On the Role of Emotion in the Future of Journalism

Abstract

In this essay, we contextualize journalism in an emotionally charged networked environment. As journalism and society change, emotion is becoming a much more important dynamic in how news is produced and consumed. Highlighting how quality reporting and editing has always had emotion at its core, we move on to articulate ways to do “affective” news well and advocate promising avenues to study and theorize it. In this context, we suggest that more research and knowledge is needed regarding the ontology of data, the political economy of identity when privacy goes public, and on the sociology of influence when power is redistributed emotionally.