Emotions in Digital Journalism

This chapter provides a selective and illustrative overview and critique of the fast-growing body of research on emotions in (digital) journalism, one of the newer essential debates within journalism studies. The chapter focuses on emotions in journalism as work and labour, with a slight digression into the emotional space between digital journalistic content and audiences. In the first part of the chapter, I reconstruct the affective/emotional turn in the field: I trace the collective intellectual path of journalism scholars identifying emotions as a critical element of digital journalism practice and outcomes and establishing them as a legitimate field of study. I also briefly define some key concepts, such as emotions, affect, emotional labour, and strategic ritual of emotionality, and point to other concepts that deserve further attention. The second part of the chapter lists examples of recent research on emotions in journalism while following two trends. The first trend perceives emotions as a problem: a phenomenon inconsistent with the objectivity ideal or a source of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health issues. The second perspective cautiously examines how emotions are inherent and beneficial to newsmaking processes. The chapter also briefly discusses emotions as a phenomenon that bridges the digital with the biological, the mediated with the material, and journalists and texts with audiences. In the last two sections, I suggest how future digital journalism research can overcome the invalid yet persistent dichotomies of objectivity vs. subjectivity and rationality vs. emotionality.