 13 years (from 2008 to 2021), this article explains how Italian journalists have been dealing with, coping with, struggling against, and accepting the digital transformation of journalism. The article considers three different phases of this transformation, which may be considered common in many different Western countries: the birth of online news websites (at first usually linked to legacy media); the spread of social media; and what has been termed the ‘platformization’ of journalism (see Nielsen and Ganther 2022). In this article, statements by Italian journalists will be considered and analyzed as products of the overall Italian journalism discourse. This article is an attempt to capture the boundary work at play in the three periods aimed to reinforce journalists’ jurisdiction (Carlson and Lewis, 2015, 2019).
Italian journalism as an institutional discourse
The sociology of news has always tried to draw which characteristics design journalism production, and it has often focused on features that appear to be shared by different news organizations (e.g. news values). Timothy Cook (1998), in explaining the reasons why journalism production exhibits uniformity, considers the institutional rules that supervise its organization. According to this framework, once formed, institutions tend to be governed by largely implicit ‘rules’ producing a certain degree of internal homogeneity. Internal homogeneity taken as a whole is able to exert a significant amount of power vis-à-vis other social actors (Benson, 2006).
Institutional theory argues that ideas, values, rules, as well as practices are able to mediate between macrostructures like journalism, on the one hand, and the micro-actions of individuals or organizations on the other. Those ideas, values, and rules act as guides to behaviour (the breach of which incurs a sanction); or, according to the slightly different institutional perspective that this article follows, those rules, norms, or discourses work as a logic of legitimacy and appropriateness, inducing individuals to strive to do what is right (Cook, 1998: p. 61). These norms and rules are both limiting and enabling, constraining and constitutive, and they maintain this influence as a cultural consensus related to how journalism is done.
Traditionally, this approach has been much better at explaining continuity rather than change in society. Journalists’ autonomy, centrality, cohesion, and permanence has been taken for granted (Zelizer et al., 2021). At a time of turmoil for institutions around the globe, a more fluid and dynamic understanding of institutions is required.
The article draws on the discursive variant of institutional theory, which suggests that the existence and functioning of institutions in society is based on a complex set of discursively constructed and legitimized rules, practices and values (Schmidt 2010). In sum, norms and rules can be understood as institutional myths necessary for the discursive creation of taken-for-granted societal understandings and trust vis-à-vis institutions (Koliska et al., 2020). In this sense, the legitimization of an institution in society is not stable but involves a discursive process of the internal organization of rules, practices, and values and external shielding against those who are recognized as outsiders to it.
Discursive institutionalism starts its analysis from uncertainty. It focuses not only on stability but also on contexts in which innovation spreads, so that solutions (in terms of new ideas, values, or practices) need to be found to establish a new stability, and institutions need to be regarded as both outputs of and constraints on uncertainty (North 1991). That uncertainty elicits ideas that help in dealing with unstable contexts. According to Schmidt (2008), discourses emerge from a logic of communication inherent to those ideas. Discourses are intertwined in the interactive process in which they are involved. Ideas float in the air if they are not substantiated in contextualized (and conflictual) discourses. Indeed, discourse is not just ideas or ‘text’ (what is said); it is also context (where, when, how, and why it is said). The term refers not only to structure (what is said, or where and how) but also to agency (who said what to whom) (ibidem). Ganther and Löblich (2021) precisely advocate for the importance in neo-institutionalism-informed analysis to consider also the existing broader (meaning) structures that influence but go beyond the journalistic institution. For instance, many principles central to the conception of modern journalism, such as objectivity or verification, are institutional solutions driven by moments of journalistic uncertainty. As Anderson and Schudson (2020) convincingly explain, objectivity was a solution to reaffirm journalism’s cultural authority at a moment when to use Schudson's words science was god, efficiency was cherished, and increasingly prominent elites judged partisanship a vestige of the tribal 19th century (Schudson, 2001: 162).
The institutional discursive approach applied here maintains that (1) journalists’ discourses are as important as their actual behaviour because they influence the meta-journalistic discourse (Carlson, 2016)-they create the boundaries of appropriate journalistic practice (see Carlson and Lewis, 2015); (2) journalists’ accounts and narratives are both influential in terms of discursive construction of norms and cognitive roles, but they may be regarded at the level of role performance in terms of narrations (see Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017); and (3) journalistic rules, legitimacy, and authority are mostly constructed discursively. Hence, a limitation of this article is that it deals only with journalists’ statements, rather than considering also other actors that struggle or strive to restrict discursive authority to journalists (Carlson, 2016: p. 2). However, journalists’ accounts regard also other actors, the parts of their accounts that consider those actors may be considered as proxies for their interactions with those actors.
