Paper short abstract:

Boundaries for journalism are in flux. Also, the social boundaries in between news workers. This study shows how hierarchy had to be reestablished in the shared software where everyone could see each other’s work in ‘real time’ and control was moved into the journalists’ space for writing.

Paper long abstract:

News work has traditionally been highly hierarchical, even in a rather egalitarian work style of harmony and trust in a Norwegian context. Based on one-year fieldwork in a small Norwegian newsroom, I display how the changing social interaction in a digitalized newsroom contributed to (re)establishing collectiveness and hierarchy in between news workers. The openness, transparency, and accessibility of the physical open office landscape extended into the newsroom’s digital ‘landscape’ of their shared production platform. There were no walls in the office landscape and the tools were not “walled off” either, but the journalists protected both the physical and digital spaces by cultivating invisible fences around their craft in both spaces. Since digital ways of performing journalism hold potential for fostering greater individualism as well as different forms of control, a protective ‘we’ for establishing internal trust, and an invasive ‘we’ in form of surveillance and control, affected each other in re-establishing hierarchy. It is important to highlight is that it is not necessarily the digital ways of working in itself, but the way they create new forms of sociality and new ways of performing harmony and control, that contribute to reestablishment of boundaries. My findings show that shifting collectives of ‘we’ did not necessarily mean less individual autonomy. Rather, professional autonomy was guaranteed through the collective community as well as the core values and mission embedded in the journalistic craft.