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Papers by Pablo Boczkowski
Brazilian Creative Industries Journal, 2022
Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University, has an influential career in Journalism S... more Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University, has an influential career in Journalism Studies. In his first book, Digitizing the News, Boczkowski has described the early efforts of newsrooms to deal with digital media. His latest book, Abundance, is based on 158 interviews with media consumers in Argentina and analyzes how they establish routines and strategies over media. In this interview, Boczkowski discusses his legacy, the challenges that a new information environment poses to classic theories, and his focus on the research of audiences.
This paper examines the dynamics of news consumption on social media through sixteen open-ended i... more This paper examines the dynamics of news consumption on social media through sixteen open-ended interviews with young users from Argentina. It adopts a texto-material perspective to explore the role of technology and users' motivations, actions and interpretations. The interviews reveal that the ideal-typical mode in which young users consume news on social media can be characterized with the notion of " incidental news " : most young users get the news on their mobile devices as part of their constant connection to media platforms; they encounter the news all the time, rather than looking for it; but click on them only sporadically and spend little time engaging with the content. Thus, the news becomes un-differentiated from the rest of the social and entertainment information. This mode of news access marks a significant discontinuity with the consumption of news on other media. It also raises major editorial and political implications.
Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and ret... more electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
New Media & Society, 2010
This paper assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on onli... more This paper assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on online news consumption. The findings suggest that the consumption of news on the Internet has not yet differed drastically from the consumption of news in traditional media. The assessment shows that the dominant modes of inquiry have also been characterized by stability rather than change (because research has usually drawn on traditional theoretical and methodological approaches). In addition, these modes of inquiry exhibit three systematic limitations: the assumption of a division between print, broadcast, and online media; the notion that the analysis should treat media features and social practices separately; and the inclination to focus on ordinary or extraordinary patterns of phenomena but not on both at the same time. On the basis of this assessment, this paper proposes an integrative research agenda that builds on this scholarship but also contributes to solve some of its main limitations.
Journal of Communication, 2009
The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory developmen... more The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory development are addressed by depicting a key transformation in the former-the increase in the frequency and volume of content dissemination in online news-and using this depiction to examine the current heuristic value of the conceptual distinction between hard and soft news. An ethnographic study of online news production at the largest online newspaper in Argentina is used to show that a growing separation in the temporal patterns of hard and soft news production is intertwined with major differences in critical aspects of editorial practice in which the common ground between hard and soft news work has traditionally been assumed to be significant. This finding challenges a dominant strain in the literature that underscores a blurring of the differences between hard and soft news. Because central elements of this case resonate with developments identified in several other settings, this study suggests rethinking some notions about the distinction between hard and soft news.
![Table 1 Summary of Main Quantitative Differences in Editorial Work Practices ‘maturity” in 2 hours and “retirement age” in 4. All of this meant pressure to produce ach story quickly, to update it as soon as new relevant events occurred, and to retire t—move it down on the homepage—if no major changes had taken place in 3 to 4 1ours since its last update. An Ultimo Momento writer stated that “I look for what’s 1ew. ... It’s what’s happening now. ... It has this plus that you are not telling the news ifter it took place but at the same time the event is taking place (...). To the person vho’s leaving their office it won’t matter if there was a train or bus accident 2 hours arlier; what matters to them is if they'll be able to go on the street and travel” Personal communication, July 5, 2005). Facundo Quiroga, Ultimo Momento’s sports -ditor, said that “here I have the chance to rotate, change, create a journalism of vertigo, movement, and give [the public the equivalent of] 15 newspapers at the same ime. ... If you demonstrate cleverness, movement, and change, you gain the respect ind the trust of the [users]” (Personal communication, December 15, 2005). Timeliness did not shape newsworthiness or work schedules at Conexiones, and the](https://figures.academia-assets.com/42847122/table_001.jpg)
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Journal of Communication, 1999
In this essay I analyze how technologies and users relate to each other in a national virtual com... more In this essay I analyze how technologies and users relate to each other in a national virtual community. I argue that a mutual shaping perspective is best suited to capture the complexity, unpredictability, and recursivity of the interactions among technological features and users' discourses and practices. Drawing from recent developments in the study of computer-mediated communication, multidisciplinary technology scholarship, and social psychology of nationhood, I show the mutual shaping of hardware capabilities, national identities, collective remembering, software configurations, and coordination practices that took place during my investigation of the Argentine Mailing List.
