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Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A postfoundational perspective
Edited by Jana Declercq, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Astrid Vandendaele
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 94] 2021
► pp. 67–98

Chapter 4
“If it wasn’t absolutely true, it couldn’t be published”

On boundaries in collaborative journalism

| Ghent University

Engaging audiences and collaborating with elite members of the public (e.g. scientists) have become increasingly important in newsrooms across the globe (Harbers 2016). In this chapter, we zoom in on collaborative journalism (in which journalists work together with non-journalists) with a postfoundational lens. We present a case in which a newspaper, university and environmental government agency set up a citizen science project on air quality in a Western European country. This chapter offers a thematic analysis of three retrospective interviews with key players, which were conducted at the end of seven months of ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes of this citizen science project. We demonstrate how collaboration plays out in (re)defining the boundaries of the cultural spaces of media, science and politics as they are constructed by our informants.

Keywords: collaboration, postfoundationalism, citizen science, linguistic ethnography, professional identity, professional practice, journalism, science, government agencies
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Media-science-politics relationship
    • Mediated issue development
    • Credibility contest
  • The case
  • Methodology
  • Profiles of the interviewees
  • Findings
    • The journalist
    • The professor
    • The department head of the environmental government agency
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.94.c4
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