What’s newsworthy about ‘social news’? Characteristics and potential of an emerging genre

Introduction

The news media are in a state of deep existential crisis, as they attempt to adapt and co-evolve with a multi-platform digital media ecology – and this crisis is both economic and societal in nature. Social media platforms have transformed news reporting, discussion and circulation (Hermida et al., 2012; Lee and Ma, 2012), provoking concerns about the role of algorithmic news curation in fragmenting and polarising audiences (Jacobsen et al., 2016; Pariser, 2011), and news organisations are grappling with the effect of metrics and real-time audience data on the news selection and curation process (Anderson, 2011; Harcup and O’Neill, 2016; Phillips, 2012).

These changes have intensified existing concerns about the social and political impacts of a more audience-centred media business, and in particular, questions about whether journalists are able to balance commercial imperatives with their responsibilities to inform the public and hold power to account. The role of social media platforms in the news business has attracted especially acute scrutiny since the 2016 US Presidential election, during which fabricated, hyper-partisan stories spread relatively freely on Facebook and Twitter, and appeared to influence both the broader media agenda and the election outcome (Benkler et al., 2017). As a result, social media platforms have been charged with being primarily focused on attention above information quality, and with being driven by their business models to allow outlets to directly target highly specified audiences with political propaganda and disinformation (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Marwick and Lewis, 2017).

On the other hand, social media are at the heart of some of the more innovative developments in socially progressive journalism that are occurring in response to the economic and technological developments of recent years (Deuze and Witschge, 2017). This article focuses on emerging forms and journalistic practices that are native to and have co-evolved with the social media environment. We argue that there are sufficiently common characteristics among these forms and practices to define a new genre, and we call this genre ‘social news’ (building on but moving beyond earlier news-sharing platforms like Digg). We define these key, shared characteristics and illustrate them through discussions of three Australian-based publications – BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv – each of which embodies specific kinds of pop-culture sensibilities and politics, and all of which are embedded within the multi-platform digital media environment. The three outlets were selected due to their shared possession of these characteristics – which first suggested to us the presence of an emerging and distinct genre. They are also outlets that have achieved considerable commercial success in Australia, further indicating to us that they deserved investigation.

An important challenge for researchers is to distinguish the kinds of news outlets that engage in quality journalism from those – like Breitbart and InfoWars – that distribute propaganda or even disinformation. However, traditional journalistic norms (Zelizer, 2013) are of limited help in this task, in that they often privilege process and format over intent and social function (Harrington, 2008). While the emerging outlets that we discuss here as social news might fail some of the traditional tests for ‘quality’ news (such as maintaining a clear demarcation between editorial and commercial content), they operate according to a relatively traditional journalistic ethos: that is, they actively investigate, accurately report, and analytically comment on traditionally newsworthy events and public issues. They also demonstrate a particular interest in media criticism, which is both symptomatic of and a potential answer to widespread distrust in the mainstream media. In turn, journalism researchers need to reconceptualise what we understood ‘good’ journalism to be, and stretch the boundaries of what counts as quality news media in this time of ‘chaos’ (Deuze and Witschge, 2017: 2). Of course, ‘social news’ is not the only form in which valuable and innovative journalism is being produced. However, some of the emergent characteristics of social news – how it challenges problematic journalistic norms, like ‘balance and ‘objectivity’, and playfully engages in platform vernaculars – can be considered useful experiments or even necessary antidotes to the perceived failings of mainstream journalism.