This article focuses on digital technological changes that for decades have been altering the context in which journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed affecting journalism legitimacy (Lewis, 2011). Technology has reshaped the journalistic landscape around the world, suggesting that institutional environments are increasingly complex and include many different actors (Lewis 2011).
This article regards discursive institutionalism as a particularly viable approach with which to delineate a history of digital journalism as seen by professionals themselves because it does not consider institutions as given, but as dynamic structural contexts where actors work, and as contingent, constructed, and challenged (Schmidt, 2010). Research like that described by this article, which deals with journalists’ accounts over almost fifteen years, may capture what was contingent and then became (de)institutionalized over time. What discursive institutionalism adds to institutionalism in general is what Cook (1998: 61) terms a logic of appropriateness, which instead becomes something that is contested and recreated; something where boundary work may exert an influence. Moreover, in line with Abbot’s work (1988) on a system of professions, this approach is able to identify struggles over discursive authority-struggles about the meaning and role of journalism that take place within and beyond journalism (Lewis 2011; Carlson 2016). Those struggles, which are heavily influenced by technological changes, have taken different forms in the past fifteen years.
The three phases of digital journalism in Italy
On reconstructing the trajectories of digital journalism, there emerge three turning points which have heavily influenced both the producers of information and their texts and audiences. They are: (1) the advent and spread of online websites and news, (2) the spread of Web 2.0 and social media, and (3) the data and platformization turn.
While these can be considered stages common to different countries, in Italy they have had unique effects due to the particular characteristics of the Italian political, social, and media environment. The three characteristics mentioned in the introduction are those that make the Italian context more complex but at the same time more original.
The next sections outline the three phases of digital journalism’s development in Italy.
Phase 1: The advent of online news
The first phase began in the 1990s. It was marked by the possibility to distribute the news through the commercial Internet. The first years were dominated but the increasing role of bloggers; among those blogger some journalists was able to exert a great influence. The process of transforming the complexity of reality into distinguishable and intelligible items of information no longer had to be done solely through the materiality and temporality of paper: the journalist on the Internet no longer has word-limits, at the same time s/he must also accompany the text with images and videos; s/he must write for what is going on but his/her article remains on the Web forever. This passage can be considered as the one most incisive on the (in)stability of the profession, precisely because it introduced positions later interpreted and occupied by actors with heterodox provenances and expertise (for Italy see Splendore 2017).
On the one hand, Italian journalists who dealt with online news found the link with politics weakened. Among the various reasons-as explained by Splendore (2020)-one was that de facto online journalists were eager to find new content because they did not have traditional limitations. All of a sudden, they could draw not only on political sources but also on other alternative and independent ones. Bringing parallelism to new frontiers beyond politics.
From the technological point of view, although Italian journalism had already undergone many changes, the decisive and symbolic change to overcome that resistance depended from an authoritative discursive turn. This turn was furnished in October 2010 by Ferruccio De Bortoli, the then editor-in-chief of one of the most reputable Italian newspapers, the Corriere della Sera, when he wrote an open letter to all the newspaper’s staff. In one passage of the letter, he stated: ‘The industry to which we belong and our profession are changing with impressive speed. Faced with epochal upheavals of this nature, the set of company agreements and practices that have so far regulated our labour relations no longer make sense’. The next paragraph begins even more eloquently: ‘It is no longer acceptable for part of the editorial staff not to work for the Web’ 2 . In the temple of Italian print journalism, this was blatant acknowledgement of what had already irreversibly changed.
Phase 2: The spread of web 2.0 and social media
The spread of Web 2.0 and social media in the early 2000s increasingly compelled journalists to share the spotlight with an actor that would henceforth progressively assume a leading role: the audience. Digital innovation was forcing journalists to cope with an actor that was previously largely ignored (Forno 2012; Murialdi 1995). Conversation with readers or participatory practices for the production of information, in such an interactive media environment, became a reality with which journalists had to cope. Those were the years when discussions among both journalists and scholars began on the benefits and drawbacks of more participative forms of journalism, which have been defined by means of partly overlapping labels, such as grassroots journalism, networked journalism, or citizen journalism. This marked a stage in which journalists were obliged to further enlarge their views about their stakeholders.
