The short history of online crime news: TheGuardian as a case study.

Crime and media have a long standing relationship. The broader description of ‘crime’ ‘control’ and ‘deviance’ can be considered the core element of news. It should therefore not surprise that scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied the evolution of crime news. However while it is online that stories break at the speed of light and start circling the globe instantly most studies still focus on newspapers and pay little attention to the evolution of crime related articles on news sites. Recently journalists were forced into a continuous deadline instead of a fixed one. This had important consequences for the operational processes and structure of (online) news organisations. By means of an
exploratory history-research approach we analyse the effects of this new reality for crime news reporting
on TheGuardian.co.uk (1996-2017) one of the largest news websites worldwide. Our analysis shows that
the news organisation developed a strong focus on user participation. We found that opening up the
realm to readers and citizen reporters has some important consequences that are situated at the level of
for example gatekeeping and ‘crime definition’.

Publication year:2019