Scholarship on social news to date has been mostly limited to BuzzFeed, which is the most well-known such publication. These studies largely focused on the process of journalistic legitimisation that BuzzFeed has undergone in recent years – however, they have also found important indications of difference, provoking further research into the characteristics and origins of these journalistic innovations. Wu (2016) examined the growing similarities of BuzzFeed with established legacy outlets. Wu (2016) found that BuzzFeed has gradually been adopting traditional newsroom structures and producing more ‘hard news stories’; with the latter distinct from the pop-culture content the outlet was originally known for. Tandoc and Jenkins (2017) studied the US version of BuzzFeed and its relationship with legacy news outlets through Bourdieu’s (1993) framework of field theory, finding that although these established outlets were initially wary of BuzzFeed’s entry into their field, they now welcome it and perceive it as ‘reinforcing existing [journalistic] norms and contributing to the reproduction of the field’s structure’ (Tandoc and Jenkins, 2017: 14). Tandoc and Jenkins (2017) also suggest, however, that future studies should investigate how BuzzFeed’s ‘discourse and practices’ could be transforming the journalistic field in ways that established journalists have overlooked (p. 14) – a suggestion we take up in this article. Tandoc (2018) also studied the news values, sources, formats, and norms of BuzzFeed (US) in comparison to the New York Times through a content analysis of news articles. As in the previous study, Tandoc (2018) found that although BuzzFeed was ‘exhibiting some departures from traditional practice’, it was, ‘in general, playing by the rules’ (p. 1). However, Tandoc notes that it would be beneficial to study BuzzFeed in relation to other emerging outlets, to confirm whether these ‘departures’ – such as a less negative tone, and a greater inclusion of ‘citizen’ voices through the use of embedded social media – were symbolic of larger shifts in the journalistic field. Tandoc and Foo (2018) also performed an ethnographic study of US-based BuzzFeed journalists, noting that the journalists they interviewed saw their work at BuzzFeed as faithful to journalistic ‘ethics’, but at the same time differentiated themselves from legacy outlets by what they see as BuzzFeed’s close relationship to audiences, its enthusiasm for ‘experimentation’, and its savvy use of technology.

The main objective of this article is to describe the emerging social news genre as it is manifesting in Australia in 2018. Here ‘genre’ is understood in its broadest sense as a textual category, with certain formal conventions and expectations, constructed with particular audiences in mind, and containing specific ideological undercurrents (Gray, 2006: 53; Lomborg, 2014). To this end, the article proposes, elaborates and illustrates the genre’s essential formal, aesthetic, and cultural characteristics through the three case studies of BuzzFeed Oz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv. In doing so, we build on extensive background research incorporating analyses of the public self-presentation and public discourse of these outlets, as well as textual analyses of selected news articles covering a range of topics and issues of shared public concern.

We first briefly outline the histories of the three exemplary social news outlets we have selected as case studies, also discussing their business and publishing models. We focus in particular on their reliance on native advertising, which is then linked to the twin cultural logics of shareability and sociability. We show how the articulation of these logics shapes the pro-social qualities of social news outlets. Arguing that these sociable qualities tend to manifest through a break with journalistic norms around objectivity, we then discuss how social news – and here the genre has antecedents in satire TV – also actively critiques journalistic ideologies and media practices, especially ‘balance’. In this regard, we argue that social news’ overt, transparent positionality must be distinguished from ‘bias’ (a covert form of positionality that the artifice of ‘objectivity’ is supposed to avoid). We then conclude by proposing a forward agenda for social news research – one that uses social news’ cultural logics to engage in new ways with issues of quality and trust, and that expands beyond the Anglosphere and Europe.

Social news: Histories and business models

Digital transformations have disrupted the news business’s previously stable and profitable revenue models. Journalism startups have attempted to adapt to this environment by experimenting with new technological and business arrangements (Bruno and Nielsen, 2012; Carlson and Usher, 2016; Kung, 2015). BuzzFeed is a good example of this. Beginning as a small lab tracking viral online content, after attracting further investment it grew into a pop news site known for quizzes and pop-culture listicles. BuzzFeed’s decision to invest in news content and to hire Ben Smith of US-based digital outlet Politico as Editor-in-Chief was grounded in the drive for continuous innovation and growth (Salmon, 2014). Growth has been achieved on a significant scale: BuzzFeed has expanded its operations to India, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia, with content tailored for each region, along with individual news bureaus based in each country. In 2015, the company was valued at US$1.5 billion (Matthews, 2015).

Although smaller than BuzzFeed, the Australian outlets Junkee and Pedestrian.tv share many of these entrepreneurial, technology-driven principles. Pedestrian.tv is a commercial digital media company and publishing brand which describes itself as the ‘House of Pop Culture’ and claims an average of 7 million page views per month. It regularly reports on a wide mixture of pop-culture, such as film, TV, music, and celebrities, as well sport, travel and politics, although these categories are frequently blurred. Beginning as a plastizine (a DVD magazine), Pedestrian.tv (2017) moved to the Internet in 2008, launching the current www.pedestrian.tv domain that would, according to the ‘About’ page on the website, ‘resonate with young Aussies in entirely new way’. The explicit connotations of this language – being young, bold, exciting, tech-literate, and emphasising growth and ‘chang[ing] the publishing game’ – echo the Silicon Valley ideology of entrepreneurialism determined to shake up established industries. Similar language and self-representation can be found in Junkee, demonstrating the ways in which the ‘About’ pages of these outlets perform a kind of ‘metajournalisic discourse’ (Carlson and Usher, 2016). These pages do not only describe the purpose and content of the publications in question, but also legitimise and generate an aura of innovation for social news brands that is contrasted positively with ‘legacy media’.

