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“Working Without Licences”: A Study of News Production by Peripheral Actors from the Perspective of Affordance
ZHANG Bingjie
Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (9) : 49-68.
PDF(1563 KB)
PDF(1563 KB)
“Working Without Licences”: A Study of News Production by Peripheral Actors from the Perspective of Affordance
The production of digital journalism is shaped by a network of diverse actors, but in China’s media environment, the question of how “peripheral actors” without licences engage in news production has long remained unresolved. From the perspective of “environment-action” affordance analysis, drawing on typological research methods, it was found that within the tension between the empowering technological environment and the restrictive institutional environment, peripheral actors actively engage in news production. They establish a dependent production routine, where republishing dominates and original content creation plays a secondary role. These actors strive to balance efficiency and legitimacy through reposting, translating, integrating, limited self-reporting and editing, narrating self, and sharing their views. Even as a form of limited agency adapted to a dominant structure, this activism has also had an impact on digital news production and online public opinion, mainly in the form of the translation of traditional media from producers to “sources”, and the transformation of news reporting from endpoints to starting points for news reproduction. This process of reinterpretation partially diminishes the authoritative role traditionally held by established media. The digital journalism has increasingly become a complex arena where diverse actors compete for jurisdiction and discourse power. From the perspective of online public opinion governance, granting institutional legitimacy to the news production activities of peripheral actors is essential. Only then can external constraints be mobilized, pushing these actors to position themselves as professional media and adhere to established journalistic norms, thereby helping to purify the online environment.
Multiple actors / second-hand news / digital journalism / “environment-action” affordance analysis
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Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism - in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a,, and way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move through and journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad of practices that make up journalism.
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Journalism's once-neglected periphery has been a focus of academic research in recent years and the urge to make sense of interlopers from the periphery has brought about many approaches to understanding these changes. In this essay I reflect on an ongoing research agenda examining one particular category of interlopers: provocative media actors who have openly challenged the boundaries of the journalistic field. These actors raise questions as to how to account for interlopers at the edges of the journalistic field, including whether we should extend the field to include them. In this essay I argue we should continue to see the field as complex, and maybe now a bit more so. Reflecting on field and practice theories and understandings of boundaries, I reengage the complexity that is a core demand of conceptualizing the journalistic field, while offering ways to consider interlopers' journalistic identities within its boundaries. Emphasizing similarities over differences, I argue we can move beyond binary distinctions between a field's core members and interlopers on the periphery by focusing on the nature of interloper work.
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This paper traces the development of a series of Anglo‐German studies on how young adults experience control and exercise personal agency as they pass through periods of transition in education and training, work, unemployment, and in their personal lives. The overarching aim has been to develop an extended dialogue between ideas and evidence to explore the beliefs and actions associated with life‐chances under differing structural and cultural conditions. What kinds of beliefs and perspectives do people have on their future possibilities? How far do they feel in control of their lives? How does people's belief in what is possible for them (their personal horizons developed within cultural and structural influences) determine their behaviours and what they perceive to be “choices”? This research contributes to the re‐conceptualization of agency as a process in which past habits and routines are contextualized and future possibilities envisaged in the contingencies of the present moment. The paper concludes by explaining the concept of “bounded agency” as an alternative to “structured individualization” as a way of understanding the experiences of people in changing social landscapes.
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This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada. Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a 'complex peripheral actor,' a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.
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In the past 20 years the world of journalism has been swept by a wave of structural, institutional and technological changes that have shaped the journalism that we experience today. Following conceptualization of hybrid media, the term ‘hybrid journalism’ has been used to define what journalism has become. Many scholars have subjected this label to scrutiny; they consider hybridity to be a vague term that requires a more precise conceptualization. In this paper, we propose that what to date has been called ’hybrid journalism’ has moved from the periphery to the center of the field. Adopting a communicative ecology perspective, we highlight that the changes due to technologies, which too often are regarded as merely disrupting the journalistic field, have now become established and are accepted as core components of the work of journalists today. This reconstruction work is mainly discursive and is explained by considering journalism as a discursive institution. We then explain the implications of studying journalism with acknowledgement that hybrid forms of journalism that are central in the field are hybrid.
