These two kinds of funding, very common in the creative industries, are being used worldwide to create and support media outlets, especially start-ups. A company or group of (non-media) companies funds, in total or partially, a media outlet. This is a way media companies have to guarantee that some part of their budget is dedicated to the media outlet.

For example “Mi Voz Chile” starts every fiscal year with about 40 per cent of its annual budget assured by a group of Chilean companies. A philanthrope can fund a media project focused on social or political issues, i.e. The Intercept, created by senior journalist Glenn Greenwald and funded by Pierre Omidyar, Ebay founder.

Transparency, the openness of an organizations' operations, is an increasingly important principle in most areas of contemporary democratic societies. Citizens expect organizations to be transparent, which means ensuring the availability of public interest information about decisions of state institutions like the government and the management of public funds. To this end, not only the media, but also non-profit, politically neutral NGOs control the state and the process of governance, by trying to make it transparent to citizens. One form of this is to uncover corruption at various levels of government by involving voters into this process. The other side of governmental transparency is the transparency of state institutions: information of public interest should be easily accessible, and decisions of state or local authorities and related lobbying operate in a clearly regulated environment and in a transparent manner.

The freedom and access of information is essential not just for citizens in making political choices, but also for journalists who strive to control political, social and economic powerholders and investigate important social issues. Transparency is also an important principle in the economy, where business organizations have recognized that credibility, trust and social responsibility are increasingly important for consumers’ choices.

For journalism and the media, transparency has become an essential factor. After much discussion in the profession about the traditional value of objectivity, the principle of transparency has become one of the most important, but not exclusive requirements of ethical journalism. The credibility of the press can be ensured by factors such as the presentation of sources, responsibility in handling information and collaboration with the audience. At the same time, transparency can often conflict with other norms of journalism, as, for example, the protection of sources is part of the journalistic responsibility, which is just the opposite of a fully transparent operation of the press. In such cases, journalists must weigh between different values, however source protection should always be a priority.

The term hate speech refers to expressions that can take many forms such as making negative statements about racial, ethnic, religious, gender, or minority groups in society. It is often based on prejudice, intolerance, and the intention to discriminate against individuals or groups. Spreading stereotypes and false assumptions may incite hatred and social conflicts and, in extreme cases, even crimes and acts of violence.

The dissemination of hate speech can endanger democratic values and human rights. Among others, legal prohibition and sanctioning can be an important tool to take action against and prevent hate speech. However, such legislation is a complex issue, as it also might restrict the freedom of opinion, which is a fundamental right. Accordingly, hate speech is not a legal term in some countries, but its legal regulation differs from country to country.

The spread of hate speech is often particularly facilitated by digital communication channels, where large audiences can be reached quickly and without control. Common means for the spread of hate speech are social networking sites, comment sections, forums, blogs, and websites specifically created for this purpose. Therefore, stronger action and rules by internet companies, social networking sites and platforms (e.g. in their community standards) against its distribution can be a tool to combat hate speech. The European Commission and four major internet platforms announced a Code of Conduct against hate speech in 2016. The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech was launched in 2019.

Aside from legal means to combat hate speech, developing media users’ and journalists’ awareness is certainly a powerful tool in recognizing changing forms of hate speech and being able to respond to it effectively. Various initiatives help to raise journalists’ awareness of hate speech, such us the Ethical Journalism Network and the MediaAgainstHate campaign led by the European Federation of Journalists and a coalition of civil society organisations.

Media ethics deals with problems of moral principles and values concerning the operation and content of the media. This includes not only the ethics of journalism, but also broader areas such as the ethics of filmmaking, photography or advertising. There are several principles in journalistic ethics. One of the most important ethical norms is the objectivity of journalists: a journalist must be factual, check the information and present it in a balanced way.

At the same time, protection and reliability of sources are essential, and methods of obtaining information must be correct. The practice of journalism should pay attention to the boundary between the public and private spheres. The press can act as a threat to privacy when it publishes information that is purely private: the right to privacy can be contrary to free speech.

Another important ethical principle of journalism is harm avoidance: journalists shall not offend individuals or social groups and their worldview must not be distorted by prejudices. Other forms of bias can be caused by interests: the journalist shall not be influenced by his or her own personal interests, nor by political, governmental, or business interests. Journalists must represent the public interest, although this concept is difficult to define.

On digital media platforms, previous problems often appear in new forms, which have also posed new ethical challenges for online journalism. For example, the use of amateur, user generated content, anonymous sources, or the possible manipulation of images make it difficult to verify the reliability of sources. The speed of Internet communication has developed a new online policy on the accuracy of reports: checking and improving them is often parallel to publication. The use of hyperlinks and other Internet resources has led journalism to create new ethical standards for quoting texts and plagiarism. Due to possible offensive and harmful opinions, editorial offices were forced to check their readers’ comments. Similarly, serious ethical and legal issues arise in relation to media marketing and data mining practices in the digital media environment, while online newspapers can do business with their readers’ data. Appropriate privacy policies of organizations and legal regulation can ensure the protection of personal data, like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The concept of platform society, as developed by José van Dijck, refers to the way societies are organized in a networked world where several social sectors have become dependent on the giant media platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. Both private and public sectors are concerned: in the fields of education, urban transport, news consumption, health, and others, interactions, transactions and several forms of communication are entirely dependent on the infrastructure created by these platforms. Consequently, the platforms have become a crucial force in people’s everyday life.

