Digital Journalism (special issue)

Extended abstract submission deadline: July 1, 2025

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital journalism, adaptation has become a crucial strategy for survival and growth. This special issue of Digital Journalism seeks to explore the multifaceted nature of adaptation within the field, examining how the relevant actors and institutions of digital journalism proactively and reactively adapt to technological advancements, shifting audience behaviors, and the changing socio-political environment.

As a construct that has emerged out of biology, anthropology, and health sciences, we know that adaptation is crucial human skill. Yet as Sarta et al. (2021) argue, “scholars have used the concept of adaptation inconsistently across research traditions without always being able to push the research agenda beyond analogical reasoning” (p. 44). While there might be a notion that adaptation is a passive process, one that happens to, for example, journalists or journalism organizations, this is only one portion of the concept. Research primarily defines adaptation as a response or reaction to a force in that an “instance of adaptation is viewed as a modification” that occurs “in reaction (or response, for that matter) to an external or environmental contravention” (Sachs & Meditz, 1979, p. 1084; Giddens, 1999). In this way, adaptation is opportunistic and describes how an individual or organization or institution can choose change and but still engage in a range of different forms of adaptation (Sachs & Meditz, 1979). Adaptation in digital journalism can take many forms, from the integration of emerging technologies and platforms to the reimagining of practices and ethics. And there are a range of actors engaged in the adaptation in digital journalism, who may not be formally affiliate with journalism, and who conduct work relevant to the overall adaptation of the field (as with technologists, peripheral actors).

In our field, adaptation has been primarily considered through the lens of technology, yet the actors of digital journalism actively adapt to a range of actions, actors and contexts: changes in the audience (e.g. rising audience hostility), physical environment (e.g. COVID protocols, violence), personal circumstances (e.g. precarity, life changes, employment disillusionment), political environment (e.g. democratic backsliding), market changes, and others. Adaptation means actors at times engage in “adoption” of new processes, seeking to normalize them as a part of working routines (Perreault & Ferrucci, 2020). As actors have engaged in platformization, this means at times that they have adapted through the stacking of platform-specific skills, using the skills gained in adapting to one platform to jumpstart their adaptation to others. But at times actors also engage in “selection” of other processes to denormalise when they no longer serve (e.g. many journalists are stepping away from social media; Bossio et al., 2024). Research produced within the “emotional turn” (e.g. Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) and “audience turn” (e.g. Costera Meijer, 2020) shows that, to stay relevant to changing audiences and new political and cultural contexts, actors reconsider/select old and actively adopt new processes and skills. For example, journalists have engaged in adaptation through personalizing their reporting, using authenticity, empathy, and passion as strategic skills, building emotional and trauma literacy, and redefining long-dominating cornerstones of journalistic professionalism, such as objectivity and impartiality.

Digital journalism bears meaningful similarities in this regard to other fields: journalists can anticipate change even if they don’t know what that change will entail. But conversely, and unlike other fields, journalists are often not provided the resources to ease adaptation. For this reason, this special issue seeks to center adaptability as a crucial journalistic professional skill; it is perhaps more crucial in journalism than other fields given that journalists consistently find themselves negotiating new circumstances and environments as a native part of their work.

This special issue invites contributions that investigate these adaptive processes, particularly those that challenge traditional norms and propose innovative approaches to journalism in the digital age.

We are interested in a wide and overlapping range of digital journalism actors–journalists, technologists, businesspeople, fact checkers, fixers, peripheral actors, news organizations, platforms, policymakers, regulatory bodies–and topics, including but not limited to:

• Technological Adaptation: How are relevant actors and organizations incorporating emerging technologies such as AI, VR, and blockchain into their workflows? What are the implications of these technologies for media integrity and audience trust? How have actors adapted through platformization and datafication?
• Emotional Adaptation: How are the actors of digital journalism adapting emotionally to changes within the media ecosystem to which they can have little effect? What are the means by which actors engage in selection in order to engage in emotional management? How can actors cultivate and actively employ emotional literacy to adapt to changing media landscapes and audience behavior, increase their relevance for broader audiences, and secure their unique role and place within the attention economy?
• Adaptation to Audiences: How are the actors of digital journalism adapting to changes in audience behavior and preferences? What strategies are being employed to engage diverse and fragmented audiences? How can actors actively go to meet their audiences, including young audiences, where they are?
• Normative Adaptation: How are ethical standards in media being redefined in the digital era? What new ethical dilemmas are emerging, and how are the actors of digital journalism addressing them? How have norms adapted to digitization?
• Economic Adaptation: How are news and tech organizations adapting their business models to ensure sustainability in a digital-first world? What innovative revenue streams are being explored?
• Cultural and Political Adaptation: How are the actors of digital journalism navigating the complex cultural and political landscapes of the 21st century? How are they addressing issues of misinformation, polarization, and censorship?

Submission Instructions

Extended abstracts should include an abstract of 500 words (not including references) as well as a full list of author(s) with affiliation(s) and abbreviated bio(s). Please submit your proposal to Dr. Gregory Perreault (gperreault@usf.edu) as one file (PDF) with your names clearly stated on the first page.

Full manuscripts should target a length of 7,000-9,000 words.

Timeline:

• Extended abstract submission deadline: July 1, 2025
  
• Notification on acceptance of abstract: August 1, 2025
  
• Deadline for full manuscripts: October 31, 2025
  

No payment from the authors will be required.

For questions, please contact one of the Special Issue Editors:

Gregory Perreault, University of South Florida
gperreault@usf.edu

Patrick Ferrucci, University of Colorado-Boulder
Patrick.Ferrucci@Colorado.EDU

Johana Kotišová, University of Amsterdam
j.kotisova@uva.nl

Dariya Orlova, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
orlova@ukma.edu.ua