Strangers to the Game? Interlopers, Intralopers, and Shifting News Production

The contours of journalistic practice have evolved substantially since the emergence of the world wide web to include those who were once strangers to the profession. Amateur journalists, bloggers, mobile app designers, programmers, web analytics managers, and others have become part of journalism, influencing the process of journalism from news production to distribution. These technology-oriented strangers—those who have not belonged to traditional journalism practice but have imported their qualities and work into it—are increasingly taking part in journalism, whether welcomed by journalists or shunned as interlopers. Yet, the labels that keep them at journalism’s periphery risk conflating them with much larger groups who are not always adding to the news process (e.g., bloggers, microbloggers) or generalizing them as insiders/outsiders. In this essay, we consider studies that have addressed the roles of journalistic strangers and argue that by delineating differences among these strangers and seeking representative categorizations of who they are, a more holistic understanding of their impact on news production, and journalism broadly, can be advanced. Considering the norms and practices of journalism as increasingly fluid and open to new actors, we offer categorizations of journalistic strangers as explicit and implicit interlopers as well as intralopers. In working to understand these strangers as innovators and disruptors of news production, we begin to unpack how they are collectively contributing to an increasingly un-institutionalized meaning of news while also suggesting a research agenda that gives definition to the various strangers who may be influencing news production and distribution and the organizational field of journalism more broadly.


Introduction
Over the last two decades they have come swiftly, a multitude of strangers to journalism working with and through new and innovative technologies and challenging the authority of news organizations and journalists alike while also opening new pathways for journalism's relevance and sustainability. Amateur journalists, bloggers, mobile app designers, programmers, and web an-alytics managers have joined an extensive and growing crowd of professionals who have, whether considered or not by journalists and news organizations to actually be journalists, introduced innovations into the news production process. They have challenged traditional definitions of what it means to be a journalist and to produce news while augmenting a news production and distribution process that relies more than ever on outsider perspectives to institute engaging and sustained content and content delivery (Lewis & Westlund, 2015a;Westlund & Lewis, 2014). While evidence suggests journalists are more aware of and accepting of the contributions these strangers have made (Baack, 2018), they continue to be cast as peripheral actors in journalism (Nielsen, 2012;Tandoc & Oh, 2017).
This may be partly due to the ways that scholars discuss these strangers. In this essay, by introducing these actors as strangers we risk marginalizing their contributions. But as this essay contends, understanding more clearly and more categorically who these strangers are, and how they are shaping the contours of journalism, may diminish the reluctance among journalists and media scholars to position them more squarely within the process of news production and distribution. As Vos and Singer (2016) suggest, by understanding who is creating journalism, where they position themselves within the practice, and how they are received by journalists and their audiences, a more holistic understanding of journalism's norms and practices may emerge. By adding to the discourse surrounding journalism practice, such explorations can contribute to a clearer conceptualization of what journalism is and what it may become (cf. Carlson, 2016). This essay seeks such clarity through the offering of categorizations that may begin to remove the stigma of outsider from journalistic strangers.
Taking up recent calls to consider the organizational field of journalism as one undergoing a nearcontinuous process of normative and productive change (Anderson & Revers, 2018;Eldridge, 2018;Ferrucci, 2017;Vos & Singer, 2016), this essay posits that while various strangers are bringing change to journalism, their position within news production is not as dichotomously straightforward as insider/outsider or interloper/journalist. By first reviewing the state of research on innovation in journalism and its emphasis on individual actors as agents of change in terms of journalism, this essay offers a consideration of three categorizations of journalistic strangers before outlining how these strangers may be changing current epistemologies of journalism as well as the practice of journalism itself. These categorizations provide a more systematic way of examining who exactly these strangers are and what impacts-real or potential-they may be having on the epistemology and practice of journalism. Thus, this essay provides new means for media scholars and practitioners to unpack the complex changes journalistic strangers may have on journalistic theory and practice individually and collectively.