Social, economic, and interpersonal data flows are largely driven by this global online platform ecosystem in our day. While the big five platforms are tremendous facilitators that enable people to engage with each other, and to receive news etc., at the same time they are also gaining control of people’s daily activities. The platforms not only provide important – and today essential – services for their users, but also monitor and collect the data flows connected to them and trade in the gathered data.

This data management raises a few concerns. Platforms can combine and analyze the data they have collected and thus have become enormously knowledgeable about users’ behaviour. This knowledge is a very valuable currency because it can be used as input for generating new knowledge, for creating user profiles, or for developing new analytical tools and artificial intelligence.

However, it is not clear who is responsible for these operations and who guarantees the privacy and other rights of users. One of the key challenges in the above context is to protect traditional public values in a connective world. In addition to privacy and security, other important traditional social values are transparency, accuracy (for example, of news), and society itself. The risks and issues (like hate speech) raised by data collection may be regulated and managed at the national level, but the platforms operate as global companies set up for business and registered in the US. The theory of the platform society points to the importance of democratic processes and looks at networked societies from a specifically European perspective.

The concept of Instagramism was coined by the media scholar Lev Manovich to describe the distinctive visual culture of the photo-sharing social app Instagram. In his words, Instagramism is the visual style of designed photos posted on Instagram, which are linked to the new global digital youth class that has its origin around 2010. The vision and visual expression of this young generation was greatly influenced by Kinfolk magazine, launched in 2011, whose aesthetic was adopted and further popularized by the image-sharing social networking site Instagram.

In his 2016 book Instagram and the Contemporary Image, Manovich describes a particular media form that combines lens image capture and design techniques. The author and his research team used big data to examine more than 15 million Instagram photos taken in 58 cities in 31 countries over five years (2010–2015). By analyzing these, he identified three main types of images on Instagram: casual, professional, and designed. Casual photographs are often imperfectly composed and executed, in keeping with 20th century “home mode” photography, but they can capture the moment. Professional photographs are carefully composed works that follow the classic rules of photography. Instagram’s distinctive visual culture is best exemplified by designed photography, characterized by a clean, minimalist style and poetic vision. In the author’s interpretation, this poetic vision enables the visual self-definition and self-representation of the younger, globalized generations, and expresses the users’ desire to slow down, to capture and live the moment.

The emergence of the internet has led to fundamental changes in all areas of public communication, referred to as the digital turn. At the intersection of journalism and technological development, new trends have emerged that affect every aspect of journalism, from news gathering and processing to news distribution. At the end of the 1990s, there were still many utopian or even dystopian expectations about the anticipated digital transformation of journalism. Some researchers expected that increasingly digital journalism would not only serve citizens’ information needs more effectively through customized and interactive solutions, but would also foster the building of communities of shared interests and concerns. Others have assumed that digital technology can dramatically improve the relationship between journalists and their audiences, and thus help professionals to better fulfil the press’ social duty. At the same time, however, views have also been expressed that digital technology is destroying traditional forms of journalism and thus harming democracy.

Today, based on the experience of the advanced digitalization of journalism, there are several definitions of exactly what digitaljournalismis. These often include references to the use of digital tools in journalism, the shift of news dissemination to digital platforms, the transformation of journalistic genres, and the complex, multimedia forms of journalistic storytelling that are made possible in the digital space. Issues of digital news archiving, challenges around media business models, and the role of online platforms in misinformation and algorithmic distribution are often at the heart of the digital journalism discussion. Challenges of citizen journalism are also frequently raised, including the risks and consequences of not knowing professional and ethical standards.

Providing a comprehensive understanding of the role and status of digital journalism, Burgess and Hurcombe point out the complex relationship between journalism and the digital media, highlighting that journalism not only reflects, but also adapts to and influences the changing media environment. According to their definition, the notion of digital journalism covers “those practices of newsgathering, reporting, textual production and ancillary communication that reflect, respond to, and shape the social, cultural and economic logics of the constantly changing digital media environment”.

Today, doing journalism digitally includes journalistic use of digital and data-driven investigative and reporting methods as well as using new genres and modes of journalistic storytelling that exploit the interactive multimedia possibilities. The digital transformation of journalism provides journalists with more analytical tools to gather data on their audiences (demographics, attitudes, interests and tastes) and the popularity of a piece of content (the number of clicks and shares of an article or video in real time). In practice, digital journalists need not use only digital databases and other digital resources when gathering information, and use digital devices (above all, a smartphone) when reporting, but can also improve their online persona and personal brand.

