(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
must also be seen as having a cultural logic of its own, blurring the line between
channels, forms and formats, between different parts of the media enterprise,…’ By
observing what media organizations actually do, scholars have found out that veteran
journalists tend to worry that media convergence will bring about a ‘telegenic culture’
and make it the most important journalistic skill and criterion for news production
practices (Klinenberg, 2005:55).
Scholars have already argued that media convergence is not only involved with
technological adoption and integration. It also involves a clash of different working
cultures within newsrooms. As mentioned, one of the aspects about the convergent
actions in the journalistic field which has not been well studied is as follows: how is
convergence connected to the news workers’ everyday production practices? The
impact of media convergence toward journalistic practices is complicated, and
includes multiple dimensions. As Domingo et al. (2007) indicates that convergence in
media should include at least four dimensions: integrated production, multi-skilled
professionals, multiplatform delivery, and an active audience. Therefore, my intention
in this paper is to avoid oversimplifying the analysis of media convergence in the
journalistic field. As García Avilés and Carvajal (2008) argue that ‘journalistic
convergence should not be regarded as just an ‘effect’ of corporate or technological
trends’ (p, 226). In the following analysis, convergence in the journalistic field will be
discussed by considering the context of different convergence policies and how the
news workers’ actual daily work has been influenced.
Research Method
The empirical data of this study are collected from ethnographic interviews 1 , which
are combined with interviews and observations of media-workers (journalists and
editors) in different media, including newspapers, online news websites, and
broadcast news media. The interviewees were asked semi-structured questions. The
questions focused on five aspects: (1) the news workers’ perception and reactions
toward media convergence (2) media convergence and the transformation of everyday
news production practices; (3) media convergence and the uses of different narratives,
formats and story-telling of making news; (4) media convergence and professional
identity; and (5) media convergence and news workers’ strategies of coping with
transformation.
1 The interviews were conducted from 2005 to 2010. However, this project is still in process, so the
research is still continuing to interview new respondents.
302