Innovation in Organizations and Journalism
Studies examining the role of outsider influence on journalism practice have most frequently focused on innovative technologies, those who introduce such technologies into the news process, and the impact of the adaptation of these technologies on journalistic norms and practices (cf. Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012;Nielsen, 2012;Singer, 2005;Tandoc & Oh, 2017). These studies have focused on individual-level analyses of routines (Lowrey, 2012;Ryfe, 2012), organizational and institutional structures (Lowrey & Gade, 2012), technology as disruptive to journalistic norms and practices (Belair-Gagnon, Owen, & Holton, 2017;Gynnild, 2014;Lasorsa et al., 2012), and technologies' relations with social and material expressions (Domingo, Masip, & Costera Meijer, 2015). Using concepts including agents of media innovation, boundary making, diffusion of innovation, disruption, and isomorphism (Boczkowski & de Santos, 2007), much of this research has alluded to the prevalence of an innovator dilemma in journalism wherein news organizations see innovations and innovators as unwelcome strangers, or what Eldridge describes as media interlopers, despite their contributions to the norms and practices of journalism (Eldridge, 2018;Nielsen, 2012).
Recent studies suggest a slow but notable change in this pattern as news organizations and journalists loosen their traditional authoritative grip on news production and see more value in non-traditional journalistic actors (hereafter referred to as "journalistic strangers") such as bloggers (Nielsen, 2012), programmers (Lewis & Usher, 2013), and web analytics managers (Tandoc & Thomas, 2015). This reflects Lowrey's (2012) contention that "over time, innovative news forms and practices emerge in variation, flock together in a selection process, stabilize, and then demonstrate retention" (p. 216). This process, observable by newsroom management and fueled by external pressures from journalistic strangers who bring with them innovative know-how, can and has fostered technology experimentation and adoption in news production. Simultaneously, it has opened new avenues from outsider contributions to and influences on the production and distribution of news.
With a few notable exceptions (Boczkowski & Siles, 2014;Weber, 2017), the literature on journalism innovation tends to single out innovation in newsrooms from other organizations as having a unique set of organizational constraints and features. Management studies have distinguished between types of innovations (e.g., product vs. process innovations) that are more easily adopted, implications for future adoption, and acts of coordination and information sharing, among other factors influencing adoption and organizational change. Orlikowski and Gash (1994) wrote about technological frames as central to understanding technological development, use, and change in organizations since they may vary across groups. The way users (or news organizations and the journalists working within in them in the case of this essay) understand a technology can impede on or enhance future individual and organizational adoption. Thus, it is important to analyze the variations across categorizations of actors who are co-shaping innovation in organizations that produce specific products, such as news production and the process of news creation and distribution. Through lenses of innovation, adoption, and subsequent effects, and including typologies of multiple actors, a more layered understanding of news production and the nuances of the actors involved there can be developed.
Unlike studies of innovation in journalism, organizational studies have pushed to set boundaries across levels of analyses in innovation. While organizational studies follow those conceived by early scholars relying on a collection of actors collaborating through similar means toward similar ends, they tend to focus on the adoption of new technology as well as non-traditional actors working within and for organizations in which they traditionally would not be involved. Those groups making use of innovative technologies and introducing them into new environments are nuanced, complex, and constituted by individuals as well as agencies with different functions or disciplinary backgrounds. Rarely is the descriptor of insider/outsider accurate in capturing how they perceive themselves professionally or how they are perceived by those they are working for or with. For these groups, technology can mean different things and serve different purposes, hindering or fostering adoption. In the case of journalism, where news organizations have sought new pathways toward financial sustainability through engagement with social and digital media innovations, journalistic strangers such as amateur journalists, bloggers, and microbloggers have provided a means of observing successes and failures of innovation adoption with minimal risk on journalists or news organizations (Holton, 2016). The emphasis on disruptive actors, or more specifically multiple actors introducing multiple disruptions simultaneously typically from outside traditional boundaries of an organization, is a key conceptual lens through which technology adoption, failure, and tension in organizations more broadly and in news production more narrowly, can be analyzed and more accurately understood.

