Journalism as Activism

In the mediated digital era, communication is changing fast and eating up ever greater shares of real-world power. Corporate battles and guerrilla wars are fought on Twitter. Facebook is the new Berlin, home to tinkers, tailors, spies – and terrorist recruiters. We recognize the power shift instinctively but, in our attempts to understand it, we keep using conceptual and theoretical models that are not changing fast, that are barely changing at all, that are laid over from the past.

Journalism remains one of the main sites of communication power, an expanded space where citizens, protesters, PR professionals, tech developers and hackers can directly shape the news. Adrienne Russell reports on media power from one of the most vibrant corners of the journalism field, the corner where journalists and activists from countries around the world cross digital streams and end up updating media practices and strategies. Russell demonstrates the way the relationship between digital journalism and digital activism has shaped coverage of the online civil liberties movement, the Occupy movement, and the climate change movement. Journalism as Activism explores the ways everyday meaning and the material realities of media power are tied to the communication tools and platforms we have access to, the architectures of digital space we navigate, and our ability to master and modify our media environments.

• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Networks
• Chapter 3: Tools: Prototyping Change
• Chapter 4: Practice
• Chapter 5: Power
• Notes
• References
• Index

"Journalism has always overlapped with activism, and certainly does so today. In Journalism as Activism, Adrienne Russell focuses on this overlap and shows how small groups of progressives around causes like Occupy Wall Street are trying to connect activism, technology, and journalism to develop new forms of media aimed not at covering the world, but at changing it."
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford

�Journalists have traditionally been cast as storytellers, but emerging technologies embed them into stories in ways that radicalize the affective nature of their involvement with events in the making. In Journalism as Activism, Adrienne Russell reconsiders the place of journalists in developing stories, and challenges the traditional dogma of objectivity, thus helping us reimagine the meaning of journalism in contemporary and future societies. Compellingly presented, elegantly written, and deeply original, this is a credo for enlightenment through journalism.�
Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois at Chicago Adrienne Russell is Associate Professor of Emergent Digital Practices and Co-director of Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Denver.