Introduction: New trends, old threads in the digital journalism field

At its simplest, the ‘digital’ has come to describe the conditions in which societies exist and interact with information and, hence, a centrepiece or focal point from which scholars make our scientific inquiries into the phenomena that define journalism (Broersma and Eldridge, this volume). Yet, this does not tie us, simply, to examining digital changes to the production, consumption, and distribution of news and journalism (Eldridge and Franklin 2019). Rather, with this second edition of The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, we echo scholars before us who have placed these dynamics in tension, between the digital and journalism, for example, and between the scholarships we have done and that we now do. These tensions are analogous to diaphragms, a shock absorber in the respiratory system
that is critical for both inflation and exhalation – two forces defined by a life‑giving tension. The field of Digital Journalism Studies enjoys similar tensions, periodically enduring the pressures of disruptive and ubiquitous technologies alongside the expanded opportunities they offer. Our diaphragm, like our field, is at times at risk of rupture when pushed too far. Yet, the palpitations of the diaphragm are what make our respiratory system function. By extension, just as digital technologies introduced over the last 25 years have pushed journalism at times towards the point of rupture, they have also breathed new life into it (Zelizer 2019)