Beyond the “personal” and the “political”. Rethinking journalism as relational work

Résumé

Traditionally, the information process had the receiver as the end point of a negotiation that started with the producers of events and reached the audience through journalistic mediation. Now, in digital spaces, the terms have been reversed: each person creates a specific and idiosyncratic information diet, obviously relying on the mainstream media. The focus is on the recipient, who has an almost infinite number of options to choose from. The individual receiver becomes his or her own de facto gatekeeper, less supported in his or her news consumption by the journalist’s own work of news selection, hierarchisation and presentation. Moreover, he has to carry out these processes on his own, through the information channels he considers most appropriate.
Starting from this scenario, which highlights the features of a new ecology of information, the paper aims to describe and analyse the complex relationship between journalistic production and publics within the mediatised public sphere. The aim is to understand how the idea of a journalistic field, understood as a “space of relationships”, manages to overcome all the personal, political and techno-economic logics within the current flow of information, in order to create the conditions for co-participation and thus the definition of a new information pact. We are faced with an information system in transition, capable of producing changes in the audience and in the way public opinion is formed. The fact that audiences are increasingly sceptical and cynical can be an “advantage”, because it is a sting in the tail for a journalism that tries too hard to chase quantity of news rather than quality.

Keywords: personal: political, journalism, news, relational work, audiences