Travail de recherche/Working paper
| Résumé : | “News ecology” and “news ecosystems” are two terms often used in journalism studies.They are, however, different concepts that draw from different lines of research and areused by different groups of scholars rarely connected to one another.The notion of “news ecology” stems from media ecology, a branch of media theory thataims at understanding the effects that mediated technologies have on communication andsocial interactions. Media ecology has challenged traditional media research by focusingon how communicative technologies impact media consumption on a daily basis.Specifically it argues that communicative technologies encompass a set of implicit rulesthat affect how humans see, understand, and think about the contents that are beingmediated. Building on these principles, “news ecology” is a relevant notion to reflect onhow citizens get acquainted with the news as well as the diversity of technologiesinvolved in news use. The notion aims at capturing the fact that news products exist in adiversity of formats, are consumed in diverse manners, and take place on different sitesand platforms. Out of all the economic, social and technological changes of the lastdecades, the popularization of the Internet is often seen as the keystone of this change.However, most recent reception studies mention the terms “news ecology” withoutrelating it to media ecology.The use of the “news ecosystem” metaphor in journalism studies is more recent andfocuses on the diversity of actors involved in news production and diffusion. If somescholars use a restricted definition of ecosystems (i.e., the ecosystems of blogs, websites,or social networking sites), others give it a more organic and composite meaning (i.e., theecosystems of actors, technologies, and contents produced in a specific area or regardinga specific topic). Using the first definition, one can analyze the configuration of newsecosystems online, the diversity of actors involved in news production and theirrelationships, as well as how news circulates through diverse technologies. Using thesecond definition forces researchers to consider news as a complex social practice inwhich a diversity of actors competes to influence the news narrative through mediatedand unmediated practices.The two research traditions rarely intersect, as media and news ecology focus more onthe reception side of news (i.e., the impact of mediums on people) and the study of newsecosystems has so far paid more attention to the production and diffusion of news.However, they share similarities—such as the facts that they both analyze media asdynamic processes are not normative in nature, or focus on complexity and change morethan structure and stability—and could inspire one another in an effort to break theproduction/reception dichotomy in journalism studies. |
