Makers of a future journalism? The role of pioneer journalists and pioneer communities in transforming journalism

Abstract

In this paper, we want to discuss the role pioneer journalists and the pioneer communities that they are part of may play in journalism s trajectory going forward. Journalism serves as an ideal case study for such an undertaking. This is because the transformation of jour- nalism is entangled with the development of media technologies and is increasingly main- tained beyond the newsroom by actors outside established media organisations, who are situated more at the periphery of the journalistic field not yet being part of the main- stream. For a couple of examples, one can look at the Hacks/Hackers movement who are engaged in data- and technology-driven journalism (Lewis and Usher, 2014), or the Con- structive Journalism Project (www.constructivejournalism.org), which are both develop- ing new forms of media coverage that integrates solution-focused elements (Haagerup, 2014). The starting point of our paper is that such forms of pioneering are a more general phenomenon in journalism. What pioneers or pioneer communities imagine is not a collec- tion of straightforward models that can be readily applied to current mainstream jour- nalism, but something that is likely to have a remarkable impact on discourse surrounding its future - something that signals developments and practices of pioneers and innovators at the periphery that push towards the centre.