The legitimacy paradox

The biggest challenges for journalism might not have to do so much with journalism. Open a random newspaper of 20 years ago or watch an old television newscast and you will see a different journalism, but one that is overall not as good as it is now. Journalism is more complete, diverse, analytical and critical. It is quicker, less institutional and more relevant to audiences. The average newsroom offers news around the clock, on a range of platforms, and in a variety of forms. Online, one can choose from an unlimited number of national and international news sources, and on social media it is hard, if not impossible, to avoid news. Whichever way you look at it, the news consumer is certainly better served. Yet, who prefers reading academic journals over consuming the news might come to a different conclusion. In the last 20 years, the swift rise of journalism studies in the rank and files of academia has been closely related to the supposed downfall of its object of study. Narratives of crisis and decline, and their terrifying consequences for democracy, offered a powerful argument that helped to legitimize the importance and necessity of the discipline. It fostered a close focus on studying journalism as a professional practice and a cultural form. A flood of excellent studies has been done on the impact of digitalization and how digital tools have been integrated and ‘normalized’ in the newsroom. However, to analyse the challenges that journalism faces, it might be more valuable to study how journalism is integrated in the digital than how the digital is incorporated in journalism. And paradoxically, it might be illuminating to focus less on journalism (cf. Broersma, 2018). In the current information ecology, journalism is abundant but it is surrounded by a superabundance of other cultural forms. These might be similar or very different, but float freely in a common space and cater to the demands of the same news users. Functions journalism traditionally had in society – from being a watchdog for democracy, to offering the ingredients for daily chitchat at the water cooler, or providing weather reports and classified ads – are also fulfilled by other types of information and have on some occasions even replaced journalism (cf. Broersma and Peters, 2017). This implies that journalism’s legitimacy is at stake. Not just its authority to provide legitimate representations of social reality, but more broadly, its legitimacy to fulfil all