Italian journalism for long managed to maintain a central position in the network of the multiplicity of communicative exchanges that took place online. Among the websites with the most views there were news sites (linked in particular to traditional media), and among the most active profiles on social media, those linked to journalism occupied important positions (Bentivegna and Marchetti 2015, 2018).
Phase 3: The datafication of journalism
Since the 2010s, ever-growing computing capacity, the increased possibility to store large amounts of data, and the ever more frequent release of data by government organizations or private companies have heightened perception of the importance of data in various areas of journalistic production and organization. This process obviously started when the first online newsrooms were established, but it has acquired growing importance since then.
In this phase, also the definitive integration of the use of analytics to measure the success of an item of journalism or a journalist him/herself may be included. Data became definitely pervasive in the selection and composition of news, as well as their assessment. The process had begun with the creation of digital journalism (which Italy still merely calls ‘online journalism’), but was precisely in this period that it became mature, incorporated and taken for granted.
The production of content is today increasingly influenced by algorithms, data, and metrics. Indeed, digital media platforms alter the audience measurement dynamic because they allow news organizations to monitor, track, and interact with their audiences directly (Carlson 2018). Especially in the current context of economic and existential crises of journalism’s purpose in a digital ecosystem, measurements have become far more expansive than mere gauges of advertising reach (Christin, 2020; Moran and Nechushtai, 2022). At the same time, many platforms that circulate journalistic content operate according to a ‘rich get richer’ structure wherein ‘content that has been preferred (recirculated, liked, commented on, etc.) by news audiences is prioritized and offered higher visibility on the feeds of others’ (Moran and Nechushtai 2022, 9; see also Poell et al. 2019). Thus, algorithms are being incorporated not only into journalistic activities but also into the logics of journalism itself (Zamith and Haim 2020).
The result is that journalists are confronted with new environments whose mechanisms disregard the legitimization processes built up over decades by the journalistic institution; they create and disseminate information that then circulates in an environment marked by the commodification of attention and the metrification of the involvement of different actors. In Italy, with respect to the use of sources, there is an evident growth of interest in and consideration of reliability in regard to everything that is an algorithmic product. At the same time, Italian journalists appear not to reflect sufficiently on their work, assigning to platforms an epistemological role that first and foremost legitimizes them and reinforces their power in society (Splendore and Iannelli, 2022).
Nevertheless, forms of struggle and resistance from publishers (which, as in many other part of the world, strive to obtain some economic benefit from platforms) are increasingly mirroring those of journalists themselves. An increasing awareness seems slowly establishing. Journalism (more than journalists) appears to be aware that platforms are becoming increasingly central to public and private life, transforming key economic sectors and cultural practices, including journalism (Nielsen and Ganther, 2022; Poell et al. 2019).
In light of this brief overview on some particular Italian characteristics over the global process towards the settlement and the discursive institutionalization of digital journalism in Italy, the research presented above will detail discursive struggles identified and expressed by Italian journalists while they were immersed in each of the phases listed above. Those three phases are considered here as the macro-level forces that influenced the micro-level journalists’ accounts (Ryfe, 2019). Which discourses and discursive struggles have prevailed in dealing with those uncertainties? Which discourses have prevailed?
Data and method
In order to shed light on the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy, this study relies on analysis of 227 semi-structured interviews (see Ayres 2008) conducted with journalists from 2008 to 2021.
The interviewees were professional Italian journalists registered in the ‘Ordine dei Giornalisti’. The interviews were carried out by the author or research assistants within the scope of a broader research programme on innovative forms of journalism. Over time, several parts of the interview guide remained unchanged. Specifically, this study analyzes questions that asked if the journalists could briefly summarize their careers, from its earliest stages to the contexts in which they were involved at that time; if they could describe the overall organization in which they were involved; if they could describe their typical day, if one existed; if they could detail the most recurrent professional challenges.
The questions recurring over time were: 1.1. I would like to start our conversation by having you tell me, in general terms, about your career as a journalist. 1.2. Can you describe generally how the work is undertaken in your newsroom/organization? 1.3. What is your typical day, if any? What is your routine when you start work, collecting sources, writing, editing, etc.? How do you search for news? 1.4. Since you started working as a journalist, what have been the biggest changes in the profession?
