Two recent research projects will be shared in this seminar. 

1. Title: Making Un-news: News Aggregation in Local Chinese Press
“Un-news” is a newsroom jargon that refers to the process as well as the product of aggregation. It encapsulates clashes between digital and legacy journalism, challenges posed by and responses to technologies in the media industry. It differs from other aggregation news because of dynamic media environment in China. This ethnographic study closely analyzes manifestations of “un-news” by digital aggregators who have to work under management of legacy print journalists and editors in a local Chinese press. The hierarchy of influences model is used to decompose the meanings and complexities of “un-news”. Fieldwork observations have confirmed our expectations that the hierarchy model remains structurally valid, although the content and meaning of influence have changed drastically within each level.

2. Title: The Fall of Beat: Implications of “Robotized” Newsroom in the Digital Age
This study adopts the labor perspective as its conceptual framework and mixed ethnographic approach as its research method to scrutinize the robotization process of routines and working conditions of a digital newsroom in a Chinese newspaper and its impact on the fate of the age-cherished beat system. The main argument is that the fall or the obliteration of beat is attributable to the combined influence of ideological control and authorities’ coercive co-optation of technology which alienates media workers from their product and practically eliminate intentionality and spontaneity of journalism. Our comparisons between print and digital beat journalists and between our own discoveries and existing literature reveal changes of paradigmic proportions in the working conditions in three aspects: 1) convergence of once segmented areas of specialty; 2) quantity replacing quality; and 3) platformization dominating over area expertise. Implications of our findings for future journalism research are discussed.