Paper title:
The construction of online newspapers:
Patterns of multimedia and interactive communication in three online newsrooms
Paper abstract:
This paper examines the material culture of newsroom practices, focusing on the mutual shaping
of technology and society to counter the dominant “technology effects” perspective of most
newsroom computerization studies. More specifically, it concentrates on one dimension of the
mutual shaping process: how actors’ definition of their situation orients the realization of online
newspapers’ multimedia and interactive potentials. Drawing from field studies in three online
newsrooms, this article shows that actors’ definition of the situation regarding the locus of
production, the role of the editorial function, and the identity of the end-consumer influences
their appropriation of these new communication potentials.