An Interweaving of Influences: How the Digital Environment Redefines Journalism

The digital environment makes the communicative space more and more dense due to the multiplication of social actors and communication channels. As a result, the hierarchy of influences—which establishes what is news—is strongly modified. There is a greater complexity of these influences due to the more interactive negotiation allowed by the digital environment. It defines a progressive enlargement of the second level gatekeepers, which illuminate or obscure specific information. The construction of the agenda no longer has a linear trend. Now everyone lives in a composite and increasingly interrelated arena, highly stratified and diversified. We analyze how this game of continuous references between the different social actors lead to a construction of the agenda in which each actor must identify the right resources to obtain an adequate positioning within the communicative field. An interweaving of influences is established rather than a clear hierarchy, which modifies the relationship between sources and journalists, and also redesigns relations with the public.