Relevant Research

Review of Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies in Digital Journalism

By Cindy Royal   
Professor   
April 7, 2025

A recent publication in Digital Journalism caught my attention for its ability to put data to trends in digital scholarship. The paper entitled Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies (March 2024) used bibliometric mapping and co-citation analysis to trace the progression of digitally focused research – what is identified as the “digital turn” – across five academic journals: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (established 1924), Journalism (established 2000), Journalism Studies (established 2000), Journalism Practice (established 2007) and Digital Journalism (established 2013). The researchers Yangliu Fan, Jakob Ohme and Christoph Neuberger of the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany looked at 6,770 articles with 260,018 citation links in these journals from 1995-2022. This roughly corresponds to the time that I have been doing digital scholarship since entering the doctoral program at The University of Texas in 1999 and since 2006 as a professor at Texas State. In the paper, the research team identified their goal as “specifically, we seek to discover how novel topics related to digital turn emerged within the field” (p. 10), a worthy endeavor that produced some revealing results.

The analysis organized the papers into ten distinct and coherent, yet loosely integrated, research clusters. The clusters are listed from most to least prevalent in the sample.

Cluster 1: content and media effects, focused on framing and agenda setting   
Cluster 2: audiences and participatory journalism   
Cluster 3: changes and problems in the news industry   
Cluster 4: professional roles, values, and practices, including political communication and global phenomena   
Cluster 5: changes in journalists’ work in the digital age   
Cluster 6: new forms of storytelling and visualization   
Cluster 7: news source and diversity   
Cluster 8: data journalism, automation and technology in the newsroom   
Cluster 9: social media platforms   
Cluster 10: community and local news

The ranking of these clusters is telling in terms of the prominent areas of journalism research. The study found that, overall, the clusters had little interrelationship. For example, the largest cluster (Cluster 1) had few connections with other clusters, particularly those related to newsroom changes, data journalism, social media and local news. “The relative ‘isolation’ implies that scholarship in Cluster 1 is mainly self-contained and rarely combined with scholarship in other clusters of journalism studies” (p. 12). To me, this result demonstrates the dominance of legacy approaches and latency to incorporate new or innovative topics. 

It wasn’t until the fifth largest cluster (on changes in journalists’ work) that integration with other clusters was evident, including the areas of audiences, professional roles, data journalism and social media. The data journalism and social media clusters exhibited weak connections with each other, even though they are both reflective of new topics introduced by the “digital turn.” I think this shows that while journalists’ work can be influenced by many topics, these topics are often viewed as distinct and separate roles. Early social media studies in journalism have focused on studying the effects within content, similarly to the study of news content, although many journalists’ roles changed associated with the practice of social media. These trends also discount effects associated with platform and algorithms – platform affordances and the content  to which users are exposed and able to engage. Studies around data journalism addressed the new skills associated with a new form of storytelling, so these projects were more focused on incorporating a new practice, rather than studying the effects of the use of data and interactivity in digital products.

The journals themselves exhibited interesting dynamics. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the oldest journal under study, was found to be slow to advance digital scholarship. The growth of digital publications was found to be driven by the introduction of new journals to the field, and particularly by the introduction of Digital Journalism in 2013. While the journals share specialties, some research specializations emerged. Clusters 1 (content and media effects), 4 (professional role, value, and global journalism), and 8 (data journalism) contain a high proportion of papers published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism, respectively. Digital Journalism also provided a home for most of the Cluster 9 (social media) and Cluster 10 (local news) articles. 

The researchers also identified five distinct timeframes reflecting papers published in the years 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2022. A useful chart on page 15 identified citation connections between clusters over time and how “new papers” in those time periods link to future clusters.

Compared with newer journals, older journals often focus on publishing work that aligns with their established research specialties. An example is Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the oldest journal in our sample, whose papers between 1995 and 2004 formed the content and media effects cluster labeled T1C4. It continues to publish new work related to this topic, which has fueled the growth of Cluster 1 (content and media effects) in 2022 (p. 15).

