Understanding Collaborative Journalism with Digital Trace Data and Crowdsourced Databases

Abstract

This study represents a unique opportunity to study aspects of human behavior related to journalism projects collaboration at scale. Collaborative journalism deserves further inquiry in light of its growing importance, the resources devoted to it, and its role in creating more opportunities for news media in the face of economic and technological challenges. It theorizes how journalism collaborative/interest groups were created, maintained, and sustained. Methodologically, this study attempts to mine GitHub’s API to identify influential individuals and discover the network patterns of social collaboration in newsrooms’ repositories.