Shadow news production: journalists’ communicative practices in undeclared sponsored online journalism

Online journalism pr esents a workspace where economic transactions can take place without being referred to as transactions. This article explores how online media journalists negotiate and interpret the production of paid news that is not declared as sponsored content. This research uses in-depth interviews with four online media journalists in Indonesia. The analysis focuses on communication practices that allow the production of such news to be carried out in daily journalistic work. The findings show that journalists rarely refer to this activity as bribery or an ethical violation. Negotiations with resource persons and public relations practitioners were relational and repeated. Economic transactions are symbolically separated from the news-writing process, a mechanism that helps journalists to maintain their professional identity. This article proposes the concept of shadow news production to explain a form of news production that runs parallel to formal journalistic mechanisms but without explicit ethical disclosure. By emphasizing the communicative practices of journalists, this study expands the study of communication by showing how the boundaries of journalistic ethics are negotiated in contemporary, online journalism.