News literacy in the digital age: challenges and opportunities

The advent of Web 2.0 was arguably the greatest game-changer for the practices, conventions, and scope of mass communication. In its aftermath, journalistic education and journalistic practice need a thorough revision in order to continue serving their socially assigned purposes. In the wake of this sorely needed update, professional journalism finds itself facing a multitude of technical, conventional, conceptual, and societal challenges. Some of them are truly recent while others find their roots in previous stages of mass media development, but the fact remains: today’s news personnel are in a digital perfect storm, and for the first time in the history of mass media, professionals get to learn from amateurs. The digital turn in mediated human communication has opened up the traditionally walled off, one-way, regulated, curated, and professionalized news-reporting process (cf. Thorne 2008). Painstakingly educated correspondents supported by trained crews now make way for citizen journalists whose contributions are increasingly considered on par with those of seasoned news pros. During the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013 or the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015, a large portion of the public did not turn to their TVs or to the major news network websites. Instead, they clung to their smartphones, tweeting, retweeting, blogging, posting pictures from the scenes, and commenting on others’ visual and textual reporting. Their information entries travelled across the globe, and professional news channels such as CNN quickly adopted them as part of the iReport wave. These are examples of extraordinary events, but such explosions of user-generated media content which is readily adopted by the mainstream communication channels merely bring a peak to a phenomenon that is now omnipresent in all network societies (cf. Castells 2005). As the extent and impact of “amateur” media production grow, our working understanding of news literacy is in dire need of updating. We become news-literate through our exposure to and consumption of mediated news reporting. The news literacy of the digital age is overwhelmingly locked in understanding citizen journalism’s usergenerated norms and practices (cf. Bruns 2007)—and for the first time in its history, the journalistic guild has to look beyond its education and professionalization to stay relevant. The article explores the interplay between the norms and practices of professional and citizen journalism in the digital arena. In the absence of many traditional constraints regarding the canvas, production, and consumption aspects of multimodal expression (cf. Bateman 2008), both the content and presentation of news items online pose new requirements to today’s professional media producers. They also keep the definition of news literacy in constant flux. Its parent concept of media literacy is similarly pushed in new, sometimes opposing directions by rapid technological growth. The opportunities for twoway dialogue, the numerous design and composition choices (cf. Seizov 2014), the feeding frenzy, and the drastically shortened news production cycle create new criteria for news