Strangers in Journalism
With the expanding prominence of technology-oriented strangers in journalism, the need to understand categorically who these strangers are is intensifying. Relying on generalized labels (e.g., bloggers, microblobbers, programmers) risks conflating those who actively seek to, or actually do, contribute to journalism with those who do not, while dichotomously casting them as insiders or outsiders, journalists or interlopers, risks devaluing their contributions. As sociologist Georg Simmel (1950) outlined in his metaphor of strangers, there may be no escaping the stigma that comes with such a label, but through more exact examinations of who strangers are and where they fit in (or want to fit in), we can better understand their personal and professional positions. Strangers are, by Simmel's account, "fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries." A stranger's position within a group, whether ephemeral or lasting, "is determined by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning" and "that he imports qualities into it which do not and cannot stem from the group itself" (p. 402). In other words, because they are not committed to the ingredients or tendencies of the group, strangers are not "owners of soil" and have the character of mobility and a possible objective stance to the qualities and activities of the group.
Journalistic strangers exemplify Simmel's definition, bringing with them new ideas and innovations that disrupt journalism from the outside, or from within in some cases. While the strangers discussed in this essay may not be ephemeral in journalism (some of them do have a lasting impact after all), they are fixed within their spatial group, did not belong in journalism from the beginning, and are importing qualities to it that do not originally stem from the journalistic profession. The definition of strangers, unlike the metaphor, entails both individuals and institutions of varying kinds. These individuals and groups of strangers are especially relevant in journalistic change, which often comes from the edges to the mainstream "where change is less encumbered by tradition, by an established way of doing things" (Bruns, 2014, p. 16). This innovation push, wherein a new media model is found to be workable and useful and spreads to mainstream outlets, has been under way for some time now, driven partially by journalistic strangers.
These strangers have helped to introduce new ways of identifying what news is, how to deliver it more effectively, and how to better engage with news audiences. As a recent example, in their research on the role of web analytics companies in news production, Belair-Gagnon and Holton (2018) found that while not acknowledging their role as challenging the culture of journalism, analytics managers working at these companies positioned themselves as disruptors of the news business model, connectors between journalists and audiences, and routinizers of web analytics practices in newsrooms. While these companies are not new to journalism-there is a long history of companies providing audience measurement tools in the media industry-they provide trace data. These companies maintain they provide a potential set of solutions for news organizations to face the financial crisis in media by, at least in part, removing the guesswork from what kinds of news audiences want to and do engage with. Similar studies focusing on the incorporation of web analytics have found this to be true, noting that while journalists remain hesitant to using web analytics to guide their content, they do see such data as critical to their work Tandoc & Thomas, 2015). The fundamental impact of web analytics-which continues to be provided by those working outside of news organizations-on the norms and practices of journalism suggests that rather than exclusively focusing on how journalists experience emerging technologies in newsrooms, research should also consider how journalistic strangers such as web analytics companies may be challenging the epistemologies of journalism by facilitating notions of hyper-personalization of news content, diffusing sets of interactions with audience members, and de-mystifying the complexities of data that can uproot traditional journalistic practices such as relying on gut instincts to decide what is news.
Media scholars have examined journalistic strangers beyond web analytics companies (e.g., web designers, web programmers, amateur and citizen journalists, drone hobbyists, and start-ups). Several of these strangers, or at least their professions, barely existed before the emergence of the world wide web. Their specializations have, for the most part, developed rapidly and steadily, driven by corporate imperatives and codeveloped with news organizations, journalists, and the public. Given their disruptive nature and the adoption of their technological innovations and practices into the creation and distribution of news within a relative temporal proximity (or simultaneously in many cases), this essay argues that these strangers should be considered collectively rather than individually for the broad impact they are having on news production. Observations of individuals changing journalism from the outside continue to provide insights into the evolving landscape of journalism's epistemology, expertise, economy, and ethics (Lewis & Westlund, 2015b;Vos & Singer, 2016), but they do so at the risk of placing significance on one stranger or set of strangers. This may miss the interplay between the many sets, or multiplexes, of journalistic strangers and their resulting impact on news production and distribution.