According to the journalists’ answers, further questions were asked to explore interactions and explanations.
The early interviews were carried out entirely by the author of this article; the most recent ones, starting from 2020, by well experienced and trained research assistants. Although a constant effort was made to apply the interview guides with the utmost professionalism, because the interviews were conducted for over 10 years, it is impossible to guarantee that their rigour and tone were always the same. This aspect is a possible shortcoming of the research.
Two-thirds of the group of people interviewed over the years were journalists employed by a news organization; the rest were freelancers. The general characteristics of the interviewees are detailed at the end of each excerpt. It can be assumed that a good representative sample of journalists in terms of age, gender, role, and media was obtained. At the same time, as the second limitation of the sample used, they were generally journalists working within the innovative sectors of the profession. The research had to do precisely with innovative aspects of journalism starting from the first online newsrooms in the wake of what was done by Domingo and Patterson (2008), passing through the management of social media, up to data journalists. By innovative I mean those professional figures who until recently did not exist within the newsrooms. This may have influenced the results of the discursive struggles about the profession-about what is journalism and what is being a journalist-in terms of innovation rather than conservativism. Nevertheless, in regard to the topic of this article, we can assume that we gathered various sets of discourses, saturating the range of perspectives.
The interviews were transcribed in their entirety and then subjected to various analyses. However, for the purpose of this article, throughout 2022 the author and an assistant researcher carefully re-read the excerpts already gathered from each interview about the topic, and they systematized the news interviews gathered recently. We then created a dataset in Excel with over 1000 lines: each line included interview paragraphs or sentences about the aforementioned topics. The excerpts included items from discourses in which the interviewees expressed their opinion on change in journalism in terms of its values, output, organization, and practices.
We anonymized these excerpts and assigned them to the following categories: ‘legacy/new’ (to denote whether the respondent worked for a brand linked to traditional media or digital-born ones); ‘current medium’ (which medium the respondent mainly worked for); year of the interview. The anonymized version of the dataset may be inspected upon request.
Then, a thematic analysis (Guest et al., 2012) was conducted on the final corpus of over 1000 excerpts, keeping in mind the year in which each excerpt was collected. After extensive discussion and comparison, the author and the research assistants refined the coding protocol, independently coded the excerpts, and reached consensus on initial discrepancies.
The analysis is built on a mixture of inductive and deductive aspects (as common in qualitative research, see Kuckartz, 2014). Many of the aspects that give substance to the three phases emerged inductively: for example, I went to the various newsrooms expressly to understand the relationship that journalists had with social media, but many aspects on which I then lingered and investigated emerged precisely from those contexts. At the same time, however, especially considering the theoretical context employed, many aspects are deductive: going into the field to understand which norms and values become routine, become a journalistic ‘institution’.
Findings
Phase 1: The arrival of the digital interlopers
What happened during the first phase can still be considered the most incisive steps in the (in)stability of the profession. First, traditional journalists were forced to cope with journalists that not rarely had their same background, but who the former considered as extraneous. Certainly, at this moment there are press journalists who are arguing with online journalists. This is a moment of change in the profession and it is certainly a positive moment. If one changes, transforms the way of working, the pressures at work have also derived from this. I do not deny that in the past there have been tensions, but online editorial offices are integrated more and more with the press (legacy, paper, 2008).
For the first time, heterogeneous roles with different and heterodox trajectories and expertise interact (and interfere) with traditional journalistic figures: We have hybrid figures, I don't know what else to call them. For example [name of person] is a graphic designer, but he is also someone who knows about coding, he is someone who also does community management and here he is framed as a journalist (legacy, website, 2008).
The interviewee’s inability to find an adequate term to define the professional figure he was speaking about is paradigmatic of the change that was happening; the perception of the change was there, but its definition was instead difficult to find. That excerpt implicitly underlines those differences, apparently irreconcilable logics are at play, which start to collaborate and interact in various forms.
Also, the advent of online news challenged, from the journalists’ point of view, the ideological relationship with the audience, which is a distinctive mark of political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini 2004): If there were another website like ours that does the things we do, we could grow more together (…). We could do the same thing dealing with different approaches, we might put a more left-wing post, they might put a little more right-wing one, it's very useful. We won't rivalry but we will enrich each other (new, website, 2008).
