[Commlist] CfP Problemi dell’informazione Special Issue: “Re-considering journalism as an ecosystem: borders, shapes, and powers”

*Problemi dell’informazione*

*Call for Papers_Special Issue - n. 1/2023*

*“Re-considering journalism as an ecosystem: borders, shapes, and powers”*

*Guest editors*: Chris W. Anderson and Augusto Valeriani

*Description*

In the early days of the commercial internet, a number of scholars 
(Anderson 2011, Deuze and Witschge 2018, Reese 2016, Wahl-Jorgensen 
2016) proposed the idea of an /ecosystemic/ approach as a new way to 
study both journalism institutions as well as the tangled web of 
messages these institutions produce. According to these and other 
theorists, the advent of digital technology rendered problematic 
previous frameworks that took news institutions as isolated analytical 
and empirical categories. Digital technology also complicated news 
diffusion models that saw media messages as largely moving between 
institutional producers and audience members, arguing instead that news 
and information traveled across a variety of institutional, 
technological, and human pathways, the content of those messages 
morphing and transforming along the way.

In the past decade, as both the architecture of the internet and the 
political environment in which journalism is practiced has changed 
dramatically, the ecosystem metaphor has been both critiqued (Nadler 
2019) and adopted by a number of researchers conducting largely 
“practical” academic research (Holcomb 2021, Kostovska et al. Stonbely 
et. al. 2019). By and large however (with a few exceptions) most recent 
research in political communication and mainstream journalism studies 
either replicates the original notion of the media ecosystem metaphor or 
does not engage with the ecosystem literature at all, despite seemingly 
fruitful methodological and empirical overlaps. In particular, perhaps 
because of its overwhelming focus on media message effects, the 
disinformation and propaganda studies literature has never explicitly 
addressed the concept of ecosystems, despite a line of analysis that has 
much synergy with the basic concept.

For this special issue of /Problemi dell'informazione/ we hope to 
rectify this state of affairs by soliciting papers that empirically and 
theoretically push the concept of the media ecosystem in new directions. 
In particular, we are interested in papers that employ and re-interpret 
the ecosystemic lens to engage with one (or better more than one) of the 
following dimensions:

·*Epistemologies of journalism*(e.g., negotiations of norms, behaviors, 
and knowledge as well as definition of field’s borders in systems that 
transcend institutions);

·*Geographies of journalism*(e.g., tensions between local, national, 
transnational and global news networks and, more broadly, issues 
connected to the physical location of news producers, distributors, 
consumers and stakeholders);

·*Politics of journalism *(e.g., patterns of negotiations between 
political and news actors in the definition of agendas, frames, and 
regimes of truth, especially insofar as these frames might be rendered 
unstable due to their ecosystemic nature);**

·*Economies of journalism*(e.g., economic relations between actors, as 
well as issues connected to business models, labor organization and 
conflicts involving news workers at large);

·*Audiences of journalism *(e.g., citizens’ approaches to news 
consumption; analysis of news diets; citizens’ representations of news 
environments and of their actors – especially the way that citizens are 
enrolled in ecosystemic networks)

·*Platforms of journalism *(e.g., content circulation across platforms, 
role of algorithms and affordances on the definition of newsmaking 
practices and news values)

·*(non-)Humans of journalism*(e.g., artificial intelligence, 
interactions between human and non-human producers, distributors and 
consumers of news; individual vs. coordinated behaviors around news 
content);

·*Inequalities of journalism *(e.g., gender/race/other gaps in access to 
the news, to professional roles, and to news space).**

·*Theoretical assessments, critiques, and applications *of the news 
ecosystem concept.


*Submission of proposals*

·*Deadline for abstracts submission: April 10, 2022*

·Acceptance email sent from issue editors: April 30, 2022

·Full Paper Submission: June 30, 2022

·First round of reviews complete: September 28, 2022

·Resubmissions of papers: November 15, 2022

·Second Round of reviews completed: December 15, 2022

·Submission of final manuscripts: January 15, 2023

Abstracts (300/500 words plus references) in English or in Italian 
should be submitted at:

https://submission.rivisteweb.it/index.php/pdi 
<https://submission.rivisteweb.it/index.php/pdi>

Abstracts should be proposed for the section “Saggi”. Please indicate 
that the proposal is for the special issue edited by Anderson and 
Valeriani in the box “Comments for the editor”.

For further information about the submission process: 
(augusto.valeriani /at/ unibo.it) <mailto:(augusto.valeriani /at/ unibo.it)>

There are no APC (Article Processing Charge) for authors.


*About the venue*
Established in 1976, *Problemi dell’Informazione (PdI)* has been the 
first Italian scientific journal focusing specifically on journalism and 
communication studies. Since then, PdI has represented a dedicated venue 
for the development of a vivid debate on these topics, fueled both by 
academic research and by contributions form professionals. More recently 
PdI has expanded its aims and scope by broadly considering all forms of 
communication, also to keep the pace with the latest transformations in 
the field of journalism and of journalism studies. PdI publishes 
contributions in Italian and in English after a rigorous double-blind 
peer review process.

*Principal Editor*: Carlo Sorrentino.

Here (https://www.mulino.it/riviste/issn/0390-5195 
<https://www.mulino.it/riviste/issn/0390-5195>) its national and 
international board.

Problemi dell'Informazione is A-class rated journal by ANVUR (Italian 
National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research 
Systems) in Sociology of culture and communication (SPS/08).

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