The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism 2015954909, 9781473906532, 9781473955073

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The SAGE Handbook of

Digital Journalism

SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

The SAGE Handbook of

Digital Journalism

Edited by

Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Chris Rojek Editorial Assistant: Mathew Oldfield Production Editor: Shikha Jain Copyeditor: Sunrise Setting Limited Proofreader: Dick Davis Marketing manager: Michael Ainsley Cover design: Wendy Scott Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Introductions & editorial arrangement © Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida 2016 Chapter 1 © Beate Josephi 2016 Chapter 2 © Owen Taylor 2016 Chapter 3 © Eugenia Siapera 2016 Chapter 4 © Rasmus Kleis Nielsen 2016 Chapter 5 © Stephen J.A. Ward 2016 Chapter 6 © Alfred Hermida 2016 Chapter 7 © Sharon Meraz and Zizi Papacharissi 2016 Chapter 8 © Steen Steensen 2016 Chapter 9 © Karin Wahl-Jorgensen 2016 Chapter 10 © Adrienne Russell 2016 Chapter 11 © James F. Hamilton 2016 Chapter 12 © Renee Barnes 2016 Chapter 13 © Steve Paulussen 2016 Chapter 14 © Henrik Örnebring and Raul Ferrer Conill 2016 Chapter 15 © Jérémie Nicey 2016 Chapter 16 © Matt Carlson 2016 Chapter 17 © Yana Breindl 2016 Chapter 18 © Stuart Allan 2016 Chapter 19 © Andy Williams and David Harte 2016 Chapter 20 © Daniel Kreiss and J. Scott Brennen 2016

Chapter 21 © Laura Ahva and Heikki Heikkilä 2016 Chapter 22 © Bart Cammaerts and Nick Couldry 2016 Chapter 23 © Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund 2016 Chapter 24 © Chris Peters 2016 Chapter 25 © David M. Ryfe 2016 Chapter 26 © Tim P. Vos 2016 Chapter 27 © David Domingo and Victor Wiard 2016 Chapter 28 © C.W. Anderson 2016 Chapter 29 © Anu Kantola 2016 Chapter 30 © Sue Robinson & Meredith Metzler 2016 Chapter 31 © Juliette De Maeyer 2016 Chapter 32 © Zvi Reich and Aviv Barnoy 2016 Chapter 33 © Anders Olof Larsson, Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Karlsson, Eirik Stavelin and Hallvard Moe 2016 Chapter 34 © Axel Bruns 2016 Chapter 35 © Kim Christian Schrøder 2016 Chapter 36 © Irene Costera Meijer 2016 Chapter 37 © Wiebke Loosen and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt 2016

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954909 At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-0653-2

Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on the Editors and Contributors

viii ix

Introduction 1 Tamara Witschge, C.W. Anderson, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida PART I  CHANGING CONTEXTS

5

1.

Digital Journalism and Democracy Beate Josephi

9

2.

Global Media Power Taylor Owen

25

3.

Digital News Media and Ethnic Minorities Eugenia Siapera

35

4.

The Business of News Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

51

5.

Digital Journalism Ethics Stephen J.A. Ward

68

6.

Social Media and the News Alfred Hermida

81

7.

Networked Framing and Gatekeeping Sharon Meraz and Zizi Papacharissi

95

8.

The Intimization of Journalism Steen Steensen

113

9.

Emotion and Journalism Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

128

PART II  NEWS PRACTICES IN THE DIGITAL ERA

145

10.

Networked Journalism Adrienne Russell

149

11.

Hybrid News Practices James F. Hamilton

164

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12.

The Ecology of Participation Renee Barnes

179

13.

Innovation in the Newsroom Steve Paulussen

192

14.

Outsourcing Newswork Henrik Örnebring and Raul Ferrer Conill

207

15.

Semi-professional Amateurs Jérémie Nicey

222

16.

Sources as News Producers Matt Carlson

236

17.

Activists as News Producers Yana Breindl

250

18.

Citizen Witnesses Stuart Allan

266

19.

Hyperlocal News Andy Williams and David Harte

280

PART III  CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF JOURNALISM

295

20.

Normative Models of Digital Journalism Daniel Kreiss and J. Scott Brennen

299

21.

Mass, Audience, and the Public Laura Ahva and Heikki Heikkilä

315

22.

Digital Journalism as Practice Bart Cammaerts and Nick Couldry

326

23.

Mapping the Human–Machine Divide in Journalism Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund

341

24.

Spaces and Places of News Consumption Chris Peters

354

25.

News Institutions David M. Ryfe

370

26.

Journalistic Fields Tim P. Vos

383

Contents

vii

27.

News Networks David Domingo and Victor Wiard

397

28.

News Ecosystems C.W. Anderson

410

29.

Liquid Journalism Anu Kantola

424

PART IV  RESEARCH STRATEGIES

443

30.

Ethnography of Digital News Production Sue Robinson and Meredith Metzler

447

31.

Adopting a ‘Material Sensibility’ in Journalism Studies Juliette De Maeyer

460

32.

Reconstructing Production Practices through Interviewing Zvi Reich and Aviv Barnoy

477

33.

Sampling Liquid Journalism Anders Olof Larsson, Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Karlsson, Eirik Stavelin, and Hallvard Moe

494

34.

Big Data Analysis Axel Bruns

509

35.

Q-Method and News Audience Research Kim Christian Schrøder

528

36.

Practicing Audience-centred Journalism Research Irene Costera Meijer

546

37.

Multi-method Approaches Wiebke Loosen and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

562

Author Index 577 Subject Index 595

List of Figures and Tables FIGURES 17.1 22.1 28.1 28.2 34.1 34.2 35.1 36.1 36.2 37.1

Communication channels and actors in activism Selection of Tweets from @HillaryClinton mixing the personal and the political, 2014 Materialist media ecologies: The rhizomatic approach The rhizomatic approach Sharing of links to Australian news sites, July 2012 to August 2014 Total visits to Australian news and opinion sites, July 2012 to August 2014 One participant’s completed Q-methodological grid Mood board about ‘What is good, quality news?’ (Costera Meijer 2006: 34) Reliability (betrouwbaar) as primary value 1 and ‘transparancy’ on place 5 and 7 Multi-method design in a project on audience participation in journalism

260 332 416 419 519 523 535 549 556 565

TABLES 29.1 35.1 35.2

Shifting ideals of the journalistic profession The most preferred news media in Denmark 2014 The most preferred news media in Denmark 2009

432 540 541

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

THE EDITORS C. W. Anderson PhD is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). Since 2009, he has also served as a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. From 2009–2010, he was a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. He has published academic articles in Political Communication, Journalism, and numerous anthologies on digital media. He blogs regularly for the Nieman Journalism Lab and the Atlantic Online. He is the author of Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) and the Journalism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) (with Len Downie and Michael Schudson.) David Domingo is Chair of Journalism at the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at Université libre de Bruxelles. Previously, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Iowa, USA, Visiting Researcher at University of Tampere, Finland, and Senior Lecturer at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalonia. His research focuses on innovation processes in online communication, with a special interest in the (re)definition of journalistic practices and identities. He is coauthor of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and co-editor of Making Online News (Peter Lang, 2011). Alfred Hermida  PhD is an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. He is Director and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, Canada, where his research focuses on the reconfiguration of journalism, social media and emerging forms of digital storytelling. His most recent book, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters, (DoubleDay Canada, 2014) won the 2015 National Business Book Award in Canada. He is co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and his work has been published in Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, the Journal of ComputerMediated Communication and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. He was a BBC News journalist for 16 years, including four as a correspondent in North Africa and the Middle East, before going on to be a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. Tamara Witschge is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts since February 2012. From 2009–2012 she was a Lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Before that (2007–2009) she was a Research

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Associate at Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and worked on project ‘Spaces of News’. This project explored the ways in which technological, economic and social change is reconfiguring news journalism. She has published widely on this topic, and is co-author of the recently published book Changing Journalism (Routledge, 2011). Her PhD thesis ‘(In)difference Online’ (2007) examined the openness of public debate on contested issues. Tamara is the General Secretary of European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and a member of the editorial board of the international journals New Media and Society, Social media + Society, Platform: the Journal of Media and Communication, and the German edition of the Global Media Journal.

THE CONTRIBUTORS Laura Ahva is a Postdoctoral Researcher interested in journalism, audience studies, participation, and the public sphere. She has published in various journals, including Journalism, and has been involved in editing a double special issue of Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice on the theories of digital journalism. She is based in the School of Communication, Media and Theatre at the University of Tampere, Finland. Stuart Allan is Professor of Journalism and Communication as well as Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. Recent books include Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis (Polity Press, 2013), as well as the edited The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism (Routledge, revised edition, 2012) and Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Volume 2 (Peter Lang, co-edited with E. Thorsen, 2014). He is currently engaged in research examining digital imagery in news reporting, amongst other projects. Renee Barnes is a Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator for Journalism at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. She is a member of the university’s research cluster Engage, which is concerned with researching and developing interactive technologies where users can become involved, informed and inspired to change their world. Her research interests are focused on the online news audience, alternative and independent news media and social media. Aviv Barnoy  is a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His research interests include journalistic knowledge, journalism practices, news sources, news economics and public relations. He received his M.A in Communication Studies from Tel Aviv University. Yana Breindl is a Researcher at the Institute of Political Science and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, Georg-August Universität Göttingen. Previously, she was a WienerAnspach Post-doctoral Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and completed her PhD on digital rights campaigning surrounding EU regulations at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has published extensively on digital rights activism and online mobilisations. Her most recent research projects focus on the regulation of Internet blocking in liberal democracies. J. Scott Brennen is a PhD candidate in the School of Media and Journalism at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. His research interests include science and technology

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

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studies, journalism studies, and media studies. His current research concerns media and representation practices in networked scientific collaborations. He earned his MA in Mass Communication from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his BA from Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA. Axel Bruns  is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), Twitter and Society (2014), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012), and Uses of Blogs (2006). His research examines the uses of social media in political communication, crisis communication, and other contexts, and he is leading the development of new research methods for large-scale social media analytics. His research website is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. Bart Cammaerts is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research focuses on the relationship between media as well as communication technologies and resistance with particular emphasis on media strategies of activists, representations of protest, alternative cultures and issues relating to media power, mediation and public-ness. He publishes widely and his most recent books include: Youth Participation in Democratic Life: Stories of Hope and Disillusion (co-authored with Michael Bruter, Shakuntala Banaji, Sarah Harrison and Nick Anstead, Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) and Mediation and Protest Movements (eds with Alice Matoni and Patrick McCurdy, Intellect, 2013). Matt Carlson is Associate Professor of Communication at Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA, where his research examines the changing conditions of contemporary journalism, with a particular interest in metajournalistic discourse and the production of meanings about the news. He is author of the books Journalistic Authority and On the Condition of Anonymity, editor of Boundaries of Journalism with Seth C. Lewis and Journalists, Sources, and Credibility with Bob Franklin, and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. Nick Couldry  is a Sociologist of Media and Culture. He is currently Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author or editor of twelve books including most recently The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity, 2016, with Andreas Hepp), Ethics of Media (Palgrave, 2013, coedited with Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski), and Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity, 2012). Irene Costera Meijer is a Professor of Journalism Studies at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She managed several research projects which share a user/audience centered approach regarding news, coined ‘Valuable Journalism’. She published widely about popular culture and journalism aiming to open up the profession as well as Journalism Studies to the perspectives, experiences and desires of audiences and users beyond clicks and hits, shares, ratings, circulation figures and beyond the aims of marketers. Her research website is http:// www.news-use.com.

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Juliette De Maeyer  is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at Université de Montréal, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersection of journalism and technology, on the discourses about technological change in journalism, and on the materiality of newsmaking. Her most recent work has been published in journals such as Journalism, Digital Journalism and New Media & Society. Raul Ferrer Conill  is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. His current research focuses on the introduction of gamification into mobile and digital news consumption. Other research interests cover digital journalism, convergence, native advertising, and social media. James F. Hamilton is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Entertainment & Media Studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, USA. His research focuses on the history, theory and practice of alternative media and democratic communication. Dr Hamilton’s books include Democratic Communications: Formations, Projects, Possibilities (Lexington Books, 2008; paperback edition 2009) and Alternative Journalism (Sage, 2009), which is co-written with Chris Atton. David Harte is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications and Award Leader for the MA in Social Media at Birmingham City University, UK. His main research interests are on the role that community news websites play in fostering citizenship. He has a background in working with local and regional policymakers on developing the creative economy and has managed projects with a focus on supporting creative businesses. Heikki Heikkilä is a Senior Researcher focusing on comparative journalism research, media accountability, and digital journalism. He has contributed to The Handbook of Global Online Journalism and the journals Journalism, European Journal of Communication, and Javnost/ The Public. He is based in the School of Communication, Media and Theatre at the University of Tampere, Finland. Beate Josephi  is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Her research, amongst others, queries the role of democracy in journalism as shown in her guest-edited issue of Journalism on ‘Decoupling Journalism and Democracy’ (2013). Publications include Journalism Education in Countries with Limited Media Freedom (2010), chapters in international handbooks on journalism and numerous journal articles. Anu Kantola is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her recent work has focused on the changing forms of power, public life and professions in liquid modernity. She has published several books in Finland and her work appears in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Journalism, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Nordicom Review, Acta Sociologica, New Political Economy, Management Learning, Journal of Political Power, and Memory Studies. Michael Karlsson is a Professor at Karlstad University, and is interested in digital journalism and is widely published in journals such as Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, and Journalism Studies.

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xiii

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His research explores how changes in media and technology shape contemporary political communication and journalism. He is the author of Prototype Politics: Technology-intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012). Anders Olof Larsson  is Associate Professor at Westerdals – Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology. Larsson was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway and received his PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2012. Larsson’s research interests include the use of online interactivity and social media by societal institutions and their audiences, online political communication and methodology, especially quantitative methods. Larsson has published on these topics in academic journals like New Media & Society, Journalism Practice, The Information Society and Convergence. His website can be found at www.andersoloflarsson.se Seth C. Lewis is the Shirley Papé Chair in Electronic and Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, USA, as well as Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. His widely published research explores the digital transformation of journalism, with a focus on conceptualizing human – technology interactions and media innovation processes associated with data, code, analytics, social media, and related phenomena. He is editor of Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts, and Critiques (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming) and co-editor of Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices, and Participation (Routledge, 2015). He is on the editorial boards of New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, among other journals. Wiebke Loosen is a Senior Researcher for journalism research at the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research in Hamburg (Germany) and Lecturer at the University of Hamburg. She has made various contributions to theoretical and empirical research in the field of journalism’s transformation in the internet age, including topics such as digital journalism, cross-media journalism, the ‘social mediatization’ of journalism, and methodology. Wiebke Loosen’s current research includes work on audience participation in journalism, the changing journalism/ audience-relationship, data journalism, and algorithmically-constructed public spheres. Further information on her work can be found on the website of the Hans Bredow Institute (http://www. hans-bredow-institut.de/), and you can follow her on Twitter @WLoosen. Sharon Meraz is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. Her research interests reside in the interplay of political communication, media theories, and social media. She has published research on participatory politics and evolved media effect theories in technologies such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Her work in these areas has been published in such journals as the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, New Media & Society, the International Journal of Press/Politics, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Journalism, to name a few. Meredith Metzler is a PhD student in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. Her research interests include political c­ ommunication,

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journalism studies/media sociology, and media ecology. She earned her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and her BA from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA. Hallvard Moe is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include media policy, democratic theory and television studies. His most recent book is The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era (University of Michigan Press, 2014), co-authored with Trine Syvertsen, Gunn Enli and Ole J. Mjøs. Moe is currently editing (with Hilde Van den Bulck) a collection of essays on the history of teletext in Europe. Jérémie Nicey  is Associate Professor at l’École Publique de Journalisme de Tours; he is a member and cofounder of the research team Prim (Pratiques et Ressources de l’Information et des Médiations) at Université François-Rabelais de Tours, and research associate at laboratory CIM, team MCPN (Paris 3). He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 in a research project on the archives of Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the participatory news photo agency Citizenside. His research focuses on media practices (he was coauthor of Lexique subjectif de l’homme informant, Editions de l’Amandier, 2011) and on the production of international news (he coedited From NWICO to WSIS: 30 Years of Communication Geopolitics, 2012), whether it is done by professional practitioners or not. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen  is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He is a frequent speaker at both academic conferences and industry events, and has taught at universities in Denmark, Germany, the UK, and the USA. His first scholarly monograph, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 2012) won the American Political Science Association’s Doris Graber Award in 2014 for the best book in political communication in previous ten years. He has edited five books and written more than 20 academic articles and book chapters since 2010. From 2015, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics, the premier academic journal of international research on the intersection between news media and politics. Henrik Örnebring is Professor of Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden, where he is also Director of NODE, the Ander Centre for Research on News and Opinion in the Digital Era. His work on journalism history, comparative journalism, and journalism and technology has appeared in journals such as European Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, and International Journal of Press/Politics. His book Newsworkers: Comparing Journalists in Six European Countries is due from Bloomsbury/Continuum in 2016. Taylor Owen is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, Canada and a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School, New York. He was previously the Research Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, a Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, a Research Fellow at the Center for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and a Researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Ontario, Canada. His doctorate is from the University of Oxford where he was a Trudeau Scholar. His research and writing focuses on the intersection between information technology and international affairs and he is the author,

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

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most recently, of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2015). His work can be found at www.taylorowen.com Zizi Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois–Chicago, USA. Her books include A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (Routledge, 2010), Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas (Taylor & Francis, 2009), and most recently, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also authored over 50 journal articles, book chapters or reviews, and serves on the editorial board of eleven journals, including the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, and New Media & Society. Papacharissi is the editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and the new open access Sage journal Social Media + Society. Steve Paulussen is an Assistant Professor in Media and Journalism Studies at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is a member of the research group Media, Policy and Culture. The common thread in his research is the study of changes in journalism and the news. Most of his publications focus on different aspects of online journalism, newswork routines, new media consumption and newsroom innovation. He is co-author of the book Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Chris Peters  is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Aalborg University’s Copenhagen campus, Denmark. His research investigates the changing experiences, conceptions and spatiotemporal uses of information in a digital era and the sociocultural transformations associated with this in everyday life. His publications include Rethinking Journalism (Routledge, 2013), Retelling Journalism (Peeters, 2014) and Rethinking Journalism Again (Routledge, 2016) (all co-edited with Marcel Broersma) as well as numerous journal articles and chapters. Zvi Reich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the BenGurion University of the Negev, Israel and a former journalist. His research interests include journalism studies, journalistic knowledge and expertise, news sources, technology use among journalists, epistemology and authorship. Professor Reich received his PhD in Communication and Political Science from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 2004. Sue Robinson (PhD, Temple University, Philadelphia, 2007) is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication where she teaches and researches digital technologies such as social media, press theory, media ecology, and qualitative methods. She is widely published in journals such as the Journal of Communication and Journalism & Communication Monographs. Adrienne Russell  is an Associate Professor of Media, Film and Journalism Studies and Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA. Her research and teaching focus on the digital-age evolution of activist communication and journalism. She is the author of the book Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (Polity, 2011), and numerous articles and book chapters for both the popular and scholarly publications. She is also co-editor of the book International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics (Peter Lang, 2008). More on her current projects can be found at www.adriennerussell.com.

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David M. Ryfe is Director and Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He has written widely in the areas of political communication, public deliberation, and the history and sociology of news. His most recent book, Can Journalism Survive? is the most comprehensive ethnographic investigation of American newsrooms in a generation. He is currently working on a study of regional online-only news sites. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt  is Senior Researcher for Digital Interactive Media and Political Communication at the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research in Hamburg, Germany. His research interests focus on the practices and consequences of social media, mainly the ­structural changes in identity management, social networks, the public sphere, and privacy. He has authored various journal articles as well as monographs of these subjects, with his most recent book Social Media aiming explicitly at a non-academic audience. Detailed information on his publications, research projects and activities can be found on his blog (www.schmidtmitdete.de), and you can follow him on Twitter @janschmidt. Kim Christian Schrøder is Professor of Communication at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. His co-authored and co-edited books in English include Audience transformations: Shifting audience positions in late modernity (2014), Museum communication and social media: The connected museum (2013), Researching audiences (2003), Media cultures (1992), and The Language of Advertising (1985). His current research interests comprise the theoretical, methodological and analytical aspects of audience uses and experiences of media, with particular reference to the challenges of methodological pluralism. His recent work explores different methods for mapping news consumption. Eugenia Siapera  is Chair of the MA Social Media Communications at the School of Communications in Dublin City University, Ireland. Her research interests include social media, journalism, political communication, multiculturalism, and social and political theory. She has written and edited five books, most recently the collection The Handbook of Global Online Journalism (with Andreas Veglis, Wiley, 2012). She is also the author of several journal articles and book chapters. Siapera is currently working on the second edition of her book Understanding New Media (Sage, 2011) and her latest article ‘#GazaUnderAttack: Twitter, Palestine and diffused war’ has appeared in Information, Communication & Society in 2015. Helle Sjøvaag  is Research Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. Research areas include journalism, online news, media diversity and regulation. Sjøvaag has published extensively in international journals, such as Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Convergence, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Journal of Media Business Studies, and Nordicom Review. Eirik Stavelin holds a post-doc position at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. In his doctoral work Stavelin focused on the journalistic practices and potential in the overlap between computing and journalism. His research interests include computational journalism, computational social science, web technology, data mining, information visualization and web culture.

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

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Steen Steensen is Professor of Journalism and Head of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway. His research interests include developments in digital journalism, the history and current trends in narrative journalism, and the philosophy of journalism. He has published several books and his research has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, Journalism:Theory, Practice and Criticism, and Literary Journalism Studies. He has recently guest edited, together with Laura Ahva, a double special issue of Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice (1:2015) on Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age. He has a background as a journalist for Norwegian newspapers, and is the editor of the Norwegian media and communcations journal Norsk medietidsskrift. Tim P. Vos is Chair and Associate Professor of Journalism Studies and Coordinator of Global Research Initiatives at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He is co-author (with Pamela J. Shoemaker) of Gatekeeping Theory (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor (with François Heinderyckx) of Gatekeeping in Transition (Routledge, 2015). Vos has published widely on roles of journalism, media sociology and gatekeeping, media history, and media policy. He focuses on factors that shape journalistic content and journalism as a social institution, paying particular attention to the theoretical issues of historical explanation. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is Professor in the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales, and also serves as Director of Research Environment and Development in the school. Her research focuses on journalism and citizenship, and she has authored or edited five books, including, most recently Disasters and the Media (Peter Lang, 2012, with Mervi Pantti and Simon Cottle), and Handbook of Journalism Studies (Routledge, 2009, co-edited with Thomas Hanitzsch). She is currently working on Emotions, Media and Politics for Polity Press. She has authored more than 40 journal articles and 20 book chapters. Stephen J.A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist. He is an educator, consultant, keynote speaker and award-winning author with extensive experience in media, both academically and professionally. He is Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics and former director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He is founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA and courtesy professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon. Oscar Westlund, PhD,  is Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg. From April 2015 to February 2016 he was Research Leader for the Media Inquiry at the Government Offices of Sweden, Ministry of Culture. His assignment included, among other things, to ­co-author one book and serve as editor for another, both published in the Swedish government’s series of official inquiries. Westlund has researched the production, distribution and consumption of news through various methods for a decade, focusing especially on the shift towards mobile media. Westlund has published more than 60 books, chapters and reports, and articles in more than 20 different international journals. He serves on the editorial boards of Digital Journalism, International Journal on Media Management, Journal of Media Business Studies, Journal of Media Innovations, and Mobile Media & Communication.

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Victor Wiard  is Researcher and PhD candidate at Université libre de Bruxelles, where his works focuses on studying the production, circulation and uses of local news in Brussels, online and offline, and the actors involved in those news processes Andy Williams is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. His principal research interests relate to the social importance of local and hyperlocal news, citizen-produced news content, and the interaction between news and public relations (especially in science, environment, and health news).

Introduction Ta m a r a W i t s c h g e , C . W . A n d e r s o n , David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida

A MATTER OF DISCIPLINE Handbooks such as these are often seen as providing the state of the art for a discipline, tracing its boundaries and exploring its history and future. They are often interpreted as the canonical voices in debates that mark the discipline. Readers of this book will almost certainly be aware of the many debates surrounding the history and future of journalism (Downie and Schudson 2009; Lee-Wright et  al. 2012; Peters and Broersma 2013; Anderson et al. 2012) and even of Journalism Studies (Zelizer 2004; Boczkowski and Anderson 2016). And we certainly hope that this Handbook will help scholars reflect on the historical ways in which journalism has been theorized and researched. Even more importantly, we aspire for this Handbook to advance the theorizing and research of journalism for many years to come. At the same time, we do not want this book to perform the role often ascribed to handbooks: as an authoritative account of the

history of the Journalism Studies discipline and the issues that the discipline is currently facing. Whether we can speak of Journalism Studies as a discipline (or Digital Journalism Studies as a sub-discipline) is not really what we are most concerned about in this Handbook. For us, there is a more pressing need that this Handbook fills: it aims to create room for new ways of looking at journalism in the twenty-first century, rather than neatly trace the boundaries of the field. We embrace the ambiguity, unease, and uncertainty of the field. If anything, then, this Handbook should be read as an invitation to (re)consider the field, its methods, and its theories. In 2000, Barbie Zelizer noted the need ‘for a more expansive world of journalism scholarship than that which exists today … to promote the growth of Journalism Studies along routes not necessarily traveled in the existing scholarly terrain’ (p. 9). Fifteen years later, we still consider this to be one of the most pressing needs of the discipline. At the same time, the

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collection of chapters that is before you shows both the richness of the perspectives available to scholars and serves as an invitation to consider and develop novel paths for insight and analysis. In a very real sense we mean for this Handbook to be used and not simply to be thought about, and this is why the chapters are written in a way that will hopefully encourage their practical application. In line with this call for new perspectives, for us the main strength of this Handbook lies in its multivocality and the existence of occasionally irreconcilable and contradictory findings, calls or statements between chapters (and at times even within chapters). It should be clear that we do not aim to provide a new paradigm for the field. On the contrary, our position is that we need to move away from a consensual understanding of journalism in Journalism Studies and towards a much more diverse understanding of news and journalism. Difference, divergence, and diversity are core themes of the Handbook. This trend is occurring both in the study of journalism and in the empirical reality that we as scholars study; our embrace of multiplicity is thus true to our object of analysis. If anything comes out of this collection, it is the multiplicity and the complexity of our objects of study, our approaches, theories, and methodologies.

THE ‘DIGITAL’ IN DIGITAL JOURNALISM Though the aim of the book is not to develop a sub-discipline for Digital Journalism Studies, this handbook does have ‘Digital’ in its title. The rise of digital technologies and cultures (and their consequences for journalism and Journalism Studies) inevitably lies at the center of this Handbook. The complementary chapters explain that when we want to explore and analyze digital journalism, we need to address changing contexts and new practices, need to reconsider theories and

develop research strategies. However, the changes addressed here do not imply that with digital everything is unmoored from its groundings. Nor do we wish to imply that before digital technologies were introduced journalism was a stable concept and stable practice. In a way, these issues do not matter for the Handbook. The Handbook decidedly does not explore similarities and/or differences between traditional and digital news and journalism, nor do we aim to establish cause and consequence. The digital environment is taken as a given and traditional journalism does not function as a benchmark, for either the editors or the contributors. Rather than drawing lines between traditional and future journalism, mainstream and alternative, digital and non- or pre-digital journalism, this Handbook shows the complexity and multiplicity of the journalistic contexts and practices. The fundamental changes that have transpired in the journalistic field over the past few decades are not easily traced to one causal factor, whether technological, cultural, social, or economic. Nor do the trends in the field neatly point to one direction for journalism practice, and consequently there is not one path for Journalism Studies. To do justice to our field of study, we need theories and methods that are as complex as our object of study (see Chapter 36 – Costera Meijer), that embrace its dispersion and hybridity (see Chapter 11 – Hamilton). The many changes that have occurred in the field cannot be simply reduced to technological change, and as such the term ‘digital’ may be misleading. In this Handbook we introduce the term ‘digital’ as a shortcut to refer to the whole world of cultural, economic, social, and technological aspects of the contemporary field of journalism. That there have been fundamental changes in parallel to the introduction and rise of digital technologies is beyond doubt. These are not limited to the field of journalism, with many of these changes also happening at the level of society.

Introduction

STRUCTURE OF THE HANDBOOK To do justice to the contextual nature of the changes relating to journalism, Part I of the Handbook deals with the ‘Changing Contexts’. It aims to provide insight into a number of what we consider to be important domains relating to journalism, addressing questions of democracy, power, representation, money, and ethics. A central theme running through this part is how fundamental aspects of journalism are questioned, contested, or reinforced in a hybrid digital media environment where a diversity of actors are present. The chapters map out the context of digital journalism, featuring the tensions between change and continuity. In order to make sense of contemporary complexity, authors in Part I provide historical perspective and a sensitivity to local circumstances in order to put the mechanisms, factors, and processes of change in the context of the evolution of the profession, the industry, and society. Following this part highlighting the changing context of journalism, Part II then hones in on the evolution of ‘News Practices in the Digital Era’. Rather than simply identifying and separating production and consumption practices, chapters in this part highlight the complexity of our object of study and identify the challenges that this poses for researchers. At the heart of these challenges are two interrelated trends: the tendency of journalism toward dispersion (Ringoot and Utard 2005) and hybridity (Chadwick 2013). These concepts do not only evoke more diversity and a greater variety of contexts, actors, and practices related to journalism. Perhaps more fundamentally, the differentiation is less clear in the digital environment – what has been described as a phenomenon of blurring boundaries (Carlson and Lewis 2015). The chapters in Part II explore the different ways in which people engage with the news as audiences, users, producers, sources, experts, or citizens. Each in its own way, the chapters challenge existing categorizations

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and contribute to new conceptualizations of actors and practices in the field. Parts III and IV address respectively how theories and methodologies can respond to these challenges and provide ways in which we can make sense of the changes in the field. To explain complexity, we propose approaching research fieldwork without rigid models. We need theoretical and methodological tools that can trace diversity and hybridity; we need research that explains how different actors define themselves in relationship to journalism, how they interact to shape news making, and what makes journalism evolve and resist change. Part III focuses on ‘Conceptualizations of Journalism’ and provides a variety of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory approaches to theorizing journalism: as practice, institution, field, network, or ecosystem. It provides new conceptualizations of the key actors in journalism, including the journalist, the public, spaces, and technology. Last, the chapters in Part IV provide us with ‘Research Strategies’. They provide both reflections on methodological tools available to us, as well as providing concrete examples on how certain methods can help us address the challenges that scholars in the field are faced with. As such, they each further our research in the field: they address changing production and consumption practices. They provide insight into accessing ‘big data’, how to sample and analyze something as ‘liquid’ as the current journalism, and generally call for methods and research strategies that allow scholars do justice to the complex and diverse nature of journalism (including perspectives highlighting the material aspects of news work, ethnography, reconstruction interviews, Q-method, and triangulation). What, then, is next in Journalism Studies? Where do the chapters of this Handbook point towards, if anywhere? As outlined above, there is not one consensual paradigm this Handbook works from, or even works toward. Most likely, the reader

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of this handbook – even if she dips in and out – will be left with more questions than answers. There are a number of tensions that shine through even from reading the table of contents. These tensions are not alleviated, and most likely will become even more acute when reading the chapters. The Handbook embraces the complexity of the field as well as the tensions and uncertainty that result from it in our knowledge of the field. Together with Irene Costera Meijer (see Chapter 36), we would like to call for more space for doubt, inconsistency, and messiness in Journalism Studies. For us, maturing as a discipline means: being able to live with not knowing, rather than aiming to know it all; looking for and embracing grey areas, rather than neatly bounding the object of study; making space for many, possibly conflicting, definitions of what is journalism and who is a journalist; and acknowledging that there are many ways in which journalism can and does impact society, beyond (or even in contradiction with) its role for democracies in Western societies (Zelizer 2013). With this Handbook we hope to contribute to such a research approach. For us, it very much shows the diversity of approaches that make this research field so fascinating and multidisciplinary.

REFERENCES Anderson, C. W., Bell, E., & Shirky, C. (2012). Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the present. New York: Tow Center. Boczkowski, P. and Anderson C.W. (2016). Remaking the News. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Carlson, M., & Lewis, S. C. (eds.). (2015). Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, practices and participation. New York: Routledge. Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downie, L. and Schudson, M. (2009). The Reconstruction of American Journalism. Lee-Wright, P., Phillips, A., & Witschge, T. (2012). Changing Journalism. London: Routledge. Peters, C., & Broersma, M. (2013). Rethinking Journalism: Trust and participation in a transformed news landscape. London: Routledge. Ringoot, R., & Utard, J. M. (2005). Le journalisme en invention: Nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux acteurs. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Zelizer, B. (2000). What is journalism studies? Journalism, 1(1), 9–12. Zelizer, B. (2004). Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the academy. Thousand Oaks, CA; London: Sage. Zelizer, B. (2013). On the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship. Journalism, 14(4), 459–73.

PART I

Changing Contexts Alfred Hermida

Given that digital journalism is a terrain in flux, this part aims to contribute towards mapping out its contours, seeking to identify and distinguish novel directions from welltrodden routes. Charting the complexities of the context for news and information is an essential first step towards understanding digital journalism. The range of chapters in this part consider, assess and question the conditions in which journalism's place in society is evolving and mutating. The first three chapters in this part consider the relationship of journalism to fundamental questions of power in a digital media environment and how to study these shifts. The shared theme in these chapters is how power in its many forms is being reconfigured, reinforced or reinvented through digital media. Beate Josephi (Chapter 1) opens the volume by considering the assumed role of journalism in the functioning of a democratic society. The chapter considers how digital

technologies that enable greater public involvement in the media – and potentially a greater democratisation of the journalistic process – have caused tensions between professionalism and participation in journalism. At the core is how institutional journalism, which sees itself as a pillar of democracy, aligns itself alongside the multiperspectival potential of digital journalism. Taylor Owen picks up on the theme of contested authority in Chapter 2, considering how new forms of digital media power are challenging institutional journalism. The chapter charts the emergence of non-institutional actors such as Wikileaks and native local news operations such as Kigali, together with the rise of decentralised witnesses and reporting from conflict zones such as Syria. Such developments challenge the foreigncorrespondent model of international reporting and the power of institutional media to decide what is news. They point to the need

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for greater understanding over how far and in what contexts these factors represent a shift in power. Issues of voice, power and representation are taken up by Eugenia Siapera in her chapter on ethnic minorities (Chapter 3). It considers problematic approaches of studying minority ethnic groups as single entities, often based on top-down conceptualisations of ethnic audiences. In common with Owen, Siapera addresses questions of digital media power as minorities take on the role of producers of content, facilitating counter-flows of information, mobilisation and bridging. The next three chapters investigate how some of the foundations of journalism have been challenged, weakened and, to some extent, fundamentally undermined. This part addresses the business of the news, journalism ethics and the relationship with audiences. For many in the industry, there is no more pressing question than how to fund the high fixed costs associated with the professional gathering, production and delivery of the news. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Chapter 4) thoroughly unpacks how digital media has undermined key elements of the business models that have been the financial beating heart of journalism. The paradox at the core of the business challenge is that what is good for the audience – more news from more sources in more ways than ever before – is at odds with the financial health of the news industry. The chapter points to a reduced role for for-profit journalism in a hybrid media environment shared with new actors, from entertainment media to PR to audience material. The reverberations of digital media are similarly shaking long-held norms and values. In his chapter on journalism ethics, Stephen Ward (Chapter 5) moves beyond asserting approaches that have defined professional journalism for the past century. The chapter does not attempt to save traditional journalism ethics but instead to revitalise ethics to take account of the impact of digital media. The chapter advances a new

inclusive, interpretive and global vision for digital media ethics that can form the basis of responsible communication by professional journalists and other actors operating in the digital media space. The challenge from these new actors to the jurisdiction claimed by journalists over the gathering, production and dissemination of the news is addressed in my chapter on social media (Chapter 6). It assesses the interplay between digital technologies known collectively as social media and professional journalism. It points out how social media have become spaces outside of institutional media for publics to consume, share, scrutinise and suspect the work of professional journalists. The chapter highlights how journalism takes place outside of the logic of news institutions, yet is shaped and reshaped by established and resilient values of professional media, with social media as an emergent hybrid and contested arena for sense-making. The last part builds on the previous chapters by taking an in-depth look at the impact of a networked and collaborative media environment on journalism. Sharon Meraz and Zizi Papacharissi delve into the concepts of networked gatekeeping and networked framing to highlight how actors, ideas and issues surface through participatory social architectures (Chapter 7). They indicate how the gatekeeping and framing functions of journalists are rearticulated with participatory social architectures, shaping who gets to speak, how information is filtered, delivered and to whom. The result is a dynamic and fluid remediation of news storytelling. The place of the journalist in such a shared and hybrid media space is taken up by Steen Steensen (Chapter 8). His chapter focuses on the context of social media and how it interacts with the publicness of journalism. Specifically, it takes a historical look at how journalists are balancing private and professional roles, arguing that the turn towards a greater ‘intimization’ of journalism and the work of the journalist due to social media represents continuity as much as change.

CHANGING CONTEXTS

Among the challenges of journalists has been the growing prominence of more personalised and emotional forms of news storytelling. But as Karin Wahl-Jorgensen explains in Chapter 9, the role of emotion in the news is not as novel as it might seem at first glance. Instead, she traces the growing prominence of emotional expression in journalism due to the development of citizen media and social media. The chapter traces journalism's shift towards more personalised and less objective storytelling as new spaces have opened up for emotional expression.

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However, as with other trends identified in the chapters in this part, such changes have been both embraced and resisted by journalists. As the terrain for journalism is reconfigured so is the environment in which journalists are operating. The world of digital journalism is simultaneously startling, unsettling and stimulating. The chapters in this part are designed to serve as a launch pad for the Handbook, setting out the context for further discussion, analysis and interpretation into the old and new norms, practices, actors, theories and concepts vying for attention in the field of journalism.

1 Digital Journalism and Democracy Beate Josephi

INTRODUCTION Digital journalism was not born out of nowhere. It grew from technical possibilities and, within a short time span, has decidedly altered the face of journalism, notably in North America, Europe and Australia. Globally, traditional journalism still holds sway, and for this reason digital journalism has to be seen in conjunction with traditional journalism rather than in isolation. Digital journalism defines its relationship to democracy somewhat differently to traditional journalism. Technological changes have opened channels for all who are able and wish to actively participate in the creation and distribution of news, a role previously confined to journalists and media houses, thus democratizing journalistic processes. This chapter explains the various visions of journalism, and of democracy, and sets out to explore how the new possibilities of participation affect journalists. Many developments in digital journalism are still playing out, but

some gains and losses brought about by the changes can already be assessed. As this chapter sets out to give an overview of journalism and democracy, it does so with the various trends in journalism, the digital divide and uneven spread of democracy in mind. Given that the beginnings of journalism and democracy as well as the current accelerating changes in journalism are located in the Western world, it is only too easy to focus on that region alone. But this would lead to a reductive picture of journalism.

Journalism and democracy The notion of journalism being a vital part of democracy was most explicitly formulated in the twentieth century. But the beginnings of a link between a critical press and the endeavours towards democracy go back to the seventeenth century when ideological struggles were first played out in the press. To free the press from its shackles of state

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and religious authority, poet John Milton demanded the ‘Liberty of Unlicensed Printing’ (1644). His speech to Parliament, published under the title Areopagitica, to this day remains a fundamental text in the fight for the freedom of expression. Milton, for his part, was convinced that if all ‘the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth’, truth would win out. As the bourgeois class rose during the Industrial Revolution and the number of literate readers grew, the press provided a forum for contesting political demands. Facilitating an informed exchange of views has to this day been one of the most influential visions of journalism. It provided the foundation for the view of ‘journalism as a source of information in a deliberative democracy’ (McNair, 2009: 238) Some three hundred years later, the Hutchins Commission and its report, titled A Free and Responsible Press (1947), favoured an elitist interpretation of journalism and democracy. The commission, which convened in the USA during the Second World War and published its report soon after, set out to clarify fundamental aspects of press freedom and democracy (Bates, 1995). Some of its views were guided by recent experiences with totalitarianism in Europe, which had sowed deep suspicion of popular rule and the common citizen, who was seen as ill informed, emotional and susceptible to the persuasions of demagogues and propaganda. In this ideological environment it was easy for the quality press and its journalists to put themselves forward as spokespeople on behalf of the public. As such, they would mediate the public’s view to the elected officials and vice versa. The media presented themselves as trusted avenues of information, and in their informational and watchdog function as essential to the workings of democracy. The media were to provide ‘a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning’ (Hutchins Commission Report, 1947). Journalists were encouraged to recognize

themselves as specialists and professionals, even though the lesser-regarded populist press decried this move as undemocratic for its elitism (Bates, 1995: 6). Much of the subsequent scholarly criticism was devoted to the practices and choices made by journalists and editors in their appropriated roles. Under the impact of digital journalism, the contestation between those who defend the mediated voice of large sections of society through professional journalists and those who prefer ‘individual-centred understandings of the democratic process’ (Curran, 1997: 100) has come to the fore again.

Reasons for the paradigm’s pervasiveness A major reason for the pervasiveness of the journalism and democracy paradigm is its prominent place in the normative theories of journalism, notably Siebert et  al.’s Four Theories of the Press (1956). The book’s persuasiveness lay in the simplicity of the binary – libertarianism and authoritarianism – on which the theories were built (Josephi, 2005). Four Theories of the Press made press–state relations the measure for media systems, a move that privileged democracies and in particular the American system, where the press was at arm’s length from the government. All media systems were then placed according to their independence of government somewhere on the line leading from libertarianism to authoritarianism. Siebert et al.’s book remained a touchstone for countless subsequent studies, also for those that exposed its shortcomings (Christians et  al., 2009; Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Nerone, 1995). To this day, the paradigm is deeply entrenched in journalism scholarship ‘because much of the scholarly world in the West – and specifically in the USA – depends directly or indirectly on the presumption of democracy and its accoutrements’ (Zelizer, 2013: 467). The discussion of democracy is

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unlikely ever to fade away altogether because, as Zelizer writes, its normative values have given it ‘a moral bypass’ (2013: 468). Digital journalism’s participatory modes have again revived the discussion of democratic models, especially the participatory one. Overall, the centrality of democracy is fading. A meta-analysis of theories of journalism in a digital age shows that ‘democracy’ as a keyword dropped from fourth place in the period 2000–6 to ninth place in the timespan 2007–13 (Steensen and Ahva, 2015: 8). The terms ‘public sphere’ and ‘citizen journalism’ have taken its place, indicating a shift in theoretical perception of journalism that is less beholden to a particular form of government.

REASONS TO CRITIQUE THE JOURNALISM AND DEMOCRACY PARADIGM A paradigm bound to a particular time and place The history of the link between journalism and democracy tends to be told in a teleological manner, not with democracy but with freedom of expression as its narrative line. John Milton’s impassioned plea in 1644 came long before Britain became a democracy and Voltaire, another eminent fighter for freedom of speech, died eleven years before the French Revolution. The journalism and democracy paradigm, as conceived in the United States where the market-funded press was to be independent from government, sits oddly with the world’s many nominal democracies. Even in the USA, as Nerone (2013) points out, the constellation ensuring the validity of the paradigm existed for a few decades at best. Only in the 1950s and 1960s, a period labelled ‘high modernism’ by Hallin (1994), did the media hold a monopoly on news services and could be seen in a position of power that

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buttressed their claim to being the ‘Fourth Estate’. This hegemonic model rested on a favourable commercial climate, such as a rise in advertising and a lowering of material and transportation costs. In Hallin’s words, high modernism in American journalism was an era when ‘it seemed possible for the journalist to be powerful and prosperous and at the same time independent, disinterested, publicspirited, and trusted and beloved by everyone, from the corridors of power around the world to the ordinary citizen and consumer’ (1994: 172). This seemingly idyllic world was premised on political consensus and economic security. Hallin determined the deterioration of the political consensus as the end of high modernism. But it was not until the impact of digital technology caused the deterioration of its economic base that the hegemonic powers of the media and journalists’ authority to choose, present and interpret the news came to an end. The narrative attention has now turned from freedom of expression for the press to freedom of information on the internet, and the question can be asked whether the ‘Fourth Estate’ should become ‘citizenfour’ (Poitras, 2014).

An uneven global picture Freedom House, whose evaluation criteria for press freedom are inspired by the democracy paradigm, has over the past 25 years consistently rated only about one third of the world’s countries as free. The graph showing press freedom over a quarter of a century indicates that the number of countries whose media is deemed free – compared to those partly free or not free – is the most steady (Freedom House, 2014). In 2014, the figures read 63 free, 68 partly free and 65 not free. This leaves over two-thirds of the world’s nations not possessing the conditions necessary for the application of the journalism and democracy paradigm. Digital journalism, like journalism, is inevitably part of a

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country’s media system, and as such cannot escape questions of state control. Digital accessibility may initially be a more pressing concern but it will become an issue, determining how much commentary and contributions to news will be permitted in countries around the world. Similarly, penetration of digital media is uneven in the world, as is the viability of the print media. Picard has summarized the challenges facing the traditional media as ‘mature and saturated markets, loss of audience not highly interested in news, the diminishing effectiveness of the mass media business model, the lingering effects of the economic crisis, and the impact of digital competitors’ (Picard, 2014: 273). However, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers would argue print is far from dead. In an update to its global report in October 2014 the organization stated that more than half of the world’s adult population – 2.5 billion people – reads a daily newspaper and more than 800 million read it in digital form (WAN-IFRA, 2014a). This puts the present ratio of traditional media to digital media at about 4:1. A survey, presented in June 2014, showed that, globally, print circulation rose by 2 per cent from a year earlier, but had dropped by 2 per cent over a five-year period. A look at the figures continent by continent underlines how much the loss in print readership is concentrated in North America, Australia and Western Europe. Over the past five years, circulation fell 10.25 per cent in North America, 19.6 per cent in Australia and Oceania, and 23 per cent in Europe. This was offset by rises in Asia, Latin America and Africa and the Middle East. These figures indicate that ‘circulation continues to rise in countries with a growing middle class and relatively low broadband penetration’ (WAN-IFRA, 2014b). In particular tabloid newspapers are enjoying a new and growing readership among the literate, urbanized workers in developing countries, such as South Africa (Wasserman, 2010).

Despite these almost encouraging figures, the speech by the Secretary General of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers contains a very familiar warning. ‘Finding a sustainable business model for digital news media is not only important for [our] business, but for the future health of debate in democratic society’ (WAN-IFRA, 2014b). This warning, rooted in the press’ imaginary of the ‘Fourth Estate’, could have been spoken in the USA a century earlier, albeit in a very different context. The press is operating in an environment where six billion of the world’s estimated seven billion people have access to mobile phones (Wang, 2014; Franklin, 2014). While the access to mobile telephony does not necessarily mean connection to digital networks that permit smart phone capabilities, these figures underline the claim of universal connectivity.

Journalism outside democracies: a study of practices The journalism and democracy paradigm has for a long time inhibited research beyond the Western world. To get around the impasse, the study of journalism practice rather than media systems has proven a more fruitful approach (Josephi, 2013). These studies, centred on the working conditions and perceptions of individual journalists around the world, confirm ipso facto that journalistic work is carried out in all countries, irrespective of their political system. The most comprehensive study to date, Hanitzsch’s Worlds of Journalism Study, now comprising 60 countries, attempts to conceptualize journalism practices and cultures around the globe. Like Deuze’s earlier reconsideration of journalists’ professional identity and ideology (2005), Hanitzsch’s survey is largely influenced by Western journalistic values. A focus on practice rather than norms is also seen as the way forward in digital journalism where ‘norms act as disincentive to

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adopt any innovation that may challenge the institutional configuration’ (Domingo et  al., 2015: 54). Domingo at al. suggest instead the employment of the entirely practice oriented actor-network theory (Latour, 2011). Actornetwork theory very comprehensively not only permits tracing ‘the diversity of actors involved in changing news production’ but also news use and contribution, that is, ‘people’s expectation regarding what is news and who is entitled to produce it, … their motivation and practice in the production of news, and their power relationships in the process of the circulation of news’ (Domingo et al., 2015: 54). The researchers admit that, from a pragmatic point of view, this is an ambitious aim and may only be approached in segments. But when done, it can help to ‘reassess the role of journalism in our contemporary societies’ (Domingo et al., 2015: 63). Actor-network theory can be applied around the globe, as shown by Poell et  al. (2013). Their investigation into the Chinese Twitter equivalent, Weibo, reveals the complexity of interactions of human and nonhuman actors, especially technologically programmed censorship. They conclude that the internet in China is a negotiated and calibrated space where censorship is far from straightforward, and despite high digital penetration, future developments are impossible to predict. This Chinese example underlines that digital journalism, if viewed as an indication of democratic developments, can get easily circumscribed by media systems and state controls whereas the focus on practices can establish how journalism is constructed in a country, even if the findings expose practices that rarely meet commonly held normative expectations.

DIFFERENT MODELS OF COMMUNICATIVE DEMOCRACY A determining factor in assessing the relationship of journalism and democracy in the

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digital age is the kind of democracy seen as desirable. In the twentieth century, three models with strong applicability to the media have emerged (Benson, 2010): the elitist model, proposed by Walter Lippmann, the participatory model, argued by John Dewey, and the deliberative model as found in the theories of Jürgen Habermas.

Elitist The transformations brought about by digital technologies have revived interest in a ‘debate’ that, although never an actual dialogue (Schudson, 2008), has gone down in history as the ‘Lippmann–Dewey debate’. It was Dewey’s book and comments on Lippmann’s work, which set their positions apart. Lippmann expressed his disillusion with the ways democracy was playing out in his books Public Opinion (1922/1997) and Phantom Public (1925). To his mind, democratic theory, starting from the vision of human dignity, had become beholden to the wisdom and experience of the voter. As Lippmann put it, stereotyping, prejudice, propaganda and the self-centred nature of man were prone to undermine this wisdom, and many problems had become far too complex for voters to grasp. Lippmann did not perceive better communication of the state’s affairs as a solution. In his view, newspapers made small headway against ‘violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three-legged calves’ (1997: 230). Importantly, Lippmann asked for the ‘abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen’ and instead to assign decision-making processes to experts so that when issues arose they could be dealt with in a manner that were ‘not mere collisions of the blind’. The press, too, needed to be rid of its shortcomings. The news was to be ‘uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that is also a check on the press’ (1997: 229). This intelligence was to

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be entrusted to disinterested experts free of their own preconceptions and self-interests. It is no surprise that Dewey called this ‘perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived’ (Steel, 1997: xv). Lippmann’s distrust in a somewhat ignorant, easily-led mass electorate has to be seen against the backdrop of rising totalitarian regimes, whether of communist, fascist or national-socialist persuasion. His preferences made Lippmann an exponent not only of an ‘elite democracy’ but also of an elite press, written by experts – that is professional journalists – for a public that needed to be enlightened. Editors and journalists were to be the gatekeepers in this top-down approach (Hermida et al., 2011). But the concept of an elite press also had the consequence that those papers, which saw themselves as papers of record, tried to live up to their obligation. They endeavoured to print ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, as the New York Times’ motto reads, including the dull but worthy stories mostly placed on the papers’ even pages. They aimed at quality discussions and contributions that many without college education may have found impenetrable. Some flaunted their elite status with slogans such the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s ‘Behind this [paper] is an intelligent mind’, and revelled in their status as opinion leaders. They were – and are – the quality press, which now has to re-legitimize itself in the face of a tangibly more democratic form of journalism.

Participatory Dewey’s contribution to the ‘debate’ came in the form of reviews of Lippmann’s work and the publication of his own book, The Public and Its Problems (1927). Schudson (2008: 2) stresses that these were favourable book reviews and not noted as confrontational. This amicability is surprising since Dewey’s concept of democracy differs considerably from that of Lippmann and now serves as the

philosophical underpinning of the participatory forms of communication that the internet affords (Hermida et al., 2011). Dewey argued for the importance of civic participation, which he saw as the source of democracy’s legitimacy (Rogers, 2010). He aimed at removing the opposition of individual and society, and saw the individual placed within the diverse networks of social relationships in which he or she was located. Unlike Lippmann who distrusted the public as rational participant in democracy, Dewey acclaimed the views of the people as a source of political authority itself, prompting his biographer to describe him as ‘the most important advocate of participatory democracy’ among liberal intellectual of the twentieth century (Westbrook, in Rogers, 2010: 3). Political judgements for Dewey were to be tested on the extent to which they could withstand contrary argument, reasons, and experiences (Rogers, 2010). Dewey’s vision of a participatory media culture, for much of the last century, seemed impossible to enact, although his concepts were desirable to some scholars. Herbert Gans, in his Deciding What’s News, pleaded for multiperspectival news that would lead to a cultural democratization (2004/1979). Gans’s seminal book, which shone a light on the close interaction between politician, officials and journalists, culminates in the demand for a pluralist nation that can accommodate co-existing ideologies and a far wider gamut of voices than could be heard in the mass media at the time. This, Gans suggested, ‘would enable journalists to function as more democratic stand-ins for the public than they do now’ (2004: 327).

Deliberative The philosopher and theorist most commonly associated with the deliberative model is Jürgen Habermas. His Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, originally published in Germany in 1962, achieved

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iconical status with its publication in English almost thirty years later. It is this book rather than his later main work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), which elevated him to being the main proponent of deliberation as a core element of democracy. For Habermas, the coffee houses of the early bourgeois capitalist times in England had become a public space where citizens, informed by the newspapers of the time, could engage in discussions about political and social events. In this space, which was neither a private domain nor the halls of parliament, public opinion was formed, based on open and critical deliberations. Habermas has been accused of idealizing the eighteenth-century embryonic public sphere but, according to Curran, it ‘offers nevertheless a powerful and arresting vision of the role of the media in a democratic society’ (1997: 82). Habermas’s emphasis in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and even more so in his Theory of Communicative Action, is on rationality. Following Kant, debates had to be guided by reason. Habermas shares with Lippmann the demand for thoughtful reasoning. With Dewey he shares the belief in deliberation as a core of democratic communicative action. In privileging reason, like Lippmann he implicitly rejects prejudice, stereotyping and other irrational sentiments. Habermas and Lippmann knew of the pitfalls of emotive responses from personal experience. Lippmann had worked in wartime propaganda whereas Habermas’s childhood and youth fell into the times of the Third Reich. Neither had Dewey’s ease with allowing the public to express their needs. The dividing lines carry into the times of digital journalism. They are akin to, but also dissimilar to, the lines drawn between quality newspapers and tabloids. Tabloids have been condemned for their reliance on emotion, affect, sensation, and drama. But precisely this preference for popular knowledge, this drawing on ‘the dense texture of … lived experience’ (Wasserman, 2010: 123), makes for their popularity and engagement factor,

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especially for those readers feeling left out by the ‘elite epistemologies linked to class hierarchies’ (Wasserman, 2010: 122). Digital journalism has been equally described in terms of drama, sensationalism, affect and emotion. In particular, news spread via social media carries these elements. Retweeted breaking news stories, be they acts of terrorism, shootings or natural disasters, are dramatic and responded to with considerable emotion. Unlike tabloids, the tweets cannot be easily dismissed as contributing nothing to the life of citizens (Sparks, in Wasserman, 2010). The immediate spread on Twitter of these events can create immense public engagement in the locality they occurred in and beyond. In these instances, digital journalism is part of civic action, although not in ways John Dewey would have imagined. The hope for a purely rational debate will not disappear, but in years to come may retreat into an idealized space where deliberations are carried by a few rather than the many.

DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF JOURNALISM There is no consensus as to what journalism is. The views range from the textual form of journalism seen by Hartley as the ‘primary sense-making of modernity’ (1996: 32) and by Wahl-Jorgenson and Hanitzsch as ‘one of the most important social, cultural and political institutions’ (2009: 3) to Nerone’s view of journalism as a discipline of news. To him it is ‘the belief system that defines the appropriate practices and values of news professionals, news media, and news systems’ (2013: 447). Schudson similarly prefers to narrow the definition to news: ‘Journalism is the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance’ (2003: 11). Digital journalism will inevitably be measured against these visions

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by the participating public as much as by scholars, and the degree to which it fulfils the demands placed on journalism to date.

Information provider The least contested function of journalism worldwide is the provision of accurate, reliable and relevant information and news. The practices, by which the news are gathered and distributed, have become infinitely more complex in digital journalism. At this point in time, which Domingo et al. have described as a ‘moment of mind-blowing uncertainty in the evolution of journalism’ (2014: 4), it seems a Herculean task to trace all the possible highways and byways of practices which now constitute journalism. In this dynamic situation, what remains as a norm is the public’s expectation for accuracy and credibility (Domingo et al., 2015: 62).

Guardian of the public’s ‘right to know’ In their fight for freedom of speech, the media have often positioned themselves as guardians of the public’s right to know. This freedom is expressly used to uncover facts which governments, officials and businesses would prefer went unnoticed or kept hidden. The watchdog role is most closely associated with investigative journalism that sheds light on decision-making processes, presumed corruption or illegal activity. In many countries, as measured by the awards it garners, investigative journalism is seen as the most revered form of journalism, usually carried out by experienced journalists. The watchdog role, although most closely connected with democracies that afford freedom of expression, is all the same recognized globally (Hanitzsch, 2011). Claiming this role as a bastion for professional journalists and traditional media has become increasingly difficult, if not

impossible. Social media provides platforms where deviances can be reported to the wider public in a matter of seconds, usually with visual material to back up claims. More intricate stories tend to need the help of a trained journalist, but a vigilant public today far outshines newsroom-bound journalists.

Mediator of societal values Benedict Anderson has given a powerful description of how the ‘ceremony’ of reading was performed simultaneously by thousands of people at certain times a day, reassuring the newspaper reader that ‘the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life’ (Anderson, 1991: 35–6). This gathering of thousands, if not millions, of readers around a ‘common set of facts’ (Nerone, 2013: 453) facilitated a common consciousness and sense of community, if not nation. This consensus model, also depicted by Hallin (1994), has dissipated, at least in the USA and Western Europe, even if the notion persists that ‘journalists describe society to itself’ (MEAA, 2014). Modern technology enables communities, be they bound by common interests or ethnicity, to imagine themselves in myriad forms, irrespective of national or geographical boundaries. Diasporic communities, frequently marginalized in their host country, have made use of the internet to create their own social, cultural and informational spaces in web-based publications, forums and interpersonal communication (Georgiou, 2003). This ever increasing mix of global and local puts into question whether democracy needs a ‘common set of facts’ to enable its workings.

WHO DOES THE NEWS WORK? The discussion of who is a journalist moves between two poles, professionalism and participation. The former is to guarantee the

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quality of the journalistic product and ethical standards; the latter the inclusive and multiperspectival reporting desired for democratic debate.

Journalistic professionalism Journalistic professionalism has been a problematic area long before digital journalism ‘forced’ journalists into boundary work against user-generated content and other cooperative attempts (Waisbord, 2013; Fenton, 2010; Schudson and Anderson, 2009; Domingo et  al., 2008, Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Professionalism can be judged harshly as ‘a discursive strategy mobilized by publishers and journalists to gain social prestige’ but it can also be used ‘to negotiate boundaries with other fields while producing a distinctive form of knowledge and news’ (Waisbord, 2013: 4–10). Hallin and Mancini divided the concept of professionalism into three dimensions: autonomy, distinct professional norms, and public service orientation. Since they only looked at democratic countries, the question of autonomy could be raised, although Hallin and Mancini already placed the caveat that journalism has never achieved the same degree of autonomy as other professions, and never will (2004: 37). Autonomy is also the touchstone for Bourdieu’s understanding of the journalistic field. For Bourdieu (2005), the degree of autonomy circumscribes the field, and within the field, it is the degree of autonomy of the media outlet from economic and political pressures that ensures the journalist’s authority in that field. Bourdieu presciently remarked that ‘precarity of employment is a loss of liberty’ that serves to severely undermine both autonomy and authority (2005: 43). This loss of authority is now evident in many parts of the world. As Picard remarks (2014: 273), digitalization has destabilized media’s business models, and with it the economic basis of journalistic employment. The

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contraction of the traditional media sector, especially in North America, Western Europe and Australia, has led to a wider shift towards casual and contract work. It has given birth to the self-employed ‘entrepreneurial journalist’, who can act as a supplier directly to the consumer or whose work is aggregated into a larger website. Despite the evident ‘precarity of employment’, Waisbord, speaking globally, still sees professionalism as an ongoing process ‘by which journalism seeks to exercise control’ (2013: 222). While labelling ‘the kind of full autonomy envisaged at the onset of modernity’ as ‘anachronistic’, he sees professionalism as a necessity to counterweight power (2013: 225). It is a journalist’s skill to distil ‘bottomless amounts of information into news’ (2013: 227). To Waisbord, boundary work has to go on continually in a ‘horizontal and chaotic’ news environment, where focussing on news expertise rather than the public trustee model will help journalists to shore up the vestiges of their status.

Democratizing the journalistic process The digital news ecosystem has severely challenged and undermined the one-way nature of journalism (Bird, 2009). Initially, journalists had little inclination to share their space with ‘amateurs’. In their exploration of participatory journalism practices, Domingo et  al. found that in 2007, ‘core journalistic culture had remained largely unchanged’ in that professional journalists ‘kept the decision-making power at each stage’ (2008: 339–40). Despite a slow start, the new news ecosystem keeps evolving and the progression towards openness and the involvement of citizens continues (Scott et  al., 2015). Participatory journalism is taking on numerous forms: ‘audience participation in mainstream outlets, independent news sites, full-fledged participatory news sites,

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collaborative media sites and personal broadcasting sites’ (Lasica, in Scott et  al., 2015: 739). Much of the activity is channelled via social media and Twitter. In open systems, citizens are able to influence the entire process of news production and distribution’ whereas in traditional media the news processes tend still to be controlled by journalists (Scott et al., 2015: 755). These findings support Hermida et  al.’s view that there are ‘few indications that participatory journalism is democratizing the journalistic process’ (2011: 143). Journalists’ boundary work and continuing claim to performing an essential part in democracy indicate that they will not easily let go of their hard fought struggle for authority. To a large part, they will be situationally forced into more inclusive work practices which, ironically, are far more democratic than their own.

Moves to multiperspectival news The future of journalism has irrevocably migrated to the digital sphere. But uncertainty surrounds where ongoing experimentation will take it and, importantly, what will ‘stick’ with readers and participators, as it is theirs to choose. As yet, the major forms of digital journalism are only online publications and online publication of content partially or wholly presented in the traditional media. The most frequent forms of interaction are responses to news stories, tweets and retweets, blogs, and user-generated content, mostly in the form of visual material. In this way, digital journalism has ushered in the greatest changes in the areas of sourcing and distributing news, moving decidedly closer to Gans’s demand of multiperspectival news and Dewey’s vision of a participatory media culture. By far the widest reaching impact has been the inclusion of social media and especially Twitter in the 24/7 news cycle. Twitter has become the crucial platform for breaking

news and subsequent developments, prompting the company to proclaim, ‘If it happened in the world in 2014, it happened on Twitter’. In 2014, Twitter reported 284 million active monthly users and over 500 million tweets sent per day (Twitter, 2014). While tweets are not per se journalism, they can be journalistic acts. Franklin has observed ‘the 140 character format requires journalistic skills of tabloid compression to be highly developed’ (2014: 257). The inclusion of the adjective ‘tabloid’ is an apt one. Much Twitter content is emotive, and many personal reactions, be they to accidents or the death of a well-known person, are carried on Twitter. The unprecedented level of ‘publicity’ can also enter the political sphere, such as when US Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Senator Feinstein, who headed the Senate report on torture, live tweeted her fact-based rebuttals during the CIA director’s defence of their actions. Twitter, at that moment, constituted a public space for highlevel political deliberation that comes close to the Habermasian demand for a reasoned debate in front of a chora of interested participators and followers. Twitter by no means only communicates in circles of political and journalistic elites. It also allows new voices to emerge in civic discourses. By gathering discussion around hashtags, it can contest mainstream media representations, as was shown in the Canadian example of #Idlenomore. In this case of legislation endangering Indigenous land, half the input came from non-elite actors and alternative voices (Callison and Hermida, 2015: 18), demonstrating that crowd sourcing achieves a multi-vocality previously not heard in traditional media. Retweets then enabled a crowd-sourced elite to effectively articulate alternative views to a wider audience. Additionally, Twitter is increasingly used for crowdsourcing. This still places the journalist at the centre, or as a node, of gathering and filtering, but it includes the perspective of official or elite sources and alternative actors (Hermida et al., 2014). Research into

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Andy Carvin’s news stream on the Egyptian Arab spring revolution for NPR drawn from tweets and put together in Washington, shows that almost half the tweets used could be considered non-elite sources. Hermida et al. describe Twitter in this case as a ‘platform for coconstruction of news by journalists and activists’ (2014: 483). In their conclusion, the researchers emphasize that the networked news ecosystem permits work with sources thousands of miles away in ways that disregard ingrained and hierarchical interview patterns. They call it an environment ‘where knowledge and expertise are fluid, dynamic and hybrid’ (2014: 495).

GAINS AND LOSSES In her introduction to New Media, Old News, Fenton (2010: 7) asks the question that is still hotly debated: Do the new media reinvigorate democracy or do they throttle good journalism? The jury is still out on that question, mainly because the situation is ‘dynamic and fluid’, and scholarly researchers find it hard to keep up with developments (Domingo et al., 2014; Franklin, 2014). What follows is an attempt to highlight gains and losses so far. It has also to be said that many of the developments discussed here are happening in North America and Europe where print media is crumbling and news reaches people, particularly young people, via Twitter and online. In China, too, news reaches its readers via digital media but this has to be evaluated in a different light, as China had no legacy media that could have called itself ‘Fourth Estate’.

Participation versus engagement Fenton’s edited volume with the subtitle, ‘Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age’ (2010), was brought together at a time when legacy media was only wobbling on its

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legs. The value embodied in traditional journalism therefore provided the touchstone against which new developments were judged, as if there was still a choice for journalism to return to traditional forms. Five years later, it is clear that the participatory forms of digital journalism are here to stay and develop. The question, therefore, is no longer whether the ‘open and iterative world of online commentary’ is to be seen as taking journalism to new heights (Fenton, 2010: 10) but whether the participation as witnessed today should be valued as civic engagement. Participation is a core value of democracy, and it has become a visible practice in the production of news in ways not seen before. Many times, citizens have become the primary providers of breaking news, and ‘the bearing witness function – observing and providing accounts of what happened – is being switched to social media and increasingly practiced by public witnesses and activists’ (Picard, 2014: 278). Dahlgren (2007: ix), for one, sees democracy enhanced by participatory media involvement, even if there is ‘no guarantee that participation based on broader value considerations will always lead to progressive decisions’. To him, participation is not just about ‘manifesting political involvement’ in the public sphere but also an activity anchored in personal values and moral views. Peters and Witschge, on the other hand, raise doubts that the participation permitted by digital journalism should be equated with citizenship in the broad sense. In their view, ‘participation in news’ rather than ‘through news’ narrows the ‘broader dialectic surrounding journalism’s democratic function for citizens in society’ (2015: 24) and substitutes them with ‘highly individualized notions of political engagement’ (2015: 29). For this reason they warn against ‘simply replacing the “democracy paradigm” with a “participation paradigm” (2015: 30) when assessing digital journalism’s democratic affordances. Carpentier, in a study focussing on audience, similarly warns of theoretically isolating the concept of participation as this

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would not gauge in wider society ‘its relevance, appreciation and significance’ (2009: 411). At this point it is important to remember that participatory practices are not the norm across the globe where mass media logic still serves as a bridge between populace and political process. Having said this, the participatory modes of news generation and production bring the media tangibly closer to the Habermasian concept of the media as an instrument of popular will. Whether digital journalism is in practice perceived by the public in this vein remains to be seen. In terms of Dewey’s vision of democracy, the avenues of deliberation are more open than ever, although the quality of these interchanges needs to be put under the spotlight.

Reason versus emotion The traditional journalism paradigm places high importance on reasoned thought. Both Lippmann and Habermas in their outlines for democracy and communicative action made rationality a central value. Schudson credits Lippmann with being ‘the most wise and forceful spokesman for the ideal of objectivity’ (1978: 151). Objectivity and neutrality still remain an important component of the journalistic ethos, although historically they have not been at all times, nor are they in all cultures (Waisbord, 2013; Hallin and Mancini, 2004). The internet’s open access no longer filters out the sentiments Lippmann tried to keep at bay with his elitist vision of democracy and the press: prejudice, stereotyping and emotive argument. The removal of tight gatekeeping processes online has allowed these to re-enter the public discourse (Witschge, 2007). Other scholars have argued that these have always been present. ‘[N]o journalistic enterprise has ever succeeded in separating reason and emotion, information and entertainment, the real and the imagined, the facts and the story’ (Hartley, 1996: 316).

Tabloids, as distinct from quality newspapers, were never shy of playing to prejudices, of sensationalizing or being entertaining in order to get the readers’ attention. Readers showed their appreciation by buying tabloids in their millions, implicitly indicating that quality newspapers were for an elite, and that their form of journalism excluded the common man (Wasserman, 2010). While the inclusivity of online participation is still up for debate, it is clear that many of the tendencies foreshadowed in tabloid journalism have entered digital journalism, especially when emanating from social media. The frequently emotionally charged messages or tweets are engaging and can be directly responded to. A look at an online site such as BuzzFeed reveals a great kinship with the tabloid world. News is but one part of the overall package of lifestyle, entertainment and sports results. While these sites do not offer the in-depth coverage or ever rising number of contextual articles that are found in the legacy press (Fink and Schudson, 2013), they can be defended on similar grounds as tabloid journalism. They attract and include a far wider public, the texts are more accessible to a wider readership and their emotional engagement can spill into the public sphere (Örnebring and Jönsson, 2007). The subjective nature of social media’s pervasive personal communication was bound to impact on the (American) ideal of objectivity. Domingo et al. found that objectivity ‘seems to be perceived by more and more participants in news work as a myth’ (2014: 10). They argue that the rituals of transparency replace the rituals of objectivity, although this does not account for all activist journalism found on the web. ‘Assuming that activism does not promote or indirectly generates violence,’ Dahlgren writes, it ‘should not be viewed as something negative that signals a “failure’ of deliberative democracy in the various public spheres” (2007: ix). Yet, as Domingo et al. also point out (2015: 62), citizens and readers have normative expectations as to the credibility of information and

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journalists, in an attempt to underscore their professional skills, highlight their commitment to accuracy and balance.

Societal cohesion versus trending Legacy media has a commitment to presenting and clarifying ‘the goals and values of society’ (Hutchins Commission, 1947). Digital journalism, while potentially a collaborative effort of a wide range of people, is placed on platforms that do not feel the same obligation. Mass media institutions have been much criticized for being little more than commercial enterprises, masking their deeper interest in profits with lip service to journalistic values and journalism’s role in democracy. But social media are far from neutral platforms. As Poell and van Dijck demonstrate, they have introduced ‘new techno-commercial mechanisms in public communication, which intensify rather than neutralize the commercial strategies of the mass media’ (2014: 185). Part of the commercial strategy is an algorithmic coding that maximizes user engagement and boosts traffic to their websites. To this end, Facebook and Twitter privilege breaking news and quickly trending stories, whereas even topics with much used hashtags, such as #OccupyWallstreet, could show systematic rise in volume but did not trend. The privileging of breaking or engaging news means that complex political issues, which play out over a longer period of time, may hardly register with users or may not get any airing at all. Poell and van Dijck conclude that social media’s algorithmic logic ‘undermines journalism’s ability to fulfil its key democratic functions of keeping governments accountable and facilitating informed public debate’ (2014: 197). The collectivity expressed in trending subjects is often shortlived and fueled by public curiosity, i.e. the public’s interest rather than public interest. It is therefore seen as qualitatively different from the societal connection provided

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by legacy media with its orientation towards public interest.

MERGING FORMS OF JOURNALISM The arrival of the digital media environment has called forth many conjectures about possible dominant traits of future journalism, or the lack thereof. ‘Twitter revolutions, if they do exist’, Nerone surmised, ‘are unlikely to be the infrastructure or the animatory fantasy of new normative structures, of a new hegemonic journalism, because they do not light up the mass of citizenry the way the daily paper once did in the West’ (2013: 454). There are various strands to Nerone’s offhand remark. One is, that normative theories of journalism in actual fact had only a small radius of application. If normative theories were developed for digital journalism, despite its wider spread, they would come from a similarly temporarily and spatially defined situation. Mature democracies are not the norm globally, and any move to have a theory developed in the West and exported to the rest should be avoided. In fact, it has been argued here all along that the centrality of democracy for any future theory – normative or otherwise – should be treated with caution. The vision of participatory journalism has great possibilities, but it is far from realising its full potential technologically and in actual participation. The moments of cooperative news that can be observed now are reminiscent of Habermas’s embryonic public sphere which held much promise until it was overtaken by different developments. Some of these, such as the commercial exploitation of participation, can be observed already. The empowerment of participation comes at the price of having user behaviour tracked, aggregated and mined. The expansive ecosystem of connective media is no less ruled by commercial imperatives than the old media. Their ways are in fact far more intrusive than the old media in that they connect user activities and

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advertisers, employing mechanisms ‘of deep personalization and networked customization’ (van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 10). The second strand in Nerone’s remark centres on the adjective ‘hegemonic’. Participatory and hegemonic are not necessarily an oxymoron, but the notion of participation sits oddly with notions of domination and hegemony. As yet, participatory forms of news work, whether through commenting, story input or becoming a news source, are far from being dominant. News media organizations ‘still produce most of the news we consume today, even those that circulate through social media and aggregators’ (Domingo et  al., 2014: 1). This institutional form of news, based on common belief systems, structures, standardized practices and norms (Picard, 2014), is produced by journalists who will continue to hold the expertise on news values and crafting a story (Waisbord, 2013). Not only do we have at this moment parallel worlds of journalism, the traditional one, rooted in mass media logic, and the digital one, opening up to forms of participation that are still to mature, but also the prediction that journalism will not be de-institutionalized any time soon. At least a portion of journalists is likely to work for a ‘few large general, commercial news providers … [that] will dominate provision in most countries in digital form’ (Picard, 2014: 279). The probable merging of institutionalized journalism which, in democratic countries, imagines itself as one of the four pillars upholding democracy, and digital journalism with its possibilities of participation, multiple perspectives and emotional engagement, will ensure that democratic values are upheld and the deliberations continue, also in nondemocratic countries.

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Bates, Stephen (1995) Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission, Its Times, and Ours. Washington, D.C.: The Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University. Benson, Rodney (2010) ‘Futures of the News: International considerations and further reflections’, in Natalie Fenton (ed.), New Media, Old News, London: SAGE. pp. 187–200. Bird, Elizabeth (2009) ‘The future of journalism in the digital environment’, Journalism, 10(3): 293–5. Bourdieu, Pierre (2005) ‘The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field’, in Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (eds), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, Cambridge: Polity. pp. 29–47. Callison, C. and Hermida, A. (2015) ‘Dissent and resonance: #Idlenomore as an emergent middle ground’, in Canadian Journal of Communication 40(4): November. Carpentier, Nico (2009) ‘Participation is not enough’, European Journal of Communication, 24(4): 407–20. Christians, C., Glasser, T., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K. and White, R. (2009) Normative Theories of the Media. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Curran, James (1997) ‘Mass media and democracy’, in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society, London: Arnold. pp. 81–119. Dahlgren, Peter (2007) ‘Foreword’, in Bart Cammaerts and Nico Carpentier (eds.), Reclaiming the Media, Bristol: intellect. pp. vii–x. Deuze, Mark (2005) ‘What is journalism?’, Journalism, 6(4): 442–64. Dewey, John (2012) The Public and Its Problems. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. (1st edn, 1927). Domingo, D., Masip, P. and Costera Meijer, I. (2015) ‘Tracing digital news networks’. Digital Journalism, 3(1): 53–67. Domingo, D., Quandt, T., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Singer, J. and Vujnovic, M. (2008) ‘Participatory journalism practices in the media and beyond’, Journalism Practice, 2(3): 326–42. Fenton, Natalie (ed.) (2010) New Media, Old News. London: SAGE.

