ABSTRACT

In the era of social media, journalism is no longer the preserve of journalists. In specialised fields, such as law, the public in general and lawyers and legal academics specifically are able to “push in” and report and comment publicly on legal matters including trials, commissions, acts of law passed in parliament and other legal processes. These contributions, as this paper explores, are reshaping the contours and content of public discussions of legal matters and of legal journalism in South Africa. This paper suggests that recent theorising of journalism role theory can help understand not just the motivations of these legal interlopers in the journalism space but also how they are shaping a new informational ecosystem in which legal issues, including human rights, administrative and criminal law, and other topics, are brought into the public domain. The paper explores what some South African lawyers understand about the roles they are playing in digital public spaces and how they perceive their contributions and their relationship to the journalism profession and to journalists within that profession. The paper suggests that these lawyers’ practices challenge our understanding about how digital media informational ecosystems work and explores how this is impacting journalism in South Africa.

摘要

在社交媒体时代，新闻不再是新闻记者的保护。在法律等专业领域，一般公众以及律师和法律学者都能够“推销”并就包括审判，委员会，议会通过的法律行为和其他法律程序在内的法律事务公开报告和发表评论。正如本文所探讨的那样，这些贡献正在重塑南非法律事务和法律新闻界公开讨论的轮廓和内容。本文建议，新闻角色理论的最新理论不仅可以帮助理解这些新闻闯入者在新闻领域的动机，而且还可以帮助他们如何塑造一个新的信息生态系统，其中法律问题包括人权，行政和刑法，以及其他主题，被带入公共领域。本文探讨了一些南非律师对他们在数字公共空间中所扮演的角色的理解，以及他们如何看待自己的贡献以及与新闻专业以及该专业中新闻工作者的关系。该论文建议这些律师的做法挑战了我们对数字媒体信息生态系统如何工作的理解，并探讨了这如何影响南非的新闻业。