Seth Lewis has just published two new articles of interest to Culture Digitally readers. The first, still in iFirst online form, appears in Information, Communication & Society, in a coming special issue on tensions in digital media work. The article is titled The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries. (If you can’t access the official version, there is a pre-print available here.) This literature synthesis attempts to articulate journalism’s norm of professional control over content, exploring its boundary work and its “ideological incompatibility” with the norms of open participation online. While the literature suggests that journalists have struggled with the architecture and culture of the social web, Seth argues for the possibility of an “ethic of participation” — a hybrid logic of adaptability and openness within and through journalism — that is emerging to resolve this tension going forward.

Also just published is a related piece of interest: Seth’s case study of the influential Knight Foundation and its efforts to shape how the journalism field perceives digital media, participation, and innovation. The article is titled, From Journalism to Information: The Transformation of the Knight Foundation and News Innovation, and leads off the latest issue of Mass Communication and Society. (If you can’t access the official version, try this pre-print version.) Of note for Culture Digitally is the rhetorical shift that Knight underwent to focus less on “journalism” and more on “information” as a boundary-shifting strategy, allowing this major nonprofit foundation to connect with a wider range of fields and actors beyond journalism. This is akin to what Tarleton Gillespie found in his study of the politics of “platforms” — the careful invocation of that term to elide underlying tensions in the role that digital media firms play in mediating public discourse.