Little attention to work practices? Here I go!

Singer et al 1999 showed that online newsrooms are filled with young journalists with different educational backgrounds than their print counterparts and that their main activity is known as "shovelware": 'taking information generated originally for a paper's printed edition and deploying it virtually unchanged onto its website'.

However, Boczkowski says that this trend is being reverted and that there is more original material being produced by online newsrooms (is it true?). Moreover, he suggests that original material may be a more appropriate ground to examine changes in the technologies and practices of newspapers as it moves from the paper to the screen.

He also suggests that despite the great amount of work that has been done in investigating newspaper technological changes, the majority of this work "has remained confined to the familiar landscape of notions and models such as gatekeeping, agenda-settings", etc, commonly investigated in new media studies. He complements his reflection by saying that further research is needed that could lead to a multidisciplinary theory building about online newspapers, such as the fields of sociology and anthropology and contextual approaches to knowing, such as activity theory and distributed cognition (Horray!!)

Even better: he says that little attention has been paid to the role of technology in the actual work practices of editorial personnel -- something which is not surprising given the neglect of technology's role in most studies of news-making in print and broadcast media.

And gets better and better: "further research is needed to illuminate what goes on in the creation of original content, taking advantage of the the web's unique technical features...and more conceptually, examining the role of technology in news-making, a long-overdue theme in sociology of news production... Potential issues include (4) the changes in gathering, processing and delivery of news content in relation to having multiple media for storing ad conveying information" (this guy read my proposal... ) :)
Dammm!