Hosting the Public Discourse 1 Hosting the Public Discourse: News Organizations, Digital Intermediaries, and the Politics of Making Newsmedia Social Joshua Braun, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University Tarleton Gillespie, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University Contact: Joshua Braun 336 Kennedy Hall Dept. of Communication Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853
[email protected] Hosting the Public Discourse 2 Abstract In this paper, we will examine the inverse and converging movement of two sets of institutions: news organizations, as they find that part of their mission necessarily includes hosting an unruly user community that doesn’t always play by the norms of journalism; and online media platforms and social networks designed for users to share content, finding that the content being shared is often a form of news, some of which challenges their established user guidelines. We draw on a range of in-depth interviews to understand how each industry is finding itself in the other’s turf, and facing the challenges and tensions the other has long coped with, but from its own distinct vantage point. From this we will explore the ways in which the roles of news provision and community management are increasingly intermingled—in ways that will continue to have an impact on both news organizations and digital intermediaries, along with their audiences and users. Hosting the Public Discourse 3 While today’s headlines are full of stories about the death of newspapers at the hands of the Internet, the longer story has been the efforts of all kinds of news organizations to adjust to, take advantage of, and in some ways migrate to an online environment.