Convergence Crises: News Work and News Space in the Digitally Transforming Newsroom

Abstract

This research documents newsroom transitions from print worlds to digital ones by uncovering the relationships that news producers negotiate and nurture with their work and their workplace. An ethnography of a hybrid newsroom and in-depth interviews with journalists in transitioning places comprised the method; an understanding of interactions of journalists in their physical, virtual, and symbolic spaces informed the analysis. The analysis reveals labor-fed tensions as reporters and their editors incorporate new technologies into their news production routines. A working diagram of the newly converged newsroom is put forward, demonstrating changed power hierarchies that privilege laborers with technological skills engaged in digital domains. Meanwhile, reporters with print-cultural mindsets find themselves increasingly isolated in the newsroom, often excluded from new workspaces.