Beyond quality control: Peer-feedback and team culture in virtual journalistic teams

Previous research has approached feedback in journalism from an operational view, that is, as a quality control process between the journalist and the editor. Challenging this view, this study examines peer-feedback, that is, feedback between the members of a journalistic team, and asks what are its characteristics, meanings, and functions in technology-mediated teamwork. We define feedback as a team level communicative process, with constitutive power and relational qualities in addition to task-related purposes. Our mixed methods analysis centers on the Slack messages of a team of journalists, and shows that peer-feedback is constitutive of team culture. Our findings broaden journalism studies’ view of feedback beyond its role as a quality control mechanism, shed light on how peer-feedback materializes in newsroom collaboration and offer a conceptual tool for future feedback-related research.