The Cyber-Newsroom: A Case Study of the Journalistic Paradigm in a News Narrative's Journey from a Newspaper to Cyberspace

摘要

This narrative and discourse analysis documents the multi-year news coverage of a scandalous mayoral investigation in The Spokesman-Review as it moved from a printed version to an online one. The article sought to determine how multimedia and interactivity changed the essential news' web of facticity (a Gaye Tuchman term). A traditional understanding of the news paradigm informed this case analysis. The most significant finding was that the news story of Spokane, Washington, Mayor Jim West in the newspaper transformed into a story about the process of newsgathering on the Internet. A new, second-order newsroom - a cyber-newsroom - was created where readers and journalists jointly disseminated and repaired the news. In the process, the traditional journalistic paradigm shifted, and a new more layered, more complex news narrative resulted. A new model, called the “Cyber-Newsroom,” is proposed.