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Fenton, Natalie (2010) ‘Drowning or waving? New media journalism and democracy’, in Natalie Fenton (ed.), New Media, Old News. London: SAGE. pp. 3–16. Fink, Katherine and Schudson, Michael (2013) ‘The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s– 2000s’, Journalism, 15(1): 3–20. Franklin, Bob (2014) ‘The future of journalism’, Digital Journalism, 2(3): 254–72. Freedom House (2014) Press Freedom over a Quarter of a Century. (http://freedomhouse. org). Gans, Herbert (2004) Deciding What’s News. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (1st edn, 1979). Georgiou, Myria (2003) ‘Mapping diasporic media across the EU: addressing cultural exclusion’. Project Report. London: LSE. Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press. (1st edn, 1962). Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (1st edn, 1981.) Hallin, Daniel (1994) We keep America on Top of the World. New York: Routledge. Hallin, Daniel and Mancini, Paolo (2004) Comparing Media Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallin, Daniel and Mancini, Paolo (eds) (2012) Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanitzsch, Thomas (2011) ‘Populist disseminators, detached watchdogs, critical change agents and opportunist facilitators: Professional milieus, the journalistic field and autonomy in 18 countries’, International Communication Gazette, 73(6): 477–94. Hartley, John (1996) Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. London: Arnold. Hermida, A., Lewis, S., and Zamith, R. (2014) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunsian and Egyptian revolutions’, in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3): 479–99. Hermida, A., Domingo, D. Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Reich, Z., Singer, J. and Vujnovic, M. (2011) ‘The active recipient: Participatory journalism through the lens of

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the Dewey-Lippmann Debate’, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, 1(2): 129–52. Hutchins Commission (1947) A free and responsible press. (https://archive.org/details/ freeandresponsib029216mbp) Josephi, Beate (2013) ‘How much democracy does journalism need?’, Journalism 14(4): 474–89. Josephi, Beate (2005) ‘Journalism in the global age between normative and empirical’, International Communication Gazette, 67(6): 575–90. Latour, Bruno (2011) ‘Networks, societies, spheres: Reflections of an actor-network theorist’, International Journal of Communication, 5: 796–810. Lippmann, Walter (1997) Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks. (1st edn, 1922.) Lippmann, Walter (1925) Phantom Public. New York: Harcourt Brace. McNair, Brian (2009) ‘Journalism and democracy’, in Karin Wahl-Jorgenson and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. London: Routledge. pp. 237–49. MEAA [Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance] (2014) [Australian] Journalists’ Code of Ethics. (http://www.alliance.org.au/code-ofethics.html) Milton, John (1644) Areopagitica. (http://www. gutenberg.org/ebooks/608) Nerone, John (ed.) (1995) Last Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nerone, John (2013) ‘The historical roots of the normative model of journalism’, Journalism 14(4): 446–58. Örnebring, Henrik and Jönsson, Anna Maria (2007) ‘Tabloid journalism and the public sphere’, Journalism Studies, 5(3): 283–95. Peters, Chris and Witschge, Tamara (2015), ‘From grand narratives of democracy to small expectations of participation’, Journalism Practice, 9(1): 19–34. Picard, Robert (2014) ‘Twilight or new dawn of journalism?’, Digital Journalism, 2(3): 273–83. Poell, Thomas and van Dijck, Jose (2014) ‘Social media and journalistic independence’, in James Bennett and Niki Strange (eds), Media Independence: Working with Freedom or Working for Free? London: Routledge. pp. 182–201.

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Poell, T., de Kloet, J. and Zeng, G. (2013) ‘Will the real Weibo please stand up?’, Chinese Journal of Communication, 7(1): 1–18. Poitras, Laura (2014) Citizenfour: A Documentary Film about Edward Snowden. New York: Praxis Films. Rogers, Melvin (2010) ‘Introduction: Revisiting the public and its problems’, Contemporary Pragmatism, 7(1): 1–7. Schudson, Michael (1978) Discovering the News: A Sociological History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. Schudson, Michael (2003) The Sociology of News. New York: Norton. Schudson, Michael (2008) ‘The “LippmannDewey debate” and the invention of Walter Lippmann as an anti-democrat 1986–1996’, International Journal of Communication, 2: 1–20. Schudson, Michael and Anderson, Chris (2009) ‘Objectivity, professionalism, and truth seeking in journalism’, in Karin Wahl-Jorgenson and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. London: Routledge. pp. 88–101. Scott, J., Millard, D. and Leonard, P. (2015) ‘Citizen participation in news’, Digital Journalism, 3(5): 737–58. Siebert, F., Peterson, T. and Schramm, W. (1956) Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steel, Ronald (1997) ‘Foreword’, in Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, New York: Free Press Paperbacks. pp. xii–xvi. Steensen, Steen and Ahva, Laura (2015) ‘Theories of journalism in a digital age’, Digital Journalism, 3(1): 1–18.

Twitter (2014) About Twitter. (https://about. twitter.com/company) van Dijck, Jose and Poell, Thomas (2013) ‘Understanding social media logic’, Media and Communication, 1(1): 2–14. Wahl-Jorgenson, Karin and Hanitzsch, Thomas (2009) ‘Introduction: On why and how we should do journalism studies’, in Karin WahlJorgenson and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. London: Routledge. pp. 3–16. Waisbord, Silvio (2013) Reinventing Professionalism. Cambridge: Polity. Wang, Yue (2014) ‘More people have cell phones than toilets, UN study shows’ (http:// newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25) WAN-IFRA (2014a) ‘World Press Trends to Get an Upgrade’ (http://www.wan-ifra.org/pressreleases/2014/10/14/) WAN-IFRA (2014b) ‘World Press Trends: Print and Digital Together Increasing Newspaper Audiences’ (http://www.wan-ifra.org/pressreleases/2014/06/09/) Wasserman, Herman (2010) Tabloid Journalism in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Witschge, Tamara (2007) ‘Representation and inclusion in the online debate: the issue of honor killings’, in Bart Cammaerts and Nico Carpentier (eds), Reclaiming the Media, Bristol: intellect. pp. 130–50. Zelizer, Barbie (2013) ‘On the shelf life of democracy in journalism scholarship’, Journalism 14(4), 459–73.

2 Global Media Power Ta y l o r O w e n

The media landscape is in a period of radical transformation from an industrial model of both production and dissemination to a far more diverse, and in some cases diffuse, ecosystem. As many in this handbook have detailed, the medium of journalism is shifting from the traditional broadcast channels of the twentieth century to a rapidly evolving network that includes digitally-native media companies (Vice, Vox.com, 538, Fusion, Buzzfeed), social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube), emerging forms of anonymous information sharing (WikiLeaks, SecureDrop), citizen reporting and traditional media companies who have survived and in some cases flourished in the digital world. An implicit assumption in many accounts of this changing media landscape is that it also represents a shift in agency and power from the state and corporate broadcast institutions of the twenty-first century to a new network of people and organizations. The theme of digital media as a decentralizing

force in the power that we have embedded in media generally, and journalism in particular, can be seen in much of the discourse around digital technology. This chapter explores whether there is a new form of media power emerging in the digital age. First, it outlines what is generally meant by traditional media power. Second, it outlines how this new media ecosystem represents a new form of media power. Third, it sketches some of the new forms of media that are challenging traditional journalistic institutions and norms.

OLD MEDIA POWER Before looking at the decentralization of media, and at the actors that are challenging traditional media structures, it is first worth exploring whether and how the media has power at all. It is important to understand how far traditional media organizations still

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play a role in how we understand and what we see of the world and to what extent does the new social ecosystem of news and information shift this power balance. Large media organizations have held power over the global information environment through three levers of control: access to information; access to infrastructure; and, over the creation of journalistic norms. First, the media has historically had many ways of controlling, limiting and shaping access to information. Some of this has to do with their positionality. Take the example of the foreign correspondents. The media and governments’ mutually beneficial relationship when it comes to embedding journalists shows the privileged space the media occupies (see, for example, Tumber, 2004). The government allows the media access to information that the public would not otherwise receive. The media then functions as a further gatekeeper, deciding what is news and what is not. The concept of media ‘Indexing’ helps to further illuminate this relationship. In his seminal 1990 paper, Lance Bennett (1990) argues that government has a privileged place in the structure of public debate. It provides access, and feeds policy debates. However, the media, he argues, amplify this influence by ‘indexing’ debates based on the government’s position. For example, in the media coverage of President Reagan’s efforts to fund a war in El Salvador, Bennett found that the press framed the situation around the original government justifications. There was significantly less reporting on the ongoing political situation after Congress decided on a representative president. Essentially, when official voices stopped commenting, so did the press. This indexing is driven both by government’s place at the center of democratic society, but also by journalistic norms of balance. The result is that governments and media together have traditionally played a significant role in deciding and shaping what debates citizens are exposed to and how they are framed. Second, traditionally, mainstream news media has had a variety of mediums through

which they can control the mass dissemination of information. Ownership of newspapers, television networks, radio stations allow the voice of a single news outlet to be spread quickly and efficiently. It also serves to block out other voices. There has traditionally been a connection between access to dissemination mechanism and editorial content production, giving the media a structural power over what information was circulated on the various networks. The pervasiveness of certain media conglomerates therefore gave them an authority over how debates are framed and what issues command the public’s attention. Writing in Foreign Affairs, James Hoge (1994) argues that in the international affairs space this leads to groupthink in the media, and significant power. ‘An overlooked aspect of media pervasiveness’, he argues ‘is its ability to quickly inform an audience swollen large in times of crisis. At such moments the massive flow of information will contain the sound and the unsound, the responsible and the irresponsible’ (Hoge, 1994). Third, as Castells argues in the Network Theory of Power (2011), elites in the network have the ability to lay out the norms to be followed by the rest of the network. Castell’s work is particularly helpful in determining whether and how traditional media organizations have the power to influence the rest of the information network in which they participate. In earlier work, Castells, along with Amelia Arsenault (Arsenault and Castells, 2008), began to address this question of mainstream media’s elite role in the network in a study of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘switching power’. They argue that Rupert Murdoch plays the powerful role of a “switch’, where he can influence several spheres of the network, due to his superior position in the network as owner of many mainstream media outlets. Certain media outlets, they argue, have structural power over the network. Timothy Cook (2006) also views the media as holding a privileged position in the information network, and playing a role distinct from political actors. The media, Cook

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argues, can be seen as a ‘fourth branch’ of government, with its own role and responsibility, with the government playing a central role in its ‘product’ (news stories). Institutional theory helps us to understand how different media outlets tend to report the same stories in the same way. Cook defines institutions as ‘social patterns of behaviour identifiable across the organizations that are generally seen within a society to preside over a particular social sphere’. In the media, these social practices have continued over time and across news outlets, creating strong norms of behavior. In this way we should view the news media as a collective with a standard set of roles and practices. And this has consequences. As Cook argues, ‘scholarship has largely confirmed a “homogeneity hypothesis”’. News outlets, even across modalities, tend to focus on particular political actors for particular reasons with particular stories in mind’ (Cook, 2006). This homogeneity of journalistic behavior and coverage has had real consequence for the limited frames through which we see the world, and as will be discussed below, stands in marked contrast to the diversity of voices and stories that the new digital media ecosystem allows.

NEW MEDIA ECOSYSTEM A jarring break in the slowly intersecting arcs of new and old media was the emergence of WikiLeaks as an actor occupying the space between publishers, sources and journalists. Since the first major WikiLeaks release Collateral Murder detailing a US helicopter attacking journalists on the ground in Iraq, it has been debated whether WikiLeaks could be considered a journalistic organization. The debate highlights many of the underlying assumptions held about the role of journalists, especially when looking at the reactions of traditional vs. new media. It points to the emerging shift in power to new forms of media institutions.

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Initially WikiLeaks was viewed by media organization as a cyber-activist group and potential information source. But in 2010 it began to shift its image to that of a legitimate journalistic enterprise. An important moment in this process was the release of the Collateral Murder video, which was hosted on its own platform and accompanied by investigative reports from professional journalists. The form and pretense of the launch sparked a debate over what exactly WikiLeaks was. Founder Julian Assange himself argues that WikiLeaks practices ‘scientific journalism’ based on public access to source documents without editing or contextualization. It is of course this editing and contextualizing that has historically been the core attribute of journalism. Media scholars such as Yochai Benkler and Jay Rosen asked how WikiLeaks publishing the video was any different than the New York Times publishing a leaked document. The only difference, they claimed, is that WikiLeaks built a system through which an individual could anonymously leak. The difference is they are virtual, and core elements of the journalistic process have been technologically enabled. However not all media outlets felt this way. Though WikiLeaks had originally partnered with the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian to release the ‘War Logs’ files, in 2011, then editor of the New York Times Bill Keller argued that he did ‘not regard Assange as a partner, and [he] would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism’ (Keller, 2011). This happened again with several other new outlets, and some of the original relationships soured. As Lisa Lynch describes in ‘WikiLeaks after Megaleaks’: ‘One vocal supporter … was Daniel Ellsberg, a formerly military analyst known for leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Ellsberg argued that Assange’s activities on behalf of WikiLeaks made him indisputably a journalist, claiming “anybody who believes Julian Assange can be distinguished

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from The New York Times … is on a fool’s errand”’ (Lynch, 2013). In many ways the Vietnam analogy is apt. With the release of the Pentagon papers, the US government attempted to suppress media coverage, but lost when it came to a Senate vote. Now, the US government was again attempting to delegitimize and suppress WikiLeaks. This is indicative of the pattern of the state attempting to control the media’s dissemination of information. In Vietnam, it failed when journalists convinced the public of the state’s wrongdoing. But in the case of WikiLeaks, it seems to have partially succeeded in delegitimizing Julian Assange and his colleagues in the public’s eyes. It is worth recalling just how new, and many would argue innovative, WikiLeaks actually was in these years before the major Cablegate document release. Here was an organization making the case that it could use digital technology to make the secrets of governments visible. In the UK and America, having just gone through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was an appetite for what can only be described as this revolutionary rhetoric. That this organization was re-imagining the role of the media as the primary filter between events and our understanding of them, was a part of this mystique. The debate over the release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables by Chelsea Manning, via the WikiLeaks platform embodies this tension. WikiLeaks initially partnered with respected journalistic outlets, in large part to be legitimized by their participation. While Assange believed he too was a publisher, one who just happened to have been leaked the source documents, it is clear that the partner news organizations were never convinced. To them, WikiLeaks was a difficult organization to define within the traditional roles of journalism. They were both source and publisher. Reporter and leaker. Anonymizing tool and platform. This pretense of journalistic role in some ways was derailed by Assange himself. When he released the full, unredacted, Cablegate

file out of spite to the Guardian, he removed himself from the normative protection he was seeking as a journalistic entity. Here is where his ideology of absolute transparency bumped up against the norms of practice in journalism. He believed the former was ultimately more important than the latter. There can be little doubt that WikiLeaks, and technologies like it, pose an existential challenge to traditional journalistic organizations. Their central role was to serve as a buffer between events as they unfold, the powers that be, and citizens. To be, as Castell calls it, a ‘switch’. As a society, we have historically seen this role as important to our governance system, attributing certain powers and responsibilities to journalism. We traditionally gave them the power to disseminate, via broadcast and print distributions channels, and in some case legal protection to protect sources and hold illegal documents, under the pretense that they would use them in a way largely beneficial to society. WikiLeaks, and more importantly the technologies that enable WikiLeaks, challenges this notion, this social bargain. If anyone can be the receiver and publisher of a leak, what is the role of journalistic institutions, and the protections afforded them? This issue has been further amplified by the Edward Snowden leak. Snowden says that he chose not to approach the New York Times with the documents because of their decision not to publish the first NSA domestic surveillance story in the lead-up to the 2004 election after a request from the White House. He ended up giving them to Glenn Greenwald, who at the time was affiliated with, though not a staff reporter for, the Guardian. What is interesting here is that both Snowden and Greenwald saw the value in publishing the documents via traditional media institutions. This gave them the legal protections that such institutions, particularly in the United States, are afforded. Greenwald also benefited from being perceived as a journalist, which is arguably why he has insisted on bylines in most of the newspapers around the world that have

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published articles using the documents in his possession. There is no doubt that Greenwald is a journalist, and had been doing journalism with the documents. He should be granted all of the protections that the position affords him. But questions arise over what would have happened if Snowden had given the documents to a blog. Would the blog author be protected as a publisher? What if this blog was his brother’s website? What if he posted them to his own website? The lines are getting increasingly blurred. Moreover, this line is increasingly unclear when it comes to new digitally native media companies that posit a different of voice, form, public role, and in many cases activists position than traditional media companies. One such example is First Look Media, which was started by the billionaire co-founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, in collaboration with Greenwald. Omidyar had considered purchasing the Washington Post but instead decided to invest the roughly US$250 million into a new media entity. The company has made a number of provocative hires including Greenwald and others who fit roughly into a niche of adversarial, independent investigative reporting. They even brought on new media theorist and critic Jay Rosen to help them imagine a new model for a journalistic institution. Greenwald (2013) sees this initiative as a direct challenge to old journalism institutions: ‘usually [dissenting journalists] are on the outside of institutional power, and what this is really about is being able to create a very well-funded, powerful, well-fortified institution that’s designed not to just tolerate that kind of journalism, but to enable it and protect it, strengthen it and empower it’. Further, he argues that the site is representative of a new form of journalistic institution, which stands in opposition to the traditional model which Greenwald (2013) provocatively states ‘neutered and, in a lot of ways, helped to kill journalism as a potent force for checking power, and the kind of journalism that I think we intend to do, where it is much more passionate and [inaudible] and intended

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to be overtly adversarial to those in power’. It is too soon to tell, but First Look Media is part of a growing trend of networked individuals coming together to form new media entities around particular topic areas or styles of journalism. A new journalistic ecosystem is emerging, and it is powered by new forms of communication of content delivery. A similar shift in intuitional influence and power has taken place in the sphere of foreign correspondence, where citizen journalists and witnesses are challenging core functions of the traditional media model. For much of the twentieth century, news of world events was produced by Western foreign correspondents working for large corporate and state-funded news organizations and distributed to the public via transatlantic cables, satellites and news delivery trucks on newsprint, radios and television sets. As such, those that controlled this production and distribution model held substantial power over how we understood and ultimately acted in the world. Every stage of this process, from the technologies used to the actors engaged, to the audience itself, has been radically transformed by the Internet and the explosion of mobile computing. While traditional news organizations and foreign correspondents still cover contemporary global affairs, they are no longer the only witnesses broadcasting details of events to the world (see Chapters 16 and 18). Until recently, we were almost entirely dependent on foreign correspondents to witness war. In the past several decades, this has meant relying largely on embedded reporters. Embedded reporting, which began in the Vietnam War, allows us into a conflict that is being fought on our behalf. The slow evolution of this form took a radical turn during the Arab uprisings of 2011. Two parallel phenomena led to decentralization in the coverage of these events. First, the traditional practice of embedding with military units was limited or had become impossible in such non-traditional conflicts, and reporting has become significantly more dangerous

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during the Arab Spring movements. Second, we saw the emergence of a wider social shift from centralized, traditional news organizations, to social and citizen journalism. The result is that western audiences could watch a series of protests and revolutions play out in social feeds, as well as on TV. While much debate, and hyperbole, has been made over the role of social media in the emergence of the Arab Spring movements, what is uncontested is that we (the West), consumed much of the news of them in a new way. Twitter was a prominent channel for news and information during Tunisian, Libyan and Egyptian uprisings, either directly through citizen feeds, or filtered through curators such as Andy Carvin from NPR, who pioneered a new form of virtual foreign correspondence (Hermida et al., 2014). Later, during the conflict in Syria, for the first time there was the widespread use of live, or nearly live video taken from mobile phones. Consider the February 2012 bombing of the city of Homs in Syria by the Assad regime. This brutal bombardment, and the human costs of Assad’s war on Syrian citizens, was covered by two western journalists, Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik. They had snuck into the city using a tunnel and the help of the Free Syrian Army and filed immensely powerful accounts of the bombing. Both were killed in the bombardment. But unlike previous wars Colvin and Ochlik had covered, the bombardment of Homs was being watched and lived via a range of new technologies. In particular, during the bombardment, citizens were uploading videos taken with their phones. Had Marie Colvin been reporting from Syria 20 years ago, she would likely have been the only voice. We would have learned about the bombings via her prose. Ten years ago, she might have been there with a cable TV network, broadcasting via satellite from a bombed out hotel. Last year, she was there alone, with a small group of other professional journalists, and thousands of citizens, uploading their accounts to Twitter and

YouTube. The result is that many learned about the conflict from citizen reporters broadcasting to social channels alongside institutional journalists. The rise of mobile connectivity and cameraphones allowed a video window into the conflict without the need for embedded Western foreign correspondents, or brave (some would say reckless) freelancers. Colvin’s video was decidedly amateur; shot from rooftops and while she was running down the street, the quality was poor. But it was visceral and authentic in a way difficult for professionals to capture. This phenomenon of decentralized witnessing and reporting is widespread. Several years ago, Engin Önder, a 21-year old student at Istanbul’s Bahçes¸ehir University, cofounded 140 Journos, an organization whose volunteers use their own mobile devices to provide uncensored news to the public via social media platforms like Twitter and SoundCloud. Named for the 140-character limit on Twitter, 140 Journos has never consisted of more than 20 people, and yet has had a marked impact on the closed and controlled Turkish media. ‘We are all journalists now’ Onder explained to the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘What we have is our own devices … it actually removes the barriers between the person who sees the news and who creates the news’ (Dlugoleski, 2013). Ethan Zuckerman (2008) argues that we remain drawn to local sources of content in our day-to-day life. This has resulted in sites like Kigaliwire.com and mexicoreporter. com, which represent a new way of reporting local news to an international audience, utilizing a variety of digital tools. Hamilton and Jenner (2004) argue that instead of witnessing the death of the foreign correspondent, what we are really seeing is a new ecosystem in which the one dominant form of parachute correspondent is now one among many. These include hired foreign nationals that cover reports independently and then sell them to media agencies, local media that conduct international reporting from home,

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non-American correspondents whose work is available online because they work for an organization that publishes online, international organization representatives that communicate through official channel, syndicated news agencies that charge companies premiums for news, and of course amateur correspondents and witnesses. This raises questions over the core ‘bearing witness’ function of the journalist. Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik certainly provided a valuable lens on the war. Colvin in vivid prose, and Ochlik through beautiful, horrific images. They provided a context, and a knowledge of the wider conflict, and could relay the war in a way that we, with similar backgrounds, histories and cultures, could understand. Developments in technology could lead to amateur representations of conflict of higher quality. What if citizens of Homs could relay a virtual reality environment to viewers a world away? This raises questions about the value proposition of the role of the foreign correspondent. More importantly, how far would that change how we understand and respond to conflicts? It is very early days for such technologies, and we certainly do not know if they will lead to a better knowledge of events, or change our actions in response to them, but they will surely change the role of both the foreign correspondent, and the large traditional media institutions that support them. More broadly, with the decentralization of both event representation and broadcasting, there has been a shift in power from the hierarchical institutions of the twentieth century to the networked publics of the twenty-first. Understanding this shift is critical to decoding the role media and journalism plays in international affairs.

NEW MEDIA POWER The examples of WikiLeaks, First Look and new forms of citizen reporting illustrate

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something important about the existing power structures and norms of practice of the traditional media ecosystem detailed above. They show how digital media is changing international journalism, and with it, the public’s understanding of the world. The three information spaces once controlled by traditional institutions – access to information, infrastructure, creation of journalistic norms – are all being challenged or transformed. First, access to information is no longer monopolized. Non-professional journalists are finding their own stories by ‘being there’ often based on the strength of being in the right place at the right time, in a way foreign correspondents could not foresee. Though independent reporters do not have an established relationship with the government, they are also able to frame stories in a way that is not based on government authority. Only recently, in order to tell a story of an event to the world, one needed to both be there, and to have the platform on which to disseminate it. This meant that journalists, working for media institutions, were the people most likely to ‘be there’ as events unfolded (Sambrook, 2010). There were always other people there, of course; they just didn’t have the capability to broadcast what they were seeing. We are now able to get content about events from the people actually living them. These eyewitness accounts do not necessarily help audiences understand and contextualize an event, but they do transport them there through a perspective that is, by definition, decentralized and direct. This media does not have the objectivity that the practice of professional journalism aspires to. Second, anyone can now disseminate information on a new media infrastructure. Blogs, social networks, and the wider internet all allow people to self-publish material which can be viewed around the globe. Mainstream news no longer has a monopoly on mass information dissemination. However, mainstream news networks have also adopted these formerly alternative online mediums,

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resulting in an integration of old and new forms. Access to these networks and dissemination platforms can help new actors challenge traditional institutions. Third, because of this decentralization of access to information combined with recent access to information networks and the ability to disseminate, norms are evolving. Social networks have been critical in the development of a new set of norms and values that are reinventing how the news is relayed. ‘Instantaneity’ is a priority, and trusted citizens can be as important as established journalists in these new environments. How people practice, participate in, and consume digital journalism is evolving rapidly. The first of these traditional journalistic norms to shift in the digital media landscape is objectivity. The purported remove of the journalist, seeking to represent events without bias, is in stark contrast to the online world in which anyone can broadcast an opinion. For many blogs and social feeds, this subjectivity is explicit. But even when filming an event on a mobile phone, any number of personal and situational biases are embedded in the documentary process. This shift in the norm of objectivity has also been found in professional journalists who blog. Jane Singer (2005) has studied how alternative online media are being adopted by the mainstream press and used to reinforce their authority on the Internet. She found that the behavior of journalists changes from platform to platform. Journalists often shift to the first person, and reflect on stories in a manner they do not generally adopt in print or broadcast outlets, or in blogs. The traditional gatekeeping role of the journalist shifts to one of information verification and quality control. In a recent study of social media storytelling during the Egyptian uprisings, Zizi Papacharissi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira (2011) analyzed and mapped information flows over Twitter during the Egyptian uprisings as a way of looking at the changing dynamic of news reporting. They found that news sharing on Twitter is often couched

in the values of traditional media, but has also developed a few of its own core values – instantaneity being a primary one. The ‘affective news stream’ has emerged as a unique environment separate from any other news source. Networks on Twitter are still largely grouped by locality, and interactions influenced by shared group identities or opinion. The combination of journalists, mainstream news outlets, and citizens on Twitter creates a complex ‘social awareness’ stream (Hermida, 2010) that redefines news as a hybrid of different information types, challenging ideas about who can make the news. Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2011) suggest that social streams reflect different sets of ‘news values’ than traditional media. On Twitter, values centred on instantaneity, solidarity and information from trusted elites. The differences in these ‘organically’ emergent values from those of traditional media indicates how media norms can change over a short period of time, diminishing the power of mainstream media as an enforcer of media norms. What is less clear is how far these new norms represent a shift in power. Castells (2007) believes so. He provides a theoretical framework from which to examine the power shift occurring with the rise of citizen journalism, in which we are seeing a move towards more ‘socialized’ ways of communication. In his model, the traditional media represents the power, and alternative media the counterpower that responds to traditionally established norms. Social movements are not only organized in a digital space, but in a ‘composite of the space of flows and the space of places’ existing through networks, face-to-face interactions, and traditional media (Castells, 2011). They are not completely divorced from real world foundations, but have lost the fragmented nature and now exist in a global network. A network that is harder to control than media infrastructure. To Castells, power is defined as the ability of one actor to control another actor,

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and counterpower as the ability of an actor to resist institutionalized forms of power. A move towards citizen, rather than institutionally produced media, is for him a form of ‘socialized communication’. In this new ecosystem, traditional ‘vertical’ forms of communication are replaced by ‘horizontal networks’ (the internet), and with this shift comes a challenge to the ability to control information. The disrupting of the ability to control information, whether it be by corporate, media, or political elites, is for Castells a form of counterpower. This counterpower is by no means absolute. With the scale of state surveillance and the degree of cooperation by the telecommunication and technology companies who operate the infrastructure of our global communications, there is a fight for this ability to control and monitor information. There is a booming private sector industry in providing technologies for countries, but autocracies and democracies, to control the Internet. But this is an exertion of power in response to the communication capabilities afforded through the Internet. As media theorist danah boyd argues (2012), social media networks often mirror the power structures of the societies in which that are grounded. Digital tools, she argues, are not representative of society as a whole, they too are inaccessible to many. When the Kony 2012 video went viral, for example, it was not because of the power of the message, or due to the decentralized acts of individuals, but rather due to an orchestrated campaign by the video’s creators, Invisible Children, using a network of celebrities and university campus groups. People felt as though they were part of a movement, but the network had been heavily influenced by elites. It had structure. And that structure is a form of power.

CONCLUSION So where does this leave the media landscape and the power that it wields, and what

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questions should researchers be asking to better understand it? First, it remains unclear how far down the path towards a citizen-led media, and what effect this will ultimately have on traditional broadcasters and broadsheets. Second, there is little understanding about the qualitative impact of learning about global events through the direct experience of those that are living in their midst versus through a professional media. Third, work is needed in better understanding the actual network distribution of decentralized global media. There is a need for a greater understanding of the character and distribution of the audience for these more diverse voices, and how to evaluate this distribution against that of a potentially larger but also more homogenous broadcast media. We have seen the power of purely social information flows and of new social media filters on this flood of information. We have seen how new technology platforms can blur the lines between sources, journalists and publishers. And we have seen how a new generation of media companies are emerging that are native to this new operating environment. What we are seeing, of course, is the emergence of a new dynamic ecosystem of information sharing; some coming from professionals, some directly from source, and a whole raft of information from people documenting the lives they are living. Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik passed away as this tension was playing out around them. And the reality is surely that while power over the control of information has been radically decentralized away from traditional media, there are benefits to new forms of networked institutions that will form the base of a new generation of CNNs.

REFERENCES Arsenault, A. and Castells, M. (2008) ‘Switching power: Rupert Murdoch and the global business of media politics: A sociological

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analysis’, International Sociology, 23(4), 488–513. Bennett, W. L. (1990) ‘Toward a theory of press-state relations in the United States’, Journal of Communication, 40(2), 103–25. boyd, danah (2012) ‘The Power of Fear in Networked Publics’. Presentation to SXSW. Austin, Texas, March 10. Available at: http:// w w w. d a n a h . o r g / p a p e r s / t a l k s / 2 0 1 2 / SXSW2012.html Castells, M. (2007) ‘Communication, power and counter-power in the network society’, International Journal of Communication, 1(1), 29. Castells, M. (2011) ‘Network theory: A network theory of power’, International Journal of Communication, 5, 15. Cook, T. E. (2006) ‘The news media as a political institution: Looking backward and looking forward’, Political Communication, 23(2), 159–71. Dlugoleski, D. (2013) ‘We are all journalists now: 140 Journos and Turkey’s “countermedia” movement’, Columbia Journalism Review, May 20, (http://www.cjr.org/behind_ the_news/turkey_counter_media.php). Greenwald, G. (2013) ‘Media venture will empower adversarial journalism to hold the powerful accountable’, Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow. org/2013/10/28/glenn_greenwald_ media_venture_will_empower). Hamilton, J. M., & Jenner, E. (2004) ‘Redefining foreign correspondence’, Journalism, 5(3), 301–21. Hermida, A. (2010) ‘Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism’, Journalism Practice, 4(3), 297–308. Hermida, A., Lewis, S. and Zamith, R. (2014) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of

Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(3): 479–99. Hoge, J., Jr. (1994) ‘Media pervasiveness’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 73(4), 136. Keller, B. (2011). Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy. Alexander Star (ed.). The New York Times Company. Lynch, L. (2013). ‘WikiLeaks after megaleaks: The organization’s impact on journalism and journalism studies’. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 314–34. Papacharissi, Z. and de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2011, September 21–3) ‘The rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter: Coverage of the January 25th Egyptian uprising on Twitter’, Paper presented at 64th World Association for Public Opinion Research Annual Conference, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Sambrook, R. (2010). Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?: The changing face of international news. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Singer, J. B. (2005) ‘The political j-blogger “normalizing” a new media form to fit old norms and practices’, Journalism, 6(2), 173–98. Tumber, H. (2004). ‘Journalists, professionalism, and identification in times of war’, in S. Allan and Barbie Zeilizer (eds), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London: Routledge. pp. 190–205. Zuckerman, E. (2008) ‘International news: Bringing about the Golden Age’, Media Re:public, Berkman Center, Harvard University (https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/ cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/International% 20News_MR.pdf).

3 Digital News Media and Ethnic Minorities Eugenia Siapera

INTRODUCTION A casual stroll through the suburbs of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or indeed any other large Western European city in the 1990s and early 2000s, would have made apparent the existence of ‘dish cities’, or the congregation of satellite dishes in high rise buildings – an indelible mark of the dual existence of immigrant communities and social housing. The visibility of the satellite dishes on immigrant social housing has not gone unnoticed by right-wing intellectuals and politicians. Politicians such as Geert Wilders, for example, point to them as evidence of the impossibility of integration, because ‘satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin’ (Wilders, non-paginated, 20081). In fact, Wilders comes at the end of a long line of conservative political thinking about the kinds of media ethnic audiences consume. In 1997, Hargreaves and Mahdjoub reported that French politicians were voicing their

concerns about the kinds of ‘fundamentalist’ programming that ethnic audiences were allowed to tune into. By 2000, David Morley had concluded that satellite dishes had become symbols of ‘cultural treason’ against host nations (p. 282). Based on this, Lisa Parks (2012) argues that ethnic communities are differentiated not only on the basis of skin colour, religion or language, but also on the basis of the kinds of ‘technologies they consume and the infrastructures to which they connect’ (p.75, italics in the original). Such differentiation is linked to a well-documented preference for own media found in a number of studies, spanning from the US (Ghanem and Wanta, 2001) to Malaysia (Carstens, 2003) and from Spain (AIMC, 2008) to the Netherlands (Ogan, 2001): ethnic minority audiences, whether from Latin America in the US and Spain, from China in Malaysia, from Turkey and Morocco in the Netherlands, all denote a preference for their own media – ‘own’ here denotes either or both in their own language

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and from their country of origin. Similarly, ethnic audiences seem to have a preference for news consumption, or as Christiansen (2004) put it, a ‘hunger for news’. However, the media landscape has been radically changed by the spread and popularity of wireless and portable media. This has drastically altered questions of visibility and social differentiation, although some political concerns remain unchanged. To an extent, the shift to wireless technologies has rendered invisible this once highly visible preference for own media. In this respect, the new media ecosystem mystifies media use by ethnic audiences. This, coupled with the new media ecosystem’s tendency towards personalization and customization (Thurman, 2011), conspire, as it were, to hide and diminish the communal and community elements of ethnic media use and consumption and conversely the lines of differentiation between ethnic minority and majority audiences/media users. While minority audiences’ new media use is hidden political concerns, linked to the post 9/11 climate, remain. Typically, it is only in highly untypical situations of radicalization by fundamentalist groups that we get to hear or talk about ethnic media consumption and this tends to skew the whole picture. On the other hand, identifying and studying media use by ethnic minority audiences is fraught with problems. Conceptualizing ethnic audiences as distinct and concrete categories may end up essentializing such groups, especially if such conceptualizations do not address the dynamic character of identity formation on the one hand, and the active ways in which various audiences engage with and socialize media objects and texts on the other (Madianou, 2012). To avoid this, while also allowing for researching patterns among communities, Madianou (2012) suggests a dual strategy: first, a focus on the (shifting) boundaries between groups rather than on what such groups are meant to contain, and second, a look at the various discourses of people/audiences themselves. A crucial insight offered by Madianou (2005)

is that news media can operate as boundarymaking devices, by (mis)representing communities and cultures. She reports (2005) that while most media use and consumption by ethnic minority audiences is ‘banal’, or indistinguishable from majority audiences, when they themselves, or their countries of origin, feature in news reports, the patterns change, the boundaries are drawn, and ethnic minority audiences assume their ethnic identities. This chapter undertakes a review of relevant studies of online news media use and consumption by ethnic minority audiences2 with a view to de-mystify and to an extent reveal the various relationships and articulations of digital news and audiences/users from ethnic minority backgrounds. Such a discussion will be incomplete if it does not include a discussion of how ethnic minority audiences are, in a sense, pre-figured and circumscribed by state policies and discourses, and media corporate practices. This chapter therefore begins with a discussion of how ethnic minority audiences are constructed from a political economic point of view, and then moves on to discuss their news consumption. Online news consumption, however, is but one kind of online practice; news production by ethnic minorities is another practice, integral to new media use. The second section of this chapter will therefore also look at the various news content production practices by ethnic minorities. All in all, a mixed and complex picture is emerging, where fragmentation and polarization coexists with boundary breaking practices, community building, bridging and political participation.

CIRCUMSCRIBING ETHNIC MINORITY AUDIENCES There are at least three distinct reference points which seek to contain ethnic minority audiences/users, especially in policy-related

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circles. The first follows on the heels of the NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) debates of the 1980s, also known as the MacBride Report (1980). It focuses on the lack of equality and parity between developed and developing nations when it comes to media and technological flows, and within nations, on the lack of parity across different ethnic communities in terms of access to, and representations in, the media. We can refer to this point as the equalization or parity point, and its main association is with policies seeking to understand and address the various digital divides between different ethnic communities, majority and minority ones. Second, the post 9/11 world saw a rise in the racialized security-based discourses about migrants (Ibrahim, 2005) and a related shift towards securitized migration policies (Fauser, 2006) that has all but adversely affected policies on ethnic minority audiences, now constructed as potential security threats. Securitization can be associated with heightened surveillance and monitoring of some groups in online environments. Third, audiences, as Dallas Smythe (1981) convincingly argued, are first and foremost constructed and understood as commodities. Once assembled, audience commodities are then sold to advertisers and this constitutes the main source of income for advertising-based media. From this perspective, the impetus for ethnic audiences to be assembled together is a financial one, and the main discourse associated with this is a marketing discourse. This section will examine these three reference points and their associated discourses, the equalizing, commodification, and securitization discourses, and discuss their implications for ethnic minority audiences of online news.

Equality and parity The NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) focused on

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the disparities in the flows of media and communication contents, but also on access to technical infrastructures and their impact on the production and consumption of media and communication contents. The report, which insisted on the democratization of communication, was unsuccessful in enlisting the cooperation of the USA, and ultimately failed to be widely adopted as policy (Calabrese, 2005). The NWICO mantle passed to WSIS, the World Summit for the Information Society. It sought to intervene in the shaping of the future information society by ensuring that any disparities in terms of access to information and technological infrastructures were dealt with. While neither initiative was particularly successful in terms of policy, they both succeeded in raising awareness of such disparities and their potential implications. By the early 2000s, the notion of digital divide had found its way into policy debates, with OECD (2001) and Pew Internet & American Life Project (Lenhart, 2003) reporting ethnicity as one of the relevant demographic categories. Specifically, these surveys showed that some ethnic groups had more widespread access to the internet as opposed to others. In the context of the US, for example, Pew reported that in 2003, 55 per cent and 46 per cent of Black and Hispanic Americans respectively were not online, compared to 40 per cent of White Americans, and this disparity was present across all income groups within the ethnic minority communities. More recent surveys, however, show that the gap has closed, and the difference between ethnic groups in the USA is no longer present. On the other hand, new divides have emerged, most notably, in terms of modes of connection and associated new media. Ten years on, in 2013, Pew reported two kinds of divides based on ethnicity and race: the first concerns the ways in which different ethnicities access the internet (Rainie, 2013; Smith, 2014) and the second concerns the kinds of platforms different ethnicities use (Duggan

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and Smith, 2013). The majority of Black Americans access the internet from mobile devices, and especially from phones, compared to the majority of White Americans, who access it through home broadband subscriptions. Black Americans are also more likely to use Twitter (29 per cent) compared to their White and Hispanic counterparts (19 percent and 16 per cent respectively). Such findings indicate a closing gap in terms of access and a consistent gap in terms of uses and practices. Accessing the internet through a mobile device, for example, restricts the kinds of practices one can engage in: it is difficult to fill in a job application on a phone (Washington, 2011), write essays or download and read detailed news reports. On the other hand, research suggests that since Twitter’s importance as a news medium is rising, it can represent an opportunity for journalists and news producers to reach this demographic (Brown et  al., 2011). While it is unclear whether this opportunity has been grasped, the question of divides haunts discussions of ethnic media audiences, especially since there few policies that explicitly attempt to bridge such divides. This is because, following the death of NWICO, informational divides and inequalities in communication were left to the market to sort them out.

Commodification The commodification of ethnic media audiences is therefore the result of the transfer of state responsibility to the market. Ethnic minority audiences’ informational and communicational needs will be met by the market which sees them as niches of potential customers, in what appears to be a win–win situation. Ethnic minority audiences can be targeted by advertisers who then – given a positive audience response – make ethnic media sustainable. Indeed, the ethnic media model, which relies on niche audiences, is a successful one, given the growth and popularity of news outlets catering to specific

ethnic communities (Georgiou, 2005; Husband, 2005). In doing so, they allow for more diversity in the public sphere, while also providing more depth and multiplicity in the representations of ethnic minority groups. Notwithstanding problems of fragmentation, Deuze (2006) argues that the success of this model is also down to its resonance with the shift towards a more participatory culture associated with the new media and the blurring between the production and consumption aspects. However, the success of the ethnic media model is associated with a rise in its market value. This is how an article in Forbes magazine describes ethnic media: ‘Ethnic media and advertising is the fastest-growing and most promising force to reckon with, understand and adapt to. That is the reality, and in it sits-pretty many lucrative and high-impact entrepreneurial opportunities’. (Prashar, 2014, non-paginated). This ‘elusive but very lucrative market’ (2014, non-paginated) has led to considerable consolidation in the area of ethnic media, at least in the USA. Corporations such as Fox International, a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox, own MundoFox and Fox News Latino, while AOL owns HuffPost LatinoVoices. (Guskin and Anderson, 2014). Moreover, the ethnic media model has given rise to a related industry of intermediaries, who ‘know’ and ‘understand’ ethnic markets thereby mediating between advertisers and ethnic market niches. For example, Ethnic Media Ltd (www.ethnicmedia.ie) is an Irish company which connects advertisers with ethnic audiences, thereby allowing Aer Lingus, Ryan Air or Vodafone to connect with Romanians or Filipinos living in Ireland through advertising in websites that such communities use. In January 2013, John DiNapoli, the founder of Multicultural and Ethnic Media Sales (MEMS), wrote an article for the Guardian Media Network arguing that advertisers ignore 14 per cent of the UK consumers, i.e. the ethnic market; MEMS, he wrote, covers over 400 ethnic websites, along with broadcasting channels

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and print media (DiNapoli, 2013). A year later, in January 2014, DiNapoli’s firm was bought by BSkyB. The proliferation of the ethnic media model is therefore predicated not only on the value of diversity but also on the value of the ethnic dollar, euro or pound. Such commodification may focus on ethnic minority publics but on the other hand, the increasing concentration of ethnic media and marketing agencies betrays a superficial and market-­oriented attention that fails to resolve or address deeply ingrained inequalities.

Surveillance and securitization While policies that address inequalities may be scarce, new policies dealing with purported threats posed by ethnic minority audiences seem to abound. Such policies rest on the securitization of such audiences. Broadly speaking, securitization in political science refers to the processes by which an object is designated as an existential threat and therefore removed from the ordinary sphere of politics (Buzan et al., 1998). Once this is accomplished, usually through a series of speech acts, then extraordinary measures and policies can apply. Ethnic minority communities have increasingly become the target of securitization in multiple ways. Fauser (2006) describes at least three kinds of threats attributed to migrant communities in the context of European countries: terrorism, health and crime. Fauser argues that this has had the effect of justifying increasingly stringent migration policies in the EU, but from the current perspective of equal importance is that securitization has led to the justification of increased surveillance and monitoring of the activities of minority communities. While theorists such as Lyon (2001) have argued that no one is exempt, some groups are made the target of more intense surveillance. This kind of surveillance, and related policies, such as racial profiling, tends to

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take place in the streets, shop, airports or in other words in the physical environment (Gross and Livingston, 2002), but we have much less information on surveillance of ethnic minority communities in online environments. It is clear, however, that online surveillance is on the one hand increasingly prevalent, and on the other it assumes multiple forms. The notion of the Panopticon, a design that allows the constant watching and monitoring of bodies, conceived by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, has now been realized as an electronic superpanopticon (Lyon, 2001: 108), where everyone is subjected to constant monitoring, and the continuous collection and storage of information about themselves and others. For Lyon, this surveillance and the massive databases that emerge, lead to an intensification of sorting and techniques of sorting, whereby people are classified and sorted into various categories, with a view, ultimately, to manage their behaviours. Once in place, surveillance techniques are subject to what is known as ‘function creep’, the tendency to expand and cover other domains and fulfill other functions (Winner, 1977). This suggests that once such databases with surveillance data are assembled, they may be used for a variety of purposes, while persons can be classified and re-categorized in a variety of ways. While Panopticon refers to a top-down form of surveillance, which ultimately rests on the idea that people internalize and reproduce disciplinary forms of control (Foucault, 1995), theorists have added two more forms of surveillance. Bauman (1999) makes use of Mathiesen’s (1997) notion of the Synopticon, which refers to the idea that people are themselves the watchers of a few select persons, such as celebrities and politicians; this form of surveillance is exemplified by the mass media, and it rests not on coercion or the internalization of coercion, but on seduction. Next to the panopticon and the synopticon Andrejevic (2002) added a third form, lateral surveillance, or the surveillance of

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each other, which rests on the idea that we survey and monitor one another in online environments. As the NSA revelations of 2013 showed, superpanopticon techniques are ongoing, and ethnic community members are specifically targeted (Greenwald and Hussain, 2014). Furthermore, a popular trope refers to the possibility that such communities are seduced by extremists. Radicalization then is seen as a form of seduction and this is used to justify lateral surveillance, i.e. calls for online vigilance when it comes to actions of specific minority members. It seems that all three forms of surveillance are applied on the online activities of ethnic minorities. For example, in a report prepared for the US Homeland Security Project, Neumann (2012) suggests that monitoring and analytical techniques such as sentiment, network and textual analysis, of relevant websites, blogs and social media feeds, offer important strategic and tactical intelligence. Such monitoring and mining of ethnic media audiences’ online practices does not necessarily take place through NSA-style techniques; anyone who comes across contents they think are extremist, violent, or offensive can report them either to the social media platforms through the relevant buttons, or directly to the police. Lateral surveillance is ongoing in the context of social media and ethnic minorities are likely to be subjected to it more intensely given the operation of racial profiling. This overview of the ways in which ethnic minority publics are circumscribed from the top down shows the presence of tensions that feed into the relationships of these publics with the news media. The commodification and securitization of ethnic minority publics may lead to considerable distrust and cynicism, while continuing inequalities in access, uses and literacies feed into digital practices with ambiguous results. The next section will explore how ethnic minority publics respond and push the boundaries imposed on them from the outset.

ETHNIC MINORITY NEWS PRACTICES: MOBILIZATION COUNTER-FLOWS, AND BRIDGING It is widely accepted that the new/social media have ushered in a new kind of relationship between media and publics, one which does not respect traditional lines drawn between producers, consumers and users of media. Axel Bruns (2008) has coined the term ‘produser’ to refer to this kind of work undertaken by new media users, who both produce contents and use such media. Although Bruns primarily referred to the kind of peer-to-peer collaborative work that takes place in, for example, Wikipedia, others referred to the more journalistic kind of work undertaken by citizens. Stuart Allan (2013) argues that citizen witnessing is in many ways a more appropriate term to apprehend the role of citizens in the production of news, especially in times of crisis. Such citizen witnessing and, more broadly, user contents are not, however, always well received. For example, Hermida and Thurman (2008) report on the difficulties and tensions between citizen/amateur and professional journalistic cultures.

Diasporic news production and mobilization There is little doubt that the internet offers great communicative opportunities to minority publics. It enables, as Castells (2009) argued, the creation and diffusion of horizontal communication networks, and therefore allows previously dispersed publics or communities to come together. This has been exceptionally opportune for ethnic minority publics, because it enables diasporas to come together. Brinkerhoff (2009) documents the multiple ways in which this coming together infuses such publics with new ideas, norms and ethics, while conversely some of the chapters in Alonso and Oiarzabal (2010) document the links between diasporic online websites and nationalism at a distance.

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As with discussions of citizen and professional journalism, discussions on diasporic online publics show tensions and lacunae. Ethnic minority publics may act as producers of news and relevant information, but this practice then creates new divisions within and between communities. Moreover, online ethnic minority publics may act as bridges between their ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries (Zuckerman, 2013) but often, in doing so, expose themselves to intense surveillance. Yet relevant statistics, where available, show that most ethnic minority use is ‘banal’ in the sense that it does not differ from that of majority publics; in this sense, it consists of personalized news feeds and mass self-communication through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Occasionally, however, we can trace the creation of new affinities, commonalities and solidarities, which may be ad hoc, but taken together, may form the seeds for the creation of a new relationship between majority/minority publics, social media and journalism. Diasporic websites, understood as produced by, and addressed to, diaspora members have exploded in numbers, so much so that there are few if any ethnic communities that are not served by at least one. Bozdag et al. (2012) list a series of diasporic media at the disposal of ethnic minority audiences in Germany, including news sites, community forums, entertainment, video games, and music outlets. None of this should come as a surprise, because, as Diminescu (2008) noted, migrants are at the forefront of technological adoption and use. To understand how ethnic minority audiences navigate the complex terrain of diasporic, satellite, and mainstream, majority culture media, Bozdag et al. (2012) argue that their appropriation must be understood in terms of the orientation of the members of ethnic communities. They developed a typology, which includes ethnooriented, world-oriented and origin-oriented migrants, which prioritize media and news from the diaspora, from the world at large

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and from their country of origin respectively. Their findings suggest that those migrants who are considered ethno-oriented, i.e. interested in the diaspora itself and in developments and news from within the diaspora, are more likely to use diasporic media. Although this argument is rather cyclical – users interested in the diaspora are more likely to consume diasporic media – its value lies in showing the specificity of diasporic media, to which Bozdag et  al. (2012) refer as the focus of diasporic communicative networking. This is because such media provide news and information that address the needs of specific communities in specific localities – a version of hyperlocal journalism but which addresses a specific kind of community. The news and information contributed appears in different languages, so that more recent migrants can understand it. Some of the news published refers to useful information regarding for example, work permits or language lessons, but which cannot be found elsewhere. This is precisely why such diasporic media become foci in ethnic minority communities. Bozdag et  al. (2012) further refer to the voluntary or semi-professional journalism undertaken by ethnic minority members, who produce news and write views from their own perspective. This sharing of news and experiences is a common element of diasporic websites, as also noted by Trandafoiu (2013), who points to the ways in which such sharing contributes to the formation of distinct migrant diasporic identities. These then can occasionally mobilize for political goals. For example, Trandafoiu’s Romanian informants mobilized in order to address the stigma attached to their communities through mainstream media coverage of Romanian migrants. Other research similarly shows how online users post news and call to action both for matters that concern their lives in the diaspora as well as developments in their country of origin. For example, Chan (2010) showed that the Chinese diaspora in Singapore posted

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news on the Sars epidemic and subsequently mobilized against, and criticized Singaporean politicians for their stance towards China and the epidemic. Siapera and Veikou (2013) found that during the Arab Spring mobilizations, Arab migrants in Athens posted news of developments in their home countries before these were picked up by the Greek media, and also mobilized support for those involved in the protests. In some respects, such practices can qualify as long-distance nationalism. More clear examples are found in the work of Bernal (2010) and Shichor (2010) who focused on the Eritrean and Uyghur diasporas respectively. Bernal looked at a website called Dehai, which in Tigrinya – the dominant Eritrean language – means both ‘news’ and ‘voice’. Bernal (2010) reports that through Dehai, Eritreans mobilized in support of their country of origin in the border war with Ethiopia, coordinated fund-raising actions, published news concerning Eritrea and Eritreans, and debated on their home country’s political situation. In so doing, Bernal argues, Dehai was nationalist in scope and orientation. Similar findings are reported by Shichor (2010), who reports that diasporic Uyghurs were involved in online national liberation efforts and in the promotion of their distinct national identity – this was primarily accomplished through reporting and discussing news and developments in their homeland. These studies show that such long-distance nationalism is especially important at times of crisis in the homeland, and can then feed into diasporic digital practices.

Counter-flows While the direction and dominant flow of news production practices seems to be one from the home country to, and for, the diaspora, we should point to the concurrent existence and circulation of counter-flows: diasporic news practices that feed back to the homeland. Some of the practices outlined

above may also contribute to shifts in practices and dominant ways of thinking in the homeland. For example, Brinkerhoff (2009) shows how diasporic Afghans make use of, and diffuse, ideas and values revolving around notions such as participation, justice, transparency and accountability, actively seeking to influence their homeland’s politics. Informants in Siapera and Veikou (2013) reflect on the freedom of speech they encountered in a European context, and of which they regularly speak to their friends and family in the MENA region. Kperogi (2008) has shown how news stories on Nigeria were broken by Nigerians in diaspora through Nigerian diasporic sites. The importance of Kperogi’s findings is to be found not only in the role of diasporic citizen journalism as investigative journalism, but also in the impact that such journalism has on the homeland. In the cases described by Kperogi, US-based online news outlets such as Elendu Reports, Sahara Reporters and the Times of Nigeria broke news that led to resignations of government officials back home. Moreover, their reports were used by the Nigerian press, who otherwise would have had to rely on international news agencies. As Kperogi put it, ‘these diaspora news outlets have gone beyond being instruments for the construction of subjectivity in the migratory settings of their owners to being active participants in the domestic politics of the homeland’ (2008: 79–80).

Bridging Another set of practices, that represent a more complex and multidirectional kind of flow, is to be found in the bridging work of some ethnic minority members who seek to provide insights into various identities, events, cultural practices and so on with a view to increase understanding. The term was introduced by the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan who argued that ‘Iranian weblogs are like bridges linking men and

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women, young and old, politicians and people, Iranians and the world’. (Alternet. org, Feb 21, 2005). These ideas were subsequently taken on and elaborated further by Ethan Zuckerman (2008; 2013). Zuckerman refers to bridge bloggers as “people who are building connections between people from different cultures via their online work” (2008, n.p.). Such bridge bloggers are familiar with the cultures they are bridging and offer information, explanations, guidance, and news one culture to another. Bridging is linking cultures and fostering understanding, and as such it is valuable work. This is clearly shown by the work of Global Voices, co-founded by Zuckerman, which curates, verifies and translates trending news from blogs, independent press and social media of 167 countries. This kind of bridging work is undertaken more informally by others especially in times of crisis; for example, the well-known blog by Salam Pax ‘Where is Raed?’ explained in English what it was like to live through the 2003 war in Iraq from the point of view of a local person. Similar bridging work was undertaken by several bloggers during the Arab Spring, and more recently by bloggers such as Maryam Alkhawaja, a Bahraini human rights activist and co-director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, whose tweets in English on Bahrain are providing important information on political and socio-cultural developments there. In their work, Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti (2013) refer to brokering, a similar practice in which diaspora members provide links between witnesses in their home country and mainstream media. Specifically, focusing on the Syrian diaspora, they argue that such brokers (a) create the necessary communication infrastructure for linking Syrian protesters to the rest of the world, for example through social media pages, Skype communications, video recordings and so on; (b) manage messages in order to bridge social media and mainstream media; and (c) act as liaisons and cultural translators (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013).

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Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti understand that those involved in such practices already have a stake in the process, as they seek to influence public opinion abroad in support of their cause. All these practices of diasporic audiences reveal fault lines and tensions. One set of tensions is to be found within communities themselves while another is located between ethnic minority communities and mainstream media. Looking at the explicitly politicized news practices of some ethnic groups, especially those caught up in conflict, tensions are to be expected. For example, the US and UK Middle East policies and the war in Iraq are revealing tensions between those community members that are critical of such policies and those who support them. These opposing views then give rise to opposing blogs, websites, and social media feeds. While these may be seen as part of a vibrant public sphere, the internet, and social media more specifically, introduce shifts in the visibility of certain parts of the community. Those more visible in social media may not necessarily reflect the positions of the largely silent majority. In the Arab Spring, for example, social media users were ‘young, urban, relatively well educated individuals’ (Howard et  al., 2011), therefore representing a very specific demographic. It is to be expected that those with higher levels of digital literacy are more likely to dominate the social media sphere, at least in terms of creating and posting content. Some are already working as journalists and emerge as media personalities in their own right; a case in point is Mona Eltahawy, the Egyptian American journalist, whose voice was influential in gathering support for the Egyptian revolution in 2011. In the case of Syria, where the situation is far more complex, the work of bridging is more contentious in political terms. Indeed, it is unclear where bridging stops and propaganda begins especially as such online work may be directed primarily towards second generation diaspora members. Another issue with bridging

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concerns the extent to which it really does provide links to other parts of the community: Siapera (2011) reports that bridge blogs often form defined networks of rather strong (i.e. multiple and redundant) links rather than bridges between networks. If bridge blogs are only actually read by like-minded people then are they still bridging? Nevertheless, bridging work is necessary, as there are clear tensions between mainstream media coverage and representation of events and identities and those found among ethnic minority members. These tensions are explained in detail in the work of Madianou (2005), who shows how members of the Turkish minority in Greece became polarized and angry when they viewed unfair and prejudiced representations of themselves in mainstream Greek media. Similar findings are reported by Matar’s (2007) study of Palestinians in London who felt that the political issue of Palestine was unfairly covered by mainstream media. Since the rise of social media, however, some of these concerns may be alleviated given the diversity of voices found online. But such diversity and pluralism is put to question, because, as Kperogi (2011) argues, mainstream corporate media are colonizing such spaces, through hegemonically imposing professional norms and values. His analysis of CNN’s iReport shows that citizen-based news and reports are re-ordered on the basis of corporate online news values such as the ‘newsiest’ news, the most shared, the most commented, and so on. In doing so, alternative viewpoints are coopted and reordered in ways commensurable with corporate interests, while paying lip service to diversity and inclusivity. Witnessing, from this point of view, is little more than free labour for large media corporations. On the other hand, Skjerdal (2011) points to the mobilization of professional norms by ethnic minority citizen-journalists in order to legitimate their online news work even when this work is oriented towards political activism and therefore in contrast with norms such as objectivity and

autonomy. In these terms, it seems that tensions between ethnic minority citizens, citizen journalists, and mainstream media can be resolved via cooptation or via strategic mobilization of certain journalistic repertoires.

‘Banal’ consumption: when does identity matter? However, by far the most common online practices of ethnic minority online users are more banal, in the sense that they read and comment on rather than produce or broker the news, and in this respect they do not differ from mainstream audiences. There are, though, some differences between minority and mainstream audiences. In the UK for example, the 2013 report by UK media regulator Ofcom shows that ethnic minority group members tend to view online news and newspaper sites more than the general population, although there were considerable differences between different groups: 34 and 31 per cent respectively of Indian and Black African ethnic minority members reported visiting news sites (other than newspaper and magazine sites) compared to 21 and 23 per cent of Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean members respectively while the GB average was 27 per cent. The same pattern is encountered in newspaper sites: 36 and 37 per cent respectively of Indian and Black African community members reported visiting newspaper sites compared again to 26 and 18 per cent of Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean community members, when the GB average is 22 per cent (Ofcom, 2013). These numbers seem to support Christiansen’s (2004) contention that some ethnic minority communities have a ‘hunger for news’. A detailed survey by The Media Insight Project (2012) is revealing of the ethnic online audience dynamics in the US: Black and Hispanic Americans are less likely than Whites to access news on their computers (62 and 56 per cent compared to 72 per cent% respectively); they are however, more

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likely to use their mobile phone for news: 75 and 64 per cent respectively compared to only 53 per cent of White Americans. Black Americans are more like to have signed up for a news alert than either Hispanic or White Americans with 58 per cent having done so compared to 46 and 42 per cent of Hispanic and White Americans. However, both Black and Hispanic Americans are sceptical of the coverage their communities receive, trusting more news sources and media from within their communities. A Pew study on social media and the news reported that while all ethnic groups access news via social media, Whites are more likely than non-Whites to use Facebook and Twitter for the their news – 63 per cent versus 37 per cent respectively for Facebook and 57 and 43 per cent respectively for Twitter (Holcomb et al., 2013). This suggests that notwithstanding the greater diffusion of Twitter among Black Americans, it is not used for viewing news, which contrasts with Brown et al.’s (2011) expectations that Twitter will be used to reach such news audiences. Such findings indicate that there are some differences in online news consumption practices, but it is difficult to reach any broader conclusions, as the overall patterns for all groups are following the same direction towards personalized news feeds, news grazing and news consumption across various media and platforms. Notwithstanding these findings, identity clearly matters, as Madianou (2005) has shown, and ethnic minority publics are more likely to follow news stories that concern members of their communities. For example, the week 14–17 August 2014 included stories such as the police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson and subsequent protests, the death of the actor Robin Williams, the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa, the Russia– Ukraine situation, and US airstrikes in Iraq. In Pew’s study, no story as such stood out, in the sense that all of them attracted equally the attention of the public: the two top stories were the Ferguson protests and the death of Robin Williams, followed closely

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by 27per cent of the public. However, a look at the ethnic constitution of this 27 per cent revealed that it was made up of 54 perc cent Black Americans, 25 per cent White and 18 per cent Hispanic Americans (Pew Research Center, 2014). These findings suggest that while there are no clear patterns concerning the news media and platforms used by different communities, stories that concern community members, and especially those that touch upon questions of justice, will attract a significant proportion of interest from the communities concerned. Taking this point further, there are instances showing that stories drive audience uses and practices, even when their own identities as community members are not directly concerned. In a significant development in the UK, the BBC was under attack for the way in which it covered the Gaza conflict in June and July 2014. Organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an online petition asking the BBC to improve their coverage of the conflict gathered 45,000 signatures3, while there were also street protests outside the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in London and BBC North in Salford. Two issues are significant here: first, that audiences can and do organize against what they see as biased media coverage by a news medium that is meant to remain impartial, and second, that such audiences are not divided by ethnic origin or identity, but include a wide variety of people, united in holding news media more accountable, and in their views on Palestine. In the Pew study of the news on Ferguson, a closer look reveals that audiences were divided on the basis of their political beliefs: while 68 per cent of Democrats (across all ethnic backgrounds) found that the Ferguson protests were about race, 61 per cent of Republicans thought that race was receiving too much attention. Such observations appear to suggest that political orientations and beliefs may be an important mediating factor in news consumption alongside ethnic identity and its salience in the news. As Stroud (2008) has shown,

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people’s political beliefs motivate their media use. This finding, coupled with network analysis research, which shows that networks tend towards homophily (McPherson et  al., 2001), gives rise to questions regarding the relationship between political and ethnic identities and news consumption and use. In other words, we know that people tend to use news media they agree with, and that they tend to link to people of a similar background. However, we do not yet know how political identities are co-articulated with ethnic identities and how this may affect patterns of news consumption. There are at least two possibilities: first, that these tendencies may lead to a kind of infinite regression, such that people will only link to similar others both in terms of identities and political beliefs, and that they will only read news that concern them and that they agree with. This would be a clear case of a ‘filter bubble’ (Pariser, 2011) supporting Sunstein’s (2009) contentions on the fragmentation and balkanization of the public sphere. Or second, that political orientation may form the basis for the building of solidarities across identities. While, as noted earlier, personalized news feeds appear to be the norm, the example of Palestine shows that solidarities can be built on the basis of shared beliefs, leading to the formulation of certain claims to, and demands for accountability by news media (or at least these news media that are funded by the public). A similar example concerns the climate change march in New York, in September 2014. While an estimated 300,000 protesters marched calling for action on climate change, the protests did not receive mainstream media coverage in the US. The march received extensive coverage in blogs and social media, eventually leading to online petitions against (at least) NPR.4 While the demographics of the protesters are not known, evidence from the American Press Institute 2014 survey shows high levels of interest on environmental news among ethnic minorities. Climate change can therefore

constitute another issue uniting audiences. More broadly speaking, however, no clear lines can be drawn across identities, political beliefs and news consumption patterns as we observe both personalized, fragmented and polarized news feeds as well as the existence of cross-over news stories linking and uniting people across identities.

CONCLUSION This chapter examined the various relationships between ethnic minority communities and their news media use or consumption. How do audiences from ethnic minority communities access and use news media in the digital age? In addressing this question, this chapter first looked at the top-down ways in which these activities are described and understood by policymakers and media/commercial companies. Three main reference points and associated discourses are used to understand and circumscribe ethnic minority audiences: the equality/parity reference point, which revolves around questions of equality of access and divisions on media use among different communities; the securitization reference point which is associated with increased surveillance of ethnic minority audiences; and the commodification reference point, which targets ethnic communities for profit. The kinds of boundaries imposed by these reference points therefore include the construction of ethnic minority audiences as lacking parity with mainstream audiences, as involved in suspect activities or vulnerable to radicalization, and as niche markets for news. These top-down constructions are stretched, resisted or ignored by such publics, who engage in various news media related activities. These include practices of bridging between communities, organizing, managing and reading diasporic news sites, brokering news, and contributing to a kind of reversing of news flows from the diaspora to the homeland. The implications of these

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practices are manifold: diasporic news sites can be quite nationalistic in their orientation but they can also contribute to the circulation of new discourses and ideas; bridging and brokering can be valuable ways of disseminating information but they can also become vehicles for propaganda. These practices may also feed into tensions: tensions between and within communities, and between professional and community-based journalists or news producers. However, for the most part, the online news related practices of ethnic minority members are almost identical to those of mainstream audiences. Things change when topics that concern them directly emerge in the news: then studies show a clear divide in terms of interest and interpretation of such news. On the other hand, it may be that political and cultural beliefs are a better predictor for interest in and interpretation of news, and these cut across ethnic identities. More research will be necessary however to show when people meet in solidarity and when fault lines are drawn between different groups. For the time being, we know that ethnic minority audiences for the most part engage in the same kinds of activities as mainstream news audiences, but there are instances when divisions occur and/or are bridged.

NOTES  1  ‘America as the Last Man Standing’, speech delivered on Sep 25, 2008 to the Hudson Institute in New York. Full text available at: http://www. snopes.com/politics/soapbox/wilders.asp  2  Although there are important and on-going debates on the terms audiences, publics and users (see Livingstone, 2005), in this chapter they are used interchangeably, with a tendency to prefer users or publics when referring to the media-related activities by community members themselves and audiences when these activities are described or apprehended by policy makers or commercial companies.  3  The full text of the letter is found here: http:// www.palestinecampaign.org/sign-open-letterbbc/

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 4  IOn Sep 21, Assaf Oron wrote an open letter to the NPR Ombudsman complaining about their lack of coverage of the climate change march – the open letter is found hereavailable at: http://www. dailykos.com/story/2014/09/21/1331465/-I-justsent-this-to-NPR-to-protest-their-shameful-noncoverage-of-Climate-March. The Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos responded in on Oct 3, 2014 – his response is found here. Available at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/ 2014/10/03/351810802/from-the-left-themisguided-criticism-of-npr-s-climate-marchcoverage

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Bruns, Axel (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang. Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Olae and de Wilde, Jaap (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Calabrese, Andrew (2005) ‘The MacBride Report: Its value to a new generation. Quaderns, 21: 19–31. Carstens, Sharon A. (2003) ‘Constructing transnational identities? Mass media and the Malaysian Chinese audience’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26(2), 321–44. Castells, Manuel (2009) Communication Power. Oxford University Press. Chan, Brenda (2010) ‘The Internet and New Chinese Migrants’. In Alonso, Andoni and Oiarzabal, Pedro J. (eds) (2010) Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community. University of Nevada Press, pp. 225–241. Christiansen, Connie C. (2004) ‘News media consumption among immigrants in Europe: The relevance of diaspora’. Ethnicities, 4(2), 185–207. Deuze, Mark (2006) ‘Ethnic media, community media and participatory culture’, Journalism, 7(3): 262–280. Diminescu, Dana, (2008) ‘The connected migrant: an epistemological manifesto’. Social Science Information, 47(4), 565–79. DiNapoli, John (2013) ‘Ignored: the 14% of consumers big firms do not target’, The Guardian, Jan 16. Available at: http://www. theguardian.com/media-network/medianetwork-blog/2013/jan/16/britishadvertisers-ignore-ethnic-minorities Duggan, Maeve and Smith, Aaron Social Media Update 2013. Pew Research Center. Available at: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/ Social-Media-Update.aspx Fauser, Margit (2006) ‘Transnational migration – A national security risk? Securitization of migration policies in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. Center for International Relations, available at: http://pdc.ceu.hu/ archive/00004804/01/rap_i_an_0206a.pdf Foucault, Michel (1995) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Georgiou, Myria (2005) ‘Diasporic media across Europe: Multicultural societies and

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Kperogi, Farooq A. (2008) ‘Guerrillas in cyberia: The transnational alternative online journalism of the Nigerian diasporic public Sphere’, Journal of Global Mass Communication, 1(1/2): 72–87. Kperogi, Farooq A. (2011) ‘Cooperation with the corporation? CNN and the hegemonic cooptation of citizen journalism through iReport. Com’, New Media & Society, 13(2): 314–329. Lenhart, Amanda (2003) The ever-shifting internet population: A new look at access and the digital divide. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available at: http://www. pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/ Reports/2003/PIP_Shifting_Net_Pop_Report. pdf.pdf Livingstone, Sonia (2005) On the relation between audiences and publics. In S. Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere. Bristol: intellect Books pp. 17–41. Lyon, David (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham: Open University Press. Madianou, Mirca (2005) Mediating the nation. London: UCL Press. Madianou, Mirca (2012) ‘Beyond the presumption of identity? Ethnicities, cultures and transnational audiences’. In Nightingale, V. (ed.) (2011) The Handbook of Media Audiences. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 444–58. Matar, Dina (2007) ‘The Palestinians in Britain, news and the politics of recognition’. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2(3), 317–30. Mathiesen, Thomas (1997) ‘The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s Panopticon revisited’, Theoretical Criminology, 1(2): 215–334. MacBride, Seán (1980) Many Voices, One World: Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow: the MacBride Report. Vol. 372. UNESCO, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McPherson, Miller, Smith-Lovin, Lynn, Cook, James M. (2001) ‘Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks’, Annual Review of Sociology, 415–44. Morley, David (2000) Home Territories: Media, mobility and identity. Routledge. Neumann, Peter (2012) Countering Online Radicalization in America, report prepared for the Bipartisan Policy Center. Available at: http://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/

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Smith, Aaron (2014) African Americans and Technology Use: A Demographic Portrait. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/ files/2014/01/African-Americans-andTechnology-Use.pdf Smythe, Dallas W. (1981) ‘On the audience commodity and its work’. In M. G. Durham and D. Kellner (eds) Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Oxford: Blackwell. pp 230–56. Stroud, Natalie J. (2008) ‘Media use and political predispositions: Revisiting the concept of selective exposure’. Political Behavior, 30(3), 341–66. Sunstein, Cas R. (2009) Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Media Insight Project (2012) The Personal News Cycle: A Focus on African American and Hispanic News Consumers, available at: http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/ wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Media_ Insight_Rethinking-the-Digital-Divide-inNews-Consumption_FINAL.pdf

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4 The Business of News Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

INTRODUCTION Journalism as we know it has developed intertwined with a particular business, the business of news. Developments in this business have, in turn, simultaneously sustained and constrained journalism. Sustained, because most journalists work for private businesses, accounting for the majority of the news produced and disseminated. Constrained, because the primary aim of these companies has been to make a profit; not the kind of professional accomplishment or public interest goal that motivates many journalists. To understand professional journalism, we therefore have to understand the business of news, a business that has made journalism more autonomous of political forces and civil society forces while making it more dependent on market forces. Journalism, as a distinct kind of professional, vocational, and paid work requires substantial resources, as opposed to various discreet individual ‘acts of journalism’

like bearing witness, documenting, and fact checking. These resources are sometimes provided by the state through public subsidies, public service media, and state ownedand-operated media, or by civil society actors for media associated with political parties, interest groups, religious organizations, community associations, or social movements. But for more than a century, they have, for the most part, been market generated by private media companies providing content to audiences, and selling audiences’ attention to advertisers (Pettegree 2014). Even in the UK, home to the BBC, one of the strongest public service media organizations in the world, analysts estimate that about three-quarters of all investment in news content comes from private sector media operating on a market basis.1 In countries with weaker public media, like the USA, the figure is far higher. To understand how and when this happens we have to see news – in addition to all the other things it is, all the other roles it plays – as a product produced for a market, often by

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private companies in pursuit of profit (Doyle 2013; Hamilton 2004; Picard 2011). Many other factors, including political, technological, and a broad range of social factors – as well as dynamics largely internal to the profession – shape what journalism is, how it operates, and how it changes over time, but the absolutely central role played by private sector media in funding journalism and journalists on a market basis means that we must consider the economic factors if we are to understand the industry fully. Both journalists and Journalism Studies scholars sometimes seem to shy away from doing so. In a way, this is understandable. Journalism as a profession makes its claim on occupational authority, in part, precisely by distancing itself from business considerations (Anderson and Schudson 2009). And Journalism Studies as an academic field is primarily rooted in vocational journalism education, tightly tied to the profession’s self-concept, and to media and communication studies, political science, and sociology – not economics or business and management studies (Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch 2009). But lack of familiarity with the economic underpinnings of journalism is a serious limitation for journalists and journalism scholars alike in terms of understanding the profession, its role in society, its institutional preconditions, and how these are changing. The chapter therefore provides an overview of central aspects of the business of news, how it is changing, and where it is heading. I show how digital media, for all the potential they offer for the practice of journalism, represent a series of serious challenges to journalism as a profession because they undermine the central pillars of business models that have sustained private sector news production in the twentieth century, and so far they offer few new examples of sustainable business models. This is primarily because intense competition between many different kinds of media, in an increasingly convergent media environment, leads to more

dispersed audiences and drives down prices for both content and advertising. This makes it ever harder to cover the high fixed costs associated with professional content production. The changes and immediate implications of the rise of digital are not identical or even necessarily running parallel from country to country, as inherited market structures, varying preferences and regulatory frameworks have shaped the news business in different ways (Levy and Nielsen 2010; OECD 2010; Trappel et al. 2011). Generally, though, these developments point toward an uncertain future where for-profit news media organizations play a relatively reduced role in an environment characterized by growth in entertainment media, social media, and stakeholder media, more communications, including interpersonal as well as strategic PR, and less original news produced by professional journalists (Nielsen 2012). The first part of the chapter introduces basic concepts from media economics and describes the business of news as it operated in high-income democracies toward the end of the twentieth century. The second part demonstrates how the rise of digital media challenges central aspects of twentiethcentury business models at the beginning of the twenty-first century while leaving other economic properties of news unchanged. The third part discusses the likely future implications for the business of news as we move from a mixed media environment toward an increasingly digital media environment.

