Some Ideas to Update “Comparing Media Systems” to the Digital Age

In recent years, we have enjoyed a flourishing of studies, books, and articles on comparative research on "legacy" journalism. Fewer have been the attempts to study in a comparative way how digitalization is changing journalism and how national digital spheres differ from each other. In this commentary, I argue that the limited number of comparative studies on digital journalism has several reasons. First of all, we face a new phenomenon that scholars are just starting to investigate, and therefore the number of already published research is obviously very small. More studies are under way but they are not published yet. The second reason has to do with the very difficulty of recovering the corpus to be investigated: Digital sources are mostly unofficial and informal, they do not depend on established organizations, they are dispersed and very volatile. It becomes therefore very difficult to choose the corpus to be investigated, also because of the dramatic differences existing in the nature and structure of different digital spheres. I conclude by emphasizing the necessary interpretive changes that have to be introduced into the comparative studies of digital(ized) media systems.