Media Globalization and Digital Journalism in Malaysia: Network Newswork

The media ecology within which conventional mainstream journalism currently operates has undergone major transformations since the advent of social media. These transformations arise from the disruption brought upon by the emergence of networked, interactive platforms and user-driven online applications including social media, blogs and alternative citizen news sites. This book analyses networked forms of journalistic production at traditional news organizations and their conventional news channels. Focusing on case studies from Malaysia, it examines current transformations to the norms, practices and values of conventional news production. Drawing upon a recent global-comparative turn in journalism studies and parallel efforts to de-Westernize communication theory, this book suggests an innovative ‘glocal’ comparative approach to analyse ‘network newswork’ among global, transnational, and local news organizations, including Al Jazeera and Bernama TV, located within the same geographical locality, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This author uses an empirically-grounded conceptual framework for exploring and understanding recent transformations that user-driven networked resources bring to professional journalists’ daily work of producing news. Discussing the implications of network newswork on the wider global journalistic sphere, the book elucidates a tiered model of networked sources and expounds upon journalism’s deepening of the digital divide in its inadvertent muting of the voices of non-networked communities that are switched off from the global news sphere and its network society. A fresh perspective on the analysis of globalization in the media and a useful guide for gaining access into media organizations and securing cooperation of organizational members for research, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Asian Media and Communication Studies, Journalism Studies, Political Communication and Sociology of Journalism.