Like Pedestrian.tv, Junkee Media is a commercial digital media company with a number of publishing brands in its stable, including Junkee, the youth life advice outlet The Cusp, and the QANTAS Airlines-sponsored travel publisher AWOL.com. Beginning as the digital music news publisher Sound Alliance, the company launched Junkee (2017) in 2013, declaring itself ‘Australia’s smartest and most original pop-culture title’ and rebranded fully in 2015. Junkee’s content is a blend of pop-culture and politics, designed to be ‘mobile [phone] first’ and – explicitly emphasising sociability – to keep ‘you up to date with all the issues, but curated through the eyes of your smartest, funniest friend’ in a style that values wit and insight (Duggan, 2013). Along with these publishing brands, Junkee (2017) Media also runs an ‘unconference’ each year which brings together ‘Australia’s best and brightest young minds’ to ‘learn, innovate, inspire and create ideas and solutions’. The programme typically features a mix of young activists and entrepreneurs.

A major driver of business growth for BuzzFeed, Pedestrian.tv, and Junkee has been native advertising. This business model is based around brand-sponsored articles, where advertising is ideally seamlessly integrated into editorial content, thereby making it ‘native’ to the article of which it forms part (Levi, 2015: 649). Native advertising is designed to be less distracting than banner ads and pop-ups, while also more engaging by tailoring its content to existing reader interests, and at the same time being less subject to consumer avoidance and circumvention through the use of automated ad blockers. BuzzFeed, Pedestrian.tv, and Junkee are distinguished by their enthusiasm for and reliance on this emerging business model. Junkee describes this as ‘pioneering a new way of merging brands and content’ so that ‘everyone wins’ (Duggan, 2013), and native advertising has been so successful for the outlet that in 2016 Junkee Media pledged to phase out banner ads altogether (Ward, 2016). Pedestrian.tv (2016) has also been enthusiastic about the potential of native advertising, previously boasting that, through this model, the outlet helps advertisers ‘create innovative, engaging and effective campaigns’, and that, at Pedestrian.tv, ‘we don’t make ads, we create entertainment’. BuzzFeed, by contrast, includes no banner ads at all and relies entirely on native advertising for its revenue. It customises many of its lists, quizzes, and videos for corporate clients, and also uses metrics – the audience data it generates from content views – to inform how it creates the ads (Robischon, 2016).

However, the turn to native advertising raises concerns around editorial integrity, journalistic ethics and consumer welfare. Levi (2015), in particular, notes the potential for the selection and coverage of news to be ‘skewed’ by interested commercial clients, thus weakening ‘editorial independence’ by ‘normalising corporatised news’ (p. 652). Any native advertising model that does not clearly label or separate its branded articles from its editorial content is indeed cause for concern, as it is with the growing use of forms of integrated advertising in other industries, such as the emerging beauty and lifestyle-vlogging influencer industry (Abidin, 2015).

The ethical issues associated with native advertising are neither new nor unique to social news. A large number of online commercial news outlets blur the lines between advertising and original content – even the highly respected Guardian Australia features a ‘paid content’ section of its website – and all commercial news outlets have had to remain aware of possible editorial influence that comes with advertising income. Additionally, the risks associated with native advertising are mitigated to a certain extent by BuzzFeed and Junkee, both of which label their ad content. But despite these measures, concerns about the influence of corporate clients on BuzzFeed were raised in late 2017 on Twitter after the outlet failed to cover a union-led nation-wide boycott of popular ice-cream manufacturer Streets. The boycott was the result of an industrial dispute. Their absence of coverage was notable, since most major digital and TV news outlets covered the boycott. The lack of BuzzFeed coverage of the boycott was also particularly suspicious, considering that Streets’ owner, the multinational company Unilever, is a major BuzzFeed client and has been accused in the past of compelling BuzzFeed to delete articles that were unfavourable to the multinational’s various brands (Stack, 2015). Thus, the possibility remains that an influential and wealthy corporate client could influence how other social news outlets cover a story that reflects badly on that client. Consonant with developments elsewhere in digital media entertainment (such as the influencer industry), native advertising is an effective tool for growth in a challenging market – but authenticity and transparency will be key to maintaining audience trust.