THE BUSINESS OF NEWS AS WE KNOW IT Private sector news production is a small part of a much larger set of media and entertainment industries including broadcasters and newspapers, book publishers, consumer magazines, film, music, and various kinds of online services. All of these companies compete for our attention as media users, most of

The Business of News

them compete for our money as media consumers, and many of them compete for the opportunity to sell our attention in turn to advertisers. To succeed, they need to balance all three concerns – what will people pay attention to, what might they be willing to pay for, and what will advertisers pay for? With the development of digital media technologies that integrate audio, graphics, text, video, and visuals, companies have to do this while meeting the growing challenge of competing head-on with one another on the same converged platforms. Only a relatively small part of the wider media and entertainment industries invest in news production. A UK study made in 2011 estimated that about nine percent of the combined revenues generated by television, radio, print publishing, and online media were invested in news.2 The percentage varied significantly by sector. The figure for newspaper publishers – who accounted for about two-thirds of total investment in news – was 23 percent, for television broadcasters, 4 percent, and for online media just 2 percent. Similar differences can be seen in other countries (Nielsen 2012; Picard 2011). Thus, while television and digital account for a larger part of the overall media and entertainment industries than newspaper publishers, the business of news is still in practice very much a newspaper business. In the USA, newspapers, even after more than a decade of declining revenues, still accounted for more than sixty percent of all the journalists employed by media companies in 2012. Television and radio broadcasting in combination – a far larger industry in terms of revenue and audience reach – employed 24 percent. The catch-all category ‘other information services’, which covers specialized business news and information service providers like Bloomberg and Reuters, as well as the burgeoning digital media sector including aggregators, syndicators, search engines, and online-only publishers, accounted for about nine percent of all journalists – though Google’s revenues alone surpass the combined revenues of the entire

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US newspaper industry by a considerable margin. The relatively limited share of overall media industry revenues invested in news production reflects not only its particular economics, but also that news forms a relatively limited part of most people’s overall media use. This applies for legacy media like print and broadcasting, where news and current affairs is only a small part of what people read, watch, and listen to. Research in the USA, for example, suggests people spent at most a quarter of their TV viewing time watching news.3 A similar picture is seen in digital media. Estimates vary, but various tracking panel studies and samples of traffic taken directly from internet service providers suggest that people spend on average somewhere between one and at most three percent of their time online accessing news.4 Surveys generally find that people say they frequently access news and that they consider following current affairs interesting and important (see, for example, Newman et  al. 2015). But we should not overestimate how much time, money, and effort people will invest in news (Picard 2011). Interest in news has always been uneven and mixed up with interest in other issues like celebrity gossip and sports. As people have a wider range of media available, they can tailor their media use more closely to their actual interests. Many will therefore consume less news than previously – not because they are less interested, but because they have more – and more appealing – content to choose from (Prior 2007). This kind of substitution of, say, entertainment for news is just one example of how all kind of content and different forms of media compete head-to-head in a wider ‘attention economy’ where media users have to allocate their scarce time amongst an abundant range of media options (Neuman et al. 2012; Taylor 2014). As media users, we typically make two kinds of investments in media content, even if we rarely see them as equivalent (Vogel 2011). First, we make a monetary investment

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as media consumers – the price we pay, unless the content is free at the point of consumption. So we evaluate whether the content in question is worth the price, especially compared to alternatives. Second, we invest some of our time in the content as media users – regardless of whether we pay for it or not, we could have spent this time differently. So we evaluate whether it is worth our while, again compared to alternatives. In economic terms, the opportunity cost of spending time with media (the value of what we could have been doing instead) may well outweigh the monetary cost (the price we pay). But empirical analysis suggests that ‘most people are a lot more willing to waste time than money’ (Okada and Hoch 2004: 313), hence many gravitate toward options that are free at the point of consumption. General interest news can be seen as a particular kind of information goods within the wider market for media and entertainment content.5 From an economic perspective, information goods share several important characteristics that transcend sector differences between broadcasters, newspapers, and online media (Hamilton 2004; Shapiro and Varian 1999; Vogel 2011). These have to do with news production, news as a good, and the market for news. First, news is expensive to produce but cheap to reproduce. News production is thus characterized by what economists term high fixed costs and low variable costs. This can be understood as, respectively, the first-copy cost (including content creation, production, and securing access to distribution networks), versus the cost of serving one more user (Doyle 2013; Hamilton 2004; Picard 2011). The combination of high fixed and low variable costs means that substantial sums are spent in the process of producing content, including time spent researching and reporting a news story and preparing it for publication. These costs are roughly the same irrespective of the number of people who consume the content. After the fixed costs of producing the content are accounted for,

however, the variable costs of distributing it to additional users are relatively low, both for print newspapers (low but not insubstantial), online services (very low), and terrestrial broadcasters (effectively zero once a station is on air). As is the case with many other sectors with high fixed /low variable costs, news production is characterized by considerable economies of scale and economies of scope (Doyle 2013; Shapiro and Varian 1999). The average cost per user served decreases as the audience grows, whether by drawing more people to one platform or by reaching more users across different platforms and titles, because the fixed costs of content production and general overhead can be spread across more users of one (scale) or more platforms/titles (scope). Due to economies of scale, large media companies often have a cost advantage over smaller competitors, just as many media companies operate a portfolio of different titles that share administrative, advertising sales and production costs, and benefit from the economies of scope. Second, news is a non-rivalrous, experience good. It is non-rivalrous in that one person accessing a news story does not prevent someone else from doing so, nor does it diminish the value for others (Hamilton 2004; Shapiro and Varian 1999). This is similar to many other information goods, such as an ebook or a movie, but different from others such as market intelligence that can provide a competitive advantage – and is therefore rivalrous – and from most tangible goods, including ‘private goods’ such as clothes and food and ‘collective goods’ such as drinking water. In addition to being non-rivalrous in this sense, some types of news content, most notably terrestrial radio and television broadcasting, is also non-exclusive in that anyone with a receiver can access content freely once they are made available. Economists call goods that are both non-rivalrous and non-exclusive, ‘public goods’ – clean air, broadcast television, and the sum total of human knowledge. It is important to note that

The Business of News

while it may well be in the public interest, not all news is a public good in this sense. Print newspapers are rarely non-exclusive as access is restricted to those who pay for a copy. Many cable news channels are only available to subscribers; an increasing number of news websites operate various kinds of paywalls. Economists call these ‘club goods’ – access can be controlled, but the number of people accessing the good does not diminish its value for other users. In addition to being non-rivalrous, news is an experience good (Hamilton 2004; Shapiro and Varian 1999). Experience goods are products where value and quality can only be ascertained by actually using them. This is in contrast to ‘search goods’, where value and quality are easily assessed in advance, and ‘credence goods’, which are consumed on trust. When choosing between competing experience goods, consumers normally have to rely on either previews such as movie trailers, recommendations and reviews from other users, or navigate by reputation of a director or actor, for example. News consumption in particular is to a considerable degree based on reputation, on media users navigating through previous experience of a particular brand, whether a news organization or in some cases individual journalists. Increasingly, though, it is driven by people using search engines like Google, and people sharing material and taking recommendations from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As long as media users continue to find satisfying content from providers they are accustomed to, fresh entrants, with no reputation, face substantial obstacles in convincing people to spend their time – let alone their money – on trying something new. Third, the news industry has generally been characterized by market concentration and limited competition within specific markets due to the combination of the mechanics of news production and news as a ‘good’ outlined above (Hamilton 2004; Picard 2011). The combination of high fixed/low variable costs that characterize news production

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generally favors the largest player in a given market, who can spread the high fixed costs of producing content across many users and therefore offer low prices. In addition, they will often be the most attractive platform for advertisers, enabling them to reduce prices for consumers even more. Empirically, media markets tend to be dominated by one or just a few large companies with many smaller firms occupying niche positions (Noam 2013). The precise configuration depends in part on the market size (Shapiro and Varian 1999). In larger markets, the result is often a differentiated product market characterized by monopolistic competition where every competitor offers something clearly distinct and thus enjoys a degree of market power in setting prices for audiences and advertisers. If the market is large enough, and producers effectively differentiated, even relatively small niches can sustain specialized outlets providing a very particular kind of content and catering to a carefully defined audience. This is the structure of many national European newspaper markets that typically offer rightleaning, centrist, and left-leaning broadsheets as well as a financial daily and one or more tabloids each with a distinct identity in the market. It is also the structure of cable television news in the USA where the abolition of the fairness doctrine and the absence of European-style requirements for ‘due impartiality’ in television news means that Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC can each occupy a distinct position, offering news differentiated along broadly-speaking partisan lines ranging from the right through the center to the left, and compete effectively against larger channels like ABC, CBS and NBC. In smaller markets or in markets that are less differentiated, the advantages that accrue to the largest player more often lead to a dominant-firm market, where one company occupies a nearmonopoly position by virtue of the strength of their product and/or the cost advantages that come with economies of scale. This is the structure of most local newspaper markets in both Europe and the USA, just as it

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is the structure of the market for commercial television news in many smaller countries. So while Fox News is phenomenally profitable on the basis of a two percent audience share in the USA, a two percent audience share is not enough to sustain a niche news channel in, say, Denmark. Whether a particular media market is differentiated and characterized by monopolistic competition or effectively dominated by one firm, the ‘experience good’ character of news means consumers who are satisfied with their current news media and who have, through sustained use perhaps, come to identify with its brand find few incentives to switch to a competitor, especially one with a relatively unknown offer. New entrants will have to offer a product that is clearly superior in some way – better, cheaper, more convenient, more fashionable – and find a way of convincing potential consumers of its worth. These dynamics favor incumbents and result in barriers to entry leading to limited competition, especially in local news media markets (Picard 2011). The combination of market concentration and limited effective competition characteristic of many media markets has pros and cons from the point of view of journalism and democracy. The problems are clear enough – the market alone provides less news because of the difficulty of covering high fixed costs, and less diverse news because of the tendencies toward market concentration and the high barriers to entry than we would ideally want – this is a classic example of market failure (Baker 2002). There are advantages, however, at least from the point of view of journalists – market concentration and limited competition is not always adverse to the public interest (Hamilton 2004). For news media, the combination provided three preconditions that have allowed many companies to profit from investments in journalism; (1) a limited supply of editorial content competing for attention, (2) a limited supply of advertising space competing for advertisers’ expenditures, and (3) a considerable ability to

‘bundle’ products so that media users with a preference for one part of the package – such as sports – unwittingly subsidize the production of other parts of the package – such as news. These factors are crucial in the explanation why, though newspaper circulation has been declining for decades, the newspaper business was till the early 2000s still a solid industry with the ability to invest in news production on the basis of considerable revenues, high profits, and solid appeal to investors interested in a relatively safe investment with regular returns – at least in countries like Germany and the USA where it was commercially developed. During the last ten years, however, all three preconditions have come under increased pressure.

THE INCREASINGLY DIGITAL BUSINESS OF NEWS Since the early 2000s, the contours of what has happened to the media industries in most high-income democracies are clear enough. The decades-old decline of print newspaper circulation has accelerated and print advertising revenues have fallen precipitously. Terrestrial television has remained economically robust even as audiences spread out across more channels and the market for pay television has grown. Both, though, face a fraught transition to a future where ondemand streaming to the home as well as to mobile devices will play a much larger role. Finally, digital media of all sorts play an increasing role in terms of media use, consumer spending, and advertising. The US newspaper industry provides the most dramatic illustration of the shift. From 2000 to 2010, print newspaper revenues declined about 50 percent even as television advertising grew about 25 percent, pay television revenues grew about 150 percent, and digital advertising grew by more than 300 percent. The development has been less dramatic in other high-income democracies and there is

The Business of News

significant country-to-country variation (Levy and Nielsen 2010; Trappel et al. 2011), but the direction of travel is broadly the same (Nielsen 2012). Overall, revenues in the media and entertainment industries have not declined. The average household spends an increasing amount on media and communication, especially on hardware and telecommunication services. Advertising expenditure fluctuates with the business cycle and differs substantially from country to country (about 1.5 percent of GDP in the USA versus 0.75 percent in France, see, for example, Vogel 2011) but is generally not declining. What has happened is that audiences and advertising has moved from sectors such as newspapers, that have historically invested in news production, to other sectors like television that invest less, and to new sectors, such as digital, that invest very little. The shift of resources away from newspapers and toward other media has had severe consequences on the number of journalists employed in many countries. From 2000 to 2010, the number of journalists in the USA, as recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, declined by more than twenty percent. As audiences continue to shift and advertisers follow them, the consequences are likely to be even greater in the future. One consequence of this is the overall change in revenues and audience behavior; another is how much the basic dynamics of the business of news as we know it have changed with the rise of digital. As one pair of media economists confidently put it: ‘Technology changes. Economic laws do not’. (Shapiro and Varian 1999: 1–2). Consider again the key characteristics of news production, news as a good, and the market for news outlined above. First, news production is still characterized by relatively high fixed/low variable costs, leading to economies of scale and of scope. The fixed costs involved in news production have generally come down as new technologies enable journalists to work more efficiently and access a greater number of sources

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of information more easily. But even in the case of fast-paced online ‘churnalism’ based on aggregating others’ content, ripping and rewriting stories, or producing ‘listicles’ and the like, the fixed costs incurred in the form of a journalists’ salary are still considerable compared to the variable costs of distributing the content. And good professional journalism still, at the very least, requires time and effort. The variable costs have come down for newspaper publishers online as digital distribution is far cheaper than print distribution. The situation is the opposite for broadcasters, where the variable costs of terrestrial broadcasting are basically zero, whereas streaming video online, although becoming cheaper, is still not free. For example, in 2013, the BBC iPlayer accounted for just 2.3 percent of all hours of BBC content viewed, but about 12 percent of the distribution costs, over GBP30 million.6 Second, news is still a non-rivalrous, experience good. A news story or video clip posted online, like a printed news article or story in a broadcast bulletin, is not diminished by several people accessing it. With both digital and analogue news – and many forms of media more broadly – there are few ways of knowing in advance whether the content in question is worth our time and, potentially, payment without actually consuming it. This means people still, to a great extent, navigate to digital news on the basis of existing habits and brand reputation, though recommendations made by people they trust matter more especially via social media. Many continue to seek out the same sources of news online as they do offline; the most widely used online news sources are still generally the websites of established broadcasters and newspapers (Newman et al. 2015). There are exceptions to this, such as Yahoo! Japan and to a lesser extent some of the Huffington Post sites, but even in countries where new journalistic ventures like Mediapart (in France) and Politico (in the USA) have been growing for years, their reach to an online audience rarely matches those of the largest established media (Newman et al. 2015).

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Third, the market for news has become dramatically more competitive with news media finding themselves in intense direct competition with other media for consumer attention, consumer spending, and advertising budgets. This is arguably the single most important change under way in the business of news. The continued high fixed/ low variable cost structure of producing news and the characteristics of news as an ‘information good’ largely benefit incumbents. But their business models and cost structures are poorly suited to a rapid shift from a situation with limited competition, where they exercise a high degree of market power and command a premium price, to one with increased competition where they exercise less market power and no longer command the same premium. The media market has become more competitive for several reasons. First, the barriers to entry have been reduced because the high fixed costs associated with content production and especially distribution have come down. This has led to a number of new players entering the market, ranging from aggregators over portals publishing wire material to journalistic online-only pure players of various sorts including international, national, and local news sites, many with a niche focus. Second, the barriers to mobility that made it hard for established media operating in one market to enter other markets have also been reduced. This has enabled a range of leading media like the BBC, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times to pursue an international audience across borders without having to overcome the distribution problems associated with print and broadcast and has helped previously primarily regional media like the Washington Post and Süddeutsche Zeitung pursue their national ambitions. Third, and most importantly, the same digital platforms that reduce the barriers to entry for start-ups and the barriers to mobility for existing companies have also enabled the rise of a whole range of new kinds of media companies that compete with those established companies for audience attention and advertisers, even

though they themselves invest little if anything in news production – most importantly search engines like Google, social networking sites like Facebook, classified sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, and increasingly in the future, providers of various specialized mobile applications. Competition from non-news media for people’s attention, media spending, and advertising budgets is the most important new form of competition faced by most news media. The increasingly digital business of news is thus still a business characterized by high fixed/low variable costs, and a business dealing in information goods that are generally non-rivalrous, experience goods. But media market have changed from having relatively limited competition to increasingly intense competition between old and new media operating on the same digital platforms. As basic economic theory would predict, increased competition has driven down prices for both audiences and advertisers, as fewer media content companies enjoy a position of market power where they can dictate prices and more of them, therefore, price their content at close to the marginal cost of serving one more customer. When it comes to digital, that cost is close to zero. Because transaction costs, as well as the psychological difference between paying nothing and paying even $0.01 for something (the so-called ‘penny gap’) complicate micropayments, the price at the point of consumption has therefore also generally been zero. Free advertising-supported content has long worked well for terrestrial television. But some aspects of how digital media are changing the business of news suggest that it will not necessarily work for news provision online as advertising itself is changing. Advertising used to be based on a limited number of media companies selling their audiences’ attention to a large number of advertisers. ‘Eyeballs’ – exposure – were the coin of trade and advertisers had a limited number of options (Napoli 2011). Well into the 2000s, economists analyzing

The Business of News

advertising markets still operated on the assumption that individual media companies had monopoly control over access to their audience, giving them leverage with those wishing to advertise (Bagwell 2007). Some forms of advertising are still sold like this, but, increasingly, digital advertising is bought through advertising networks and advertising exchanges that sell to particular audiences spread across a wide range of sites and targeted on the basis of increasingly detailed personal information collected online (Turow 2011). To reach local sports fans, for example, you no longer have to go via the local newspaper or local television station. Instead, you can specify the group you want to reach and see your ads appear across the various websites, national media, search engines, social media, and fan spaces the network can access. And the number of sites on which one can advertise has grown exponentially, presenting media companies with new competitors, advertisers with new opportunities, and an almost infinite amount of advertising inventory available online (Taylor 2014). This development means news media do not have the privileged position online that they used to have offline, and the audience attention they have to sell is no longer as valuable as it used to be. In the 1990s, advertising agencies and media companies imagined digital ads might reach a CPM (cost per mille, the cost per thousand views) of US$80, as these ads, which could be more interactive, targeted, and timely than existing formats, were in many ways superior to broadcast or print advertising (Turow 2011: 44). As the growth in supply has outpaced the growth in demand, this is not how things have developed. A few very select target demographics online are highly valuable, as are high ‘conversion rates’ through advertisements that people actually click on. But mere exposure, sold and bought in bulk, is not.7 Comparisons of CPMs across platforms and genres are not like-for-like comparisons and often, reliable data is not available. However,

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figures from the USA in 2011 on CPMs for different media still give a sense of how different the rates for digital advertising are from offline advertising, with average CPMs of $60 for print newspapers, $23 for primetime network television, between $3.50 and $2.50 for generic online advertising, $0.75 for mobile display advertising, and just $0.56 per thousand impressions on social networking sites.8 The industry saying that analogue dollars (100 cents) turn into digital dimes (10 cents) and mobile pennies (1 cent) is not strictly speaking precise, but does capture the stark difference in advertising rates between different platforms. The low price of most online advertising is what makes it hard to cover the fixed costs associated with content production on the basis of using advertising alone. This led a growing number of newspapers to explore other potential revenue sources and launch various forms of paywall from 2010 (Hamburger Abendblatt in Germany, Le Figaro in France, the Times in the UK) and 2011 (the New York Times in the USA) onward. By 2013, 70 percent of American daily newspapers had some sort of pay model as part of their digital business, up from virtually zero in 2009. Some online-only news sites also rely on pay models for large parts of their revenues, including the investigative journalism site Mediapart in France. It is not yet clear how well pay models are working for news organizations, or whether the rapid rise of smartphones and tablets will provide a more hospitable environment for pay models, as some have suggested (Nel and Westlund 2012). Little detailed data is available on the number of paying subscribers and whether the sales revenues generated outweigh the advertising revenues lost. Surveys suggest that the percentage of people paying for news is generally in the low single-digits but (slowly) growing, and only a minority report that people might pay in the future (see, for example, Newman et al. 2015). Still, Arianna Huffington’s assertion in 2009 that ‘the paywall is history’ seems premature.9

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The change toward a radically more competitive market has put all three of the outlined preconditions of legacy news media profitability under considerable pressure as the amount of content of varying quality and kind has greatly expanded, the supply of advertising, especially so-called ‘content-less advertising’ via search engines and social networking sites has exploded, and the ability to ‘bundle’ products has eroded on many digital platforms.10 These changes have reduced the revenues and profit margins of existing private news providers and made it hard for new journalistic start-ups to break even on a commercial basis. They have generally led companies to cut costs, including their investment in journalism. These developments are great news for audiences and advertisers alike. Media users can far more efficiently access precisely the content they prefer, and often get it for free, and advertisers can target their appeals more precisely to the particular people they want to reach. They are not, however, good news for the business of news as we know it, because they make it hard to cover the fixed costs associated with content production. Convergent markets are dominated by a few large companies, and while some of them are content companies, they are rarely news media companies, who account for a small and shrinking percentage of media use, consumer spending, and advertising. Google and Facebook, for example, alone capture nearly half of global digital advertising, leaving everyone else to fight for the other half. While the idea of a ‘long tail’ nurturing a large number of small niche media producing content tailored to specific communities has occasioned much optimism, the evidence that this works in practice is limited (Vogel 2011: 50). The business of digital news production is therefore challenging both for legacy news media incumbents and for start-ups. If one of the main problems of earlier media markets was the low level of effective competition characteristic of differentiated-product

markets and especially dominant-firm markets, an increasing problem in today’s media markets may, perversely, be the very high level of effective competition, especially in areas where neither audiences nor advertisers perceive the media on offer as significantly different from each other, and hence see them as direct substitutes. This points toward the ‘commodification’ of news, a situation where media users have many sources of news to choose from, rightly or wrongly see no qualitative difference between them, and where the competing providers each offer content at the marginal cost of serving one more user – online effectively zero. The problem with this, according to Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, is simple: ‘information commodity markets don’t work’ (1998: 23). Companies cannot cover the fixed costs of content production if competition drives prices down to the marginal cost. As early as the 1990s, business professor Carl Shapiro and media economist Hal Varian suggested that only two kinds of companies would thrive in the long run in such an environment (Shapiro and Varian 1999). First, companies that develop highly differentiated products that audiences and/or advertisers are willing to pay a premium price for, even when they have alternatives available. This is often coupled with pay models and is the strategy pursued by an increasing number of the most well-known news organizations across the world, including up-market titles like the New York Times, exclusive titles including financial newspapers, and investigative journalism start-ups like Mediapart. It is also pursued by some of the most popular European tabloid newspapers, like Bild in Germany and the Sun in the UK. The challenge here is to convince users not simply that your product is good, but that it is so much better than the many often free alternatives available, that they should pay you. Second companies that succeed in reaching such a big audience that their volume can make up for what they lose in terms of revenue per user. This strategy is often coupled

The Business of News

with a heavy emphasis on sensationalist and infotainment-like focus, shareable content, and a high level of aggregation and re-use of other people’s content to keep production costs low. It is the strategy pursued by some newspaper titles like the Mail Online and new start-ups like BuzzFeed and Gawker Media. Even with very large numbers of online users, the challenge here is to cover the fixed costs of content production given the low rates paid for digital advertising. In both cases, there is also a question of whether news providers can reach the critical mass necessary to break even. Both the New York Times, with its product differentiation and paid content strategy, and the Mail Online, with its volume of free content are explicitly and aggressively seeking a global audience. Andrew Miller, former CEO of the Guardian Media Group, the nonprofit trust behind the Guardian – one of the most visited English language news websites in the world – has said explicitly ‘we need to go global … we could not survive in the UK’.11 The implication that a country with a population of more than 60 million may not offer enough volume to sustain even a very widely-used news brand underlines how difficult the situation is in smaller national markets, let alone at the local level.

THE FUTURE OF THE BUSINESS OF NEWS The transition from the business of news as we knew it in the late twentieth century to the digital realities of the early twenty-first century are part of a profound and unfinished media revolution that has been under way for more than a decade and will continue for years to come (Anderson et al. 2012; Nielsen 2012). It is important to recognize that though the rise of the internet and increase in mobile access is part of already substantial changes in the media, we are only at the beginning of a longer period of much more deep-seated change. A number of recent studies have

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tried to quantify the relative importance of different media platforms in terms of people’s overall media repertoire, and generally find that legacy media, especially television, still play a much larger role than digital media for most people, even in high-income democracies (Hilbert 2011; Neuman et  al. 2012). One study from the USA focusing specifically on news suggested that 92 percent of time spent on news consumption in 2013 was spent on legacy platforms, with broadcasting accounting for 57 percent and print a surprisingly high 35  percent, compared to 4 percent for desktop internet and 4 percent for mobile internet.12 Digital advertising is growing rapidly, but legacy platforms still account for three quarters of global advertising spending. Similarly, most legacy news media companies still generate 80 to 90 percent of their revenues (and in many cases all of their profits) from their ‘old media’ operations, and only very few onlineonly news sites generate sizable revenues (OECD 2010; Grueskin et al. 2011; Nielsen 2012). Obviously, digital media use is growing by the day and legacy media, such as television, are rapidly being digitized, but the ‘digital age’, whatever it will entail, is still ahead of is. The unfinished media revolution is driven largely by the interaction between transnational technological developments, economic forces, and changing patterns of media use. Media policy, which so profoundly shaped our twentieth-century news media environments through public service obligations, funding for public service media, cross-media ownership regulation and the like, have so far played little proactive role in shaping these developments (Nielsen 2014). While there are overall transnational similarities, the consequences are not the same from country to country, at the national level and the local level, or from company to company.13 These differences represent more than a time-lag where less advanced countries are bound to follow a path blazed by more advanced ones, or where conservative companies eventually

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will have to emulate more innovative ones to survive. They also have to do with profound and often inherited differences in market demand, market structures, and market sizes, and to some extent media policy. Most visibly, the news media business in many low- and medium-income democracies like India and Brazil is growing rapidly as especially formats like tabloid newspapers and terrestrial television news that appeal to an expanding middle class with growing purchasing power and of increased interest to advertisers (Kohli 2013; Porto 2010). Upmarket news media in these countries face many of the same challenges online as their counterparts in high-income democracies – the Times of India no less than the Times of London or the New York Times – as their target demographic increasingly rely on digital media where they have more and more media to choose from and advertisers have more and more ways of reaching them. They have, however, still benefited from economic growth, the rise of the middle class, and advertisers looking for ways of reaching it. Even within the relatively homogenous world of highincome democracies there are significant differences. In the USA, a historically strong newspaper industry, heavily reliant on advertising and composed mostly of local monopoly newspapers, has already been hit hard by the changes (Downie and Schudson 2009). In much of Northern Europe, an equally strong newspaper industry built on a more diverse mix of advertising and sales revenues has felt declines in print circulation and advertising keenly but has not yet suffered to nearly the same extent (Esser and Brüggemann 2010). In Southern Europe, a newspaper industry that was already commercially weak before the rise of the internet is seriously challenged and a growing number of titles are dependent on proprietors or other benefactors propping them up (Antheaume 2010). Across company-to-company, market-tomarket, and country-to-country differences, the common denominator is that the business of digital news is a difficult one. Only a few

media organizations have found sustainable business models for digital journalism – let alone profitable ones. This applies both for legacy news media and new entrants. Some of the most talked-about companies in the sector are either not actually making any money or are extreme outliers with little to tell us about where the rest of the industry is heading. Even after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web, and more than 20 years after news organizations started to move on to digital platforms, most digital news production is still funded by revenues from legacy operations, various forms of subsidies, or by investors betting that they will find a sustainable business model sometime in the future. Linear projections are dangerous and often misleading, but the overall trends seem clear – print revenues are declining, television has held up better but is widely perceived as being primed for digital disruption, and while the digital business is extremely profitable for a few dominant companies, the digital content business is difficult, and the digital news business specifically very difficult for incumbents and new entrants alike. Private sector news providers which until recently made substantial profits from bundled media products that included a considerable news component and underwrote thousands of journalistic jobs, face the secular decline of their profitable legacy business, a difficult transition, and an extremely challenging digital environment. Very few news start-ups have managed to break even. As Clay Shirky (2009) has noted, this is what revolutions are like – ‘the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place’. Sometimes nothing takes the place of that which is broken. In this transitional period it is clear that the legacy news media organizations that are still our most important sources of news, the most important producers of news, and the most important underwriters of professional journalism have both assets and liabilities that come with being the incumbents. Legacy is an asset in terms of having an established brand (important when it comes to marketing

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experience goods), human resources in their newsroom and elsewhere (important in terms of producing quality content that may stand out in a crowded market), and of course the still considerable revenues generated by their print or broadcast operations (resources that can sustain the organization and be used for investments in new digital initiatives). Legacy is also a liability as culture change in an established organization can be hard, both for management, the newsroom, and on the commercial side as cost structures built around the business of news as we knew it are hard to sustain in an increasingly digital environment, and even well-managed incumbents often find it hard to change (Christensen et al. 2012; Küng 2008). Even amongst the most accomplished entrepreneurs of the new digital economy, the relative strengths and weaknesses of building a digital news operation around a legacy news medium versus starting from scratch seem unclear – witness the contrasting decisions in late 2013 by Amazon. com founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos to buy the Washington Post for about $250 million versus eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar’s announcement that he would invest approximately the same sum in launching his born-digital First Look Media. What is clear is that the world we live in now is a fantasy world from the media users’ perspective. It is a fantastic fantasy world in that affluent media users in the high-income democracies have access to more content from more sources, and often for free, in more convenient formats than any media users before them. The amount of information literally a click away is positively mindboggling. But it is also an unreal fantasy world in that the content consumed is overwhelmingly funded by legacy business models that seem unfit for a digital environment, and in that established and start-up news providers alike are struggling to find sustainable business models for digital news production. The future of journalism as a profession pursued on a more or less full-time basis and as a paid job may thus in the future rely on

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more than the market. Beyond profit, two other broad motivations for funding news media have been power and public service. Indeed, especially before the nineteenth century, most of what we would today call journalism and news was produced by media that worked directly and explicitly to serve the interests of powerful institutions like the state and particular corporate interests, or were part of publicly-oriented civil society associations like political parties, religious groups, or social movements (e.g. Pettegree 2014). Even if the profit motive behind commercial news provision was to fade, these two other motivations are not going away. Power is the central motivation behind stakeholder media, expressing and defending the interests of specific communities, often funders and proprietors (see, for example, Hunter and van Wassenhove 2010). They range from the unprofitable partisan newspapers of yore to various types of instrumental media operated as part of wider public affairs strategies today, from the websites of advocacy organizations, think tanks, and prominent brands such as Red Bull, over heavily subsidized news organizations like the international editions of the China Daily (owned by the Chinese government) or the Epoch Times (associated with the Falun Gong movement) to state-backed international broadcasters like Alhurra, Al Jazeera, and Russia Today, or even the media operations of terrorist insurgent groups like the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. More broadly, as more money is invested in public relations and strategic communications, government agencies, interest groups, and corporations show increased interest in the idea that every organization is a media organization and develop broader communication strategies of which advertising and news media are only a small part (Davis 2013). Public media, whether non-profit media backed by individual benefactors, corporate sponsorships as part of CSR-strategies, and/or member support or state-backed by direct government appropriations or licence fee-type funding, are not going away either.

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As the private sector and the market provides reduced funding for journalism, public media and non-profit media will, everything else being equal, play a relatively speaking larger role.14

CONCLUSION Since the rise of news sheets, gazettes, and the first newspapers, the production and circulation of news in high-income democracies has become less and less directly dependent on backing by powerful institutions such as the state, political parties, religious groups, or particular corporate interests, and more and more the province of a distinct business, the business of news – increasingly a powerful institution in itself (Pettegree 2014). Journalism and its development as a distinct profession have been closely intertwined with this business, and though journalism is shaped by many other factors than economic forces, to understand journalism, one must also understand the business behind it. Understanding the business of news and how it is changing with the rapid growth of digital media is important: for journalists who want to understand the economic underpinnings of their profession, for journalism scholars who want to understand their object of analysis, and for citizens who want to understand the economic forces shaping the news they rely on to follow public affairs. The rise of digital media has lowered the costs of media production and distribution and given people new ways of accessing and finding news. This has not changed the basic high fixed/low variable cost structure of news production or the character of news as a nonrivalrous, experience good. But the advance of digital media and the gradual convergence of previously distinct media onto interactive digital platforms offering audio, images, text, video and data from different providers across previously established market boundaries has drastically changed the markets wherein

individual news media compete for audiences’ attention, media consumers’ spending, and advertisers’ budgets. Until recently, most established media companies enjoyed a high degree of market power because of their dominant market position and/or because their reputation set them apart from their competitors. They could therefore charge a premium price over the marginal cost of serving one more customer, ultimately covering the high fixed costs of content production and delivering operating profits. Today, fewer and fewer news media companies command a premium as content is increasingly commoditized and the supply of advertising inventory grows more quickly than demand, driving down rates. These developments are good news for audiences and advertisers in many ways, as well as for companies like Google and Facebook that play a dominant role in new digital media markets. But they are bad news for news media, whether legacy or new entrants, because if competition pushes prices toward the marginal costs of serving one more customer, ultimately, these companies will be unable to sustain the high fixed costs involved in producing the content in the first place, let alone securing the competitive return on investments that investors or owners could achieve elsewhere. After a century in which the business of news has been generally profitable, and one where the most successful companies became powerful institutions in themselves, the very economic foundations are shifting. Amongst content producers, there will be a few winners, and many losers. Not all legacy news media will find a commercially sustainable niche in this environment, nor will all new entrants. Digital media can potentially make good journalism better in many ways – more accessible, more appealing, more contextual, more convenient, more immediate, more participatory, and more responsive, – and have much else to offer us both as citizens and consumers. But the basic economics of digital media suggests that the market will sustain fewer

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people pursuing journalism as a profession. In the twentieth century, the business of news could to some extent underwrite the private provision of journalism as a public good. This will be harder in the twenty-first century, and unless new business models are developed for private sector news provision on a market basis, the future therefore holds the prospect of more and more media – including entertainment, social, and stakeholder media, more and more communications – including interpersonal communication but also strategic PR, but less and less professionally produced journalistic news.

NOTES  1  http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/ consultations/measuring-plurality/statement/ annex6.PDF  2  http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/ consultations/measuring-plurality/statement/ annex6.PDF  3  http://www.people-press.org/2010/09/12/americans-spending-more-time-following-the-news/  4  See for example: http://www.poynter.org/ latest-news/mediawire/145736/americansspend-just-a-fraction-of-online-time-with-newscompared-to-social-media/. See also, Hindman (2011).  5  ‘Goods’ is economists’ terms for anything that satisfies a human want and therefore has value, for example for a consumer. ‘Information goods’ are goods whose main value lies in the information they contain and that can therefore easily be digitized.  6  http://www.theguardian.com/media/mediablog/2014/feb/09/bbc-technology-dmi-freeview  7  Increasingly, advertising is moving away from the exposure paradigm all together toward an emphasis on click-through rates and engagement. But there is no consensus on a new model or new metrics on the basis of which one can agree on prices (Napoli 2011).  8  Numbers from http://www.poynter.org/latestnews/mediawire/153854/newspapers-cantmake-money-online-because-advertisingcosts-too-darn-much/; http://www.tvb.org/ trends/4718/4709; http://www.cnet.com/news/ mary-meeker-unveils-kpcbs-internet-trendsfor-2012/

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 9  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/11/newspapers-web-media-paywall  10  The ‘unbundling’ of local news and local classified advertising through the rise of sites like Craigslist and Monster.com alone has cost the US newspaper industry classified advertising revenues of more than $10 billion annually, even as it has benefited the consumer and the leading online classified sites.  11  h t t p : / / w w w . n e w y o r k e r . c o m / m a g a zine/2013/10/07/freedom-of-information? currentPage=7  12  h t t p : / / w w w . p o y n t e r. o r g / l a t e s t - n e w s / business-news/the-biz-blog/212550/newresearch-finds-92-percent-of-news-consumptionis-still-on-legacy-platforms/  13  Local news media, whether legacy media (Nel 2010) or online-only start-ups (Hindman 2011) are struggling to break even online. As noted, looking at news is a relatively small part of what we do online, and local news specifically an even smaller part (Hindman 2011). Operating in smaller markets, local news media have a hard time finding the volume – whether in advertising, sales, or other revenues – to cover the fixed costs of content production. And the rise of advertising exchanges and advertising networks offering targeted advertising across multiple sites means that local audiences are no longer as valuable as they used to be, as they can increasingly be reached in other ways. ‘Hyperlocal’ sites and networks of local sites like Patch in the USA have not yet proven their economic viability.  14  There has been much interest in non-profit news production, and philanthropic and foundation support for journalism in recent years. The most systematic attempt to assess the overall investment is from the USA, where philanthropic giving amounted to an estimated $150 mil­ lion out of the more than $60 billion revenues generated by commercial means. http://www. journalism.org/2014/03/26/the-revenue-picturefor-­american-journalism-and-how-it-is-changing/ In other countries with less of a tradition of philanthropic giving, news organizations have so far found it hard to secure significant support from foundations and the like (Bruno and Nielsen 2012).

REFERENCES Anderson, C. W. and Michael Schudson (2009) ‘Objectivity, Professionalism, and Truth Seeking in Journalism’. In The Handbook of

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Journalism Studies, edited by Karin WahlJorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, 88–101. London: Routledge. Anderson, C. W., Emily Bell and Clay Shirky (2012) Post-Industrial Journalism. New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School. http://towcenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/11/TOWCenter-Post_ Industrial_Journalism.pdf. Antheaume, Alice (2010) ‘The French Press and Its Enduring Institutional Crisis’. In The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, edited by David A. L Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, 69–80. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Bagwell, Kyle (2007) ‘The Economic Analysis of Advertising’. In Handbook of Industrial Organization, edited by M. Armstrong and R. Porter, Volume 3: 1701–1844. Elsevier. http:// w w w. s c i e n c e d i re c t . c o m / s c i e n c e / article/pii/S1573448X06030287. Baker, C. (2002) Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruno, Nicola and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (2012) Survival Is Success. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Christensen, Clayton M., David Skok, and James Allworth (2012) ‘Breaking News’. Nieman Reports. http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102798/BreakingNews.aspx. Davis, Aeron (2013) Promotional Cultures. Cambridge: Polity. Downie, Leonard and Michael Schudson (2009) The Reconstruction of American Journalism. New York: Columbia University. http://www. journalism.columbia.edu/cs/ ContentServer?pagename=JRN/Render/Doc URL&binaryid=1212611716626. Doyle, Gillian (2013) Understanding Media Economics. London: Sage Publications. Esser, Frank and Michael Brüggemann (2010) ‘The Strategic Crisis of German Newspapers’. In The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, edited by David A. L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, 39–54. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Grueskin, Bill, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves (2011) The Story So Far. New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia

Journalism School. http://towcenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/11/TOWCenter-Post_ Industrial_Journalism.pdf. Hamilton, James (2004) All the News That’s Fit to Sell. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hilbert, Martin (2011) Mapping the Dimensions and Characteristics of the World’s Technological Communication Capacity During the Period of Digitization (1986–2007/2010). SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2039491. Rochester: Social Science Research Network. http:// papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2039491. Hindman, Matthew (2011) Less of the Same. Washington, D.C: FCC. https://apps.fcc.gov/ edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-307476A1. pdf. Hunter, Mark and Luk van Wassenhove (2010) Stakeholder Media and the Future of Watchdog Journalism Business Models. Paris: INSEAD. http://markleehunter.free.fr/documents/ IJ_business.pdf. Kohli, Vanita (2013) The Indian Media Business. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Küng, Lucy (2008) Strategic Management in the Media. London: Sage Publications. Levy, David A. L, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, eds. (2010) The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Napoli, Philip M. (2011) Audience Evolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Nel, François. 2010. ‘Where Else Is the Money?’ Journalism Practice 4(3): 360–72. doi:10.1080/ 17512781003642964. Nel, François and Oscar Westlund (2012) ‘The 4c’s of Mobile News’. Journalism Practice 6(5–6): 744–53. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012. 667278. Neuman, W. Russell, Yong Jin Park, and Elliot Panek. 2012. ‘Tracking the Flow of Information into the Home’. International Journal of Communication 6: 1022–41. Newman, Nic, David A. L. and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2015. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis (2014) ‘“Frozen” Media Subsidies during a Time of Media Change’. Global Media and Communication 10(2): 121–38. doi:10.1177/1742766513504203.

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Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis (2012) Ten Years That Shook the Media World. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Noam, Eli M. (2013) Global Trends of Media Ownership and Concentration. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2242670. Rochester: Social Science Research Network. http://papers. ssrn.com/abstract=2242670. OECD (2010) The Evolution of News and the Internet. Paris: OECD. Okada, Erica Mina and Stephen J. Hoch (2004) ‘Spending Time versus Spending Money’. Journal of Consumer Research 31(2): 313– 23. doi:10.1086/jcr.2004.31.issue-2. Pettegree, Andrew (2014) The Invention of News. New Haven: Yale University Press. Picard, Robert G. (2011) The Economics and Financing of Media Companies. New York: Fordham University Press. Porto, Mauro P. (2010) ‘The Changing Landscape of Brazil’s News Media’. In The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, edited by David A. L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, 107–24. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Prior, Markus (2007) Post-Broadcast Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Shapiro, Carl and Hal R. Varian (1999) Information Rules. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Shirky, Clay (2009) ‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable’. http://www.shirky.com/ weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinkingthe-unthinkable/. Taylor, Greg (2014) ‘Scarcity of Attention for a Medium of Abundance’. In Society and the Internet How Networks of Information and Communication Are Changing Our Lives, edited by Mark Graham and William H. Dutton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trappel, Josef, Werner A. Meier, Leen d’Haenens, Jeanette Steemers and Barbara Thomass, eds. (2011) Media in Europe Today. Bristol: intellect. Turow, Joseph. 2011. The Daily You. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vogel, Harold L. (2011) Entertainment Industry Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin and Thomas Hanitzsch, eds (2009) The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York: Routledge.

5 Digital Journalism Ethics Stephen J.A. Ward

Journalism ethics, the study and application of norms for practice, sails the roiling sea of a digital media revolution. In transforming practice, the revolution reconstructs journalism ethics. The once cozy world of journalism ethics – a somewhat sleepy domain of agreed-upon codes of ethics too often presumed to be invariant – is already a faint memory. Barely a principle or practice, from objectivity to verification before publication, goes unchallenged. New notions, new forms of media and new practitioners sweep aside long-held certainties, slogans and habits. Editors and ethicists debate what part of traditional journalism ethics should be saved and what principles need invention. We witness the end of a tidy, pre-digital journalism ethics for professionals and the birth of an untidy digital media ethics for everyone. And I do mean everyone. Amid the chaos of revolution, there is the possibility of a new journalism ethics with distinctive concepts, aims, methods, and

content. This chapter traces the contours of this emerging digital journalism ethics. It presents a vision of a future journalism ethics based on leading trends, taking a normative, philosophical and future-orientated approach. It advances a new mindset for journalism ethics, examining new and seminal ideas about the function and justification of journalism ethics, as well as new forms of media criticism. It concludes that future journalism ethics will be, increasingly, discursive, interpretive, global and integrative, addressing large public purposes and global issues, while employing ‘imperfect’ modes of reasoning (see Ward, 2015).

ORIGIN OF MEDIA ETHICS The term ‘media ethics’, popular today, is not the original term for the ethics of popular, news-orientated publication. Before there was media ethics, there was journalism

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ethics. Journalists at newspapers and magazines, working in a pre-digital media era, conceptualized and created the field of ethics as a practical set of rules for conduct and publication content. An explicit, craft-wide journalism ethics began to appear in the early 1900s as journalists in the USA and elsewhere established professional associations. The associations constructed codes of ethics with principles that are still familiar to us, such as the principles of objectivity, truth-telling, and editorial independence. Later, as other forms of media developed, the term ‘media ethics’ was coined to refer, collectively, to the norms of professional media practice in general. Media ethics referred to the ethics of journalism, advertising, marketing, and public relations. Journalism ethics was considered a branch of media ethics. Media ethics, in all forms, was defined as the responsible use of the freedom to publish, from journalism to advertising. Its aim was to provide the norms that define responsible media practice and to guide practitioners in making sound ethical judgments. In the late nineteenth century, a movement arose in the USA States and other Western countries to explicitly define and codify what responsible publication meant for the growing ranks of professional media workers. Journalists had started to work in the large newsrooms of the mass commercial press. Professionalism was intended to raise the social status of this group, whose members were increasingly well-educated (see Ward, 2005). But it was more than that. Professionalism was meant to assure the public that journalists would use their power to publish responsibly. A professional attitude would run counter to the growing power of the press and the worrisome influence of press barons, newspaper syndicates, and business on reporting. That journalists aspired toward professionalism in the early 1900s is not surprising. This was a time when many groups, from doctors to lawyers, sought to be professionals.

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Professionals, it was argued, had an overriding and distinct duty to serve the public. Serving the public interest trumped serving one’s own interest and serving the interests of specific groups. The trades and crafts, it was assumed, had little (or no) public-interest rationale. Practitioners of the trades and crafts served the private needs of individuals, not society at large. They entered into economic contracts with clients without reference to larger public concerns. When you call in the plumber to fix your bathroom drain, reference to the common good or public duties is out of place. In contrast, professional soldiers, doctors, and then journalists, began to define their duties in terms of public service. The stress on social responsibility and public service was due, in large part, to the growing power of the established professions, such as medicine, and the emerging professions, such as journalism. Professionals received sensitive information from clients and therefore could do great harm, if they were not ethical. Hence, licensing and mechanisms of self-regulation seemed appropriate for many professions. In journalism, the stress on responsibility was due to the development of the powerful mass commercial press. This press came to enjoy a virtual monopoly on the provision of news, analysis, and advertising to the public. The public became passive consumers of information dependent on data provided by a professional class of journalists employed increasingly by large news organizations. In the early 1900s, and beyond, this dependency raised public concerns about the reliability of this mediating class of news workers. Did the press really serve the public or did it advance its own interests? Did it tell the truth or was it biased? In response to these concerns, journalists formed professional associations and created the first profession-wide codes of ethics (Ward, 2005). Professional media ethics was born as a conscious attempt to assure the public they could trust the press to serve the public first.

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The journalists who drew up the codes of ethics promised more than a general commitment to serve the public. Serving the public as information mediators required journalists to embrace a distinct set of principles. One was a professional duty to act as editorial gatekeepers of what should be published. Journalists should make sure their stories were accurate, and they should verify claims. They should be impartial of mind, independent in spirit, and objective in reporting. News should be separated from opinion. This self-imposed ethics, supported by accountability structures such as press councils and readers’ ombudsmen, would constitute the self-regulation of journalism. Journalism ethics, therefore, became the professionally mandated ethics of an important social practice, rather than the personal and idiosyncratic values of individual journalists or their news outlets. Times had changed. In a society dependent informationally on journalism, many journalists accepted a collective responsibility and, together, endorsed the principles of truth-seeking, minimizing harm, objectivity, and accountability. Media ethics, in journalism and elsewhere, was developed by professionals for professionals. It is important to not lose the essential point for ethics in these historical details. The most irrevocable damage to the continuance of pre-digital journalism ethics was a technological development that began roughly toward the end of the previous century. It was the creation of digital media, and the many new forms of online communication and publication that it made possible, at relatively low cost. The publication of information, views, and persuasive rhetoric were made increasingly accessible and attractive to non-professional writers, citizens, social groups, government, NGOs, and corporations. Networks of like-minded citizens could communicate and share information and knowledge, while critiquing professional journalists. In retrospect, the basis of the original journalism ethics was a historically contingent

state of news media: the dominance, if temporary, of the mass commercial press over the public sphere’s information channels. Predigital journalism ethics was created to guide the responsible members of mainstream news media. Once that dominance was weakened, the ethics that accompanied this form of journalism would, almost inevitably, be questioned. The fatal blow, then, was the spread of digital media and the decline of mainstream media’s near monopoly on the publication of news. This was a ‘fatal’ development not for media and journalism ethics in general, but a fatal blow to any attempt to maintain conservatively the assumptions and ethics of pre-digital ethics. A new ethics for a digital media era must be constructed.

KEY QUESTIONS Two powerful trends in digital media are influencing journalism ethics. First, the emergence of a mixed news media that is interactive and online. News media is mixed for two reasons: because practitioners use many types of technology to create media content, for example, printed newspapers, blogs, and social media, and because it is now a domain of professional and citizen journalists. A second and related trend is the globalization of media. We live in a world where reality is defined by a ubiquitous and networked global media. News media are global in reach, collecting news from around the world. News media are global in impact because reports have impact across borders, sparking riots in distant lands or prompting global responses to natural disasters. The two trends create the issues that dominate journalism ethics. To discuss the ‘state’ of journalism ethics is to discuss the implications of these trends: •• Questions of identity: If citizens and non-­ professional journalists report and analyze events around the world, who is a journalist?

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•• Questions about scope: If everyone is potentially a publisher, does journalism ethics apply to everyone? If so, how does that change the nature and teaching of journalism ethics? •• Questions about content: What are the most appropriate principles, approaches, and purposes for digital journalism ethics? For example, is news objectivity still a valid ideal? •• Questions about new journalism: How can new forms of journalism, e.g. nonprofit journalism or entrepreneurial journalism, maintain standards such as editorial independence? •• Questions about community engagement: What ethical norms should guide the use of citizen content and newsroom partnerships with external groups? •• Questions about global impact: Should journalists see themselves as global communicators? How do journalists reconcile their patriotic values with their duty to humanity and to address global issues from multiple perspectives?

Good answers to these questions will require a new mindset. A mindset is a set of ideas for understanding (and practically dealing with) some practice or problem. I may adopt a Libertarian mindset when I discuss politics. I may adopt a ‘law and order’ mindset to support strict penalties for recreational users of marijuana. A mindset in journalism ethics is a set of ideas about ethics, the role of journalism, and its primary values. The new mindset consists of (1) functional notions, (2) epistemic notions, (3) structural notions, and (4) critical notions. Functional notions are about the nature and function of journalism and its ethics. Epistemic notions are beliefs about moral reasoning and the sources of moral authority. Structural notions say how ethical content (e.g. principles) should be organized into code of ethics. Critical notions examine existing views of journalism and how the public can assess the performance of its news media system. For each category, the new mindset advances non-traditional, often novel, ideas drawn from many places – philosophy, ethics, sociology, theories of technology and communication studies. The ideas are held by a heterogeneous band of journalists, ethicists, and citizens.

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FUNCTIONAL NOTIONS Discourse ethics The new mindset re-conceives journalism ethics as an open-ended discourse about the norms of digital global media. Creating this discourse is a major function of media ethics. Ethical discourse converses about values, judgments, issues and the propriety of certain ways of acting. It is a distinct form of conversing. It is a ‘give and take’ in communication that aims to improve the views in question. Discourse is valued in itself. By discoursing we affirm the rationality and dignity of ourselves and others. At the heart of discourse ethics is evolution, enrichment and fair negotiation. Discourse ethics believes in the transformative role of cooperative discourse in revising our beliefs and influencing conduct. Discourse ethics is the exploration of an ethics-to-be-formulated, an ethics better able to deal with new conditions and new issues. Ethics as discourse rejects the notion of ethics as pre-established and static ethical content, a view held by many hierarchical religions and traditions. This view identifies ethics with absolute principles to be applied in uniform ways across space and time. An evolving discourse is of minor value to a ­pre-established ethics. Why discourse at length if we already know the answers? At best, discourse is used to teach the principles. Yet ethics as discourse does not de-­ emphasize content per se. It recognizes that people require ethical beliefs. Ethics as discourse requires only that people not make such beliefs immune from revision and impervious to discourse.

Dialogic discourse Not all forms of communication are ethical. Discursive ethics asks participants to engage in a dialogue that honors certain norms of communication. Participants strive for a fair,

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informed, reasonable, and inclusive ‘thinking together’. How the participants discuss is important. Racist or intolerant discourse can cause harm. Discourse is supposed to embody public reason, i.e., giving reasons to each other as equal citizens, and by being reasonable in our demands. It is a ‘communicative form of moral conduct’ (Makau and Marty, 2013: 79). Dialogic discourse emphasizes the social side of ethics. Dialogic ethics is not an inward conversation with oneself but an outward conversation with others. Dialogue lies between the high demands of philosophical deliberation and manipulative persuasion. Dialogic ethics is a cooperative, fact-based exploration of an issue where the goal is not victory in debate by any means (Makau and Marty, 2013). Dialogue does not expect participants to be perfectly impartial or to reason in the tidy, regimented manner found in papers on logic. In dialogue, rationality amounts to listening and responding to others in meaningful conversation. Scholars are developing more realistic models of dialogue. One theme is that dialogue should not be dismissed as nothing more than a reassuring chat among like-minded people or a polite conversation among people of different minds where tough issues are avoided. Scholars reconceive dialogue as an often difficult discourse among people who are from different ethnicities, economic classes, and positions of power. What is the relationship between dialogic discourse and digital journalism ethics? First, the idea of ethics as discourse, rather than ethics as fixed content, is crucial in an era where journalism is rapidly evolving. If there is no consensus on content, new principles and norms of practice need to be created through discourse. The idea of ethics as a process for articulating new norms becomes paramount. No single authority can ‘legislate’ the content of digital journalism, imposing it on professional and citizen journalists. Therefore, the best option is an open, democratic, and dialogic discourse among journalists and the

public. Second, ethics as dialogic discourse is the best option for a global journalism. Digital ethics needs to contain norms and principles that ‘cross’ borders and can gain the assent of journalists in different media cultures. The principles should take into account the impact of stories on other cultures and nations, and on citizens’ understandings of global issues – issues such as climate change that require global cooperation. The principles also need to guide journalists in properly representing other cultures and traditions. Therefore, for the new mindset, the process of discussing issues and new content is as important as defending established principles. A discursive approach to journalism ethics is found in many places. We media users and producers – journalists, citizens, and ethicists – increasingly ‘do’ ethics through discourse. We discuss, endorse, and disagree through expanding global networks of communication. Our beliefs evolve amid these exchanges. The use of dialogic discourse also occurs in more formal environments, such as in academia and in meetings of media scholars. Take, for example, the movement to construct a global media ethics (Ward, 2013). The aim is to create an ethics for media practitioners worldwide, and especially for covering global issues. Theorists articulate cosmopolitan aims and principles for journalism, such as serving humanity, acting as a bridge of understanding between warring groups, and promoting human rights.

Ethics as political morality Dialogic ethics redefines journalism ethics as a public ethics, in two ways. First, it makes public discourse intrinsic to journalism ethics, weakening the idea that journalism ethics is an individual affair – what each person happens to value. Second, it makes public (and global) issues a focus of journalism ethics. Journalism ethics, as discursive

Digital Journalism Ethics

ethics, tends to be a ‘macro ethics concerned with issues for media systems, such as media diversity, access to media technology, ownership of global communication and how news media cover global issues such as security, human rights, and climate change. The discursive approach situates ethics – one might say it ‘immerses’ ethics – in the political domain. Issues of power, inequality, transitions to greater democracy, and giving voice to the less powerful, are central concerns. In this mode, ethics becomes almost indistinguishable from political morality – the political structures and principles of justice that should shape society and our world.

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these contexts, people begin to construct an emergent ethics – new principles and new processes for decision-making. Emergent ethics is part of the history of the human race. For instance, Beitz (2009: 13) defines modern human rights as an emergent practice that arose after the Holocaust. The ethics of human rights challenged older, parochial value systems that confined rights to members of specific nations. Journalism ethics today is a prime example of emergent ethics. It is a zone of contestation. The new mindset should see journalism ethics as rightfully emergent and contested.

EPISTEMIC NOTIONS Emergent ethics In pre-digital journalism ethics, a professional consensus on principles encouraged practitioners to think of their ethics as stable and settled (see Ward, 2014). Disagreement or uncertainty were negative signs, indicating some weakness in their ethics. Digital ethics takes a contrary position: disagreement and uncertainty is a natural, healthy and welcomed part of ethics discourse. Discourse ethics thinks of ethics as emergent – the continual emergence of new norms and principles. In society, social and technological change call for the construction of a new principles and new ethics systems. New values enter into an uneasy tension with old values. These new values seek to establish a beachhead on the terrain of the incumbent ethics. The development of bioethics and the ethics of technology with military applications are examples of emergent ethics. In these areas, the pace of technological development swamps the ability of current principles to guide practice. New norms and ethical practices need to be articulated to deal with such evolving capacities as the ability to extend a human life indefinitely, or to embed computer chips in soldiers’ brains to make them superior fighters on the battlefield. In

A mindset that thinks of journalism ethics as evolving public discourse implies an epistemology. It holds, implicitly or explicitly, beliefs about the justification of moral claims and the nature of ethical reasoning. Some of those beliefs were close to the surface in the previous sections. These beliefs are part of a perspective I call imperfectionism (Ward, 2005: 34–5).

Imperfectionism Pragmatic philosophers, from William James and John Dewey to Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, provide seminal ideas for an epistemology that seeks to ground journalism ethics’ discursive turn (for a review, see Albrecht, 2012). A pragmatic epistemology consists of general beliefs about knowledge and specific beliefs about how we form ethical beliefs. The ‘imperfect’ epistemology is defined by a commitment to: (1) falliblism, (2) experimentalism and interpretism (see Ward, 2015). Falliblism is the view that there are no ‘metaphysical guarantees to be had that even our most firmly-held beliefs will never need revision’ (Putnam, 1995: 21). Humans are

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imperfect inquirers. Their beliefs are fallible and never certain. Our beliefs are hypotheses on the best way to understand a phenomenon or proposals on the best way to regulate conduct. Falliblism is not extreme skepticism. It does not require us to doubt everything. It only requires us to be ready to doubt anything – if good reason to do so arises. Falliblism rejects the pervasive metaphor of absolutism that our beliefs need infallible, foundational principles, the way a house needs a strong and unmoving foundation. Falliblism prefers the metaphor of knowledge as on-going inquiry, like a ship already under sail (Quine, 1960). The ship contains our conceptual schemes for science, ethics, and other domains. The schemes have basic beliefs, such as natural selection in biology. But the fallibilist does not equate being basic with being foundational, i.e., immune from revision. As we sail along, some beliefs strike us as questionable. We use some of our beliefs to question other beliefs. But we can’t question all of our beliefs at the same time. Moreover, we always inquire from some type of ship, i.e., a context that includes conceptual schemes and a particular historical period. Falliblism dovetails with a commitment to experimentalism. If our beliefs are fallible, they can be improved by new experiences and discourse with others. We are psychologically open to new ideas. Even large social patterns, such as democracy, are what Mill called ‘experiments in living’ (2006: 65). Falliblism and experimentalism entail imperfectionism. The imperfectionist believes that inquiry is rarely ‘perfect’ by reaching clear and unchallengeable findings. The complexity of the world resists perfect results. Moreover, the cognitive capacity of humans is limited and flawed by bias and other infelicities. An imperfectionist, in dropping the demand for perfection, believes well-grounded belief and valuable reasoning exists between the absolute and the arbitrary. Imperfection does not entail that all beliefs are equal in merit.

To adopt this pragmatic epistemology is to regard ethical inquiry as fallible, experimental and imperfect. This approach has theoretical and practical advantages for both ethics in general and digital journalism ethics. If we adopt a perfectionist, absolute view towards ethics, we are likely to see limited value in democratic discourse, since on this view, ethical principles are not created or articulated through discourse, they are discovered. They already exist and ethics is a matter of conforming conduct to these pre-existing norms. Moreover, on this view, principles do not evolve according to changing conditions. They are not fallible. Imperfectionism, then, appears to be an approach to ethics that is better able to explain and under gird the idea of digital journalism ethics as an emergent discourse where new ethical norms need to be formulated in an experimental manner, across borders. This epistemology of this ethics encourages us to participate in the task of reconstructing journalism ethics. In a global, plural world, we need an epistemology that promotes a view of inquiry as imperfect and contested. The attitude encourages us to learn from others, and to enter into dialogue. Rather than look for absolute foundations amid the winds of change, we should work through a global discourse that compares ethical frameworks and is ready to revise. The task of ethics is not to preserve and protect, but to reflectively engage the future with new ideas, new tools.

Interpretism Interpretism is a view on how we construct ethical views. It regards all ethical claims, codes of ethics, and moral education in communities as based on a normative interpretation of the conduct or practice in question. A normative interpretation says how¸ ethically speaking, a practice or profession ought to be carried out. A normative understanding says what the practice is (should be) when viewed in its best light (Dworkin,

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1986). Normally, we start with a practice that consists of shared routines, and shared understandings about who is a practitioner, plus paradigmatic examples of good practice. Then we state the point of the practice – the ethical and social purposes of the practice, and its associated norms. Different interpretations of the point of journalism can be found among modern journalists, from Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow to Hunter Thompson and current citizen journalists. In journalism ethics, almost every code begins with an inspirational preamble that states the point of the practice. For instance, the revised preamble (revised in 2014) to the influential code of the US-based Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) states:1 Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity. The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.

The four principles are to seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently and be accountable. Under these principles fall a large number specific norms and rules. This code is a classic example of a normative interpretation of the aim of journalistic practice seen in its best light. Interpretation is the way that imperfect practical thinking occurs in journalism ethics. To interpret is to put forward, experimentally, hypotheses on how to regulate forms of conduct. Interpretism acknowledges the need to listen to other perspectives. Other interpretations are always possible. We direct our attention to the all-too-human, practical, non-absolute and social nature of ethics. Interpretism allows us to recognize the problems in journalism ethics as more than conflicting opinions on specific issues. The problem is deep disagreements among normative interpretations about the point of journalism.

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Publicism and authority Questions over how to evaluate normative interpretations are timely. Digital journalism has stoked the fires of a debate between those who think the source of moral authority is an individual journalist’s own value system and those who think the source of authority is what society demands of all journalists, regardless of their personal values. I support the latter view but formulating it properly is difficult. We are liable to construct a false dualism where we have to choose between a strident individualism which celebrates freedom of publication and rejects ethical restraints or a ‘social responsibility theory of the press’ that overemphasizes the need for social control of journalism, especially where it is deemed offensive or runs counter to existing social mores.2 A digital media ethics needs a social philosophy that recognizes legitimate appeals to the public as the ground of its ethics, yet allowing great latitude for contrarian journalism and controversial publications. This ‘third’ approach is ‘publicism’. It claims that the ultimate source of justification or authority for the principles of journalism ethics is the fact that they promote the practice’s social responsibilities as outlined by some plausible interpretation about the point of the practice. In my view, the best interpretation is the advancement of an egalitarian and just democracy where self-governing citizens use media to flourish and govern themselves. In short, serving a democratic public is the most basic criteria for evaluating principles. Any value claim, practice or principle must promote or be consistent (and not violate) the public responsibilities and principles that define this democratic interpretation. The public basis of journalism ethics is due to the social and institutional nature of journalism. Society increasingly demands that activities articulate and follow a public ethic as we move from (a) personal hobbies (and social activities) to (b) social practices and to (c) activities within institutions. Normally we are free to engage in the activities of (a), such

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as stamp collecting or attending a football game, as long as we use common decency, don’t harm people, and follow general moral rules, such as keeping promises. Publicism has little purchase here. Talk of public duties and special codes of ethics to regulate such activity are out of place. Things change, however, when a social activity becomes a social practice. A practice is a regimented social activity, with its own skills, knowledge, aims and responsibilities. The most obvious examples are the professions. To practice law, for example, is not to engage in a personal activity as an unregulated hobby for pleasure. The demands of publicism apply to law. To practice law is to follow socially prescribed rules of conduct and to fulfill public duties. Publicism applies to journalism ethics because, over the centuries, journalism developed from a personal interest of individual editors to an important social practice and then to an institution of society, mentioned in constitutions (see Ward, 2005; Ward, 2014). As noted earlier, the first explicit craft-wide ethics for journalism arose in the early 1900s. It was a collective, group ethics of all journalists who saw themselves as professionals with inescapable and common public duties (Ward, 2014). The institutional status of journalism changed journalism ethics. It strengthened the idea of journalism ethics as a group ethic, anchoring it more securely in the fundamental needs of democracy. To say, for example, that journalism was a ‘fourth estate’ was to anchor journalism ethics in something much broader than personal values or the mores of a group. It anchored journalism ethics in the institutional structure and political philosophy of an entire society. The media revolution has not undermined the validity of publicism in journalism ethics. Many citizens dabble in journalism as an online hobby. Yet many others enter into the practice. Journalism remains a social practice and institution. The numbers of journalists and the impact of what is published increases, not decreases. What has changed is that older

definitions of who is a journalist have lost their relevance and professional journalists are no longer alone in the field. As long as journalists were organized into professional organizations, one could point to their codes of ethics as expressing a public ethic. But things are less clear when citizens practice journalism but do not belong to professional journalism associations and do not fall under their codes of ethics. Yet, the fact that it is more difficult today to apply the idea of publicism to journalism is not a reason to reject the idea of public journalism ethics. Publicism is not identical to professionalism or the codes of mainstream journalism. The task is to redefine publicism for a mixed, global journalism. Publicism blocks the idea that bloggers, users of Twitter, or anyone who engages in journalism are free to make up their own idiosyncratic ethics – or not bother with ethics at all. Journalism ethics does not ‘belong’ to journalists. Journalists have no special authority to announce, ex cathedra, its values and what it will accept as restraints on its publishing. Journalists must face the tribunal of the public, not just their own conscience, when their conduct comes into question. They need to provide reasons that other citizens would accept, from a public point of view.

STRUCTURAL NOTIONS Given this philosophical approach, the question now becomes how to organize new principles and practices into ethical systems and codes of ethics? The best approach to reconstruction in journalism ethics is an integrative approach that seeks ‘unity in difference’ – common core principles that allow for different interpretations and practices.

Integration or fragmentation However, not everyone agrees that the task for journalism ethics is constructing a new

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consensus among journalists on ethics. There is debate between integrationist and fragmentists about whether a new journalism-wide ethics is possible or desirable. An integrated ethics has unifying principles and aims widely shared by practitioners. To be an integrationist is to believe that the ethics of journalism should be united to a substantial degree. A fragmented ethics lacks unifying principles and aims. It is characterized by deep disagreement about aims, principles and practices. In journalism, fragmentation is the proliferation of different views about the purpose of journalism and its main norms. To speak metaphorically, a fragmented ethics is not a mainland where values connect to a hub of principles. Instead it is an archipelago of isolated ‘islands’ or value systems. They lack connection and espouse conflicting values. To be a fragmentist is to believe that fragmentation is not only a fact about journalism ethics but also a positive state of affairs. Integration smacks of homogeneity, where all journalists follow the same pattern. The metaphor of a mainland describes the state of pre-digital journalism ethics prior to the digital revolution. In journalism, it may appear that only fragmentation is occurring, since the disagreements attract publicity. However, a closer look shows that both integration and fragmentation are occurring. There is a movement toward integration in the revision of codes of ethics. Many major news organizations, from the BBC in the UK3 to the Society of Professional Journalists have, or are working on, substantial updates of their editorial guidelines. These revisions are integrative insofar as they show how their principles apply to new practices. New policies are introduced but they are consistent with overarching principles. Fragmentation also carries on. The view that social media journalism or blogging has its own separate practices and norms, and that traditional (and integrating) principles such as impartiality don’t apply, has been a mantra since online journalism emerged (Friend and Singer, 2007).

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Unity in difference An integrative approach avoids the polar opposites of treating ethics as fragmented islands of value or treating ethics as homogenized principles that ignore differences. Fragmentation is a negative force. It divides journalists into camps, weakening their ability to join in common cause, e.g. against threats to a free press. Fragmentation suggests to the public that there is no such thing as journalism ethics, only each journalist’s opinion, and this may be a reason to support draconian press laws. Fragmentists lack a vocabulary to address the demands of publicism. They struggle to discuss the public aims and duties that all journalists should honor because, by their own assumption, there are no general, ‘cross-island’ principles or duties. Worse still, the public will struggle to keep fragmented practitioners accountable because there are no agreed-upon principles for the evaluation of media conduct. Under the flag of fragmentation, dubious forms of journalism can be rationalized by appeals to ‘personal’ values. Further, fragmentists, in rejecting integration, seem to assume mistakenly that the source of authority for ethics is each individual journalist or each island of journalists. In contrast, the ‘unity in difference’ approach grounds journalism ethics in flexible general principles that can be realized in multiple ways by different forms of journalism and different media cultures. These overlapping values unify, to some tolerable degree, the obvious differences. To forge a consensus, we must formulate principles in a manner that allows for variation in interpretation and application. For example, how investigative journalists, daily reporters, and social media journalism will honor the principles of truth-seeking, accuracy, and verification will differ within acceptable limits. Culturally, media systems from Canada to South Africa, will define differently what they mean by serving the public

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or the social responsibility of the press. The structure of journalism ethics is less hierarchical and unified than, say, the ethics of the Roman Catholic Church with its infallible Pope and central teachings. Instead, what responsible journalists in different regions of the world may share is an overlapping consensus on basic values such as truth telling and acting as a watchdog on power and injustice.

Personalized ethics One consequence of the breakdown in consensus is a ‘personalization’ of ethical guidelines. Personalization means that it is up to each journalist, form of journalism or media platform to create their own, personalized, ethical guidelines. Personalization is a response to fragmentation. If no consensus is possible, perhaps the best that can be done is to design one’s own guidelines. Journalism ethics has always recognized differences between types of journalists, e.g. allowing columnists to be partial while reporters were to be impartial. But personalization is different. It has a smaller area of agreement than pre-digital ethics. In pre-digital ethics, the area of common values was quite large. Codes of ethics were ‘de-personalized’ – they were universal (or ‘platform-neutral’) – and they were rich in content. They were platform neutral in prescribing rules for anyone that practiced journalism. They were rich in content because they endorsed many general principles and norms. The aforementioned SPJ code exemplifies this de-personalized integrative approach.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethics The SPJ’s integrative approach was not followed when the US-based Online News Association (ONA) decided in 2014 to create their first code of ethics.4 The approach stressed common process, not common

content. The ONA decided that, in an era of multiple forms of journalism, the best strategy was to personalize the process – to give each online journalist or outlet the ‘tools’ to construct their own editorial guidelines. The ONA website encouraged its members to ‘build your own ethics’. It said the project ‘is designed to help news orgs, startups, individual journalists and bloggers create their own ethics codes’. This process has been dubbed ‘DIY ethics’. The toolkit starts with a small set of common principles that the ONA thinks most journalists would consider fundamental, such as tell the truth, do not plagiarize, and correct your errors. Then journalists are asked to make a choice between (a) traditional objective journalism, where ‘your personal opinion is kept under wraps;’ and (b) transparency journalism, ‘meaning it’s fine to write from a certain political or social point of view as long as you’re upfront about it’. The toolkit then provides guidance on constructing guidelines for about 40 areas of practice where ‘honest journalists’ might disagree, such as removing items from online archives, use of anonymous sources, and verification of social media sources. The DIY approach appears to be a positive, inclusive and democratic approach, suited to a plural media world. To others it is an abandonment of journalism ethics, an ill-timed concession to relativism and subjectivism. For the latter, journalism ethics needs strong content. It needs to stand behind the principles and not retreat to a ‘process’ that, like a smorgasbord, allows everyone to pick and choose what values they like.

An integrated code The structure of future codes of ethics should be an integration of the depersonal and personal approaches. It is a false dilemma to say we must choose between the approaches. Any adequate code in the future will have to combine both approaches in a creative and

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mind-stretching exercise. An integrated code would consist of four levels:







Level 1: Depersonalized, general principles expressing what every responsible journalist should affirm insofar as they serve the publics of self-governing democracies. Level 2: More specific norms that fall under the principles, like the SPJ code, only there is no ban on mentioning forms of journalism or formulating rules for new practices. Level 3: Case studies and examples of how the norms of Levels 1 and 2 are applied in daily journalism, such as how to minimize harm, without a focus on new media issues. Level 4: A set of guidelines and protocols for new media practices and platforms. This level would be a work in progress, evolving as we improve our ethical thinking in this area.

This code should be a living document online. It should be constantly improved upon in light of public discussion on issues and trends. Unlike the personalization approach, the code would be rich in content, from the principles on Levels 1 and 2, to the applications and leading-edge discussions on Levels 3 and 4. Unlike the depersonalized approach, it would do more than state abstract principles for all. It would weave fundamental principles into a multi-leveled code.

CRITICAL NOTIONS Open, global ethics The digital revolution has given birth to an ethics discourse that goes beyond the confines of media professions. It also transcends borders. The public participate directly in the discussion of journalism ethics. This discursive, public-engaged ethics alters pre-digital notions of media criticism and reform. Discussion of journalism ethics is now ‘open’ to all. It is not a ‘closed’ discourse among professionals only. It is discussed by online networks of citizens and professionals. The networks discuss everything from

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shoddy reporting in the mainstream media to the use of cell phones to monitor human rights. This global discourse, whether angry or restrained, reflective or reactionary, misinformed or erudite, is participatory moral reasoning in the form of discourse. Unlike many professional discussions, it is informal and unstructured. It mixes together a stew of fact, rumor, bias, interpretation and ideology. Normative interpretations of journalism conflict. Digital media ethics, at this level, is contested, evolving, cross-cultural, and never settled. For those who favor systematic thought and careful reflection, this discourse is frustrating and ‘goes nowhere’. For those who favor inclusive, free-wheeling discourse, this form of ethics is stimulating and challenging, and much needed. Whatever one’s preferences, this is a form of discourse that researchers and ethicists in digital media ethics need to study and understand, because it is the new global forum for media ethics. Finally, media ethics is becoming, increasingly, a form of social activism. Today, the critics can join the media players on the field. They can do ‘media ethics activism’. One sense of that term is summed up in the phrase: ‘If you don’t like the media you’re getting, create your own media’. Media ethics goes beyond criticism. We can create new and counter-balancing media spaces committed to ethical ideals. One space is the development on nonprofit journalism. Across the USA, centers for nonprofit investigative journalism have sprung up, financed by foundations and individual donors. Around the world, journalism schools do the sort of real-world journalism in the public interest that is lacking among commercial media. Non-governmental agencies experiment in the use of new media for social reform or to inform citizens about human rights. These new media entities have potential as stand-alone initiatives. But they can have additional impact if they unite with others. In doing media ethics activism, new media,

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legacy media and education units can join to shape the media universe for the better.

CONCLUSION Given the trends surveyed in this chapter, the task is to create a new, more complex, and conceptually deeper global ethics for responsible communication, professionally and non-professionally, mainstream and nonmainstream, online and offline. In the future, journalism ethics will be part of a larger communication ethics, as we sort out the norms for media use by everyone. Journalism ethics will be process-orientated as an open and global, public discourse, incorporating non-Western interpretations of practice. Discussion and reform of media will involve the public, as an essential player. Ethics will be emergent and contested, rightfully so. Journalism ethics will become more activist, creating good journalism and advocating for the better world. The philosophical basis for this new ethics will be an epistemology that borrows substantially from pragmatic and other related philosophies. At its core will be imperfectionism as expressed by falliblism, experimentalism and interpretism. The new ethics will redefine, not abandon publicism, as an anchor for moral claims, and it will focus on macro public issues.

NOTES  1  Available at http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp  2  For a classic presentation of the social responsibility of the press, see Chapter 3 of Siebert, Peterson and Schramm, 1956. For a discussion of the tension between libertarian and strong social responsibility views see Chapter 3 of Ward, 2011.

 3  http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/  4  The project is at http://journalists.org/resources/ build-your-own-ethics-code

REFERENCES Albrecht, James M. (2012) Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Beitz, Charles (2009) The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald (1986) Law’s Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friend, Cecilia and Jane Singer (2007) Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Makau, Josina M. and Debian L. Marty (2013) Dialogue and Deliberation. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Mill, John S. (2006) On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. New York, NY: Penguin. Putnam, Hilary (1995) Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Quine, Willard V. O. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm (1956) Four Theories of the Press. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Ward, Stephen J. A. (2005) The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond. Montreal, Que.: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ward, Stephen J. A. (2011) Ethics and the Media: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ward, Stephen J. A., ed. (2013) Global Media Ethics: Problems and Perspectives. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Ward, Stephen J. A. (2014) ‘Radical media ethics: Ethics for a global digital world’, Digital Journalism. DOI:10.1080/21670811.2014. 952985. Ward, Stephen J. A. (2015) Radical Media Ethics: A Global Approach. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

6 Social Media and the News Alfred Hermida

In October 1896, New Yorkers caught their first glimpse of one of the iconic phrases in journalism. Above Madison Square shone a red illuminated advertising sign that said, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’. It wasn’t until a year later that the most famous seven words in American journalism appeared on The New York Times masthead, going on to become emblematic of a highbrow approach to the news (Campbell, 2012). Today, a more apt slogan might be ‘All the news that’s fit to share’. By 2010, readers were sharing a link to a Times story every four seconds (Harris, 2010). On any given day, a mix of the enlightening, enticing or entertaining makes its way to the list of most tweeted stories on its website. Social recommendation of the news has become commonplace as digital networks such as Facebook and Twitter have developed as spaces for audiences to disseminate, dissect and dispute the work of professional journalists. Audience research points to the rising use of social networks for news, together with the growing importance of

social recommendation as a source of traffic for news websites. But the sharing of news and information is not a new phenomenon brought about by social media. There have always been degrees of social interaction with media (see Chapter 21). Humans are, by nature, social animals. Throughout history, people have used the communication tools at hand to sort, filter and share information, and to form and nurture relationships. Donath notes that the roots of sociable media can be traced back 4000 years to clay tablets bearing personal observations (2004). The key issue is how the advent of computer-mediated communication has given rise to new forms of media that are impacting the dynamics of the discovery, selection, publication and distribution of news and information. Indeed, journalism is but one sector being transformed by technologies intended to enhance communication and the formation of social ties. This chapter addresses the interplay between social media platforms, tools and

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services, and journalism. It examines the implications for journalism of what Wellman and Rainie call the triple revolution – the rise of ‘social networks, the personalized internet and always-available mobile connectivity,’ (2012: ix). It seeks to highlight the impact of social practices, cultural trends and technological actants on flows of news and information. The chapter begins by examining the rise of social media as spaces for the dissemination, circulation and interpretation of the news. It will then address the implications of new audience habits on journalism, assess the response of news organisations and consider the rise of new actors and actants.

