Media logics on the Internet: actors, spaces and newsmaking

Abstract

[Abstract] Legacy media are having to adapt to the new forms of consumption of their audiences. In the digital context, these audiences are increasingly accessing through “side doors” such as social networks, direct searches or content aggregators instead of direct access to media websites (Newman et al., 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 & 2021). This practice is even more common among younger users: accessing news through social media has become the preferred way of consuming news, especially for those under 35 years of age (Newman et al., 2021). In this new digital environment, legacy media have to compete, not only with other non-news content (Newman et al., 2021), but also with other actors such as alternative media, politicians, activists, celebrities and even anonymous individuals who acquire the ability to fix the informative attention of users. Thus, it has been observed that, while in some social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, the legacy media maintain the hegemony of information, in others, such as Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat or Tik Tok, they are already being surpassed in terms of their capacity to fix media attention by new media actors such as celebrities (Newman et al., 2021). In the context of this reduction of media power attention due to the emergence of new media actors, what are the media doing? That is, how are journalistic production and journalistic routines changing in the context of a hybrid media system?