Moreover, this commercial dependence on ‘engaging’ and ‘entertaining’ native advertising campaigns reflects two of the core generic characteristics of social news: shareability and sociability – characteristics that both respond to and exploit the logics of social media.

Shareability and sociability as logics of social news

Shareability is a fundamental logic of social media platforms. Facebook’s current slogan to new users on its login webpage is that the platform ‘helps you connect and share with the people in your life’. Twitter’s (2017) stated mission is to ‘give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly’, while the image-based platform Instagram (2017) describes itself as ‘a community … who capture and share the world’s moments’. Similarly, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has previously spoken of BuzzFeed’s expertise in sharing, claiming that BuzzFeed had a great understanding of ‘what people share and why people share and what stories are interesting’ and criticised legacy outlets like The New York Times for having ‘stories [that] are boring’, even if they still do ‘a lot of tremendous journalism’ (Salmon, 2014). In the press release announcing their launch of Junkee, what was then Sound Alliance stated that young people ‘share content on social media that makes them look knowledgeable or is funny’ and that Junkee was to be built with those sharing practices in mind (Duggan, 2013). Although Pedestrian.tv (2016) has not explicitly used the word ‘sharing’, it has previously boasted of its ‘unique understanding of content, culture and media’ that can help brands ‘connect with [their] audience’ and thus suggested knowledge about the platform ecologies where sharing flourishes.

In these contexts, sharing has multiple meanings. Most obviously, the word refers to the technological affordances that enable networked communication and the distribution of concrete objects, such as images, among users. But more broadly, the term appears to denote more overtly pro-social values. ‘Share’ is a word with almost purely positive connotations. Although originating in a more functional description of the equal partition of a concrete thing, such as land, it has come to signify notions of giving, selflessness and the revelation of intimate feeling (John, 2017). Hence, the popular children’s axiom: sharing is caring. As John (2017) has argued, those using the term ‘seek to harness more than just its technical meaning of certain aspects of computer-mediated communication’ (p. 61). More pragmatically, platforms need users to share personal information so they can sell these data to advertisers (Fuchs, 2011) – and social news outlets also have a commercial imperative for sharing, and this is where native advertising, in terms of optimising impact for campaigns, comes in.

Regardless of their motivations, both platforms and outlets depend on users voluntarily giving something to others: whether that is information, images, or news articles. There is a necessity, here, for sociable environments and content that can facilitate this giving. Sociable is understood via Simmel’s (1971) notion of ‘sociability’: the ‘impulse’ to connect and the pleasure in ‘socialising’, and the ‘satisfaction in the very fact that one is associated with others’ (p. 128). This ‘impulse’ to connect and share is not only an outcome of the technical affordances of a platform, for not all content is shared, and some spreads more than others. Moreover, when Peretti boasts of BuzzFeed’s expertise in sharing, he speaks of it almost as a textual quality: that, unlike BuzzFeed, the New York Times’ articles are ‘boring’ and that there are reasons why some content is more shareable than others – in other words, BuzzFeed understands and can cater to the sociable impulse.

The question of what makes some articles more shareable than others, and thus more likely to facilitate sociability, has attracted scholarly attention (Harcup and O’Neill, 2016; Hermida et al., 2012; Phillips, 2012). Harcup and O’Neill (2016) propose that shareability is in itself an emerging news value, and while they find it difficult to pin down exactly what makes some articles more shareable than others, they suggest it has something to do with emotional responses: shareable news items are those that make readers ‘laugh’ or ‘angry’ (p. 11). Shareability here is a quality inherent to a story – that some stories just simply trigger the impulse to be sociable more than others. This may explain shareability to a certain extent, but it does not fully capture the sense suggested by Peretti and the Junkee and Pedestrian.tv ‘About’ webpages. Peretti’s complaining of ‘boring’ stories, Junkee’s intention to create content that will make their readers seem ‘knowledgeable or funny’ and Pedestrian.tv’s ‘unique understanding of content, culture and media’ allows for a broad enough canvas of news stories, with the main discriminating feature being a general desire to keep readers engaged through humour, ‘culture’, and intelligence. This need not mean being restricted to popular culture to the exclusion of hard news: BuzzFeed, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv all publish on a range of news topics, including the economy, parliamentary politics, and social and cultural issues. Thus, social news outlets demonstrate that rather than just attempting to gauge the shareability of news topics or events, researchers need to also think about shareability as emerging from the ‘attributes of a media text’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 4) – in this case, social news articles.

