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Journalism's once-neglected periphery has been a focus of academic research in recent years and the urge to make sense of interlopers from the periphery has brought about many approaches to understanding these changes. In this essay I reflect on an ongoing research agenda examining one particular category of interlopers: provocative media actors who have openly challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field. These actors raise questions as to how to account for interlopers at the edges of the journalistic field, including whether we should extend the field to include them. In this essay I argue we should continue to see the field as complex, and maybe now a bit more so. Reflecting on field and practice theories and understandings of boundaries, I reengage the complexity that is a core demand of conceptualizing the journalistic field, while offering ways to consider interlopers' journalistic identities within its boundaries. Emphasizing similarities over differences, I argue we can move beyond binary distinctions between a field's core members and interlopers on the periphery by focusing on the nature of interloper work.

Interlopers are a class of digital-peripheral journalists and outlets who position their work as journalism, but who have struggled to be recognized as such. While we have long acknowledged journalism's place online, as digital-peripheral journalists interlopers face challenges when it comes to appreciating their work as news and their contributions as journalism. This article argues their contributions warrant further evaluation as the journalistic field continues to confront change and engage new approaches to journalism, and as interlopers continue to produce news. Using Deadspin's coverage of the Sinclair Broadcast Group as an exemplar of such contributions, this article details an approach which accounts for interlopers' unique approaches to news, locating in broader news discourse measures of "journalistic realization" as a legitimating discourse. Its findings tentatively suggest a weakening of historically hardened boundaries between journalism's core and its periphery, and argue for continued, nuanced exploration of the nature of the journalistic field.

Abstract
New patterns of journalistic endeavour have altered the ways in which news and information reach the public, with new technologies enabling new types of journalistic actors to produce news both on their own and in collaborative arrangements with traditional journalists. From these intersections, new questions for understanding journalism amid change ask whether we are facing a fractured or more consolidated journalistic field. This article explores intersections of traditional and emergent news actors as disruptions to the dominant vision of the field. It shows the treatment of autonomous work of digital interlopers in news texts as reinforcing prevailing views of journalism by invoking traditional information authority and paradigmatic news-source relationships. Using field theory and analysis of narratives of journalistic roles in news texts to support its thesis, this article looks at reactions to the emergence of two independent news actors – WikiLeaks and ProPublica – representing distinct approaches to newswork born of a digital age. In its conclusion, this article outlines the initial framework for an 'appropriation thesis' that extends paradigm repair in instances when new journalistic actors' newswork is subsumed under traditional routines, thereby muting narratives of a heterogeneous field that would contradict the field's dominant vision and authority.

Abstract
Researching what Silvio Waisbord (2013) calls the ambiguities of the profession of journalism requires confronting changes and challenges to journalism, addressing the self-proclaimed assertions of those who see themselves as journalists, and doing so with an eye to changing landscapes. To understand journalism's professional identity in a digital era requires an equally agile approach, one that assesses professional adherence and identifies ways these aspects of identity translate and transpire in traditional understandings and forms, and how they relate to digitally native forms of mediated communication. Steeped in reflexive approaches born out of critical enquiry, this article advocates textual analysis and a discourse analysis methodology for analysing this identity, and posits that evaluating discourses of professional identity in texts serves as a gauge of journalism's 'threat perception' towards new entities in the digital era. Pairing this approach with an engaged discussion of concepts of journalism allows for a broader understanding of how journalism's professional identity is performed. First, this method better utilizes the way identity serves as a point around which tenets of 'being' journalism can be explored and, second, it engenders a more nuanced understanding of perceived threats to journalism's primacy in the digital era. For educators, exploring how 'different answers to journalistic problems are emerging in the online environment' (Singer 2005: 180), reflexive analysis assuages disputes over journalism's ambiguous professionalism, and moves towards a view of digital possibilities that discounts threats, and advances understandings towards a more reflexive space that better addresses the nexus between traditional concepts of journalism and new media opportunities.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- List of contributors -- 1. Tabloid culture: Parameters and debates -- 2. Digital impacts on the tabloid sphere: Blurring and diffusion of a popular form and its power -- 3. Tabloidization in the Internet age -- 4. Is Facebook driving tabloidization? A cross-channel comparison of two German newspapers -- 5. Tabloids in Zimbabwe: A moral-ethical research agenda -- 6. Trivializing entertainment news in India: Elements of tabloidization in the news coverage of Bollywood celebrities -- 7. Tabloid and populist sensitivities in Denmark -- 8. Recent shifts in the Australian tabloid landscape: Fissures and new formations -- 9. The post-communist "hybrid" tabloid: Between the serious and the "yellow" -- 10. From baby bumps to border walls: Celebrity gossip magazines and the post-truth politic -- 11. Dispatches from la Crónica roja: Why sensationalism and crime still matter in the new Latin America media ecology -- 12. The rise and fall of tabloid journalism in post-Mao China: Ideology, the market, and the new media revolution -- 13. Reclaiming and tabloidizing "truth" in Turkey -- Index.

This monograph addresses the question of how journalistic knowledge work, and in particular inferential reasoning, as a process of uncertainty reduction is manifested in news texts. We argue this takes place both in and in-between news media within a community of practice. The main premise is that journalistic texts reveal communal processes of knowledge creation and it is within these texts that we see the contours of what we term an "inferential community." The backdrop to this, is that the digital (news) landscape, political developments, and global issues produce an environment rife with uncertainty. We focus on three contemporary cases around the current U.S. presidency. We are, however, not arguing that the processes we study are altogether new; journalists have always, alone or together, grappled with uncertainty. Rather, we present here a conceptualization based on the premise that current circumstances offer a window into the more fundamental processes of journalistic knowledge work based on inference.