Since professional logic and work organization are closely intertwined (Tuchman 1972), the blurring of the journalists’ professional boundaries also affected the newswork routine. This is how some newsrooms, the actual contexts in which journalism takes shape, have been occasionally substituted by a more fluid and hybrid journalistic work, in both special and temporal terms: Physical presence is not so compulsory. Communication is now all on the Web. There is a capacity for simultaneous work that is enormous. There is no need for an editorial office; rather, there is a need for a lot of networking among the collaborators who are around? (new, website, 2008). In fact, there is no such thing as a meeting in which a schedule is set for the day, because there are constant updates (new, website, 2008).
Many of the experiences of the journalists interviewed were based on the contrasting possibility that the Web brought. High concern was expressed about the shape of the journalism’s content: The classic journalist resists writing online news. Some people cover politics, some people cover sports, and the Internet is still seen as something ambiguous (legacy, newspaper, 2008) But here [on the Internet] you don't have any size problems, you are freer and in some way do not have any limits. But you are also more multimedia, if you are good at producing online news, you do an interview, you can record it, and then decide what to do and how to use it (new, website, 2008)
The perception of change and the need to go along with it, is not only opposed; it is also praised and accepted sometimes even by those who occupied a well-established position in a legacy newsroom: There is not the print journalist, there is not the blogger journalist, the photographer journalist, and the digital journalist; there is the journalist who tells stories and does so with all the means at his disposal (legacy, newspaper, 2015).
Phase 2: Hybridization of practices
The second phase identified by the analysis of the interviews has to do with the increased pervasiveness of other actors due to the affordances of Web 2.0 and social media. Nevertheless, those actors (i.e. big tech companies like Facebook or Twitter) seemed to be experienced primarily as practices. Journalists appeared to be worried more about what they should have done, rather than about the companies that were behind those practices.
The legitimacy of journalism is traditionally built also on autonomy (see Anderson and Schudson, 2020) understood as control over the content produced. However, during this second phase, the interviewees recalled a type of logic that seemed to envisage distributed control with respect to the content produced. Predictably, these changes have induced many journalists to raise barriers in defence of their unique professional expertise, claiming accuracy, and contextualization: It is true, as they rightly say, that nowadays with Twitter everyone can be a journalist. The thing is, if I'm walking down the street and at that moment a building explodes, I write about it and I've written a news story. But apart from the fact that I then have to understand why it exploded, how many people were killed, who blew them up, and that's work that a non-journalist cannot do on Twitter (legacy, press agency, 2015).
A similar argument applies to those politicians who try to reach the electorate directly without having to depend on the news media. Again, the professional values of accuracy, and contextualization were stressed by the interviewees to defend their jurisdiction, with the interesting addition of a monitorial inclination: Twitter has greatly increased a politician's ability to spin, and it makes our job even more necessary. When there is disintermediation you can think it's OK or you can rely on someone else to do the job of mediating, understanding, and interpreting. […] If there's only the government's version, it’s not news, it's propaganda. Let's say, data should always be read and explained. A normal person cannot understand if it's positive or negative if there is a decline in unemployment but an increase in persons that are not even looking for a job; and then a journalist needs to explain it. An interpretation must always be given. (legacy, newspaper, 2015) The problem is that if journalism is about standing behind statements, then you can live on Twitter. but can I find out from Twitter if it is true that health funding is increasing or decreasing? I mean, if some politician says it's increasing, is it true? Can I find out from the politician’s statement in Twitter? Social media do not provide any accurate information about that (legacy, newspaper, 2015).
From the excerpts it can be interpreted that the possibility for politicians to reach the public directly has led journalists to value a more critical attitude toward their statements.
Many excerpts focus on users as able to influence daily practices. Regardless it is a real novelty, interviewees usually perceive it as such. We interact frequently with our readers and, as far as possible, respond to their comments. If a news article gathers a lot of comments, it also happens that we decide to write a further news story the next day just to give voice to the readers and their positions. This certainly influences our work, as never happened in the past, but not in deciding whether to cover a certain news item or not (new, website, 2012).
The interviews show how journalists are aware of the changes that have taken place and introduced new (and soon familiar) practices.