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The increasing influence of actors who might not fit into traditional definitions of a journalist but are taking part in processes that produce journalism has attracted scholarly attention. They have been called interlopers, strangers, new entrants, peripheral, and emergent actors, among others. As journalism scholars grapple with how to refer to these actors, it is important to reflect on the assumptions that underlie emerging labels. These include: 1) what journalistic tasks are involved; 2) how and why these journalistic tasks are performed; 3) who is making the definition; and 4) where and when these actors are located. However, journalism being the centre of our investigation should not automatically assume that it is at the centre of social life. So, it might also be that for the technological field, journalism is at the periphery; that for these technology-oriented actors whose influence across fields is increasing, journalists and what they do are at the periphery. For a field that supposedly plays an important role in public life, this has important implications.
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1. 例如在《新闻的发明》一书中，安德鲁·佩蒂格里（Andrew Pettegree）（
2. 合法性（legality）与正当性（legitimacy）是两个不同的概念，其中前者指的是合乎法律，后者指的是广泛的社会认可。它们分别是法律层面的规范性认定和社会层面的道德与价值认定，参见刘杨（
3. 这里所说的新闻，并非传统新闻学范式下的硬新闻，而是数字新闻学语境中的广义新闻，即前文所述的新事实，它涵盖日常新闻与杂合新闻等类型。
4. 在本文中，行动（action）指的是具有目的性和导向性的行为（behavior）。结合具体语境，本文会灵活地使用这两个概念。
5. 这里的法律制度是一个广义概念，不仅包括全国人大及其常委会制定的规范性文件（狭义上的法律），也包括由此延伸而来的法规、规章和平台规定等。
6. 参见2017年出台的《互联网新闻信息服务管理规定》和2025年出台的《互联网新闻信息稿源单位名单》中的相关规定。
7. 在我国当前的媒介环境下，“无证上岗”的外围行动者面临较强的结构性约束。为更精准地描述其行动空间，本文引入“有限能动性”（bounded agency）（Evans，
8. 新榜是一家数据驱动的内容科技公司，于2014年正式运营，由复旦大学新闻学院提供学术支持。以往的学术研究表明，该网站具备内容有效性。
9. 该榜单不包括人民网、新华社等影响力较大的传统媒体，为研究提供了可操作性。
10. 在筛选公众号的过程中，笔者发现，在数字媒介环境中，传统媒体与外围媒体在新闻生产方式上存在一些趋同现象。例如，搬运与个性化表达不仅存在于外围媒体，也广泛出现在传统媒体中。然而，二者仍存在细微差异。尽管部分传统媒体同样采用转载、编译和整合的方式做新闻，但基本遵从客观、公正等传统新闻规范；相比之下，外围行动者则更倾向于在新闻性内容中融入个人猜想、主观臆断等私人化情感，对传统新闻规范的遵循程度较低。当然，这仅为初步观察，后续仍需通过系统性的比较研究进一步深化相关讨论。
11. 例如中央网信办《关于加强“自媒体”管理的通知》（2023）规定，“自媒体”在发布涉及国内外时事、公共政策、社会事件等相关信息时，网站平台应当要求其准确标注信息来源，发布时在显著位置展示。《中华人民共和国民法典》规定了各种类型的行为人——区别于新闻媒体、新闻单位等以往表述——均可优先保护自身的新闻报道权、舆论监督权（樊勇，
12. 这种尽可能远离本地政治的做法，在新闻业的发展历史上并不新奇，参见舒德森（
13. 就网络舆论治理而言，数字新闻业中的偶然参与者是另一个需要重点引导的对象。
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