Hero or Anti-Hero?

Exploring constructions of journalistic identity in a digital age has been a lively area of as the field of digital journalism studies has grown (Franklin 2013, 2014; Steensen Ahva 2015). Yet despite many approaches to understanding digital change, key avenues understanding changing constructions of identity remain underexplored. This paper a conceptual void in research literature by employing semiotic and semantic to analyse performances of journalistic identity in narratives of newswork by and focused on digital megaleaks. It seeks to aid understanding of the way describe changing practices of newsgathering, and how journalists position within these hybrid traditional/digital stories. Findings show news narratives the primacy of journalists within traditional boundaries of a journalistic field, and a preferred imagination of journalistic identity. Methodologically, this paper shows semantic and semiotic approaches lend themselves to studying narratives of newswork journalistic metadiscourses to understand journalistic identity at the nexus of and digital dynamics. The resultant portrait of journalistic identity channels a sociohistoric, notion of the journalist as “the shadowy figure always to be found on the of the century’s great events” (Inglis 2002, xi), updated to accommodate modern, digital .