Would You Slack That? The Impact of Security and Privacy on Cooperative Newsroom Work

Journalistic work is increasingly conducted using cooperative technologies. But while journalists need security and privacy just like professionals in sectors like health and education, constrained finances and missing legal requirements cause journalists to rely mostly on third-party platforms for their professional communications. In this study, we analyze how journalists manage professional collaborations across myriad tasks and contexts, with a focus on how their security and privacy concerns may shape these behaviors. We find that journalists' relatively open information-sharing practices may reflect the strength of their informal intra-organizational networks, rather than their organizational commitment per se. Moreover, while journalists—like many workers—manage their security and privacy concerns by avoiding sensitive communications via certain channels, the physical shrinking newsrooms of is reducing opportunities for the face-to-face communications journalists rely on for secure, private, professional exchange. Journalists' self-censorship on collaborative platforms therefore warrants particular attention given journalism's essential role in the public sphere.