自发式“记者联盟”是一种非正式的民间合作，它与自上而下官方组织化的“记协”有所区别。自发式“记者联盟”并非社交媒体兴起后的独有现象。社交媒体出现之前，记者间出于友情而进行的共享与合作一直存在，但合作规模、形式和信任程度均有所限制，很难成为新闻生产过程中的固定环节，也很难形成以职业和阶层为基准的共同体身份。社交媒体出现后，这些限制得以突破：同行间的线上交流成为日常生活的一部分；底层记者与管理层之间的沟壑变得更深，与其它社会职业界限更明显；记者们的职业认同和阶层认同也更强烈。笔者通过长期的“蹲点式”观察发现，以职业和阶层共同体为根基的“记者联盟”虽然提高了新闻生产效率，但却存在伦理风险：如群体中的民粹主义倾向、对“新闻真实”的冲击和对组织伦理的背叛等。

Union of journalists is an informal, grass-roots collaboration, which is different from official organizations such as Journalists’ Association. It is not a unique phenomenon. Before the rise of social media, resource sharing and cooperation between journalists was mainly based on friendship.However, the scales, forms and trust of cooperation were limited so that it was difficult forit to become a regular part of news production and to form a community based on career and class. The advent of social media has just broken through these limits: the online communication between peers becomes part of everyday life; the gapsbetween journalists and institutional management becomes deeper and deeper; the boundaries between journalists and other social professionals becomes more and more obvious;journalitic professional identities and class identities became stronger and stronger. By investigating the Wechat group, we could get the first hand experience that the union of journalists based on professional community and class community have seemingly improved the efficiency of news production.However, there were some ethical issues, such as the populism tendency in the whole group, the shock to authenticity of news, and the betrayal of organizational ethics.