Journalism and Changing Technology
In this report, we interviewed foreign correspondents, as opposed to innovators or people who have “technologically specific jobs.”72 Journalism scholarship has long grappled with the challenge for reporters and news organizations to embrace change in the industry. Most research points to the difficulty of adaptation in journalism practice and norms, whether outlets use innovation flow theories such as adoption (e.g., technology acceptance model, theory of reasoned action, or diffusion of innovation theory) or social construction of technology.73,74 In journalism practice and norms, change can also take multiple forms. Brian Ekdale et al. argued that technological change faces fewer hurdles than audience relationships, because “journalists recognize the need to adapt their practices to newer capabilities.”75 Josep Lluís Micó et al. suggested that journalistic change depends on the position of journalists in the network (i.e., the complexity of groups within the media company, the historical distance between newsrooms, and power relationships complicated capability to change).76
Since our report focuses on foreign correspondents rather than full-time technologists or newsroom innovators, our findings point toward relative continuity in foreign correspondents’ newsgathering practices. These are reporters trying to catch up with sources, who have moved to new technologies in order to communicate with each other. This journalistic practice represents a form of cat-and-mouse game. Echoing Welsch’s observation that chat apps are a “supplement to regular reporting,” the intention behind this game is driven by pre-social networking journalistic methods of seeking sources and stories where they are.77 As a result, the journalistic construction of the technology [chat apps] is tied to foreign correspondents’ practices during political unrest. In this context, chat apps become evermore relevant as an object of study since this is where sources are increasingly communicating with each other to make sense of their social lives and world events.
A key finding of this report is the way that chat apps have become essential tools for reporting teams located both near and far from events. Reporters have relied on chat apps in their work at the center of the action, across town in a newsroom, and hundreds or thousands of miles away. Chat apps are the latest in a long line of tools journalists have used to supplement their on-the-ground reporting with information gleaned from a variety of sources. Using a mixture of public and private social networks, journalists follow stories as they emerge and piece together sources, questions, and facts. Especially in large-scale instances of political unrest, they have become the preferred tools for many reporters and news organizations as they undertake fundamental journalistic practices: sourcing, newsgathering, and verification. Old goals and processes remain intact; what is new is the technology.
We can identify ways that, beyond their coverage of specific events, journalists have embedded chat apps into their newsgathering processes. Our interviewees gave many examples of the routinization of chat apps in ordinary day-to-day coverage of political unrest. In the nearly two years since the Hong Kong protests, journalists in Hong Kong and China have come to depend on chat apps for daily newsgathering and sourcing, background information, and for verifying everything from claims to quotes to content. Journalists with language and technical skills have made active use of the some-to-some and one-to-one functionalities of chat apps. In some cases this has given reporters access to a wider set of sources; in other cases, reporters have used chat apps to stay in more constant touch with preexisting sources. Some of the more large-scale uses of chat apps—such as the in-house WhatsApp groups—set up by large news organizations to coordinate a dozen or more reporters arose in response to the specific circumstances of the Umbrella Movement protests. In interviews, reporters and editors indicated that there was much they liked about these groups. Faced with large physical gatherings and a torrent of user-generated content, they could work with colleagues at protest sites and in the newsroom. Our interviewees consistently said they were satisfied with what chat apps brought to their coverage. Asked if they would approach coverage differently in a future event of this magnitude, no reporter said they would abandon or lessen usage of chat apps. So while large-scale chat app groups are not a daily feature of reporting, the technology allowing those groups remains very much in the daily practices and consciousness of reporters.