Peripheral newcomers

Peripheral newcomers: Journalist students’ experiences of internship through online collaborative tools

Digital tools for journalistic workflow such as Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook Workplace and Teams have become a larger part of the skill repertoire of journalists. The pandemic has boosted this development, as many news media were forced to work through tools allowing remote e-work during lockdown. Journalism education program across the world is discussing how to learn from it and how they can perform best possible pandemic pedagogy.

One of the ongoing discourses questions whether this emergency with partly remote e-work will be continued and be the “new normal” both for businesses and education. While other studies have focused on the consequences and possibilities turning classroom activities into digital ones, this project focuses on journalism students’ pandemic internships and their perceived learning experiences. During the pandemic the digital internship represents a second layer of remoteness for the student.

The project identifies a dissonance between the students’ prior expectations and their actual experiences doing their internships partly through remote digital work collaboration. The students cope well with the basic journalistic competences and the technical skills needed for online collaboration tools but have trouble dealing with human relational communication through digital collaborative tools. This indicates that integration or socialization of newcomers into a workplace culture is more difficult and alienating through digital collaborative tools alone.

To better prepare students integrating in the newsrooms and prepare them for a possible “new normal”, we argue that including online digital collaborative spaces as part of the journalism programs practice would create a safer learning environment adjust their expectations. 

Prosjektleiar: Kjetil Vaage Øie