Reconstructing the dynamics of the digital news ecosystem: A case study on news diffusion processes

Günther Elisabeth, Buhl Florian, Quandt Thorsten

Abstract

The digitization of news production, distribution, and consumption has provided journalism researchers with plenty of opportunity to explore the establishment of new structures and processes within the developing networked media system (Franklin and Eldridge, 2017). Alongside rather manifest distinctions of online journalism, such as the reorganization of newsrooms, journalism scholars have started to discover digital news phenomena whose accessibility requires the advance of research designs in the first place. Observers might recognize these phenomena without the help of innovative research methods. Readers might recall personal experiences with online journalists’ publish-first-and-update-later routines (Karlsson and Strömbäck, 2010; Saltzis, 2012; Widholm, 2016) or the acceleration of the news cycle (Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008). However, transferring such anecdotal evidence into a set of more systematic, generalizable observations of such phenomena is a reconstructive endeavor that benefits from the interplay of methodological advances and theoretically focused procedures of data analysis.