DEFINING SOCIAL MEDIA Within the space of a few years, social media has become a ‘global phenomenon’ (Pew, 2010: 1), with the brisk uptake of a range of services and tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Weibo across the world. By 2010, almost half of adults in countries such as the USA, Poland, the UK and South Korea, were using social media (Pew, 2010). Since then, social media use has flourished in a digital media ecosystem, fuelled by the rapid spread of smartphones, development of easy-to-use apps and widespread connectivity to the internet. By 2014, more than two billion people were active users of social media, three-quarters of them accessing platforms via mobile devices (Kemp, 2014). Facebook alone had 1.44 billion monthly active users in March 2015, most of them using the service on mobile (Facebook, n.d.). Among the other main platforms in 2015 were Twitter with 302 million monthly active users, Instagram with 300 million and LinkedIn with 347 million members (Bullas, 2015). In 2004, Judith Donath predicted that ‘we are rapidly approaching the time when, for millions of people, mediated sociability will be with them at all times, no matter where they are or what they are doing’ (2004:

631). Given the proliferation of always-on, connected mobile devices and social media, that time may be upon us. The internet technologies of social media build on the idea of Web 2.0 popularised by internet entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly (2005). He frames Web 2.0 as an architecture of participation that enables people to have interactions that go beyond consumption to the creation, dissemination and sharing of digital content (O’Reilly, 2005). Kaplan and Haenlein define social media as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (2010: 61). The production of media content by audiences pre-dates the internet. As Harrison and Barthel argue, ‘historically, active media users have accomplished radical and community-oriented purposes through the ­ construction of media products organised in support of social movements and community initiatives’ (2009: 174). What distinguish social media are the networked structures and mechanisms it provides for individuals with mutual values, concerns or interests to connect and collaborate without any central coordination. These platforms, tools and services enable individuals to ‘construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (boyd & Ellison, 2007: n.p.). Harrison and Barthel argue that ‘new media technologies now enable vastly more users to experiment with a wider and seemingly more varied range of collaborative creative activities’ (2009: 174). Manuel Castells describes this new form of socialised communication as ‘mass self-communication’ (2007: 248). The key elements are that it is ‘self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by the many that communicate with many’ (2007: 248).

Social Media and the News

Social media falls within the scope of participatory communication technologies that are presumed to enable people to interact, participate and collaborate in the production of media, rather than just consuming media (see, for example, Tapscott and Williams, 2006). Implicit is the notion that, pre-social media, audiences were passive consumers of media. Such an approach underplays how audiences bring their own interpretative lens to make sense of media messages (Fiske, 1987). Traditionally, though, audiences have had little capacity to influence the creation and composition of media narratives presented in print or broadcast. Social media, then, offers users an expanded role in the ability not just to shape media messages, but also appropriate and reinterpret them or bypass the media altogether in a many-to-many model. As Marwick and boyd note, ‘in contrast to the imagined broadcast audience, which consumes institutionallycreated content with limited possibilities for feedback, the networked audience has a clear way to communicate with the speaker through the network’ (2011: 129). It means that distinctions between producers and consumers of news, between the media as gatekeepers and the public as audiences, have become blurred to the point that the terms themselves are in need of redefinition and reinterpretation. This chapter will address how news has become a pervasive ingredient of social media, before going on to examine the impact of social media on the gathering and production and on the dissemination, interpretation and framing of news.

THE NEWS ENVIRONMENT News has long been shaped by spatial and temporal factors. In the last century, news consumption habits developed alongside professional routines of news gathering, production and distribution. The daily newspaper condensed the world into a stable, textual

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representation of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’. The stories followed a daily pattern of production, with the final product sent to the printing presses in early evening and delivered to audiences the following morning (Sheller, 2015). The information was tied to specific times in the day and specific geographic areas, be they local, regional or national. Broadcast news was shaped by similar temporal and spatial considerations. Towards the end of twentieth century, news started to morph from being a rationed commodity consumed by audiences at specific times of the day to being an abundant all-youcan-eat buffet open all hours and available on the go. Studies point to the fluidity of news and information consumption, shaped by available communication technologies, time, space and context. For example, a 2013 UK industry survey found mobiles capture the attention in the morning during breakfast or the commute to work, while tablets are more popular in the evening (ComScore, 2013). Just as news production and dissemination is no longer just the purview of professional journalists, news is no longer simply a discrete activity tied to particular times and places. Rather news has become ambient (Hermida, 2012): the development of lightweight and always-on socially-networked devices enables the pervasive, persistent and perpetual awareness of news. As Pew Research noted back in 2010, ‘encounters with news are becoming more personal as users customize their experience and take charge of the flow of news into their lives’ (2010: 40). Social discovery of the news is not novel. Publics have always turned to the available communication systems to connect with others to filter, manage and share information. The novel aspect is how news habits are shaped by the new digital technologies of social media. Commonly, news-seeking behaviour has been characterised as a purposeful activity in seeking information (Tewksbury et al., 2001). Typically, an individual would decide to read a newspaper or

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tune into a radio or television news bulletin. The growth of the internet has gone hand in hand with a greater incidental, maybe even accidental, exposure to the news. In their 2001 paper, Tewksbury et  al. noted how audiences were exposed to news by simply browsing the web, given the ubiquity of news headlines on popular websites. With social media, news is ever more pervasive in everyday experiences. Social media spaces, largely created as private, corporate enterprises, have mutated into places for the dissemination, circulation and interpretation of news and information. They have become networked public spaces for audiences to share, discuss and contribute to the news, enhancing the ability of news consumers to both create and receive tailored news streams. Social media is not replacing mass media. Rather people are using it as a source for news alongside established media (Hermida, et  al., 2012; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). Newman, Levy and Nielsen note that in four years of study of news habits, ‘we see a consistent pattern, with television news and online news the most frequently accessed, while printed newspapers have declined significantly and social media are growing rapidly’ (2015: 9). Their research points to the emergence of social media as a space for news, with two-thirds of Facebook users across 12 countries having reported finding, reading, discussing or sharing news on the network (Newman et al., 2015). In the USA specifically, a similar number of Facebook and Twitter users said they got some of their news on these platforms (Barthel et al., 2015). While social media services are still secondary news sources, they are growing in importance for young adults (Barthel et  al., 2015). Looking ahead, the trends point to how younger generations are increasingly relying on digital media at the expense of more established media. News consumption habits across social media are not uniform across audiences or social networks. Social media platforms tend to have distinct age profiles, with Instagram

and Snapchat skewing younger than Facebook. While high profile networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the most popular sources for news overall, young adults are also turning to other services such as Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr (Newman et  al., 2015). Similarly, the relative importance of these secondary networks for news varies across countries. For example, the social messaging app, WhatsApp, emerged as a significant news platform in Brazil, whereas it barely caused a ripple in the USA (Newman et al., 2015). Audience behaviour varies from platform to platform, particularly between the two more important networks for news – Facebook and Twitter. By 2015, 41 per cent of American adults were getting some of their news from Facebook, compared with 10 per cent on Twitter (Barthel et al., 2015). But studies point to two distinct news consumption cultures emerging on each platform. On Facebook, though, news exposure and consumption is more of a by-product of spending time on the service. News is an incidental experience that just happens on Facebook when users are sharing experiences, photos or connecting with friends (Mitchell et al., 2013). The incidental news exposure on Facebook contrasts with more purposeful news seeking on Twitter. In a sign of how Twitter is seen as a real-time avenue for news, twice as many American internet users turn to it to keep up with breaking news than Facebook (Barthel et al., 2015). Since its launch in 2006, the service has moved towards emphasising timely informational messages. In her analysis of its evolution, van Dijck (2011) found that ‘subtle but meaningful change in Twitter’s interface indicates a strategy that emphasizes (global, public) news and information over (personal, private) conversation in restricted circles’ (2012: 340–1). As Newman, Levy and Nielsen put it, ‘we seek news on Twitter but bump into it on Facebook’ (2015: 81). For news organisations, Facebook is a more valuable way to

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reach casual users of the news than devoted followers who check the news several times a day. Individuals with a passing interest in news have traditionally been much harder to reach. Social discovery on Facebook, then, has become far more important as a means for news organisations to gain access to these elusive audiences. Overall, a major shift may be taking place in how the public learns about the world around them. The minority of those who follow the news closely will continue to seek it out on mainstream and social media. Those with a passing interest in the news may be moving away from even casual news-seeking activities. In an ambient news environment, the distinctiveness of media formats fades into the background as news seeking behaviour oscillates seamlessly between television, the internet, the mobile phone or the newspaper (Sheller, 2015). The pervasive, persistent and perpetual nature of news and information, facilitated by digital technologies and fuelled by social media, means that some may no longer see a need to seek out the latest updates. Instead ‘the news will come to me’. Such an attitude is based on the belief that if something is important enough, it will crop up on a social media feed (for a discussion, see Hermida, 2014).

THE CONTEXT FOR JOURNALISM The ubiquity of the production and consumption of news and information has had, and continues to have, profound implications for journalism. The scale and impact of the shifts in news present challenges and opportunities for both journalists and the public. The separation between the producers of news and the consumers of news has become further blurred with social media. The media space is best described as a hybrid news system (Chadwick, 2011). Hybridity (see also Chapter 11) affects how news is surfaced, circulated, framed and discussed. It affects

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the actors involved in the shaping and representation of the news. As Chadwick suggests, ‘the personnel, practices, genres, technologies, and temporalities of supposedly ‘new’ online media are hybridized with those of supposedly ‘old’ broadcast and press media’ (2011: 7). Social media builds on earlier participatory practices of the news media, which tended to be circumscribed by prevailing newsroom norms and values (for an overview, see Singer et  al., 2011). Much of the initial research into participatory journalism looked at how newsrooms were integrating material from the public into news products and at the spaces created online for audience feedback. Social media, and in particular, Twitter, serve as spaces where the distinctions between material from journalists and audience are blended into constantly updating social awareness streams. On Twitter, much of the mix of information, experience and comment is event-driven, with messages about the latest political scandal, a popular music video or soccer transfers jostling for attention in a constantly updating stream of content. The nature of Twitter as a news platform is most evident at times of crisis. During a natural disaster or terror attack, Twitter comes alive with firsthand accounts, speculation, emotion and opinion (Hermida, 2014). Professional journalists, news organisations, groups and individuals generate hybrid, ambient streams of news and information through processes of broadcasting, redacting and dissemination. The resulting amalgam of fact, comment, experience and emotion rubs up against the established journalistic practice of separating reporting from opinion and commentary. Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2012) suggest that the hybrid news production and dissemination processes on social media reshape how events become news. Novel news values of instantaneity, solidarity and ambience emerge alongside traditional journalistic news values of impact, proximity and currency, particularly at times of breaking

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news when a large number of individuals are involved in the selection, filtering and distribution of information (see Chapter 7). The news, then, is ‘collaboratively constructed out of subjective experience, opinion, and emotion within an ambient news environment’ (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012: 279). The flow, framing and representation of the news is negotiated in interactions that Chadwick argues are ‘characterized by conflict, competition, partisanship, and mutual dependency, in the pursuit of new information that will propel a news story forward and increase its newsworthiness’ (2011: 19). One of the most visible manifestations of this process currently takes place around exchanges labelled with specific hashtags. The hashtag has emerged as a key method to filter information and to participate in discussions on social media beyond a user’s circle of contacts. But the hashtag has also been harnessed as a framing device. For example, in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a popular hashtag on Twitter was #SochiProblems. It appeared more than 331,000 times used by athletes, journalists and citizens to share and rebroadcast anecdotes of teething troubles at the Russian venue, from odd toilet layouts to yellowtinged water (Hermida, 2014). Instead of stories of sporting triumph, the lead-up to the games was framed as a stream of amusing and often embarrassing tales of ‘only in Russia’ (see Chapter 7 for a detailed analysis of networked framing). At other times, social media has emerged as a channel to contest mainstream media narratives. One of the most prominent examples has been the use of social media to challenge media accounts of news events that portray Blackness as threatening (see, for example, Muhammed, 2010). In 2012, anti-racism activists turned to Twitter following the shooting dead of unarmed African American Trayvon Martin in Florida (Senft and Noble, 2013). The hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter,

served as a ‘call to action’ – ‘an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise’ (Garza, 2014). Two years later, the #Ferguson hashtag was used to draw attention to events in the city in Missouri following the fatal shooting of the unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in August 2014. The subsequent protests generated 3.6 million tweets in a week, discussing the circumstances of the shooting, the actions of the police and media coverage (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015). Social platforms were used not just as a place of protest, but also to turn the spotlight back on the police and media themselves. In their study of the #Ferguson hashtag, Bonilla and Rosa note it ‘allowed a message to get out, called global attention to a small corner of the world, and attempted to bring visibility and accountability to repressive forces’ (2015: 7). #Ferguson and later hashtags such as #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown sought to highlight and contest stereotypical media misrepresentations of African Americans. As Bonilla and Rosa suggest, ‘social media platforms such as Twitter offer sites for collectively constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities’ (2015: 6). Scholars have pointed out how communication practices on social media can serve to bring people together around an event or issue in the news. Bruns and Moe (2013) argue that hashtags can facilitate the rapid formation of ad hoc issue publics around a news event. Such groups may be as fleeting as the issue that brought them together on social media declines in prominence. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag is an example of how individuals can coalesce around an issue facilitated by the networked affordances of social media. Castells (2009) argues that such actions can nurture a form of network power through switching. Power comes from the connections made by individuals across diverse networks that enable them to combine resources to contest hierarchical power.

Social Media and the News

Social media can serve as a contested middle ground, where the power of institutional elites such as the mainstream media is questioned and, to some extent, negated by the actions of disparate individuals (Callison and Hermida, 2015). The hashtag serves as a switch through which these individuals express, debate and articulate meaning in a hybrid media space. Research into social movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street in the USA and Idle No More in Canada has highlighted how social media is being used by committed individuals to challenge dismissive media coverage and amplify a counter narrative (Callison and Hermida, 2015; Gleason, 2013; Lotan et al., 2011; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; see also Chapters 10 and 17). Such research suggests that traditional journalistic sourcing techniques may be out of step with the dynamics of social media, particularly when it comes to reporting on emergent social movements. News sourcing practices tend to favour elites who derive authority and legitimacy from institutional positions of power. Yet authority and credibility can be assigned to individuals on social media through networked gatekeeping (see Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion). According to Meraz and Papacharissi, networked gatekeeping is ‘a process through which actors are crowdsourced to prominence through the use of conversational, social practices that symbiotically connect elite and crowd in the determination of information relevancy’ (2013: 22). Institutional elites such as politicians, business leaders and prominent journalists extend their inherited, structural power into social media environments (see Chapter 16). But the actions and interactions of networked publics can result in the emergence of key actors who would not be traditionally considered by journalists as authoritative sources. Hybridity means that the power of established elites operates alongside emergent, crowdsourced nodes of influence. The authority to speak on behalf of a movement

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or idea becomes a contextual, relational and dynamic resource allocated by the actors engaged around a particular event, issue, or cause on social media (Hermida, 2015).

THE PRACTICE OF JOURNALISM As this chapter has so far explored, the context for news and journalism is being modified as social media grows in popularity and scope. Equally impacted are the norms and practice of journalism as a profession at an individual and organisational level. Research on the interaction between journalism as a profession and social media has mushroomed in recent years. Much of it is focused on Twitter, and more specifically on the use of the service by journalists and newsrooms. Such research is valuable in charting the contours of journalistic practice in a hybrid media, but it risks drawing on ‘primarily … traditional conceptual lenses to make sense of emergent phenomena’ (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009: 563). Studies point to the pervasive adoption of social media by journalists as part of their news work (Gulyás, 2013; Hedman and Djerf-Pierre, 2013). But such numbers can mask how far new communication technologies are both reinforcing and reinventing established routines. Much of the research suggests that journalists use the immediacy and reach of social media services such as Twitter to extend existing newsgathering, reporting and broadcasting practices (for an overview, see Hermida, 2013). Newsrooms regularly scour social media to cherry-pick eyewitness accounts, photos and videos at times of breaking news, or to find and contact news sources. But studies suggest that audiences are not actively engaged in the co-creation of the news or given agency over the nature of the story (Cozma and Chen 2013; Noguera-Vivo 2013). Overall, approaches to public involvement in the news is in line with previous research into

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participatory journalism that found that journalists view the audience as active recipients, who are expected to act when they see news and then react to the published news story (Singer et al., 2011). The strain on established practices is even more evident when it comes to the journalistic tenet of verification. While the discipline of verification is core to journalism (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001), there are significant tensions as journalists balance accuracy with the velocity, volume and visibility of social media content. For example, Bruno (2011) found inconsistent approaches to social media content among three news organisations during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Similarly, a study by Thurman and Walters into live blogging at the Guardian concluded that ‘factual verification is cursory’ (2013: 82). Approaches and techniques for verifying content on social media are commonly discussed within the news industry (see, for example, Silverman, 2013). That being said, verification has never been an absolute in journalism, with a wide variability in methods and standards (Shapiro et  al., 2013). Arguably, the issue is less how far the rules of verification are being bent and more how far the concept is being altered in environments where the control and production of knowledge is dynamic and diffused. The work of Hermida, Lewis and Zamith (2014) points to the potential of social media as a networked and collaborative newsroom, where reports are sifted, dissected and questioned in public exchanges between the journalist and members of the public. The question for both scholars and professionals is how far journalism is becoming ‘a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time’ (Hermida, 2012: 666). Journalists operating in these social media spaces end up balancing professional identity with the personal and private (see Chapter 8). Social media platforms are spaces beyond the institutional publication frameworks of a news organisation. Moreover, organisational

accounts tend to be outnumbered by the individual accounts of journalists. The public and the private, as well as the personal and the professional, jostle side by side in social media. The lines of separation are far more blurred and far more fragile than in institutional media outlets. While it is difficult to generalise, studies on journalists’ behaviour on Twitter suggest they share more personal and private details about their family and social activities, presenting a more subjective appearance than through traditional news products (Lasorsa et  al., 2012; Vis, 2013). Another study (Lasorsa, 2012) pointed to the role of gender, and suggested women tended to be more open than men. From the perspective of the news industry, social media is both a blessing and curse. It offers new ways to connect and engage with audiences in the spaces where they congregate. This is particularly important in order to reach those with a passing interest in news. As Newman, Levy and Nielsen note, ‘social discovery is a better mechanism for reaching Casual Users and those on lower incomes than going directly to a website or using email’ (2015: 78). Furthermore, social media offers the potential to tap into the core of loyal, dedicated readers and harness their enthusiasm to recommend and amplify a particular story. Simultaneously, the agenda-setting role of the mainstream media is undermined when everyone can be their own news editor. Social sharing allows individuals to bypass the choices of editors and instead choose to highlight what they deem important and worthy (Purcell et al., 2010; Hermida et al., 2012). By 2014, tools to share, like or recommend content on US news websites were ubiquitous (Ju et  al., 2014). The proliferation of social recommendation mechanisms on news websites has served to encourage and reinforce what Singer (2014) describes as the secondary gatekeeping function of the audience. She notes that while editors might attempt to highlight certain issues or stories using established salience cues, ‘they also are

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counting on a user’s ability to scoop any item into his or her own social net and from there to highlight it, re-disseminate it, or enhance its chances to be seen in some other way’ (2014: 66). Media organisations have to contend with an additional dynamic of this hybrid media space – the economic and societal power of social media platforms themselves. While news websites abound with buttons to tweet or like a story, it is far from clear who benefits the most. Research to date raises questions about the economic benefit of social recommendation. In their study, Ju, Jeong and Chyi found that the contribution of social media to traffic and advertising revenue ‘is underwhelming at best, despite all the media hype about the potential of SNSs as news delivery channels’ (2014: 8). The economics of off-site distribution add a further layer of complexity. Technology companies have been courting the mainstream media to host content natively on their platforms through, for example, Facebook’s Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover or Apple News. The potential immediate economic value to media companies has been hotly debated (Doctor, 2015; Filloux, 2015). In the long term, there are questions over how far the twentieth-century distribution model of news is being challenged, undermined and, perhaps, ultimately, obliterated by the rise of new intermediaries standing between a publisher and its audience. Filloux suggests ‘we’re heading towards a new phase of massive re-intermediation, of reshuffling the layers between the news producers (traditional media houses or pure players) and readers’ (2015: n.p.). Much as the internet contributed to the unbundling of the newspaper, now these platforms are unbundling individual pieces of content from its publisher. Significantly, it breaks the direct relationship between a reader and the publisher. The relationship, instead, is between the reader and the news distributor, be it Facebook or Apple. The threat may still appear to be a distant storm

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on the horizon that may change direction, especially considering the financial challenges facing much of the media (see Chapter 4). And, the numbers for people getting their news through social media were still far off the size of television and newspaper audiences (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). Still, as noted in Newman et  al., ‘there is renewed concern about the power of these networks, about the lack of transparency around the algorithms that surface content and about the extent to which publishers will get a fair return for the quality content that drives so much social media usage’ (2015: 15). Technology companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have emerged as key media organisations in the twenty-first century, even though they do not create media. In any case, for them, news is far from their central concern. As they become entwined in the distribution, circulation and promotion of news and information, scholars and industry analysts have interrogated the duties and responsibilities of social media platforms to the public interest, above all in supporting the information needs of a well-­functioning democracy (Napoli, 2005). While the Council of Europe (2012) has framed social networking services as having a public service value, it is debatable how such notions are prioritised by the commercial entities that dominate social media. Napoli notes that while public interest has been a part of mainstream media, there is ‘something of a public interest vacuum at the institutional level that has characterized how these platforms are designed and operated, at least in relation to the issue of the dissemination of news and information’ (2015: 6). Similarly, Ananny and Crawford (2015) found a disconnect between the public service ideals of journalism and the professional values of the designers of social platforms. Of interest, then, are the values embedded in the proprietary algorithms that fuel the recommendation, discovery and consumption of news and information on social platforms.

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The issue here is not the algorithm per se. Gillespie (2014) compares algorithms to the town crier – they are just the latest cultural form to process, filter and select information. It is the opacity of algorithms. The issue is how such algorithms are designed and used by individuals to identify and highlight knowledge to certain individual users and not others. Algorithms make decisions on the indexing, relevance, value, visibility and prominence of knowledge in ways that shape and inform public life (see Gillespie, 2014). As scholars such as Anderson (2011) and Tufekci (2014) have highlighted, there is a need for greater scrutiny of the role and impact of algorithmic manipulation on the flow of news and information.

CONCLUSION The start of the chapter suggested that an apt slogan to describe today’s media environment might be ‘All the news that fit to share’. The phrase is a memorable way to describe an emerging media space where social discovery and dissemination plays such a significant role. The catchy slogan masks the complexity of how news and information is produced, processed, and packaged. As this chapter has explored, those seven words encapsulate a hybrid media space where old and new actors, actants, audiences and activities interact in socially negotiated sensemaking (Weick, 1995). The dissemination of news and information through social interaction has always played a role in society. Far more significant is how it takes place in the social operating system that Wellman and Rainie (2012) call networked individualism. As a result, Wellman and Rainie suggest, ‘the lines between information, communication and action have blurred’ (2012: 14). The information habits of networked individuals go beyond consuming the news. Implicit in the notion of networked individualism is an expectation that

people use social media not simply to seek multiple sources of news and information, but also to compare results, connect with others and share experiences. Everyone takes on the role of editor and gatekeeper, whether intentionally or not. Social media is a space full of paradoxes. The news is everywhere and nowhere on social media. People do not go to Facebook for the news. Such platforms are primarily used for social purposes – to communicate and connect with others. News is incidental, part of the everyday social practices taking place on these platforms. Yet at the same time, news stories and issues can rise to prominence through these social practices, as publics take in information, assess it, integrate it into existing memory and knowledge and then rearticulate it. These dynamics intersect with the practice of journalism, the business of journalism and the role of journalism in society. News is becoming more personalised and individualised while at the same time more collaborative and collective. Each Facebook feed presents an experience uniquely customised to one person, yet issues and stories surface and are prominent across the feeds of many users. The choices of thousands of individuals are routinely aggregated to provide a representation of the interests and concerns of the public – at least of an engaged and ephemeral ad hoc public that has formed around a cause facilitated by social media. For journalists and news organisations, the paradoxes of social media can be perplexing. News can take place simultaneously outside of the logic of news institutions, yet is shaped and reshaped by the interplay with the institutional logic of news. Traditional news values of impact, currency and proximity matter, but so do emergent values of instantaneity, solidarity and ambience. For journalists, this is not just a personal, professional, public or private space. Social media can be a composite of all of these. There attributes play out on a continuum and combine in intricate ways, depending on the platform, context and

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individual choices. At an institutional level, the opportunities in distribution and revenue come with uncertainty and potentially longterm risks. Mapping the contours of this networked, hybrid media environment, and understanding its impact on news and public life, is an on-going enterprise. Such an enterprise goes beyond investigating news practices by audiences or journalists in social spaces. It involves charting the processes of news as they play out on social platforms, identifying the actors involved at a particular time and place, and unravelling the context in which such developments take place. How an event or issue gets reported as ‘the news’ is the result of multiple interactions by multiple factors and forces that are dependent on the nature of the story, the context in which it unfolds and the influential actors at the time. In the contested space of social media, power is fluid and dynamic, shaped by contextual, relational and temporal factors. Identifying and mapping how authority, influence and power is assigned and reassigned in a hybrid news environment is critical. Ultimately, it comes down to understanding what becomes news.

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racial politics of social media in the United States’, American Ethnologist, 42: 4–17. boyd, d. and Ellison, N. (2007) ‘Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1): article 11. Bruno, N. (2011) ‘Tweet First, Verify Later? How Real-time Information Is Changing the Coverage of Worldwide Crisis Events’. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Bruns, A., and Moe, H. (2013) ‘Structural layers of communication on Twitter’, in Weller, K., Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Mahrt, M. and Puschmann, C. (eds), Twitter and society, Vol. 89: 15–28. New York: Peter Lang. Bullas, J. (2015) ‘33 Social Media Facts and Statistics You Should Know in 2015’ (http:// w w w. j e f f b u l l a s . c o m / 2 0 1 5 / 0 4 / 0 8 / 33-social-media-facts-and-statistics-youshould-know-in-2015) Callison, C. and Hermida, A. (2015) ‘Dissent and resonance: ‘#Idlenomore as an emergent middle ground’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 40(4): 695–716. Campbell, W. J. (2012) ‘Story of the Most Famous Seven Words in US Journalism’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-uscanada-16918787) Castells, M. (2007) ‘Communication, power and counter-power in the network society’. International Journal of Communication, 1(1): 238–266. Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chadwick, A. (2011) ‘The political information cycle in a hybrid news system: The British prime minister and the “Bullygate” affair’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(1): 3–29. ComScore (2013) UK digital future in focus 2013, ComScore whitepaper (http://www. comscore.com/Insights/Presentationsand-Whitepapers/2013/2013-UK-DigitalFuture-in-Focus) Costera Meijer, I., and Groot Kormelink, T. (2015) ‘Checking, sharing, clicking and linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014’, Digital Journalism 3(5): 664–679. Council of Europe (2012) Recommendation CM/Rec(2012)4 of the Committee of

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Ministers to member states on the protection of human rights with regard to social networking services (https://wcd.coe.int/ ViewDoc.jsp?id=1929453) Cozma, R., and Chen, K. (2013) ‘What’s in a Tweet?’, Journalism Practice 7(1): 33–46. Dijck, J. Van. (2011) ‘Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform,’ International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 7(3): 333–348. Doctor, K. (2015) ‘On end games and end times’, Nieman Lab, July 2, 2015. (http:// www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomicson-end-games-and-end-times/) Donath, J. (2004) ‘Sociable media’, in W.S. Bainbridge (ed.), The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human–Computer Interaction. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group. Facebook, (n.d.) Stats. http://newsroom. fb.com/company-info/ Filloux, F. (2015) ‘The redistribution game for news’. (http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/ 06/14/the-redistribution-game-for-news/) Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Garza, A. (2014) ‘A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza’, The Feminist Wire. (http://www.thefeministwire. com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/) Gillespie, T. (2014) ‘The relevance of algorithms’ in Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P., and Foot, K. (eds), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gleason, B. (2013) ‘#Occupy Wall Street: Exploring informal learning about a social movement on Twitter’, American Behavioural Scientist, 57: 966–82. Gulyás, A. (2013) ‘The influence of professional variables on journalists’ uses and views of social media: A comparative study of Finland, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom’, Digital Journalism, 1(2). Harris, J. (2010) ‘How Often Is The Times Tweeted’ New York Times (http://open.blogs. n y t im e s. c o m / 2 0 1 0 / 0 4 / 1 5 / h o w - o f t e nis-the-times-tweeted/) Harrison, T. M., and Barthel, B. (2009) ‘Wielding new media in Web 2.0: Exploring the history of engagement with the collaborative construction of media products’, New Media & Society, 11(1–2): 155–78.

Hedman, U., and Djerf-Pierre, M. (2013) ‘The Social Journalist: Embracing the Social Media Life or Creating a New Digital Divide?’, Digital Journalism, 1(3). Hermida, A. (2012) ‘Tweets and truth: Journalism as a discipline of collaborative verification’, Journalism Practice 6(5–6): 659–68. Hermida, A. (2013) ‘#Journalism: Reconfiguring journalism research about Twitter, one tweet at a time’, Digital Journalism, 1(3): 295–313. Hermida, A. (2014) Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters. Toronto: DoubleDay Canada. Hermida, A. (2015) ‘Power Plays on Social Media’, Social Media+Society 1.1. Hermida, A., Fletcher, F., Korell, D., and Logan, D. (2012) ‘Share, like, Recommend’, Journalism Studies, 13(5–6): 815–24. Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C., and Zamith, R. (2014) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 479–99. Ju, A., Jeong, S. H., and Chyi, H. I. (2014) ‘Will social media save newspapers: Examining the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms’, Journalism Practice, 8(1), 1–17. Kaplan, A and Haenlein, M. (2010) ‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media’, Business Horizons, 53(1): 59–68. Kemp, S. (2014) ‘Global social media users pass 2 billion’, We Are Social, August 8, 2014. (http://wearesocial.net/blog/2014/08/ global-social-media-users-pass-2-billion/) Kovach, B., and Rosenstiel, T. (2001) The Elements of Journalism. New York: Crown Publishers. Lasorsa, D. (2012) ‘Transparency and other journalistic norms on Twitter’, Journalism Studies, 13(3): 402–17. Lasorsa, D., Lewis, S. C. and Holton, A. E. (2012) ‘Normalizing Twitter: Journalism practice in an emerging communication space’, Journalism Studies, 13(1): 19–36. Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I. and boyd, d. (2011) ‘The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian

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­revolutions’, International Journal of Communication, 5: 1375–1405. Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011) ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience’, New Media Society, 13(1): 114–33. Meraz, S. and Papacharissi, Z. (2013) ‘Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #Egypt’, International Journal of the Press and Politics, 18(2): 1–29. Mitchell, A., Kiley, J., Gottfried, J. and Guskin, E. (2013) ‘The Role of News on Facebook: Common yet Incidental’ (http://www. journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-ofnews-on-facebook/) Mitchelstein, E., and Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2009) ‘Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production’, Journalism 10(5): 562–86 Muhammad, K. G. (2010) The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern America. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Napoli, P. M. (2005) ‘Media management and the public interest’ in Albrarran, A., ChanOlmsted, S. and Wirth, M. (eds), Handbook of Media Management and Economics: 275–95. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Napoli, P. M. (2015) ‘Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeeper’, Telecommunications Policy, 13(9): 751–60. Newman, N., Levy, D. A. L., Nielsen, R. K. (2015) ‘Digital news report 2015: Tracking the future of news’. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Nielsen, R. K. and Schrøder, K. C. (2014) ‘The relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news’, Digital Journalism, 2(4): 472–89. Noguera-Vivo, J.M. (2013) ‘How open are journalists on Twitter? Trends towards the end-user journalism’, Communication & Society/Comunicacion y Sociedad 26(1): 93–114. O’Reilly, T. (2005) ‘What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software’ (http://oreilly.com/ web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html, accessed September 2, 2010)

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Papacharissi, Z. and de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012) ‘Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt’, Journal of Communication, 62(2): 266–82. Pew (2010) ‘Global Publics Embrace Social Networking’, Pew Research Center (http:// pewglobal.org/files/2010/12/Pew-GlobalAttitudes-Technology-Report-FINAL-December15-2010.pdf) Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosenstial, T. and Olmstead, K. (2010) ‘Understanding the Participatory News Consumer’, Pew Internet & American Life Project (http://www. pewinternet.org/2010/03/01/part-5-newsgets-personal-social-and-participatory/) Senft, T. and Noble, Safuya U. (2013) ‘Race and social media’ in Hunsinger, J., and Senft., Theresa M. (eds), The Social Media Handbook. Routledge. pp. 107–214. Shapiro, I., Brin, C., Bédard-Brûlé, I., and Mychajlowycz, K. (2013) ‘Verification as a strategic ritual: How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy’, Journalism Practice, 7(6): 657–73. Sheller, M. (2015) ‘News now’, Journalism Studies, 16(1): 12–26 Silverman, C. ed. (2013) Verification Handbook, European Journalism Centre (http:// verificationhandbook.com/) Singer, J. B. (2014) ‘User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space’, New Media & Society, 16(1): 55–73. Singer, J. B., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Hermida, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Reich, Z. and Vujnovic, M. (2011) Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. New York: Wiley Blackwell. Tapscott, D., and Williams, A.D. (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Penguin. Tewksbury, D., Weaver, A. J. and Maddex, B. D. (2001) ‘Accidentally informed: Incidental news exposure on the World Wide Web’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 78(3): 533–54. Thurman, N., and Walters, A. (2013) ‘Live blogging: Digital journalism’s pivotal platform?’ Digital Journalism, 1(1): 82–101. Tufekci, Z. (2014) ‘Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance, and computational politics’, First Monday, 19(7) (http://firstmonday.

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7 Networked Framing and Gatekeeping Sharon Meraz and Zizi Papacharissi

INTRODUCTION In enabling the rise of the network society (Stadler, 2006), social media technologies have also created a paradigmatic shift in processes of news creation and news dissemination (see Chapter 6). The significance of these lightweight, mobile, and portable technologies were evidenced in their facilitation of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, which spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Cottke, 2011). Through these technologies, supporting and contesting publics came into being, utilizing the sociotechnical affordances of social media tools to effect momentum and create interest among broadcasting and listening publics (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Similar to their usage in the Arab Spring, social media technologies such as Facebook

(Carren and Gaby, 2011), Twitter (Penney and Dadas, 2014; Gleason, 2013; Wang et  al., 2013), and YouTube (Thorson et  al., 2013) assisted the digital networking of Occupy Web publics while facilitating audience learning about the events on the ground. These technologies, dubbed connective due to their ability to amalgamate the personalized digital activism of publics into larger narratives of protest and meaning (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013), have come to transform how we view the role of publics in relation to information creation and distribution. Outside of social movements and protest scenarios, these technologies have facilitated crisis communication. From events like the 2006 Hurricane Katrina disaster (Meraz, 2011c) to the 2008 news of Osama Bin Laden’s death (Newman, 2011), these technologies have altered the form of live news events as they unfold online. In focusing on how ‘new communication networks complexly interacted, entered into and shaped’ these events (Cottke, 2011: 651), there is a

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palpable sense that these sociotechnical applications are integral to the meaning of these movements as to be ‘fused inside them’ (Cottke, 2011: 649). These technologies have transformed the relationship between traditional media and the public (Hermida, 2013, 2012, 2010; Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Bruns, 2005). They have also remediated the existing media ecology, introducing hybridity into conventional journalistic paradigms, news values, and traditional media institutions (Chadwick, 2013; Hermida, 2012; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). The persistent, ever present flow of information emanating from these technologies has been described as a form of ‘ambient journalism’, sustaining an ‘awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share, and display news and information, serving diverse purposes’ (Hermida, 2010: 297). The suggestion of ambience has been mirrored by further descriptions of these streams as social awareness (Naaman, Becker, and Gravano, 2011), or as social sensors (Sakaki, Okazaki, and Matsuo, 2010). We argue that the resulting news feeds emerging from these tools are organized by dynamics that have evolved beyond the organizational logic of traditional news institutions. We suggest these new dynamics are captured through the operation of networked gatekeeping and networked framing, specifically in those contexts that are open and inclusive to the participatory actions of the public. In this chapter, we present the dual theories of networked gatekeeping and networked framing as ways of understanding how networked actors, committing independent or coordinated acts of journalism, contribute to hybrid, ambient, and social news environments. We outline the operation of the processes of networked gatekeeping and networked framing through a variety of different news events. In outlining these theories, we seek to account for the rise of networked public spheres that enable publics to build

alternative discourses that may intersect with, run parallel with, or run counter to the discussions arising in traditional media (Meraz, 2013). These theories address how citizen actors, alternative media, and mainstream institutions co-exist in networked, socially constructed and infused news streams (see, for example, Meraz, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Newman et  al., 2012; Lotan et  al., 2011). In outlining the theoretical processes that fuel networked gatekeeping and framing, we account for the generation of coherent and robust narratives that are co-constructed and coproduced in tools that elicit widespread, decentralized public participation. We focus on the altered norms, newer modes of operation, and remediated conceptual processes for how information gains relevancy, actors achieve prominence, and publics shape, alter, and intersect their narratives with the traditional media logic. These paradigms present a shift from top-down, prior control paradigms to crowd-centered, networked, and collective intelligence logics. We anchor these reformulated norms in the sociotechnical practices of publics spreading, sharing, repurposing, and recirculating content within social media technologies (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Jenkins et al., 2013) across a diverse context of news events and protest scenarios.

MEDIA CONTROL THEORIES OF GATEKEEPING AND FRAMING The theory of gatekeeping is interdisciplinary in origin (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008). In relation to the field of communication, it is often discussed within the context of agenda setting (McCombs, 2004). Gatekeeping describes the news selection processes by traditional media organizations. Lewin (1947) coined the term ‘gatekeeper’ in his study of group dynamics, with the theory of gatekeeping defined as a narrowing process of ‘culling and crafting countless bits of

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information into the limited number of messages that reach people each day’ (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009: 1). This selective process also revealed elite media as gatekeepers of nonelite media organizations in a process termed intermedia agenda setting (McCombs, 2004). Media gatekeeping was thus enmeshed in a media climate characterized by limited media supply, concentrated ownership of the tools of media production, and routinized media practices that served to homogenize the news choices of media organizations (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996). The attendant theory of media framing is closely aligned to gatekeeping in its theoretical premise of inclusion and exclusion. It is also conceptually aligned with attribute media agenda setting in its emphasis on the media’s ability to set the substantive and affective framing agenda of passive news publics (Weaver et  al., 1981). Framing is defined by Entman (1993: 52) as the promotion of ‘a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/ or treatment condition’. Reese (2001: 11) defines frames as ‘organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time’, while Gamson and Modigliani (1989) imbue frames with the ability to make sense of relevant events and suggest what issues are important. Studies reveal that the power to frame the media’s agenda is also disproportionally controlled by media elites and societal elites such as the US President, political officials, and public relations practitioners, who provide routine streams of news and information to media (McCombs and Reynolds, 2002). In media framing, the question, ‘Who sets the media agenda?’ is thus articulated as inter-elite competition, known as the cascading activation model (Entman, 2003). This model explains patterns of influence that become activated as elites engage in competition over who will shape media, policy, and public agendas. Media framing is a theory that illuminates the tendencies and tensions among elite gatekeepers such as government officials, non-administration

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elites, and news organizations to control the media agenda. The inclusive, participatory logic of social media technologies calls these media control theories of gatekeeping and framing into question. The viability of the gate metaphor, with its suggestion of limited channels and controlled flows (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2004, 2000), seems inapt for a current media ecology where information seeps from application to application in an effortless stream of automated reposting (Meraz, forthcoming). Revisions to media gatekeeping pre Web 2.0 left the public out as a key participant (Bennett, 2004) as mass media retained power to select and filter the news of the day amidst the onslaught of technologies that enabled bottom up, networked action. Gatekeeping theorists Shoemaker and Vos (2009) acknowledged the role of the public in the gatekeeping process, but suggested that the primary gatekeeping role remained the job of the traditional media newsroom, relegating the audience to the secondary gatekeeping process of interacting with traditional mass media content through sharing, linking, and commenting on these news choices. The theory of gatekeeping, conceptualized for a time when the sociality of the public was constrained due to nonresponsive media technologies (Meraz, 2012), proves difficult to retrofit for a networked environment. In its current form, media gatekeeping and framing cannot account for the networked actions of publics in social media tools. These control theories do a poor job of explicating how publics promote, curate, and filter news and information outside the purview of mass media institutions (see Chapter 16). In the wake of an empowered public, mass media remain hesitant to relinquish gatekeeping power. Research suggests that for the majority of elite newsrooms, efforts to normalize social media technologies (Singer et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2011; Thurman, 2008) are aimed at fortifying their role as primary gatekeepers (Messner et  al., 2012; Holcomb et al., 2011; Lasorsa et al., 2011).

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Lewis (2012) describes this battle to maintain leadership as a tension between professional control and open participation, fueled by traditional media’s efforts at boundary control. The majority of journalists rarely source citizens (Broersma and Graham, 2013) in their news reports, and when audience involvement is permitted, it takes place within the standard journalistic conventions of traditional media practice (Singer et al., 2011; Williams et  al., 2011). The majority of mass media newsrooms remain reluctant to fully embrace reciprocal flows or cocreative acts between themselves and the public (Aitamurto, 2013; Hermida, 2013; Lewis et al., 2013). In their desire to maintain gatekeeping control, newsrooms have had no choice but to resort to the help of the networked publics during breaking news events. News genres, like sports, elicit more calls for reader involvement than politics, revealing the growth of new hybrid journalistic practices (Coddington and Holton, 2014). Individual journalists are also more likely to abandon journalistic norms of objectivity when compared to mass media newsrooms. For example, journalist Andy Carvin facilitated public participation in his Twitter feed during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 (Hermida et  al., 2014; Hermida, 2013; Thurman and Walters, 2013). Live blogging the news offers unique opportunities for readers at work to collaborate with journalists seeking to reconcile the competing demands of elite and mass publics (Thurman and Walters, 2013). Moreover, journalists and citizens live blogging or tweeting events as they unfold and turn into a mediated story, frequently work together to produce news narratives characterized by a unique mix of fact, opinion, news, emotion, and drama (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). We may understand such collaborative news narratives as premediated, that is, evocative of the form that news takes on before it turns into mediated news stories (Grusin, 2010). In summary, media gatekeeping and media framing remain in their conceptual definitions

theories of mass media power as it relates to newsroom processes. As a review of the literature suggests, pluralized news gathering and storytelling practices upset traditional power hierarchies, rendering gatekeeping and framing practices networked. Tendencies and tensions between newsroom practices and situational dynamics reveal emerging processes of hybridity for those journalists who must adapt to the demands of real-time news streams. Hybrid and fluid journalistic processes enable these journalists to utilize the collaborative potential of participating publics and sustain cocreation and coproduction between mass media and publics. We argue that it is difficult to understand the full impact of networks of connected citizenry on media gatekeeping and framing through a study of the evolution of the mass media newsroom or changing newsroom practices. Given that mass media newsrooms are slow to acknowledge the impact of the public, we instead turn our attention to the dual theories of networked gatekeeping and networked framing as unfolding network processes within crowd-centered environments. In these scenarios, open, inclusive philosophies enable networked publics to share, create, distribute, and revise content. Within crowd-centered environments, these network processes are enabled through the sociotechnical architectures of Web 2.0 technologies that firstly, enable publics to be connected to the processes of news production and news dissemination independent of and in conjunction with traditional media newsrooms. Secondly, these processes enable publics to engage in personalized digitally mediated activism within technologies that act as organizing agents to the collation and aggregation of individual acts of content creation (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Papacharissi, 2010). Thirdly, these sociotechnical architectures afford heightened horizontal connectivity between and among publics, fostering dialogue, communication, and conversation among heterogeneous publics. Fourthly and finally, powerful aggregation

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of content through algorithmic processes reveal popular news items and news sentiments that may connect to or be separate from the news decisions as made by traditional media ­organizations. These processes reveal innovative news making practices and hybrid production values that introduce new or remediate older news values (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). We define these new processes through the dual theories of networked gatekeeping and networked framing (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). The refined theoretical processes of networked gatekeeping and networked framing emphasize a series of social practices that occur within technical artifices. These sociotechnical practices enable the crowd or attendant publics to engage in the active filtering, collaborating, sharing, and spreading of information through interconnected social media architectures. Through these social media applications, publics engage in unique forms of conversational practices that lend subjective pluralism, cocreation, and collaborative curation to news streams. The malleability and fluidity of these networked processes can help explain how digitally mediated collective action scales rapidly, facilitates widespread mobilization, and creates innovative forms of repertoires that achieve inclusion and embrace participation among broadcasting and listening publics. We turn our attention now to the theory of networked gatekeeping as we explore the operation of this theoretical principle through reference to diverse news events as enacted through social media applications

NETWORKED GATEKEEPING AS A CROWD-CENTERED THEORY Unlike the top-down emphasis of media gatekeeping, we define networked gatekeeping as a ‘process through which actors are crowdsourced to prominence through the use

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of conversational, social practices that symbiotically connect elite and crowd in the determination of information relevancy’ (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013: 158). This definition inverts prior top-down models of media gatekeeping and builds on the work of Barzilai-Nahon (2011, 2008) in her re-­ articulation of the role of the empowered or the ‘gated’. Barzilai-Nahon (2011, 2008) refined the gated through calls for (a) contextual clarification of their political power to gatekeepers, (b) information production ability, (c) relationship with the gatekeeper, and (d) alternatives in the context of gatekeeping. We further build on her insight on altered norms through examining how crowd-­ centered applications, like Twitter, enable new paradigms of filtering and promoting information to emerge from the inclusive logic of public participation. In seeking to account for gatekeeping in a networked context, we help explain how crowd-centered action on social media alters the logistics of elite-driven power and control as present in traditional media gatekeeping. We seek to explain how the networks of connected citizenry promote gatekeepers to prominence, thus revealing altered logics for how eliteness emerges. For example, the pivotal role of social media to recent social movements (Ingram, 2011; Tufekci, 2011) was well expressed through the Egyptian protests, where Twitter and Facebook supported networked information flows with diasporic publics (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Lotan, et  al., 2011). These social uprisings gave visibility to marginalized voices and enabled alternative narratives of dissention to emerge. Callison and Hermida (forthcoming) examined the Idle No More Movement in Canada on Twitter, and found that reports by mainstream media were rivaled by alternative media narratives and leading bloggers, who emerged alongside traditional media to create a multivocal, networked voice to the social movement. Examining the Kony 2012 meme, Lotan (2012) found that its viral circulation

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was attributed to high school teenagers, who arose as influentials online. Infrastructures like Twitter enable distributed engagement from supporting and dissenting publics through markers like the hashtag, which function as calls to action for participatory engagement (Leavitt, 2013). The processes through which networked gatekeeping principles are facilitated in Web 2.0 applications blend social and technical processes in iterative, recursive, and reinforcing relationships. These relationships emphasize and enable horizontal, networked citizen connectivity, a phenomenon absent from media gatekeeping and framing. Several different terms have been utilized to describe how networked gatekeeping practices afford openness and fluidity to participation among diffuse, distributed publics. Gatewatching suggests that active publics participate through curating media content, filtering and amplifying news items, and sharing their preferences in social media applications that utilize algorithms to collate and reveal popularity (Bruns, 2005). For example, social media news sites, like Reddit, enable publics to submit stories and upvote popular items, and through proprietary algorithms popular stories bubble up to the top news front page (Massanari, forthcoming; Meraz, 2012). Studies reveal that the news choices of these sites often echo but also deviate from the news items as highlighted by traditional media (Meraz, 2012). Crowdsourcing is another term to describe a more open, horizontal process to production. Crowdsourcing has been reserved explicitly for scenarios where a business call is made to outside, interested parties via the Web, with payment negotiated at a fraction of inhouse expenditure (Brabham, 2013; Howe, 2008). Produsage (Bruns, 2008), a term that fuses production with consumption, captures the spectrum of participation that engaged publics enact through listening (consumptive) and broadcasting (productive) practices within social media architectures (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). All of these terms afford

non-elite, networked publics the power to direct and influence the flow of information. As we turn attention to outlining the processes within networked gatekeeping, we emphasize the real time nature of gatekeeping (Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith, 2014) and its emergent qualities. These qualities lend fluidity and transience to how influence is negotiated and enacted through iterative processes (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Unique processes blend broadcasting with social conventions (Bakshy et al., 2011; Watts and Dobbs, 2007), to facilitate networked gatekeeping as ‘connectivity is established, filtered, and coordinated in networks organized by both human and technological agents’ (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013: 29). These participatory gestures include such social acts as sharing, linking, liking, retweeting, hashtagging, mentioning, and hyperlinking. These social acts enable prominent actors to be buoyed to influence through social media’s technical artifices. We now outline some of the driving sociotechnical processes that enable networked gatekeeping to operate in Web networks that promote crowd-centered participation.

Social filtering/collaborative filtering Social media publics receive and share news items through the process of social filtering and recommendation from their friends and networks on social media platforms (Hermida, 2012; Purcell et  al., 2010). Recommender systems leverage the opinions of user communities to help individuals in that community easily select content of interest among competing choices (Herlocker et  al., 2004; Resnick and Varian, 1997). Collaborative filtering emphasizes the social aspect to this filtering, as application algorithms record the action of users in order to determine how to filter content. This form of gatewatching is typified by social media news aggregators

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like Reddit, which enable members to scour and curate the Web for interesting news stories, and through the collective voting experience of members, popular and top stories are revealed via site specific algorithms (Meraz, 2012). The process of collaborative filtering can also elevate participating publics to gatekeeping status. During times of social movements or in protest scenarios, Twitter’s addressivity markers, like the retweet and mention marker, provide social markers for validating notable perspectives. Crowdsourced elites then function as ‘gatekeepers, gatewatchers or gatesnatchers, emerging on the stream, attracting attention, employing transparency in reporting and verifying information, and directly interacting through processes that were openly documented on their feeds’ (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013: 158). Social processes of recommendation and filtering enable a dynamic quality to the emergence of prominence in networked gatekeeping. Through collaborative filtering, networks of connected citizens can participate in the elevation of focal actors or gatekeepers through utilizing the applications’ conversational markers as forms of community-wide actor endorsement. The process of social filtering and collaborative filtering has been demonstrated in several crowd centered, social media contexts. Within social media news sites like Twitter, retweets [RT] function as a form of endorsement, buoying users to prominent gatekeeping positions (Hansen et  al., 2011; boyd et  al., 2010), through reposting and recirculating. Lerman (2007, 2006) found that social filtering often biased the decision making of users on the Digg social media news aggregator towards networks of friends and popular users. On #Egypt, the popular actors that emerged from Twitter’s RT marker were journalists from the Middle East region (e.g. Mona Eltahawy and Dima Khatib), prominent media institutions (e.g. Al Jazeera English and CNN Breaking News), independent news outlets (e.g., Democracy Now), and prominent citizens (e.g. Wael Ghonim).

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This diverse mix of actors lent a plurality to the Twitter stream through the representation of traditional media elites, citizen elites, and activists (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Lotan et  al., 2011). Research on Twitter’s usage during the Occupy movement found that diverse Twitter publics utilized the platform to propel information diffusion over and above calls to participation or organizing/coordinating protests (Theocharis et  al., 2013). The affordances and restrictions of Twitter’s brevity of form during Occupy enabled what Carren and Gaby (2011) dubbed ‘rhetorical velocity’, affording diverse publics the ability to spread information in a more viral manner.

Power law to participation Understanding power dynamics in networks is crucial to how networks function (Castells, 2009). This open, inclusive logic to participation in social media applications becomes a central metric in determining how gatekeepers emerge. Gatekeepers are promoted to eliteness through networked processes that aggregate crowd-centered recommendation metrics, conferring on a select amount of individuals power and authority. Social network science theory has revealed the ubiquity of power laws, the scenario that the top 10–20 perecent of users command inordinate attention and power (Nahon et  al., 2011; Drezner and Farrell, 2008; Perline, 2005; Newman, 2003; Barabasi et  al., 2000; Barabasi and Albert, 1999) in Web-based social networks that are inclusive and open (Singh and Jain, 2010; Capocci et al., 2008). Unlike traditional media gatekeeping, network gatekeepers achieve prominence via a competitive process of wining the support and validation of the crowd (Nahon et  al., 2011), with power ephemeral and transient (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Nahon, 2011). In these crowd-centered environments, mainstream media journalists are not guaranteed elite status.

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Early studies on the US blogosphere documented the rise of elite, partisan male political bloggers, who became gatekeepers to opinion formation on the partisan US political blogosphere for both publics and mainstream media (Meraz, 2009; Farrell and Drezner, 2008; Harp and Tremayne, 2006). The lack of egalitarian power sharing was articulated as gender and race discrimination by those excluded. Female political bloggers felt that the blog’s architectural features of hyperlinking (both within text and on blogrolls) effectively worked to encourage gender homophily, and thus, biased the algorithm toward those already indicated as influentials (Meraz, 2008). Female political bloggers and minority political bloggers formed alternative networks online in an effort to promote their political agenda and gain relevancy, sidestepping some of the negative repercussions of the power law that promoted primarily white, male political bloggers (Meraz, 2008; Harp and Tremayne, 2006). In reality, the power law can limit opinion and disproportionately increase the power of those who are already of influence in a network. Yet, the power law functions in crowdcentered environments to enable a better distribution of non-elite to elite influence, a marked phenomenon during protest cycles and social movements. During the protest that resulted in the resignation of Mubarak on #Egypt, the power law to participation resulted in a series of promoted gatekeepers. Yet, the top 20 influencers differed depending on the addressivity marker of retweet vs mention (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Overall, there was little evidence of traditional mass media entities having higher status than influencers of non-mass media affiliation across the arc of networked participation (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Networked gatekeeping processes thus worked to pluralize or hybridize the status of the ‘influential’ among mass media elites and non-mass media citizens. The status of the elite is also functionally dependent on the actions of the crowd in networked

gatekeeping (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Nahon et al., 2011). Unlike media gatekeeping, network gatekeeping suggests that power is less permanent and more fluid as the social actions of the crowd determine which nodes are considered central gatekeepers. In recognizing the power law as an organizing principle to the knowledge sharing in crowd-centered networked environments, it is accepted that some publics rise to power and retain network-wide influence. During the US Occupy movement, there remained a power law to participation such that the majority of popular, Occupy Twitter content was produced by a few users (Wang et  al., 2013; Smith and Glidden, 2012). Yet these users that emerged as central gatekeepers did so through fluid, open processes afforded by the logic of networked gatekeeping (Papacharissi and Meraz, 2012; Nahon, 2011). This logic permitted elites to arise through crowd-based social acts of retweeting and mentioning these elites on Twitter.

Homophily The process of networking along homophilous values and beliefs is, like the power law, a ubiquitous network principle (McPhearson et al., 2001). Homophily also operates as an underlying process in networked gatekeeping, explaining how like-minded publics coalesce. Homophily determines attention and drives gatekeepers to prominent status. There are several social acts that indicate tendencies toward homophily. Hyperlinking provides an avenue for actors to engage in gatekeeping strategies (Dimitrova et  al., 2003). Prior studies on hyperlink gatekeeping in political blog networks reveal that partisan political bloggers are more likely to link to perspectives that support their ideological position (Meraz, 2009; Farrell and Drezner, 2008; Adamic and Glance, 2005). Similarly, partisan Tea Party Web publics participating on their Facebook political group were selective in their linking

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to backdated Web content in an effort to provide agenda support for their pre-articulated issue platforms (Meraz, 2013). Through selective exposure practices that are driven by homophilous partisan beliefs, political bloggers and Twitter publics are led to link to and network with supportive sources and publics. When hyperlink gatekeeping includes cross linking between partisan blog publics, this practice appears to serve the purposes of amplifying pre-existing agendas, emphasizing the normative pattern of homophily as a network gatekeeping practice among ideologically consonant publics (Nahon and Hemsley, 2014). Gatekeepers that are crowdsourced to eliteness via Twitter’s conversational, addressivity markers are also impacted by processes of homophily. During #Egypt, there was evidence of geographic homophily, as many elite gatekeepers that emerged on the stream were from the Middle East region (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Similarly, during the US Occupy movement, geographic hashtags mobilized publics from New York City’s Zucotti Park (#ows, #occupywallstreet) to such US cities as Boston (#occupyboston), Denver (#occupydenver), Los Angeles (#occupyla), Oakland (#occupyoakland), San Francisco (#osf), Washington DC (#occupydc), and outside the USA (#occupytogether, #occupyeverywhere), providing a space for homophilic publics to tweet an agenda that pertained to their region (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and Meraz, 2012). These geographic hashtags provided coherence to a movement that was often critiqued as lacking a straightforward, tangible political agenda (Rushkoff, 2013; Butler, 2012). As an operating principle, homophily serves to strengthen ideologically consonant agendas and provide a platform for cross talk. Among political Twitter discussion groups, there is strong evidence of ‘content injections’ or deliberate partisan efforts to muddy ideological Twitter streams with dissenting

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information (Conover et al., 2011; Yardi and boyd, 2010). Through homophilic bonds, Web publics utilize networked gatekeeping strategies embedded within social media applications to promote ideological consonance to their viewpoints. We turn our attention next to explicating the processes of networked framing as a crowd-centered theory.

NETWORKED FRAMING AS A CROWD-CENTERED THEORY We build on the Entman’s (1993: 52) definition of media framing to define networked framing as ‘a process through which particular problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluations and/or treatment recommendations attain prominence through crowdsourcing practices’. The process of networked framing in crowd-centered contexts is enacted through all of the aforementioned processes that enable networked gatekeeping. Processes of social and collaborative filtering, frequently driven by homophilic tendencies, may enable publics that are ideologically similar, to engage in the networked framing of issues through processes of sharing, commenting, liking, linking, reposting, and content producing. Prior studies conducted on the political blogosphere reveal that ideologically consonant sourcing provides the filtering or curating mechanism by which political blogs manage partisan interpretations of political issues. In relation to content, partisan political bloggers are also more likely to frame the interpretation of issues in a partisan manner within their blog posts (Meraz, 2011a, 2011b, 2009), and headlines (Meraz and McCombs, 2013). Given that top, political blogs set the agenda for less elite political blogs in a two-step flow process of opinion leader to follower (Nahon and Hemsley, 2014), networked framing can have significant consequences in the shaping of public opinion.

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Emerging evidence across big data provides support for the networked framing of political issues by leading, elite political bloggers during the 2012 presidential election. In a longitudinal study of blog headlines from Jan to October 2012, Meraz (forthcoming) found that leading partisan political bloggers were significantly likely to discuss divergent issue agendas and people agendas as promoted in their blog headlines. Networks of ideologically similar partisan political bloggers pushed select keywords in their headlines to promote select issues and select people agendas through the operation of networked framing principles. These networked framing principles attest to the utilization of the political blog by US political blog elites to mobilize supporter Web publics along a partisan political agenda. The sociological affordances of Twitter that permit crowd-centered determination of leading news items and news perspectives operate in specific ways to afford networked framing. Twitter includes a convention called the hashtag, which functions as lightweight, semantic annotations that publics assign to tweets in their efforts to self-tag generated content. Hashtags thus contextualize content in a bottom-up, folksonomic manner (Bruns and Burgess, 2011; Zangerle et  al., 2011). Hashtags afford ad hoc, emergent publics the organic ability to dynamically self-organize content around an issue or issue perspective (González-Ibáñez et  al., 2011; Kouloumpis et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2011). Hashtags can label a topic along content frames (for example, #jobs) and sentiment dimensions (#love), or enable both simultaneously (for example, #getmoneyout). Emerging issues that lack consensus on a single hashtag enable realtime competition among competitive hashtags for stickiness or traction among Twitter publics. These hashtags can be utilized as outward markers of an issue’s ebb and flow as network frames are negotiated by the public while news is in its premediated form (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Unlike traditional newsroom practices, networked framing on social

media lays bare the battle to frame issues on the frontstage (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Unlike the model of cascading activation (Entman, 2003) the battle for hashtag virality involves the involvement of non-elites alongside elites who push their issue interpretations and perspectives to the fore through tweets labeled with hashtags. Hashtags that gain contagion or popularity function to enact, sustain, and enable crowd-centered framing of an issue or event over time. In the context of protests and social movements, an analysis of hashtags on Twitter can provide a window into the operation of networked framing effects as utilized by supportive and dissenting participating publics. Research conducted on #Egypt revealed the utilization of popular hashtags as high-level frame markers of the rhythms of the uprisings as it cascaded over the Arab Spring region (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Tags like #sidibouzid, #Algeria, #Iran, #Libya, and #Bahrain, connected the #Egypt uprisings to eruptions in the Arab Spring geographical area. Leading hashtags like #Cairo, #Mubarak, and #Tahrir enabled the crowd to tag and annotate the uprisings on Twitter along such markers as key dates, geographic locations, and political figures (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Though the US Occupy movement’s ‘We are the 99%’ became an open signifier for diverse meanings of the movement (Pew Center for the People and the Press, 2011), political publics utilized the #p2, #tcot, and #tlot hashtags to create a political platform for supporting (#p2) and dissenting (#tcot) publics to tweet about the protest (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Publics tweeting to #p2 registered broad and widespread sympathy and support for the movement in its political goals of standing against Wall Street corruption and banking fraud. In sharp contrast, publics tweeting to #tcot were keen to criticize the political agenda of Occupy publics, while pushing the alternative agenda of the Tea Party movement.

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Outside protest cycles and in day to day, political activity, Twitter publics utilize hashtags to provide real-time issue interpretations (Small, 2011). During the 2012 Presidential election debates, users from popular political groups engaged in hashtag wars to reframe the political debate through issue and sentiment hashtags (Fineman, 2012). Politically motivated individuals often utilize hashtags to inject partisan content into ideologically opposed tweet streams in an effort to pollute or hijack the hashtag frame (Conover et  al., 2011; Yardi and boyd, 2010). The nuances of networked framing can also differ cross nationally. Leavitt (2013) analyzed the Cala Boca Galvão phrase as it gained contagion on the Brazilian Twitter user networks during the 2010 World Cup. English speakers interpreted this campaign to signify the ‘Save Galvão Birds Campaign;’ however, the meme was utilized by Brazilian Twitter users to respond negatively (‘Shut up, Galvão’) to a local broadcast sports announcer (Galvão) during a specific 2014 World Cup Match. In examining how networked framing unfolds in crowd-centered environments, it is clear that a significant process involves the dynamic of contagion and virality. These processes underlie how perspectives take hold in crowd-centered contexts where the actions of publics are interdependent. It is unclear how the viral process is initially kickstarted, though prior studies in information contagion suggest herd behavior, or the tendency by publics to mimic or imitate the visible behavior of those who have come before (Bikhchandani et al., 1992). Existing actors with celebrity and fame also have an increased likelihood of encouraging others to adopt their issue frames as are the first movers, defined as those individuals who have existed in the network for a longer time (Barabasi et  al., 2000; Barabasi and Albert, 1999). The virality inherent in processes of networked framing affords publics the opportunity to repost and recirculate content, enabling replicating, mutating, remixing, and refashioning of new narratives from

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the original content (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007; Shifman, 2012; Shifman and Thelwall, 2009). These processes enable a shaping and amplifying of crowd-centered framing effects. For example, the short form nature of hashtags provide open calls for publics to engage in replicative content acts that may develop, expand, and rework hashtag frames through creative reinterpretation. Affective elements of expression frequently lend virality to emerging frames or tags as framing devices. Networked frames that attain spreadability may utilize humor as a dominant device for driving crowd appeal and participation (Shifman, 2012; Knobel and Lankshear, 2007). In fact, performativity, in the form of play, frequently finds its way into tweets that attain virality, despite the brevity of the medium (Papacharissi, 2012). Sarcasm and humor can be used to either affirm or context the collective purposes of a movement in the making, as that movement takes shape online via the discursive stream of tag associated with it. For example, studies of the #ows tag, associated with the Occupy movement, showed that conservative publics sought to discursively delegitimize the movement online through the repetitive use of sarcastic, yet factually unsupported claims (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). By contrast, affective endorsements of solidarity helped frame the Egyptian uprisings that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 as a revolution, well before the uprisings had produced a regime-reversing outcome (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Moreover, the phatic nature of endorsements and rebroadcasting of the same news, even when there was no new news to report, helped sustain an ambient, always-on pace for the movement. Conventional news reporting blended with drama, opinion, and live blogged facts to the point where it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, and doing so missed the point. This frequently enhanced the intensity of the stream, giving shape to a form of news best understood as affective (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012).

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It is worth noting that the phatic nature of the platform, which encourages the sharing of news and opinions as a way of socially connecting with others is bound to lend an affective form to emerging narratives. Affect refers to pre-emotive intensity or drive that we experience. Affect itself is not an emotion, but it represents the intensity with which we experience and express emotions like joy, sadness, pain and so on. Emotions are subjective, but the affordances of the platform invite the propagation of intensity when emotions align or diverge. For example, repetitive use of retweeting will afford a particular frame a level of intensity, affectively propagated, that may help advance that frame to prevalence. Alternatively, the affective tonality of a narrative, discursively materializing through consistent use of humor, sarcasm or other expressive modalities may similarly increase or decrease the intensity with which a potential frame comes into or drifts out of prominence. Affect then, becomes an important component of how mechanisms of networked gatekeeping and networked framing are enacted online via Twitter. Understanding the propagation of intensity online is key, as it potentially influences the ways in which networked publics respond to the stories that they are listening to, curating, and cocreating. Qualitative and quantitative studies of affect online are essential, as they help us understand the rhythmicality, the tonality, and the potential impact of evolving streams, and the stories these streams help tell. The utility of networked gatekeeping and networked framing as theories that promote the voice of marginalized publics and alternative narratives further amplifies the phenomenon called resonance, described by Callison and Hermida (forthcoming) as ‘the process by which articulations get taken up and retweeted and affirmed by movement participants using the network’. The fluidity and openness of networked gatekeeping and networking framing theories enable this redistribution of power implied by the notion of resonance, as a public’s collective identity

is constructed and collaborated in an ad hoc, iterative manner. In their analysis of the Idle No More Movement in Canada on Twitter, Callison and Hermida (forthcoming) note that resonance ‘allows for a process of broad enrollment, consensus, alliance, as well as criticism and opposition’. The theoretical processes of networking gatekeeping and networked framing operate in crowd-centered contexts to afford supporting and dissenting narratives to emerge through sociotechnical architectures that enable publics to mobilize and countermobilize, thus affording plurality and multivocality to a movement. The dynamic, emergent, and somewhat transient quality to power, eliteness, and influence affords these theories flexibility in capturing how networks negotiate the framing of their narratives through select, focal gatekeepers. For scholars interested in how online platforms afford collaborating news storytelling, networked gatekeeping and networked framing are central in understanding who tells a story, who curates that story, how that story is told, to whom, and with what level of intensity, to paraphrase the seminal media directive of who says what to whom with what effect. Networked gatekeeping and networked framing refashion the unidirectional power influence of elite to crowd, and explicate how crowd-centered dynamics within participatory social architectures afford more plural, fluid processes to selecting gatekeepers and promoting issue and issue frames across news events. The processes that underlie networked gatekeeping and networked framing generate hybridity and remediate former news values (Chadwick, 2013; Hermida, 2012; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012), thus altering the relationship between traditional media and the public (Hermida, 2013, 2012, 2010; Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Bruns, 2005). Resulting news feeds emerging from these tools are organized by dynamics that have evolved beyond the organizational logic of traditional news institutions. Through these

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social media applications, publics engage in unique forms of conversational practices that lend subjective pluralism, cocreation, and collaborative curation to news streams.

CONCLUSION Networked gatekeeping and networked framing offer new theoretical paradigms through which we can understand the crowd-centered action of networked publics. These publics are afforded the opportunity to participate in social acts via social media technologies. Unlike media gatekeeping and framing, networked gatekeeping and networked framing offer new frameworks, hybrid values, and altered logics for assessing the prominence of actors, issues, and issue interpretations. These theories offer fluid perspectives for understanding how crowd-centered action can result in purposive activity during times of social protests, political movements, crisis communication, or day-to-day events. Unlike media gatekeeping and framing, networked gatekeeping and framing explicates sociotechnical processes through which networks of connected citizenry promote gatekeepers and fashion issue interpretations through networked participatory actions. Unlike media gatekeeping and framing, the emphasis in networked gatekeeping and framing is on public participation and horizontal connectivity. These theories take hold more directly in crowd-centered environments that lack the rigid hierarchy of mass media or elite influence. Though networked gatekeeping and framing is not devoid of its own metrics for determining power, the processes that connect elites and crowds in symbiotic, social acts afford a dynamism and fluidity to these dual theoretical processes. In their emphasis on horizontal citizen connectivity, publics engage in unique forms of conversational practices that lend subjective pluralism, cocreation, and collaborative curation to

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news streams. The malleability and fluidity of these networked processes help explain how digitally mediated connective or collective action affords its own logic that remediates or introduces hybridity in former top down models of journalistic practice. Online platforms reshape the ways in which we tell, share, and listen to stories. Networked framing and networked gatekeeping advance our understanding of how news storytelling is remediated through the hybrid logic and hierarchies of contemporary platforms.

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group’, in T. Johnson (ed.), Agenda setting in a 2.0 world: New agendas in communication (New Agendas in Communication Series) New York: Routledge. pp. 1–27. Meraz, S. (2015) ‘Quantifying partisan selective exposure through network text analysis of elite political blog networks during the US 2012 presidential election’, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 12(1): 37–53. Meraz, S. and McCombs, M.E. (2013) ‘Network agenda setting through semantic word analysis of issue attribute agendas among political blogs, traditional media, and partisan media outlets during the 2012 presidential election’, paper presented at the annual convention of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. Meraz, S. and Papacharissi, Z. (2013) ‘Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #Egypt’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(2): 138–66. Messner, M., Linke, M., & Eford, A. (2012) ‘Shoveling tweets: An analysis of the microblogging engagement of traditional news organizations’, #ISOJ: The Official Research Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, 2(1): 76–90. Naaman, M., Becker, H., and Gravano, L. (2011) ‘Hip and trendy: Characterizing emerging trends on Twitter’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(5): 902–18. Nahon, K. (2011) ‘Fuzziness in inclusion/­ exclusion in networks’, International Journal of Communication, 5: 756–72. Nahon, K. and Hemsley, J. (2014) ‘Homophily in the guise of cross-linking: Political blogs and content’, American Behavioral Scientist, 58(10): 1294–1313. Nahon, K., Hemsley, J., Walker, S., and Hussain, M. (2011) ‘Fifteen minutes of fame: The power of blogs in the lifecycle of viral political information’, Policy & Internet, 3(1): 1–28. Newman, M. (2003) ‘The structure and function of complex networks’, SIAM Review, 45(2): 167–256. Newman, N. (2011) ‘Mainstream media and the distribution of news in the age of social discovery’. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Available from http://

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reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/ mainstream-media-and-distribution-newsage-social-discovery. Newman, N., Dutton, W.H., and Blank, G. (2012) ‘Social media in the changing ecology of news: The fourth and fifth estates in Britain’, International Journal of Internet Science, 7(1): 6–22. Papacharissi, Zizi (2010) A private sphere: Democracy in the digital age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2012) ‘Without you, I’m nothing: Performances of the self on Twitter’, International Journal of Communication, 6(18). Available from http://ijoc.org/index. php/ijoc/article/view/1484/775. Papacharissi, Z. and de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012) ‘Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt’, Journal of Communication, 62(2): 266–82. Papacharissi, Z. and Meraz, S. (2012) ‘The rhythms of Occupy: Broadcasting and listening practices on #ows’, paper presented at the annual convention of the Association of Internet Researchers 13, Salford, UK. Penney, J., and Dadas, C. (2014) (Re) ‘Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement’, New Media & Society, 16(1): 74–90. Perline, R. (2005) ‘‘strong, weak and inverse power law’, Statistical Science, 20(1): 68–88. Pew Center for the People and the Press (2011) Public divided over occupy Wall Street movement’. Available from http://www.peoplepress.org/2011/10/24/public-dividedover-occupy-wall-street-movement/. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosensteil, T., & Olmstead, K. (2010) ‘Understanding the participatory news consumer’. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available from http:// www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/OnlineNews.aspx. Reese, S. (2001) ‘Framing public life: A bridging model for media research’, in S. Reese, O.H. Gandy Jr., and A.E. Grant (eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media in our understanding of the social world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 7–31.

