As relações entre jornalistas e as pessoas da área adjacente ao jornalismo que competem com eles pela atenção e autoridade têm sido uma fascinação dos académicos nas últimas duas décadas. Estes “actores periféricos” têm constituído um desafio permanente à capacidade dos jornalistas de se distinguirem como profissão e defenderem a sua própria legitimidade para o público.

The relationship between journalists and the journalism-adjacent people who compete with them for attention and authority has been a fascination of scholars over the past two decades. Whether it’s bloggers, WikiLeaks, or citizen journalists, these “peripheral actors” or “interloper media” have formed a continual challenge to journalists’ ability to distinguish themselves as a profession and argue for their own legitimacy to the public.

Most research on the relationship between journalism and its interlopers has focused on journalists’ own efforts to draw boundaries around their work in order to keep others out and reinforce their distinctive authority. But those efforts are empty without the assent of the audience — someone to reinforce journalists’ exceptionalism and grant them credibility based on that.

So how do audiences interpret the boundaries between journalists and those interlopers, and to what extent do they even separate the two? That’s what Sandra Banjac and Folker Hanusch sought to determine in a study published in October in the journal New Media & Society. Banjac and Hanusch used focus groups of young people in Austria to examine their perceptions of, and standards for, journalists and content creators on Instagram, YouTube, and blogs.

Their participants drew hard, normative boundaries between journalists and content creators in many of the places you might expect: journalists act selflessly in the public interest, while content creators are working for their own gain. Journalists are detached and objective, while content creators are emotional and subjective. Journalists have particular education and training, while content creators lack specialized skills.

Banjac and Hanusch argued that those boundaries, and their predictability, indicate how deeply embedded journalists’ discourse about the grounds for their authority is in audiences’ notions of journalism. But they were more intrigued by the subtler similarities that audiences drew between journalists and content creators. Namely, audiences held the two groups to much the same standards and voiced the same concerns about their missional drift.

Audiences’ standards for content creators, the authors argued, were implicitly journalistic. They were troubled at how commercially oriented some Instagram and YouTube creators had become, and how the drive for profits and desire to please sponsors had compromised their autonomy. They complained that some of these market-driven creators began posting incessantly, forsaking more substantive material to appease advertisers’ demands and try to capitalize on a relentless attention economy.

Sound familiar? Those are two of the primary critiques that audiences have leveled at journalists, particularly in the digital era. And now, Banjac and Hanusch argued, they were applying those same critiques and standards to content creators.

The solutions that audiences posed to those problems for content creators echoed recent calls for journalism reform, too. They wanted creators to perform authenticity by being transparent about their influences and their imperfections. They wanted more engagement, more acknowledgment of their own priorities and interests. And they wanted creators to slow down and prioritize quality content over a rush for clicks and likes.

This convergence of standards doesn’t mean audiences have wiped away the differences between journalists and, say, makeup artists on YouTube. But the authors argue that while audiences keep a firm boundary between journalists and social media creators in their minds, their standards for journalism may be bleeding into adjacent fields, providing the potential for those groups to be seen within the same realm as journalism. Journalists may be adamant about their distinctiveness from the people populating your Instagram feed and YouTube queue, but the audience might see them as implicitly more similar than they themselves might even be aware.

RQ1 – Mark Coddington and Seth Lewi

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