Editors: Tamas Tofalvy and Igor Vobič
Routledge, 2025
https://www.routledge.com/Histories-of-Digital-Journalism-The-Interplay-of-Technology-Society-and-Culture/Tofalvy-Vobic/p/book/9781032795072
About the book:
Building on the momentum of the recent “historical turn” in digital media and Internet studies, this volume explores how digital journalism has developed from a historical perspective. With contributions from established and emerging scholars from Europe, Asia, South and North America, the book investigates not only how established journalistic systems transformed in the early days of digital but how the structural, technological, and cultural changes induced by digitization have reconfigured the trajectory of journalism.
The book argues in support of three main claims. The first is that emphasis should be given to the plurality of histories instead of one single digital journalism history, thereby acknowledging the complexities, interactions of social relations, cultural traditions, power configurations, and technological changes that have shaped journalism and digitization. The second is the decentralization and decolonization of digital journalism histories. The third refers to the need to highlight and demonstrate the idea that the evolution of digital journalism should be viewed as the co-construction of the social and technological realms.
With theoretical and methodological reflections on historicizing digital journalism along with original case studies or comparative inquiries into the phenomena over the decades-long digital revolution of journalism, this volume will shape the nascent field of digital journalism history and start a global critical exchange of various approaches to and aspects of historicizing digital journalism. As such, it will interest scholars and students of digital journalism, journalism history, digital media, Internet studies, and technology studies.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Why historicize digital Journalism? Disentangling the relationship between journalism, technology, and history
Tamas Tofalvy & Igor Vobič
PART 1: Theories and methods of digital journalism histories
Chapter 2: Conceptualizing change in digital journalism: Three key theories in comparison
Thomas Schmidt
Chapter 3: "I tape therefore I am": Excavating digital journalism’s lieux de memoire through oral history
Christopher Silver
Chapter 4: Bridging boundary work theory and the social construction of technology from a historical perspective: On the construction of socio-technical boundaries of digital journalism
Tamas Tofalvy
PART 2: Professionalism and meta-discourses of digital journalism
Chapter 5: The short history of naming journalism in the digital era
Laura Ahva
Chapter 6: Inquiry into the digital sublime: Interrogating the major narratives concerning new technologies in journalism research between 1980 and 2013
Igor Vobič, Jernej Amon Prodnik & Boris Mance
Chapter 7: Digital disruption or union neutralization? A diachronic history of tensions between the figures of the professional and the worker in the history of a Canadian newspaper
Samuel Lamoureux
Chapter 8: “A whiff of panic”: How journalists in the UK and Germany articulated their professional beliefs and identity in crisis times
Imke Henkel
Chapter 9: From bytes to bylines: A history of AI in journalism practices
Carl-Gustav Lindén & Laurence Dierickx
PART 3: Cultures of data, organizations, and journalism practices
Chapter 10: From audience clicks to time spent: Evolution of audience analytics and metrics in Norwegian newsrooms
Ana Milojević
Chapter 11: No crisis but cooperation: Construction of online newspapers in Nepal
Harsha Man Maharjan
Chapter 12: A singular public model: A history of online journalism through DiarideBarcelona.com
Javier Díaz Noci
Chapter 13: Digital journalism in Brazil: A history of diversity in products and research
Suzana Barbosa & Otávio Daros
Chapter 14: History of digital journalism in Egypt: Between institutionalism and individualism
Nagwa Fahmy & Maha Abdul Majeed Attia
CODA
Chapter 15: Historiography and digital journalism
John Nerone