The impact of digitalization on the professional expectations of journalists is now clearly visible: job advertisements include mobile and social media skills and skills of storytelling across multiple platforms (mobile, social, website and print) as key elements of the job description.

In technological terms, hypertext is a non-sequential and non-linear, multi-centred (heterarchical) text or text system networked in a digital medium. The elements, objects and nodes of the text system are connected by so-called hyperlinks. The programming language used to enable hypertext is html (hypertext markup language). From the reader’s perspective, a hypertext is an interactive network of interconnected texts with embedded links providing interoperability between texts. These links are connecting points, gateways through which the reader can go to any depth on a given topic and navigate the information set according to his needs and interests, without being limited by the linearity of traditional (printed) texts.

Although the concept of hypertext is primarily associated with the world wide web and we mainly encounter hypertexts on the internet, the concept predates the emergence of the world wide web. The first hypertexts were CD-ROMs, software, and digital databases. It was also with the advent of the internet that hypermedia was born, which is an extension of hypertext and includes multiple media such as text, graphics, audio, video etc., and is not just text-based like hypertext.

Today, the concept of hypertext is not only relevant to the IT field but has also triggered a major academic response in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and art theory. In the journalism literature, hypertext (along with multimedia and interactivity) is often referred to as a defining feature of the language of digital journalism. As Ramón Salaverría underlines in his article on 25 years of digital journalism research, unlike static information in traditional media (print, radio, and television), hypertext links in digital media have taught readers how to actively access news. As a result, we are no longer just able to read, listen or watch the news, but also to browse it. Linear reading of texts is now often replaced by non-linear consumption of content.

Hypertext is therefore a fundamental feature of online journalistic platforms such as online news portals or social media accounts of news media. Its importance for digital journalism lies primarily in the fact that it allows for a complex explanation of the subject of the text, the provision of background information, and the referencing of other related texts. And last but not least, hypermedia enables effective multimedia storytelling for digital journalists.

An influencer is a person who, through his or her influence (perceived or real), knowledge, social position, or connections, can influence the decision-making of others, especially regarding consumption habits or certain shopping decisions. Today’s influencers are opinion leaders in digital and social media, often well-known TV personalities, celebrities, journalists, analysts, and professional leaders. Typical influencers are also YouTubers, bloggers, vloggers, or other online content publishers who have a significant number of followers on digital media platforms. Their followers often behave and act like fans.

The growing complexity of the influencer phenomenon is reflected in attempts to create influencer typologies. These tend to distinguish between different types of influencers with different marketing potential, based on audience reach and follower engagement. In terms of the number of followers, a distinction can be made between so-called mega-influencers with a following of millions; macro-influencers (more than 10,000 and less than 1 million followers) who are emerging in online media; micro-influencers (up to 10,000 followers) who are locally known or linked to a specific topic; and nano-influencers (from 1,000 to 5,000 followers) who focus on specific niche topics.

Cooperation between different companies and brands and relevant influencers forms the basis of widespread contemporary influencer marketing, which uses the visibility and influence of a third party, specifically a celebrity, to raise awareness of a product or service, and shape consumer attitudes and support sales, in exchange for appropriate compensation. Examples of common influencer marketing tools include product launch videos, product placement with photos or videos, and collaboration or cross-promotion between several influencers.

Influencer marketing often also works as viral marketing, as the tweets, posts, or blog and video blog entries of online celebrities go viral (via sharing, commenting etc.) on social networks. This approach to shaping and influencing opinions is also known as word of mouth (WOM), or in its electronic version as e-word of mouth. In its original, non-marketing context, the term refers to the transfer of information from person to person in a social context. It is based on the now-proven fact that we tend to listen to the opinions of our acquaintances rather than, for example, advertising.

Lifestyle journalism is a non-traditional popular field of journalism which is often considered trivial because of its close links to commercial interests and has frequently been defined in opposition to the normative ideal of journalism. It is often seen as a combination of journalistic elements such as soft news, service journalism, consumer journalism, popular journalism, or even cultural journalism. In a sense, it does provide a service to readers by publishing advice, reviews, and advertisements, which are common tools in lifestyle journalism. In this regard, it aims to directly address readers, viewers or users as individuals making consumer choices. Many characterizations of this field also share a close connection with public relations, with lifestyle journalists often accused of fulfilling market mandates.

Its key themes and areas are travel, music, food, fashion, entertainment, leisure, arts, gardening etc. Lifestyle journalism is therefore an umbrella term covering not only these topics, but also specific genres or modes of addressing the audience. In line with its typical themes, lifestyle journalism often uses entertainment formats and is therefore often perceived as a complement to breaking news, political news, and news about social and cultural conflicts.

Consequently, the status and legitimacy of lifestyle journalism within journalism is controversial and challenged by new actors (bloggers, vloggers, micro-vloggers, influencers) involved in lifestyle-related topics in digital media.