Three Typologies of Strangers
To begin dissecting such multiplexes and those who comprise them, as well as to more fully understand key contributors to today's rapidly evolving news process, this essay offers formative categorizations for journalistic strangers that help alleviate issues of conflating labels and overgeneralizations. The definitions and examples offered here are meant to serve as a platform for discussion that elevates the discourse of non-traditional journalism actors while providing more constructive ways of placing them within journalism more broadly. Eldridge (2018) describes one segment of these strangers as media interlopers, or individuals "positioning their work as journalism, alongside sharp critiques of traditional journalists and dominant narratives of what journalism 'is'" (p. 4). These interlopers do not fit typical definitions of journalists and often find themselves working outside of journalism's professional norms to the ridicule of journalists and news organizations (cf. Quandt, 2018, on dark participation in this issue). Provided a stage by the internet and social media, interlopers make use of new technology in ways that challenge news production, raising questions of who produces what and with what impact on journalism and news audiences. Yet, as Eldridge (2018) notes, their place within journalism, as well as the place of similar actors on the periphery of the journalistic field, remains clouded by the fluid nature of their interaction with journalism and a lack of scholarship devoted to understanding them. This essay contends that today's technology-oriented media interlopers may be thought of as actors or institutions who may consider the work they do to be part of news media, though they do not always define themselves as journalists and if they do their role may not only involve traditional journalistic tasks or they may bring new practices and norms in journalism. As such, they are generally questioned by traditional journalists and news organizations. These interlopers are not new to journalism, though with the help of the world wide web and social media, they have forced a reconsideration of what journalists are and journalism is. Against the backdrop of innovation and disruption, these interlopers (as well as other strangers to journalism) are challenging news organizations to reconsider their roles-either potential or realized-as either competitors or collaborators in today's digital news cycle. Such tension is driven, at least in part, by the rising number of and nuances between media interlopers (Eldridge, 2018). In other words, so many journalistic strangers are now contributing to journalism and, whether they see themselves as journalists or are critical of the state of journalism, are shaping how news is produced and distributed. Yet, categorizations of journalistic strangers and their impacts on journalism practice and epistemology have yet to be made clear. The following sections lay an initial foundation for such categorizations. Leaning into media scholarship that has explored non-traditional journalism actors (cf. Boyles, 2017;Eldridge, 2018;Lewis & Westlund, 2015a), possible categorizations and definitions of journalistic strangers are offered as a means to strengthen the ways in which these actors are discussed by scholars and practitioners while also removing, even if slightly, the stigma that continues to keep them bound to the edges of journalism.

Explicit Interlopers
Explicit interlopers are defined here as non-traditional journalism actors who may not necessarily be welcomed or defined as journalists and work on the periphery of the profession while directly contributing content or products to the creation and distribution of news. They frequently and overtly challenge journalistic norms, calling for improved practices (e.g., more transparency through linking in social media spaces; fact-checking that includes public input).
Early forms of explicit interlopers who emerged alongside the proliferation of the internet include bloggers and citizen journalists who contributed to news production through early adoption of innovations. In creating weblogs, or "frequently updated website[s] with posts arranged in reverse chronological order so new entries are always on top" (Blood, 2003, p. 61), bloggers used the internet, coding, and web spaces dedicated to diary-style entries to critique traditional news sources and to share news and information of their own. Scholars and news practitioners initially questioned their role in journalism, categorizing weblogs in four distinct ways: (1) those produced by journalists; (2) those produced by professionals about journalism or the news industry; (3) those produced by individuals breaking news or events; and (4) those linking to news or events (Blood, 2003). In her analysis of political and civic affairs weblogs, Singer (2005) found that bloggers were making use of hyperlinks-not yet a practice among most journalistsand that journalists were beginning to shift the style of their content and platforms of delivery based on the successes and failures of bloggers. Yet, journalists were apprehensive about accepting bloggers as producing journalism, while news bloggers more frequently positioned themselves as journalists or-at the very least-as contributing to journalism via practices that allowed them to break and contextualize news more quickly than journalists (e.g., publishing online first, allowing audiences to publish in their spaces, using blogs and web pages to solicit news).
