Hybrid professionalism in journalism: Opportunities and risks of hacker sources

Hackers have a double relevance with regard to the transformation of the journalistic field: first, they have established themselves as journalistic actors, even if their work may sometimes seem unfamiliar. Second, hackers have not only become important sources for information but they are also a topic of public interest in a data-driven society increasingly threatened by surveillance capitalism. This paper critically discusses the role of hackers as news sources by analyzing the "stalkerware" investigation carried out by the online news magazine Motherboard. Drawing from field theory and boundary work, the article sheds light on how hackers exert an increasing influence on journalism, its practices, epistemologies, and ethics, resulting in an increasing hybridization of journalism. Journalism has become a dynamic space, in which hackers are not only becoming relevant actors in the journalism field, but they often represent the only sources journalists have to shed light on wrongdoings.

Main Findings

Most importantly, hackers are increasingly defining the conditions under which jour-nalism is carried out. By doing so, hackers are influencing the journalistic practice as well as its normative framework, pushing journalists to come to terms with work-ing in growingly complex and sometimes controversial grounds. Albeit some of the ethical considerations are certainly not new (verification, accuracy, truth), other issues have become paramount: questions of privacy, transparency, security, and at-tribution. This is a direct consequence of the wider change in the journalistic field that can be traced back to a networked or-ganization of newswork and to the conse-quent expansion of the boundaries of the journalistic field. Whether this networked orientation of journalism has been origi-nated by economic reasons (by pooling to-gether human, financial and technological resources, or even through integration and convergence strategies in news organiza-tions due to economic shortcomings), or by cultural changes due to new actors en-tering the field of journalism (for instance in the area of data and interactive journal-ism figures such as computer engineers, data scientists, design specialists, activists or – well – hackers) is hard to tell.