Digital Journalism in Latin America

This volume showcases the vibrancy of the study of digital journalism in Latin America. It includes an inquiry into journalists’ perceptions of media companies’ policies regarding social media use; a survey of investigative reporters; an examination of the interaction between traditional broadcast journalists and online news teams in two television stations in Colombia; research on modes of news consumption on Facebook and WhatsApp in Costa Rica and Chile; and a study of the institutionalization of independent journalism in Brazil. The methods employed by the contributors include surveys, in-depth interviews, eye tracking, and participant observation. These texts reveal differences across and within Latin American media and their audiences. This underscores the importance of abandoning the ethnocentric perspective of most journalism scholarship, which tends to homogenize a supposedly exotic other. In a research field marked by inequality, in which the vast majority of studies, authors, and reviewers are from the Global North, where only 14% of the global population lives, the studies included in this volume illustrate how research about and from the other 86% can increase the representativeness of the scholarly endeavor. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Digital Journalism.

Eugenia Mitchelstein is Associate Professor and Chair of the Social Sciences Department the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Victoria, Argentina, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina (MESO). She has authored two books, one edited volume, and more than thirty journal articles.

Pablo J. Boczkowski is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, USA. He is the author of six books, four edited volumes, and more than sixty journal articles. His latest book (forthcoming) is To Know Is to Compare: Studying Social Media Across Nations, Media and Platforms (with Mora Matassi).