Phase 3: The platformization of journalism
For Italian journalism numbers and data were important in all the phases of this process related to the settlement of digital journalism. They were important for measuring the impact of journalism or the popularity of journalists by means of analytics. The phases that this article highlights should not be conceived as separate blocks. It often happens discovering and reading in the collection of excerpts the research relies on, a continuous back and forth, attempts to use the different forms of digital innovation as well as resistance against those forms. However, the importance of data as reported by our interviewees took an outstanding relevance in this third phase: Everything is data-driven, anchored to performance and data. In general, digital is very data-driven, it is ingrained in the work of a digital editorial team to work with respect to data, and if they don’t, they risk writing for no one. (legacy, website, 2016).
Data and numbers were also important in the experience of data journalism itself. Data journalism did not take Italian journalism by storm; it was not able to cover a leading role in newsrooms. Nevertheless, the importance of data journalism was especially discursive in its ability to weaken the inextricable nexus between Italian journalism (culture) and the importance of being able to write. There is a relevant cleavage here, between those still tied to the press and those who know how to work with digital media. I remember last year during an interview with a major newspaper I was recounting the things I do with data journalism and the question was, "so do you make doodles too?”. Look, they're not doodles?! (new, website, 2015).
The (sometimes unreflected) importance given to data contributed to create a rift with the traditional commentary and opinionated orientation of Italian journalism: I mean that for me data is what I believe in. Pure, hard data is what I believe in, and the ability to aggregate the data according to science, because it is not that I aggregate them as I like (legacy, television, 2021). If I'm telling that there is an issue - maybe arguing with numbers and data - that there is something for which thousands of people every day feel distressed or are being assaulted, that's one way I'm telling you it's important but I always do it if there is concrete evidence to say that indeed the thing is. If I then have to say 'in my opinion it is right,' I say it somewhere else (new, website, 2021).
As previous research focussing on the Italian context has shown, journalists tend to take a great deal of interest in what is happening on platforms, both in terms of potential sources and in terms of knowing their audience (see Splendore 2017). Platforms introduce into the field of journalism logics that have always been alien to it. This unease is evident from the interviews collected: I don't know if it lowers the quality, but it standardises it a bit: you have to do stuff that is always a bit repetitive so that the algorithm rewards you (legacy, website 2018) it is probable that a newspaper or a journalist, even one with the best of intentions, when he or she is on a social network is a victim of the dynamics of the social network - because we always come back to the algorithm, but it's true: if the algorithm of a social network is built to reward a certain way of posting, you can post in a different way but that means you will be invisible (legacy, website, 2021).
However, the difficulties do not stop at different professional logics imposed by the platforms. Indeed, there are many journalists who state how difficult their work has become in a context where algorithms foment polarization: Social media in my opinion unfortunately do not give anything more, only less. They polarise, and indeed sometimes in my opinion even push a certain type of editorial line (legacy, website, 2021). Whether social networks have had a positive effect on the way people discuss, or at any rate on the way debates are formed, I wouldn't be...I mean in my opinion no, right now I would be quite negative about that. Not so much. I mean in my opinion they have led to the distortion and over-representation of marginal trends and strands of thought that instead within social media have acquired a centrality that, on balance, in my opinion is negative (legacy, website, 2021)
Statements like ‘we cannot pretend there are no social media’ (legacy, newspaper, 2021) were made numerous times by the journalists interviewed. At the same time, a growing number of more complex arguments emerged about the disruptive role of social media/platforms. Platforms generate a perverse mechanism whereby strong, violent, and cutting-edge news stories get more clicks. Therefore you try to shape all news in that way, nurturing a public debate with those same characteristics, and it then becomes a self-perpetuating spiral […]At the same time, people lose their trust in journalists too, because they see us always shouting, fighting, and disagreeing about anything. They cease trusting the press and put themselves in the hands of the first Facebook page, Instagram account, or whatever that tells them something they already think and agree with. […] The journalist ends up being both a victim and a perpetrator: a victim because s/he works in a toxic environment. And a perpetrator because s/he also participates, feeds, and goes along with this same mechanism (Legacy, paper, 2021).
The effective role of Ordine dei Giornalisti is rarely referred to explicitly, but it is nevertheless always indirectly considered in the interviewees’ accounts. This is true both for those who rely on Ordine dei Giornalisti in order to protect the boundary of the profession and for those that regard the guild as an exclusive and elitarian mechanism that has become pointless in the digital age. It can be read as a further proof that, as stated in the Introduction, discursive struggle about what constitutes journalism in Italy is often an issue related to who is legally considered to be a journalist.