The textual qualities we ascribe to social news are not in themselves new. Similar observations have been made in response to the increasing popularity of satirical television programmes like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report since the mid 2000s. The Daily Show was branded as ‘fake news’ (long before the term had gained as much purchase in the political world as it now has), and was labelled not as journalism but as late-night entertainment – indeed, Jon Stewart consistently rejected criticisms of his work that were made through a journalistic frame. The show was nevertheless hailed for the ‘modernist’ ethos that underpinned its approach to politics (Baym, 2010). The Daily Show was also called out as an important experiment in political news that forced traditional journalists to rethink their craft (Feldman, 2007). By virtue of its discursive positioning, it could actively mock the mainstream news (particularly Fox News and other cable news channels) for so badly abdicating their public responsibilities (Harrington, 2013: 17–21). It could also better engage the audience by reflecting their everyday – that is, sometimes crude and emotional – political discussions, rather than use the much more formal and ‘neutral’ language that dominates orthodox news forms (Jones, 2010: 44; Gray, 2008: 147). More recently, Last Week Tonight has gone further, demonstrating the commercial viability of investigative, long-form news-entertainment hybrid genres. Additionally, Last Week Tonight owes much of its success to social media users sharing clips from the show, especially where users cannot access HBO, the cable channel on which the show airs.

Blending humour and play with ‘serious’ news is not an entirely new experiment in journalism, then. However, what distinguishes social news from earlier experiments is the way that these new outlets are so centrally driven by ‘platform vernaculars’ (Gibbs et al., 2014) – the platform-centric aesthetic and social conventions through which these news stories are presented and consumed. Snark, playful irreverence, and pop-culture content are commonly combined to various degrees in social news stories. Memes and reaction GIFs (Miltner and Highfield, 2017) are frequently included as part of the organic flow of text within articles. BuzzFeed Oz News also makes use of memes and emoji (cartoon images used to express emotion or denote certain activities) in headline images. For example, an article about Facebook’s efforts to tackle abusive practices like ‘revenge porn’ – the dissemination of nude images of ex-partners without consent – referenced a popular ‘send nudes’ meme in its sub-title and in its headline image (Esposito, 2017). Emoji are common in the thumbnail images used to promote articles, as in the case of the article ‘If Your NBN Sucks, Telstra Might Give You Compensation’ where an angry-face and a dollar-sign emoji are plastered on top of an otherwise conventional photo-op of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visiting a telecommunications worksite (Taylor, 2017a). The story was about the National Broadband Network, a national telecommunications infrastructure project in Australia established with the goal of upgrading the country’s Internet speeds and replacing existing copper cable networks. However, ever since it was announced in 2007, the project has been beset by problems and has suffered significant political interference – BuzzFeed’s use of the angry-face emoji was thus tapping into ongoing public frustration.

The cultural logics of social news thus share deep connections with the logics of social media platforms – like shareability. Similarly, the tone and content of social news reflect the platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2014) – the emergent codes and conventions – of social media and its publics. Milner (2016) has described memes as ‘everyday vernacular’, noting how ‘memetic logics and grammar underscore … a shared social vernacular prevalent within and across participatory media collectives’ (p. 84). The everydayness of these vernaculars – the etymology of ‘vernacular’ itself having origins in describing speech practices that are non-elite and ordinary (Burgess, 2006) – indicates the suitability of social news for the forms of inter-personal socialising prevalent on platforms. These vernaculars are also related to what Highfield (2016a) has called the ‘irreverent Internet’, where ‘engagement with issues, texts, and events take more jokey forms’. Not only is humour a dominant textual feature of social news, but humorous Twitter reactions, in the form of embedded tweets, are a regular component, and even sometimes the main topic, of articles. For instance, a 27 October 2017 Junkee article about the reactions on Twitter to five federal politicians being forced to resign from Parliament because of dual citizenship issues contained a proliferation of the textual elements described above (Langford, 2017). Headlined ‘All The Best Twitter Reactions To A Bunch Of Politicians Getting Booted From Parliament’, the article presented numerous humorous tweets written in the snarky, pun and GIF-heavy styles common on Twitter. The article also used Australian colloquialisms – summing up Twitter reactions as ‘pretty … fucking stoked [pleased and proud]’ – and deployed slang associated with Internet meme cultures, by declaring only to highlight the ‘spiciest’ of roasts (‘spicy’ being a common descriptor of particularly funny or poignant memes). The headline image was a The Simpsons meme, drawn from an infamous episode in which the Simpsons family visits Australia only to eventually be subjected to a literal booting after the troubled son, Bart, offends the locals. In the image, Bart Simpson’s face is replaced with that of the agrarian conservative National Party MP Barnaby Joyce, and Homer’s face – as he rushes over to defend his son from the boot – is replaced with the head of Prime Minister Turnbull.

