The death of scoops. The unexpected consequences of doing journalism online

Abstract

The Internet as a channel has its own characteristics, affecting those who employ it. Journalism, with its own values shaped along the history, has to adapt to the Net. After a decade and a half of relationship, journalists are now realising the full implications of some characteristics associated to the Net. One the them, immediacy, creates an unexpected situation where every medium know what their competitors are offering, then making scoops or exclusive news worthless, and tending to produce similar contents. This trend, in turn, influences the cultural understanding of the profession, which works as a field in Bourdieu’s terms, causing an important alteration of values. Among them, the classical figure of the journalist as a ‘gatekeeper’, who decides what must be socially known or not, fades. Employing an ethnographical approach to three of the more important Spanish newsrooms, this article explores these phenomena under the theoretical umbrella of Bourdieu’s sociology, finding that some traditional and well rooted journalistic values are now under threat.