You get what you give: Sharing as a new radical challenge for journalism

Abstract

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Research that focuses on participation in the field of journalism remains undertheorized and overused to explain whatever type of relation with the audience. This tension leads to a shortage of a solid theoretical construct to explain the processes of sharing online content in journalism. This article frames the audience studies in a new paradigm, which is linked to the key concept of sharing. It argues for an unresolved issue between the users’ abundant social activities with media content and the lack of explicit strategies by the media to take advantage of how and why people share news on the internet. This article deals with a theoretical framework for journalism built on the convergence of audience studies, the research on participation and the management of online communities. All these approaches converge in the activity of sharing content, which remains undervalued within the academic and scientific field of journalism studies. This article recovers the paradigm of a media landscape made by information flows –instead of information stocks. Therefore, the act of sharing –by the audience– becomes strategic for the media. What it means in the field of research in journalism for the coming years is the main issue of this theoretical article. As part of the final results, the article summarises some research lines that are useful to develop a new framework around audiences and sharing content. We hope this work contributes to the theoretical awareness within a distinct segment of journalism studies influenced by the audience’s online activities with media content.