Even when it engages with ‘hard news’ topics like national politics, then, social news content is fun to share among peers. It reflects, and is embedded in, the emotive and playful sociable communicative practices already prevalent on these platforms (Highfield, 2016b; Lomborg, 2014). These practices do, however, tend to reflect a particular user – young, educated, and literate in popular culture – and the humour of social news is frequently made at the expense of conservatives and ‘baby boomers’. Precisely because the humour is constitutive, in the sense of bringing people together through laughter, its implied ‘us’ targets and often excludes an equally implicit ‘them’ (Phillips and Milner, 2017: 96). This complicates the sociable and progressive potential of these outlets outside of their targeted demographics, and raises legitimate concerns about fragmented audiences on platforms. Below, we return to this question of the particular positionality of social news, which is both symptomatic of and an answer to a sometimes polarising news environment.

As the above examples demonstrate, social news is an affective media genre – it explicitly evokes and expresses feeling. Papacharissi (2015) argues that feeling is key to how Twitter publics form, communicate, and collaborate, and that hashtags, memes, and other visual content can serve as ‘affective gestures’ that ‘provide the basis of how individuals connect and tune into the events in the making’. In social news, the use of this visual content, along with the irreverent and outwardly emotional responses like outrage that regularly feature in these articles, invite feeling, and encourage others to share this feeling. This is an important distinction from conventional news articles, which can and do elicit targeted emotional responses, but remain mostly dispassionate in tone. Social news, in this way, responds to Beckett and Deuze’s (2016) call for an increased role of emotion in journalism, and for an overtly emotional journalism which ‘inspires connection’ (p. 2). An article by Pedestrian.tv on Australia’s 2017 same sex marriage postal survey, headlined ‘Final ABS Update Shows Whopping Number Of You Legends Voted In SSM Survey’, demonstrates this role of affect in inspiring togetherness (Feltscheer, 2017). It not only reports on the high 78.5 per cent turnout in the controversial postal survey used to determine whether Australian should legislate same-sex marriage, but also explicitly expresses enthusiasm and excitement for this high turnout. Its personal address – ‘you legends’ – also intends to make the reader feel good about this result. Declaring the turnout a ‘bit of a big deal tbh [‘to be honest’]’, this feel-good sense is further reinforced when the writer expresses gratitude to Australia for its ‘fucken GOOD WORK’ and expresses that he ‘LOVE[s] YOU V MUCH WITH ALL OF MY GAY HEART’. Australia, here, is hailed as a feeling community brought together by a victory for love and social justice. GIFs are deployed affectively as well: a humorous GIF of Marilyn Monroe waving goodbye with the caption ‘Bye Bitch!’ both celebrates the end of a process about which there was so much ambivalence, and ends the article with a potent dose of camp affect.

As well as engaging affective publics, then, the sociable qualities and political feeling of social news appear to violate traditional notions of journalistic ‘objectivity’ in favour of overt positionality: with implications for existing understandings of journalistic quality, as we discuss in the following section.

Positionality and transparency: Challenging ‘objectivity’

For decades, scholars have engaged in an ongoing demystification of the concept of ‘objectivity’ and its role as a core principle of journalistic occupational ‘ideology’ (Deuze, 2005; Golding and Elliot, 1979). Schudson (1978) located the construction of objectivity in the commercial competition of the 19th American press industry: in these crowded markets, objectivity became a marker of accurate and reliable news product, and by extension, of quality journalism. The idea that there could be a distanced, detached, and neutral news had also been challenged by other 20th century scholars. The semiotic analysis of objective news content – whereby objectivity was argued to be a signifying system which masked, often unconscious, ideological commitments – dates back as far as Schudson’s work, with different scholars having deployed this critique in various ways (Chomsky, 1988; Glasgow University Media Group, 1976, 1980; Hall et al., 1978).