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Resnick, P. and Varian, H. R. (1997) ‘Recommender systems’, Communications of the ACM, 40(3): 56–8. Rushkoff, D. (2013) ‘Permanent revolution: Occupying democracy’, The Sociological Quarterly, 54: 164–73. Sakaki, T., Okazaki, M., and Matsuo, Y. (2010) ‘Earthquake shakes Twitter users: Real-time event detection by social sensors’, in WWW ‘10: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web. New York, NY: ACM. Shifman, L. (2012) ‘An anatomy of a YouTube meme’, New Media and Society, 14(2): 187–203. Shifman, L. and Thelwell, M. (2009) ‘Assessing global diffusion with web memetics: The spread and evolution of a popular joke’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12): 2567–76. Shoemaker, Pamela and Reese, Steven D. (1996) Mediating the message: Theories of influence on mass media content (2nd Edition). New York: Longman. Shoemaker, Pamela and Vos, Timothy P. (2009) Gatekeeping theory. New York: Routledge. Singh, V. K. and Jain, R. (2010) ‘Structural analysis of the emerging event-web’, in WWW ‘10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM. Singer, Jane B., Domingo, David, Heinonen, Ari, Paulussen, Hermida, Alfred, Steve, Quandt, Thorsten, Reich, Zvi, and Vuinovic, Marina (2011) Participatory journalism: Guarding open gates at online newspapers. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Small T.A. (2011) ‘What the hashtag?’, Information, Communication and Society, 14(6): 872–95. Smith, J., and Glidden, B. (2012) ‘Occupy Pittsburgh and the challenges of participatory democracy’, Social Movement Studies, 11(3– 4): 288–94. Stadler, F. (2006) Manuel Castells: The theory of the network society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Theocharis, Y., Lowe, W., van Deth, J.W., and Albacete, G.M.G. (2013) ‘Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: Transnational online mobilization patterns and action repertoires

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in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements’, paper presented at the annual convention of the 41st ECPR joint sessions of workshops, Mainz, Germany. Thorson, K., Driscoll, K., Ekdale, B., Edgerly, S., Gamber, T., Schrock, A., Swartz, L., Vraga, E.K., and Wells, C. (2013) ‘Youtube, Twitter, and the occupy movement: Connecting content and practices’, Information, Communication, and Society, 16(3): 421–51. Thurman, N. (2008) ‘Forums for citizen journalists? Adoption of user generated content initiatives by online news media’, New Media & Society, 10(1): 139–57. Thurman, N. and Walters, A. (2013) ‘Live blogging – digital journalism’s pivotal platform? A case study of the production, consumption, and form of live blogs at Guardian. co.uk’, Digital Journalism, 1(1): 82–101. Tufekci, Z. (2011) ‘Tunisia, Twitter, Aristotle, social media and final and efficient causes’. Technosociology. Available from http:// technosociology.org/?p=263. Wang, C.J., Wang, P.P., and Zhu, J.J.H. (2013) ‘Discussing Occupy Wall Street on Twitter: Longitudinal network analysis of equality, emotion, and stability of public discussion’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16(9): 679–85. Wang, X., Wei, F., Liu, X., Zhou, M., and Zhang, M. (2011) ‘Topic sentiment analysis in Twitter: A graph based sentiment classification approach’, in Proceedings of the 20th

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8 The Intimization of Journalism Steen Steensen

INTRODUCTION On 6 August 2014 Fredrik Græsvik, a Norwegian TV 2 national broadcaster correspondent to the Middle East, published a rather peculiar post on Facebook. Græsvik, one of the most experienced and profiled war correspondents in Norway, had been covering the Gaza conflict during the summer on TV and social media. Since 2007, when he started blogging, Græsvik had been one of the most active Norwegian journalists in social media with thousands of followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, in addition to the many readers of his blog. On this day in August, things were about to change. ‘From now on, this is a private account’, wrote Græsvik on Facebook. Then came the peculiar part: I ask those of you who are my friends but who do not know me to delete me as your friend. You are a couple of thousand, so it is easier for you than it is for me. As of Monday, all status updates are from me and have nothing to do with TV 2.1

This rather strange attempt at privatizing his social media persona came as a result of massive critique from friends of Israel related to the way Græsvik commented on the Israel–Palestine conflict on social media. His followers on social media could not possibly miss that he sympathized with the Palestinian side, a fact that became especially apparent during the Gaza bombings the summer of 2014. The complaints he generated, which were outnumbered by supportive comments, became too much for TV 2. It urged him, and all the other journalists working for the broadcaster, to be as neutral and balanced on social media as on air. This was not an option for Græsvik, who instead tried to distance his social media persona from his TV 2 persona by privatizing the former. Of course, this was an impossible manoeuvre, illustrated by Græsvik himself when the next day he wrote on Facebook: ‘As a private person I can report that the Gaza war so far has caused the death of 415 children. On both sides’.2

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Græsvik’s paradoxical manoeuvre of stating in public that he spoke as a private person may serve as an example of the problems journalists face when they joggle their mediated personas in the increasingly messy landscape of private and public spheres. Social media combines elements of broadcast media, mass communication and face-to-face interaction (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 123), seemingly collapsing the boundaries between the public and the private. This chapter takes a closer look at how social media challenge our conceptions of private and public communication and asks how the potential merger of these spheres affects journalism. The chapter argues that the changing boundaries between private and public communication imply that journalism is becoming dominated by a discourse of intimacy, in which personal opinions and self-disclosures are key characteristics. However, such a discourse of intimacy is not new to journalism. A core aim of this chapter is to show that journalism has a long history of mitigating the tensions between the private and the public, the personal and the professional, and that recent developments due to social media represent continuity as much as change. The chapter starts with a review of the significance of social media, journalistic adaptations of them and the consequent intimization of journalism marked by the blurring of boundaries between the private and the public, the personal and the professional. It then moves on to discuss similar kinds of intimacy in pre-social media journalism. The chapter ends with a discussion, inspired by Sennett’s (2002) classical analysis in The Fall of Public Man, of whether social media represent to journalism what the ‘electronic media’ represented to politics in the second half of the twentieth century, namely a fall of the public role of its practitioners due to an intimization of the public sphere. Sennett argued that broadcast media, especially television, obscured politics to such an extent that it no longer mattered what politicians

did; what mattered was their ability to reach through to an audience with charismatic personalities. Sennett called this ‘the tyranny of intimacy’, and argued that the public sphere had become invaded with intimate details from the private spheres of public figures. If journalists today find it hard to separate their private personas from their professional ones in social media, we might therefore ask whether the same kind of tyranny of intimacy applies to journalists as public figures, and if so, what the consequences are for the future role of journalists. Of particular interest to this future role is the relationship between journalists, news organisations and audiences. As journalists build direct relationships with audiences in social media, they detach themselves from the news organisations that employ them and thereby from the context and audience reach provided by those organisations. This might make it harder for journalists to assess whom their audiences really are and to what degree their social media behaviour reaches ‘a public’. It also makes self-presentation more difficult, as having a sense of both context and audience is essential to how we present ourselves, according to Goffman (1971). Mastery of self-presentation might therefore be a new and defining skill for the journalists of the future.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEWS CONSUMPTION The emergence of social media, and services like Facebook in particular, have changed both the media industry and media culture (see Chapter 6). The popularity of these services means that individuals are more prominent communicators in online spaces than institutions such as traditional producers of journalism. This increased significance of the individual over institutions has some significant consequences for how news is perceived along the private/public continuum.

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There are at least three major trends, which all privilege the role of the individual over the role of institutions. First, people increasingly get their news updates from their social media feeds instead of from traditional news publishers (Hermida et al., 2012; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014; State of the News Media 2014, 2014). Second, people increasingly discuss and make sense of news through social media instead of through for instance comments to stories on professional news publishers’ websites (State of the News Media 2014, 2014). News stories are increasingly framed by, and recontextualized within, personalized social media feeds and shared and discussed with friends and family within those feeds. Third, and as a consequence of the two other trends, advertisers are shifting from traditional publishers to Google, Facebook and other social media (WAN-IFRA, 2014). All three trends empower the news consumer at the expense of the news producers, and thereby make news consumption more like acts of individual and personalized choice rather than acts that relate to a commonly shared public sphere. However, social media feed heavily on mainstream media, with much of the content on social networks coming from these traditional providers (Kwak et al., 2010). This suggests that social media serve as filtering tools for news provided by traditional media. Users, though, tend to downplay the importance of social media to their news consumption and instead emphasize social media’s role in controlling the information overflow (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2014; Pentina and Tarafdar, 2014). In one cross-country study of news consumption, only one in ten said that social media were their most important news sources, while more than 50 per cent of the respondents in all countries said that television was their most important source for news (Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). Another cross-country study also shows that television is still the most important platform for news consumption (Papathanassopoulos et al., 2013).

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Social media are in other words not replacing traditional media. Rather, they are avenues to access, make sense of and distribute traditional journalism, and they are often used not instead of, but in addition to, traditional mainstream media (Hermida et  al., 2012). Twitter discussions peak during news broadcasts and Facebook activity increases when major news breaks. The news flow of today is complex. It involves many actors, actants, audiences and activities (Lewis and Westlund, 2015). It is best described as networked (Anderson, 2010; Domingo et  al., 2015; Russell, 2013) and ambient (Hermida, 2010). Social media has pushed news consumption in a more private and individualized direction, but the traditional news-producing institutions still play an important role in what is perceived as news among audiences. The question then becomes how these traditional news institutions and the journalists working in them have responded to this shift in news consumption.

JOURNALISTS IN SOCIAL MEDIA Given the significance of social media to peoples’ lives and the way they consume and participate in news, news organizations and journalists have found it necessary to establish a strong presence in social media (see Hermida, 2013 for an overview). Journalists were early adopters of social media, and they have continued to be overrepresented (Gulyás, 2013). Initially, journalists used social media predominantly to extend their already established public presence; they started to promote and distribute their own stories through social media (Artwick, 2013; Blasingame, 2011; Messner et al., 2011; Pew Research Center, 2011). However, social media soon also became an arena to push breaking news (Vis, 2013). It seems as if journalists’ use of social media started as a practice in which the new media were adapted to existing practices through a

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process of normalization (Lasorsa et  al., 2012), similar to the process that took place when journalists started to blog (Singer, 2005). Such normalizing practices imply no changes along the private/public continuum in how journalists perceive and perform their role. However, such professional normalization of social media is currently contested as journalists increasingly use social media to interact with sources and users (Gulyás, 2013; Hedman, 2015; Zeller and Hermida, 2015). When a journalist interacts with a source or a member of the audience through social media, s/he opens up for more individual and non-public communication on a platform that is not to the same degree institutionalized as the preferred platform of the news outlet s/he works for. Furthermore, journalists use social media not only for professional reasons. Hedman and Djerf-Pierre’s study shows that private use of social media is in fact more important to journalists. They found that 65 per cent of Swedish journalists use social media for private purposes daily or ‘all the time’, while only 44 per cent are as active in their professional use (2013: 373). This implies that journalists increasingly mix their private and professional roles within the same platforms. The platform that best reflects this mix of private and professional roles is Twitter. The micro-blogging service has developed into a social medium in which the dissemination of news and information is a core activity, emblematically reflected by the company’s 2009 change in default question to users from ‘what are you doing?’ to ‘what’s happening?’ (van Dijk, 2011). In a thorough review of research into journalism and Twitter, Hermida concludes that the service ‘has developed into an always-on, event-driven communication system where news is shared, contested, verified and recommended’ (2013: 306). Twitter is therefore of special interest to scholars interested in the interplay between journalism, news and social media. For the purpose of this chapter, there are especially two aspects of this interplay relating to the

blurred distinction between the private and the public, the personal and the professional that are of interest. First, journalists tend to reveal their personal opinions to a greater extent on Twitter than through their traditional media platforms. Second, journalists tend to use Twitter to reveal details from their personal life to a wider audience. Both these aspects can be characterized as markers of a discourse of intimacy, implying that perspectives based on the inner thoughts and private acts of journalists dominate the journalistic discourse. Such a discourse of intimacy opposes the objectivity discourse, which has dominated journalism in modern democracies. In the following, I will explore these two aspects more closely.

The medium of opinions? Even though journalists tend to adhere to established norms and values of journalism when communicating on social media in general and Twitter in particular, studies indicate that the norm of objectivity is contested by j-tweeters, especially among sports journalists (Sanderson and Hambrick, 2012) and among the most active and popular journalists on Twitter (Lasorsa et  al., 2012; Vis, 2013). It might be that the 140-character format and the dialogical and highly networked structure of Twitter favours commentary over fact (Hermida, 2013). But an equally valid explanation might be that j-tweeters, as any other Twitter user, operate under their own name on a neutral platform outside their traditional media newsrooms and news outlets. A j-tweeter is not to the same degree a representative of his or her news organization as when s/he puts his or her byline on a newspaper story, a TV broadcast or an online newspaper story. A j-tweeter is more of a ‘personal brand’ (Bruns, 2012) and hence more inclined to express his or her opinion. This tendency for journalists to contest the objectivity norm on Twitter has caused

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controversy and been a main reason why many news organizations have developed guidelines for social media behaviour for their journalist. The Norwegian correspondent to the Middle East, Fredrik Græsvik, referred to in the introduction, serves as an example of this controversy. The controversy did not make Græsvik loose his job, as it did for the CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, when she in 2010 lamented the death of a Hezbollah leader in a tweet. However, Græsvik’s and Nasr’s blunders are not representative of how foreign correspondents normally behave in social media. In a content analysis of US foreign correspondents’ tweets, Cozma and Chen (2013) found that only 10 per cent of the tweets were expressions of personal opinions. An interesting finding from this study is that expressions of personal opinions did not have any significant impact on the popularity of the correspondents on Twitter. Those who did not express personal opinions where as likely to have many followers and get as many favourites and retweets as those who did express personal opinions. This suggests that sticking to the objectivity norm does not hinder a journalist’s popularity on Twitter, which in turn suggests that there is no need for journalists to blend their professional and private personas. In fact, expressing personal opinions on Twitter might alienate followers instead of attracting them. This was the case when a Norwegian National Public Broadcaster (NRK) sports journalist, a Manchester United fan, tweeted after his team lost to Liverpool 3–0 on 16 March 2014. Reflecting that the game was played close to the 25-year commemoration of the Hillsborough tragedy, where 96 fans were killed and Liverpool fans were falsely blamed, he tweeted: ‘Well, at least we didn’t kill any fans’. Even though it is rather customary for football fans to mock the opponent’s fans, the tweet did not go down well. The sports journalist was bullied in the mainstream press and had to publicly

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apologise, partly because of pressure from his employer, the NRK. Complaints were even made to the Norwegian Broadcaster Complaints Commission and NRK had to account for their social media policy to the commission. Four days after his infamous tweet, the journalist published one last tweet before taking an 11 month long break from the social medium: ‘Apologies to everyone, this will not happen again. Sorry’.3 The kind of sharing of personal opinion this journalist did serves as an instructive example of how context collapses when private and public spaces converge in a medium marked by immediacy and breaking news discussions. The statement was not suited to reach an audience outside the private context of football fans watching a game together, but Twitter allows for the spontaneous and instant sharing of such statements to a much wider public within a spur of a moment. The line between what is acceptable or not is fluid and difficult to predict, and j-tweeters have to make quick judgments on how emotionally engaged and polemic they can be without alienating themselves in the public’s eye. It is therefore not difficult to understand that journalists have a hard time performing such balancing acts. It is one of the reasons why many news organizations have established social media guidelines, which try to enforce traditional newsroom norms and values on the journalists’ social media activities. Establishing social media guidelines might therefore be a way for news organizations to try to maintain social control over their journalists, something which has been an important function of news organizations for decades (Breed, 1955). The social control dimension has even made some news organizations restrict, impose strict rules or even block access to social media from the newsrooms (Sivek, 2010: 154–5). However, Opgenhaffen and Sheerlinck’s (2014) more recent analysis of social media guidelines indicates that news organizations have gradually moved away from such strict social media policies and now allow their

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journalists more freedom of opinion. There might be a pragmatic reason for this. News organizations may have observed that journalists, faced with the uncertainties of the job market, will prioritize their personal brand over the institutional brand ‘feeling that in the name of survival, their own brands must come first’ (Sivek, 2010: 152). There are in other words tensions between news organizations’ need to maintain credibility and objectivity associated with their brand on the one hand, and journalists’ need for self-promotion and personal branding through social media on the other. In their study of Flemish journalists’ view on such guidelines, Opgenhaffen and Sheerlink (2014) found that the journalists oppose them, arguing that common sense should drive their social media practice and that strict guidelines would jeopardise their personal freedom.

Journalistic self-disclosures in social media The other important aspect of journalistic social media behaviour that promotes a discourse of intimacy to journalism concerns the way in which j-tweeters tend to reveal details from their personal lives to the public through self-disclosures. Bruns (2012: 105) argues that individual personality rather than institutional association drives Twitter visibility. Herrera and Requejo argue that ‘[t]he media voice on Twitter has to be […] personal and human’ (2012: 82). Hence, social media make the news market more driven by personalities, implying that j-tweeters feel pressured to reveal some personal information in order to attract an audience. This brings to mind the classical distinction between front-stage and back-stage made by Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1971). This distinction implies that self-presentation always is related to context and audience. People navigate between the more private back-stage areas and the

public front-stage areas, like actors on and off stages. With social media, this distinction falls apart. With Twitter, there is only the stage, no front or back. Hence, balancing the personal with the professional, the private with the public becomes more complex in social media like Twitter (Hermida, 2008) In an investigation of how high-profile tweeters balance personal and professional identities, Marwick and boyd (2011) found that they adhered to authenticity, a norm marked by revelation of personal information. The revelation of personal information is strategic for these high-profile tweeters, according to Marwick and boyd, who argue that such revelations are ‘self-conscious identity presentations that assume a primarily professional context’ (2011: 127). Many of the tweeters they interviewed described how difficult they found it to strike the right balance between being personal and being professional. Marwick and boyd concluded that for high profile tweeters the personal/­ professional equilibrium ‘implies an ongoing front-stage identity performance that balances the desire to maintain positive impressions with the need to seem true or authentic to others’ (2011: 124). There are not that many studies dealing with this personal/professional equilibrium regarding j-tweeters in particular. However, an analysis of 500 j-tweeters with the most followers globally revealed that female journalists are more likely to tweet about their personal lives than their male colleagues (Lasorsa, 2012). Lasorsa argues that this gender difference may have something to do with the fact that female journalists to a greater extent than their male colleagues write ‘soft’ news. ‘Soft’ news, or feature journalism, draws upon a discourse of intimacy (Steensen, 2011b), and journalists who write in these genres are therefore more likely to adhere to an ideal of subjectivity in their journalism. This connection between ‘soft’ news production, subjectivity and journalistic activity in social media will be addressed later in this chapter.

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An interesting experimental study of whether personalized j-tweets increased likeability among followers showed that journalists who tweet self-disclosures came across as more likeable persons (Boehmer, 2014). However, such personalized self-disclosures had no effect on professional likeability, according to the same study. This finding indicates that striking the right balance between being personal and professional is difficult for journalists. The two social media and journalism tensions described above – between personal opinion and objectivity, and between personal self-disclosures and professional identity – and the intimization of journalism they may represent, are, however, not new to journalism. Journalism has a long history of relying on a discourse of intimacy and finding ways to make public the personal opinions and self-disclosures of its practitioners. In the next section, I will take a closer look at how such a discourse has been articulated in pre-social media journalism, and what we might learn from such historic articulations.

JOURNALISM AND INTIMACY IN PRE-SOCIAL MEDIA TIMES As with the entrance of new technology and new media in previous times, the social media discourse on journalism resembles a discourse of revolution. Discussions around social media and journalism tend to emphasize the potential changes and effects as something new and unique, with disruptive powers. Mosco (2004) has shown how new technologies and new media always have been framed within such a discourse of revolution upon their introduction. He argues that the changes presumably brought forward by new technologies and new media are usually the result of processes that started long before the introduction of the new. Furthermore, they tend to happen much slower and in a much less radical fashion

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than early predictions would estimate. This was the case when the internet hit journalism (Scott, 2005; Steensen, 2011a), and it seems like it is the case when social media now make their impact on the profession. The potentially change-making tensions related to social media and the intimization of journalism due to the blurring of boundaries between the private and the public, the personal and the professional discussed above all have historical parallels. Reviewing these historical parallels is important to avoid losing sight of how dynamic and adaptable the profession of journalism always has been. Early notions of journalism were dominated by an ideal of activism, in which the journalist’s personal comments and opinions flourished, like they do once again in social media today. And genres of feature journalism have promoted intimacy as part of the professional role.

The historical importance of the journalist as activist When the British journalist and editor James Mill published his seminal text ‘The Liberty of the Press’ in Edinburgh Review in 1811, he had something particular in mind. There was at the time a general fear in Great Britain, and in other European countries, that the French revolution would inspire similar bloody uprisings elsewhere. Mill argued that it was possible to achieve social reform without the entire blood spill – if the press was free to criticise the government. Mill wanted to make the government so afraid of revolution that it would pass on reform before social uprisings made a mess of things. Journalism was the means to achieve this end in Mill’s view. He believed that journalists should agitate for social reform. When the British government passed the free press act at the beginning of the 1830s, journalists and editors in newspapers like The Scotsman and The Pall Mall Gazette became political actors who envisioned themselves

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as more important than politicians in creating societal change. It was the era of ‘the press as parliament’ (Hampton, 2001: 226). Since then, journalism has had an adversary side to it. Being personal, in the sense that journalists let their personal opinions influence their professional work, is in other words quite common throughout the history of journalism. Waisbord argues that journalism, before objectivity became a seemingly hegemonic professional ideal, was ‘largely ‘advocacy journalism’, a propaganda tool for political organizations, a platform for press entrepreneurs with political ambitions, a path for political activism reporters’ (2009: 372). In fact, this has been the main function of journalism, even in liberal democracies, in most of its existence. The objectivity norm, which is one of the strongest markers of demarcation between the personal and the professional, and the private and the public for journalists, became institutionalized in the US press during the 1920s (Schudson, 2001) and much later in the European press. In many democracies in Europe, like the Scandinavian countries, the party press system, which did not promote objectivity as a professional ideal, lived on until the 1970s and 80s. In these democracies, objectivity has in other words been a significant ideal only for a few decades. Furthermore, the press system in other democracies, like those in the Mediterranean countries, has never embraced objectivity as a significant journalistic ideal (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), thus suggesting closer ties between a journalist’s personal opinions and his professional work. The insistence on neutrality and the separation of fact from opinion in news reporting is in other words a relatively speaking novel idea with limited global penetration. That being said, objectivity as a journalistic ideal has diffused from one press system to the other globally during the last decades, according to Hallin and Mancini (2004). However, even in press systems in which objectivity has become a seemingly hegemonic ideal –

the US press system and other liberal press systems – advocacy journalism has never vanished. In the 1980s, 17  per cent of US journalists defined themselves as ‘adversary’ (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986). This share has increased over the last decades and has been coupled with a new type of journalist, the ‘populist mobilizer’, according to Beam, Weaver and Brownlee (2009). And even those journalists who adhere to an ideal of objectivity find it hard to separate fact from opinion, according to a cross-country European study conducted by Patterson and Donsbach, who conclude that ‘there is […] a perceptual gap between journalists’ self-image and their actions’ (1996: 466). When journalists suddenly start stating their personal opinions in social media, they are in other words in tune with not only the journalism of the past, they are also in tune with journalism as it has been practiced in the objectivity era. The difference might be that their self-image now is more in tune with their actions.

Subjectivity and self-disclosures in feature journalism The second tension, between personal selfdisclosures and the professional role as journalists, also has its parallels in the history of journalism, most notably in the genres of feature journalism, or ‘soft’ news. In an analysis of historical and modern textbooks on feature journalism, Steensen found that a discourse of intimacy always has been central to these genres. This discourse implies that the feature journalist ‘seeks to connect with the reader on an intimate level, and that she allows herself to be personal in her writing, by for instance using the personal noun “I”’ (2011b: 54). This discourse of intimacy has been a vital part of reportage journalism and literary/narrative journalism. The reportage genre is perhaps the oldest and throughout the history of journalism most sustainable

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journalistic genre. Haller (1987) argues that the reportage dates as long back as the days of Herodotus in ancient Greece and his travel logs The Histories, which he wrote during the years 431–25BC. The Histories is based on Herodotus’ own observations during his travels, and this – the eyewitness account – has been portrayed as a defining characteristic of the reportage genre (Carey, 1987). BechKarlsen defines the genre as ‘a personal narrative based on the reporters own experiences in the real world’ (2002: 216, my translation). The reportage is by default subjective, and many of the great reportage journalists in modern times, like Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, have made personal self-disclosures a natural part of their journalism. The reportage genre had its modern breakthrough in newspapers in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when authors/journalists like Balzac, Zola, Dickens and Dostojevski introduced realism and naturalism, in which it became important to depict the world as it presented itself to them. At the same time, the penny press in the USA paved the way for the ‘human interest’ story, which had many similarities with European reportage journalism of the time. An early and significant example is a reportage published in the New York Herald by the editor Bennett following the murder of a prostitute in a fashionable New York resort, writing: What a sight burst upon me! There stood an elegant double mahogany bed all covered with burnt pieces of linen, blankets, pillows, black as cinders. I looked around for the object of my curiosity. On the carpet I saw a piece of linen sheet covering something as if carelessly flung over it. (cited in Hughes, 1981: 12)

Bennet then describes his feelings when looking at the corpse and likens it to a statue of marble. His 1836 crime scene reportage is in other words highly subjective. He positions himself as the point of identification for readers; all depictions are filtered through his subjective point of view, thus framing the reportage as a first person narrative, in which the journalist is the main character. Such

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subjective reportage journalism reached a high peek in the 1890s in many European countries and in the USA, where, according to Hartsock, it took the form of narrative literary journalism, which provided ‘a challenge to or resistance against mainstream “factual” or “objective” news’ (2000: 41). In the 1960, history would repeat itself when journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese once again challenged mainstream factual and objective news. Talese and Wolfe were the early front figures of what was to be labelled ‘new journalism’, a journalism marked by narrative structure and personal point of view (Wolfe, 1975). Some of the new journalists, those who are labelled by Eason (1990) as ‘the modernists’ – e.g. Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer – challenged the, by then, conventional notion of journalistic epistemology and described ‘what it feels like to live in a world where there is no consensus about a frame of reference to explain “what it all means”’ (1990: 192). They insisted that it was not possible to say something true about events in the world without making visible their subjective perspectives and interpretations. These journalists where not only subjective, they also added details from their personal lives to the stories they wrote. Such an ideal of subjectivity has continued to thrive in literary, narrative journalism in the USA and in European reportage journalism (Hartsock, 2011). The last decades, too, have seen an increase in intimate, self-confessional long-form literary journalism (Harrington, 1997; Steensen, 2013).

THE FALL OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALIST? It should now be clear that the blurring of boundaries between the private and the public, the personal and the professional in social media are not new to journalism. Such a discourse of intimacy has been part of journalists’ public personas across genres and

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press systems in various ways and degrees throughout the history of journalism, even in times and places in which objectivity has been the dominant professional ideal. Herein lies an important lesson. Journalism is a complex and quite schizophrenic profession and practice in which competing and seemingly mutually exclusive ideals, norms and discourses co-exist. Journalism is both objective and subjective, it is both fact-driven and opinion laden, it is both personal and professional. We should therefore not assume that social media bring about major changes to journalism as profession and practice. What social media do, is to add complexity to the already existing paradoxes of journalism. This added complexity is primarily related to the way journalism and journalists relate to audiences, what I refer to below as the audience collapse. In this last section of the chapter, I will discuss the implications of this added complexity and whether it means the ultimate fall of the public journalist.

The audience collapse When Bennett wrote his highly subjective crime scene reportage in 1836 and when Hunter S. Thompson wrote his euphoric alcohol and drug-inflated gonzo-reportage from the Kentucky Derby in 1970, (Thompson, 1975), they had one thing in common besides the highly subjective and personal accounts they included in their journalism; they knew whom they wrote for. The publications that would run their stories had relatively stable audiences, who would be presented with the stories in fixed contexts. The stories would be laid out and presented in fixed spreads in the respective newspaper and magazine, which would provide a stable context and thus a frame of reference for genre affiliation and possible interpretations. The boundaries between the journalists and the audiences were clear, and the publications had means to control the message.

This all changed when journalism went digital. Online newspapers could not package stories in fixed contexts the way the printed press and broadcast media could. Different web browsers would present online newspapers differently, as would different screens. Online newspapers are not fixed entities, they change continuously and the stories that are published change with them. This is what Manovich (2001: 30) labels the ‘variability’ of digital media and what Yates and Sumner call ‘loss of fixity’ (1997: 3). When journalism went digital, journalists and editors lost the power of fixing stories in time and space. Consequently, journalists and editors lost some of the control they had on how their stories would be presented and by whom they would be consumed. With the increased spectrum of platforms, from smartphones to big smart TVs, even more control was lost. Finally, with social media journalism has lost almost all fixity and has become as variable as never before. In today’s social media world a journalist has no way of knowing whether a reader will access a story while reading a printed newspaper or through an embedded link on his or her Facebook wall. With social media, journalists and editors have lost the ability to control the context in which stories are consumed, interpreted and commented upon. The imagined audience, as journalists and editors previously were able to envision it, has collapsed. Furthermore, when journalists publish something in social media they lose the privilege they have when publishing something for a newspaper (offline or online), magazine or broadcaster, namely the privilege of knowing the approximate audience reach of what they publish. This is especially important in social media with limited or no means of controlling audience reach, like, for instance, Twitter. A tweet can reach only a few of your friends and therefore function as a private message, or it can go viral and reach a global audience. A journalist has no way of knowing beforehand what kind of audience his or her tweet will reach, and therefore what kind

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of status along the private/public continuum it will gain. As pointed out by Marwick and boyd, social media ‘collapse multiple contexts and bring together commonly distinct audiences’ (2011: 115). This is the challenge of social media to journalism. Having a sense of both context and audience is essential to how people present themselves, argued Goffman (1971). When control over both context and audience is lost, self-presentation becomes problematic. An instructive example of how this might affect journalistic self-presentation is the way some Norwegian journalists communicated on social media following the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway. A group of journalists with the online newspaper VG Nett managed to observe and take pictures of the police’s reconstruction of the terrorist attack on Utøya 22 July 2011. The journalists were so happy with their scoop that they high-fived each other on Twitter and bragged about the ‘scoop’ they had secured by taking pictures of the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik as he showed the police how he had murdered 69 youngsters on Utøya. This bragging was clearly not meant for a broader public. It was part of an internal collegial discourse. But it reached way beyond the inner collegial circle. Some of the survivors of the Utøya massacre read the Twitter exchange, found it appalling and complained to the Norwegian press complaints commission, Pressens Faglige Utvalg (PFU). They argued that the journalists’ Twitter bragging, in addition to the publication of the pictures, was in violation of Norwegian press ethics. VG and the journalists regretted their Twitter activity, but argued that PFU had no jurisdiction over what journalists write on Twitter. PFU agreed and concluded that Twitter messages were to be regarded as ‘private statements that fall outside of the commission’s field of operation’ (PFU, 2011, my translation). In other words, when journalists write in social media they are not bound by press ethics. This becomes problematic when

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journalists have social media nicknames that affiliate them with the organisation they work for (like ‘@TV2Fredrik’) or if they in other ways make the affiliation apparent in their bio. The PFU later specified that a journalist’s social media activity could fall under the commission’s jurisdiction if the journalist made such an affiliation apparent. This is the reason why the TV 2 correspondent Fredrik Græsvik formally disconnected his social media persona from his employer. Nevertheless, the problem remains, at least for high-profile journalists like Græsvik, who in a Norwegian context always will be associated with TV 2, regardless of what his Twitter and Facebook bio might state. That being said, the lack of context and imagined audience that obscures self-­ presentation in social media is less problematic for those journalists who have managed to brand themselves heavily in social media. Journalists like Græsvik in Norway, Anderson Cooper (CNN host with more than 5 million followers on twitter) in the USA and Caitlin Moran (columnist for the Times with more than 500k followers on Twitter) in the UK, to name only a few, have all turned their names into popular social media brands. For them, social media becomes similar to a traditional mass medium, through which they know they reach a large audience within a relatively controlled context. But even for such high-profile journalists, the private/­ public distinction can be difficult to balance, as the Græsvik example illustrates.

Social media, journalism and the tyranny of intimacy Sennett’s (2002) analysis of public life offers some insights regarding what this audience collapse in particular and the increasingly complex intimization of journalism in general may imply for the future public role of journalists. In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett laments the end of public life. He argues that public life had been deprived of

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value unless it involved some kind of intimacy. He romanticized public life in the preindustrialization world, in which man could experience emotionally meaningful encounters with strangers while remaining aloof. In the twentieth century, this dimension of public life was lost, according to Sennett. In a society without gods, the humanitarian spirit is defined by an ideology of intimacy; what is considered morally good is connected to the warmth and closeness of intimate, personal relations (2002: 259). Such relations could no longer be found in public life, which consequently was deprived of meaning. Public spaces were dehumanized as man only found meaning in private spheres. Strangers stopped talking to one another in public spaces, and moving in such spaces – for instance to and from work – was reduced to instrumental necessities. In such a culture, politics without personalities became impossible. People started to ‘conceive of the political as a realm in which personality will be strongly declared’, argued Sennett (2002: 261). Politicians were judged based on the charismatic nature of their public appearance. A politician’s motivation, not his actions, became the defining factor of his success. If he could convince the public that his motivations were true and authentic, it did not matter what he actually accomplished through action, argued Sennett. At the core of this development was the rise of broadcast (‘electronic’) media: ‘The electronic media play a crucial role in this deflection, by simultaneously overexposing the leader’s personal life and obscuring his work in office’ (2002: 265). Sennett’s analysis is today echoed by researchers like Bruns (2012) who argue that personality is more important than institutional affiliation for professionals who strive for impact through social media. If one believes that social media make public life even more intimate, and if one thinks that Sennett’s analysis was accurate, then the following question prompts itself: Do we conceive of social media as a realm in which

personality is strongly declared, and will the publicly displayed personality of a journalist in social media therefore define his or her professional success? There is some evidence in the research that personality is crucial for attracting an audience in social media. The more journalism moves to social media, the more dependent on the personality of its practitioners, and hence a discourse of intimacy, it is likely to become. Journalism may go down the same path as politics has: charisma, motivation and emotional engagement may be the future drivers of journalists, and not the actions they undertake in their fact-finding watchdog and independent fourth estate mission to save democracy. If that will be the case, then the public journalist, as we know him or her, will fall. However, the public journalist will not necessarily fall in the Sennettian way, which implies a moral collapse of public life. Sennett’s vision of modern public life is deeply normative in the sense that he evaluates the intimization of the public sphere as a tyrannification. To Sennett, charisma, emotional engagement and personal motivation are difficult to combine with a solid and accountable performance of public, professional obligations. This resembles the same kind of normativity that suggests that journalistic professional objectivity cannot go hand in hand with emotional engagement and public displays of subjectivity. The history of journalism shows that objectivity and subjectivity, the personal and the professional, the private and the public are not necessarily dichotomies. Therefore, the intimization and individualization of journalism that social media seem to promote do not automatically imply a fall of the professional and public role of journalists. These effects might simply imply a transformation of what ‘professional’ and ‘public’ mean to journalism. Furthermore, social media has not yet transformed journalism to being individual acts of intimacy. Perhaps it will never happen. Journalism has not entirely switched

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over to social media. In spite of the economic difficulties, journalism still thrives in institutional media, and social media would be deprived of much meaning if traditional media content vanished. Social media does not replace traditional media. They are counterparts to them and they feed on them. What is vital is that journalists do not succumb to a kind of technological determinism that highlights a demand for a further intimization of journalism in social media. Instead, journalists eager to create a successful social media persona might find comfort in the findings of the studies conducted by Cozma and Chen (2013) and Boehmer (2014): Being personal and intimate in social media might increase your likeability, but it does not necessarily increase your professional esteem.

NOTES  1  Translated by the author. Original post, published 5 August on https://www.facebook.com/fredrik. graesvik, read: ‘Fra og med nå er dette en privat konto. Jeg ber dere som er venner med meg uten å kjenne meg om å slette meg som venn. Dere er noen tusen, så det er lettere for dere enn meg. Fom mandag er alle statusoppdateringer fra meg og har ingenting med Tv2 å gjøre’. Græsvik published a similar message on Twitter.  2  Translated by the author. Original post, published 7 August on https://www.facebook.com/fredrik. graesvik, read: ‘Som privatperson kan jeg melde at Gazakrigen så langt har kostet 415 barn livet. På begge sider’.  3  Translated by the author. Original tweet: ‘Ber alle om unskyldning, dette skjer ikke igjen. Beklager’. The original tweet (‘Well, at least we didn’t kill any fans’) was published in English.

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9 Emotion and Journalism Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

INTRODUCTION The era of digital journalism represents a shift in the forms of knowing – or epistemology – of journalism. This shift, I argue, has opened up new spaces for more emotional and personalized forms of expression in public discourse. In referring to digital journalism, I am interested in the consequences of a particular set of developments that have occurred as a result of the ‘digital disruption’ (Jones and Salter, 2011) engendered by the emergence of online journalism and convergence. These processes have been ongoing since the 1990s (see, for example, Scott, 2005) but remain profoundly destabilizing and transformative. The changes to journalism practice that have resulted from these processes are multifarious and far-reaching, involving fundamental challenges to everything from the business model of journalism to journalism’s self-understanding and its relationship to the audience. As Franklin

(2013: 2) argued in an editorial to the first issue of the journal, Digital Journalism: Digital journalism is complex, expansive and, even in these early days, constitutes a massive and illdefined communications terrain which is constantly in flux. Digital journalism engages different types of journalistic organizations and individuals, embraces distinctive content formats and styles, and involves contributors with divergent editorial ambitions, professional backgrounds, and educational experiences and achievements, who strive to reach diverse audiences.

Franklin’s description of the complexities of the digital journalism landscape highlights how this new era has challenged conventional understandings of who journalists are and what journalism is, involving an everwider range of groups and individuals, as well as genres and platforms. This chapter focuses on a particular cluster of developments which have brought to the forefront challenges to the conventional ‘objective’ storytelling style of journalism, including

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more emotional and personalized forms of narrative. It addresses how the increased prominence of user-generated content, citizen journalism and social media is ushering in new conventions of journalistic storytelling and hence new forms of truth claims. This should be understood against the backdrop of broader cultural transformations which have also impacted on the journalistic field. First, there is a growing recognition that rather than necessarily undermining the rationality of the public sphere, emotional expression may be a vital positive force in enabling new forms of engagement. Second, the rise of ‘subjective and confessional journalism’ (Coward, 2013) has been a growing trend in journalistic expression over the past few decades. This, in turn, has been accelerated and underwritten by the emergence of digital journalism and social media. The blurring of conventional boundaries between ‘journalists’ and ‘audiences’ has contributed to challenging epistemologies of journalism, away from ways of knowing which privilege objectivity and distancing, and towards a central place for emotionally-inflected narratives of witnessing and personal experience (see also Wahl-Jorgensen, 2014, 2015). I should note that here I am using the term ‘emotion’ rather than the widely circulated – and often interchangeably used – phrase ‘affect’. It is useful to clarify this choice of terminology from the outset. Massumi (2002) has argued that even if the two terms are often used interchangeably, there are important conceptual reasons to distinguish between the two. As he sees it, affect is best understood as a bodily sensation, a reaction to stimuli characterized by intensity and energy, but without a conscious orientation and interpretation. By contrast, an emotion: is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and

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meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. (Massumi, 2002: 28)

Though Massumi describes emotional reactions as personal first and foremost, his distinction has also become an important resource for sociologists and political scientists interested in collective behavior, insofar as it is premised on emotion as both interpretation and narrativization of affect, or its placement in the nexus of social relations. As such, it enables us to understand emotion as articulated and expressed affect. Emotion is thus exemplified, amongst other things, by journalistic narratives that collectively narrativize and make public affect. Papacharissi (2014), in her recent book Affective Publics prefers the term ‘affect’ over ‘emotion’, understanding it as extending ‘beyond feelings as a general way of sense-making… Affect informs our sensibilities, theorized both in sense-making processes of the human body and in relation to the sense-making technologies that are affective driven. Affect precedes emotions and drives the intensity with which emotions are felt’ (Papacharissi, 2014: Kindle location 357–71). Here, my interest is precisely in what happens after affect – what happens as a consequence of the moment when affect is narrated as a conscious state of emotion (Clough, 2007: 2) in public through journalistic discourse, and hence becomes collective and potentially political.

JOURNALISM AND EMOTION: A TROUBLED MARRIAGE? The relationship between journalism and emotion is a particularly fraught one because professional journalism has historically been closely aligned with ideals of objectivity (see, Schudson, 1978). Journalism, coming of age around the turn of the twentieth century alongside the rise of beliefs in positivist science and a commitment to the rationality

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of the modernist project, has been normatively invested in objectivity, understood in terms of the exclusion of values from the journalistic narrative (see also Maras, 2013). Objectivity has tended to be viewed – in the field of journalism and elsewhere – as the polar opposite of emotion. For example, Dennis and Merrill (1984: 111) suggested that objectivity in journalism is tied to the aim of presenting ‘an emotionally detached view of the news’, while Schudson argued that objectivity ‘guides journalists to separate facts from values and report only the facts’ using a ‘cool, rather than emotional’ tone (2001: 150, cited in Maras, 2013: 8). Objectivity is characterized by a de-­personalized narrative style, which erases the subjectivity of the journalist (Maras, 2013: 8). As Edward Epstein (1973) memorably put it, the norm of objectivity generates detached ‘news from nowhere’. Objective journalism is normatively aligned with a view of journalism as a key institution in the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). It is understood as the site for impartial, rational-critical discussion of matters of common concern. Subjectivity – and thus emotional expression and personal histories – is viewed as irrelevant and outside the scope of acceptable topics. Emotion has tended to represent a ‘bad object’ for journalism practitioners and scholars, understood in terms of its deviance from ideals of the public sphere (cf. Coward, 2013; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012). As Pantti (2010) argued, ‘emotionality typically represents a decline in the standards of journalism and a deviance from journalism’s proper social role; while “quality” journalism informs and educates citizens by appealing to reason, other kinds of journalism focus on pleasing their audiences by appealing to the emotions’ (Pantti, 2010: 169). Such arguments are evidenced, among other things, in the concern over the sensationalist excesses of tabloid journalism. What gives rise to the moral panic associated with tabloid journalism is the very idea that it appeals to our sensations and represents a

preoccupation with the bodily and the emotional (Sparks, 2000) as opposed to our reason. These concerns mirror anxieties over the transgressive nature of other popular culture genres such as television talk shows, which, through their emphasis on ‘therapy talk’ – openly discussing and expressing emotions and personal experience in public – challenge conventional understandings of emotional management in public discourse: To experience the virtual realities of television talk shows is to confront a crisis in the social construction of reality. Television talk shows create audiences by breaking cultural rules, by managed shocks, by shifting our conceptions of what is acceptable, by transforming our ideas about what is possible, by undermining the bases for cultural judgment, by redefining deviance and appropriate reactions to it, by eroding social barriers, inhibitions and cultural distinctions. (Abt and Seesholtz, 1994: 171)

Such a position seeks to police the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Its warnings about the dangers of contagion and the transgression of boundaries reflect broader anxieties about the perils of emotional public discourse. In expressing concern about ‘shifting our conceptions of what is acceptable’, ‘transforming our ideas about what is possible’ and ‘eroding social barriers, inhibitions and cultural distinctions,’ it highlights worries about the need to carefully regulate the tone and content of emotional expression in public discourse. Preoccupation with the ways in which emotions are managed and expressed in public discourse is, however, not confined to popular cultural forms such as tabloids and television talk shows, but extends to well-established and prestigious journalistic forms that draw on emotional storytelling. For example, Stephanie Shapiro (2006) has criticized the ‘emotional journalism’ characterizing Pulitzer Prize winners, resulting in a ‘sob sister’ style of writing: Newspapers can’t resist the urge to go long when it comes to tales of fatal illnesses, disfiguring ailments and accidents, particularly when they strike children. In recent decades, the drama underlying

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these anguishing accounts has led to the creation of a subgenre of narrative journalism that often vies with hard news for A1 recognition in the country’s most prestigious newspapers.

Such human interest stories, molded by the techniques of fiction, put a face on the bewildering universe of medical ethics, risky procedures and end-of-life choices. Like the harrowing tales that yellow journalism’s Nellie Bly and her sob sister descendants became known for, they also are calculated to snag readers by the emotions and not let them go until they burst, on cue, into tears. To Shapiro and other critics, such ‘emotional journalism’ risks descending into voyeurism, oversimplication and pathos – similar to the charges levelled at other forms of emotionalized public discourse. By contrast, any more ‘positive’ assessments of the role of emotion in journalism have tended to receive less attention (Pantti, 2010). In recent years, however, media and journalism scholars are beginning to take an interest in emotion (Pantti, 2010; Peters, 2011; Richards and Rees, 2011; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013a, 2013b). This emerging body of work could be seen as a late addition to a larger ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley, 2007) across humanities and social sciences disciplines which challenges us to take body and mind, as well as reason and passion into equal consideration (Hardt, 2007: ix). The ‘affective turn’ reflects an increasing interest in how emotional engagements make a difference to social and political life (Goodwin et al., 2001; Staiger et al., 2010). This affective turn has been particularly prominent in disciplines such as cognitive psychology and sociology. One field that is particularly useful to examine here is that of social movement studies because it has raised central issues around the role of emotion in political discourse and forms of collective action. Social movement scholars are interested in how emotions both energize and shape the activities of activists, suggesting that emotional engagement cannot be overlooked as a powerful – and positive – motivating

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factor in getting people involved in political life (Dahlgren, 2009: 83–6; Gould, 2010). Scholars thus reflect on the rise of ‘passionate politics’ and ‘the politics of affect’ (see, for example, Goodwin et al., 2001), to mention just a few labels affixed to this set of practices. Some of the impetus towards an ‘affective turn’ comes from scholars studying the increasingly close relationship between politics and popular culture (van Zoonen, 2005), as well as those who discern the emergence of an ‘emotional public sphere’ (Lunt and Stenner, 2005; Lunt and Pantti, 2007). What unites these approaches is a fundamental questioning of the polar opposition of rationality and objectivity to emotion in light of the view that emotional expression may actually be integral, rather than destructive, to a healthy public life. The interest in the relationship between journalism and emotion has emerged in close dialogue with this body of work, and has taken a variety of forms, from broader attempts at theorizing the relationship between emotionality and objectivity (Peters, 2011) and the rise of a ‘subjective journalism’ which privileges personal voice (Coward, 2013), to tracing the place of emotional and personalized storytelling in award-winning journalism (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2013a, 2013b), and developing tools for discerning an emotional stance in supposedly ‘objective’ news agency reporting (Stenvall, 2008, 2014). Scholars have examined journalists’ views of the appropriate use of emotion in reporting (Pantti, 2010) and their experiences of trauma (Richards and Rees, 2011). Research that focuses on the perspectives of journalists has shown that they are highly aware of the emotional impact of their work on their audiences. Gürsel’s (2009) ethnographic work on photojournalism at an American news magazine demonstrates that the anticipation of audience emotional reactions to stories informs deliberations over everything from photo selection to layout. She argued that the purpose of ‘wielding emotions’ is

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to ‘bring the story closer’ and educate the reader (Gürsel, 2009: 40–1). The idea of bringing the story closer through the elicitation of emotion is also central to a set of welldocumented journalistic practices around the reporting of distant suffering, as highlighted in the case of humanitarian disasters (see, for example, Chouliaraki, 2006; Joye, 2009, 2010). Finally, as will be discussed in more detail below, the distinctive – and more emotional – practices of citizen journalists in the digital era are receiving increasing attention (Allan, 2013; Blaagaard 2012, 2013). Here, I would like to trace how such developments are shaping the epistemology of journalism in the digital era. The epistemological implications of journalistic forms have long been discussed by journalism scholars.1 Ettema and Glasser (1987), who were among the first to develop the idea of the epistemology of journalism, understood and studied it in terms of how ‘journalists know what they know’. Looking at investigative journalism, they examined what ‘counts as empirical evidence and how that evidence becomes a justified empirical belief – ergo, a knowledge claim about the empirical world’ (Ettema and Glasser, 1987: 343). This chapter, however, understands the epistemology of journalism more broadly, in terms of the ‘rules, routines and institutionalized procedures that operate within a social setting and decide the form of the knowledge produced and the knowledge claims expressed (or implied)’ (Ekström, 2002: 260). This is particularly important to consider in the light of journalism’s epistemological position as the ‘primary sense-making practice of modernity’ (Hartley, 1996: 32–4). The knowledge claims of journalism have broader ideological consequences, but are also shaped by sociological forces and prevailing power relations. As Matheson (2004) described it, drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of the relationship between knowledge and power: Conventions of newswriting do not simply chronicle the world but […] constitute certain claims to

knowledge about such matters as the audiences for news texts, the position of journalists in that world and the relationship between audience and journalist. […] Journalists adhere to these conventions in order to be able to make the kinds of authoritative statements about events and individuals which we are accustomed to hear from them. News discourse can be seen as a particular instance of the more general ‘will to truth’ which motivates and constrains institutional forms of knowing in modern society. (Matheson, 2004: 445)

What I suggest, drawing on Matheson’s (2004) approach, is that the digital age has ushered in new platforms and genres of expression – including in journalistic forms – which may move beyond conventional ‘objective’ practices and allow for more personalized, subjective and emotional forms of narrative. I have developed these points in more detail elsewhere (see Wahl-Jorgensen, 2014, 2015) but am by no means the first to identify the epistemological shifts associated with transformations in journalism. For example, Dahlgren (2013) has written about the ‘multi-epistemic’ nature of public discourse resulting from both technological and social change. These changes have occurred alongside shifts in the material circumstances of journalism practice, and the power relations informing them. Along those lines, I do not wish to suggest that technologies are transformative in and of themselves. It is important to understand that the adoption, appropriation and use of particular technologies are contingent on, and interact with, a broader array of political, economic and social circumstances. As work in journalism studies and elsewhere has pointed out, it is far more useful to see technologies as possessing particular affordances – forms of action it makes possible – and to understand how these affordances might shape their use, in interaction with particular sociocultural contexts (Papacharissi, 2014). In today’s ‘polymedia’ environment, made up of intersecting and hybridizing technologies, media, platforms and applications (Madianou, 2013), we can trace particular affordances that may enable new forms of

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voice (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard, 2013: 150). As discussed in the next section, the rise of the digital era has been closely associated with a widening and democratization of opportunities for news production. This has happened with the emergence of technologies that make it much easier for ‘ordinary people’ not just to make news, but also to share it with others known and unknown.

DIGITAL JOURNALISM AND EMOTION: TRACING THE CONSEQUENCES OF ‘DIGITAL DISRUPTION’ The ‘digital era’ is often associated with the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. The development of convergent forms of news content enabling greater interactivity in a proliferation of forums, genres and forms – ranging from blogs, comments and usergenerated content to social media – has had profound consequences. Starting with the earliest experiments in the 1990s and early 2000s, media organizations enabled users to comment on online stories, and the introduction of blogs facilitated further instantaneous dialogue, for the first time generating communities of opinion that could respond in real time to unfolding news events (see Steensen, 2011). The internet was welcomed with much fanfare by observers who saw it as an opportunity to ‘produce virtual public spheres’ (Papacharissi, 2002) and hence revolutionize mediated public participation. From the very beginning, the innovations facilitated by the affordances of new technologies challenged conventional forms of journalistic storytelling and hierarchies of production and distribution. The changes wrought by digital journalism are challenging conventional power relations of the public sphere, where participation is no longer the preserve of mainstream media. Instead, ‘ordinary people’ have been granted

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greater autonomy over the production and distribution of opinion. Media organizations, which have traditionally functioned as the gatekeepers, have now become gatewatchers or curators, sorting through and publicizing information available elsewhere on the internet (Bruns, 2005:  2). Perhaps most importantly, the increasing role of audience contributions represents a shift from the situation where such contributions are consistently and neatly parcelled off in specific sections, and towards one where they are, at least on occasion, broadcast or published alongside content provided by professional journalists. This is significant, because it means that the clashing and fundamentally incompatible epistemologies of conventional ‘objective’ journalism and ‘emotional’ audience content now sit alongside each other, rather than the former being privileged by the hierarchies of news content (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2014). To many observers, the transformations signaled here began with the emergence of the phenomenon variously described as citizen journalism, user-generated content, ‘we media’, and collaborative journalism. The use of views, images and videos contributed by members of the public first gained prominence after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Here, eyewitnesses were able to film the disaster as it unfolded, providing news organizations with unprecedented immediacy in their coverage (Allan, 2009). It gained further impetus and importance after the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. Since then, the coverage of most major news events – ranging from the Arab Spring to the Boston Marathon bombings – has been inexorably shaped by contributions from members of the public. While a great variety of terms are in circulation to describe the phenomenon, the phrases ‘user-generated content’ and ‘citizen journalism’ are perhaps the most widely used (see also Chapter 12). Whereas the former takes an institutional view, based on the idea that users are generating content for legacy

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media, the latter has clear normative implications in drawing on the vocabulary of citizenship. This chapter draws on the vocabulary used by the scholars discussing the phenomenon, on the assumption that the use of terminology is aligned to particular analytical and normative optics. For scholars tracing the consequences of these transformations, the challenges to norms of objectivity and the emergence of new ways of knowing has been a prominent theme. The distinctive stance of citizen journalists is in part captured through the idea of what Allan (2013) has referred to as ‘citizen witnessing’ (see also Chapter 18). This term captures what are by now well-established practices of first-person reportage; ones ‘in which ordinary individuals temporarily adopt the role of a journalist in order to participate in newsmaking, often spontaneously during a time of crisis, accident, tragedy or disaster when they happen to be present on the scene’ (Allan, 2013: 9). However, the participation of ‘ordinary people’ through practices of citizen witnessing is shaped not by the routines and values of mainstream news, but rather by the vernacular of lived experience – often emotional, embodied and deeply personal. For example, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s approach to the Victoria Bushfire Emergency 2009 demonstrated that through the use of technologies, the broadcaster made an active effort at generating affective communities and containing anxiety caused by the disaster. ABC started the Bushfire Community site which asked for audience members to share ‘your experience by text, photos, audio or video’ (Pantti et al., 2012: 84). This site could be seen as exemplary of a new participatory genre which is hosted by mainstream media but ‘where there is no hierarchy of discourse and where access is unlimited’ (Pantti et al., 2012: 84). This structure does not necessarily afford contributors the same authority as professional journalists but does give voice and opportunity for information sharing to individuals who may not otherwise have venues

for communication, and thus facilitates the ­creation of a community. The creation of an online community was a priority because of the remote and spread-out geography of the area affected by the disaster, which meant that it was difficult for journalists to reach. Following the creation of the site, members of local communities caught up in the bushfire proceeded to use it to share information as well as eyewitness photos and videos about conditions on the ground. Increasingly, however, members of the community began to share their emotions about the disaster, in the form of poems, deeply personal accounts of their own experience, and condolences and prayers. This represented a shift in the types of agency and accounts typically afforded to victims of disaster, made possible by digital technologies: [T]he contributions of ordinary people to the bushfire coverage on ABC Online represented a departure from the role they have traditionally played in disaster reporting, that is, as news sources or news characters represented by media professionals. Rather than being media-led, the affective community seemed to be in dialogue with itself, as the media provided a space for sharing emotions and forming a community. (Pantti et al., 2012: 86)

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION AND AUTHENTICITY The shift towards a greater prominence of audience participation as part and parcel of journalistic content – and the associated greater emphasis on subjective and emotional discourses and ways of knowing – has been seen to represent a significant challenge to the paradigm of objectivity. Proponents see it as a welcome paradigm shift challenging the ‘dry, distancing, lecture-like mode of address’ of traditional journalism (Allan, 2013: 94). Allan (2013) characterizes their position as follows: Journalism by the people for the people is to be heralded for its alternative norms, values and

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priorities. It is raw, immediate, independent and unapologetically subjective, making the most of the resources of web-based initiatives…to connect, interact and share first-hand, unauthorized forms of journalistic activity promising fresh perspectives. (Allan, 2013: 94)

Allan’s reconstruction of the arguments in favor of ‘journalism by the people for the people’ suggests that its power lies precisely in its subversion of the ways of knowing – or epistemology – of traditional journalism. With its ‘raw, immediate, independent and unapologetically subjective approach’, it challenges the norms of objectivity so closely aligned with conventional journalistic storytelling. Instead, it is shaped by ‘arational’ motivations and ‘breaks with deliberative democratic formats in that emotions, affect and passion are introduced into the deliberative space through technology’ (Blaagaard, 2013: 72). The shift towards more emotional forms of expression in citizen journalism heralds, to many observers, the emergence of a ‘new authenticity’ (Chouliaraki and Blaagaard 2013), signaling a new system of truth claims tied not to the authority of objectivity, but to the truth inherent in unrehearsed, unpolished and personal accounts of ordinary people. In this context, authenticity is understood as closely tied to ideas around such contributions being raw, immediate, and subjective, as discussed by Allan (2013) above. The emphasis on the authenticity of the more personal and emotionally inflected style of ‘ordinary people’s’ journalistic contributions is consistent with research on audience responses to user-generated content, which suggests that audiences tend to value it because it is seen as more ‘authentic’ than professional content (Wahl-Jorgensen et  al., 2010). The understanding of authenticity advanced by audiences involves the idea of an uncensored outpouring of personal storytelling, emotional integrity, realism, immediacy and identification. This is contrasted to the perceived professional distance of journalism, which involves a ‘cold’, ‘detached’, ‘objective’,

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and ‘distanced’ approach (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2010). For example, in describing usergenerated content after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Tippett, founder of NowPublic.com, argued ‘it’s a very powerful thing to have that emotional depth and first-hand experience, rather than the formulaic, distancing approach of the mainstream media’ (Allan, 2013: 94). Such observations highlight the ways in which the perceived authenticity or ‘truth’ that comes from emotional involvement and personal experience appears to trump the expertise associated with professional skills. To some observers, these new forms of truth claims are closely related to the affordances of new technologies, particularly the use of mobile phones for recording audiovisual content. As Blaagaard (2012: 80) put it: [T]echnology becomes an extension of the lifeworld and of narrative. We are shown the world not only from the perspective of another individual, but as if we were inside that person’s body, seeing the world with his or her eyes. This is particularly apparent in visualized citizen journalism, in which the poor quality and visibly unprofessional aspect of mobile phone footage makes that footage even more ‘compelling’ and suggests to us that the story is true.

The rise of citizen journalism offers a challenge to the abstract and analytical approach of conventional media, and a reshaping of the relationship between the public and the private. This is precisely because of the embodied, partial, subjective and personal nature of opening up for empathy in the sense of being able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. This, in turn, suggests new horizons for the moral power and responsibility of news media, which have the capacity to generate an ‘injunction to care’ about the suffering of distant others (Cottle, 2013). For Chouliaraki and Blaagaard (2013), these developments have the potential of raising fundamental questions about conventional journalism values, and ultimately may support cosmopolitan forms of action in the context of

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reporting on disasters, crises and suffering. The interest in the cosmopolitan potential of emotional and personal forms of journalistic storytelling highlights what is perhaps one of the most important insights into the place of emotion in public discourse: The growing recognition that rather than necessarily undermining the rationality of the public sphere, emotional expression may be a vital positive force in enabling new forms of engagement and identification among audience members.

Social media, emotion and journalism If anything, questions about how the digital era may drive more personalized and emotional forms of journalistic discourse have been further amplified with the advent of social media (see also Chapter 6). Issues around emotional expression and engagement have always been central to the architecture of social media. This is in part because of the influence of the fields of public relations and marketing in shaping this architecture of social media (Wahl-Jorgensen, forthcoming). These fields have always been preoccupied with questions of how to generate emotional resonance, engagement and attachment to particular products and brands. As early as 1928, the pioneering public relations expert Edward Bernays, writing to provide advice on what strategies politicians ought to adopt to optimally sway public opinion, examined in detail the role of emotional appeals, suggesting that candidates need to harness ‘as many of the basic emotions as possible’ (Bernays, 1928/2004: 119, cited in Grabe and Bucy, 2009: 91). Emotional expression and elicitation are structurally encouraged in social media, as a way of ensuring and monetizing engagement – this is, for example, evidenced in the development of the Facebook ‘Like’ button, which operates as a way of expressing what Pariser (2011) has described as bland positivity (see

also Hermida, 2014). It also informs the emergence of sentiment analysis, ‘the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text’ (Pang and Lee, 2008: 10). Sentiment analysis employs data-mining techniques on very large sets of data, in some cases consisting of millions of postings, examining the positive and negative sentiments in opinion expression (Liu, 2010). This approach entwines commercial questions with political ones: It interprets the display of emotions in social media as a collective and political practice; and one which provides useful information about public opinion – despite clear methodological and normative problems (see also Andrejevic, 2011). This is an intriguing direction given that it explicitly links understandings of citizenship (as expressed through measures of public opinion) with emotion or, at the very least, its interpretation in the form of ‘sentiment’. Much scholarly research using sentiment analysis has focused on Twitter because postings on the site are public and searchable. Here, scholars have demonstrated, through a correlation of large-scale sentiment analysis with news events, that emotional evaluations of events map onto broader indicators of public mood (Bollen et  al., 2010). For example, research has found that Twitter sentiments on Barack Obama closely mirror polling data regarding approval ratings (O’Connor et al. 2010). A second driver of the emphasis on emotion in social media is the fact that most users are strongly motivated by self-expression and the sharing of personal experiences and feelings: We are using social media to take the private habit of chronicling our life and make it public, producing a collective and shared account of society. Every day, millions of people are openly recounting their life stories on digital spaces, telling everyone about their lives, experiences and views (Hermida, 2014: 29)

The emotionality of expression and sharing practices in social media has resulted in a

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further blurring of the boundaries between public and private first ushered in by the advent of citizen journalism and user-­ generated content. This is not to suggest that social media represent the transformation of public debate into a private and non-political space. Rather, the ‘performative architecture presented through Twitter is everyday space where dominant narratives are reproduced and can be challenged through performances that are both personal and political’ (Papacharissi, 2014: Kindle location 2240). These processes of the reproduction and challenge of dominant narratives occurs through the collaborative construction of what Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2012) have referred to as ‘affective news streams’. In a study of storytelling on Twitter during the Arab Spring events in Egypt, they emphasized ‘the need to consider affect in explanations of the role of media use during mobilization’. We characterized the news streams we studied as affective, because they blended opinion, fact, and emotion into expressions uttered in anticipation of events that had not yet attained recognition through mainstream media. Combined with the networked and ‘always on’ character of social media, the affective aspects of messages nurture and sustain involvement, connection, and cohesion. Previous studies have emphasized the role of shared topics, interests and geolocality. We extend this work by advancing the concept of affective news streams, to describe how news is collaboratively constructed out of subjective experience, opinion, and emotion within an ambient news environment. (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012: 279)

The idea of affective news streams highlights the fact that in today’s ambient news environment, forms of public expression are no longer tightly regulated by professional norms shaped by an allegiance to the ideal of objectivity. Instead, they are collaboratively constructed in ways that blend conventional facts-based information with personal experience, subjective opinion and emotion in a way that does not privilege particular forms, genres or styles (see also Chapter 8). Extending on this body of work in examining the affective tone of Twitter discussions in

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the Occupy Wall Street movement, Papacharissi (2014) likened the role of Twitter to that of music: In some ways, Twitter plays a part similar to the role music used to play for movements – by enabling affective attunement with the movement itself. Songs that reflect the general aspirations of a movement allow publics and crowds to feel, with greater intensity, the meaning of the movement for themselves. Affective attunement permits people to feel and thus locate their own place in politics. Antagonistic content injections interrupted the affective harmony of #ows, creating an effect similar to that of noise interrupting a song. (Papacharissi, 2014: kindle location 1852)

The metaphor of music evokes both the ambient and the sensual. It suggests that a plethora of forms of discourse may make themselves heard at any moment, but that just as emotion may play a positive role in bolstering the aims of a movement, it may also interrupt harmonies – it may contribute to challenging dominant narratives and call consensus into question. This insight calls to mind the insights of radical democrats, who have long been interested in agonistic forms of public discourse (Mouffe, 2005), arguing that the ability to make dissenting voices heard is central to democratic practice. Further, it reminds us of the importance of understanding negative emotion – including anger and disagreement – as central in motivating and shaping political action ( Gould, 2001). Digital technologies and social media have made possible the articulation of the whole spectrum of emotion, and understanding the specific ways in which emotions operate is vital to charting this new media landscape. Along those lines, our motivations for responding to stories, photos and videos shared by others are often emotional in nature: ‘Emotions play a vital part in the social transmission of news and information. Interest, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, fear and contempt affect how some stories catch on and travel far wider than others’ (Hermida, 2014: 53–4). In particular, research has demonstrated that content which induces

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emotions reflecting high arousal – including positive emotions of awe, and negative emotions of anger or anxiety, was more likely to be socially shared than content inducing low arousal emotions such as sadness (Berger and Milkman, 2012). This systematic pattern, in turn, generates an emotional information universe which may be very different from that created by the conventional news agenda of legacy media. It is one where the content that tugs the hardest on the heart strings of its audience is more likely to go viral, whereas content that just makes us sad will never top the agenda (see also Pariser, 2011). At the same time, this new economy of emotional sharing cannot be viewed as isolated from the news selection processes of mainstream media. In an era driven increasingly by concerns about audience metrics and the emergence of clickbait journalism ( Anderson, 2011), journalistic news values and decisions are now profoundly shaped by predictions of click-through and sharing (Tandoc, 2014). As Tandoc (2014) wrote, based on ethnographic case studies of news selection in three newsrooms: In order to attract an audience no longer loyal to legacy news, journalism dances in a provocative manner – publishing stories about the wildest celebrities, uploading adorable cat videos, highlighting salacious headlines – hoping to attract attention, to increase traffic (Tandoc, 2014)

Tandoc’s (2014) work – and that of others tracing the ways in which news organizations have responded to the emotional dynamics of social sharing (Hermida, 2014) reminds us that precisely because of the porous line between audience and journalistic practices, and between social media and legacy media, we now have to view emotion as a central factor in shaping the news agenda, for better and worse.

Shifting power relations and emotion in journalism This discussion, in turn, serves as a useful reminder that the emergence of new forms of

storytelling, styles, and forums for journalism is not a sufficient precondition for changing the epistemological paradigm of journalism, but that such changes occur through complex interactions between audiences and news organizations. Changes in journalistic storytelling do not occur solely as a result of the incursion of amateurs into news production process, and neither are the more emotional and less ‘objective’ storytelling practices confined to members of the public contributing to the news. In investigating the epistemology of blogging, Matheson (2004) took a closer look at how the British newspaper, the Guardian, responded to the introduction of the new form in its own hosted blogs. He demonstrated that they were characterized by a distinctive way of knowing premised on the ‘establishment of a different interpersonal relation, of a different authority and of a journalism focused upon connection rather than fact’ (Matheson, 2004: 453). Here, then, journalists are using the affordances of the new medium to establish emotional connections to their audiences in a way that would not be possible using conventional ‘objective’ journalistic style. To Matheson, the writing represented a ‘more “raw”, less “cooked”, source of information, allowing users to participate more in constructing knowledge about events in the world’ (Matheson, 2004: 455). This echoes the language around the ‘new authenticity’ afforded by the technologies used by citizen journalists, and demonstrates that the practices of professional journalists are also shifting in response to the affordances of digital media, possibly enabling forms of expression which may be more partial, embodied and emotional. For example, Ashok Ahir, formerly Political Editor for BBC Wales, has suggested that the prominence of Twitter as a tool of journalistic reporting has changed professional routines of impartiality. Today’s journalists are no longer reporting for just one platform, but are required to produce

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content that might circulate through social media, online, as well as in the conventional broadcast and print formats of legacy media. Increasingly, journalists will tweet throughout the day when covering breaking news events. Because of the distinctive affordances of Twitter – the fact that messages are limited to 140 characters – there is rarely an opportunity to represent stories in a balanced and impartial way. Rather, Twitter posts from journalists reporting on specific events will tend to offer short bursts of opinion, analysis and factual information in ways that would be inconceivable in conventional broadcast and print reports, but represents news as an ongoing process and unfinished product. As such, journalists depart from an impartial approach in their Twitter reporting, which occurs throughout the day. But they return to it in their writing and production of content for the conventional finished product of news – in the form of print editions and evening news broadcasts (Ashok Ahir, personal communication, October 2013). At the same time, the shift documented in this chapter may also be making it increasingly acceptable for journalists to share their own emotions, particularly in the context of crises and traumatic events. As Charlie Beckett (2014) writes: Journalists are now able to use a range of different platforms, networks and channels to get their content across in different ways. They vary their style and message and perhaps even their editorial principles accordingly. They seek attention for their work in new ways. The audience can also personalize their news consumption and shape their relationship with the mediated world according to their views, habits and, I think, emotions. (Beckett, 2014)

In tracing these shifts, Beckett exemplifies this development towards a more flexible – and more openly emotional and non-­ objective – storytelling style – by discussing a film made by BBC Correspondent Andrew Harding for the BBC 10 O’Clock News on the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. In this story, Harding both reported events but also

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reassured villagers that ‘I’m sure help is on its way’ – thus overstepping the boundaries of the role of the ‘objective’ journalists who is an impartial and distanced observer. This report was broadcast on the evening news – the stalwart of conventional legacy media genres. Yet Beckett suggests that these shifts have occurred due to the opportunities demonstrated, and rendered acceptable, by the affordances of new technologies. The ‘new authenticity’ that has been brought about by increased audience participation, then, has also spilled over into a less ‘objective’ and more emotional and personalized forms of storytelling amongst professional journalists who might increasingly be drawing on more vernacular forms of discourse, drawing on the conventions of everyday life rather than engaging in purely ‘objective’ reporting. This highlights the fact that it is no longer possible to understand particular platforms, genres or practices as entirely autonomous and operating in isolation from others. Rather, there is a need to appreciate how the digital age has brought about a profound shift – and one which has had significant consequences for the ways of knowing in journalism. At the same time, it is worthwhile noting that the changing forms of journalistic storytelling, and the increasing prominence of audience participation, have not gone unchallenged by professional journalism. In seeking to protect the privileges of their beleaguered profession they carry out painstaking boundary work which emphasizes their professional skill and objectivity (Carlson and Lewis, 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015). News organizations have invested heavily in enabling audience participation through usergenerated content – ranging from platforms including CNN’s iReport to the Guardian newspaper’s GuardianWitness site. However, these platforms share a strategy of cooptation (Kperogi, 2011), fencing off audience contributions in special sections and sites, designed to relegate members of the public to being providers of supplementary, emotive content (Williams et al. 2011).

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The strategy of cooptation is based on carving out a continued role for professional journalism that goes beyond practices of curation; one which is premised on the quality of information and analysis provided by journalists whose skill sets, in the eyes of the profession’s defenders, are perhaps now more important than ever. The epistemological tensions between the historical professional paradigm of objectivity on the one hand, and the more emotional styles of citizen journalism, user-generated content and social media on the other, are therefore by no means resolved. Rather, what this chapter has demonstrated are some potentially productive spaces of encounter between them. This encounter results in dynamic and variegated outcomes circulating across amateur and professional forms of news production and traditional and new media platforms.

CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that the role of emotional expression has tended to be overlooked in journalism scholarship and practice, in part due to the profession’s historical allegiance to the ideal of objectivity. Nonetheless, the era of digital journalism has made emotional expression increasingly prominent. The impetus towards this development has come from several directions: First, the increasing role of citizen journalism and user-generated content have generated new ways of knowing, through personalized and embodied accounts of news events ranging from bush fires to protest and revolutions. Second, the emergence of social media – closely informed by the fields of PR and marketing which have always been alert to the central place of emotion in public discourse – has further amplified these trends through the generation of affective news streams. These affective news streams embody both positive and negative emotion, support and disruption, consent and dissent. However, the emotional turn in

digital journalism is not complete, but a dynamic and hotly contested process, continually challenged by professional journalists. Scholars have discerned the possibility for embodied accounts of personal experience to cultivate cosmopolitan sensibilities. At the same time, an emotionalized public discourse is one where anger, hatred and intolerance might be given voice in ways that might challenge consensus and unity – for better or worse. Understanding how these changes shape our views of the world and what we know about it is an urgent task.

NOTE  1  This paragraph draws on material published in Wahl-Jorgensen (2015).

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PART II

News Practices in the Digital Era David Domingo

This part explores the diversity of actors engaging with news in the digital environment. Contributors provide a critical overview of the contemporary developments in journalism in such a way that shows the complexity of the research field. They propose areas that deserve further study and perspectives that may foster a better understanding of current trends. Each of the chapters in its own way challenges the assumption that specific types of news actor inevitably engage in specific news practices, and invites us to think outside the box of existing models of journalism. The first three chapters outline trends that are at the core of digital news practices: the dispersion and hybridization of journalistic activities, some very visible and challenging to professional media, others much more invisible but nonetheless important for understanding how news is produced, distributed, and used. Adrienne Russell (Chapter 10)

highlights the dispersion of journalistic practices amongst an increasingly diverse set of actors and technologies, symbolized by their ‘networked’ nature. She maps out the possibilities that the horizontal logic of the internet has opened for news production, distribution, and usage, and traces the initiatives – most of them not lead by professional journalists – that are challenging the hegemony of industrial journalism: from activist coverage of events to leaks of secret official information. James Hamilton (Chapter 11) addresses the hybridization of news production practices, content formats and journalistic identities. Hamilton makes a strong case for overcoming oppositional categorizations of journalistic practices like ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’. He proposes to approach an analysis of practices by acknowledging their contextual specificity, and by focusing on the constant borrowing of genres, technological tools, and marketing strategies.

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The contribution by Renee Barnes (Chapter 12) completes this overview of current trends by highlighting the invisibility of certain news practices, especially amongst news users that do not engage into active participation as content producers. She offers a sobering counterbalance to the evidences of dispersion and hybridity presented in the first two chapters: she reminds us that most citizens do not actively participate in news production or commenting. She advocates for considering that this so-called ‘silent majority’ also performs news practices that are worth researching. The second section of this part on practices problematizes the evolution of professional journalism and its boundaries. Steve Paulussen (Chapter 13) places the newsroom center stage, before the other chapters start to move beyond its porous walls. The focus in this case is on how newsrooms deal with technological innovations, and Paulussen shows how studies to date point to a story of fierce resistance to change. He asks for this to be kept in mind when analyzing emerging practices: institutionalized configurations have a great deal of inertia. Henrik Örnebring and Raul Ferrer Conill (Chapter 14) show that media companies seem more eager to embrace technological and organizational change if it makes it easier for them to cope with the economic and productive uncertainties they face. The chapter presents the benefits and risks of the decentralization of professional newswork through a multilayered network of freelances, news agencies, and specialized news companies. The tendency towards outsourcing newswork that they address highlights the diminishing weight of the newsroom as an object of study. The phenomenon of outsourcing is contributing to the consolidation of a pool of semiprofessionals around media companies and citizen-journalism platforms, and these active contributors usually linger in a limbo characterized by little or no pay despite their replication of many professional news practices. Their motivations and contradictory identities

are explored by Jérémie Nicey (Chapter 15). He proposes to call them ‘informants’ rather than ‘amateurs’, as these semi-professionals aim to become regular contributors of newsworthy material. The next section of this part is constituted by chapters that propose to revisit, and rethink, the role of three key actors in the news sphere: sources, activists, and witnesses. This part makes clear that the hybridity of their practices does not necessarily entail that these actors substitute, ignore, or compete with professional journalists. The chapters offer a nuanced portrayal of the complexity of the relationship between these actors and the news. First, Matt Carlson (Chapter 16) demonstrates how, in the era of social media, the institutions and organizations that were regular sources for journalists are now aware that they can construct and distribute their own messages directly to their publics. This reduced dependence on news for publicity undermines the power journalists have over theirs sources. Paradoxically, sources they still seek interactions with news media and perceive them as worthwhile. The chapter clearly shows, therefore, how practices and roles multiply and vary in different circumstances. Yana Breindl (Chapter 17) shows a similar trend amongst activists, who develop a symbiotic relationship with journalists in spite of their mutual distrust. Reporters continue to need their expertise, while activists need the legitimacy of news coverage to reach a wider public than those unconditional supporters who are already engaged with the cause. The multilateral communication dynamics between activists, politicians, citizens, and journalists emerging from this situation underline the complexity of news production when we look beyond the newsroom. Similar tensions are explored in the next chapter, by Stuart Allan (Chapter 18). He highlights how photojournalism is evolving in a digital age, paying particular attention to the role of ordinary citizens in the visual

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reportage of breaking news during crisis situations. For varied reasons, these so-called ‘accidental photojournalists’ feel compelled to bear witness. Allan explores how and why professional newsrooms relate to these accounts produced by citizens, pondering the ethical and ontological implications that the dispersion of news producers has for journalism. As an epilogue to the inventory of the diversity of news practices, the contribution by Andy Williams and Dave Harte (Chapter 19) highlights the connectedness of the different actors. It focuses on the specific media environment of hyperlocal news. The authors portray the heterogeneous profiles and motivations of the creators, as well as the often bittersweet evolution of these journalistic

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projects. This chapter shows how important it is to analyse the relationship between the emerging and developing practices of community news production and their immediate social and economic contexts. Overall, this section provides an overview of the many tensions that cut across actors involved in the production, distribution, and usage of news. The dispersion of actors and the hybridization of practices blur the identities of the different actors involved, and the definitions of journalism and news are increasingly contested in the digital era. Chapters in this part identify the most important tensions in contemporary journalism: between participation and control, between innovation and stability, and between decentralization and legitimacy.

