During the 2023 wildfires in Canada’s Northwest Territories, journalists evacuated alongside residents. Spread across Canada, they continued to report on and for a community that had been dislocated. This paper argues that, in such conditions, local journalism adopts a place maintenance function, preserving and repairing a shared sense of “home” when physical proximity is no longer possible. Building on concepts of imagined communities, place maintenance, and interpretive communities, we show Northern journalists sustain continuity through three mechanisms. First, they reaffirm a distinct Northern identity and its boundaries. Second, they coordinate and legitimate shared interpretations of the crisis within a small Northern journalistic community. Third, they enact custodial relationships with audiences through translation, coordination, and information provision when routine infrastructures falter. Across these practices, coverage is oriented toward restoring the status quo ante , clarifying journalism’s continuity work and the conditions under which place maintenance takes place during periods of rupture.

This study examines how socially and culturally ingrained visual semiotic resources are used to demonstrate netizens’ affinities with ‘the people’ and dislikes of ‘the elite’ in expressions of online and bottom-up national populism in China. Using a methodological framework that integrates multimodal discourse analysis with a study of ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality, we study ‘weaponized’ Internet memes that were generated during three Diba Expeditions in 2016, 2018 and 2019. We identify three major social-culturally embedded visual semiotic themes: the Jiong playful style, nostalgia, and the strategic use of colour. These themes reflect the negotiation between populist dynamics, emerging online in China to express dissatisfaction with elites and nationalist appeals which emerge to push back against external ‘threats’. This study enhances our understanding of populist visual mobilization and visual protest by examining the Diaosi self-image constructed by the people in online and bottom-up populism in China. Traditionally, populist discourse has depicted ‘the people’ as pure, hardworking, and morally upright, mediated through the rhetoric of populist leaders and parties in top-down approaches. However, our research reveals a more complex and self-reflective portrayal, where the Diaosi subculture presents ‘the people’ as vulnerable, marginalized, and socio-economically disadvantaged. This self-construction challenges conventional populist narratives and highlights the dynamic and context-specific nature of populist identities.

This study seeks to explore how women journalists' perspectives on role conceptions and practice might contribute towards an understanding of minoritized group coverage, and help us explain the potential enactment of solidarity in and through journalism. Drawing upon Biddle's role theory, we conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with women journalists based in the UK and Germany. Findings reveal that whilst women journalists' perspectives on how minoritized groups should be represented in the news media are relatively consistent, their practiced roles often do not match this ideal due to a complex range of political, professional and personal factors. Many women journalists from minoritized groups perceive their identities as being exploited and suppressed strategically, ultimately constraining their work. Overall, this study contributes to the theorization of solidarity in and through journalism; rather than being a distinct, alternative sub-genre, the interviews uncover solidarity as a regular and often invisible journalistic practice, influenced by structures of intersectional opportunity and disadvantage.

An innovation and change discourse has become central in journalism studies scholarship concerned with highlighting solutions to the many challenges confronting media in the digital era. Although with good intentions, these debates have been predominantly technocentric in their imagination of media’s future, inadvertently directing its development towards a preoccupation with mastering digital technologies. On the one hand, media have strategically appropriated and exploited such technocentric discourse to position themselves within the field as leaders with considerable prestige and status. On the other hand, however, journalists and media professionals have approached technological innovation with caution, demonstrating innovation to be a gradual process with incremental changes that need to align with or reimagine practices that support journalism’s core ambitions and public service ideals. Drawing on the scholarly work of colleagues included in this thematic issue, in this editorial we conceptualize media innovation as a fuzzy and contested concept and call for an expanded research agenda that redirects our attention more firmly towards: exploring organisational and institutional innovation; considering the role of ancillary organisations, collaborative projects, and the various newly emerging innovative actors within and outside of the journalistic field; adopting bottom-up approaches to examine societal innovation and its public value and scrutinize questions around who benefits from change; and finally, paying more attention to the transnational as well as culture-specific contexts in which media innovations happens.

