Cozy Journalism : the rise of social cohesion as an ideal in online, participatory journalism

Abstract

In recent years applications like CoveritLive have diffused with great speed in online newsrooms. Such technologies create an interface where audience participation and journalistic reporting potentially merge into a text-production system marked by a high degree of immediacy and interactivity. This paper investigates the consequences of such practices for the professional ideology of journalism. What norms and ideals do journalist who initiate and partake in such practices adhere to? To what degree does their practice conflict with traditional ideals of journalistic reporting? The paper analysis the ‘live’ coverage of football matches in the two most popular Norwegian online newspapers, VG Nett and dagbladet.no. The findings suggest that the merger of audience participation and immediacy creates conflicts of ideals for the journalists involved, and that ideals of subjectivity and social cohesion are promoted by such practices of journalism.