10 Networked Journalism Adrienne Russell

INTRODUCTION On New Year’s Day, 1994, the day the North America Free Trade Agreement took effect, a band of roughly 3000 Mexican guerillas, members of the indigenous highland communities of Chiapas, descended from the mountains to meet government forces over a list of grievances tied mainly to land-rights theft and forced impoverishment that were outlined in a printed declaration of war. The Mexican military dispatched reinforcements and pushed the guerillas back into the rainforest. The declaration and subsequent Zapatista communiqués received scant coverage in the national and international press. Stories that did appear were too brief to give the public an understanding of the rebel movement’s motives and goals (Cleaver, 1998). But nascent online activist networks lit up in support: Zapatista supporters began to post material on digital topic-sites called Usenet groups and other similar internetbased ‘town squares’ whose members were

concerned with events unfolding in Mexico. The information and discussions posted on the Zapatista networks allowed easy low-cost exchange among supporters and became prototypes to new genres of news: mainstream coverage was frequently posted with corrections and rebuttals and critiques in the style of today’s news blogs. Posts containing alarming or controversial information – such as reports on the numbers of victims of violence or first-hand accounts of military raids – were scrutinized and edited extensively. Listserv news reports rarely included the perspective of government or other official sources, except to correct them. They emphasized rather what activists and non-­ governmental organization members had witnessed. They featured expressions of solidarity and mobilization in support of the movement. As months passed, the Zapatista movement inched closer to the center of global politics, not by winning sympathetic coverage from international media, but rather by building new ways of communicating and

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knitting together alliances on a global scale (Russell, 2001). Seventeen years after the Zapatistas in Chiapas faxed dispatches to emailers with dial-up modems, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians weathered water cannons and tear gas for a month, broadcasting their clash with authorities in real time, their smart phones plugged wirelessly but directly into global networks of information surfers and sharers. International news organizations integrated eyewitness reports and on the ground footage directly into the news cycles, shaping the narrative in ways that saw traditional sources of authority vying with everyday people to control the narrative and shape the story of the Egyptian chapter at the heart of what became known as the Arab Spring (Allagui and Kuebler, 2011; Lotan et  al., 2011; Hermida et al., 2014). These online news stories mark different evolutionary periods in the era of networked journalism. Indeed, the term networked journalism only first appeared in the mid-2000s. It referred to the new diversity of collaborations taking shape between newsroom employees and everyone else, all digitally connected (Beckett, 2008; Jarvis, 2006; Rosen, 2009). Professionals were suddenly teaming up with amateurs, as the thinking went at the time, and advocates of openness and interactivity devised ways to leverage the affordances of digital tools and networks to move journalism away from more hierarchical closed structures of traditional news outlets. Subsequent scholarship attempted to expand the meaning of the term, focusing on the new roles played by networked publics as creators, investigators, reactors, remixers and (re)distributors of news. Early discussions on existing news institutions and on journalism happening outside traditional newsrooms explored the ways journalism practices and products were changing. Indeed, the term network publics is meant to both signal and signify the shift from passive audience or consumer to more actively engaged members of the public and the new environment where all variety of

media – amateur and professional, corporate and independent – intersect in new ways (Ito, 2008). Research on networked journalism and its publics is characterized, on one hand, by optimistic descriptions of expanded reporting and sourcing and empirical studies that document increased quality and engagement (Hermida et  al., 2014, Papacharissi, 2014, Russell, 2013) and, on the other hand, by laments over failing business models and a perceived decline in professional norms and practices and by studies that show mainstream media’s reluctance to adopt innovations and the lack of engagement of the public with new news form. (Fenton, 2010; see also Chapter 13). As this book goes to press, the tensions between advocates and skeptics of networked journalism persist, as the pace of change in the field of journalism shows little sign of slowing. Research that considers the expanded range of journalism-related actors and practices demands a way to conceptualize contemporary news as a space. Before the digital era, Pierre Bourdieu argued that media researchers ought to consider the universe of journalists and media organizations acting and reacting in relation to one another as a field, arguing that the ‘institution’ of journalism is shaped most significantly by its participants’ responses to varying degrees of political and economic pressure and by the ways that journalists position themselves within a tradition of their craft and among their peers (Bourdieu, 2005, see also Chapter 26). This approach is especially relevant today, as the practices and norms that guide reporters and editors and that shape content are influenced by increasing numbers and varieties of people. Thus the chapter considers networked journalism as a field where various participants act and react to one another. So what is the emerging shape of networked journalism? To begin to answer this, it is worth looking to one of the biggest ongoing stories of the second decade of the twenty-first century: the effort to report on the workings of the US National Security

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Administration, as it has been revealed by the reports of whistleblowers and leaked documents (Chadwick and Collister, 2014; Greenwald, 2014). It is a tale of an unconstitutional global snooping operation from which no one is safe, including US allies and citizens. The most powerful reporting has come from a trove of documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. The documents were reported on by independent and mainstream journalists, whose stories were spread through news and social media outlets. The documents were housed on servers in various international locations and protected through encryption tools created by hackers and digital freedom advocates and activists. The stories written from the documents became the inspiration for the creation of a media company funded by eBay founder and billionaire Pierre Omidyar to provide a safer and more effective platform to report on leaks of this sort. The story of the NSA global dragnet snooping is an example of accountability journalism generated not from traditional news outlets but by activists and journalism innovators and then sustained in a hybrid environment where independent and traditional journalism, media start-ups, public opinion and networked activism cooperate and compete to disseminate and shape the story, to convey its meaning and to spur reaction to it. The unfolding NSA news story is a case in which traditional centralized government power intent on stopping the flow of the leaks has run up against the growing power of the distributed digital investigative and information network. And it is an example of two of networked journalism’s characteristic dimensions: First, it relies upon accountability generated not in relation to news outlets but by activists and journalism innovators; second, it occurs in a hybrid environment, where there are contests over the meaning of the story. These dimensions question two longstanding central tenants of journalism – its role as a watchdog of power and as a facilitator of public discourse. While some of the normative

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values of journalism are being challenged in the digital context, debates around journalism often still concern its role as a watchdog to power and the heightened anxiety among professionals and non-­ professionals alike about the ability of journalists to hold government institutions and businesses accountable. The focus among journalism critics on watchdogging has been carried over from the mass-media era. But professional journalists are not exclusively qualified to act as watchdogs, as the Snowden revelations have demonstrated. Indeed, many have pointed to the close alignment of news institutions with government and corporate interests to argue that newspaper and television outlets – especially in an era where their bottom lines bleed red – may not be relied upon to do the work. Independent journalist Glen Greenwald, for example, describes it: ‘Above all else, [journalists] invariably give great weight to official claims, even when those claims are patently false or deceitful’. (Greenwald, 2014). Also widely documented is legacy news media’s frequent failure to hold corporations and corporate interests accountable (Bagdikian, 2004). In his book on the global financial crisis of 2008, The Watchdog that Didn’t Bark, Dean Starkman, an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, documents the way business reporting beginning in the 1990s gave itself over almost entirely to a process he called ‘CNBCization’, where unconscionably risky and corrupt financial sector practices went unreported and executive profiles and investor tips ruled the day. In response to such failures on the part of the mainstream press, today, increasing shares of accountability journalism are being taken up beyond the world of traditional journalism (Greenwald, 2014). And beyond watchdogging, John Dewey (1927) famously argued that the main role of journalism ought to be to foster informed conversation among the public, a role that has been severely eclipsed in the era of professionalized commercial media. Networked journalists – by which I mean an expanded

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field that includes so-called citizen reporters and editors as well as data managers, website builders, audience-community managers, social-networking staffers, and more – are breathing new life into this Dewey ideal by working to facilitate dialogue or ‘interactivity’ (Russell, 2011), while networked publics contribute to professionally edited publications by acting as idea generators, witnesses, and interpreters of professional journalism (Hermida et al., 2011). This chapter reviews recent scholarship that has met the challenge of analysing emergent news practices by going beyond the producers, audiences, institutions, and texts of legacy news that are typically the object of Journalism Studies, to focus instead on an expanded field of news-related information, tools, practices and cultures. The sections that follow provide an overview of recent literature organized around four overlapping themes that shed light on key elements of networked journalism: changing relations between journalists and publics; the tension between professional control and open participation; data driven practices; and the networked public sphere (Benkler, 2006). The chapter then concludes with a brief discussion of new challenges to the study of journalism and how scholarship reviewed here can help guide us in rethinking our theoretical and methodological approaches.

CHANGING RELATIONS BETWEEN JOURNALISTS AND PUBLICS Perhaps the most obvious way journalism is changing in the digitally-networked era is that it includes an increasing number of opportunities for the public to participate in news-making processes. Technological innovation is facilitating and fostering information sharing and conversational exchanges online between journalists and members of the public, expanding the field of journalism beyond the newsroom and traditional

reporting (Hermida et al., 2014; Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012; Russell, 2013), even as some journalists are reluctant to embrace these new tools and relations and as most citizens do not participate in these innovative news practices (Heinonen, 2011; Lasorsa et  al., 2012). Just before the rise of digital tools and networks in the early 1990s, a small group of US journalists and scholars sought to reform the relationship between the public and the press by treating readers and community members as participants in the newsmaking process. The movement came to be known as public or civic journalism. It argued that instead of being detached observers, journalists should act as advocates of public life by using the newspaper as a forum for community issues, by talking with people in the community and by covering issues that concern them (Glasser, 1999). The idea of journalists advocating for anyone, however, raised alarms among traditionalists dedicated to the norms of objectivity and the neutrality they were meant to ensure. Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post wrote that ‘Too much of what’s called public journalism appears to be what our promotion department does’ (Case, 1994: 14). Then, as today, public involvement in news takes a different shape depending on whether democracy or financial profit is prioritized. Social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo in China, provide new ways for people to observe, filter, disseminate, and analyze news, while at the same time making immense profit and serving as effective channels of distributing news content. Alfred Hermida calls the information genre that results ambient journalism (2010), a sort of social awareness system that ‘delivers a fragmented mix of information, enlightenment, entertainment, and engagement from a range of sources’ (Hermida et  al., 2014: 482). Axel Bruns sees networked audiences tweeting and Facebooking the news engaging in a new kind of productive information use. He calls it produsage – or user-led content creation – that vastly grows the number

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of actors involved in constructing the news (Bruns, 2008; Hermida et al., 2014). Coverage of the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, for example, was significantly shaped by tweets from activists on the street at the sites of conflict, making their way into mainstream news coverage (Lotan et  al., 2011). Activists and journalists created news together by combining subjective experience, opinion, and emotional observations (Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012). This mingling of platforms, genres and sources took place not only through the work of non-journalists, but also in the curated feeds of media professionals who increasingly see social media as a beat of its own. A study by Hermida, Lewis and Zamith of NPR senior product manager for online communities Andy Carvin’s use of Twitter at the height of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprising found that reference to non-elite, non-­ American actors dominated his feed. The authors argued that the way professional journalists use social media platforms expands the range of people involved in shaping the news (Hermida et  al., 2014). This inclusiveness departs significantly from typical international news writing and broadcasting, which has relied heavily on national political elites (Kunelius and Eide, 2012a; Tow Center, 2014). Zizi Papacharissi sees produsers asserting themselves within stories, exercising power over how the stories are framed. ‘Ultimately telling a story represents an attempt to present one’s own perspective on a particular course of events, and to thus frame how things happened. It represents an act of agency’ (2014: 2). There are several ways networked publics step out of the role of journalist source or helper to directly shape news stories. So-called citizen journalism focuses on producing locally relevant content outside mainstream newsrooms in projects like Bondy Blog, which trains local youth to cover news in the suburbs ringing Paris, an area typically ignored by French mainstream news. The bloggers address what Bondy Blog Director

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Nordine Nabili calls ‘blind spots’ in coverage (Nabili, 2013). Citizen journalists aim to empower communities by transferring the power and responsibility of reporting away from mainstream journalists and institutions (Dickens et al., 2014). Stuart Allan (2013) prefers the term citizen witnessing to describe the role ordinary citizens play in news reporting (see Chapter 18). He challenges traditional distinctions between the ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’ journalist, arguing that in bearing witness to what they see, citizens engage in journalistic activity that has the potential to recharge journalism and demand greater transparency and accountability among powerful institutions (see also Chapter 15). Yet another model of grassroots news is generated by community reporters who fill the void left in the wake of folded local media outlets by creating their own news platforms and content (see Chapter 19). The stated aim of the projects is not only to inform but also to create a sense of community and to foster media literacy among participants. Community reporting sites link to others and create an inter-local network of news production and consumption (Dickens et al., 2014). These various genres of community-driven newsmakers share a commitment to a journalism that acts as a tool of empowerment. They take up many of the norms of professional journalism – commitment to fairness and accuracy and to serving the public interest – but they do not always position themselves as neutral in relation to the subjects they cover, as most professional outlets strive to do. This new way of approaching journalism is key to the changing the relationship between publics and journalism, as members of publics have changing expectations regarding who will bear witness and how authority will be wielded in relation to specific positions in society. A widely held misconception about the norms of professional journalism is that the quest for neutrality necessarily eliminates affect from news. Karen Wahl-Jorgensen, in

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her study of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles between 1995–2011 (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012), points out that along with the strategic ritual of objectivity (Tuchman, 1972) there is a strategic ritual of emotionality ‘an institutionalized and systematic practice of journalists infusing their reporting with emotion’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012), which includes outsourcing emotion by describing the emotions of others and depending on sources to discuss their emotions. Affect in news is not new but perhaps increasingly more central in the context of networked journalism because those sources who have typically expressed emotion – those to whom the work of affect has been outsourced – are closer to the center of newswork (Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012; see also Chapters 7 and 9). Today, coverage of any major news events is collaboratively constructed out of various forms of information, experience, opinion, and emotional response. There is evidence all around, as well, that the source of affect and emotion is not exclusively the work of the engaged public but also frequently mainstream journalists fed up with the constraints of neutrality. In a segment from Ferguson, Missouri, broadcasted on CNN and circulated widely on the web, for example, CNN reporter Jake Tapper directed his camera at the militarized police force lined up against citizens there protesting the police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. Tapper looks into the camera and displays utter disgust as he says, ‘This doesn’t make any sense’. Andrew Chadwick sees these blurred boundaries between information and affect, news and entertainment as part of a hybrid media environment marked by ‘subtle but important shifts in the balance of power [that] are shaping news production’ (Chadwick, 2013: 6). His research on the various forces at play in the field of political communication explores a news environment where digital media and traditional media practices, products, technologies mix. ‘[H]ybridity is creating emergent openness and fluidity, as grassroots activist groups and even lone

individuals now use newer media to make decisive interventions in the news-making process,’ he writes (2013: 208; see also Chapter 11). Journalists now depend more on international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to determine the news agenda and to deliver news content, partly because newsrooms lack resources and partly because activists and NGOs are becoming more media focused, producing effective messages and news streams of their own (Powers, 2014; see also Chapter 17). These increasingly mediasavvy organizations raise issues that would otherwise be ignored and, in the process, provide information, analysis, and sources that strengthen international news coverage (Powers, 2014; Sambrook, 2010). This, too, changes the relationship between journalists and publics, as publics with specialized knowledge become generators of news and analysis and shape the news agenda. Reliance on NGO-produced news and information contributes to a shift in international news, which has traditionally turned on the notion of foreign correspondence, where a reporter abroad explains distant events and cultures to his countrymen and women back home (Hamilton, 2011; Powers, 2015). But NGOs have a different mission and a different perspective; they are less tied to national points of view. The result is news writing or broadcasting with a more global outlook that aims more to document and highlight the interconnectedness of economic, political, social, and environmental realities in different parts of the world (Berglez, 2008). The idea that identifiable ‘others’ can be bounded by nation-states and translated for imaginary homogenous domestic audiences is less tenable today as national cultures become more cosmopolitan and national boundaries become more fluid (Heinrich, 2012). And while access to digital tools and networks are not shared equally in different parts of the world, stories linked to human rights, largescale protests, and geopolitics become not ‘solely domestic or foreign news’ (Berglez, 2008), but instead circulate within, and

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help foster, a broader, global public sphere (Volkmer, 2003) – a transnational space where public opinion is shaped not only by legacy systems of foreign correspondence but also by networks that exist alongside traditional mainstream news. In this hybrid environment, where journalism is ambient, real-time, always-on and engaged, new roles and methods of reporting are emerging that offer further opportunities to produce journalism that informs and engages.

TENSION BETWEEN PARTICIPATION AND CONTROL This expanded level of participation in journalism by publics, as well as the growing presence of developer and strong influence of new technological platforms, have raised questions about the parameters of the field and, more charged, about who is responsible for production, quality control and distribution of the work. These questions are not new. One strain of journalism research has long concerned itself with how journalism has become codified and legitimated (Schudson, 1978; Zelizer, 1992) – what Gieryn (1983) calls ‘boundary work’. Today boundary work in Journalism Studies is concerned with the way norms, values, practices are evolving in an era when some of the most important newswork is being done by amateurs or non-institutional journalists (Lewis, 2012). Institutional and technological forces, however, also still very much shape the field (see Chapter 13). The Knight Foundation, for example, pours millions of dollars each year into funding projects that broaden the boundaries from journalism to include unpaid contributors and tech developers (Lewis, 2012). Traditional newsrooms also are investing in developers even as they lay off reporters. Journalism is being reshaped by developers who create the platforms or ‘newsware’, which serve as the new-media-news

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architecture (Ananny, forthcoming). Today’s reporting is inseparable from technological infrastructures that define the conditions under which news is gathered, reported, and disseminated. Just as television once changed the way news stories were reported, so has the digital network with its bits and bytes, algorithms, interfaces, social-media practices and norms (Ananny, forthcoming). Indeed, social media has become a journalism beat – spaces where journalists expect news to happen (Archetti, 2013; Cozma and Chen, 2013; Hermida et al., 2014). But scholars are also sounding alarms as it becomes evident that architectures built to appear participatory provide the means by which control can be exerted and free labor exploited (van Dijck, 2012, see also Chapters 14 and 15). Nick Couldry cautions against ‘the myth of “us”’. The myth, he writes, ‘encourages us to believe that our gatherings on socialmedia platforms are a natural form of expressive collectivity, even though it is exactly that belief that is the basis of such platforms’ creation of economic value’ (2014: 2). In order to understand the complex workings of communication networks, he writes, we must acknowledge how net native institutions like Facebook and YouTube for example shape social and political action, how they shape not only how we communicate but also how we understand ourselves and one another (2014). Perhaps most influential in the networked communication environment and yet mostly invisible are the computational algorithms that select the information we are served up in our search engine lists, Facebook feeds and by Pandora’s non-human DJs. Like broadcasting and publishing, algorithms are a communication technology created in the interest of for-profit corporations. They shape worldviews, commercial habits, and relationships (Gillespie, 2014). Filters are not neutral and yet they operate without the knowledge or consent of the user. In assessing information, algorithms create knowledge logic, telling us what knowledge is and how we should identify what is most relevant to us. ‘That

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we are now turning to algorithms for what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the Word of God,’ writes Gillespie (2014: 168). In an essay on the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered after police shot and killed unarmed teen Michael Brown in August 2014, Zeynep Tufekci offers a compelling example of how algorithms shape discourse online (2014). She describes how on the night violence broke out in Ferguson, her Twitter feed was filled with news of events there, but not her Facebook feed, which is controlled with the filtering algorithm Edgerank. Tufekci (2014) wrote that her ‘friends’ on Facebook were mostly the same people as were her ‘followers’ on Twitter. Yet there was no mention of events in Ferguson on her Facebook feed until the next morning, when Edgerank ‘seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more’. She wondered what would have happened if there were no Twitter, which does not filter feeds, to spread the news that national journalists were being arrested, that police tricked out with military gear pointed assault rifles at protestors? Algorithms have consequences, she wrote: I’m not quite sure that without the neutral side of the Internet – the livestreams whose ‘packets’ were as fast as commercial, corporate and moneyed speech that travels on our networks, Twitter feeds which are not determined by an opaque corporate algorithms but my own choices – we’d be having this conversation [about Ferguson]. (Tufekci, 2014)

It is a question tied to a larger issue in the era of networked journalism about how best to protect the internet as a space where open participation flourishes. Internet freedom touches on three central issues: (1) protecting net neutrality, or disallowing third parties (like Facebook and their algorithms or telecommunication companies seeking increased profits) to meter or filter traffic (Wu, 2011); (2) protecting privacy, or the ability of journalists and their sources

to communicate away from the prying eyes of governments and corporations whose widespread collection of data is now common knowledge, and whose efforts to track protestors and anonymous sources and to stop stories from getting out is now infamous (Human Rights Watch Report/ACLU, 2014); and (3) establishing and maintaining a robust digital commons where sharing of content, code and data is the norm and laws that criminalize digital cultural practices like sharing and remixing are revised (Benkler, 2006). The last point is important particularly because governments around the world use copyright protection as an excuse to pass laws that abolish net neutrality and privacy (MacKinnon, 2012). Some of the most passionate advocates of internet freedom are journalists working in the service of public good who deal with material and sources that require protection, and with data that is in the public domain. On their side we also find the publics outside the journalism establishment working on small scale and community news, whose projects and artifacts of engagement (Clark, 2016) would fall off the grid without net neutrality. Their work most directly depends on it. Indeed these disparate actors in the journalism field have overlapping interests and goals. They are all at one level or another, and to varying degrees of success, attempting to hold the powers that be accountable, give the public the information they need, engage them in dialogue for the purpose of sorting out issues of common concern or increasing mutual understanding across various groups. And they are doing so by tapping into the new possibilities afforded by digital tools and networks. In the context of these common goals, what Lewis in 2012 called the ‘mismatched ethics and expectations’ between producers and users of news seems to be moving into a more likeminded set of principles. Lewis suggests along these lines that we may be on our way to a ‘revised logic for journalism: one that preserves certain ethical tensions and boundaries that lend legitimacy, abandons

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jurisdictional claims that have lost their currency in the new environment, and embraces fresh values, such as open participation, that are more compatible with the logic of digital media and culture’ (2012: 852). In other words the new logic for journalism may entail maintenance of standards such as truth and accuracy, an abandonment of the idea that professional journalists are exclusively qualified to discover the truth, and new values such as collaboration, open participation and distributed control, which require a free and open internet.

DATA-DRIVEN PRACTICE The prevalence of everyday voices, and the more active role of publics in shaping news come alongside extraordinary advancements in data-driven journalism. Richard Sambrook sees data journalism as an important ingredient in the networked-journalism mix. ‘In a world awash with opinion, there is an emerging premium placed on evidence-led journalism and the expertise required to properly gather, analyse, and present data that informs rather than simply offers a personal view’ (2014). As major news organizations and foundations work to advance the ways data can be used to enhance journalism, enormous innovations in data collection, verification, protection and sharing are enabling journalists around the world to build stories from massive amounts of information uploaded by governments and businesses and from the web of digital traces spun by the hundreds of millions of people plugged into the network every day. In October 2008, the New York Times released its first Application Programming Interface (API), a tool that allows developers to access databases and make them available and relatively easy to read. The Times’ campaign-finance API allowed newsroom ­ users to retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on US Federal Election

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Commission filings. Developer Derek Willis said tensions cropped up around the project. ‘There’s a natural tendency to keep information and data to ourselves, because of competition and the desire to keep it close until we’re ready. Some would say this is because we don’t want to surrender authority’ (Russell, 2011). Years later, as networked journalism culture speeds ahead in many respects, the tension around data sharing still exists, but news outlets and individual journalists have pushed through their reluctance, and sharing information from which to report stories is becoming an essential element of news practice. Journalists at ease with computer programming, are creating their own apps and interactive features to encourage people to explore and make better use of data. Indeed, according to Alexander Howard of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, ‘the open question in 2014 is not whether data, computers, and algorithms can be used by journalists in the public interest, but rather how, when, where, why, and by whom. Today, journalists can treat all of that data as a source, interrogating it for answers as they would a human’ (2014, see also Chapter 23). The most innovative journalists today are developing and using tools that help collect, organize, verify, analyze, visualize, and publish data. ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database, for example, compiled records on approximately US$2.5 billion in payments to doctors, other medical providers and health care institutions disclosed by 15 pharmaceutical companies since 2009. The database is designed to allow patients to run searches on their own physicians or medical centers. The database constituted the first comprehensive look at the kind of money spent by drug companies to enlist doctors as a sales force. It eventually led to the passage in 2010 of The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which requires drugmakers and medicaltechnology manufacturers to report financial relationships with physicians and teaching hospitals. The War Logs spurred another rash of high-profile data journalism. The logs

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were uploaded to WikiLeaks and contained records from the war in Afghanistan. They revealed unreported civilian casualties caused by Allied Forces, soaring Taliban attacks and NATO communiqués that voiced fear that Pakistan and Iran were fuelling the Afghan insurgency. Information in the War Logs was reported by the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and other outlets. More recent work by mainstream and independent international outlets parsed National Security Agency documents leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden (see Chapter 17). Data journalism is about doing more accountability journalism but it is also about creating a new public-interest information infrastructure where readers are asked to wade into public domain datasets and spur coverage. Newsroom developers, for example, have created open-source survey tools to query government officials about their responses to breaking news or ongoing investigations; election databases from which users can build interactive charts and graphs; and tools to create easy-to-use interfaces for census or climate change data. Howard (2014) explains: Such projects are informed by the principles that built the Internet and World Wide Web, and strengthened by peer networks across newsrooms and between data journalists and civil society. The data and code in these efforts – small pieces, loosely joined by the social Web and application programming interfaces – will extend the plumbing of digital democracy in the 21st century.

The new centrality of data to the work of journalism is opening up the field to people with new skills and shifting practices. Datajournalism ventures like the Guardian’s Datablog, Washington Post outgrowth Vox, and the New York Times’ Upshot are pushing networked data-journalism from the margins to the center of newswork. In the process, altered values are rising. James Ball, special projects editor for Guardian US, says that transparency ought to be the standard in all newswork. In data journalism, he says, that

means showing your work and sharing your data (2014). The ethos of providing the public and the wider journalism community with access to the raw data behind a story is shared by leading journalists around the world and it brings collaboration and transparency to a new level (Howard, 2014). Some outlets, like Nate Silver’s FiveThirty Eight, have decided not to release raw data and have drawn heat for the decision. ‘That’s a shame, and a missed opportunity,’ says Ball. ‘Sharing this stuff is good, accountable journalism, and gives the world a chance to find more stories or angles that a writer might have missed.’ Many journalism projects pair journalists around the world with tech developers. Internews, which has been around since the early 1980s, is an international nonprofit news organization that operates in roughly 40 countries to promote local media worldwide. Tech training and data journalism have become cornerstones of Internews collaboration. In ‘A Collaboration without Borders’, an Internews project, investigative outlets banded together to investigate organized crime across Latin America. The project trained journalists from outlets in Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico in investigative- and collaborative-reporting techniques, including how to obtain government records on crime and political contributions, crowd-source information from communities most affected by crime rings, work with local developers to create a useable databases, and share reporting. The project offered some measure of protection through collaboration and it produced groundbreaking work (Constantaras, 2014).

NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE So what happens to public discourse in the networked era? Much of the scholarship discussed in this chapter points to the existence of an expanded, more diverse, less

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nation-centric field of journalism, in which new actors and practices shape news content. According to Yochai Benkler, the networked public sphere is an ecosystem of communication channels that together create a space where citizen voices and minority points of view are made visible, and where stories and sources gain prominence based on relevance and credibility rather than their connection to the powers that be (Benkler, 2006). It is ‘less dominated by large media entities, less subject to government control, and more open to wider participation’ than the mass mediated public sphere, which replaced the salon and town-hall discussions that first fuelled Jürgen Habermas’s notion of an ideal public sphere (Benkler et  al., 2013; Habermas, 1989). Studies of the news coverage of climate change and internet regulation help identify the possible shape and nature of the networked public sphere. A study by MediaClimate, an international team of researchers focused on coverage of climate change in 18 countries, found evidence of an engaged transnational public working in parallel to professional news organisations that reproduces traditional power dynamics (Kunelius and Eide, 2012a; Kunelius and Eide, 2012b). Climate change is an issue that re-situates social actors, in part by engaging various groups and individuals directly with the production of news and information about the issue. Reviewing coverage of annual UN climate summits since 2007, the study demonstrates a shift in how activists are being covered but also how activists are moving into the coverage as sources, contributors, and producers. There is ‘activism-friendly’ journalism being produced in countries such as Finland, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and USA, according to the study, suggesting that climate change – and climate change denialism or inaction on the part of authorities – enabled journalists to abandon or renegotiate some of their usual routines. Civil-society actors not only got a lot of overall attention, but also received sympathetic coverage, in part by creating

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their own media that was in turn amplified though traditional media channels. ‘For journalism, our findings offer both signs of hope and sobering reminders of realism,’ write MediaClimate researchers Risto Kunelius and Elizabeth Eide. ‘New kinds of communication networks and alliances of actors can indeed help new kinds of journalism to emerge and empower people transnationally. But the structural links of journalism and dependency on powerful actors and power hierarchies shines through as well.’ (2012a, see also Chapter 16 and Chapter 17). In a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation (SOPA/PIPA) in the USA designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations, a team of Berkman Center researchers compiled, mapped, and analyzed a set of nearly ten thousand online stories on the proposed legislation from September 2010 through the end of January 2012 (Benkler et al., 2013). The study found that the coverage came from a diverse mix of sources that included traditional journalists as well as small-scale commercial tech media, non-media NGOs, and individual writers. The material moved into the larger discourse on the bills through more established media. The networked reporting and analysis raised awareness, shifted opinion, and ultimately defeated the bills. ‘The data suggest that, at least in this case, the networked public sphere enabled a dynamic public discourse that involved both individual and organizational participants and offered substantive discussion of complex issues contributing to affirmative political action.’ In other words, the case of SOPA/PIPA is evidence that the networked public sphere is not dominated by commercial media, powerful government and corporate actors. The vibrancy of the networked public sphere, however, clearly depends on context. Issues with already-mobilized publics do better at fostering dynamic coverage and discussion untethered to power elites, as do stories unfolding in places with high internet penetration.

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THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM STUDIES The field we are studying is subject to profound changes and innovations, even if some traditional newsrooms resist with the inertia of institutionalized practices. And journalism research, like journalism, is going through a transformation. Journalism’s boundaries today are so porous that we can no longer expect to understand news by focusing exclusively on isolated elements of journalism: audiences, content, producers, organizations, technologies and so on. As this chapter highlights, the literature aimed at understanding networked journalism includes studies that focus on the practice – how journalists go about their work – in order to capture what is happening both within and outside traditional newsrooms (Boczkowski, 2004; Chadwick, 2011; Clark, 2016; Domingo and Paterson, 2011; Lewis et  al., 2013; Papacharissi, 2014). Others are exploring the algorithms and code that redefine the fastmoving communication environment that journalists are working in, and they highlight the values embedded in the technology that shape news content (Gillespie, 2014; Ananny, forthcoming). Still others map the flow of journalism content and analyze related public discourse, mapping connections among information hubs that set news agendas for national and international networks (Benkler et  al., 2013; Bennett and Segerberg, 2014; Kunelius and Eide, 2012a). It can be difficult to see the network, however, in even semi-comprehensive widescreen. The context of different press systems and geopolitical realities, for example, still very much shapes news environments. Rodney Benson’s (2014) analysis of immigration coverage in France and the USA uses field theory to understand changes taking place (see also Chapter 26). He concludes that globalization and the networked environment fail to iron out differences in the way journalism is being produced across borders and in the kind of content being delivered.

He looks instead to point out strengths and limitations of the varied environments. His and other transnational comparative studies remind us that digital culture generally and the wider field of journalism is not shared equally in different parts of the world (Kleis and Schrøder, 2014). Finally, the transformations taking place today have raised existential and ethical questions for the field. If journalism is being remade how can we create a version of journalism that supports the kind of world we want to live in (Silverstone, 2006)? How might we create a media environment that is hospitable, that promotes justice and challenges injustice, and narrows inequity (Couldry, 2012)? How can we facilitate more robust public engagement (Bennett and Segerberg, 2014; Clark, 2016; Lewis et  al., 2013; Papacharissi, 2014)? These questions gain urgency when set against scholarship on the threats to access, privacy and freedom of expression that come from the highest levels of corporate and government power. In order to continue to answer these pressing questions, we need to train our focus on what networked publics and journalists can and are doing with media rather than what journalism does to the public.

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Archetti, C. (2013) ‘Journalism in the Age of Globalization: The Evolving Practices of Foreign Correspondents in London’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 14(3): 419–36. Bagdikian, B.H. (2004) The New Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ball. J. (2014) ‘The Upshot, Vox and FiveThirtyEight: Data Journalism’s Golden Age, or TMI?’, Guardian Datablog, April 22. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/apr/22/upshot-voxfivethirtyeight-data-journalism-golden-age [accessed August 30 2014]. Beckett, C. (2008) ‘Networked Journalism’, Guardian, May 3. Available from: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/ may/03/networkedjournalism [accessed June 1 2008] Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press. Benkler, Y., Roberts, H., Faris, R. Solow-­ Niederman, A., and Etling, B. (2013) Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate. Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Publication series. Available at: http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2013/ social_mobilization_and_the_networked_ public_sphere [accessed 10 August 2013] Benson, R. (2014) Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berglez, P. (2008) ‘What is global journalism?’ Journalism Studies, 9(6): 845–58. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2004) ‘The processes of adopting multimedia and interactivity in three online newsrooms’, Journal of Communication, 54(2): 197–213. Bourdieu, P. (2005) ‘The Political Field, the Social Science Field and the Journalistic Field’ (R. Nice, Trans.). In: R. Benson and E. Neveu (eds), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. pp. 29–47. Bruns, A. (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Case, T. (1994) ‘Public Journalism Denounced’, Editor and Publisher, November 12: 14–15. Chadwick, A. (2011) ‘The political information cycle in a hybrid news system: The British

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prime minister and the “Bullygate” affair’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(1): 3–29. Chadwick, A. (2013) The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chadwick, A. and Collister S. (2014) ‘­Boundary-Drawing Power and the Renewal of Professional News Organizations: The Case of The Guardian and the Edward Snowden NSA Leak’, International Journal of Communication, 8: 2420–41. Clark, L.S. (2016) Participants on the margins: #BlackLivesMatter and the role that shared artifacts of engagement played among minoritized political newcomers on Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. Special issue on New Constructions of Public Space, Jose Van Dijck and Thomas Poell (eds.), International Journal of Communication, 10: 235–353. Cleaver, H. (1998) ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’, in J. Holloway and E. Pelaez (eds) Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution. Chicago: Pluto Publishing. Constantaras, E. (2014) unpublished interview with author. Couldry, N. (2012) Media, Society World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. London: Polity. Couldry, N. (2014) ‘The myth of “us”: digital networks, political change and the production of collectivity’, Information, Communication & Society, 18 (6): 608–626. Cozma, R. and Chen K. (2013) ‘What’s in a tweet? Foreign correspondents’ use of social media’, Journalism Practice, 7(1): 33–46. Dewey, J. (1927) The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt. p. 142. Dickens, L., Couldry, N., and Fotopoulou, A. (2014) ‘News in the community?’, Journalism Studies, doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2014. 890339 Domingo, D. and Paterson, C. (eds) (2011) Making Online News — Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism. New York: Peter Lang. Fenton, N. (ed.) (2010) New Media, Old News. London: Sage. Gieryn, T.F. (1983) ‘Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: strains and interests in professional

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ideologies of scientists’, American Sociological Review, 48(6): 781–95. Gillespie, T. (2014) ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’, in T. Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (Inside Technology series). Cambridge: MIT Press. pp: 167–94. Glasser, T. (ed.) (1999) The Idea of Public Journalism. New York: Guilford Press. Greenwald G. (2014) No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. New York: Metropolitan Books (loc, 968). Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hamilton, J.M. and Lawrence, R.G. (2010) ‘Foreign correspondence’. Journalism Studies, 11(5): 630–33. Heinonen, A. (2011). ‘The Journalist’s Relationship with Users: New Dimensions to Conventional Roles’, in Jane B. Singer, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Alfred Hermida, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Wiley-Blackwell. Heinrich, A. (2012) ‘Foreign reporting in the sphere of network journalism’. Journalism Practice, 6(5–6): 766–75. Hermida, A. (2010) ‘Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism’. Journalism Practice, 4(3): 297–308. Hermida, A., Lewis, S.C., and Zamith, R. (2014). ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3): 479–499. Howard, A.B. (2014) The Art and Science of Data Driven Journalism. May 21. Available from: http://towcenter.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/05/Tow-Center-Data-DrivenJournalism.pdf [accessed May 21 2014] Human Rights Watch/ACLU joint report (2014) With Liberty to Monitor All Available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/07/28/ liberty-monitor-all [accessed October 1 2014] Ito, M. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in K. Varnelis (ed.) Networked Publics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Jarvis, J. (2006) ‘Networked Journalism’. Buzz Machine, July 5. Available from: http://www. buzzmachine.com/2006/07/05/networkedjournalism/ [accessed December 12 2006] Kunelius, R. and Eide, E. (2012a). ‘Moment of hope, mode of realism: On the dynamics of a transnational journalistic field during UN climate change summits’. International Journal of Communication, 6: 266–85. Kunelius R. and Elisabeth Eide, E. (eds). (2012b) Media Meets Climate. Göteborg: Nordicom. Lasorsa, D. L., Lewis, S. C., and Holton, A. E. (2012) ‘Normalizing Twitter: Journalism practice in an emerging communication space’. Journalism Studies, 13(1): 19–36. Lewis, S.C. (2012) ‘The tension between professional control and open participation: Journalism and its boundaries’. Information, Communication and Society, 15(6): 836–66. Lewis, Seth C., Holton, Avery E., and Coddington, Mark (2013). ‘Reciprocal journalism: A concept of mutual exchange between journalists and audiences’, Journalism Practice, 8(2): 229–241. Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I., and boyd, d. (2011). ‘The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’. International Journal of Communication, 5: 1375–1405. MacKinnon, R. (2012) Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom. New York: Basic Books. Nabili, N. (2013) Unpublished interview with author. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis and Schroder, Kim Christian, (2014) ‘The relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news’, Digital Journalism, 2(4): 472–89. Papacharissi, Z. (2014) ‘Toward New Journalism(s): Affective news, hybridity, and liminal spaces’, Journalism Studies, 16(1): 27–40. Papacharissi, Z. and Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication, 62(2): 266–82. Powers, M. (2014) ‘The structural organization of NGO publicity: Explaining divergent publicity strategies at humanitarian and human

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rights organizations’. International Journal of Communication, 8: 90–107. Powers, M. (2015) ‘The new boots on the ground: NGOs in the changing landscape of international news’. Journalism, 1–17. doi: 10.1177/1464884914568077. Rosen, J. (2009) ‘Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press’. Press Think, 12 January. Available from: http://journalism.nyu. edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2009/ 01/12/atomization_p.html [accessed August 10 2010] Russell, A. (2001) ‘Chiapas and the New News: Internet and Newspaper Coverage of a Broken Cease-Fire’, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, 2(2): 197–220. Russell, A. (2011) Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition. London: Polity. Russell, A. (2013). ‘Innovation in hybrid spaces:  2011 UN Climate Summit and the changing journalism field’. Journalism, 14(7): 904–20. Sambrook, R. (2010). Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant? The Changing Face of International News. Oxford: Reuters Institute. Sambrook, R. (2014). ‘Journalists Can Learn Lessons From Coders in Developing the Creative Future’, Guardian, 27 April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/ apr/27/journalists-coders-creative-future [accessed August 10 2014].

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Schudson, M. (1978) Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books. Silverstone, R. (2006) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. London: Polity. Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2014) Amateur Footage: A Global Study of User Generated Content in TV and Online News. Report available at http://usergeneratednews. towcenter.org/ January 2015. Tuchman, G. (1972) ‘Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’snotions of objectivity’, American Journal of Sociology, 77(4): 660–79. Tufekci, Z. (2014) ‘What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering’, The Message, August 14. Available at: https://medium.com/message/fergusonis-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0 [accessed August 14 2014] van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Volkmer, I. (2003). The global network society and the global public sphere. Development, 46(1): 9–16. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2012) ‘The strategic ritual of emotionality: A case study of Pulitzer Prizewinning articles’, Journalism, 14 (1): 129–145. Wu, T. (2011) The Master Switch. New York: Vintage. Zelizer, B. (1993) Covering the Body. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

11 Hybrid News Practices J a m e s F. H a m i l t o n

Despite claims otherwise, news practices have always been hybrid. But, with the recent incorporation of digital technologies and attendant changes, by 2008 it seemed only a matter of time for this hybridity to go all the way. I suggested only partly tongue-in-cheek the possibility of ‘a Protest Channel comprised of on-the-street video footage shot by global-justice activists with running commentary, interviews and analysis, sandwiched as it would likely be between a channel devoted to home improvement and one to golf’ (Hamilton, 2008: 2). Since then, however, a good portion of this, what seemed at the time, farcical scenario has come to pass in the form of Vice News. Although lacking the running commentary and analysis, and hosted on the internet instead of on cable television, a signature component of this commercial news organization consists of hours’ long unedited video – what it calls ‘raw coverage’ – of its reporters in the midst of civil disturbances and protest such as the autumn 2014 Hong Kong Occupy protest,

and in August 2014, civil disobedience, protest and confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting death of AfricanAmerican Michael Brown by a white police officer. While in Ferguson, three Vice News reporters ‘captured [days’ worth of footage of] tear gas canisters being lobbed into crowds of protesters, [and] filmed conversations with on-duty officers and local residents’ (Advertising Age, 2014). Instead of selling the coverage to cabletelevision systems or selling advertising time (although its YouTube rendition did wrap it in YouTube-selected advertising), Vice News stumbled on possible commercial success due to its Ferguson livestreams securing a surprisingly steady viewership. As reported in an advertising trade magazine, rather than ‘turning viewers off, people appear to be tuning in for increasingly longer durations: Thursday night’s livestream averaged four and a half minutes of watch time per view; that figure hit fifteen and a half minutes for Saturday night’s second installment’

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(Advertising Age, 2014). While the commercial value from aggregating audiences through livestreamed protests is still uncertain, it contributes to boosting the brand value of Vice News as a reputable news outlet, thus building upon the Emmy Award it won earlier in 2014 for its HBO-hosted cable-television documentary series (Advertising Age, 2014; Vice Staff, 2014). The case of Vice News seeming to straddle mainstream and alternative journalism suggests one of a number of possible futures of journalism in an increasingly digital media ecology. As will be discussed, it is only one of many cases of the continued hybridization of news. This case helps establish key premises for the argument of this chapter. First, ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ are treated too often in discussions of digital journalism as separate spheres, which belies their hybridization in practice. Second, and following from the too-often uncritical assumption of separate spheres, comparatively less has been written about the insufficiency of positing separate spheres, despite the empirical necessity of doing so. Third, the resulting task which this chapter addresses is to critique separate spheres and to retheorize hybrid news practices, in which features heretofore allocated into ‘mainstream’ or ‘alternative’ sphere become mixed and co-present.

AGAINST OPPOSITIONS Scholarship in alternative media has contributed great understanding to Journalism Studies and to media studies generally by drawing attention to the determinations exerted by media organization and practice within particular historical conditions. By drawing needed attention to media and communication produced by social movements, it has forever rendered corporatized, commercial or statist media work and organization as no longer natural, singular or commonsense (Hájek and Carpentier, 2015).

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Early scholarship in alternative media posits key differences between the alternative and the mainstream such as intention (challenging dominance vs. supporting it), organization (horizontal and egalitarian vs. vertical and hierarchical), and form (commentary, personal story and imaginative art as routes to authoritative claims to reality vs. solely ‘objective’ news reporting) (Armstrong, 1981; Downing, 1984; Hamilton, 2000; Atton, 2002). However, by staking itself out as a distinct field of research, earlier alternative-media scholarship had to by logical necessity distinguish itself from its ostensible opposite the ‘mainstream’ in order to validate itself as an identifiable phenomenon and topic area. Retrospectively speaking, this separation has come at a cost of a narrowing of explanatory reach and of political value. Despite the tenacity of the distinction, its insufficiency has only become clearer in more recent scholarly work (Downing et  al., 2001; Couldry and Curran, 2003; Atton, 2004; Kenix, 2011; Uzelman, 2011). Indeed, what ‘alternative’ is depends on time, place and situation (Hamilton, 2008). More specifically in the case of alternative journalism; personnel, intention, form and organization vary immensely due to its radically historical and contextual constitution in relation to a specific, provisional dominant (Atton and Hamilton, 2008: 9–21). Furthermore, the perpetually porous boundary between legacy journalism – what Bruns (2011: 133) aptly calls ‘industrial’ journalism – and alternative journalism is only one example of a broader case about popular culture generally. As Williams argued more than 40 years ago, journalism like all popular culture cannot be categorized into pure, invariant types, but rather ‘is always an uneasy mixture of two very different elements: the maintenance of an independent popular identity, often linked with political radicalism, resistance to the establishment and movements for social change; and ways of adapting, from disadvantage, to a dominant social order, finding relief and

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satisfaction or diversion inside it’ (Williams, 1970: 22; see also Hall, 1981). Historical inquiry reveals the depth and extent to which the alternative and mainstream journalism have always overlapped in a wide variety of ways, with developments ostensibly ushered in only recently by digitization actually having much deeper roots (Wunch-Vincent and Vickery, 2007). Indeed, industrial journalism as today’s ‘mainstream’ emerged as an alternative to a mainstream of a very different kind. Beginning in the later eighteenth century, newspapers’ gradual adoption of advertising and political support broadened the range of content contributors. While the earliest newspapers were personal projects of individual printers, a merchant press emerged that was intended largely for business and community leaders and written by correspondents whose personal letters to townspeople passed through the hands – and often in front of the eyes – of the local postmaster, who was often also the local newspaper publisher eager for news of abroad. By the nineteenth century, in the USA as well as in Britain, this specialist press broadened again in readership and content with the emergence of commercial-popular presses (Schiller, 1981; Nerone, 1987; Williams, 1978; Wiener, 1988). Yet what made this broadening possible was paradoxically the gradual institution of increased restrictions. Efforts to establish and defend a market position led to efforts first to ‘out-scoop’ the competition on breaking news and, later, to legally protect against unauthorized republication (Schwarzlose, 1989; Hamilton, 2008: 134). Consistent with this effort was the gradual, simultaneous professionalization of journalism, which justified exclusive employment of writers for a specific paper (Høyer and Lauk, 2003). As a result, while enabling new kinds of public participation, industrial journalism also restricted public participation to being suppliers of letters to the editor and other brief contributions of opinion, sources in news stories, and buyers/readers of the publication.

It was in response to this commercialindustrial form and organization of journalism that an alternative journalism composed of various labor and socialist presses sought to open up writing to the rank and file (Fogarasi, [1983/1921]; Worker’s Life, [1983/1928]; Hogenkamp, 1983). They enacted different relationships with and among readers, such as what was described by a labor organizer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as ‘long-distance handshaking’ (Haywood, 1966: 153–4.) However, no clear dividing line ever separated the mainstream from the alternative. Even in the nineteenth century, an amalgam of evangelism and commercialism already characterized social-reform media in the USA to a high degree (Hamilton, 2008: 97–99). The Appeal to Reason, the largestcirculation socialist newspaper ever in the USA, was funded primarily through advertising (Shore, 1988). And the 1960s underground press’ reliance on lifestyle-product advertising underscored its mainstream features (Peck, 1985; McMillian, 2011: 60–4). When moving from an historical argument to one concerning the current digital environment, the inadequacy of positing discrete kinds or types of journalism is even clearer. Commercial social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube play key roles in national movements for social change, such as in the variety of Occupy sites or the Arab Spring (Christensen, 2011; Khondker, 2011; Gerbaudo, 2012). Amateur textual, video and audio accounts appear with increasing regularity in professional news outlets (see Chapters 15 and 18), as well as occupying increasingly central roles in professional news organizations (Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Thorsen and Allan, 2014). Innovative news organizations such as ProPublica and TalkingPointsMemo that aspire to conventional professional goals are supported increasingly by non-commercial and non-statist means (Holcomb and Mitchell, 2014). Other barriers between discrete types are also being breached, including those between discrete forms, such as news

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and videogames; between discrete spheres, such as public and private; and between discrete approaches, such as objective and subjective (Meikle and Redden, 2011: 7–15; see also Chapters 8 and 9).

ARTICULATION AND CONTEXT Fully acknowledging this empirical complexity requires moving past the limitations of taken-for-granted categories (see also Chapter 27). As one way of doing so, studies of digital journalism might gain greater explanatory reach by centering analyses not on the cohesiveness and consistency of discrete categories and kinds, but on the practice of hybridization. As used here, hybridization has much in common with Hall’s notion of articulation. Informed by the work of Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, and many others, articulation provides a way of understanding how diverse and seemingly unrelated cultural, political, and ideological elements are assembled at a specific historical moment, or ‘historical conjuncture’ (Hall and Grossberg, 1996). Writing more recently, Hall describes a conjuncture as a ‘period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms, which are always present in different domains in a society, begin to come together into what Gramsci calls a “ruptural unity”’, underscoring, through this paradoxical formulation, how unstable and contradictory such an amalgam is (Hay, Hall and Grossberg, 2013: 16). Analysis of the conjuncture is crucial, because it is what generates the forces that produce the articulation and thus the phenomenon. It is for this reason that Grossberg has called articulation and the version of cultural studies informed by it a theory not of things and essences, but ‘a theory of contexts’, for the crucial issues are located in the analysis of these contexts and how they produce phenomena as articulations (Grossberg, 1993: 4). Where the characteristic positivist

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question regarding any phenomenon concerns essences (‘What is it?’), and the idealist question concerns individual choices and uses (‘What do people do with it?’), the question driven by a radically contextualist perspective concerns the combination of forces that brought it into being, and thus that constitute and maintain it. Its paradox and contingency makes hybridization a tricky term. Logically, to claim a phenomenon as a hybrid depends on first positing the existence of certain elements, in order to claim that they have been subsequently hybridized. If left at this point, such a claim reverts to a form of a priori categorization, thus returning us to the same set of theoretical limitations noted in the beginning of this chapter about taken-for-granted categories. However, when fully grasped as paradoxical and radically contextual, hybridization has the capacity to organize thinking about digital journalism in a way that mutually exclusive categories do not. A focus on articulation and historical conjunctures places discussions of specific innovations and changes within the broader terrain of digital journalism writ large. Furthermore, it not only recognizes how multiple journalistic formations are produced but also how they come to be articulated in various ways within particular historical contexts. Hybridization via a focus on articulation also avoids the problems of a priori categories by treating the various elements combined as themselves radically contextual and produced via their relationship. Thus, the very production of elements that become hybridized such as the ‘opposing sides’ of mainstream and alternative becomes a key concern of analysis, emphasizing that they are reproduced rather than simply existing. Such an intention (although with different theoretical premises) has already informed studies of newsroom routines and ideologies under pressure from user-generated content. They address how the dominant institution is maintained in part through its resistance to the threat of amateurs storming

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the barricades (Cook and Dickenson, 2013; Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Paulussen and Ugille, 2008; Singer et al., 2011). Investigating digital journalism via hybridization and articulation has great possibilities for generating new questions and insights. By addressing the production and maintenance of many journalisms within the current digital environment through a theoretical perspective that focuses on articulation through particular historical conjunctures, a number of new kinds of research topics and questions can be identified. While suggestive rather than definitive, the following discussion presents some key emergent hybridities whose investigation would solidify and deepen understanding of digital journalism by understanding it as produced through an articulation of a provisional alternative and an equally provisional mainstream.

HYBRIDS OF SOCIAL FORMATION AND USE: MEDIA INTERVENTIONS As examples ranging from the Pentagon Papers case to the publication of revelations of NSA surveillance suggest, mainstream news organizations articulate at least some of the time with an oppositional rather than dominant social formation, a term which, in referring to an activity instead of a sociological category such as a social group or class, avoids essentializing and reifying what needs to be grasped as a process (Williams, 1977: 118–20). However, these and similar accounts remain theorized largely though normative liberal press theory (Altschull, 1990). By lauding the bravery of individual sources and reporters for bucking the system, such examples are interpreted either as exceptions to the rule of mainstream subservience to power, or as evidence of the continued necessity of a strong and independent ‘Fourth Estate’ to serve as a bulwark against abuse of state power. In both cases, analysis assumes and takes for granted the existence of the

mainstream, with alternative journalism regarded by implication either as the tragic ideal or mainstream wannabe, due to aspiring to mainstream resources, effects and importance, but forever falling short. However, the concept of ‘media interventions’ proposed in Howley (2013) calls into question this established, habitual formula. By focusing on a kind of action taken instead of a kind of content or a kind of institution, the label ‘media intervention’ moves past analyses that rely on positing different kinds of institutions and journalism. The concept of media intervention, then, has great relevance and value for studies of digital journalism that view it through the lens of hybridity and articulation. On one hand, the concept of media intervention draws upon the scholarly debate regarding tactical media. Such an approach regards social movements not as singular agents that can be studied in isolation, but as generalized social processes of resistance and challenge dispersed throughout popular culture (Boler, 2008). As derived from readings of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, de Certeau, and others, the notion of tactical media signals not only the impossibility but also the undesirability of asserting general theories of media/communications and social movements due to the need to refuse any rationalizing containment of praxis and human possibility. Thus, tactical media suggest the need to focus on modest and achievable interventions at an everyday, tactical level – interventions that always change in relation to context and the array of specific forces and potentials. Given such a conception, no attempt is made at defining the essential characteristics of tactical media, because there is no unchanging essence in the first place to define. What remains instead is the ever-present need to theorize and act while at the same time recognizing the radical contingency of both. A ‘media intervention’, then, labels these articulated acts of challenge and resistance, no matter the location of the institution, resources or practices drawn upon and used.

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But, on the other hand, the concept of a media intervention extends this discussion about tactical media into new directions of great relevance to digital journalism. It provides a way of thinking about media and social change that, in its contextuality and variety, coincides clearly with a perspective that stresses hybridization and articulation. Howley conceives a media intervention as ‘associated either with advocacy or activist practice’ or with ‘mainstream media institutions and texts’, and furthermore uniformly within ‘the purview [neither] of progressive nor conservative cultural politics’ (Howley, 2013: 9). The concept of a media intervention is more attuned to particular modes of practice (see Chapter 22), rather than essential characteristics of ‘mainstream’ or ‘radical’. Developing this point further, and by paraphrasing Couldry, Howley notes that the concept of media intervention ‘encourages scholars to ‘identify agencies and processes of change’ … whether they originate from the state, the market, or civil society’ (Howley, 2013: 9, emphasis in original). Various forces articulate a media intervention, which arises out of potentially any institutional location and which plays out in a variety of ways. Case studies in Howley (2013) that concern journalism highlight how media interventions work through hybridization and articulation. On one hand, mainstream journalism operates in many ways as an alternative media project by coinciding with social movements to effect social change. An example is Howarth (2013), which addresses commercial-newspaper campaigns in Britain, and a specific campaign regarding geneticallymodified (GM) foods. Following the appearance of the first GM foods in food stores in 1996, a generally receptive climate for it changed by 1998, largely due to ‘an intensification of newspaper engagement and a shift in content from ambivalence to increasing hostility towards the policies promoting GM food’. As a result, ‘public opposition, including a de facto consumer boycott, escalated and hardened’ to the point that ‘four [mainstream] newspapers had launched campaigns

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against the policy’. By 2000, the government had ‘negotiated a voluntary moratorium with the biotechnology industry’, the prime minister apologized in print, and the newspaper campaign subsided (Howarth, 2013: 37–8). On the other hand, alternative-media efforts both challenge as well as support the position of mainstream media. For example, Orgeret (2013) focuses on the role of alternative, citizen journalism in pressing news agendas developed by the mainstream. During what he called ‘16 days of activism’, an activist ‘decided to live on the streets of Cape Town [South Africa] and emulate the life of a street child as closely as possible’, sharing his experiences through social media (Orgeret, 2013: 178). Yet, the effort challenged as well as supported legacy journalism organizations. While demonstrating that ordinary citizens can create and circulate news to overcome limitations of mainstream coverage, this media intervention at the same time served as fodder for the mainstream press, which reported on it. As a result, the alternative fed the mainstream at the same time it challenged it, producing an understanding of this media intervention as complexly located in overlaps of different social formations and with varying, complex effects. Many other examples could be offered. Yet, by steering clear of categorical types and focusing instead on specific tactics and practices, they all illustrate the degree to which media interventions recognize hybrid relations between media organizations, social formations and uses: That the mainstream can be alternative and the alternative mainstream no longer becomes nonsensical, but emerges instead as empirically characteristic.

HYBRIDS OF TECHNOLOGY AND FORM: SOCIAL WITNESSING Hybridity and articulation also characterize current innovations in technologies and cultural forms, such as those fostered by the

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interplay between digital recording, social media and personal accounts. This observation recalls arguments about the necessity to recognize technologies not as separate from culture and society, but instead as, in Williams’ terms, ‘always made within societies’ (1989: 173, emphasis in original) or, as Slack and Wise put it, ‘always already a part of culture [and society], not a cause or effect of it’ (2002: 488). From their earliest years, news accounts written by eyewitnesses have appeared in newsletters and newspapers. Their veracity, authority and resulting institutional value comes in no way from a claimed intrinsic truthfulness or accuracy, but instead derives discursively from longstanding Anglo-American traditions and conventions of empiricism as well as their place within institutions of competitive disputation, particularly law but extending as well into the developing practice of experimental science (Hamilton, 2008: 43–8; Shapiro, 2000). These traditions and conventions underwrite its value for institutions whose value is determined by empirically verifiable accounts, such as what became professionalized, industrial journalism. However, in addition to having great value for industrial journalism, witnessing places infinitely reproducible representation within the reach of individuals who do not have industrial-media resources at their disposal. The combination of value to professional news as well as amenability to individual practice that has made what Allan (2013) calls ‘citizen witnessing’ such a compelling phenomenon in digital journalism today (see Chapter 18). Granting that recording technologies actively produce accounts rather than simply and neutrally capture them, facsimile recordings via digital devices makes video and audio citizen witnessing even more valuable for legacy news organizations than written accounts because facsimile accounts are assumed to be unaffected by human bias and interpretation, an assumption that has however been a target of critique for some time (Sontag, 1977; Berger, 1995). What is more,

the recent inclusion of digital video and audio recording on mobile phones that are carried through habit by many people each day has only extended the ability to be a citizen witness or, as Allan (2013: 1–25) puts it, an ‘accidental journalist’. Metamorphoses in citizen witnessing hybridize the individual and the social, as well as the mainstream and the alternative into a form today that can be called social witnessing. Paradigmatic of a new point in this process is the work by digital-innovatorturned-activist-livestreaming-eyewitnessturned-digital-journalist Tim Pool (Gynnild, 2014; Lenzner, 2014). Pool has articulated a variety of ready-made devices and capabilities and, furthermore, deployed them in new ways as well. His basic technical setup consists, first, of a networked smartphone and subscriptions both to a wireless carrier that allows unlimited data transmission and to a wireless livestreaming service. This enables Pool to transmit to any users viewing the livestream remotely whatever is in range of the phone’s video camera and audio mic. An external battery allows Pool to stream for 15 hours at a stretch (Pool, 2012a; 2012b). The final articulated piece is a chat app on the smartphone to carry on real-time conversations with people who are viewing the livestream. Pool converses with others about events he is showing and users are seeing, while on occasion even taking requests from remote viewers for what to show or what questions they would like him to ask people he is interviewing. Social witnessing as a hybrid news practice is more than this technical assemblage. It requires in turn an articulation to larger institutions and social formations. While one could use this combination of equipment and services to livestream hours of, as Pool puts it, ‘friends doing dumb stuff’, he began to use it instead as a means of informing others in realtime about events and developments in protests and civil disturbances, thus articulating social witnessing as a self-described activist-journalist in

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support of a social movement. As a reporter summarizes, Pool and others ‘aren’t satisfied with American mainstream media coverage, calling the medium largely corrupted by the corporate world. Instead, as he often takes time to tell his audience, he’s here to show what’s really going on’ (Townsend, 2011). While attending the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Pool livestreamed each day, sometimes for 21 hours straight. His livestream reached more than 2 million unique viewers over two months later that fall (Jardin, 2011). Pool took the technical basis of this practice to the next level by using Google Glass, the eyeglasses-like mobile computer and communications device. He claims that wearing Glass rather than holding a smartphone allows him to stay focused on the event, helping him protect himself and avoid arrest or injury in volatile demonstrations or situations (Ungerleider, 2013). As Pool put it in a recent interview, ‘When there’s a wall of police firing plastic bullets at you, and you’re running through a wall of tear-gas, having your hands free to cover your face, while saying “OK Glass, record a video,” makes that recording process a lot … easier’ (Dredge, 2013). Yet, while social witnessing hybridizes commercially available consumer electronics with alternative media practice, it has as much relevance to legacy commercial news organizations as to social movements. On one hand, social witnessing articulates with mobilization and social protest as a cultural form of simultaneity, engendering a vicarious solidarity that sometimes people also act upon (Anderson, 1991). As one attendee told Pool during his Occupy Wall Street livestreams, ‘Your livestreaming today got me out of bed, and got me here. So, I think that happened to a lot of other people, too. That you’re doing a job for us, that is, is important’ (quoted in Townsend, 2011). But, on the other hand, social witnessing has also articulated with legacy professional journalism. Pool’s efforts have been significant enough to be noted by US legacy commercial newsmagazine Time

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as ‘Occupy Wall Street’s Live Streamer’ (Townsend, 2011; Time, 2014). In 2013, Pool joined the multimedia news, branding and entertainment conglomerate Vice, Inc. as head of live news. And, in autumn 2014, Pool became senior correspondent and director of media innovation for the commercial media company Fusion, a joint venture of Univision and the Disney–ABC Television Group (Steel, 2014). The degree to which social witnessing as a hybridized phenomenon of digital journalism overflows the boundaries between the mainstream and the alternative is indicated as well in an email by CEO Isaac Lee that announced Pool’s hiring at Fusion. Someone who is hailed as both a ‘“guerrilla journalist of the digital age”, but also as, “the future of journalism” by Time Magazine’ indicates through this contradictory pairing of guerrilla and professional, alternative and mainstream, the inability of a priori categories to adequately take account of where social witnessing fits in (Fusion, 2014). By being ‘in’ both ‘sides’, it renders irrelevant the very conception of them as sides.

HYBRIDS OF NEWS AND MARKETING: VALUING THE REAL Hybridizations that operate in relation to digital journalism take many different forms. This final example suggests that attention to articulation and hybridization is also valuable for understanding institutional hybridizations between news and marketing industries, with the clearest current example that of multimedia conglomerate Vice Inc. It calls itself the ‘world’s leading youth media company specializing in creating, distributing, and monetizing original content globally’, and with justification. It embraces a vertically-integrated, transnational conglomerate organization by not only creating content, but also distributing, promoting, and selling it via its many web portals (Vice Inc., 2014).

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Currently it has offices in 35 countries and an audience in the tens of millions that it delivers to advertisers by using an ‘unorthodox though compelling coverage of news, music, travel, sports and fashion’ (Brownstein, 2014). In addition to Vice News, the brand content umbrella includes Noisey (pop music coverage), Motherboard (high technology), Munchies (food), Vice Sports, The Creators Project (art and technology), Thump (dancehall music and culture), i-D (clothes fashion), Fightland (competitive martial arts), and Vice on HBO (current-issue documentary cable-television content). Its significance for this chapter is how it hybridizes news and marketing to an extent much more fundamental than simply adding soft-news or self-promotional aspects to hard-news publications or shows. Vice Media Inc. uses news to build its brand. For Vice, news is not just related to nor simply assists in marketing, but literally is its marketing communications. News is marketing communication. To hybridize news and marketing, Vice articulates fearless truth-telling not to public service or social responsibility, but to libertinism. Its editorial formula that shocks and appalls bourgeois sensibility is a marketing tactic to generate publicity, awareness, and brand value for urban hipster-wannabee young males. Indeed, co-founder Shane Smith has been described as ‘P.T. Barnum meets Lord Byron’ (Ortved, 2011). These are the two most important Romantic-era figures for understanding current media culture. While circus master Barnum is the pioneering marketing communications specialist who first discovered the value of how to gather a crowd and generate interest in order to sell; Byron is the quintessential Romantic selfcentered destructive sensualist. Vice News produces news as marketing via the cultural form of naturalism. Indeed, its signature content is real-time witnessing, later recut and repackaged as long-form naturalist documentary (of course, with the claim of taking viewers to hidden places to see for

themselves a self-conscious construction). Given the infinite range of what could be shown, Vice News articulates with libertinism by choosing to specialize in thrills, danger, and offbeat if not underground situations and practices. But, by also presenting itself as telling the truth no matter what it is or who is offended, Vice at the same time articulates with the objectivity credo of professional journalism as an independent ‘Fourth Estate’. Evidence of its marketing effectiveness is its worldwide and growing audience, and of its journalistic aspirations an Emmy Award in 2014 for Outstanding Information Series or Special (‘Vice | Television Academy’, 2014). The articulation of news and marketing was as strategic as it was happenstance. The project that became Vice, Inc. started in 1994 as a free alternative weekly newspaper in Montreal (Picard, 1998). As paraphrased in a 2000 profile, the ‘juvenile joke of a magazine – which pontificates on poo, sex, alcohol, politics, drugs, punk rock and hiphop’, later characterized as an ‘international delinquency magazine’, had by 2000 become big business (Dunlevy, 2000). By 2001, the brand of this ‘rude, smart-ass magazine’ was a ‘stick-it-to-the-man brand – a post-modern marketing concept tailor-made for kids looking to buy rebellion,’ and ‘a blend of AngloMontreal cynicism, straight-up New York hip hop and 18-year-old libido’ that ‘appeals to an elusive group of 15- to 28-year-old trendsetters that every marketer of everything from soda pop to skateboards is desperate to reach’ (Toane, 2001), a response to the challenges of marketing noted by Frank (1997). However serendipitous the origin of this editorial formula, the co-founders soon recognized the marketing value of the project not only despite its contradictions, but because of them. As one co-founder put it, ‘Vice is comfortable with the contradiction inherent in promoting a counter-culture magazine as a full-fledged, multi-channelled, value-added brand.’ As another co-founder put it at the time, ‘It’s a business, at the end of the day….Kids come into our stores and

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buy $500 Dub shells. [Some of those] kids are 15 and they live at home and they have nothing to do with their money except buy clothes and CDs.’ The news story concludes in a suitably paradoxical vein by calling Vice Media Inc. ‘an industrial-strength anti-brand for the most brand-conscious generation ever’ (Toane, 2001). The only question about this news– marketing hybrid was how to finance it and what specific form it would take. Initially it expanded into fashion retailing in an effort to develop itself as an e-retailer. As a journalist summarized at the time, ‘Vice magazine, Vice Fashion, Vice Film, Vice Records and Vice TV will all be used to guide traffic to the Web site and promote E-commerce – online purchasing of fashion, music, video games and anything else deemed worthy of a sales pitch to Vice’s audience’ (Dunlevy, 2000). It brought in outside investor money to continue to expand, but later bought out its outside partners to go it alone (2000). What opened the doors to the pathway to the Vice Inc. of today was the addition of news in 2006 and the move in 2007 to the internet as a cost-effective distribution network, first via its own web property and, later, as branded content sold to and seen on other online media sites, initially from Viacom via MTV to CNN, marketing-media behemoth WPP, and cable-television company HBO, with its relevance to all yet another example of its ability to articulate news and marketing (Kelly, 2007; Levine, 2007; Rabinovitch, 2010; Krashinsky, 2011; Dunlevy, 2013). The documentary formula solidified as it hybridized ‘short videos about independent music, extreme sports and, of course, some nudity’ together with ‘ambitious news reports, like an interview with Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed “mayor of Beirut”, investigations of environmental abuse, and a story about a Colombian date-rape drug’ (Levine, 2007). The success of articulating news and marketing via libertinism and documentary became clear by the mid2000s and its trajectory ‘from little more than a fanzine to a magazine with 900,000 readers

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in 22 countries and an international brand which takes in clothing, TV, book publishing, music (Bloc Party has released an album in the US through Vice Records) and now film’ (Wilkinson 2008). To this range was added a brand-strategy/creative division called Virtue to monetize the Vice branding formula by offering branding assistance to other ­companies and products (Iezzi, 2009; Harding, 2010). From the start, and consistent with naturalist documentary, Vice News specialized in first-person documentary of unusual topics and situations related to war, sex and youth culture. A Vice news executive of the day put the marketing value of news clearly. ‘We see ourselves as CNN for kids who can’t be bothered to watch CNN … We feel there are things people should know about. In a way, we try to educate people by tricking them into being interested in stuff. “Look – trainers!,” and then you find the piece is about Liberia or Sierra Leone’ (Horan, 2006). This hybridization of sensational and informational, of shock and seriousness had its branding value. ‘What makes Vice stand out,’ argues one profile, ‘is the way it works serious and insightful reportage into a milieu normally associated with froth. A recent Russia special, for example, painted as stark and graphic a portrait of the lives of young Russians as you will read anywhere. An issue by and about disabled people was shocking and confrontational, but at times it brought a lump to the throat. Above all, both sets of stories had the ring of truth’ (Horan 2006). The episode with which this chapter began only moves the Vice hybridization of news and marketing to the next stage. What has remained consistent throughout the emergence of Vice Media Inc. is the hybridized nature of this project in terms of content, intention, institution, and purpose – one that required the emergence of digital journalism to be realized. As a co-founder of the company put it in 2013, ‘we ended up creating something new that is one part news, one part entertainment, one part – I don't

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know, but you put it all together and it creates something that doesn’t really exist in the mainstream news or mainstream contentcreation world. There’s the rest of the world and there’s VICE doing our own weird s–t over here. Something has happened to make the VICE stuff a true alternative’ (quoted in Dunlevy, 2013). By developing an urban punk ‘zine of the 1990s into a commercial transnational multimedia conglomerate of the 2010s, and by developing a content formula in which long-form documentary becomes one of its most effective marketing strategies to sell itself as a brand, Vice Media Inc. is no more a true alternative than it is a co-opted alternative. Instead, it provides a look into a possible future of digital journalism that hybridizes both.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Attending to hybridization suggests novel and crucial questions to ask. Following the case of media interventions, more serious attention can be paid to hybridizations of social formation and use, in which journalistic projects support a dominant by challenging it, and/or challenge a dominant by supporting it. For example, in its reporting on NSA and GCHQ eavesdropping, the Guardian challenges governments of liberal democracies to live up to their ostensible ideals in a sort of restoration of the dominant. Attention to other examples of digital news practice located in multiple, tangled social formations would deepen our understanding. Following the case of social witnessing, more attention can be paid to hybridizations of technology and form, in particular to the diffusion (or not) of social witnessing as an increasingly accepted tool of legacy news reporting and why or why not, as well as to the compelling truth-effect of social witnessing as a form of collective engagement,

both for activists and for armchair voyeurs. It also draws attention to other kinds of assemblages of digital technology and reporting, such as the recent exploration of the use of aerial drones with cameras, which in their capability for remote surveillance heightens concern about the value of news coverage for state-sponsored intelligence gathering as well as more generally about the implications of military origins of technological innovation (Bishop and Phillips, 2010). Finally, following the case of news as branding, further attention can be paid to emerging organizational forms that dispense with historical categories of editorial and sales departments, and with content categories of news and advertising (such as the evolving category of ‘sponsored content’). These suggestions are but a tentative beginning to what is needed. For the changes currently rippling through digitizing news industries have hardly ceased. Like the hybrids only briefly discussed here, the most challenging phenomena and important questions about them have yet to be conceived. By posing a productive ambiguity, perhaps the neologism ‘post-journalism’ best captures the current historical moment of digital journalism as one of hybridity and articulation, one that accepts current claims about what Anderson et  al. (2014) call ‘post-industrial journalism’ while theorizing such developments even more radically. Just as with postmodernism, the term suggests a point that has moved past an earlier accepted stage, but that is still indebted to this earlier stage in the sense of being produced by its relation to the past, present and possible futures.

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Allan, Stuart and Einar Thorsen, eds. 2009. Citizen Journalism; Global Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. Altschull, J. Herbert. 1990. From Milton to McLuhan; The Ideas Behind American Journalism. White Plains: Longman. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso. Anderson, C.W., Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky. 2014. ‘Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the present’. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, December 3. Online at http:// towcenter.org/research/post-industrialjournalism-adapting-to-the-present-2/ Armstrong, David. 1981. A Trumpet to Arms; Alternative Media in America. Boston: South End Press. Atton, Chris. 2002. Alternative Media. London: Sage. Atton, Chris. 2004. An Alternative Internet; Radical Media, Politics and Creativity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Atton, Chris and James F. Hamilton. 2008. Alternative Journalism. Los Angeles: Sage. Berger, John. 1995. ‘Appearances’. In Another Way of Telling, pp. 81–129. New York: Vintage International. Bishop, Ryan, and John Phillips. 2010. Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology; Technicities of Perception. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boler, Megan, ed. 2008. Digital Media and Democracy; Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brownstein, Bill. 2014. ‘It's a dirty job, but Vice wants to do it’. The Gazette [Montreal], March 15, p. E2. Bruns, Axel. 2011. ‘News Produsage in a Pro-Am Mediasphere: Why Citizen Journalism Matters’. In News Online; Transformations and Continuities, edited by Graham Meikle and Guy Redden, pp. 132–47. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Christensen, Christian. 2011. ‘Twitter Revolutions? Addressing Social Media and Dissent’. The Communication Review 14(3): 155–57. Cook, Clare and Andrew Dickinson. 2013. ‘UK Social Media, Citizen Journalism and Alternative News’. In The Future of Quality News

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News Media 2014. Pew Research Journalism Project. March 26. Online at http://www. journalism.org/2014/03/26/the-revenuepicture-for-american-journalism-and-how-itis-changing/ Horan, Tom. 2006. ‘From Chic to Cheek; Not Taking Things too Seriously is the Credo at Vice Magazine. But It is Surprisingly Influential, says Tom Horan’. Daily Telegraph, July 15, p. 8. Howarth, Anita. 2013. ‘Newspaper Campaigning in Britain in the Late 1990s’. In Media Interventions, edited by Kevin Howley, pp. 37–54. New York: Peter Lang. Howley, Kevin, ed. 2013. Media Interventions. New York: Peter Lang. Høyer, Svennik, and Epp Lauk. 2003. ‘The Paradoxes of the Journalistic Profession: An Historical Perspective’. Nordicom Review 24(2): 3–18. Iezzi, Teressa. 2009. ‘With Virtue, Media Brand Vice Helps Marketers Tap Its Genius’. Advertising Age, April 13. Jardin, Xeni. 2011. ‘The Dronecam Revolution Will be Webcast: Interview with Tim Pool of “The Other 99”’. Boing Boing, November 23. Online at http://boingboing.net/2011/ 11/23/theother99.html. Kelly, Brendan. 2007. ‘Adding to List of Vices; VBS.TV Expands the Montreal-Born Media Empire's Reach into the World of Online Broadcasting’. The Gazette [Montreal], May 17, p. D1. Kenix, Linda Jean. 2011. Alternative and Mainstream Media: The Converging Spectrum. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Khondker, Habibul Haque. 2011. ‘Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring’. Globalizations 8(5): 675–79. Krashinsky, Susan. 2011. ‘Irreverent Vice Magazine Gets Cash Injection to Target Emerging Markets’. The Globe and Mail [Canada], April 6, p. B7. Lenzner, Ben. 2014. ‘The Emergence of Occupy Wall Street and Digital Video Practices: Tim Pool, Live Streaming and Experimentations in Citizen Journalism’. Studies in Documentary Film. doi: 10.1080/17503280.2014.961634 Levine, Robert. 2007. ‘MTV Seeks Guidance from Rebels; Vice Magazine Helps Broadcaster Navigate Transition to Web’. The International Herald Tribune, November 20, p. 15.