This research examines migrant women's representation in British and German news during the COVID-19 pandemic, paying particular attention to expressions of solidarity. While previous research has focused on the representation of women and migrants, studies have largely treated these groups as distinct entities. Combining topic modelling with informed grounded theory, this research compares the representation of migrant women, including women from ethnic minorities, across a diverse corpus covering 2020-21. This two-step methodology facilitates intersectional analysis at the macro and micro level, revealing the salience, topical concentration and context of migrant women's coverage. Findings show that solidarity emerged through the platforming of migrant women's voices, and connected to discourses of class, poverty and precarity. Representations containing empathy and pity - less likely drivers of social change - were more prevalent. This research contributes to our understanding of migrant women's coverage during the pandemic and provides a granular and intersectional lens for analysing minoritized group representation.

This article explores the complex, multi-layered mechanisms of internet censorship in China, emphasizing its role as both a tool of control over public engagement and a mechanism for elites to disconnect themselves from spaces of public scrutiny, and avoid potential threats such as doxxing by bottom-up populist online movements. Through in-depth interviews with social media users, this study investigates how individuals perceive, assess, and navigate the boundaries of internet censorship, focusing on their awareness of censorship practices, the assessment of sensitive content, and the tactics they employ to circumvent restrictions. We further examine how a sophisticated censorship mechanism—comprising self-censorship, platform censorship, and physical enforcement—works to disconnect netizens from grassroots collective actions. The findings reveal that internet censorship in China not only regulates online populist activism but also serves as a protective shield for elites, allowing them to curate a controlled digital space that suppresses critical discourse. By highlighting the ways in which both ordinary users and elites navigate the challenges of digital engagement in this heavily regulated environment, this study provides theoretical insights into the practice of disconnectivity as an elite privilege. It enhances our understanding of the interplay between connectivity, censorship, and disconnectivity in shaping the digital landscape and its implications for social change and political engagement in China and beyond.

In order to better understand alternative news media, we need to focus more centrally on the audiences that regularly consume them. This special issue, entitled “Contesting the Mainstream: Understanding Alternative News Media,” advances such an audience turn. In the introduction, we outline how scholars have understood and characterized alternative news audiences. These have ranged from seeing them as (i) ideal participants and activists; as (ii) being misinformed and manipulated; and as (iii) being critical users. Drawing on studies published in this special issue, we highlight how these studies provide new and revealing empirical insights that advance all three perspectives. Taken together, the articles make a strong argument to move beyond binary ideations of normatively “good” or “bad” alternative news audiences. In our view, they signal the need to better understand the complexity behind audience engagement not just with alternative news media but mainstream journalism more generally. Based on this argument, we identify several starting points for moving the field forward with such an audience turn in mind.

This paper explores online bottom-up populism in China by examining the discursive logics of populism that emerge within expressions of populist discontent.Through a conceptualization of the affordances of social media that considers what they enable alongside what they constrain, it uses a computational grounded theory approach to examine individuals' posts and the use of hashtags in online communication on Sina Weibo around the #DrivingIntoThePalaceMuseum case.Through its analysis, three discursive logics of online populism are identified: antagonistic logic, polarization logic and protest logic.However, while the affordances of social media enable populist discourse polarization, they also enable "depolarization" through the government's censorship mechanisms.This results in a dynamic bottom-up populism articulation that reflects an awareness of China's censorship mechanisms.Within the Chinese media environment, this functions as a "pressure valve" releasing the buildup of populist sentiment in a Chinese "social volcano.

In this commentary, I look back on ten years of Digital Journalism, and our shared efforts to define a field of Digital Journalism Studies. In doing so, I reflect on the strengths of our field as a socialized space as it has matured, and address two focal points, balance and uncertainty, which have centered my thinking about Digital Journalism Studies research. I then offer three recommendations for our field going forward: to prioritize offering perspective over developing predictions; to foster awareness over awe, and to maintain a devotion towards unapologetic contributions, with humility.