New Media, automation and peripheral actors in Journalism

Abstract

The transformation of the media environment in recent years has fuelled a landscape in which traditional media, new media and social media play a central role (Cabrera-Méndez et al., 2019). They shape the communication flows that circulate through the multiple channels of the network society and contribute to the renewal of the characteristics of mediation and mediatization processes. The liquid society of our days, with multi-screens as main gadgets for both production and consumption in communication, walks is still living in the shadow of automation. These features irradiate a communicative map in which the digital native media and the peripheral actors of the journalistic field reveal themselves as travelling companions of the young generations who, as active audiences, show an increasing prominence as actors for communication.
At the stage of today’s network society, the media and digital platforms have positioned themselves as indispensable intermediaries for a growing number of human practices. They have generated a “platformization” of society (van Dijck et al., 2018), where new actors are trying to occupy new spaces and play new roles. Within the same scenario, the media have become omnipresent, playing a central role in the transformation of culture and society, with current technologies influencing the processes of mediatization (Döveling et al., 2018).
Social Science researchers are convinced that the media have a deep importance for the proper functioning of society (Deuze, 2021) by remaining one of the main drivers of social change (Casero, 2021). In the same framework, many peripheral actors in the circulation and production of journalism are filling central and integral space through the development of non-profit initiatives (Hermida & Young, 2019). Hence, this is a great change that results in many lines of research in the field of Communication. However, it is necessary to know as much as possible about the ins and outs of its evolution to anticipate the future of the communication environment, characterized by the development of automation and the Internet of things.
In this issue of Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, researchers and academics are invited to offer the results of research carried out in recent years on this new and complex structure whose main characters are the new media, the new peripheral actors and the automation process employed by them.
Keywords: Digital Journalism, new media, native digital media, peripheral actors in journalism, artificial intelligence, renewed communication processes.
Deadline: December 15, 2021