Amira Firdaus - Media Globalization and Digital Journalism in Malaysia: Network Newswork

First published 2018

by Routledge

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2018 Amira Firdaus

The right of Amira Firdaus to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Amira Firdaus, author.

Title: Media globalization and digital journalism in Malaysia : network

newswork / Amira Firdaus.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge research on

media in Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017022158 | ISBN 9781138672697 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781315562391 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and globalizationMalaysia. | Online

journalismMalaysia. | Digital mediaMalaysia.

Classification: LCC P92.M3 A47 2018 | DDC 302.23/09595dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022158

ISBN: 978-1-138-67269-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-56239-1 (ebk)

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by Apex CoVantage, LLC

From YouTube videos of earthquakes and armed conflicts, to politicians Twitter feeds, to trending segments of primetime newscasts, social media content is now regularly used to complement traditional news reporting. We know that social media is bringing disruption to journalism that we know. What we know little of, however, is the dynamics of this user-driven networked digital disruption, particularly within conventional journalistic contexts (i.e. institutional, mainstream news media). I wish to propose network newswork as an emerging practice of news production which allows journalism to capture the complex journalistic space which integrates user-driven networked informational sources into various stages of news production. This book is one attempt to ask and answer a question often overlooked in current excitement over new networked forms of journalism: Within traditional, institutionally-driven journalistic settings, how is network newswork integrated into routine newswork? Drawing upon a recent global-comparative turn in journalism studies, I suggest a glocal comparative approach to this question by focusing my empirical analyses on expatriate and local journalists all based in the same locality of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but all working for news outlets that operate in distinctly different news spheres. Thus, I wish to explore how globalized informational flows are used within different glocal journalistic settings, represented by global channel Al Jazeera English s Kuala Lumpur operations, and the newsroom of Malaysian national channel Bernama News Channel (formerly known, and referred throughout this book, as Bernama TV ), as well as four other transnational outlets. Based on semi-structured interviews with journalists recruited via a chain of referrals within professional networks of journalists, this book takes a hierarchy of influences approach to exploring how institutionally-based, mainstream journalists deal with online, networked sources. What I found was that across global, local and glocal news spheres, commonalities abound within microsociological news practices. However, ideological macrosociological differences are inherently real, with real implications of giving rise to divergent understandings of social medias role as resources for news production. Interestingly, as this book will show, commonalities and divergences across news spheres are the result of ideological-institutional and professional-journalistic-routines structuration of individual journalists agency in appropriating user-driven networked media as tools of newswork. The book also discusses the implications of network newswork on the wider global journalistic sphere. I elucidate a tiered model of networked sources and expound upon journalisms 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.