The journalist’s new job: Digital technologies and the reader-less quality of contemporary news production

Abstract

This ethnography of digital news-making at a newspaper in Beijing, China, develops the argument that contemporary journalists’ prevalent use of digital information technologies is contributing to the rise of a ‘reader-less’ orientation within the profession. That is, a situation in which journalists increasingly feel that they can no longer afford to be guided by a commitment to meeting the informational interests of an imagined community of readers, but must instead work to advance the representational interests and agendas of various government and corporate organizations. By showing how digital news-making arrangements put pressure on journalists to construct their profession in this manner, and discipline themselves into accepting the reduced forms of socio-political agency that such constructions entail, the essay engages with broader concerns about the media’s changing logics and functions, and suggests that ‘reader-less’ orientations may be an emergent feature of contemporary media production that future ethnographies can fruitfully attend to.