Still, technological and economic destabilisation in the digital age, and the resulting plethora of online outlets producing content claiming to be news, along with the anxieties associated with native advertising and the current so-called ‘post-truth’ era with its malicious and fabricated ‘fake news’, have made the issue of objectivity timely once more. Compounding this issue are anxieties around the role of filter bubbles or echo chambers (Bozdag, 2013; Jacobsen et al., 2016; Pariser, 2011) in algorithmically reinforced and partisan social media spaces. BuzzFeed Oz News, Pedestrian.tv, and Junkee are both symptoms of and responses to the dynamics of social media that are at the root of these anxieties. First, in alignment with the social media logic of personalisation and social connection, social news is marked by its transparent positionality – by which we mean both the ways that writers for social news outlets situate themselves in rather than separating themselves from their stories, and the political perspective-taking which characterises their reporting. Second, as discussed above, social news is often quite overtly targeted at specific demographics, with particular political persuasions, and the content is designed to appeal to like-minded readers: for example, BuzzFeed Oz News, Pedestrian, and Junkee are all targeted towards pop-culture literate and progressive young people.

We argue that the term positionality is best used to describe these combined characteristics because it avoids unhelpful binaries between objectivity and bias, and because it alludes to the overt positioning that these outlets use to address particular audiences. In terms of the former, these outlets frequently take an explicit and transparent position on the stories they cover, rather than the distanced and dispassionate coverage typical of legacy outlets. While BuzzFeed Oz News tends to be the most conventional in its article content, the outlet still features a fairly overt editorial stance targeted towards a specific demographic, with its own preferred politics, irreverent tastes, and communicative styles. This is evident through their regular use of pop-culture GIFs within articles – such as in an article on political tensions within the Australian far-right One Nation party, where GIFs of women eating popcorn and drinking tea are deployed to mock the party’s troubles and also to ironically indulge in the spectacle of political ‘~drama~’ (Taylor, 2017b). Political positions are also evident on headlines about progressive issues like marriage equality – for example, ‘Josh Thomas’ Response To An Anti-Same Sex Marriage Politician Is Fucking Fantastic’ (Di Stefano, 2017). Social news outlets also quite explicitly cover some topics more than others: Junkee and Pedestrian, in particular, emphasise concerns pertaining to their young demographic – like housing affordability. But this explicit perspective-taking is not bias. Long regarded as a ‘slippery concept’ (Wamsley and Pride, 1972: 450), bias by definition cannot be explicit or overt; rather it connotes slanted or selective news coverage of particular political candidates or issues concealed within otherwise seemingly objective news content (Eveland and Shah, 2003; Hopmann et al., 2012). The explicit positionality of social news should also be distinguished from editorial stance which could sway news selection, such as the different news agendas of The Guardian or a conservative News Corp masthead, where overt perspective is still confined to editorials or opinion.

Furthermore, social news explicitly criticises journalistic conventions associated with objectivity, most notably ‘balance’. Balance is an established journalistic norm in some media systems, but it has been contested. Entman (1989) claimed that balance ‘aimed for neutrality’ by presenting ‘both sides’ in ‘any significant dispute’ with ‘roughly equal attention’ (p. 30). However, not all sides deserve ‘equal attention’ (Dearing, 1995; Dixon and Clarke, 2013). In their work on climate science coverage in the US, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) found that by considering all views equally, established newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post had over-represented discredited perspectives and thereby distorted public perception of the solidity of global warming science. Balance also often places arguments in a reductive for-or-against and tends to promote party-political conflict to the detriment of other more marginalised voices (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2017), and can be easily exploited by political strategists (Harrington, 2017). This was evident during the 2017 postal survey on same-sex marriage in Australia, initiated by the conservative Turnbull government – itself an exercise in ‘hearing both sides’ so as to stall policymaking on a well-supported issue of human rights. Legacy news outlets like News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph and Fairfax Media’s The Sydney Morning Herald regularly ran provocative and contrarian op-eds, the justification again being that this was balance. Social news outlets lacked these provocative ‘No’ op-eds, and Junkee and Pedestrian.tv even went as far as to actively advocate for the ‘Yes’ side (Bennett, 2017). Also notably, social news outlets’ critique of balance has appeared in response to established broadcasters giving platforms to dangerous and hateful voices. Both Junkee and Pedestrian.tv have criticised these broadcasters for giving airtime to far-right provocateurs (Bruce-Smith, 2017; Faruqi, 2017), as well as actual neo-Nazis, such as when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s youth radio station Triple J interviewed an organiser of the ‘Unite the Right’ Charlottesville rallies in August 2017, ostensibly seeking to hear his ‘perspective’ on racial tensions in America (Hennessy and Story, 2017).