These bloggers contributed to a more digitally participatory culture of journalism wherein the boundaries between journalists and audiences were blurred by new forms of audience engagement and contribution through the internet and social media. A similar scenario played out with WikiLeaks, which was developed outside of journalism and, "based on their growing notoriety, were able to build at least temporary alliances with some very significant mainstream media outlets" (Bruns, 2014, p. 15). In combining an existing pathway of journalistic contributions-leaking information and documents in this case-with the features of the internet and related technologies, WikiLeaks altered news production by providing faster (and mostly transparent) leaked information along with the opportunity for news organizations to digitally house and share that content.
The capability of the public and other journalistic strangers to contribute to and inform news production raised a bevy of concerns among journalists and news organizations, who expressed anxiety over a more reflexive culture of journalism that diminished traditional journalistic authority. As Lewis (2012) contended, new actors in journalism were negotiating journalistic norms, contributing to news and information as part an evolving digital and social mediasphere, and challenging news organizations to rethink their approaches to audiences. In other words, these strangers to journalism influence changes in news production largely through applications of emerging technologies, with the explicit aim of adding to or being a part of journalism without actually assuming the label of journalist.

Implicit Interlopers
Implicit interlopers are defined here as non-traditional journalism actors whose alignments with journalism are less clear than explicit interlopers. Because they do not generally challenge journalistic authority, and because of the potential contributions and improvements they offer to journalism, such as more successful content and audience engagement (e.g., news crowdsourcing or usergenerated content), they may be more welcomed by journalists and news organizations. Implicit interlopers, who may not be as critical of journalism as explicit interlopers given that their financial well-being is linked to news organizations and other journalists in many cases, are also not as quick to reject the label of journalist.
As an illustration, Boyles (2017) explored journalism hackathons or events bringing together programmers and journalists to construct collaborative programs that may benefit news production, audience engagement, or other areas of journalism. In this study, she noted that civic hackers, or those who apply their programming knowledge for civic benefit, help inform news organizations and journalists about technological advancements and opportunities. They also encourage journalists to tinker with innovations they otherwise would be hesitant to use. While civic hackers are not journalists, nor do they typically embrace the label of journalist, they nonetheless work with journalists to create products with the potential to improve various areas of news production and engagement. To this end, they help "cultivate stronger press-public relationships" and contribute to the ways in which journalists think about the tools and technology used for their profession.
Other scholars have noted similar roles for programmers and web analytics professionals (Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018;Lewis & Usher, 2013). The latter provide for-profit services to news organizations through web analytics and have thusly invested in understanding the norms that drive journalism and appropriating some of those without actually becoming journalists themselves. This has helped to ease a hesitancy among journalists to incorporate complex data into their content considerations and helped web analytics companies coordinate more effectively with news organizations (Nelson, 2018;Petre, 2018). As Petre (2018) observed, web analytics professionals have found ways to make data more intelligible and applicable for journalists, helping them to combine journalistic intuition and training with web analytics when making decisions about news coverage.
Further, Belair-Gagnon and Holton (2018) found that web analytics organizations make efforts to understand the ways that journalists work and the problems they face when working with web metrics and analytics, developing ways to alleviate those issues either through personal interactions or through the development of new delivery platforms. While these interlopers do not consider their activities journalism per se, they acknowledge their contributions to news production. Their vision of journalism in the construction of knowledge starts with the rationalization of news production by encouraging the use of digital tools spurred by marketing techniques geared towards understanding individually and collectively personalized users' behaviors rather than fostering a notion of journalism as serving public interests. In other words, these companies may impact traditional journalistic values as well as audience preferences, and this un-derstanding of journalism may lead to a digital footprint resulting from uncontrollable past experiences that have an active role in establishing current knowledge. This impact may be a profound one: an epistemology of journalism that reflects on oneself and users' behaviors as opposed to one geared towards public interest.
This emerging form of construction of knowledge brings together elements of the past and an imagined audience while at the same time entering into conflict with established visions of journalism: one that is watchdog or responds to public interest. This epistemological transformation in journalism wrought, in part, by implicit interlopers, suggests that news organizations may depend more on a quantified notion of digital users' behaviors as a determinant in the production, and more particularly in the formatting and placement, of news. Such considerations may be contextual and depend on several factors including the role that proprietary and non-proprietary platforms may play in the shaping of technology and epistemological changes in journalism.