Topics like “blogosphere” don’t appear until the 2009 timeframe, although the phrase “blog” (shortened from “weblog”) was coined in the late ‘90s, with the website Blogger launching in 1999. Novel topics like “digital news networks” and “data journalism” began to grow in the 2019 period, although these practices had started as much as a decade or more before then (I wrote my first article on data journalism in 2009, and struggled to get it published by 2012). The data journalism and social media clusters, while separately evolving, don’t become sizable until the 2022 time period. The launching of new journals devoted to digital topics, particularly that of Digital Journalism in 2013, played a significant role in the growth of these articles in this sample.

The paper also looks at the methods employed. Interview (1200 articles) was the most common method identified, followed by surveys (784), content analysis (782), experiments (403), and case studies (389). The use of qualitative methods seems reasonable at a time when a field is emerging, using research to gain an understanding prior to measuring its influence. The researchers found little evidence of new methods emerging, particularly those associated with digital, computational, network or machine learning methods. This was particularly evident in the digitally focused clusters of data journalism, where the interview was most frequently employed, and social media, where content analysis was most frequently used. 

The most interesting conclusion of this research to me is the validation of what I have been experiencing throughout most of my career. It has been difficult to find a home for research on new and emerging topics, because the topics themselves have not come into favor – neither in editorial policies or in the mindsets of reviewers – nor have the methods needed to study them fully emerged. While many scholars began researching social media and used familiar methods to study its content, this did not reflect the platform and network effects associated. Others moving into the data journalism area were more focused on the skill sets and people who worked in this area, with little emphasis on the potential for the “products” they could create. 

So what does this mean for media scholarship? In email correspondence with the research team, they stated the relevance of this research for scholars. “It could serve as a valuable guide for journal submission strategies and reading lists, identifying research opportunities, and informing graduate training, particularly method training.”  

They continued, “From a meta-scientific perspective, our results show how a field of research develops in relation to its subject. Which changes are registered and which are ignored? And which new (digital) methods are being adopted?”

They felt the research could also be useful to the media profession. “Our mapping can be used to understand the research topics and trends in journalism studies. This enables practitioners to engage critically with academics and academic insights, potentially facilitating more informed collaborations between the journalism sector and scholarship.”

I think we need to continue to question the relevance of the scholarly work we do, as it relates to supporting the changes occurring in the profession. Where useful, we should consider places in which the topics associated with these research clusters can be connected, but more importantly, there is opportunity to study new and emerging areas with new and emerging methods, as long as there are journals willing to accept these approaches.   
I don't see a cluster yet on digital product management, which has been my research area since 2015, although this direction may be present in Cluster 5 about changes in journalists' work (not exactly what product management comprises). In my opinion, the academic environment has been slow and/or dismissive in recognizing the work in journalism from those who are not considered reporters and editors, but are growing in importance to media's offering.

And due to the sample ending in 2022, with ChatGPT being launched in November of that year, there is no cluster associated with research on artificial intelligence. I think we will see a big push for AI-related research coming, both as a distinct cluster and integrated within other clusters. But I hope it won't be lagging by 10+ years or cordoned into its own silo, the way it has taken research to evolve associated with digital and Internet topics. 

The ramifications are vast. Young scholars internalize journal reviews, acceptances and rejections. They want to achieve tenure and promotion, and this is strongly influenced by publication, citations, impact factors, which are often accompanied by egos and a competitive nature. Progress can be discouraged when a field is not accepting of new and novel topics and approaches. This research depicts the lags in the discipline that have prevented the field from embracing relevant, innovative topics as quickly as it could or should have. And it demonstrates the importance of new journals, when the legacy publications are unwilling to change and evolve. But even so, many of us have sought refuge for our ideas in other journals that have evolved around communities, like the one established by the International Symposium on Online Journalism. I assume that journals focused on advertising and public relations topics may have experienced the same trends in terms of digital acceptance, and it would be interesting to see similar studies in those areas. I hope that more research will be done on the gaps and challenges associated with media research and that journals will heed the results of this study in considering its editorial policies and reviewing processes. Kudos to the authors for this important analysis. I encourage you to check out the full paper.

Fan, Y., Ohme, J., & Neuberger, C. (2025). Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies. Digital Journalism, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2480106.