Journal of Communication, 2011
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2009
This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has ... more This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has been an increase in journalists' use of technology to learn about the stories competitors and other players are working on and a parallel decrease in the reliance on face-to-face encounters with colleagues to gather this information. Second, this greater technology use has been tied to an intensification of monitoring and an expansion of imitation in the newsroom. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of editorial work in the leading online and print newspapers of Argentina, these changes are analyzed to make scholarly contributions about the role of technology in monitoring and imitation. This analysis also provides a window into the intersection of communication, culture, and critique in contemporary journalism by showing how recent forms of technological appropriation in the newsroom have shaped how journalists gather information and make meaning out if it in a way that affects their ability to be critical.
Northwestern University’s School of Communication – Lambert Family Conference Inventing the New: ... more Northwestern University’s School of Communication – Lambert Family Conference
Inventing the New: Innovation in Creative Enterprises
April 8 and 9, 2016
Claudio E. Benzecry & Pablo J. Boczkowski (Communication Studies, Northwestern University)
Tentative Program
This study examines the uptake of multiple interactive features on news sites. It looks at the th... more This study examines the uptake of multiple interactive features on news sites. It looks at the thematic composition of the most clicked, most e-mailed, and most commented stories during periods of heightened and routine political activity. Results show that (a) during the former period, the most commented stories were more likely to be focused on political, economic, and international topics (or ''public affairs'' news) than the most clicked and most e-mailed articles. (b) The 3 types of interactivity exhibited a greater presence of public affairs content during the period of heightened political activity than during its routine counterpart. (c) As the period of heightened political activity unfolded, consumers' propensity to click on, e-mail, and comment about public affairs stories increased.
This paper examines the consumption of online news at the place of work and during work hours, wh... more This paper examines the consumption of online news at the place of work and during work hours, which are relatively new temporal and spatial coordinates of news consumption for large segments of the population. This novel phenomenon is analysed to make descriptive and conceptual contributions to scholarship on news consumption, in particular, and technology and society, in general. Descriptively, the analysis reveals the emergence of discontinuous features of online consumption 'at work' within the context of continuity in some elements of news consumption in print and broadcast media. Conceptually, the analysis underscores the continued relevance of the notions of routines, space, time, and sociability to make sense of news consumption. But, it also shows the need to renew the understanding of how each of these conceptual tools matter when the media change from print and broadcast to digital and the practices of consumption coincide with those of work. The paper also suggests revisiting the boundaries between work and home and between the instrumental and leisure purposes of consuming communication technologies.
Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski shares in this Dialogue his insights and observations derived from ... more Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski shares in this Dialogue his insights and observations derived from more than a decade of research on the impact of digitization on the journalism landscape. He explains the continual relevance of the key concepts and findings from his earliest research to the contemporary media environment and at the same time introduces his most recent research findings and observations about the "news gap". Professor Boczkowski summarizes the main trends in the transformation of online news in the digital age, and he points out that the increasing visibility of various social fields constitutes a trend that can have tremendous implications on not only journalism but also on social change at large.
Brazilian Creative Industries Journal, 2022
Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University, has an influential career in Journalism S... more Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University, has an influential career in Journalism Studies. In his first book, Digitizing the News, Boczkowski has described the early efforts of newsrooms to deal with digital media. His latest book, Abundance, is based on 158 interviews with media consumers in Argentina and analyzes how they establish routines and strategies over media. In this interview, Boczkowski discusses his legacy, the challenges that a new information environment poses to classic theories, and his focus on the research of audiences.
This paper examines the dynamics of news consumption on social media through sixteen open-ended i... more This paper examines the dynamics of news consumption on social media through sixteen open-ended interviews with young users from Argentina. It adopts a texto-material perspective to explore the role of technology and users' motivations, actions and interpretations. The interviews reveal that the ideal-typical mode in which young users consume news on social media can be characterized with the notion of " incidental news " : most young users get the news on their mobile devices as part of their constant connection to media platforms; they encounter the news all the time, rather than looking for it; but click on them only sporadically and spend little time engaging with the content. Thus, the news becomes un-differentiated from the rest of the social and entertainment information. This mode of news access marks a significant discontinuity with the consumption of news on other media. It also raises major editorial and political implications.
Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and ret... more electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
New Media & Society, 2010
This paper assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on onli... more This paper assesses the main findings and dominant modes of inquiry in recent scholarship on online news consumption. The findings suggest that the consumption of news on the Internet has not yet differed drastically from the consumption of news in traditional media. The assessment shows that the dominant modes of inquiry have also been characterized by stability rather than change (because research has usually drawn on traditional theoretical and methodological approaches). In addition, these modes of inquiry exhibit three systematic limitations: the assumption of a division between print, broadcast, and online media; the notion that the analysis should treat media features and social practices separately; and the inclination to focus on ordinary or extraordinary patterns of phenomena but not on both at the same time. On the basis of this assessment, this paper proposes an integrative research agenda that builds on this scholarship but also contributes to solve some of its main limitations.