Intralopers
This also raises questions of those individuals working within news organizations and informing journalists without embracing the full role or label of a journalist. Defined here as media intralopers, or non-traditional journalism actors working from within news organizations without journalism-oriented titles, they may be trained in journalism or be well versed in the craft of the profession. These individuals are distinct from explicit and implicit interlopers because they work from the inside out, bringing non-traditional journalistic expertise and perspectives to news organizations and disrupting news production through advancements in digital and social media. This also includes the in-house production of emerging technology meant to supplement or complement journalists' work. In this sense, intralopers are the less strangers by proximity than they are by the work they perform in relation to news production.
As one example, in 2018, Reuters released Lynx Insights, an internally developed automation tool that reporters can use to accelerate the production of their stories or find new ones. While Lynx Insights may be deployed by journalists as a way for organizations to suggest enhancing their work, it is a product of programmers and other developers working from within Reuters. A survey of American data journalists also showed on the one hand that "larger organizations [are] more likely to undertake data work that involved a division of labor, with computer-assisted reporters, graphic designers, statisticians, and programmers working on teams" (Fink & Anderson, 2015). Smaller news organizations are likely to have one journalist who would acquire data skills. Fink and Anderson also noted that smaller organizations were more limited to third party pools, as smaller news organizations may see data journalists more as a luxury that elite news organizations can afford.
This mirrors the efforts of the "intrapreneurial units" Boyles (2016) explored in her interviews with news innovation leaders in North America. Unlike the implicit interlopers, intralopers coordinate their work within the news production process meaning they may also be more limited by regulations imposed by their news organizations or by the institutional norms that drive journalism practice. At the very least, they may face pressures that explicit and implicit interlopers may not, including tensions within news organization structures (e.g., between production and management as well as between editorial and intrapreneurial units), complexities in navigating professional relationships with journalists, and intricacies of their own role performances and identities.

Discussion
Since the emergence of the world wide web and proliferation of social media, media scholars have called attention to the role of strangers as influencers in technological innovation in the creation and distribution of news (Westlund, 2012). Scholars have developed case studies on the attitudes, behaviors, and impacts journalistic strangers may have had-and are having-in news production. They have also argued for a need for deeper examinations of who these types of strangers are and how they may be changing journalism, raising questions of how they individually and collectively affect news production, and perhaps how scholars approach those effects (Lewis & Westlund, 2015a, 2015bWestlund & Lewis, 2014). The role of journalistic strangers in journalism necessitates an extensive understanding of their positions and roles in news production. It also requires researchers to address broader questions of technological adoption and innovation in newsrooms while considering how explicit and implicit interlopers, intralopers, and journalists do or do not coordinate their professional identities and activities as well as the effect this coordination may be having on the culture of journalism.
Rather than emphasizing single actors or single groups of actors when examining evolutions in the creation and distribution of news, as well as the culture of journalism, this essay argues that with more distinct categorizations of journalistic strangers, scholars can develop research that includes the actors and groups who add to news production and culture individually and collectively. In doing so, more accurate analyses of the ways these strangers are contributing to the production of knowledge around the process and culture of journalism may be developed and discourses drawing these contributors in rather than casting them out may be strengthened.
This essay provides a starting point by discussing the relevance of coordinating between teams of strangers and journalists in technological innovation while also highlighting the culture and perceived roles that particular groups have had in coordinating their roles within news production. Boyles (2016), for example, showed how digital newsroom management, organizational cul-ture, and speed of innovation have fostered tensions between intrapreneurial innovation units in newsrooms and the livelihood of news organizations. Building on this and similar studies, practitioners and scholars may consider investigating the sort of organizational settings that allow for the coordination of efforts between strangers and journalists. In other words, by recognizing that there are different types of strangers often acting simultaneously in news production and knowing how to categorically define them, scholars may be able to conceptualize how these strangers and the different forms of interactions they co-produce in journalism vary across individuals, teams, groups, and organizations. Research questions may include how news organizations coordinate the use of audience metrics between those supplying the analytics tools, news managers and editors, and journalists or what roles news organizations open up for explicit and implicit interlopers, and how these actors coordinate with intralopers and journalists.