Conclusion
The introduction of this article is based on two different points. The interviewees often evoked political parallelism, even more that it is shown from this article, but over time it seems evident that journalists are increasingly focussing on the possibility of having more and different voices. As for the resistance to technological innovations, what can be seen is a balance between the persistence of this resistance and a gradual acceptance due to incorporated practices (see Couldry 2012).
On inspecting the excerpts that we have highlighted, it is apparent that in the first two phases discursive struggles took place on new practices and new roles within the field of journalism-which in the Italian case means within the Ordine dei Giornalisti. This means that the critics from within the field were, initially, against online journalists, then against those journalists that ceased to ‘write’ but carried a camera with them, and then against those who managed social media. Those were considered the newcomers. Step by step, these conflicts eased. The more digital journalism grew, the more its legitimacy supported by numbers grew (sales of hard copies decreased, number online users increased). The idea is that discursive struggles were prevalently within the profession and they took place in a media environment that favoured newcomers and not incumbents. 3 Then, the Italian journalists’ approaches to each innovation (from the basic introduction of online news work to the need to cope with analytics and social media) were progressively incorporated. In discursive neo-institutional terms, they became rules that today both limit and enable, maintaining a cultural consensus related to how journalism is done. To put it in boundary work terms, the result has been slow and conflictual incorporation (see Carlson and Lewis, 2015: 20). Newcomers in terms of actors, practices, and values have crossed the borders and are now uncontested legitimate parts of Italian journalism.
What does not clearly emerge from the article – and which would have needed more detailed discussion and the use of an overabundance of excerpts to show that this process of incorporation happened in three steps: (1) boundary-work took place within the field, between journalists. It might be supposed that also publishers were involved, but our excerpts do not consider very often publishers as negative (or positive) drivers of the change. In other words, what happened was that some journalists did not recognize as legitimate and authoritative other journalists (those who worked for online websites, those who managed social media, those who followed the analytics). For instance, in Italy citizen journalism was rarely considered a threat to the profession. (2) The gradual acceptance of those actors and practices (e.g. the fact that updating and posting on social media became the rule for both individual journalists and newsrooms) depended on two factors: (a) economic pressures, the need for new business models, the economic crisis of journalism, the pressure applied by publishers and owners to adapt to the changing media environment and (b) the acceptance and consideration of the measures of journalism (analytics, likes, shares, and so forth) as a form of legitimation of journalism itself. Data on viewership or newsstand sales have always been regarded as legitimation; those measures became for journalists a proxy for what readers want, what they recognize as informative, and consequently a recognition of journalists’ jurisdiction. In neo-institutional discursive terms, those measures shape the cultural consensus related to how journalism is done.
The third phase shows a slightly more mature and more sophisticated approach by journalists. After a long period in which journalists appeared to feel threatened even by the adoption of simple digital tools, or by practitioners who embraced new practices, it now seems that journalists regard platforms as eroding their independence, autonomy, profit. Journalists do not regard social media as new practices to adopt (e.g. updating the social media account of the news media) but in what they are: media global companies that have increasing power over their work (see Nielsen and Gunther 2022). This is not a homogeneously distributed discourse: it needs some interpretation efforts to grasp it from journalists’ words, but it is what can be retrieved from what they say about their everyday experience in many forms (e.g. from the polarized debate to the adaptation of their work due to the change of an algorithm). Even the increasing number of negotiations around the world between the big tech companies and journalism, publishers, journalist associations may have increased awareness about the extent to which those companies are affecting journalism. Many Italian journalists now see those big tech companies as the main threat to their work. This point needs more focused research in order to determine if journalists are increasing their awareness about the functioning of the big tech companies; but after a long period in which (as some of the excerpts presented here show) journalists seemed to embrace the offshoots of those media to improve their reputation or the circulation of their news items, it now seems that they taking a step back.
Finally, this overview has some limitations. Given the length of the period considered, the richness of qualitative data, and the number of the issues considered, this article offers a coherent interpretation underestimating the complexity at play. The data should also be read in terms of the hybridization of Italian journalism culture, its change in terms of the perception of professional roles. This article also mirrors some results that previous research in the field has already presented, also from the author himself when he delved into interviews that are also assembled here. Nevertheless, this article is the first overall attempt to draw over those messy fifteen years that have changed and have been changing also Italian journalism.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