Journal of Communication, 2009
The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory developmen... more The twin issues of recent changes in journalistic phenomena and how they afford theory development are addressed by depicting a key transformation in the former-the increase in the frequency and volume of content dissemination in online news-and using this depiction to examine the current heuristic value of the conceptual distinction between hard and soft news. An ethnographic study of online news production at the largest online newspaper in Argentina is used to show that a growing separation in the temporal patterns of hard and soft news production is intertwined with major differences in critical aspects of editorial practice in which the common ground between hard and soft news work has traditionally been assumed to be significant. This finding challenges a dominant strain in the literature that underscores a blurring of the differences between hard and soft news. Because central elements of this case resonate with developments identified in several other settings, this study suggests rethinking some notions about the distinction between hard and soft news.
Journal of Communication, 1999
In this essay I analyze how technologies and users relate to each other in a national virtual com... more In this essay I analyze how technologies and users relate to each other in a national virtual community. I argue that a mutual shaping perspective is best suited to capture the complexity, unpredictability, and recursivity of the interactions among technological features and users' discourses and practices. Drawing from recent developments in the study of computer-mediated communication, multidisciplinary technology scholarship, and social psychology of nationhood, I show the mutual shaping of hardware capabilities, national identities, collective remembering, software configurations, and coordination practices that took place during my investigation of the Argentine Mailing List.
Journal of Communication, 2011
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2009
This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has ... more This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has been an increase in journalists' use of technology to learn about the stories competitors and other players are working on and a parallel decrease in the reliance on face-to-face encounters with colleagues to gather this information. Second, this greater technology use has been tied to an intensification of monitoring and an expansion of imitation in the newsroom. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of editorial work in the leading online and print newspapers of Argentina, these changes are analyzed to make scholarly contributions about the role of technology in monitoring and imitation. This analysis also provides a window into the intersection of communication, culture, and critique in contemporary journalism by showing how recent forms of technological appropriation in the newsroom have shaped how journalists gather information and make meaning out if it in a way that affects their ability to be critical.
Northwestern University’s School of Communication – Lambert Family Conference Inventing the New: ... more Northwestern University’s School of Communication – Lambert Family Conference
Inventing the New: Innovation in Creative Enterprises
April 8 and 9, 2016
Claudio E. Benzecry & Pablo J. Boczkowski (Communication Studies, Northwestern University)
Tentative Program
This study examines the uptake of multiple interactive features on news sites. It looks at the th... more This study examines the uptake of multiple interactive features on news sites. It looks at the thematic composition of the most clicked, most e-mailed, and most commented stories during periods of heightened and routine political activity. Results show that (a) during the former period, the most commented stories were more likely to be focused on political, economic, and international topics (or ''public affairs'' news) than the most clicked and most e-mailed articles. (b) The 3 types of interactivity exhibited a greater presence of public affairs content during the period of heightened political activity than during its routine counterpart. (c) As the period of heightened political activity unfolded, consumers' propensity to click on, e-mail, and comment about public affairs stories increased.
This paper examines the consumption of online news at the place of work and during work hours, wh... more This paper examines the consumption of online news at the place of work and during work hours, which are relatively new temporal and spatial coordinates of news consumption for large segments of the population. This novel phenomenon is analysed to make descriptive and conceptual contributions to scholarship on news consumption, in particular, and technology and society, in general. Descriptively, the analysis reveals the emergence of discontinuous features of online consumption 'at work' within the context of continuity in some elements of news consumption in print and broadcast media. Conceptually, the analysis underscores the continued relevance of the notions of routines, space, time, and sociability to make sense of news consumption. But, it also shows the need to renew the understanding of how each of these conceptual tools matter when the media change from print and broadcast to digital and the practices of consumption coincide with those of work. The paper also suggests revisiting the boundaries between work and home and between the instrumental and leisure purposes of consuming communication technologies.
Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski shares in this Dialogue his insights and observations derived from ... more Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski shares in this Dialogue his insights and observations derived from more than a decade of research on the impact of digitization on the journalism landscape. He explains the continual relevance of the key concepts and findings from his earliest research to the contemporary media environment and at the same time introduces his most recent research findings and observations about the "news gap". Professor Boczkowski summarizes the main trends in the transformation of online news in the digital age, and he points out that the increasing visibility of various social fields constitutes a trend that can have tremendous implications on not only journalism but also on social change at large.
