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As newspapers move toward web platforms, journalists struggle with their authoritative role in society. A documentation of policy development for commenting on news articles, this research considers these reader-content areas as places of boundary work for the journalist—audience relationship in interactive news environments. This ethnographic examination demonstrated significant internal conflict among both journalists and readers. The ‘traditionalists’ — those who want to maintain a hierarchal relationship between journalists and audiences — clashed with the ‘convergers’ — those who felt users should be given more freedoms within the news site. The resulting policy privileged journalism by relegating reader input to specific, structured spaces. But for the first time, audiences participated in that policy development, asserting their own textual privilege according to a value system apart from journalistic norms. The result was a grand identity complex for the news profession characterized by interrupted information flow patterns and diffused power over knowledge. Institutional hierarchies for policymaking and execution are radically changing.
Sue Robinson (Mon,) studied this question.