This thematic issue sets out to explore the power relationships between journalism and social media. The articles here examine these relationships as intersections between journalistic actors and their audiences, and between news media, their content, and the functions of social media platforms. As the articles in this issue show, the emergence of social media and their adoption by news media and other social actors have brought about a series of changes which have had an impact on how news is produced, how information is shared, how audiences consume news, and how publics are formed. In this introduction, we highlight the work in this issue in order to reflect on the emergence of social media as one which has been accompanied by shifts in power in journalism and its ancillary fields, shifts which have in turn surfaced new questions for scholars to confront.

Abstract

Recent developments in the relations between politicians and journalists in the US have (among other things) created a situation where journalists often have to deal with information that is very difficult, even impossible, to verify, yet has potential societal significance that cannot be ignored. This has, we argue, affected how journalists and journalistic outlets relate to each other within what we tentatively term an inferential community. To argue this, we analyze journalistic demonstrations of authority in attempts to establish and connect 'facts' related to uncertain claims in two cases of the coverage of the nascent Trump administration. This is, however, not a fully elaborated case study through which we can conclude something broader about contemporary journalism. The paper should rather be seen as a preliminary empirical probe allowing us to focus on a specific issue while proposing a tentative conceptual and analytical frame through which this may be studied in a more sustained and detailed way.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that when journalism comes to resolving the conflicts that emerge between people, including journalists, the unbounded spaces of the internet pose particular challenges. It also shows from a political economy perspective how, higher up among fields of power in society, ownership, regulatory frameworks, policy, and politics further pose risks to a more optimistic future for digital journalism being realized. The book discusses how within legal protections for the public - for those who would rather be 'forgotten', for various reasons - institutions have been able to regulate privacy from digital search, even as the long-term implications of such protections for journalism's informative roles remain unclear. It looks at how this has taken shape across 20 years of multiplatform reading - comparing newspaper and online readership figures alongside one another - to put newspapers' struggles into perspective.

An innovation and change discourse has become central in journalism studies scholarship concerned with highlighting solutions to the many challenges confronting media in the digital era. Although with good intentions, these debates have been predominantly technocentric in their imagination of media's future, inadvertently directing its development towards a preoccupation with mastering digital technologies. On the one hand, media have strategically appropriated and exploited such technocentric discourse to position themselves within the field as leaders with considerable prestige and status. On the other hand, however, journalists and media professionals have approached technological innovation with caution, demonstrating innovation to be a gradual process with incremental changes that need to align with or reimagine practices that support journalism's core ambitions and public service ideals. Drawing on the scholarly work of colleagues included in this thematic issue, in this editorial we conceptualize media innovation as a fuzzy and contested concept and call for an expanded research agenda that redirects our attention more firmly towards: exploring organisational and institutional innovation; considering the role of ancillary organisations, collaborative projects, and the various newly emerging innovative actors within and outside of the journalistic field; adopting bottom-up approaches to examine societal innovation and its public value and scrutinize questions around who benefits from change; and finally, paying more attention to the transnational as well as culture-specific contexts in which media innovations happens.

An innovation and change discourse has become central in journalism studies scholarship concerned with highlighting solutions to the many challenges confronting media in the digital era. Although with good intentions, these debates have been predominantly technocentric in their imagination of media's future, inadvertently directing its development towards a preoccupation with mastering digital technologies. On the one hand, media have strategically appropriated and exploited such technocentric discourse to position themselves within the field as leaders with considerable prestige and status. On the other hand, however, journalists and media professionals have approached technological innovation with caution, demonstrating innovation to be a gradual process with incremental changes that need to align with or reimagine practices that support journalism's core ambitions and public service ideals. Drawing on the scholarly work of colleagues included in this thematic issue, in this editorial we conceptualize media innovation as a fuzzy and contested concept and call for an expanded research agenda that redirects our attention more firmly towards: exploring organisational and institutional innovation; considering the role of ancillary organisations, collaborative projects, and the various newly emerging innovative actors within and outside of the journalistic field; adopting bottom-up approaches to examine societal innovation and its public value and scrutinize questions around who benefits from change; and finally, paying more attention to the transnational as well as culture-specific contexts in which media innovations happens.

This article explores the complex, multi-layered mechanisms of internet censorship in China, emphasizing its role as both a tool of control over public engagement and a mechanism for elites to disconnect themselves from spaces of public scrutiny, and avoid potential threats such as doxxing by bottom-up populist online movements. Through in-depth interviews with social media users, this study investigates how individuals perceive, assess, and navigate the boundaries of internet censorship, focusing on their awareness of censorship practices, the assessment of sensitive content, and the tactics they employ to circumvent restrictions. We further examine how a sophisticated censorship mechanism - comprising self-censorship, platform censorship, and physical enforcement - works to disconnect netizens from grassroots collective actions. The findings reveal that internet censorship in China not only regulates online populist activism but also serves as a protective shield for elites, allowing them to curate a controlled digital space that suppresses critical discourse. By highlighting the ways in which both ordinary users and elites navigate the challenges of digital engagement in this heavily regulated environment, this study provides theoretical insights into the practice of disconnectivity as an elite privilege. It enhances our understanding of the interplay between connectivity, censorship, and disconnectivity in shaping the digital landscape and its implications for social change and political engagement in China and beyond.