There were signs at the AEJMC annual conference in 2008 that academic research was catching up with online journalism. On one panel Sue Robinson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison set out what going online actually asked of a journalist.
Her argument was that it meant considerably more than reading a few stories on a screen: it meant joining a collaborative, networked culture — news shifting from being a destination to being a journey. The first practical step was reading and engaging with the comments on one’s own stories. Robinson’s research found that only about half of journalists read the comments at all, and that essentially none took part in the conversation there.
The underlying claim is that publishing a story is the start of a process rather than the end of one, and that the traditional newsroom habit runs the other way: publication is the finish line, and the reporter moves on to the next thing. Paul Bradshaw had already described what the alternative might look like in his model of the news diamond.