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12 The Ecology of Participation Renee Barnes

INTRODUCTION The advent of the internet as a vehicle for delivering news, and the participatory potential it offers, has changed the way both journalists and academics conceptualise the practices of the news audience. No longer do they need to imagine them reading or watching news in their homes, at a café or on the train, but they have visual reminders of the audience through comments, submission of stories and images, as well as other avenues of participation now routinely incorporated into news websites. For journalists this has radically changed their role, with solicitation and management of these contributions now a driving force in the news production process (Singer et al., 2011). For journalism scholars this has resulted in considerable attention paid to those who leave contributions on news websites and the democratic potential of this new form of ‘open journalism’ (Sill, 2011). However, this emphasis on those who leave a visible reminder of their participation neglects

those audience practices that are ‘silent’. This chapter seeks to address this overemphasis by outlining a strategy for examining the spectrum of news audience practices from the ‘loud’, visible practices of information production through to the ‘silent’ practices where engagement with news websites can be a highly involved internal practice. Terms such as ‘citizen journalism’ (Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Robinson and Deshano, 2011) and ‘participatory journalism’ (Bowman and Willis, 2003; Singer et  al., 2011) or user-generated content (Carpentier, 2011) are usually associated with news audience behaviours related to producing content. Specifically the phenomenon is defined as a citizen or group of citizens ‘playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information’ (Bowman and Willis, 2003: 9) or people inside and outside the newsroom communicating to and with each other in an ongoing process of creating a news website and building a multifaceted community

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(Singer et al., 2011). Within these broad definitions, audience behaviour is understood as acts of ‘producing’ content as well as ‘participating’, which ranges from making actual contributions of content to the ranking and sharing of news items (Shao, 2008). Avenues for participation by the audience are many and varied and can include active contributions such as comments, discussion forums, user blogs, audience reports, reputation systems, microblogs and social networking sites (Singer et al., 2011). For Jenkins (2004 and 2006) we are in the midst of a ‘convergence culture’ where the public has moved from a position of informed citizens to become active monitorial citizens. This process has blurred the boundaries of media production and media consumption so that those who engage with news websites are now understood by some researchers as ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2005). However, this shift towards viewing the audience of news as more interactive and productive can also be problematic as it fails to take into account those who I will refer to as the ‘silent’ audience. This silent audience ‘internalise’ their participation by creating meaning from consuming the media text and using it as a method to imagine and connect to the rest of the website audience (Bird, 2011; Barnes, 2014a). Much has been written on the ‘active audience’ (Fiske, 1989; 1990), a concept that predates the internet and its associated participatory culture. Barker (2003: 325) describes the media audience (and that is for any media) as active producers of meaning from within their own cultural context. In this way, the audience is positioned as not simply passively digesting media content, but as actively filtering messages through their own experiences and understandings, thereby producing individual meanings regardless of whether or not it is in a public space. Conceptualising those who engage with online news websites, then, as the audience rather than users or ‘produsers’ enables a more inclusive understanding of participation. This chapter is concerned with

understanding how those who visit online news websites use news. That includes those who leave a visible marker of their participation by producing content and those who are silent and engaging with the media text in an individual and internal way. To do this we will first discuss those audience members who are ‘producing’ content or making active contributions on news websites, followed by those who are silent and not publicly flagging their engagement with the website. Finally, the chapter will outline a framework for analysing how the audience interprets, reacts and engages with the news online. Specifically it will propose a strategy for conceptualising the online news audience through its diversity of practices, which draws on an approach more in line with fandom where deliberation and dialogue operate alongside identity play, community formation and pleasure seeking.

‘PRODUCING’ CONTENT The bulk of the research on modes of audience participation in the news production process focuses on the impact of this participation on the day-to-day work of the journalist, participation features on news websites and how this user-generated content is managed. Singer et al. (2011), drawing on interviews with 67 print and online editors across ten Western democracies, outline five production stages that enable analysis of audience participation in the news production process: 1 Access and observation of something that can be communicated; 2 Selection and filtering of that information; 3 Processing and editing of a story; 4 Distribution of the story. This is the stage where it is made available for reading and discussion; 5 Interpretation of the story. This stage follows publication and refers to when the story is open to comment and discussion.

Overall, the study showed that those avenues that provided the least challenge to

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a journalist’s agency and authority, such as interpretation of the story, were the most open to participation. This is consistent with studies that have shown that journalists wish to encourage audience participation by accepting, and in some cases encouraging, audience comments to journalists’ stories (Domingo et al., 2008; Jönsson and Örnebring, 2011) and will embrace audience material when it yields content that enhances their stories (Harrison, 2010; Robinson, 2010; Singer, 2010; Williams et al., 2010). For example, the dominant perception of audience input amongst BBC journalists was as another source – not as a form of collaborative news journalism (Williams et al., 2010). In this way, journalists still adhere to their traditional gatekeeping role (Domingo et  al., 2008; Chung and Nah, 2009; Singer, 2010; Karlsson, 2011) and discard audience material when it threatens professional practices, norms and values (Quandt, 2008; Harrison, 2010; Wardle and Williams, 2010; Williams et  al., 2010). Judged within the normative journalistic values, audience contributions are dismissed as a valuable input to the public discourse due to their propensity for displays of emotion, particularly aggression; lack of focus or on topic discussion; and ‘irrational’ nature (Hardaker, 2010; Robinson, 2010; Shepard, 2011; Singer et al., 2011). The study of the online news audience itself is far less prevalent and in most instances focuses on those who are producing content or leaving active contributions on the websites. Studies have shown the interactive audience is driven by social-interactive motives (Springer et  al., 2015) and wants to express personal matters and have ‘fun’ (Bergstrom, 2010; Holt and Karlsson, 2014), rather than producing news for democratic reasons as many scholars had hoped. Those participating on news websites would also prefer to remain anonymous (Fortunati et al., 2005; Meyer and Carey, 2013) and as a result debate and discussion can be dominated by aggression, disruption and deception, or

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‘trolling’ (Hardaker, 2010; Shepard, 2011). Others have investigated how content produced by journalists encourages or discourages participation, in particular the leaving of comments following news stories. These studies found negative or controversial stories focused on public affairs (particularly politics) elicit a higher number of comments from online readers and greater interactivity between commenters following the story (Diakopoulos and Naaman, 2011; Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2012; Weber, 2014). It has also been suggested that the audience wants to develop their own norms and values regarding news, which can deviate from traditional journalistic norms and values (Robinson, 2010; Williams et al., 2010). Those participating on news websites consider commenting as a democratic right and value transparency and the ability to selfmoderate over civility and ‘on-topic discussion’. However, the audience does still ascribe textual authority to journalists and notions of professionalism can inhibit their participation on news websites. Robinson and Deshano’s (2011) study investigated whether people who contribute to news websites achieved a sense of community and individual fulfilment. The authors argue that ‘reporting’ on events on local news websites and blogs might enhance people’s sense of belonging to where they live. At the same time, they found that for many the notion that their contribution might be considered ‘journalism’ acted as a barrier to participation on these sites. Audience contributions are, therefore judged by scholars, journalists and even the audience themselves using normative journalistic values, which fail to recognise how playful, emotionally driven contributions may facilitate engagement with news and public discourse more broadly. There is also a body of work that has focused on how the audience perceives the contributions of other audience members. The audience has been shown to value contributions such as images, videos and

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eyewitness accounts which they perceive to be authentic, immediate and real (Williams et  al., 2010). Bergstrom’s (2010) study of Swedish online newspapers found that while general interest for creating content for the web was limited, audience contributions within and outside traditional journalism were widely read and a study of online news readers in Germany found that comments following news stories were read for entertainment purposes (Springer et  al., 2015). Robinson (2010) and Barnes (2014a) also found that the online news audience placed a high value on audience members’ comments following news stories as well as the ability to make a comment. This suggests that audience contributions to news websites can play a fundamental role in the engagement of even those who are silent and not leaving active contributions. Drawing on work by Saffo (1992), Hermida and Thurman (2007) cite the value to the ‘individual’ in the feeling of engagement fostered through interactivity opportunities offered by news, as a way of enhancing personal experience and ultimately brand loyalty. ‘This all suggests that the psychological effect of being able to participate in some form is no less significant than the effect of the content itself’ (Hermida and Thurman, 2007: 23). A few studies have attempted to illuminate the many and varied practices that are associated with the audience of news. Ike Picone’s (2011) study of Flemish online news users adapted Bruns’ theory of ‘produsage’ as a framework for understanding the process of information production to that of an audience experience. The empirical study argues that productive news use or produsage – ‘correcting, evaluating, completing, marking it or commenting on’ news (2011: 99) – was shaped by motivational, situational and social factors. Specifically, it found that users needed to be in ‘the mood for produsage’ and must be prepared to make the level of investment needed to make an active contribution. Produsers also needed to have an emotional investment in the story and the skill and

desire to ‘publicise’ themselves. Specifically, the study found that when an audience member chooses to leave a visible marker of their participation, either through a comment or by sharing or liking on social media they have a particular audience in mind. Casual produsers seem to treat other users as an audience of which they do not know the reach. This potential public plays an important role as produsers adapt their contributions to the perceived likes and needs of it. (Picone, 2011: 116)

This interaction between the differing practices of the online news audience, those making active contributions and the ‘silent’ audience, is particularly important when conceptualising the diversity of practices of the audience and will be discussed in further detail later in the chapter. The way the audience uses news can be understood as broader than just productive. In a longitudinal study of news usage as an activity Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2014) identify 16 practices of news use: reading, watching, listening, viewing, checking, snacking, monitoring, scanning, searching, clicking, linking, sharing, liking, recommending, commenting and voting. This diversity of audience practices, include those which are visible and some which are not, and are not media platform specific. Instead these practices relate to how individuals undertake the news activity and how it is anchored to other activities within their day. For example, the practices of reading and watching were associated with in-depth or intense concentration, while viewing or listening were more about ‘wallpapering’ the day; a practice undertaken while completing other activities such as preparing dinner or driving. Other activities such as checking, snacking, scanning or monitoring are also practices that relate to limited availability of time and other situational or locational elements of an individual’s day. Likewise, clicking was linked to investment, as an additional activity on top of checking or snacking on news. Linking, sharing, liking, recommending, commenting and voting

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on news were practices that required more active investment and were connected with generating personal benefit through image management. Overall, the study suggests that audience news use encompasses a complex spectrum of activities influenced by motivational and situational factors. This approach is similar to other studies that have examined how news usage orders and even anchors other social and cultural practices (Schrøder, 2014; Domingo et  al., 2015). Therefore, if we consider the diversity of practices associated with news use, along with the role of these audience practices in overall audience engagement, a more nuanced understanding of the online news audience begins to emerge. Understanding a broader role for audience contributions in overall audience engagement is important when we consider that only a small portion of those who visit a news website leave a visible active contribution (van Dijck, 2009; Barnes, 2014a; St John III et al., 2014). Van Dijck (2009) has cited an ‘an emerging rule of thumb’ that suggests only one in a hundred people will be active online content producers, with 10 ‘interacting’ by commenting, and the remaining 89 simply viewing. So how then are we to understand how the majority of the audience, those who are ‘silent’, are using and engaging with online news content?

THE SILENT MAJORITY Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink (2014) outline numerous practices that are silent, such as checking, scanning, snacking and monitoring. These practices are not only ‘silent’ but need to be understood as linked to and vital for the enactment of other more visible audience practices. Couldry (2009) argues that ‘voice’ must be recognised as ‘the implicitly linked practices of speaking and listening’ (2009: 580). Listening, in this instance, is not the act of hearing, but ‘the act of recognising what others have to say,

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recognising that they have something to say or, better, that they, like all human beings, have the capacity to give an account of their lives that is reflexive and continuous, an ongoing, embodied process of reflection’ (2009: 580). Therefore the act of listening can incorporate reading the words of others and ‘an interactive website is worth nothing, unless someone is listening to the process of interaction’ (2009: 581). It is within this context, that O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher (2009) call for a rubric of listening to be applied to the analysis of mediated communication, as media is a ‘relational space of interacting practices and identities, a space of recognition and refusal, connection and contestation, representation and re-presentation’ (2009: 423). Understanding listening as a fundamental practice of media consumption, the authors argue, allows issues of difference and inequality within meaningful interaction to be examined and ultimately increase media-facilitated opportunities for public presence in and recognition by the media. ‘Listening’ therefore becomes a method for advancing audience studies as it allows the deconstruction of the active-passive binaries of communication (Lloyd, 2009, see Chapter 36). The term describes ‘a now familiar experience of contemporary public space, saturated with transient snatches of conversation enabled by mobile telephony, television flat screen and leaky earphones’ (Lloyd, 2009: 478). Crawford (2009) offers a compelling argument for the use of the metaphor of ‘listening’ when envisaging the audience of online communication. ‘Listening’ enables the capture of ‘emerging modes of paying attention online’ (2009: 525) and Crawford suggests that it is an embedded part of networked engagement and a necessary corollary to those making active contributions. In establishing a theoretical framework for understanding listening online, Crawford is primarily concerned with communication on social media, Twitter in particular, however, she asserts ‘listening’ can be used as a concept

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for understanding a wide range of online communication practices in which scholarly analysis has placed an overemphasis on posting, commenting and speaking up (2009: 528). Individuals can scan online information quickly and be involved in ‘background listening’. Commentary and conversations in the online space can continue as a background to an individual’s day ‘that accrete to form a sense of intimacy and awareness about the patterns of speech, activity … across a group of contacts’ (2009: 528). The practices of actively contributing by, for example, leaving a comment on a news site or ranking a story or voting in a poll, are made on the expectation of that contribution being ‘heard’ (Couldry, 2009), and contributions are even adapted to the perceived likes and needs of the intended ‘listeners’ (Picone, 2011). Those ‘listening’ to the contributions of others are thus a vital component of the online community which forms around these sites and can create a sense of attachment or engagement through the practice of ‘listening’. It is therefore important to understand that just as scholars in semiotics and reception studies have long argued, the term ‘active’ applies to all participants, not just those providing written contributions.

EMOTION AND COMMUNITY AS DRIVERS OF PARTICIPATION Understanding audience interaction as a personal, social and interpretative process is something that fan scholars have routinely done in their analysis of fan communities and is a framework that offers much to the study of the online news audience (Barnes, 2014b). To do this, however, we need to move away from examining journalism in terms of what it should do and rather investigate what it does (see Chapter 27). As outlined earlier, the online news audience engages with news through critical dialogue and deliberation as well as in playful and emotional manners.

This means reconsidering the Habermasian ideal of seeing journalism or news as a purely rational discourse and instead investigating the role emotion, in particular concepts of pleasure and play usually associated with fandom, can have in audience engagement with news. In a study of comments on popular US news and political blogs, Gray (2007) found comments often exhibited a ‘mix of deliberative, “rational” opinion, and emotive, playful elements far more fan-like by nature’ (2007: 82). This interaction with news means that: News acts as a command center for many projects of identity and personal security that are deeply emotional, and not at all coldly ‘rational’, and yet that allow us to place ourselves in our house, neighbourhood, nation, and world (2007: 78).

This suggests value in considering the role emotion and affect plays in an individual’s engagement with a text (Grossberg, 1992). As Jenkins (2007: 3) suggests: Most popular culture is shaped by a logic of emotional intensification. It is less interested in making us think than it is in making us feel. Yet that distinction is too simple: popular culture, at its best, makes us think by making us feel.

Considering the role that emotion takes in deliberative discussion and debate provides an expanded understanding of how the audience may be using news. This refrain is taken up by Gorton (2009), who argues that knowledge is not gained solely through rational distance and that emotion can play a role in rational decision-making. Gorton argues that the presence of emotion does not necessarily negate the ‘rational’ or ‘critical’ potential of an audience member’s interaction with a text. ‘The place of emotion in our everyday lives and the way in which affect works to inform and inspire action… in other words, our actions are guided not just by what we think but also by how we feel and our bodily responses to feelings’ (2009: 69). For Gorton, a central theme of the work on emotion and affect is the intrusion of the personal or

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private on the public sphere, where personal perspectives and feelings are used to engage with the broader public discourse. As with Gray’s (2007) thesis, this argument suggests emotional engagement is an important factor when considering how and why an audience uses an online news site. The cultural concepts of emotion and affect therefore offer a useful tool for illustrating that an ‘emotional response’ is not insignificant or irrelevant (see Chapter 9). Wetherell (2012) uses the term ‘affective practice’ to describe how a particular stimulus, such as a news article or a comment from another reader, incites an emotion which can lead to an emotional reaction. Within this model, communication involves an attempt to produce emotion. A general feeling is aroused from engagement with the text, and as a result we can have a physical reaction to that emotion, such as the leaving of a comment following a news story. These emotional reactions are also highly contagious. In what Gibbs (2011) terms ‘affective contagion’, some affects, particularly anger, fear and enjoyment are contagious. A reader of an online news story may react to feelings of disgust, fear or even joy, outlined in the comment of another, which will in turn inspire the action of posting a comment, but this comment may well be both emotional and critical. However, affective practice can also result in other avenues of engagement, such as individual and collective identity formation and developing a sense of belonging to the community associated with the text (Barnes, 2014a). Fan scholars have traditionally examined the role of identity, belonging and community in engagement, where fandom can be understood as a particular form of emotional intensity or ‘affect’ (Grossberg, 1992; Hills, 2002) inspired by a media text that is then mobilized in negotiating the level of investment in that text. The studies of fandom offer more comprehensive ways of understanding an audience that can be applied to readers of news

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websites. Fans appropriate or ‘poach’ (Jenkins, 1992) the objects of their fandom and interpret or rework the text before recirculating within the fan community. This can also be referred to as ‘textual performance’ (Lancaster, 2001) where fan culture is articulated through creative self-expression as well as communal activities. Therefore a fan may create content through fan fiction or involve themselves in communal discussions about the object of their fandom. Sandvoss (2005) has described fan engagement as a form of ‘narcissistic’ investment, whereby a fan seeks to construct their identity by either consciously or unconsciously identifying parts of the self in the external object – the source of the fandom. In this way, a fan may not actually identify as a fan, but through regular and repeated consumption of an object of fandom forms an intense and emotional engagement with the media text and the imagined fan community associated with that text. Central to Sandvoss’ thesis is that a definition of fandom should be based on fan practices: The clearest indicator of a particular emotional investment in a given popular text lies in its regular repeated consumption, regardless of who its reader is and regardless of the possible implications of this affection (2005: 7).

Traditionally, the news media has not been classed as an object of fandom, nor its audience as fans. However if we draw on Sandvoss’ conception of the fan, the news audience may not describe themselves as ‘fans’, but through regular and emotionally committed consumption of that media, may well use it as a form of individual and collective identity development in the same way as a ‘fan’ might use a popular culture text. This ‘fan-based’ understanding of engagement enables a way for conceptualising the ‘silent’ practices of the online news audience: it is possible to have highly emotional engagement without ‘producing’ any content. The emphasis on the connection with a community also offers another way of understanding audience engagement with news websites in

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terms of fandom. Fan scholars emphasise the role that identity creation, both individually and collectively, plays in fan engagement and the how it manifests into a sense of belonging to the fan community (Lancaster, 2001; Hills, 2002; Sandvoss, 2005). Typically, virtual communities are understood as being based on shared interests and facilities, shared values and experiences, mutual obligations and social interaction (Hopkins et  al., 2004; Nip, 2004; Tyler, 2006). Nip (2006) summed up the components of community as: a sense of belonging, shared forms of interactions, and social ties among members of the group. Using this concept of community, it is possible to view discussions on news sites as a kind of community activity. In particular the dynamics of community development can offer an insight into motivations for participation on online news sites. Lin (2008) and Bagozzi and Dholakia (2002) found that regular visitors to a virtual community have an intention to produce content. Others (Teo et al., 2003; Meyer and Carey, 2013) found that a sense of belonging played a key role in effecting members’ intention to participate in virtual communities. Additionally, Wasko and Faraj (2005) found that those who do not leave contributions are vital to sustaining a virtual community through their act of viewing contributions. Drawing on the study of fandom’s emphasis on the role of emotional investment in activating a sense of community, the role of emotion and affect in the participation of the online news audience is crucial. A sense of community can encourage active contributions, as it ensures there are members ‘listening’ to those contributions. Equally, a feeling of community membership helps the silent audience to form their own engagement with the website. Through their consumption of the content on the website, both journalist produced and by other audience members, they can create an emotional connection which can help form individual and collective (that of the community of the website) development.

New forms of participation in journalism suggest we need to consider the audience in new ways. Bruns (2005) does this by terming the audience ‘produsers’ because of what they do or as producers of information. The integration of fan theory, in particular the influence of emotion and affect and the mechanisms of community, enables an analysis of the audience activity not just in terms of production, but also in the silent practices that are enabled by a complex process of emotional engagement and identity and community development. To summarise, fan theory can be used to understand those who leave active contributions on news websites by conceptualising these individuals as ‘poaching’ these texts and interpreting them and then circulating within their personal community via their comments and discussions of news stories, sharing stories on social media or by providing sites with material they believe should be included. Equally, it could be argued that the submission of a comment on a story, a news tip or even an image could be theorised as an example of ‘textual performance’ (Lancaster, 2001), where the contributor is using this form of participation as a means of self expression and identity construction. Fandom’s emphasis on the role of collective identity and the sense of belonging to a community can also help inform analysis of the majority of news website audience – the silent majority – who may regularly and repeatedly visit a news website, but never leave an active contribution. These audience members can form an attachment to the website and provide the ‘listening’ cadre necessary for those who make active contributions. Taken as a whole, this fan-based approach destabilizes conventional interpretations of news audiences, and enables a more comprehensive grasp of audience engagement in which emotion and affect are amongst the triggers for participation both in terms of producing content and individual ‘silent’ participation. Indeed, in a study of the audience of alternative and independent news websites

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those not leaving active contributions on a website formed emotional attachment to the site, derived a sense of belonging and identity development, and ultimately felt they participated in the virtual community associated with the website (Barnes, 2014a). Therefore, understanding audience engagement as made up of varying forms of participation from those leaving active contributions through to those who are silent, but actively and often intensely engaged with the website, offers a more sophisticated way for analysing online news audience practices.

THE ECOLOGY OF PARTICIPATION As this chapter has outlined, engagement with online news websites is complex and cannot be understood by solely concentrating on those who leave a visible reminder of their visit to the site. Traditional definitions of ‘participatory journalism’ as only concerned with those who leave active contributions on a website limits the study of how the audience uses news. Instead what has been proposed here is a way to conceptualise the audience through the diversity of practices. Practices, which each individual audience member will choose to undertake depending on various temporal, situational and social factors. A way to conceptualise the diversity of practices of the online news media audience is as an ‘ecology of participation’. The term ecology is used in its most basic sense, and not intended to encompass the complex systemic discourses associated with ‘media ecosystems’ (see Chapter 28) where the term ecology is understood as a way of operationalizing interactions and relationships between different organisms and their environment. Often referred to as the Haeckelian form, after the mid-nineteenth century biologist Ernst Haeckel, who is said to have defined the term when he claimed that: ‘Ecology is the study of all those complex interactions

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referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence’. Understanding then how the audience uses news as an ecology of participation reinforces the importance of the interactions and relationship between each mode of participatory practice. This ecology can therefore be understood as incorporating the practices of actively contributing, listening and distributing with each practice reliant upon and interacting with each other. ‘Actively contributing’ is the act of publicly flagging participation through comments or contributions to news websites. This is akin to what Lancaster (2001), in his articulation of actively contributing fans, describes as ‘performing the self’ and Picone (2011) in his conceptualisation of produsing as selfpublication. The terminology of produser or produsage is not preferred as it is restricted to the production of information. Instead ‘actively contributing’ incorporates all those practices which are visible, which may well be information production such as the submission of a comment or story to a news website, but can also include other visible acts such as ranking of stories or comments or voting on polls. This textual performance can be enacted through creative self-expression, as well as through communal activities, and flags to other active contributors and those not actively contributing that these audience members are participating. These contributions may be both emotional and critical and can serve as a vehicle for ‘affective contagion’ (Gibbs, 2011), which in turn encourages further ‘active contributors’. ‘Active contributors’ are the visible indicators of the news website community, but are reliant on and closely linked to those community members who remain silent. The silent listening audience are necessary, and influence contributions made by ‘active contributors’. ‘Listening’ is the broad mode of practice that can be used to understand how the ‘silent majority’ uses news. It incorporates the practice of ‘background listening’ (Crawford, 2009) or viewing, checking, snacking, scanning or monitoring (Coster Meijer and Groot

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Kormelink, 2014) where ‘commentary and conversations continue as a backdrop throughout the day, with only a few moments requiring concentrated attention’ (Crawford, 2009: 528). However, listening can also incorporate a more complex process whereby the content (both journalist produced and that provided by active contributors) is used to garner a sense of belonging to the online community and facilitate identity development (Barnes, 2014a). What might be termed ‘engaged listeners’ may have emotional or personal reactions to the content, but they will not publicly declare this, instead they will remain silent and internalise this response. ‘Engaged listeners’ are actively producing meanings and pleasure from the texts and form an affective relationship with the news website. They are negotiating their own identity and forming a sense of connection to the collective audience through visiting the site. This form of participation can be associated with fan behaviours as it is characterised by a high level of emotional investment and motivated by the desire to connect with the community, albeit in a silent way. ‘Distributing’ is the practice of sharing and discussing content from the news sites on external sites. Distributors may be ‘active contributors’, even if these active contributions may appear to be silent as they are on external sites such as social media platforms. Shao (2008) has previously termed this ‘participation’ rather than distribution and it has been shown to form a vital component of the participatory news ecology. Despite significant international differences, the number of digital media users who share news through their online social networks, like or rate news stories, or post occasional comments keeps growing (Newman and Levy, 2013). In a digital news environment characterized by information abundance and convergence, users seem more and more likely to spread their news consumption over multiple platforms, hence creating their own ‘personal information space’ (Deuze, 2007: 30–3). News use thus becomes extremely fragmented and

personalized and as such ‘distributors’ play a vital role in the ecology of participation for news websites. Conceptualising audience practices as an ‘ecology of participation’ where each mode of practice, as outlined above, is interrelated offers much to the future study of online news. It provides a framework for qualitative studies of understanding how the audience uses news, moving away from the contemporary focus of quantitative or metric-based approaches to audience engagement. While ratings, shares and clicks provide useful information about the frequency of news consumption they offer little insight into the interrelationship between modes of practice and how individuals actually experience news (see Chapter 36). By incorporating an approach more in line with fandom where deliberation and dialogue operate alongside identity play, community formation and pleasure seeking, the concepts outlined in this chapter provide a way for analysing the practices of the news audience as an experience, rather than within the professional journalistic practices and norms. Framing the practices of the online news audience as an ecology, also enables the study of the interactions between modes of practice and offers potential for analysing how these interactions impact upon overall participation and engagement with news. The ‘ecology of participation’ could be further developed as a framework for studying the flow of news, by analysing how news circulates in relation to the interrelationship between each mode of practice. Overall, it is hoped that the concepts outlined in this chapter provide a way for a more audience-centred approach to the study of participation in online news.

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Hardaker, C. (2010) ‘Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions’, Journal of Politeness Research, 6: 215–42. Harrison, J. (2010) ‘User-generated content and gatekeeping at the BBC hub’, Journalism Studies, 11(2): 243–56. Hermida, A. and Thurman, N. (2007) ‘Comments please: how the British news media is struggling with user-generated content’’ in 8th International Symposium on Online Journalism proceedings, University of Texas, Austin, March 30–31, (http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/papers.php?year=2007) Hills, M. (2002) Fan Cultures. London; New York: Routledge. Holt, K. and Karlsson, M. (2014) ‘“Random acts of journalism?”: How citizen journalists tell the news in Sweden’, New Media Society, doi: 10.1177/1461444814535189 Hopkins, L., Thomas, J., Meredyth, D. and Ewing, S. (2004) ‘Social capital and community building through an electronic network’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 39: 369–79 Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. New York; London: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2004) ‘The cultural logic of media convergence’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1): 33–43. Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence culture. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, H. (2007) The wow climax: tracing the emotional impact of popular culture. New York: New York University Press. Jönsson, A.M. and Örnebring. H. (2011) ‘User Generated Content and the News: Empowerment of Citizens or Interactive Illusion?’, Journalism Practice, 5(2): 127–44. Karlsson, M. (2011) ‘Flourishing but restrained: the evolution of participatory journalism in Swedish online news 2005–2009’, Journalism Practice, 5(1): 68–84. Lancaster, K. (2001) Interacting with Babylon 5. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lin, H. (2008) ‘Determinants of successful virtual communities: Contributions from system characteristics and social factors’, Information and Management, 45(8): 522–27. Lloyd, J. (2009) ‘The listening cure’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 23(4): 477–87.

Meyer, H.K and Carey, M.C. (2013) ‘In moderation: Examining how journalists’ attitudes toward online comments affect the creation of community’, Journalism Practice, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2013.859838 Newman, N. and Levy, D.A.L., (eds) (2013) ‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013’, Tracking the Future of News. Oxford: The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University. (http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ Reuters-Institute-Digital-News-Report-2013. pdf.) Nip, J.Y.M. (2004) ‘The relationship between online and offline communities: the case of the queer sisters’, Media, Culture & Society, 26: 409–28. Nip, J. (2006) ‘Exploring the second phase of public journalism’, Journalism Studies, 7(2): 212–36. O’Donnell, P., Lloyd, J. and Dreher, T. (2009) ‘Listening, pathbuilding and continuations: a research agenda for the analysis of listening’, Continuum: The Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 23(4): 423–39. Picone, I. (2011) ‘Produsage as a form of selfpublication: A qualitative study of casual news produsage’, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 17(1): 99–120. Picone, I., Courtois, C. and Paulussen, S. (2014) ‘When News is Everywhere’, Journalism Practice, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2014.928464 Quandt, T. (2008) ‘(No) news on the world wide web?’, Journalism Studies, 9(5): 717–38. Robinson, S. (2010) ‘Traditionalists vs. convergers: textual privilege boundary work and the journalist–audience relationship in the commenting policies of online news sites’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 16(1): 125–43. Robinson, S. and DeShano, C. (2011) ‘Citizen journalists and their third places’, Journalism Studies, 12(5): 642–57. Saffo, P. (1992) ‘Consumers and interactive new media: A hierarchy of desires’, 1993 Ten-year forecast, Institute for the Future, (http://www.saffo.com/essays/consumers. php). Sandvoss, C. (2005) Fans: The mirror of consumption. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Schrøder, K.C. (2014) ‘News media old and new’, Journalism Studies, 16(1): 60–78. Shao, G. (2008) ‘Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective’, Internet Research, 19(1): 7–25. Shepard, A. (2011) ‘Online comments: dialogue or diatribe?’ Nieman Reports, Summer 2011: 52–53. Sill, M. (2011) The case for open journalism now: a new framework for informing communities, Annenberg Innovation Lab, (http:// w w w. a n n e n b e r g i n n o v a t i o n l a b . o r g / OpenJournalism/). Singer, J.B. (2010) ‘Quality control: perceived effects of user-generated content on newsroom norms values and routines’, Journalism Practice, 4(2): 127–42. Singer, J.B., Hermida, A., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Reich, Z. and Vujnovic, M. (eds) (2011) Participatory journalism: guarding open gates at online newspapers. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Springer, N., Engelmann, I. and Pfaffinger, C. (2015) ‘User comments: motives and inhibitors to write and read’, Information, Communication & Society, doi:10.1080/1369118X. 2014.997268 St. John III, B., Johnson, K. and Nah, S. (2014) ‘Patch.com: The challenge of connective community journalism in the digital sphere’, Journalism Practice, 8(2): 197–212. Teo, H.H, Chan, H.C., Wei, K.K. and Zhang, Z. (2003) ‘Evaluating information accessibility and community adaptivity features for sustaining virtual learning communities’,

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13 Innovation in the Newsroom Steve Paulussen

And the newsroom has historically reacted defensively by watering down or blocking changes, prompting a phrase that echoes almost daily around the business side: ‘The newsroom would never allow that’. (Innovation report from the New York Times, 2014, p. 78, cited by Benton, 2014)

In May 2014, a leaked internal report from the New York Times caused a lot of excitement among media observers, with one of them even calling it ‘one of the key documents of this media age’ (Benton, 2014). Based on an evaluation of the newspaper’s own digital activities as well as those of some of its competitors, the report written by a team of strategists and digital staffers offered 96 pages of analysis and suggestions for the newspaper’s leadership to better manage and foster innovation inside the newsroom. As the authors’ emphasis was on how the New York Times could still do more to adapt to the digital age, the innovation report read a bit like a chronicle of missed opportunities. Yet the relevance of the document stemmed less from its dire and pessimistic tone than from the

fact that it gave a unique inside look into the digital strategy of one of the major leading newspapers in the world. Moreover, the report was remarkable because it revealed the many hindrances faced by legacy news organizations in making the transition to digital. For readers familiar with the scholarly and professional literature on online journalism, these hindrances are well known. In 2004, Pablo Boczkowski already characterized the culture of innovation at newspaper organizations as being ‘marked by reactive, defensive and pragmatic traits’ (2004a: 51). He comprehensively showed that with regard to digital developments, newspapers hardly encouraged experimentation and tended to move only when they were forced to by new players. In other words, they ‘appropriated new technologies with a somewhat conservative mindset, thus acting more slowly and less creatively than competitors less tied to traditional media’ (Boczkowski, 2004a: 52). This analysis has been echoed and reaffirmed in several studies on the adoption of

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technological innovations in newsrooms in different countries around the world. Almost a decade after Boczkowski, David Ryfe (2012) diagnosed American newsrooms as suffering from a general reluctance to embrace innovation due to what he calls a ‘”yes, but” syndrome’: when asked, many journalists recognize the digital challenges, but then come up with different excuses for not coping with them. As will be shown below, the academic literature on online journalism is indeed rich in identifying various ‘yes, but’ factors influencing innovation processes in newsrooms. This chapter starts with a broader discussion on how to understand change and continuity in journalism in an era of digital transition. Next, I will briefly discuss the importance of digital strategies and the inevitable ‘culture clashes’ they engender. This will lead me to a review of the research into the adoption (and adaptation) of new technologies and new practices in journalism, whereby I will pay particular attention to the theoretical and methodological frameworks of these studies and the gaps they leave in our current knowledge and understanding of innovation processes in the newsroom.

THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF NEWSROOMS Although legacy news media have hardly been at the forefront of digital innovation and have been slower to appropriate new technologies and practices than their new digital competitors, ‘the cumulative transformations should not be underestimated’ (Boczkowski, 2004a: 52). Put differently, while news organizations seem to adapt slowly on the short term, their incremental evolution over several years is significant and fundamental. Indeed, in recent scholarly literature the changes in the news industry due to the digital shift are regarded as radical and disruptive (Küng, 2015).

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Schlesinger and Doyle (2015) turn to Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of ‘creative destruction’, which refers to ‘the process of industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating the new one’ (Schumpeter, 1950, cited in Schlesinger and Doyle, 2015: 306). The notion of ‘creative destruction’ is useful for researchers because it considers newsroom innovation neither as a strategy, nor as an end goal, but as a process – as a ‘series of dynamics, mechanisms, means, and changes that lead to a particular outcome’ (Siles and Boczkowski, 2012: 1386). Such a process-oriented conceptualization encapsulates the idea that newsrooms are continuously being reshaped – destroyed and recomposed – in order to adapt to the permanently changing digital news ecosystem. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, virtually all newspaper and broadcast organizations have been restructured to adapt to the digital age. They developed digital and multi-platform strategies and explored a wide range of new opportunities for content production and delivery, including experimentations with multimedia production (Deuze, 2004), blogging (Singer, 2005), user-generated content and audience participation (Singer et  al., 2011), crowdsourcing and data journalism (Anderson, 2013a), social media (Lasorsa et al., 2012), mobile news publishing (Westlund, 2013) and personalized news services (Usher, 2014) – the list of innovations introduced in legacy newsrooms in recent years is in fact quite substantial. Nikki Usher (2014) explains how these innovations relate to a broader shift in newsroom culture that emphasizes three values reshaping news work in the digital age: immediacy, interactivity, and participation. The value of immediacy reflects that news media are coming to terms with a network society where information spreads instantly, which urges journalists to adapt to the constant deadline of a 24/7 news environment. Interactivity refers to the new possibilities

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of hyperlinking, multimedia storytelling and personalized news delivery that allow the user to control and manipulate the content formerly owned by journalists. The third value mentioned is participation: news media are increasingly aware that ‘the Web has become a platform for a social, shared experience of content’ (Usher, 2014: 235). While Usher points out how these new values of digital news production emerged inside the newsroom of the New York Times, the literature makes clear that her analysis holds true for the whole news industry, notwithstanding that some values developed more easily than others (Domingo, 2008). Nevertheless, despite the emergence of new values, the success of legacy news media’s explorations of the immediate, interactive and participatory potentials of the digital environment remains limited, especially in terms of economic viability. According to Picard, the business models of traditional media organizations, which were ‘based on high market power over distribution platforms, mass audience, and mass advertisers’ can no longer be sustained in a digital news ecosystem characterized by new competitors, audience fragmentation and decreasing revenues from sales and advertising (2014: 500). Given the changing economic conditions due to the digital shift (see Chapter 4) and accelerated by the financial crisis, the recent history of legacy news organizations in Western countries has indeed been one of crumbling audiences, decreasing profits, and overwhelming numbers of closures, takeovers, synergies and job losses. Nonetheless, Picard refutes apocalyptic visions on the future of journalism by signaling how journalists and enterprises are ‘adjusting to new conditions, undertaking regeneration and renewal, and pursuing new opportunities’ (2014: 502). This statement resonates with other authors suggesting that journalism is currently at a crucial moment in its history – a ‘new dawn’, where its practices, roles and values will be ‘reconfigured’, ‘renegotiated’ and ‘reinvented’ (Usher, 2014).

A PROCESS OF NEGOTIATION It is useful to understand innovation in the newsroom as an organizational process characterized by different dynamics, mechanisms and negotiations. Most newsroom innovation studies take such an organizational, social constructivist perspective that regards change as a process of continuous negotiations regarding strategy and newsroom culture on different levels and between different actors of the media organization.

Developing a digital strategy Since the rise of the internet, one of the largest challenges for legacy media organizations has been to develop a digital strategy. A major reason is that any vision about the future of digital news is inevitably blurred because of the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability of technological developments. Looking back to the evolution of online newspapers, George Brock, a journalism professor and former newspaper managing editor, admits that the impact of digitalization on journalism was poorly understood by legacy media organizations due to a lack of tradition in experimenting and investing in technology and digital talent (2013: 108–9). Another important element is that, in spite of declining audiences and advertising income, legacy media still derive the lion’s share of their revenues from the ‘old’ offline business model, which makes them even more reluctant to embrace the digital future. Since the emergence of the internet, traditional media organizations have been struggling with the so-called ‘innovator’s dilemma’ (Christensen, 1997): As long as the old business model is still profitable while the new is unstable at best, most managers will opt for caution and implement defensive rather than proactive strategies. Hence, technological innovations in newsrooms are rarely planned or anticipated and seem to arise more out of fear rather than excitement (Nguyen, 2008).

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This general risk-averseness and the lack of a culture of experimentation in newsrooms translates into a high degree of mimicry and contingency (Boczkowski, 2010, Lowrey, 2012). The fear of missing out or lagging behind seems to make media organizations apt to react quickly to each and every technological innovation emerging from outside, mostly by setting up small-sized ad hoc projects whose primary goal is to copy the new things that others are doing. This ‘interorganizational imitation’ or ‘herd behavior’ – concepts borrowed from the disciplines of organizational sociology and managerial economics (Boczkowski, 2010: 18) – explains the hypes often surrounding new tools and practices, as all of a sudden everyone seems to start doing the same thing.

Negotiating cultural change While risk-averseness and herd behavior partly explain the conservative, defensive and contingent character of traditional media’s digital strategies, it is also important to look inside the newsroom to see how innovation is not just a matter of vision and strategy but also of culture, structure and agency. Especially in research about newsroom convergence (that is, the reorganization of newsrooms in order to enable the cross-media production and multi-platform delivery of news) media scholars have theoretically built on change management literature to stress that any reorganization brings about tensions that need to be carefully addressed (Killebrew, 2003). Important research in this area was done by Peter Gade (2004), showing that management’s change initiatives in newsrooms are generally met with skepticism and resistance by the rank-and-file. Later studies confirmed the importance of alignment between the business and journalistic motives for innovation as a precondition for it to become accepted in the newsroom (Quinn, 2005, Tameling and Broersma, 2013). At the same time, online newsroom studies also made clear that the

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process of accepting organizational change requires a profound reconfiguration of often long-standing and deep-rooted routines, values and norms embedded in the work cultures of different entities in the media organization. These work cultures tend to have a braking effect on innovation processes. Whereas Gade (2004) focused on the tensions between management and rank-and-file, other researchers show that ‘culture clashes’ also occur within the rank-and-file, between formerly separated departments, each with their own work culture, who all of a sudden have to work together to make multi-platform news delivery possible. Several studies identify culture clashes and language barriers between the print and broadcast teams that now have to collaborate in integrated newsrooms (Singer, 2004, Silcock and Keith, 2006), while other studies also observe tensions between technical and journalistic staff (Paulussen and Ugille, 2008). To better understand these tensions and culture clashes behind innovation processes, the remainder of this chapter will discuss the different elements constituting journalism’s professional and organizational culture, and how they interact with the implementation of new tools and practices in the newsroom.

FACTORS SHAPING NEWSROOM INNOVATION Most of the research on the adoption of innovations in the newsroom has been conducted from a ‘social shaping of technology’ (SST) perspective. As opposed to linear and deterministic accounts of technological development that tend to describe the relationship between technology and society in terms of ‘impact’ of the former on the latter, researchers in the SST tradition assume a ‘mutual shaping’ between technology and society, thus arguing that the social effects of technology are contingent and dependent on how the technology is adapted to economic, organizational

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and cultural conditions (Lievrouw, 2006). Applied to journalism research, this means that the adoption of technological innovation needs to be examined within the professional and organizational context in which journalists shape the way the innovation is implemented (or not). This idea of the social construction of technology has been, and still is, at the core of most studies about online journalism and newsroom change. Some of the first studies on technological innovation in journalism drew on diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers, 2003) and used surveys as a method for examining the adoption of new technologies among journalists (Garrison, 2001, Singer, 2004). Inspired by the seminal work of Boczkowski (2004a, 2004b), however, more and more researchers recognized that the complexity of the changes taking place in journalism required a more qualitative, interpretative approach. This resulted in a wave of newsroom ethnographies in which researchers combined the methods of participant observation with in-depth interviews and document analysis to gain a better understanding of the profound changes in newsroom culture in a context of convergence (see Paterson and Domingo, 2008, Domingo and Paterson, 2011). Taken together, these online newsroom ethnographies, though diverse in scope and focus, have created a substantial and coherent body of knowledge about the factors shaping innovation processes in the newsroom. Some remarks have to be made about how these factors should be interpreted. First, it is important to note that although these social factors are often discussed in terms of constraints or enablers of innovation adoption, it is not always easy to distinguish between cause and effect in change processes, precisely due to the mutual shaping between technology and social factors. Therefore, researchers tend to emphasize that the factors described below are both shaping (constraining, enabling or altering) and being reshaped by (constrained by/enabled by/ altered by) technological innovations.

Secondly, the fact that the different factors are ‘dependent on each other through complex chains of causes and effects’ (Steensen, 2009: 833) implies that they cannot be understood in isolation of each other. In other words, it is impossible to single out one factor as the key determinant in shaping innovation processes, even though Steensen (2009) suggests there is a certain hierarchy between them. Finally, Steensen remarks that a distinction can be made between structural factors of media organizations and ‘instances of individual practice’ (2009: 822). Following this suggestion, I will first discuss the structural factors influencing change processes in newsrooms, and then focus on what research tells us about the role of agency in shaping journalistic innovations.

Structural factors In a study on the integration of interactivity and multimedia in online journalism, Boczkowski (2004b) proposed an analytical model that makes a distinction between three production factors shaping the processes of technology adoption: organizational structures, work practices, and representations of users. This model has been used in many other online newsroom studies, which contributed to its further refinement and expansion. The list of structural factors that have been identified by researchers as influencing innovation processes in the newsroom has become quite long, but generally speaking, they can be put in two categories: on the one hand, there are issues of organizational management and leadership, and on the other hand, there are factors that refer to the institutionalized production culture in professional journalism.

Organizational structures As said, all legacy newsrooms have gone through fundamental restructuring in order to adapt to the demands of multi-platform news

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delivery. Cost-efficiency and productivity enhancement were the guiding principles of these reorganization efforts that were aimed at integrating offline and online operations and reallocating resources accordingly. Newsroom integration Much has been written in academic and professional literature about the integration of print and online operations in newsrooms. An integrated newsroom structure would facilitate the coordination of cross-media activities and foster cooperation between print and online teams. Yet different forms and models of newsroom integration coexist. Some authors distinguish vertical from horizontal newsroom convergence models (Tameling and Broersma, 2013), while others present a convergence matrix to differentiate between three ideal-typical models of newsroom integration (García Avilés et al., 2014). Each model reflects different decisions made regarding issues of market strategy, newsroom design, work organization, change management support and the journalists’ relationship with the audience. Issues with newsroom integration do not only relate to the physical design of the workplace, but also have to do with confusion about the new organizational hierarchy and lines of command. Singer illustrated this confusion with a quote from a journalist who experienced that all of a sudden he had ‘two different bosses’ (2004: 14). If such issues are not adequately addressed, they may lead to high tensions, sometimes even forcing the newsroom’s management to turn back the clock. Indeed, a tendency of ‘deconvergence’ has already been observed at newspaper as well as broadcast organizations (Tameling and Broersma, 2013; Van den Bulck and Tambuyzer, 2013). Resource reallocation A key aspect in the management of innovation processes concerns the reallocation of resources and investments. As discussed by Quinn (2005), there is an ongoing tension

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between a business view, in which convergence is regarded as merely a cost-saving strategy, and a journalistic view that argues that convergence can only lead to better journalism if it is supported by new investments. This tension has been observed in many online newsroom ethnographies pointing at a lack of resources as a major constraint to the adoption of innovations in the newsroom. Areas where the need for investment is being felt, include: •• Technological infrastructure: Although the role of hardware and software is under-recognized in online journalism research so far (see further), some ethnographic studies discuss how the implementation of new technology, such as a new content management system (CMS), can create tensions between technical and editorial staff with regard to (real and perceived) bugs in the new technology (Paulussen and Ugille, 2008, Schmitz Weiss and Domingo, 2010); •• Recruitment: Different authors have argued that, in hindsight, legacy media should have invested more in hiring digital talent, not only to fill in new job profiles (Kaltenbrunner and Meier, 2013), but also to introduce fresh and disruptive ideas about content production in the newsroom (Ryfe, 2012); •• Training: Several studies suggest that a common concern among staff is that insufficient and inadequate coaching and training on the job is provided to acquire the multiple skills needed to master new tools and practices of digital cross-media news production (Singer, 2004, Kaltenbrunner and Meier, 2013); •• Workflow and time management: While time has always been a scarce resource in journalism, a lack of time has probably become ‘one of most frequently mentioned structural constraints’ to the adoption of new tools and practices in the newsroom (García Avíles and Carvajal, 2008: 237). Workflow and time management has become crucial to allow newsroom staff to adjust to the new demands of the 24/7 mode of news production (Lund, 2012).

When reflecting on this brief overview of organization-related structural factors, one may notice that they are often discussed as contributing to the success or failure of

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innovation. Influenced by media management theories, these factors are indeed often ‘framed prescriptively (…) as a management challenge to be dealt with at the level of the individual news organization’ (Lowrey, 2012: 217). The implicit suggestion, then, is that innovations can succeed if only these structural constraints are properly addressed. The problem with such prescriptive accounts is that they tend to see innovation in newsrooms as being controlled and determined by media management and policy decisionmaking that is imposed from the top down, hence potentially underestimating the role of journalists’ professional culture in shaping innovation processes.

Professional cultures To understand how also professional culture shapes newsroom innovation, it is useful to consider the sociological concept of ‘normalization’. Normalization process theory proposes a framework to understand and explain the mechanisms of how ‘material practices become routinely embedded in social contexts as the result of people working, individually and collectively, to implement them’. The central idea is that this social process is ‘affected by factors that promote or inhibit the routine embedding, or normalization, of a practice in its social contexts’ (May and Finch, 2009: 540). For online journalism research, normalization process theory can be useful to understand the social construction of technology in a newsroom context by focusing on the routines and norms embedded in the professional culture of journalism. This was demonstrated by Singer (2005) in her study on j-blogging in which she concluded that most journalists ‘normalized’ their blogs to fit in their existing norms and practices of information control and gatekeeping. Patterns of ‘normalization’ are also observed with regard to the adoption of Twitter by journalists, where, despite indications of slight adjustments, old habits and conventional role perceptions tend to inform journalists in making

sense of the microblogging platform (Lasorsa et al., 2012). Habits As explained by Ryfe (2012), journalists’ habits often stand in the way of innovation and change. Through socialization, new entrants to the profession learn and adopt the routines and unwritten rules of newsgathering and production. This results in a general belief that ‘the way things are done is the way things ought to be done’ (Ryfe, 2012: 60). As routines are deeply engrained in the daily work practices, they are largely invisible and become so taken-for-granted that journalists find it hard to even imagine other ways of doing journalism. Moreover, routines also serve as ‘strategic rituals’, since doing things the way they have always been done feels safe and comfortable and reduces the risk of being criticized. Literature offers many examples of how routine behavior inhibits journalists from incorporating new tools and practices into their daily work (Deuze, 2008). To illustrate that habits are hard to break, Ryfe describes the example of an editor of an American regional newspaper who wanted to change the way that reporters covered the news. One of his directives was that reporters would no longer make daily visits to the agencies that comprised their beats. The experiment turned into a failure because reporters felt uneasy with the fact that they could no longer rely on their routines of beat reporting. These routines were so deeply embedded in their professional identity that the new rules were not just seen as counter-productive, but also as a direct threat to the reporters’ sense of self. Habits thus ultimately led reporters to reject the new rules (Ryfe, 2012: 57–83). Other studies stress how routine behavior leads journalists to approach new media from a traditional print logic. Especially in the early days of online journalism, journalists struggled with making sense of digital features such as hypertext, interactivity and multimedia, which all challenged the old

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linear textual mode of content production. As traditional journalists were likely to see themselves primarily as ‘writers’ of news stories, adding hyperlinks, interactive features or video material to their stories was simply not considered part of their job (Deuze, 2004). Today, the idea that journalists have to be multi-skilled seems to be more widely accepted, but traces of print dominance can still be observed. Conflicts between online and print routines are also prevalent in the work rhythms within legacy newsrooms, reflecting at least two discourses of ‘immediacy’. In her newsroom ethnography of the New York Times, Usher describes it as follows: Thus, two dynamics were at play …. There was both the old world of immediacy, where breaking news meant tomorrow, and the new world of immediacy in online journalism, where immediacy meant ‘fresh’ constant updates and where the home page would not look the same in any way after six hours (Usher, 2014: 122)

Role perceptions Routines are not only rooted in journalistic beats and print logic, but also in journalists’ perceptions of their gatekeeping role (see Chapters 7 and 16). Particularly in the literature on participatory journalism, much emphasis has been put on the fact that professional newsrooms, by and large, tend to approach the phenomena of user-generated content and citizen journalism from a traditional gatekeeper logic (for other perspectives, see Chapter 12). Research repeatedly found journalists are ‘anxious to emphasize’ that user-generated cannot be a replacement for professional journalism: ‘Journalists see it as their job to vet and verify information, then get it out to the public’ (Singer: 2010: 138). By maintaining and cherishing their gatekeeping role, they try to retain control over the news process. While this is, as Singer notes, ‘undoubtedly an angst-ridden response to an industry in crisis’ (2010: 138), it also relates to professional standards of trust and public accountability. Professional

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journalists keep struggling, for instance, with questions of if and how they have to take responsibility, both in legal and ethical terms, for user contributions published on their websites (Singer et al., 2011). Although professional norms evolve and journalists are increasingly coming to terms with the digital news ecosystem, it is clear that notions of professional control and autonomy can block innovation. Deuze is very explicit about this: Most if not all innovations in journalism tend to be met by doubts regarding their perceived impact on editorial autonomy …. This elevates editorial independence to the status of an ideological value in that it functions to legitimize resistance to (as well as enabling piecemeal adaptation of) change. (Deuze, 2005: 449)

Editorial autonomy also relates to journalists’ representations of their users. Boczkowski (2004b) argues that online newsrooms with a rather high degree of autonomy and decision-making power tend to be more likely to perceive their users as tech-savvy and multimedia-minded than newsrooms that experienced less autonomy. Similar reasoning can be followed for the editorial independence from commercial influences. From a public service perspective, journalists tend to see their ‘imagined public’ as citizens with specific information needs, but under the pressure of commercial motives, they may feel forced to reduce users to ‘eyeballs’ and ‘target groups’, which, in turn, may render them reluctant to change practices (Vujnovic et al., 2010).

Beyond structural factors So far, I have discussed the social construction of technology in the newsroom from an institutional perspective. From this perspective, innovation processes are seen as the outcome of a complex interplay of different structural factors that relate to organizational strategies, structures and resources, on the one hand, and professional routines and

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norms embedded in journalism culture, on the other hand. Although these structural factors can go a long way in helping to understand processes of innovation in newsrooms, the institutional perspective does not suffice as it undervalues the role of agency. Several authors have therefore called for a more practice-oriented approach to innovation processes that gives more credit to individuals’ autonomy within the news organization (Cottle, 2007, Domingo, 2008, Steensen, 2009). A shift of focus from the structural to the individual level does not only help to better localize the agents of change within an organization, but it can also explain the disparate character of innovation processes in newsrooms. The fact that different news organizations tend to adopt quite different approaches and strategies towards innovation does indeed suggest that structural barriers can be both reinforced (if there is, for example, a high degree of unwillingness to adapt) and circumvented (if newsroom staff is able and prepared to change) through local and individual actions. Change processes are thus ultimately shaped by the way in which structural factors are translated into (and renegotiated through) the daily practices of different actors trying to adapt to their changing material environment (Domingo, 2008). Schmitz Weiss and Domingo argue that, complementary to ‘the macro-social perspective that aggregates social actors into collective structures’, there is a need for ‘a micro perspective that focuses on the internal relationships of a specific social group, in which each individual may play a crucial role in the innovation process’ (2010: 1159). They identify in the literature at least two theoretical frameworks that offer such a perspective: the first is the communities of practice (CoP) framework, the other is actor-network theory (ANT). Both frameworks have been used in recent newsroom innovation studies, contributing to what might be labeled as the ‘practice turn’ (Steensen, 2013: 54) and the

‘material turn’ (Boczkowski, 2015) in online newsroom research.

The practice turn Reviewing the literature on newsroom innovation, Steensen rhetorically asks ‘whether individual practice has been downplayed as a determinant for innovation in online newsrooms’ (2009: 822). Following Cottle (2007), he calls for a conceptual change from routine to practice in order to give more credit to the role of journalistic agency in processes of change in newsrooms. He then describes the case of a Norwegian media company where two senior staffers used their strong position within the newsroom to successfully oppose the plans of a project group established by the newspaper’s management. The case study shows how individual actions of only a few key members in the newsroom can play a decisive role in steering processes of innovation. This leads Steensen (2009) to the conclusion that newsroom innovation appears to be random. The haphazard nature of innovation due to individual actions is also observed in the case discussed by Ryfe, where journalists’ unwillingness to change their reporting habits could be partly explained by their troubled relationship with the news editor in charge (2012: 83). Schmitz Weiss and Domingo (2010) use the concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) as a lens for analyzing how innovation emerges from individuals’ shared practices and negotiations in the newsroom. CoP theory was initially developed in an educational context to understand the dynamics of collective learning (Wenger, 1998), but has already been applied as a meta-theoretical framework in other areas, including communication studies. For the study of newsroom innovation processes, Schmitz Weiss and Domingo (2010: 1168) demonstrate that a CoP approach helps to understand how, in the terminology of the theory, ‘through mutual engagement and joint enterprise, journalists adapted to new situations by learning from each other’ and how through this process

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‘new knowledge was quickly naturalized into the shared repertoire of the community’. As opposed to most approaches in newsroom innovation research, the CoP approach focuses on individuals’ shared experiences and attitudes towards the opportunities of new technologies rather than on the conflicts and contradictions they entail (Schmitz Weiss and Domingo, 2010). Although most newsroom studies focus on journalists as key agents of change in the newsroom, online journalism scholars are aware that journalists do not work in a vacuum. Understanding change in journalism therefore requires an examination of the boundaries of the profession and its interactions with other ‘communities of practice’, both inside and outside the news organization. Within the newsroom, it seems worthwhile to pay closer attention to the role of managers and newsroom leaders, whose ‘individual enthusiasm and commitment’ can be key in pushing developments forward (Singer et al., 2011: 63). Also the practices of IT staff in newsrooms need more scrutiny, especially since ‘technologists’ can play a pivotal role in the first stages of innovation adoption in newsrooms (Nielsen, 2012). Westlund and Lewis make the important point that ‘contemporary literature at the nexus of organizational change and media innovation nevertheless appears to adopt a relatively narrow approach when defining and studying those agents participating in media innovation activities’ (2014: 12). Researchers’ focus is mostly narrowed to human actors, and journalists in particular, within the newsroom. To broaden the scope, the authors propose a framework that looks at human as well as non-human agency both within and beyond the newsroom (for a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 23). The framework distinguishes between three ‘agents of media innovations’, namely human actors (including traditional and online journalists, managers, marketing staff, technologists, and users who actively contribute to the

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production of news) audiences (referring to the publics who can contribute to media innovations ‘by virtue of the data created about their engagement with content’ (Westlund and Lewis, 2014: 13); and technological actants (e.g. algorithms, applications and content management systems). The consideration of nonhuman technologies as agents (or ‘actants’) of media innovation alludes to the tendency in journalism research towards an increased engagement with the materiality of news work.

The material turn Studying the mutual shaping of technology and society implies that, aside from social factors and actors, also the role of technology in innovation processes must be taken into account. This may sound obvious, yet online journalism research has generally paid little attention to the way in which technology can play an active role in shaping innovations. Several online newsroom ethnographies acknowledge that technological and material considerations influence attitudes towards innovation among staff (see above), but few of these studies view technology in itself as a proper ‘agent of change’. However, this is slowly changing as more and more online journalism scholars seem to engage with actor-network theory (ANT). Praised by its proponents for the fact that it allows for a truly holistic approach to the analysis of technology in relation to news work (Hemmingway, 2008), Plesner summarizes the merits of ANT (see Chapter 27) as follows: ‘Instead of choosing between (e.g.) an institutional, a discursive, an interpersonal, or a technological focus, such an analysis focuses on all the various kinds of (human and non-human) actors that make a difference in the production of media texts’ (2009: 624). Two aspects are of particular interest here: First, ANT rejects the sociological inclination to provide explanations, and looks instead at associations between human and non-human actors – or ‘actants’ in ANTterminology. Second, due to its holistic

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perspective, ANT does not make any presumptions about the relations between actants, or in other words, it ‘gives primacy neither to people nor to technology’ (Plesner, 2009: 612). Instead, it tries to trace the power relationships (and how they evolve) between the different human and non-human actors within the actor-network of, for instance, a newsroom (see also Hemmingway, 2008). Micó et  al. (2013) show how an ANT approach can lead to a better understanding of the intricate and contingent nature of innovation processes because it considers processes as the outcome of journalists’ interactions with technologies and other actors in the media environment. However, since this study is methodologically based on interviews with journalists, it might still overemphasize the role of human agency (as perceived by the interviewees) in relation to technology. This becomes clearer if we look at recent studies based on new methods that elucidate the ‘active’ role played by technology in processes of innovation, that is, not only through the practices of human actors, but also in a more direct way. Rodgers (2015), for instance, provides an account of the implementation of an inhouse web content management system at a Canadian online newspaper, in which he pays particular attention to ‘the complex ontology’ of the software. He argues that software should ‘be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization, accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely and analysing its capacity to encourage forms of “computational thinking”’ (Rodgers, 2015: 10). Another study that acknowledges this ‘partial autonomy’ of technology is presented by Aitamurto and Lewis (2013) who reveal how Open APIs can actively stimulate and inform R&D developments inside newsrooms and thus serve as an accelerator of open innovation. The evidence in these ANT-inspired studies on media innovations may seem rather anecdotal and localized to the specific context of the cases

described, but nevertheless, by putting materiality more at the center of attention, this strand of research opens new pathways for further inquiry into the complex mechanisms and dynamics underlying innovation processes in journalism.

CONCLUSION Since the emergence of the internet, media and journalism scholars have increasingly become engaged in debates about innovation in journalism. From different disciplinary perspectives, many of which are rooted in the domains of (media) management, sociology and even computer science, and by means of different methods, with newsroom ethnography as the dominant method, researchers have contributed to our understanding of newsroom innovation. In this chapter, I have tried to address the virtues and shortcomings of the different theoretical and methodological approaches taken by these researchers. I also have described the evolution in research from a mainly structuralist perspective towards new perspectives that give more credit to the role of human and non-human agency in shaping processes of innovation. To end this chapter, I will briefly reflect on some of the future directions research on this topic can take. First, I want to refer to Boczkowski’s (2011) suggestion that online journalism research has not yet resulted in major contributions to the further development of theories on innovation and organizational change. Looking at the literature today, it appears that journalism scholars are still rather hesitant to rethink theories or build new ones on the basis of their findings. Instead, they seem to draw upon concepts and frameworks from other domains and make them fit within their own research designs. As indicated in this chapter, online journalism scholars have found theoretical inspiration in literature ranging from change

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management over mimicry theories and normalization process theory to communities of practices models and actor-network theory. The diversity of frameworks used has resulted in a rich but scattered literature that is tributary rather than contributive to these theoretical sources. Nevertheless, a review of this literature provides us with a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between structural and individual, human and non-human, factors and actors underlying the processes of innovation in journalism. At the same time, it remains difficult to grasp the relative autonomy of each and every factor in relation to other factors. For example, if we accept that technology is an independent, partially autonomous actant of change, how much weight should we ascribe to it before getting trapped in technological determinism (Domingo, 2015)? And how much autonomy do individual journalists really have to innovate and experiment within a structural context that is defined by economic, organizational, cultural and technological conditions? As argued above, the structural conditions within newsrooms can serve as barriers to, but also as enablers of change. Yet it is fair to say that research tends to emphasize the hindering effects. A possible explanation is that most studies focus at the newsroom as a whole, which can lead to an under-recognition of internal dynamics and differences among staff or within specific teams. Therefore, it seems relevant to pay closer attention to those newsrooms – and the departments within those newsrooms – that have strategies in place to explore and develop new ways of doing journalism. The studies discussed above under the heading of the ‘practice turn’ already guide in that direction. Thinking of new opportunities for research on innovation in journalism, it also seems evident that scholars will continue to engage in research into the role of materiality in news work. This relates to Anderson’s (2013a) proposal to expand the existing arsenal of

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economic, political, cultural and organizational lenses in the sociology of news with a technological lens. On the theoretical front, ANT probably offers the most interesting perspectives for a better understanding of the materiality in processes of innovation. However, the employment of ANT will also require methodological renewal, whereby tech-savvy media scholars with some background knowledge of computer code and algorithms may have a competitive advantage (see also Lewis and Usher, 2013). Finally, it may have occurred to the reader that this chapter has almost exclusively focused on innovation processes inside the newsrooms of legacy media organizations. However, partly due to the defensive innovation strategies of legacy media, much of the innovation in journalism takes shape outside these newsrooms (see Chapter 10). Hence, it may be more fruitful to look beyond the newsroom, and beyond professional journalism, to better grasp how innovations in the production and distribution of news emerge and evolve (Anderson, 2013b). Knowledge gained from research within the borders of the newsroom can then both contribute to and be improved by the further development of those studies that examine journalism and news innovation in the broader context of the convergent and networked media ecosystem (see Chapter 28).

REFERENCES Aitamurto, Tanja and Lewis, Seth C. (2013) ‘Open innovation in digital journalism: Examining the impact of Open APIs at four news organizations’, New Media & Society, 15(2): 314–31. Anderson, C.W. (2013a) ‘Towards a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism’, New Media and Society, 15(7): 1005–21. Anderson, C.W. (2013b) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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Benton, Joshua (2014) ‘The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age’, Nieman Journalism Lab, http://www.niemanlab.org/ 2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-timesinnovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documentsof-this-media-age. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2004a) Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2004b) ‘The processes of adopting multimedia and interactivity in three online newsrooms’, Journal of Communication, 54(2): 197–213. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2010) News at Work. Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2011) ‘Future avenues for research on online news production’, in David Domingo and Chris Paterson (eds), Making Online News – Volume 2. Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 161–65. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2015) ‘The material turn in the study of journalism: Some hopeful and cautionary remarks from an early explorer’, Journalism, 16(1): 65–8. Brock, George (2013) Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age. London: Kogan Page. Christensen, Clayton (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School. Cottle, Simon (2007) ‘Ethnography and news production: New(s) developments in the field’, Sociology Compass, 1(1): 1–16. Deuze, Mark (2004) ‘What is multimedia journalism?’, Journalism Studies, 5(2): 139–52. Deuze, Mark (2005) ‘What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered’, Journalism, 6(4): 442–64. Deuze, Mark (2008) ‘Understanding journalism as newswork: How it changes, and how it remains the same’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 5(2): 4–23. Domingo, David (2008) ‘Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: dealing with an uncomfortable myth’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(3): 680–704.

Domingo, David (2015) ‘Research that empowers responsibility: Reconciling human agency with materiality’, Journalism, 16(1): 69–73. Domingo, David and Paterson, Chris (eds) (2011) Making Online News – Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism. New York: Peter Lang. Gade, Peter J. (2004) ‘Newspapers and organizational development: Management and journalist perceptions of newsroom cultural change’, Journalism & Communication Monographs, 6(1): 3–55. García Avilés, José A., Kaltenbrunner, Andy and Meier, Klaus (2014). ‘Media convergence revisited: lessons learned on newsroom integration in Austria, Germany and Spain’, Journalism Practice, 8(5): 573–84. Garrison, Bruce (2001) ‘Diffusion of online information technologies in newspaper newsrooms’, Journalism, 2(2): 221–39. Hemmingway, Emma (2008) Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Re­­ gional Television News. London: Routledge. Kaltenbrunner, Andy and Meier, Klaus (2013) ‘Convergent journalism – newsrooms, routines, job profiles and training’, in Sandra Diehl and Matthias Karmasin (eds), Media and Convergence Management. Berlin: Springer. pp. 285–98. Killebrew, Kenneth C. (2003) ‘Culture, creativity and convergence: Managing journalists in a changing information workplace’, International Journal on Media Management, 5(1): 39–46. Küng, Lucy (2015) Innovators in Digital News. London: I.B. Tauris. Lasorsa, Dominic L., Lewis, Seth C. and Holton, Avery E. (2012) ‘Normalizing Twitter. Journalism practice in an emerging communication space’, Journalism Studies, 13(1): 19–36. Lewis, Seth C. and Usher, Nikki (2013) ‘Open source and journalism: toward new frameworks for imagining news innovation’, Media, Culture & Society, 35(5): 602–19. Lievrouw, Leah A. (2006) ‘New media design and development: Diffusion of innovations vs Social Shaping of Technology’, in Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (eds), The Handbook of New Media. London: Sage. pp. 246–65. Lowrey, Wilson (2012) ‘Journalism innovation and the ecology of news production:

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institutional tendencies’, Journalism & Communication Monographs, 14(4): 214–87. Lund, Maria K. (2012) ‘More news for less: How the professional values of 24/7 journalism reshaped Norway’s TV2 newsroom’, Journalism Practice, 6(2): 201–16. May, Carl and Finch, Tracy (2009) ‘Implementing, embedding, and integrating practices: An outline of normalization process theory’, Sociology, 34(3): 535–54. Micó, Josep, L., Masip, Pere and Domingo, David (2013) ‘To wish impossible things. Convergence as a process of diffusion of innovations in an actor-network’, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 118–37. Nguyen, Ann (2008) ‘Facing “the fabulous monster”. The traditional media’s fear-driven innovation culture in the development of online news’, Journalism Studies, 9(1): 91–104. Nielsen, Rasmus K. (2012) ‘How newspapers began to blog. Recognizing the role of technologists in old media organizations’ development of new media technologies’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(6): 959–78. Paterson, Chris and Domingo, David (eds) (2008) Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. New York: Peter Lang. Paulussen, Steve and Ugille, Pieter (2008) ‘User generated content in the newsroom. Professional and organisational constraints on participatory journalism’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 5(2): 24–41. Picard, Robert (2014) ‘Twilight or new dawn of journalism? Evidence from the changing news ecosystem’, Journalism Studies, 15(5): 500–10. Plesner, Ursula (2009) ‘An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: communication technologies as actants in newswork’, Journalism, 10(5): 604–26. Quinn, Stephen (2005) ‘Convergence’s fundamental question’, Journalism Studies, 6(1): 29–38. Rodgers, Scott (2015) ‘Foreign objects? Web content management systems, journalism cultures and the ontology of software’, Journalism, 16(1): 10–26. Rogers, Everett M. (2003) Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). New York: The Free Press.

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Ryfe, David M. (2012) Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Schlesinger, Philip and Doyle, Gillian (2015) ‘From organizational crisis to multi-platform salvation? Creative destruction and recomposition of news media’, Journalism, 16(3): 305–23. Schmitz Weiss, Amy and Domingo, David (2010) ‘Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice’, New Media & Society, 12(7): 1156–71. Silcock, B. William and Keith, Susan (2006) ‘Translating the Tower of Babel? Issues of definition, language, and culture in converged newsrooms’, Journalism Studies, 7(4): 610–27. Siles, Ignacio and Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2012) ‘Making sense of the newspaper crisis: A critical assessment of existing research and an agenda for future work’, New Media & Society, 14(8): 1375–94. Singer, Jane B. (2004) ‘Strange bedfellows? The diffusion of convergence in four news organizations’, Journalism, 5(1): 3–18. Singer, Jane B. (2005) ‘The political j-blogger: “Normalizing” a new media form to fit old norms and practices’, Journalism, 6(2): 173–98. Singer, Jane B. (2010) ‘Quality control: Perceived effects of user-generated content on newsroom norms, values and routines’, Journalism Practice, 4(2): 127–42. Singer, Jane B., Hermida, Alfred, Domingo, David, Heinonen, Ari, Paulussen, Steve, Quandt, Thorsten, Reich, Zvi and Vujnovic, Marina (2011) Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Steensen, Steen (2009) ‘What’s stopping them? Towards a grounded theory of innovation in online journalism’, Journalism Studies, 10(6): 821–36. Steensen, Steen (2013) ‘Balancing the bias: the need for counter-discursive perspectives in media innovation research’, in Tanja Storsul and Arne H. Krumsvik (eds), Media Innovations: A Multidisciplinary Study of Change. Göteborg: Nordicom. pp. 45–59. Tameling, Klaske and Broersma, Marcel (2013) ‘De-converging the newsroom: Strategies for

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newsroom change and their influence on journalism practice’, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 19–34. Usher, Nikki (2014) Making News at The New York Times. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Van den Bulck, Hilde and Tambuyzer, Sil (2013) ‘Collisions of convergence: Flemish news workers’ and management’s perceptions of the impact of PSB newsroom integration on journalistic practices and identities’, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 54–75. Vujnovic, Marina, Singer, Jane B., Paulussen, Steve, Heinonen, Ari, Reich, Zvi, Quandt,

Thorsten, Hermida, Alfred and Domingo, David (2010). ‘Exploring the politicaleconomic factors of participatory journalism’, Journalism Practice, 4(3): 285–96. Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westlund, Oscar (2013) ‘Mobile news: A review and model of journalism in an age of mobile media’, Digital Journalism, 1(1): 6–26. Westlund, Oscar and Lewis, Seth (2014) ‘Agents of media innovations: Actors, actants and audiences’, The Journal of Media Innovations, 1(2): 10–35.

14 Outsourcing Newswork Henrik Örnebring and Raul Ferrer Conill

INTRODUCTION Outsourcing refers to the contracting out of previously internal business processes to a third party (Grossman and Helpman, 2005; Hätönen and Eriksson, 2009). The practice is common in many business sectors and spans outsourcing one specific procedure to a local partner, to outsourcing several processes to countries far away from the core business (so-called offshore outsourcing or just offshoring; Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg, 2011). In the business literature outsourcing is generally viewed in a positive light as it allows companies to focus on their core activities (Barrar and Gervais, 2006; Gilley and Rasheed, 2000), but there is also a wideranging literature outside of the applied business field that adopts a very critical perspective on outsourcing (Kalleberg, 2009; Klein, 2000; Standing, 2011). Outsourcing has been linked to circumvention of labor regulation (Benner, 2002; Burkholder, 2006), exploitation and wage inequality (Feenstra

and Hanson, 1996), poor job safety (Mayhew and Quinlan, 1999; Quinlan and Bohle, 2008), and anti-union practices (Noronha and D’Cruz, 2006), for example. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several cases of outsourcing in the news business have gained wider public attention. In these cases, what has been viewed as controversial is not the safety or the low salaries of the outsourced newsworkers, but rather the fact that journalism has been outsourced to begin with. Reuters outsourced their IT database work to India in 2004 and soon went further by outsourcing parts of their coverage of the New York Stock Exchange to Bangalore (Jeffery, 2006; Ramesh, 2004; Schifferes, 2007). In 2007, California local news website Pasadena Now outsourced the reporting of City Council meetings to India (Ehrenreich, 2007; Maderazo, 2007); this was possible because Pasadena City Council meetings at the time were broadcast on the Web. Critical journalist Jennifer Maderazo’s headline prediction (‘Reporting from Afar Might Work,

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But Not For Local News’) turned out to be wrong, as in 2012 Pasadena Now founder James Macpherson announced that he had developed a platform to help other local news organizations outsource their local coverage as well (Sheffield, 2012). This announcement came just one month after the revelation that US company Journatic had outsourced local coverage for newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle to the Philippines using fake bylines with more American-sounding names (Tarkov, 2012). Attention to the concept of outsourcing within Journalism Studies remains scant, however. Mosco, who has studied outsourcing in knowledge and cultural work in general, points out that while outsourcing of so-called ‘knowledge work’ is growing in importance (mainly driven by the software industry), much of the evidence of outsourcing of media and newswork specifically, is anecdotal (Mosco, 2006: 776–7). Following Mosco’s critical observation, we do not think that outsourcing in journalism is best analyzed or understood through the extreme examples described previously. This type of outsourcing is clearly not the industry norm. Focus on these cases ignores the fact that outsourcing in different forms has always been a part of the news business. Most newspapers have outsourced some or all of their foreign coverage to news agencies for more than 150 years. The founding of the large transnational news agencies in the nineteenth century were closely linked to the industrialization of news and an emerging division of labor within the news business (Rantanen, 2009: 45–6), and national news agencies applied the practice of outsourcing to national news (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 2000). Similarly, in the early history of the mass press (i.e. the latter half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century), ‘freelancing’, though it was not known by that name, was the norm in journalism and permanent, contractual employment was the exception (Örnebring, 2013). Almost all production of journalistic

texts was outsourced in the sense that it was done by contingent employees outside the newsroom. This chapter draws upon existing literature as well as 10 informant interviews; the participants include both senior editors/ managers and stringers and they represent a range of media organizations both national and international, (Reuters and Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), the largest Swedish national news agency); newspapers like Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter and national public service broadcasters, such as the BBC (UK), SVT (Sweden), and TVE (Spain). Informants also include a news producer at a local news agency, and four so-called stringers – local freelancers who may or may not have journalism as their main source of income. The aim of the interviews was to gather descriptive data on what industry practices related to outsourcing look like. Informants with different roles and from different media organizations were used in order to, where possible, corroborate and verify described practices and make rough assessments of how widespread they are.

OUTSOURCING – DRAWING THE BOUNDARIES There are many contemporary practices in journalism and news production that could metaphorically be viewed as outsourcing but which are not necessarily outsourcing in a strict definition of the term since a formalized, contractual relationship between the outsourcer and the ‘outsourcee’ does not exist. On the other hand, outsourcing in this strict sense is clearly part of wider trends in the news industry. For example, most news organizations today make extensive use of audience-generated material, in particular when covering big breaking news events. The 2005 BBC coverage of the London bombings could be viewed as the ‘model case’ for this large-scale use of

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citizen-submitted material: on its website, the BBC incorporated a large amount of raw video, photographs and messages recorded and supplied by survivors and witnesses within the tunnels of the subway (Sambrook, 2005). The relevance of user-generated content (UGC) in terms of outsourcing is apparent when news organizations like the BBC (and many others) offer payment to users (thereby entering into a contractual relationship with the submitter) for content that is deemed particularly important or unique (Conlan, 2006; Robinson, 2007). However, such practices do not require a long-term contractual relationship with a specific service provider; as this phenomenon is covered in Chapters 15 and 18 in this volume, we will focus here on outsourcing that is more longterm and contractual. A more obvious example of metaphorical outsourcing is the growing amount of PR material that is turned into news with little or no editing (Lewis et  al., 2008) also known as churnalism (Davis, 2008). This practice is definitely an important external source of ready-made news, but does not rest on an active, formal business decision to enter into a contractual relationship with another company. The currency here becomes media exposure in exchange for minimal journalistic editing increasing the trend of producing news content by actors outside the newsroom/ news organization. However, repurposed content becomes relevant to outsourcing practice research when news agencies deliver content that derives from press releases. As Johnston and Forde (2011) show, when news publishers buy news from a news agency, they regard the content as credible and of higher quality than mere press releases simply because it is created by fellow journalists. In such cases, the added value embedded in the content is merely symbolic and raises questions of quality, autonomy, and transparency that we will address later in this chapter. Thus, while we see outsourcing in journalism as part of the wider trend of increased production demands coupled with decreased

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resources (see Chapter 4), we think it is useful to be more discriminate when using the term in relation to professional journalistic work. Using outsourcing in a metaphorical sense waters down the term somewhat and also creates a bias for novelty, when in fact outsourcing has been a cornerstone of the news business for more than a hundred years. Historically, it is clear that news agencies have been the key players in this outsourcing, which is why they will also be in the focus of this chapter (though other forms of outsourcing will be covered as well). We also want to place outsourcing as a ‘digital journalism’ concept within the wider debate on how technology is reshaping journalistic work in various ways (see, for example, Anderson, 2011; Bromley, 1997; Örnebring, 2010; Parasie and Dagiral, 2013; Powers, 2012). So far, studies of technology and newswork have focused on technologies and practices of the newsroom (see Chapter 13). We wish instead to focus on the role of technologies in coordinating and controlling journalistic work that takes place outside the newsroom. In line with our aim of contextualization, we continue with a discussion of how outsourcing fits in with wider news industry structures and how it relates to changing labor conditions in journalism. This is followed by a section on how outsourcing affects journalistic practice, in particular the interactions between actors ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the newsroom. We then enter into a discussion on the relationship between (digital) technology and outsourcing, before tackling the normative implications of existing outsourcing practices as well as possible future complications.