Social news is therefore easily distinguished from the hyper-partisan outlets trading in propaganda and disinformation that appeared to gain traction during the 2016 US presidential election. It is neither composed of fabricated news stories, nor does it rely on disinformation: the ‘decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic’ that ‘create a fundamentally misleading view of the world’, and which characterise right-wing outlets like Breitbart (Benkler et al., 2017; Marwick and Lewis, 2017). Social news outlets, although overtly political and tapped into progressive social media publics, appear to be highly invested in accurate reporting. This was evident, for instance, during the same-sex marriage postal survey, wherein BuzzFeed Oz reporters actively live tweeted political developments. These tweets often possessed significant doses of wit and snark, and regularly made references to popular memes – qualities not typical of press gallery reporting – but they also demonstrated a deep dedication to informing and explaining to readers about a frequently fraught and confusing process. Moreover, the relationship between social news outlets and traditional legacy news is not antagonistic: the outlets under examination here, particularly Junkee and Pedestrian.tv, are often critical of the latter but do not share the disdain for ‘mainstream media’ that Breibart and similar outlets bear.

Social news thus goes beyond traditional normative understandings of quality journalism (especially notions of ‘objectivity’), while producing something that is still recognisably news, and with values that are perceivably journalistic, such as depth and accuracy. Deuze and Witschge’s (2017) claim that ‘going beyond boundaries is what is productive in this time of flux’ (p. 13) is thus validated. Judging the quality of new, innovative outlets according to older criteria can, at best, provide a poor understanding of this innovation, and at worst, present an overwhelmingly pessimistic picture of contemporary journalism.

Conclusion: A forward agenda for ‘social news’ research

The shared qualities and practices of social news outlets are indicators of an emerging genre of news, with specific journalistic practices that challenge hegemonic professional norms and that are grounded in the material realities of the platform-dominated digital media environment. The social news genre has three key characteristics: first, its use of the vernacular conventions and pop culture sensibilities of social media; second, a shareability built around the affordances, sociable cultures, and affective publics of platforms; and third, a tendency to an overt, transparent positionality that consistently supports and identifies with politically progressive platform cultures. Also, rather than presenting a threat to ethical journalism, this transparent positionality can actually address underlying issues of trust and democracy associated with journalistic norms such as ‘neutrality’ and ‘balance’. Additionally, social news is currently produced and distributed by a range of outlets that share a business model reliant at least in part on native advertising, and that appeals in content and tone to particular niche audiences and subcultures. As we have shown, social news is both symptomatic of a platform-dominated media environment, and a demonstration of how quality news can be made to flourish in this environment – but only if quality is considered in a more sophisticated way. In doing so, we hope to have provided a framework for reconsidering quality journalism more broadly.

Social news is thus an emergent site of journalistic practice that emphasises the convergence of news with the sociable and affective cultures of social media platforms. By conceptualising social news as a genre, we have highlighted the existence and the necessity of a plurality of news forms and journalisms, even if these have a shared function: that of regular, accurate and reliable information and commentary. In a media system where traditional, ‘quality’ news outlets are struggling with fragmenting audiences, declining advertising revenue and decreased social relevance, the news outlets that engage audiences in innovative ways, are able to thrive on social media platforms, and are able to achieve commercial success, while continuing to perform the democratic functions of journalism deserve more attention. More research is needed on the changing professional identities associated with these forms of journalism, and the implications of blending news forms with the cultures and business models of social media platforms. More attention is also needed into how such publications manage the tensions between affective appeal to niche audiences (which are algorithmically reinforced) and the importance of plurality to a healthy news environment (which implies reaching a broader and more diverse audience).

Although this article was largely focused on English-language examples from Australia, future studies on social news outlets and other emerging news forms outside of the Anglosphere and Europe (especially in East Asia, where news sharing is extensively embedded with instant messaging), as well as those which might appear to fall into our framework of social news but that do not have a progressive political tone or audience, are urgently needed. Finally, irreverence and irony, which are important cultural elements of social media’s platform vernaculars, are increasingly being weaponised for far-right causes, and conflicts within sub-cultures, such as the videogaming community, have turned platforms into battlegrounds for highly toxic online culture wars (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernandez, 2016; Massanari, 2017; Phillips and Milner, 2017). Research on the news outlets that are attuned to these sites, and are familiar with the sophisticated but coded vernaculars and strategies deployed by far-right causes, will also be increasingly necessary.