While intralopers may be less disruptive to the culture of journalism as they embrace the news production process more explicitly, implicit interlopers (e.g., web analytics companies) who may be more accepted now as part of journalism may emphasize new epistemological logics (e.g., personalization of news or the focus on audience preferences rather than public concerns). And while explicit interlopers are somewhat disassociated from journalism, journalists may take from them (e.g., adopting participatory journalism practices from bloggers and social media producers). The effects of these actors and changes in journalistic knowledge-oriented norms are not evolving solely in a case study form, from one interloper to another for example, but appear to be happening in coordination with each other, especially when applied to creating and distributing news in participatory journalism contexts.
As these journalistic strangers may envision different technology frames, important empirical questions remain. How do these frames impede or enhance current and future uses and adoption of technology in newsrooms? How do these journalistic strangers see themselves in relationship to news production and journalism more broadly, and how do they see themselves fitting into changing processes of news production? To address such questions, potential research avenues in journalism studies should include longitudinal analyses of how these innovation processes work separately and together, following the temporally-unbound research agenda that Carlson and Lewis (2018) suggested. Given that social media and other technologies such as web analytics are prompting news organizations to adapt more quickly, so too should scholars be more temporally reflexive in their studies.

Conclusion
Drawing on a limited number of existing studies, this essay has reflected on ways to provide categorizations for journalistic strangers who have had, and are having, an impact on the creation and distribution of news and journalism culture. These strangers vary in their influence on news production, and this essay illustrates that different categorizations of strangers (i.e. explicit and implicit interlopers, and intralopers) may have different levels of influence on journalistic norms and practices based on the innovations they adopt and their positions, real or perceived, within journalism as a profession. Scholars have identified specific journalistic strangers in news production, and this essay argues that there is a need for more definitive studies on groups and variation among groups or teams of strangers. In this context, an overarching set of empirical questions offered here include: What are the roles of explicit and implicit interlopers and intralopers in news production innovation? Does the cultural proximity to journalism between these strangers have an impact on the success or failure of news production innovation? And as the nature of these strangers continues to evolve and they become more integrated into news production, are there other typologies that researchers should consider? More broadly, if these strangers are changing news production and the organizational field of journalism, are they really strangers to journalism at all?
This brings us to questions of the changing epistemologies of journalism and what journalism ought to be under the coordinated influence of strangers. Technological innovation, which can happen quickly, fluctuates for different groups and may be dependent on these groups' observations of one another. In the case of news creation and distribution, this could be seen as explicit and implicit interlopers and intralopers taking cues from one another based on each other's successes and failures in innovation. As Poole and DeSanctis (2004) suggested, tracing the history of a technology and user engagement with that technology can reveal much about the process of adoption and the resulting changes to individuals, the groups they are bound up with, and the influence of those groups on other groups. This is especially evident when some of those individuals are less bound by organizational policies or restrictions. Such is the case with explicit and implicit interlopers and intralopers, who are often freer to work at the edges of journalism.
While media scholars have begun exploring the role of strangers in journalism, though more noticeably in American, Australian, or western European case studies, there remains a need to analyze how these groups relate to each other in the wider organizational field of journalism. Such an expansion of research has practical and theoretical contributions in understanding innovation processes more holistically, how these processes depend on external and disruptive actors that are part of a networked environment beyond the bounds of newsrooms, and in what ways they challenge traditional news production and journalism culture. Scholars and practitioners will need to consider how external actors "force innovation" in journalism and where these actors fit in. The categorizations outlined here provide a starting point. This is not to suggest that all journalistic strangers are welcome-especially given that many are happy to be, and will continue to be, content working outside of journalism-but rather to highlight the more malleable nature of journalistic boundaries, which appear to be looser and more penetrable than ever and to provide more constructive categorizations to those individuals contributing to today's journalism.