Crisis, Opportunity, and the Evolution of Digital Journalism and Media Industries

Dear Colleagues,

The digital transformation has profoundly reshaped journalism and media industries, generating both crises and opportunities. Economic pressures, platformization, audience fragmentation, and the rise in artificial intelligence and algorithmic mediation have disrupted traditional structures of production and circulation while fostering new forms of creativity, participation, and engagement. These shifts also expose new vulnerabilities, such as the amplification of misinformation, polarization, and hate speech, which challenge the ethical and social responsibilities of media actors in the digital age.

This Topic, entitled “Crisis, Opportunity, and the Evolution of Digital Journalism and Media Industries”, seeks to explore how different kinds of crises—economic, political, technological, or epistemic—act as catalysts for change across journalism, entertainment, and interactive media sectors. Such transformations also exert a direct influence on users, who, through processes of empowerment and the capacity to reach mass audiences via digital platforms, assume an increasingly active and participatory role within the contemporary hybrid media system. Equally, it aims to examine how emerging opportunities, including those enabled by AI, redefine professional practices, industrial logics, creative processes, and audience relationships. Contributions may address transformations in news and entertainment ecosystems, platform governance, creative labor, automation, gaming and transmedia storytelling, datafication, or the political economy of digital culture.

We welcome the submission of both theoretical and empirical research that offers critical, comparative, or interdisciplinary perspectives on the evolution of journalism and media industries in times of change. We look forward to receiving contributions that expand the dialogue on how crises, innovations, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the future of digital communication, culture, and media.

Prof. Dr. Koldobika Meso-Ayerdi
Dr. Javier Odriozola Chéné
Dr. Rosa Pérez Arozamena
Dr. Ana Serrano-Tellería
Topic Editors