Re-considering journalism as an ecosystem.. Introduction

The idea that there exists something like a “media ecosystem”- an interlinked array of publishers, media outlets, technological portals, distribution systems, advertisers, audiences, media policy papers, and so on- is an old one. Arguably, the tradition of thinking about media as an “environment” or a “natural container” (as opposed to a series of discrete messages) goes back to Marshall McLuhan (2003) and Harold Innis (Innis, 1999) at the latest we can date it to 1968 when Neil Postman coined the term “media ecology” (Postman, 2000) and later founded the New York University communication studies department that bore this very name. Considering the fact that the notion of the “news ecosystem” is now more than a decade old, what should the next steps be for scholars with some affinity for the concept? To this end, we are delighted to present to the readers of Problemi dell’Informazione a collection of essays that strongly demonstrates how the ecosystem prism can still assist us in our intellectual effort to keep taking journalism seriously, to borrow Barbie Zelizer’s renowned expression (Zelizer, 2004). But the present issue does more than this; it shows how, by adopting such an approach, we can identify, understand, and possibly better address, some of the most relevant challenges characterizing contemporary journalism as a field of study, as a network of relations, and as a democratic resource.