Social Media and Connective Journalism

How do people under 21 learn about news and politics? When and how do they decide to share news with others in their social networks? And what happens to those they share "newsworthy" information with and to the sharers themselves? Based on 10 years of ethnographic work with youth in four major urban areas, Dr. Regina Marchi and her colleague Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark illustrate how online sharing is a key precursor to collective and connective political action. Their research highlights ways that youth, particularly those from minoritized and immigrant communities, share information via social media to do things traditionally associated with journalism, such as informing, investigating, watchdogging, and collating information needed to make decisions in the political realm. They conclude that sharing stories with others online plays an important role in how youth who arenew to politics come to see themselves as civic actors. For more information about Regina Marchi, visit:https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/marchi-regina Related Publications: Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism Cambridge University Press 2017 Marchi. R. 2016. "News Translators: Latino immigrant youth, social media and citizenship training," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077699016637119 Marchi, R. 2013. "With Facebook, Blogs and Fake News, teens reject journalistic 'objectivity,'" Journal of Communication Inquiry (36) 3: 246-262.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0196859912458700 Marchi, R. 2012. “From Disillusion to Engagement: minority teen journalists and the news media,” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 13(8): 750-765.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1464884911431379 Marchi, R. 2009. “Z-Radio, Boston: Teen journalism, political engagement, and efforts to democratize the airwaves,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media, vol. 16 (2): 127-143. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19376520903276981