Digital Shift Toward What? Implications of Digital Transformation for Professional Journalism Practice in Morocco

This chapter investigates the extent to which Morocco’s news media have adapted to digitization of news production and consumption by shifting to multimedia storytelling and data journalism. The central question we aim to answer in the chapter is: In what ways has “digital transformation” of journalism affected professional journalistic practices and news coverage in the Arab world? Our case study investigates some stylistic, epistemic, and discursive dimensions of multimedia storytelling and data journalism employed in influential online Moroccan newspapers. We specifically focus on how these online newspapers/news platforms reported on a prominent event witnessed by the country, namely the death of dozens of migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, during a mass border crossing at the Spanish-controlled enclave of Melilla in the north of Morocco that took place on June 24th, 2022. The chapter argues that online journalism in Morocco exhibits contradictory practices and interactions of “older and newer media logics.” The digital transformation of journalism has resulted in hybrid professional practices culminating in a digital ecosystem that seems akin to what Chadwick (The hybrid media system: Politics and power, 2017) refers to as “a hybrid media system.”