OUTSOURCING: INDUSTRY STRUCTURES AND LABOR CONDITIONS News organizations have long outsourced many business processes not directly related to the production of news content itself, such

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as distribution (van Weezel 2009), printing (Bakker 2002), layout, design and infographic production (Bekhit 2009), and advertising sales/production (MacInnes and Adam 2006). In recent years, user-generated content processing has also been outsourced, notably the moderation of online comments (Braun and Gillespie 2011; Domingo 2011: 78). All these forms of outsourcing have generally not been considered controversial, and they demonstrate that outsourcing is widespread within the industry and that there is no apparent or particular resistance to outsourcing in general. However, normative concerns surrounding outsourcing has generally focused on the outsourcing of news content production. There are three main ways in which such outsourcing is integrated into industry structures: the work of news agencies as outsourcing brokers; the use of freelancers in many areas of newswork; and the existence of so-called content sharing agreements. These will be covered here in turn, followed by a discussion of how outsourcing fits in with the general transformation of labor conditions and employment strategies in the news industry. News agencies play a crucial role in the overall division of labor within the industry, a role that has been significantly strengthened over time (Boyd-Barrett, 1980; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 2000, 2004; Fenby, 1986; Paterson, 1999, 2010, 2011; Rantanen, 1998). The best illustration of how contemporary news agencies fit into the overall industry structures of journalism outsourcing is to provide an example of how a contemporary news agency operates, and in particular of how news agencies have broadened the range and scope of outsourcing services they offer. Our example is TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå/ The Newspaper Telegram Agency), Sweden’s largest national news agency, and the following information comes from one of our informants, from public sources, as well as from Czarniawska’s study of TT (2011). The agency currently produces and/or edits content for major Swedish news outlets

and conglomerates such as the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily News), the newspaper group Stampen Local Media (incorporating eight local Swedish dailies and nine local freesheets), Metro, and Talentum (a magazine publisher specializing in professional/industry magazines in areas like technology, business, marketing and law). TT has over the years incorporated processes that used to be managed by their clients internally, such as subediting/copyediting and design/layout. This process of increasing the number of outsourced services has accelerated with the introduction of digital technologies. As TT has grown in importance, it has also streamlined its business processes in order to focus on becoming a news transaction channel in the media market; TT now outsources several of their ‘own’ processes to freelancers and other companies as well. Journalistic content like feature material that requires specific competencies, much foreign coverage, and other specialized services are handled by freelancers or other media specialized agencies. One such example is TT’s Swiss partner company Six Telekurs, which provides financial information and data services. TT also has different text and image content agreements with other major international new agencies like AP, Reuters, and AFP, as well as other Nordic agencies. A high-capacity technological infrastructure for real-time information transfer is what makes it possible for TT to essentially act as an outsourcing broker: news organizations buy a content stream from TT, who in turn buys elements of this content stream from other, specialized companies. This represents a two-tier or sometimes multiple-tier outsourcing which obviously makes the original information source less transparent for the news consumer. Transnational news agencies use similar processes and procedures but on an international rather than a national market; their role in providing particular forms of content (mainly foreign coverage) is so dominant that Paterson suggests that the nowmaligned term ‘media imperialism’ is still

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relevant to describe it (Paterson, 2011: 18). The key point here is that news agencies are thoroughly integrated into the news industry and that most news organizations would find it difficult to function without the outsourcing services they provide; yet these services are largely considered unproblematic and ‘natural’ within the industry. The use of freelancers or stringers is likewise a naturalized and deeply embedded form of outsourcing within the news industry. This is likely due to the long historical continuity of contingent labor within the news industry; as previously noted, ‘freelancing’ was long the norm, not the exception. Research on freelancing within journalism has to date focused on working conditions and the structural change in labor markets (see, for example, Baines, 1999, 2002; Dex et  al., 2000; Ekinsmyth, 1999; Storey et al., 2005). A key question has been whether freelancing is a choice or a condition that is forced on workers due to cutbacks and downsizing. To date the evidence is mixed: on the one hand, many freelancers report high job satisfaction but at the same time did enter the contingent work force involuntarily in the first place, that is they lost their permanent jobs (Edström and Ladendorf, 2012; Massey and Elmore, 2011; Nies and Pedersini, 2003). Unfortunately, little is known about the scope and extent of this transformation of labor conditions and the shift to more contingent work, other than that the casualization of journalistic work seems to be on the increase (Walters et  al., 2006). Organizations like Pew Research Centre track the disappearance of full-time permanent jobs in journalism (for example, a 6.5 percent decrease in full-time permanent jobs in the US newspaper industry in 2012; see Guskin, 2013) but we do not know if the people losing their jobs become freelancers, go to other types of media organizations, or leave journalism altogether. There is some evidence that freelance work and other types of contingent employment is more common in the online news industry than elsewhere (Deuze and Fortunati, 2011: 116). General

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issues of wage inequality and precarious working conditions that apply to outsourcing in general are also present in freelance journalism (D’Amours and Legault, 2013; Gynnild, 2005). The few scholars to actually study this casualization of journalistic labor are very critical and also highlight the fact that outsourcing of this type also weakens professional identities, makes mentoring in the workplace more difficult, and makes it more difficult for journalists to build relationships with sources over time (Gollmitzer, 2014; Lee-Wright, 2012). Cohen (2012) also highlights the fact that freelance journalists have particularly weak intellectual property protections and that employers often use their materials more extensively than regulated in their contracts. The main takeaway points of the research on freelance journalism as a form of outsourcing are that the phenomenon is on the increase, and that previous research has tended to take for granted the crucial role that employment security plays in the ability of journalists to form and maintain professional practices, values and identities. The third and final well-established form of outsourcing in the news industry is content-sharing agreements, or shared-service agreements. This is a type of contractual arrangement (common both in commercial and public service news organizations) where content that has been gathered and compiled by an organization is offered to all the members of the network. These agreements are done in terms of reciprocity, and while the contract may include fees, the distribution of content is done for free. An example of this is the Eurovision Exchange News Network (EVN), which distributes and shares contents to all its members with the aim of ‘distributing costs and benefits in the shape of an international broadcasting union’ (Kressley, 1978). EVN was established 60 years ago and it now serves worldwide news coverage from over 100 sources through a constant feed of digital content. Producers, editors and newscasters only need to use EVN’s framework to select the news they want to cover in

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order to access the content, which is ready to be formatted and included in their production pipeline. In the USA, similar shared-service or joint-service agreements between local broadcasters have been criticized as a way of circumventing ownership concentration legislation (Potter and Matsa, 2014; Powell, 2014; Stearns and Wright, 2011) and have been linked to homogenization of content (Stelter, 2012). In their report on the topic, Stearns and Wright (2011:6) found that the end result of most shared-service agreements is that viewers get to see the same content on competing local broadcast stations – a clear homogenization of content.

OUTSOURCING AND WORK PRACTICES The structural changes in labour conditions in the wake of increased outsourcing discussed previously – the decrease in permanent, full-time jobs and the increase in contingent employment – could reasonably be expected to also affect working practices. However, while there is a long-standing interest in Journalism Studies in working practices, this research has generally been based on the practices of permanent, fulltime employees (Gollmitzer, 2014). ‘Working practices’ in journalism research thus usually refers to working practices in the newsroom, but many earlier works on the topic also discuss the difficulties of making a strict distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, even in the pre-internet era. Tuchman’s (1978) work is notable here, particularly when she discusses the issues involved in coordinating a journalistic staff that might be geographically dispersed (Tuchman, 1978: 25ff) – though she of course makes no reference to outsourcing as that was not a central feature of the type of newswork she studied. Similarly, White’s classic study of gatekeeping practices (1950) deals with the working practices surrounding the outsourcing of

newswork (selecting news from a wire service feed) but does not treat the use of wire services per se as a research problem. Gatekeeping research following White has focused on these selection criteria but has not framed the wire editor as someone specialized in managing and processing outsourced newswork, for example. There are a number of studies that hint at changing working practices in the wake of increased outsourcing, and also studies that specifically study the practices of freelance journalists. Few of these studies place such changes and specificities within an overarching context of increased employment precarity and use of outsourcing – Gollmitzer (2014) being a recent exception (see also Deuze, 2007). In work on so-called entrepreneurial journalism, for example, critical discussions of outsourcing and precarity are conspicuous in their absence as authors simply ignore the fact that the need to be ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘flexible’ in large part stems from an overarching shift of risk from employer to employees (see, for example, Baines and Kennedy, 2010; Briggs, 2011; Hunter and Nel, 2011). In a study of social media use and attitudes to social media among Swedish journalists, Hedman and Djerf-Pierre found that freelance journalists in general were more frequent social media users and more enthusiastic about their use, in particular because freelancers had to use social media more frequently for purposes of personal branding and networking (Hedman and Djerf-Pierre, 2013: 382). Gollmitzer’s research reveals an increased internal stratification of newswork (see also Klinenberg, 2005) following increased contingency and outsourcing, where ‘[P]ermanently employed journalists increasingly manage budgets and engage in administrative tasks while a growing number of freelancers and interns perform the “actual” journalistic work, including research and investigation of topics, interaction with sources, and creation of news texts’ (Gollmitzer, 2014: 836). And as legacy news organizations generally have

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different budgets for their main outlets and for the digital one, fees for each medium can vary greatly. As articles for the Web command lower fees, the proliferation of digital publications has increased the number of outlets where non-exclusive stringers can publish their content, opening the doors to niche and local contributors (Deuze 2009; Lewis et al., 2010) but has also created an environment where online journalistic production often pays next to nothing (Bakker, 2012). Gynnhild (2005) has also noted that there is a clear stratification within the field of freelance journalism, where a few ‘superstars’ can command high fees and enjoy a great degree of autonomy, but where the majority of freelancers work under conditions of low security and limited autonomy. In her interviews with UK freelancers, Brown notes that even some senior freelancers are fearful of even leaving for a holiday since they do not feel certain that there would be new assignments for them when they come back (Brown, 2010). The need to have a steady income has created working conditions where freelance journalists in practice become more like freelance text producers, writing journalistic texts one day and PR material the next (Cohen, 2012; Krasovec and Zagar, 2009), something that of course also contributes to the internal stratification of journalistic work. Furthermore, this stratification clearly has gender lines as women are more likely to embark on freelance journalism careers than men, and women also stay freelancers for longer (Bastin, 2012; Massey and Elmore, 2011). The specific kind of freelancing linked to the production of foreign news (in particular news from conflict zones), that is the use of stringers, often local journalists or ‘fixers’, is something that has raised somewhat more critical scholarly interest. Such stringers are often not insured – a very significant reduction in cost for the outsourcing media organization – which has led to critiques of the ethics involved since these stringers frequently are at high risk of injury or death

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(Bishara 2006; Pendry 2011; Seo 2014). Other research on this topic has highlighted the extreme reliance of (Western) news agencies (and by extension Western news media in general) on local contingent employees, who often work under much more strenuous and risky conditions than their Western colleagues (Bunce, 2011; Paterson et al., 2011). Studies also indicate that industry practices surrounding the use of local employees (in effect a type of outsourcing) are highly sophisticated but largely non-transparent for audiences (Murrell, 2010; again, see Paterson et al., 2011). The modes of interaction between freelancers, news agencies and media outlets are highly atomized. From the stringer’s point of view, the technological platforms and requirements are different for each news organization. The multiskilling demands that have been extensively researched in the newsroom context (Domingo et al., 2007; Huang, 2006; Singer et  al., 2011) thus also apply outside the newsroom as freelancers need to adapt their production and delivery methods to the technological requirements of their employers. These patterns are often shaped by the degree of involvement and trust between the freelancer and the employer, because from the news agency’s perspective, it is the experience and degree of trust with each freelancer that defines how the individual is going to collaborate with the company. A stringer must earn the credentials to collaborate tightly with the agency. As performance and reliability are established, the freelancer may be granted access to the editing system (Johnston and Forde, 2011; Paterson, 2011: 92ff). According to most of our informants, this process tightens the relationship between both actors. It reduces the risk for both parties: the news agency runs less risk of running unverified, erroneous information and the stringer runs less risk of becoming unemployed. This is consistent with research that shows that many journalism freelancers attempt to build long-term relationships with a limited number of clients (Baines, 1999).

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If the news agency and the freelancer are consistently reliable and accurate, the news outlet (which buys the outsourcing service from the news agency) tends to waive factand source-checking filters. Brokerage and services based on a network model are central to contemporary news outsourcing. A news agency like Reuters has a whole section in their staff handbook on to how to deal with stringers. This particular piece of ‘specialized guidance’ advises cautious skepticism when hiring freelancers. Words like ‘beware’, ‘be cautious’, and ‘the smell test’ (Reuters, n.d.) pinpoints the issue of trust when dealing with external contributors. On the other hand, there are many examples of the increasing automation and atomization of newswork processes by incorporating technological innovation that invites the use of dislocated journalists (rather than attempting to reduce it). Websites like Find Stringers (www.findstringers.com) offer news organizations a streamlining of the process of hiring freelance journalists.

OUTSOURCING AND TECHNOLOGY It is generally accepted that various forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played an important role in the spread of outsourcing (Abramovsky and Griffith, 2006; Orlikowski and Barley, 2001; Stanworth, 1998) and that technology has made new forms of ‘teleworking’ possible, not least in the media sector (Baines, 2002; Deuze, 2007). Digital communication networks and tools make it easier and more feasible to move certain work tasks and work areas to geographically distant places. In the case of journalism and the news industry, one can find many more historical examples of technology-driven outsourcing: it was the global telegraph networks that made outsourcing of foreign news coverage to news agencies possible. Technology and outsourcing are linked and interrelated. As before, we

see news agencies as historically at the forefront of news outsourcing, so they remain the natural focus of our discussion. As Czarniawska (2011) reflects in her ethnographic study of news agency work, the cybernization of news production – the incorporation and interaction of human and non-human actors in an attempt to optimize the flow of the process – results in routines embedded in technologies that rely on monitoring, coding, and filtering actions that solve the problems of information overflow. This information overflow is a problem that is perceived as derived from technological advancement and innovation, but also one that could be solved at the same time through technological processes. The increasing automation of the control of news production ‘rationalizes’ the relationship between news organizations and stringers/freelancers, as well as the relationship between news organizations buying outsourcing services from other news organizations. Another example of this cybernization is the automation of metadata annotations and the use of predictive algorithms to suggest suitable content for users (Fernández et  al., 2006). This is clearly an example of technology-assisted dual outsourcing mentioned by Czarniawska: news organizations buy material and content feeds from news agencies (which needs to be categorized and made searchable), who in turn outsource much of their newsgathering and production to stringers (whose content must be indexed and categorized). Simplifying the technological tools for producing and transferring content has widened the pool of contributors and decreased payments for individual pieces of outsourced content, particularly for the digital medium, leading to more production efficiency and cost reduction (Marjoribanks, 2000a; 2000b; Örnebring 2010). As the digitization of news process settles, digital content requires a new reconfiguration (Boczkowski, 2010). Considering the amount of data produced, processed and transferred, and the complexity and multi-tiered nature of the content streams, it is not surprising that the

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technical solutions embedded in the business processes are fast becoming the keystone of the modern newsroom. Within news organizations, technological staff is becoming more prominent and more influential (Westlund 2011) – and interestingly, they rarely seem to be on temporary and contingent contracts but are rather full-time employees (Parasie and Dagiral, 2013). Content management systems are central in today’s news production processes, where external contributors incorporate their content, or where clients connect to a platform from where they can retrieve content themselves. An example of this is Reuters CMS platform, Reuters Connect, which ingests all media types, enriches them with the NewsML-G2 standard metadata, and makes them available to their clients through five delivery options: web services (through APIs that can be adapted to the clients’ platforms); content downloaders (through specific monitoring software); push methods (through CDNs); RSS (through web address aggregators); or media express (through a website solution service on Reuters’ servers). What is being outsourced here is not merely content production but also the workflow and work processes of news production. Thus, the digital turn in news production has allowed the technology/network-assisted breaking down and atomization of processes that can then be reassembled into news output. Increasingly, in terms of process, it is irrelevant where each ‘part’ of content is created, or by whom.

NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS In summarizing the results of the research presented here, scholars and practitioners alike seem to agree that the increased outsourcing of news content production is driven by two interrelated trends. One is the steep crisis experienced by traditional news outlets, forcing them to limit their budgets and

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decreasing in-house reporting, which in turn affects the working conditions of staff members (Bakker, 2012; McChesney, 2003). The other one is the proliferation of technological innovations that have been incorporated to the newsroom, mainly used for purposes of creating faster, cheaper, and easier interconnectivity between on the one hand displaced reporters and other content providers, and on the other hand the ‘home’ editorial office. In other words, the practice of outsourcing has consolidated and accelerated as the use of technology facilitated and streamlined the process. This process has also radically changed the skill sets demanded by newsworkers as different types of technologies and media converge in digital news production (Deuze, 2008). Technology and economy are clearly interrelated and we would caution against viewing technological systems and developments as ‘inevitable’ or ‘forces of nature’ (cf Örnebring, 2010): as has been noted repeatedly in this handbook, technologies are embedded in social, cultural, and – in our case particularly – economic settings. It is striking that the purpose of most of the practices of news outsourcing we have described here is not increasing the quality of news, including more diverse voices in news, or fostering new, creative ways of presenting the news, but rather – frequently very explicitly – to streamline, reduce costs, shift risk to contingent employees, and to some extent homogenize journalistic work processes. As noted, the outsourcing of noneditorial forms of work within news organizations has not been controversial; it is the outsourcing of the content production itself that runs counter to prevailing norms about the autonomy and democratic role of journalism. Following Lee-Wright (2012), it is clear that previous research has under-emphasised the importance of stable working conditions and economically-stable institutions to the maintenance of professional values and standards. Research indicates that outsourcing is driving a development where journalism is

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viewed as essentially no different from any other content production, and where producers are interchangeable and not in need of any specific skills beyond purely technological ones (for example, using different content management systems, being able to produce decent quality film and still footage). The critical tone of the professional and academic debate on the phenomenon of journalism outsourcing is also easy to detect in most of the articles cited in the introduction: how can quality local news be produced thousands of miles away, even if council and committee meetings are broadcast on the Web? The Journatic case is also obviously controversial because the company did try to hide what they were doing, leading to the unquestionable dangers of outsourcing that Tarkov (2012) identifies. Our overview of research and contemporary industry practices demonstrates the inadequacy of letting striking examples, like Pasadena Now outsourcing local news production to India or Journatic doing the same to the Philippines, set the terms of the emerging debate on news outsourcing. In our view, the only extraordinary fact about these examples is that they became public: in fact, news organizations routinely publish content that has been produced two or more steps removed from the parent organization and whose provenance is impossible to establish for the news consumer. The major differences here are two: one, that Pasadena Now and Journatic are new actors on the market and therefore scrutinized more intensely than the established actors (news agencies) who in fact drive much of the outsourcing processes in the news industry. Two, that the purpose of the outsourcing processes related to news agency work is bringing foreign news to a domestic audience (for the most part), whereas Pasadena Now and Journatic use the outsourcing logic to move news in the opposite direction: organizing local coverage for domestic audiences from geographically distant locations. The first outsourcing strategy has long historical precedent within the news

industry and is, as we have demonstrated, a wholly naturalized part of industry structure, whereas the second one is viewed as new and counter to prevailing journalistic standards – despite the fact that the mechanisms and overarching economic logics are exactly the same. In fact, it could easily be seen that the arguments leveled against outsourcing local coverage to distant location could just as well be used as arguments against outsourcing foreign coverage to news agencies: it is just as impossible for the audience to determine who created the content in the first place, and much of the work is conducted by people on precarious and even exploitative contracts, with so many steps to the production process that the risk of inaccuracies increases. However, outsourcing practices that are established within the industry are accepted (often simply by virtue of being established), and it is ‘new’ outsourcing practices (particularly those that involve ‘Them’ covering ‘Us’ rather than the other way around) which are normatively suspect. We would, in fact, argue that the organizational structure of most major newsrooms today revolves around outsourcing in one way or another (incorporating user-generated content, making use of news agency content streams, managing an increasingly contingent, short-term workforce). Journalism is increasingly based on the pricing of news as single goods (Gynnild 2005) – in particular in the online environment – and journalists ‘… compete for (projectized, one-off, perstory) jobs rather than employers competing for (the best, brightest, most talented) employees’ (Deuze, 2009: 316). Even legacy news organizations, that still employ a large number of journalists working in a centralized newsroom, per-item purchasing and production of journalistic content is becoming more common. Far from being exceptional, news outsourcing is today central to the organization of commercial newsgathering, production and dissemination. This centrality would also suggest that studying various aspects of outsourcing is an

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urgent task for Journalism Studies. Studying journalism-as-outsourcing comes with two main challenges, however: one conceptual and one methodological. The conceptual challenge is that so much of journalism research (from survey studies to the ‘classic’ newsroom ethnographies from the 1970s and 1980s) presupposes that journalism is conducted under conditions of stable, longterm employment within large, resource-rich organizations. Concepts and theories are by and large based on a different empirical reality and therefore have difficulty capturing the precarious, flexible and shifting organizational boundaries of newswork that outsourcing entails. The methodological challenge lies in the increased secrecy and closedness of media organizations: like in the case of Journatic, many news organizations would prefer their outsourcing practices not to be studied or even known to a wider audience, and therefore getting access as a scholar – always a key issue with ethnographic studies in particular – is likely to be very difficult. These challenges do not mean that journalism scholars should shy away from this task: rather, the challenges around the study of outsourcing also point to the general necessity of re-conceptualizing journalism in light of new working practices and workflows, new organizational frameworks, and new technological and economic structures.

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Gilley, K.M., and Rasheed, A. (2000) Making more by doing less: an analysis of outsourcing and its effects on firm performance. Journal of Management, 26(4): 763–90. Gollmitzer, M. (2014) Precariously employed watchdogs? Perceptions of working conditions among freelancers and interns. Journalism Practice, 8(6): 826–41. Grossman, G.M., and Helpman, E. (2005) Outsourcing in a global economy. The Review of Economic Studies, 72(1): 135–59. Grossman, G.M., and Rossi-Hansberg, E. (2012) Task trade between similar countries. Econometrica, 80(2): 593–629. Guskin, E. (2013) Newspaper newsrooms suffer large staffing decreases. Article from pewresearch.org. Published June 25. Available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ 2013/06/25/newspaper-newsrooms-sufferlarge-staffing-decreases/ Gynnild, A. (2005) Winner takes it all. Freelance journalism and the global communication market. Nordicom Review, (1): 111–20. Hätönen, J., and Eriksson, T. (2009) 30+ years of research and practice of outsourcing – Exploring the past and anticipating the future. Journal of International Management, 15(2): 142–55. Hedman, U., and Djerf-Pierre, M. (2013) The social journalist: Embracing the social media life or creating a new digital divide? Digital Journalism, 1(3): 368–85. Huang, E. (2006) Facing the challenges of convergence: Media professionals’ concerns of working across media platforms. Convergence, 12(1): 83–98. Hunter, A., and Nel, F.P. (2011) Equipping the entrepreneurial journalist: An exercise in creative enterprise. Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, 66(1): 9–24. Jeffery, C. (2006) Outsourcing American journalism? Meet the Bangalore bureau. Mother Jones, November 22. Available at http://www. motherjones.com/mojo/2006/11/outsourcingamerican-journalism-meet-bangalore-bureau, last accessed September 22, 2014. Johnston, J., and Forde, S. (2011) The silent partner: News agencies and 21st century news. International Journal of Communication, 5: 20. Kalleberg, A. L. (2009) Precarious work, insecure workers: Employment relations in

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15 Semi-professional Amateurs Jérémie Nicey

This chapter intends to think beyond the apparent distinction between news professionals and the improperly named ‘amateurs’, by exploring the multifaceted positions, profiles, motivations and practices of end-users who generate news content. We shall discuss the scope of professionalism, which obviously includes business and socioeconomic considerations. The chapter will also highlight and structure the debates in media studies about non-professional production – a phenomenon which has attracted much attention in recent years. The questions about journalism and its status as a profession take place in a context marked by several tensions: persistent complaints about media bias and media influence (since the mid twentieth century); a financial crisis which has affected the media industry among other sectors (especially since the mid 2000s); the concomitance of such a retreat with the digital shift; and a profound critique about the practices and the legitimacy of journalists.

The context of crisis is favourable to usergenerated content (UGC) because for newsrooms it is a low-cost – if not no-cost – way to produce stories. Thus, some prospective discourses even link the decline of traditional media with the coming of the end of journalism as a profession (Deuze, 2005; Allan, 2010; Roumen, 2014). Yet, the expectations towards participatory journalism seem more complex: end-users who produce news content do not replace journalists but rather act as a complement, or even ‘an edifying supplement’ (Reich, 2008: 740). The newsrooms of mainstream media encourage user production and make use of it, sometimes remunerating such production, especially if the contributor is regular, relevant and accurate. In those cases, the end-user moves from the position of layperson to what could be labelled ‘enlightened user’. The chapter explores to what extent UGC is evolving towards professionalization and what are the markets for such participants. Attempts to answer these issues require the

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examination of various criteria: the identity of both journalists and contributors, through the designations of the latter; the activity and creativity of non-professionals; their reactivity, which makes them a useful resource; the interactivity of digital tools and UGCdedicated platforms; and the community as a commodity.

IDENTITY AT STAKE: NAMING PARTICIPATION In news production, as with other sectors, the opposition to ‘amateurs’ by professionals rests mainly on symbolic representations and on a socio-discursive construction (Eldridge, 2013). Until the mid 2000s, the terms ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘participatory journalism’ referred mainly to weblogs (blogs) or to digital alternative media (such as Indymedia, launched in 1999: see Platon and Deuze, 2003). As recalled by Allan and Thorsen (2009), the issue and uses of the terms were initially controversial among professional journalists; yet, they were publicized and reinforced with the creation of the South Korean website OhmyNews.com in 2000 (Kim and Hamilton, 2006), and later with the growing access to online publishing thanks to broadband technologies (Allan, 2007). Following the trends, UGC proved efficient for mainstream media to depict events (images of the Twin Towers on 9/11; the tsunami in South Eastern Asia in 2004; the chase for the Boston Marathon murderers in 2013), to provide the perspective of participants (bloggers instant-reporting from the Occupy movement against global financial corporations in 2011 and 2012), to counteract governments or other institutions (images from Burma during the ‘Saffron revolution’ in 2007; images of a police officer killing unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014), or to report international uprisings (in Lybia, until Gaddafi’s death: see Kristensen and Mortensen, 2013).

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Although the inclusion in journalistic product of content produced by end-users has a long history, it had been confined to rare and peculiar situations (like the video footage by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of JFK in 1963). Nonetheless, the production of such contributors is undoubtedly active nowadays, and increasing. During the 2000s, the users – at least a section of them, with technical, cognitive and social skills – not only proliferated: they understood that they could raise the interest of established media with their own content, or even distribute it by themselves (Deuze, 2006). This shift led to a consensual expression to qualify news contributors – ‘people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006). Discussing the conceptualization of UGC reveals interesting facets. First and foremost, the term ‘amateur’ remains pejorative and contemptuous – further, in the adjectival form ‘amateurish’. Within the media and culture industries, such designation is nonetheless common. Its etymology (the latin ‘amator’ deriving from ‘amo’/’amare’: to love) underlines that the main criterion is passion; the term later appeared in English and French to refer to people feeling passionate about arts without practice – devotees or enthusiasts, in other words. Such a definition, which seems strictly limited to hobbyists, does not suit users who contribute. The latter go beyond their passion, many transform it into a ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins, 1992). Furthermore, the users we are dealing with share a significant common trait: they produce material focused on news, of public interest, and it distinguishes them from other web users sharing their own private content, often considered of low value (Carr, 2005; Keen, 2007).

Plural participations, plural designations Defining the participants is complex because of the existence of extremely diverse practices (see Chapters 12 and 21). Although the

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qualifier ‘news content contributor’ has the advantages of relative neutrality and clarity, it does not indicate the nature of participation. In this regard, several common designations apply: commentators, disseminators or relays and, at a production level, news witnesses, information brokers, newsgatherers, or news footage collectors. In this chapter, we focus on this last group, because this requires a presence on the field of events and an activity of production; the combination having real added value – if not being the essential condition – to render this UGC attractive to news media. On the opposite end of a spectrum of participation, the comment replies which often appear under online news stories are commonly considered neither part of the production process, nor a creative production: their authors cannot therefore pretend to remuneration, their comments should stay free … in every sense. Furthermore, the particular status of activists or of alternative media are studied elsewhere (see Chapter 17). Some practitioners privilege the terms ‘citizen reporter’ or ‘street journalist’ (Witschge, 2009); they valorize their position on the field. But these last designations annoy many professionals, some of whom feel threatened by the paradigm shift (Robinson, 2007; Deuze, 2008), although they admit working increasingly with UGC. Despite their proximity, ‘citizen journalism’ should not be confused with ‘collaborative journalism’: the latter refers to cooperative practices between professionals and so-called ‘amateurs’, which led to the widespread ‘pro–am’ concept. Accordingly, the perception of UGC by professionals has remained complex over time, their resistance being reduced but a feeling of superiority still being pre-eminent (Heinonen, 2011; Örnebring, 2013). We still think that focusing on contributors as information gatherers and content producers is the most productive way to address the discussion on why and how their production intends towards professionalism and towards established professionals themselves.

Money for nothing? The ailing legitimacy of journalists and the challenges of ‘informants’ The distinction between professionals and non professionals needs to be discussed. What defines the professional journalist – implicitly excluding non professionals – is recurrent mention of qualifications and rulefollowing (Aldridge and Evetts, 2003). If apprenticeship is considered to be an important criterion, however, then it should be remembered that not all journalists have received initial media education or a diploma. Among others, three indicators support this exception: (1) the journalistic field is known for its strong autodidacticism; (2) research shows that the 30 most influential bloggers have a higher university diploma than the 30 most powerful journalists of the US print press (Hindman, 2009); (3) studies focusing on the most active end-users producing images tend to show that they are homogeneous and part of a socio-economic elite (Brabham, 2008; Aubert and Nicey, 2015). In other words, the argument of qualification seems no longer available to distinguish professional journalists. Thus, differentiation by the notion of ‘recognized’ training appears insufficient, if not invalid. By extension, both journalists and active end-users could be called ‘media workers’. Besides, the debate about journalism itself as a profession is ancient and unresolved (Ruellan, 2007); during the nineteenth century, media owners as well as audiences, both reluctant to give money for nothing, argued about the legitimacy of the profession of journalists, particularly in comparison with writers. Research also reveals that criticism of participatory journalism often cites three main failings: profound subjectivity, lack of regulation, and lack of regularity/ frequency in production – suggesting that professionals do better (Örnebring, 2013). While the first two will be discussed in the coming sections, the third should be nuanced by stressing that intermittence is a status, or

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at least a constraint, shared by many professional news practitioners, especially those in precarious job conditions (see Chapter 14). As a whole, UGC challenges journalist identity (Aldridge and Evetts, 2003; Deuze, 2005); after a decade of relative confrontation, it would be more useful to focus on the hybridity of news actors. The terms ‘prosumers’ (Toffler, 1980; García-Galera and Valdivia, 2014) or ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2008a) reflect this. We propose and recommend the simpler, clearer term informants. Such a label emphasizes the activity and nature of their work, marked by both formal and informal elements that will be analyzed in the following sections.

ACTIVITY AND CREATIVITY: PARALLEL PRACTICES AND MOTIVATIONS In order to appreciate UGC, it is essential to examine routines and practices. In this, informants do not profoundly differ from professionals – except for the sources they can mobilize (Reich, 2008). Whether they collect news material for others, or report news stories on their own, or intend to augment existing reportages, informants proceed in ways similar to established newsrooms. First, the primacy of audiovisual content should be stressed: the increasing mediatization of events leads to a coverage from a more visual perspective, in order to attract attention. The use of non-professional images is not new; it has simply become generalized and systematized. This is true of local, national and international events. As an example, since 2011, citizen journalists in Syria gained both reputation and massive audiences – although the nature of coordinated activists and their impartiality is open to discussion. Despite this, whether informants produce fully-fledged news stories or just raw material useful for newsrooms, their production context resembles that of professionals.

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For instance, the equipment they use to capture events is equivalent to that used by some professional reporters, if not better sometimes. Informants are therefore positioned to produce serious news material and even ‘in some cases, doing a better job than the professionals’ (Gillmor, 2004: 25). Apart from cameras, users benefit from digital publishing systems – for no-cost or for accessible costs – that have enabled their reactivity and interactivity (Allan, 2007). The activity and creativity of contributors often corresponds to the imitation of professional routines: professional standards are adopted by new actors (Flichy, 2010: 9). Such imitation proves that professional journalistic institution has lost neither its expertise, nor its authority (Sjøvaag, 2011; Deuze, 2005; Hermida and Thurman, 2008). But the phenomenon of parallel practices goes further. By imitation and integration of professional codes, UGC can also intensify questionable tendencies of journalism, such as extreme immediacy or the increasing content dealing with celebrities. Overall, whereas textual contributors are initially motivated by the wish to protest, photo contributors tend to reinforce consensus (Ross, 2011), especially as they use similar equipment, and seldom select alternative events, to that of the professionals. This is an interesting point that can justify the preference of mainstream media to privilege photo and video UGC platforms; for professional newsrooms, this is an easy way to illustrate their stories at low or no cost.

Profiles and motivations: from simple sharing to skilled and remunerated material On the user side, the profiles are various, as are the skills, which have evolved over time. Whereas the creation of the first blogs showed that the writing style and story content of bloggers was more conversational, and lengthier than those of journalists (Andrews, 2003), the most serious blogs

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soon adopted journalistic style and formats (Lowrey, 2006; Gil de Zúñiga et  al., 2011). Initially, UGC tended to be the social preserve of a minority – albeit not a minor one (Rebillard, 2007): intellectuals, often highlyeducated, with a comfortable economic position and familiar with communication skills. As wider segments of the population started to make use of the tools created by news media to foster audience participation, they took journalism as the framework of reference, and that has increased their chances to have an impact on the professional coverage of events. As a proof, certain blog-native topics or citizen leaks can now reach larger audiences and higher notoriety than mainstream media common articles. In the same spirit, the photo production of non-professionals has gained in quality and newsworthiness (see Chapter 18); as a result, such images have gained economic value, especially if they are scoops. In this regard, their work does not fundamentally differ from that of professional journalists. The higher the purpose and motivation of non-professional actors, the greater the quality of their news coverage. Yet, research has mostly focused on the motivations for news organizations to sustain and boost participatory journalism, concluding that their primary motivation was economic (Vujnovic, 2011). Very few studies have tried to inventory expectations of participants themselves. One reason is that the motivations may vary from one context to another, from one content to another, from one informant to another; moreover, even for a single contributor, these motivations may be mixed. Yet, some of the answers can be found in the specific area of photo production. For instance, a study on the photo website iStockphoto indicated that ‘the desire to make money, develop individual skills, and to have fun were the strongest motivators for participation’ (Brabham 2008). Furthermore, recent research about the French-based UGC-dedicated agency Citizenside focused on its members (citizen eyewitnesses and photographers), some of

whom manage to be remunerated when published by media, and revealed that: [their] motivation for participating is twofold: a desire to share, and a personal challenge to take photographs like a pro. Of those surveyed in the questionnaire, 25 (i.e. 37.3%) said that their primary motivation was to ‘earn a little money from [their] images’, but it is also revealing to note that most had a different motivation (a total of 42 participants, i.e. 62.7%1). […] Citizenside’s members often present the idea of selling their work as a bonus – even if many admit that this was what first drew their attention and prompted them to create an account. (Aubert and Nicey, 2015: 563)

Such elements have led to following typology of photo contributors: ‘Students (around 20 years old) who wish to become journalists or image professionals; Older adults (40 plus) making a career transition; Freelance professional photographers who want to diversify their activity; Photography enthusiasts; Activist; Complete amateurs/chance eyewitnesses’ (Aubert and Nicey, 2015: 565– 6). Concerning the last category, it appeared as minor, contrary to the popular imagination: ‘there is a need to deconstruct or even invalidate the representation of participatory journalism through the figure of the average citizen who happens to capture a very imperfect image of an event with whatever tool is at hand, typically a smartphone’. Instead, many informants are skilled, equipped and they anticipate events. Moreover, the interviews with informants outline that despite their wish to get remuneration or symbolic compensation (the prestige of being published and possibly spotted), they are conscious of both the commodification of the audience (Jennes et al., 2014) and the interests of newsrooms in their low(er)cost content, which stresses the profitability of such process. The interviewees also mentioned a civic dimension and the motivation to convey various opinions or to foster the circulation of plural news. In the long run, newsrooms consider active members of the audience sometimes as a source, sometimes as a resource, or even as collaborators

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(Canter, 2013). These three concepts are helpful and they now need to be discussed one after the other, to better understand the position of informants.

REACTIVITY: THE INFORMANT, FROM SOURCE TO RESOURCE A wide range of informants are not only active in their production; they are often reactive, as journalists are supposed to be. First, the successive democratizations of the Internet (1990s) and of mobile devices (2000s) now make them hyper-connected to news and to newsrooms themselves. Those who accept geolocation, receive alerts from dedicated newsrooms if they are located near to a news event, so as to report about it (Aubert and Nicey, 2015). Traffic in the opposite direction is widespread: citizens are well positioned to alert newsrooms about events that they are witnessing. In this regard, active informants should be considered as ‘ancillary reporters’ or as ‘co-workers’ (Heinonen, 2011), insofar as they help professional media to achieve ubiquity – a goal that remains an illusion, though, since not every place or event is filmed. News production is a time- and eventdriven market. In this context, the digital practices of audiences reveal a strong value: immediacy. Hence, rather than fighting in vain against citizen journalists who prove efficient in capturing events before professional photo-reporters arrive, the globallyreputed photo agencies try to partner, invest in, or even buy participatory photo websites. Critics of non-professionals nevertheless underline the supposed lack of frequency of production. In other words, the circumstantial nature of their newsgathering is what gives it simultaneously its strengths and weaknesses. Yet, the issue could be seen in reverse: irregular, infrequent and opportunistic use of UGC by mainstream media is not likely to boost the engagement of end-users;

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it may even discourage the most productive, organized and enthusiastic of them. In the domain of news photography, active footage collectors adopt both thorough and fast professional habits. They are not passers-by capturing events by chance; rather they proceed with long preparation and anticipation. Once on site, they may wait for hours to shoot the event that they are expecting which highlights both the degree of their passion and the availability that they manage to combine with their primary job or occupation – ‘putting their personal life on hold for a few hours’ (Aubert and Nicey, 2015: 562). Such engagement is, however, often in vain: UGC sales remain rare and many news editors persist in considering it ‘amateur’ or ‘voluntary’ labour – these designations being contradicted by reported motivations of informants, described above.

Authenticity and proximity as market values Audiences, and among them the contributors, possess another value: their presence and experience on the field. As already mentioned, they are well positioned to warn journalists about stories and events occurring in their local environment. This trend confirms one of the long held principles of journalism: there is a distinction between ‘gatherers’ in the field (what we proposed to call ‘informants’) and ‘processors’ at the news desk (Tunstall, 1971). Moreover, this echoes the fact that every citizen has the ability to provide news and ought to use this capacity, in order to bring variety to public issues and discourse (Lippmann, 1922). In this spirit, news stories originating from nonprofessionals are less predictable and less conventional than those of traditional newsrooms; they bring authenticity and proximity to the news. Yet, the position of informants has a drawback – their limited access to several kinds of ‘restricted’ events; this includes institutional,

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cultural, police/security events, or national and international politics (Reich, 2008). Most non-professionals are indeed ‘forced to focus on events open to the public, for obvious reasons of accessibility’ (Aubert and Schmitt, 2014: 140–1). The problem is partly solved by a request for an accreditation, a pass or a badge to cover particular events; but in such cases, as aptly noticed by some practitioners themselves, ‘accreditations mean no amateurism’ (Aubert and Nicey, 2015: 561). Speaking of limits, widespread opinions of established journalists towards non-professionals should be mentioned, as they tend to maintain the boundary between informants and professionals. Such discourses claim that citizen journalism does not integrate a sufficient consideration of the core values of professional media workers, such as ethics, objectivity, defamation rejection, accuracy and truthfulness of news. However, practices show that active end-users may well be accountable and respect a code of conduct; this is especially visible in the context of the development of several tools and UGCdedicated platforms.

INTERACTIVITY: ACCESS, TOOLS AND UGC-DEDICATED PLATFORMS As mentioned earlier, digital equipment to produce news became economically accessible to ordinary users during the 1990s and the 2000s; the simplified usage (Caple, 2014) and the quite low entry costs of digital cameras, phones, computers and Internet connections – contrary to the high entry costs of one-way media systems – have led to the trend of ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2007: 239; Allan, 2007). The first steps of participation within news production happened through the use of simple software tools. In the second half of the 2000s, broadband and mobile devices brought simultaneity and intuitiveness, and enhanced the capacities of immediate and personal

broadcasting. The tools are numerous, although the significance of open-source software should be underlined as this reduces costs considerably. The fact that in many cases both professionals and informants use the same tools to produce and disseminate their content (blogging software like WordPress, social media platforms like Twitter) confirms that many practices are shared. As a proof, some contributors are so conscious of the value of the news material they provide, in terms of professional usage, that will watermark their images, for instance, reinforcing their property dimension. Furthermore, tutorials or technological kits (e.g. Mobile Journalism Kit2) improve practices and show that many professional web actors are eager to create dedicated environments in order to increase and collect user-generated content.

UGC-dedicated platforms: several modes and achievements With time, in accordance with the varying degree of success of the participatory journalism paradigm, online areas for UGC have been structured – although some websites remain mixed in their intentions. It is interesting to analyze the diverse modes of platforms, as they exploit end-user production. The present typology does not pretend to be exhaustive, however, because websites of this nature proliferate as fast as others disappear or adapt their model. UGC-dedicated platforms could be thus classified: 1 UGC news (images) agencies: Such web-based agencies collect UGC (mainly images) and sell it to professionals on behalf of their authors, sharing the benefits (on average 50%) with them. This category includes Demotix (UK, acquired by the photo agency Corbis in 2012) and Citizenside/Newzulu (France/Australia: see Nicey, 2013a). 2 UGC hubs of mainstream media: The media organization designs its own UGC tool (whether via in-house resources or via

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3

4

5

6

outsourcing, for example with expert agencies of the previous category) and allocates a number of journalists to manage and edit the received content. Some key players using this model are the BBC hub (Williams et  al., 2011); CNN’s platform iReport (Kperogi, 2011; Palmer, 2014); and the hub ‘GuardianWitness’ (launched by the Guardian in 2013) which has raised criticisms of cutting the freelance market and generalizing the use of UGC for free (Turvill, 2013). (Inter)national independent UGC websites: Such websites have global news provision as their ambition but in fact they are often geocentred (except Global Voices Online). They often include a mix of professionals, active informants and ordinary end-users. They include, among others: the pioneer Ohmynews (SouthKorea, since 2000: see Chang, 2009), and Blastingnews (at various headquarters), as well as Agoravox, Rue89 and Obiwi (France), Blottr – which remunerates authors £1 for every thousand page views, Streetreporter (UK), AllVoices, OurMedia and Newsmeback (USA), Typeboard (Australia), Merinews (India), Jasmine News and Vikalpa (Sri Lanka), 7iber (Jordan), YouReporter (Italy), Nyhetsverket (Sweden). Even in the case of self-defined activist projects like Indymedia, research has found that they reproduce the processes of professional news selection (Platon and Deuze, 2003). Local or hyperlocal UGC websites/wikis: Such platforms report local or hyperlocal news stories, often with a civic or community-service priority. Among them are My Missourian, Akronist, MyTown Colorado, Baristanet, or Chicago Talks (USA), Cambridge Day (UK), myHeimat (Germany), Ketnet (Belgium), iBelarus (Belarus), BaleBengong (Indonesia), see also Chapter 19. News-on-demand niche platforms: These websites, like Demand Media, offer tailored content mainly produced by professional journalists, but some stories are managed and reported by end-users who are experts in their own domain and some users are paid one or two dollars (or euros) to reassemble topics. Non news-specialized sites: This category comprises blogs – the oldest model – and platforms mainly dealing with images and often focusing on entertainment or personal sharing. They offer the possibility to upload and market news content although they

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are not specialized in the news domain. Major players include, for images: FlickR, iStockphoto (see Brabham, 2008), Picasa, Fotolia, Fotolog, Scoopshot, MyPhotoAgency, Shutterstock, ImageShack and Mizozo; and for video: YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion, but other platforms appear constantly, like Vine (the 6-second video application) or Periscope for live video streaming. Some of these services remunerate informants for their content or share advertising revenue.

Apart from the platforms specifically devoted to audiovisual content, UGC has increasingly and massively spread among social media, where it is not remunerated. This is the case of Twitter and also of Facebook via its own website but also via Instagram and WhatsApp, the mobile applications acquired by the social network giant. The circulation of user-generated news photographs is increasing as well on other apps like Snapchat, Fizwoz, Meporter, Rawporter, Newsflare. What can be learned of these categories? That their members are plural, as are their practices and intentions. For the end-users looking for remuneration or even professionalization, the UGC (image) agencies are the most relevant. Yet, the latter operate both as a lever and a limiter: they help structuring, promoting and selling their content, but at the same time, as economic intermediates, they are likely to divide revenues. As a result, informants tend to be poorly paid, except for rare scoops that feed the appetite of participants, as any lottery does. Ultimately, these platforms seem helpful to the informants in the sense that they bring notoriety or at least visibility, which is crucial for these aspirants: it indeed positions them as pre-professionals or semi-professionals, who may later be valorized towards recruiters of established media (Aubert and Nicey, 2015). The phenomenon can be illustrated by the case of Demotix: since 2012, it has transformed its community and now targets professional freelancers, integrates advertising and gives 80 percent of the revenue to its top 100 highestpage-viewed informants.

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On the other side, most traditional newsrooms have not integrated daily purchase of UGC in their news production practices, despite their interest. As a result, several UGC websites have ended in failure. For instance, the platform NowPublic closed in 2013 in spite of its notoriety since 2005 and its content-sharing agreement with reputed agency Associated Press; it has been replaced by the website Examiner, driven and fed by … journalists. Yet, the most inconvenient implication for informants concerns employment: by practicing opportunistic outsourcing (see Chapter 14) of citizen-created content, the newsrooms favour the salaried work of those they call ‘amateurs’, thus promoting cheap labour (Deuze, 2008) instead of increasing stable job positions. Some specialists have forecasted other business models, like ‘realtime auctions’ for UGC breaking news stories or images (Gillmor, 2009). In any case, it seems necessary to deepen the discussion on the economic motivations of mainstream media to promote participation.

COMMUNITY AS A COMMODITY To reach an overview of how and why the use of informants has professional and financial implications, we should focus on the communities that they belong to and that they produce for. The confusion with ‘community journalism’ or ‘civic journalism’, practiced by professional journalists, should be avoided, though. By focusing on their peers – their community – and by proposing news stories, one should observe that some active informants are relayers, if not efficient ‘opinion leaders’, characterized long ago (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955) by three major factors: their expression of values; their professional competence; and the nature of their social network. In other words, they may be real influentials (Song et  al., 2007); what high-rated social media (mainly Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube and Amazon) have fully understood when promoting systems of social recommendation. Informants indeed play a decisive role within the commercial function of media – their position as intermediates reaching larger audiences and targeting customer profiles, to the benefit of advertisers and brands. In studies about YouTube or Twitter, for example, such strategies about user-generated labour have been underlined (Andrejevic, 2009; Hirst, 2013). By extension, the recurrent vindication of the ‘community’ actually serves economic actors of the collaborative web who use it as a myth to generate value which is not – or seldom – redistributed to the community members themselves (Bouquillion and Matthews, 2010). While professionals have ambivalent positions about the contributions of informants, the business rationale of news media is much more welcoming: their discourses and views are of high financial value (Fuchs, 2012).

Calls to participation: the value of end-users Recent trends show that most media outlets attempt to enlarge the involvement and active participation of their audiences. As a matter of fact, such opportunities are not driven by citizen expectations, rather end-users possess an inner value and they are monetized as such. The imperatives of media content have recently shifted: the process based on their one-way transmission to the public has lost its primacy (Hermida, 2011). Henceforth, what counts and is prioritized by the media industry and its partners is the diffusion and dissemination by end-users (Domingo et al., 2008). In so doing, media platforms aim at upgrading their content and enlarging their audience. In addition, the consumptions and networks tending to mobility, the media industry at large – including the telephone sector and Internet Service Providers – constantly adapt their business models. In this context, the

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participation of leaders within communities is cost-effective for media outlets. Yet, research often alerts the risk of overvaluing end-user discourses: just as TV ratings have proved their limitations, an excessive use of audience data to determine media contents may satisfy advertisers and brands, but it may not improve journalism itself (Noblet and PignardCheynel, 2010).

FROM BROADCAST TO FORECAST? – THE IMBALANCES AND CONTRADICTIONS OF UGC Although user-generated content and participation in news production appear as an opportunity both for informants and journalism itself, the job market – still in crisis – is not ready to absorb multiple new actors, unless they are low- or no- cost. In order to attract newsrooms and recruiters, informants in fact practice and imitate professional codes and routines: they use similar tools, they focus on newsworthy stories, they identify places in advance, they vary angles, they work and transmit their production as fast as possible. All this emphasizes the fact that journalists have not lost their expertise and that the fundamental principles still apply. If they have the skills, equipment and preparation, if they are well placed to witness a breaking news event, and if they are members of an efficient UGC-dedicated platform, informants may reach income. Yet, despite salutary exceptions, the majority of informants are certainly proactive but not considered professionals because of their low or inexistent income gained from their production. As a result, many informants stay preprofessionals or at least semi-professionals for some time; in a sense, the term protoprofessionals would be more appropriate to their status and practice. Therefore, we witness a sort of trompe l’oeil effect – an illusionary professionalization of UGC. It is, rather, rationalization: participation of

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end-users is promoted mainly to the benefit of media organizations themselves. Consequently, debates about the fair use of UGC (including copyright) seem elusive; although informants appear as serious coproducers, the crisis logics of media organizations enhance flexibility and the absence of contracts. Participation in the news domain comprises a wide range of activities: at the bottom, it is an accepted practice not to remunerate simple commentators or interpreters of already existing news stories whereas opinionated journalism (senior editors, chroniclers) still generates highly prestigious individual positions and income in traditional media. Therefore, UGC highlights the profound inequalities of media production, as well as the opposition of citizen and market logics, none of which are new: informants resemble the already existing professional category of freelancers, with even more extreme labour conditions. Apart from their low wages, for instance, they do not benefit social/healthcare protection; furthermore, the notable difference with freelancers is that informants do not pre-sign contracts with a media outlet, and therefore have no guaranteed remuneration for their images. The category of freelance photojournalists may therefore expand and become more complex, and even more insecure. Despite the discourses on change and innovation, this confirms that journalistic activities and constraints mainly foster continuity, including the existence of freelancing (Nicey, 2013b). More interestingly, it should be noted that the trend within media production is to promote the engagement of end-users without remuneration, thus creating a sort of a ‘pronetariat’ – a proletariat exercising on Internet; a new class of users proposing their content on digital networks (de Rosnay and Revelli, 2006). Such participation ensures partners of media brands, in particular advertisers, of real added value: the involvement of their community. The validity of such discourses underlining the political economy of media organizations, may transform the original logics of citizen

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journalism and user-generated content into what should be more aptly called UGB: usergenerated branding. Professionals still rule journalism and protect their own interests: their media outlets, their corporation and their own careers. Similarly, citizen reporters sometimes wish to protect their community and the cause they want to raise, but they are profoundly dependent on the selection or ‘gatewatching’ (Bruns, 2008b) by the professionals in the newsrooms. The best way to reach broadcast channels remains to fulfill the desire of editors for specific stories: in this regard, the attempt of the Guardian to publicize the projections of coverage (the section ‘Open Newslist’, launched in 2011) was singular, though finally discontinued and not really successful in attracting suggestions. Back to the proposed description of ‘proto-professionals’, some informants may be used as indicators, as in the police domain where information is crucial. By providing raw material to established news professionals, they transform the latter into controllers (Robinson, 2007), also qualified by some academics as ‘preditors’ (Wilson et al., 2008) or better known as ‘community managers’ whose tasks of ‘curation and coaching’, among others, are decisive (Domingo, 2011). In the end, horizontal communication is limited within UGC: ironically, it still responds to vertical logics and there is still ‘professional control’ (Williams et al., 2011; Lewis, 2012). Contrary to blogs or to hyperlocal citizendriven platforms, the current model would here be ‘framed UGC’ (Rebillard, 2011: 32). All this has a social impact: the news industry still mostly legitimates and remunerates individual actors if they are formed (trained and graduated) and not only informed (initiated and regular news customers). Although it would be a pitfall to interpret that all active end-users want to be remunerated or to target professionalization, the economic strategy of mainstream media to use UGC actually highlights the already imbalanced and precarious character of news professions, as well as the monetization of a good whose nature is rather

free and likely to be shared – i.e. information. Finally, informants seem to be agents of a ‘market order’ rather than of a citizen model, in parallel with the situation argued during NWICO debates in the 1970s (Savio, 2012). Yet, we assume the following hypothesis: users may feel civically engaged if they are engaged in media production, i.e. if they are regular informants, recognized as semiprofessionals or professionals. Therefore, further research ought to examine how dominant media institutions develop strategies to enrol audiences; beyond discourses about civic expression and the motivations of such enrolment, informants may be of relevance to apprehend the future audience’s interest in news – either a public and democratic interest, or a private and financial interest.

NOTES  1  The other answers for the ‘primary motivation to participate’ were: ‘Capture a news event’ (17.9%), ‘Share a news event’ (17.9%), ‘Have my name mentioned in news media’ (13.4%), ‘Appreciate Citizenside’s community and get points/awards’ (3%), ‘Get a ‘scoop’/be faster than journalists’ (1.5%), ‘Other’ (9%).  2  Interestingly, the market discourse for such tools not only insists on their efficiency both for professionals and non-professionals, but also describes them as ‘vital’ to foster participation: the ‘mobile journalism kit (MoJo Kit®) is a fully equipped, full high-definition, broadcast quality, multimedia mobile studio for novices and professionals alike. […] The MoJo Kit® is lowering the barrier to entry into multimedia production and increasing local capacity within underserved communities around the globe to utilize video and photography as a vital tool to create positive social, environmental and political change’: http://www. mojokit.info/, accessed March 30, 2015.

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16 Sources as News Producers Matt Carlson

Maya Arulpragasam was upset. Known more for her stage name of M.I.A., the British-Sri Lankan musical artist had just been profiled in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine titled ‘M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop’, which framed her as an ill-informed proponent of violent Tamil separatists (Hirschberg, 2010). Of course, there is nothing new about the subject of a lengthy profile being irked at how she was represented. This may even be the price of fame. But what was notable about Arulpragasam was her reaction. She fought back publicly against the Times, taking to Twitter to challenge quotes from the piece, and even sending out the phone number of the article’s author. Arulpragasam later released her own recordings from the interviews through her website to corroborate her version of events. The New York Times responded by appending a lengthy correction to the original story explaining how several of the quotes were presented outof-order to sound more provocative than they were.

If we look beyond the matter of this single story, Arulpragasam’s feud with the Times reveals something much more novel. With an array of digital media at her disposal, Arulpragasam’s fame meant that she could turn to media channels outside of traditional news discourse to talk directly to the public. Through Twitter and uploaded digital recordings on her website, Arulpragasam was able to challenge her portrayal in one of the most venerable and widely read news outlets in the world. Plus, her complaints touched off a host of articles on digital news sites like The Daily Beast and Huffington Post that further extended her side to audiences outside her immediate reach. In all these ways, this incident exposes many of the fault lines underlying the source–journalist relationship in the digital media environment. While decades of valuable journalism research has illuminated the journalist– source relationship underlying the production of news, much of it has been predicated on a model of media scarcity. Journalists

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controlling broadcast and print channels accrued power, in part, through their control over the selection, creation, and dissemination of news to large audiences. To be a news source was to speak within the mediated space; being left out relegated a source to silence. However, these assumptions are now dated as digital media have greatly expanded the terrain of mediated communication. This chapter argues that the changing media environment requires a thorough reassessment of how news sourcing should be understood in an era of media abundance. Most notably, the relationship between journalists and ‘elite’ news sources – individuals or organizations that possess the reputation and audience to command public attention on their own – has been altered by digital media technologies allowing for a secondary flow of information outside of traditional news channels (see Chapter 15, 17 and 18 for the developments in citizens and activists as producers of news). While changes in the communicative environment can be easily identified, what this means for journalism is far less obvious. Journalists exercising their gatekeeping power now do so in competition with sources able to speak to the public directly. Spokespersons and public relations professionals have grown increasingly adept at locating new media channels, even entirely circumventing professional news outlets. In addition, sources may use these channels to challenge their representation within news stories or to shape the news agenda. In light of these developments, a number of questions arise: Is this the beginning of a new era of accountability for journalism? Or does it constitute a new era of powerful sources able to circumvent the critical eye of the press? What is clear is the need to analytically reprosecute the journalist–source relationship in light of digital media. The following sections begin by revisiting the source–journalist dynamic in a mass media era marked by a scarcity of communication channels, before revisiting these

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issues in the emerging digital media environment. In particular, the changing strategies of the public relations industry and the ability of elites to be their own public communicators are considered. Journalists have to adjust their practices as well to encompass social media as sources for their accounts. The chapter ends with a discussion of what these changes mean both for journalism and the public sphere.

SOURCES IN A MASS MEDIA ERA Understanding the role of news sources – the individuals or organizations called upon by journalists to provide accounts – begins with a broader consideration of two key factors. First, journalists looking to present their work as legitimate accounts of the world turn to objectivity as an overarching norm. Even as the viability of objectivity faces constant – and in many ways valid – criticism, it has been a steadfast anchor for much of Western journalism (see Ward, 2004). Second, news sourcing has been shaped by journalism’s near monopoly on the provision of public information to widespread publics. The dissemination of information on public affairs independent of the government has long been a cornerstone of democratic theory (Habermas, 1991). Yet, structurally, the means of communication remained limited to only those organizations sanctioned by state subsidy or market power to reach mass audiences. Sources had to rely on journalists to gain entrée into the news and, by extension, the mediated public sphere. Both of these factors have profoundly shaped what news sourcing looks like.

Sources and objectivity Much of the recent attention on journalism focuses on difference. Yet even in the face of new technologies and challenges for the

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news industry, news sourcing practices and patterns endure (Reich, 2009). Understanding this persistence starts with tracing the origins of news sourcing practices to the rise of objectivity as a key norm in Western journalism (Schudson, 1978; Maras, 2013). As journalism gradually shed its literary and partisan roots at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the stress on objectivity took hold, along with concomitant values of distance and impartiality. As a normative commitment, objectivity stressed the suspension of personal or organizational bias in favor of an unfettered view of events being covered. The emphasis shifted to an externalized view of knowledge holding that the truth of any situation could be captured. A belief in journalistic objectivity required a corresponding set of practices intent on delivering on that promise, all of which was couched in the drive for professionalism. Both a cultural token and a concrete reorganization, the professional project of journalism resulted in the US with the rise of journalism schools and professional organizations (Waisbord, 2013). The objective journalist became the professional journalist, with manifest epistemic consequences for the evidentiary premises on which accounts of the world could be based. The eyewitness account continued to hold its authority in bearing witness (Zelizer, 2007), but in a quotidian way the dominant method of doing journalism came to rest on the explicit attribution of information to others. With nearly any news story, once past the lead or summary introduction we encounter attributed statements explaining what happened. This style is so commonplace as to be overlooked for its epistemic consequences. Yet as Sigal famously put it: ‘the news is not reality, but a sampling of sources’ portrayals of reality, mediated by news organizations’ (1986: 27–8). Coupling this development with the objectivity norm reveals the twofold nature of this strategy. On one level, frequent attribution is an evidentiary process. Journalists accumulate evidence through

cobbling together accounts from a few actors, and plainly lay out their sources for all to see. This connection between source and idea or fact allows journalists to offload declarative assertions about events, whether to a head of state or a person on the street. News sourcing is an epistemic practice through which knowledge of the world is constructed and communicated (Ericson, 1998). Tuchman (1972) argues that shifting statements from the journalist to the source helps protect journalists by lessening their responsibility when statements appear errant or controversial. Beyond providing evidence, the strategy of frequent attribution also relates to authority. Certain sources get called upon to provide accounts, or have their accounts privileged over others. Again, this hierarchy is so common that it may escape our notice as a constructed convention. Studies have shown clear preferences for official sources across time and media (Sigal, 1973; Berkowitz, 1987; Soloski, 1989; Hallin et  al., 1993). These findings matter because patterns of news sources ritualistically reproduce ‘the authoritative apparatus of society’ (Ericson et  al., 1989: 395). The selection of sources is not merely about information, but comes to bestow cultural meaning about who has authority in a given society (Berkowitz, 2009). Unsurprisingly, the resulting mutual reliance between sources and journalists has been well noted for more than a half-century (Gieber and Johnson, 1961). The reliance on news sources leads us to consider a number of consequences. The first concerns how the relationship between sources and journalists shapes what information gets communicated to the public. Central to studying news sourcing is how the selection of sources results in the selection of particular viewpoints or sets of facts (Soloski, 1989: 864). As journalists leave aside their own voices in keeping with their commitment to objectivity, sources take on more power in defining reality. This formulation is the basis for Hall and colleagues’ (Hall et  al., 1978) labeling of elite news sources as ‘primary

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definers’ who not only provide information but, more importantly, establish the meaning of an event. Their research tracked how a spate of robberies developed into a moral panic in 1970s Britain to show how certain sources possessed an advantage in defining what was happening, despite some dubious evidence for their claims. Nonetheless, journalists without normative recourse to their own assessments had little choice but to rely on these sources. Over the years, scholars have risen up to challenge the primary definers model as overly simplistic and masking such mitigating factors as inter-elite disagreement (Schlesinger, 1990; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Cottle, 2000). However, the larger point remains that the role of news sources goes beyond providing information to the framing of issues in particular ways (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976; Gitlin, 1980; Entman, 1993). Journalists tend to acquiesce to their sources – covering conflict only when elite sources openly partake in conflicting opinions (Hallin, 1986; Bennett, 1990). This view of journalism is not to assert that sources are somehow liars; journalists often corroborate source accounts to ensure some level of accuracy. But what is important to note is that information cannot be divorced from the intentions of sources. Events look different to different people; who is asked shapes what is reported as true. And, as we will see, the digital media environment complicates this idea.

Sources and media scarcity Looking back at the height of what Hallin (1994) calls ‘the high modernism of American journalism’ during the Cold War era, the totality of news offerings appears paltry by today’s standards. In the USA, the local newspaper, a few newsmagazines, and network and local television news summed up the bulk of news. The UK offered a more diverse newspaper market, with the BBC dominating broadcast news. This pattern of

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public service broadcasting and competitive newspapers persisted in other nations as well. The lack of choice – in both news and entertainment – consolidated the audience for news (Prior, 2007). To an earlier generation, newspapers provided not merely information but a common stock of stories that people turned to, often because it was what was available (Berelson, 1948). The mass communication era with its modicum of media producers and legions of media consumers was collectivizing, for better or for worse. Within this era of media scarcity, journalists’ ability to put certain information in front of their audiences – and, conversely, their capacity to withhold other information – gave rise to the popular metaphor of the gatekeeper (White, 1950; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009). Seen as gatekeepers, journalists were positioned as intermediaries using their training and expertise to direct the flow of information to audiences who had few options for gathering news outside of mass communication channels. Journalists acted as sieves, allowing through certain information and stories while excluding others. In this iteration, the authority of journalists connected closely to their judgments about what events should be placed in front of audiences and with what emphasis (Carlson, 2007). Journalists’ power derived from controlling the gate. It is no wonder then that agenda setting became a popular theory within mass communication research (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). The notion that journalists could control what the public was thinking about – if not what they were actually thinking – became the effect that best crystallized the political and cultural power of the gatekeeper. This story so far is a familiar one, but what needs to be revisited is how this paradigm of media scarcity affected news sourcing. With limited channels for gaining publicity, news sources needed the news to reach a mass public. This structural reliance resulted in a source–journalist relationship marked by a mix of cooperation making newswork possible and contestation in which sources

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defended their representations against journalists’ portrayals (Gans, 1979). In short, sources having few viable options for reaching the public had to risk giving up message control to the journalists who crafted the final stories, with limited means of repair in the face of unflattering portrayals. From an institutional standpoint, news sources confronted this environment by devoting increasing resources to their communication efforts (Davis, 2002), working proactively to generate ‘information subsidies’ (Gandy, 1981), and developing mutual systems that tended to favor elites (Fishman, 1980). Sources learned how to manage journalists to increase their chances of getting their messages into news, but in a system that benefitted both sources and journalists by presenting both parties as authoritative (Ericson et al., 1989). As media scarcity began to give way to media abundance – first with the rise of cable television around the world (Cushion and Lewis, 2010), and then with the internet (Peer and Ksiazek, 2011) – the model of the journalist as gatekeeper became less tenable (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011, see also Chapter 7). A greater variety of news sites meant the fragmentation of the media audience across multiple sites, which both shrank the influence of any one news site while hatching new alternatives for sources to reach the public. Much of the recent story of the news media has centered on the decline of legacy news operations and the simultaneous rise of diverse digital news forms (Chyi, Lewis, and Zheng, 2012; Carlson, 2015b). But this view of the emergent media environment needs to be augmented with an understanding of public communication flows that now parallel journalism’s once monopolized control over information. The ethics of participation are deeply embedded in the culture of the Web (Streeter, 2011), and the explosion of expressive forms encapsulated in the term ‘Web 2.0’ promotes further sharing. This chapter will avoid wading into the arguments as to whether this shift has been inherently democratizing or not, although evidence for

fundamental reshuffling of public communication is hard to come by (Hindman, 2008). Instead the focus is on how elite sources, both at the individual and organizational levels, make use of this technology to communicate directly to the public and how it reshapes their relationships with journalists.

RETHINKING NEWS SOURCING IN A DIGITAL MEDIA ERA Although the rhythm of news production has long been swift and merciless, the shift to digital platforms entails a move from the dictates of journalist-imposed deadlines – the print deadline or the evening newscast – to the demands of the audiences – uploading content for lunch hour, for example. This shift results in the perpetual need to generate new content and to avoid stale stories (Boczkowski, 2010; Boyer, 2013). Yet despite the opportunities afforded by new technologies, the pressure to constantly publish new news coupled with declining resources in the face of reduced advertising subsidies seems to perpetuate traditional sourcing patterns (Phillips, 2010). Reich (2009) points out that despite an uptick in public relations materials easily and cheaply communicated via digital technologies, journalists remain beholden to finite time and space constraints. In the end, even though digital media have transformed production and delivery throughout the news industry, the actual practices by which news stories are crafted endure (Ryfe, 2013). Meanwhile, news start-ups suggest novel ways of doing journalism, but how this affects news sourcing practices from the journalistic side of the equation remains to be seen (see Chapter 10). On the source side, elite sources have long availed themselves of media outlets outside of news, from writing books to appearing on talk shows. With regard to the latter, politicians are keenly aware of what

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has been called the ‘Oprah Effect’ (Jamison and Baum, 2011) – the positive results they receive from appearing in non-news televised spaces like comedy programs and talk shows. While this effect is hard to measure, evidence supports positive results for candidates taking this approach (Taniguchi, 2011). The elite sources’ pursuit of non-news outlets has accelerated in the digital media environment with its plethora of sites and communication tools allowing these sources to reach audiences that do not watch news. This is especially important for politicians trying to gain support for their campaign or their policies. For example, US President Barack Obama promoted a new health care law by appearing on Zach Galifianakis’s absurdist online interview program Between Two Ferns, which is hosted by the humor website FunnyOrDie. com (Stanley, 2014). Against criticism that the silliness of the segment undermined the dignity of the presidency, the Obama administration lauded the venue for reaching younger citizens eligible for the new law. The video received 24 million views on the site, with an additional 7 million on YouTube. Another reason that sources seek out these non-news sites is to avoid journalistic interrogation. To return to the FunnyOrDie video, Obama traded humorous barbs with Galifianakis, but largely presented his policy pitch without substantive questions. If we look beyond this one example, what emerges is a complex media landscape yielding numerous sites through which sources can reach the public. Obama’s appearance on Between Two Ferns was not an aberration, but an outgrowth of a media system marked by a variety of media channels. Elite sources, from celebrities to politicians to organizations, emphasize their social media and online presence, using a variety of means to reach the public directly instead of through the news. The sections below consider ways in which the terrain of news sources needs to be rethought to accommodate technological innovation. The focus will primarily be on changes in public relations and the power of

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elite sources to harness social media to reach the public directly.

Public relations and disintermediation Much of the discourse regarding the disruptive potential of digital media has focused on disintermediation, or the elimination of actors or steps in the chain between creation and dissemination. This includes journalism (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001), which normatively represents itself as an intermediary facilitating the flow of information about newsworthy events occurring in the world to audiences. As discussed above, this function has historically been related to media structures, as regulatory policy and expense limited the number of mass communicators. Journalists became the means through which information travelled to reach large audiences, and a necessary conduit for news sources and advertisers. Beyond the position of news in information exchanges, this cultural position contributed to a mythology of journalism as the center of society, taking on the function previously occupied by the commons (Couldry, 2003). Given this social place of news, much of the public relations industry has traditionally been directed at affecting news coverage. The relationship between journalism and public relations is long and complicated, marked by antagonism and symbiosis (Macnamara, 2014). Normatively, journalists hold themselves as being at a distance from PR; journalistic identity emerges in part from its opposition to paid promotional practices. In practice, studies of news content consistently show a high percentage of news stories originated as press releases (Lewis et al., 2008). The close correspondence between PR and news has been ritualized in a press release form that mimics ordinary news writing to try and facilitate, as much as possible, the easy transition from paid speech to news. Aside from seeking attention, the authors

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of press releases hope to shed the suspicion accompanying paid speech by laundering their messages through putatively objective journalism. Yet there are only so many journalists and so much room for content, which has increased the competition to gain access to the news. As a result, public relations staffing has increased dramatically to enhance the resources necessary to chase after journalists (Davis, 2002). Many of these public relations practitioners started in journalism before being drawn away by better salaries and more stable employment. In sum, the mass communication era corresponded with the development of an entire public relations apparatus intent on creating or shaping news content, from planting stories to getting access for their clients to crisis management. All of this is predicated on journalism’s near monopoly on public communication. The rise of digital media transforms this equation by giving public relations practitioners new avenues for reaching the public. This evolving way of thinking can be summed up in a statement from a general business book touting the transformation of the marketing and communications industries: Public relations work has changed. PR is no longer just an esoteric discipline where great efforts are spent by companies to communicate exclusively to a handful of reporters who then tell the company’s story, generating a clip for the PR people to show their bosses. Now, great PR includes programs to reach buyers directly. The Web allows direct access to information about your products, and smart companies understand and use this phenomenal resource to great advantage (Scott, 2010: 10).

This is, in many ways, a radical shift in which public relations seizes on disintermediation to emphasize digital media platforms capable of reaching audiences without the filter of journalists. One London-based PR practitioner told Macnamara (2014: 746), ‘With being able to go direct to people, you are broadcasting yourself. A lot of what we do here is broadcasting straight to people … we’re plugging into people directly now, bypassing the traditional routes.’ Meanwhile,

Macnamara found journalists to be ‘sensitive to the increased autonomy and power that have been handed to PR practitioners by the internet and are concerned about being bypassed, leading to misinformation and propaganda corrupting the public sphere’. Here we see a dynamic in which PR finds new avenues of communication while journalists react by warning of the consequences of public messages not verified or contextualized by professional journalists. This sentiment will be explored in more detail below. Within public relations, social-media and non-traditional communication forms have moved from a fad on the periphery to becoming a central focus (Sapienza, 2007). For example, the literature on crisis communication contains efforts to think through how best to reach people outside of news channels (Schultz et  al., 2011). Another study found that corporate leaders can utilize Twitter to create a personal brand and to reach younger consumers without having to go through the news (Hwang, 2012). Others have proposed a new dynamic of ‘media-catching’ where journalists seek out PR rather than the other way around (Waters et  al., 2010). This becomes possible when journalists are able to search through public sites in pursuit of a story. Public relations practitioners are also finding a new way into digital news content. Rather than the back door of press releases, they now increasingly enter the front door through the rise of sponsored content or native advertising – stories on news sites appearing within the same space as news stories, but created by, or for, paying costumers (Carlson, 2015a). Although these stories are labeled differently than news content, their placement signals new relationships between public relations, marketing, and digital publishers that pushes against boundaries that have traditionally separated these activities (Coddington, 2015). The consequences of these efforts raise concerns about the intrusion of commercial interests within the space of news (see Carlson, 2015a; Couldry and Turow, 2014).

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In sum, the public relations industry is exploring dimensions of publicity outside of news. No longer does PR have to work with journalists to make sure a source is heard; the source now speaks publicly. This does not mean that journalism has become unimportant; communications activities still largely target the news, and sourcing practices have been largely consistent over time. But the evolution of the balance between journalistic and non-journalistic direct communications efforts certainly indicates the growing importance of the latter. A second area of investigation for thinking about the transformation of news sourcing fo­­­­­­­ cuses on how elite sources are becoming elite communicators. As the literature above on news sourcing reminds us, the sources journalists call upon to offer an account of the world regularly adhere to a hierarchical pattern. In this way, the news both reflects an existing social hierarchy through their sourcing practices while also perpetuating this order as authoritative (Ericson et  al., 1989). For example, heads of state and other highranking officials easily gain entry into news and regularly receive attention while other sources are left out of the news. In many ways, this vision of journalism’s relationship with elite power fuels much of the democratizing discourse surrounding digital media and its potential for opening up public communication in a nearly unlimited way. However promising digital media may be for the health of public information flows, we must also examine ways in which the sources that have been able to command attention from journalists are now commanding attention as direct communicators themselves. Here again the forces of digital disintermediation complicate previously settled understandings of public communication. Digital media allow for a number of expressive technologies – websites, blogs, videos, and social media – open to anyone with basic computing skills and access to technology. Yet elite sources have the advantage of pre-existing recognition, either through

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institutional affiliations (e.g. political office holders) or individual reputation (e.g. celebrities) (see Chapter 7). Elites are learning how to communicate directly to the public, and with some success through social media channels. For example, at the time of writing in July 2015, President Barack Obama has 62 million Twitter followers he can reach without the mediation of journalists (Obama still trails singers Katy Perry and Justin Beiber, who have 72 and 65 million respectively). Although Twitter followers do not automatically equate to the audience for any particular tweet, the scale of their social network reach dwarfs the 61-follower average for active Twitter users (Bruner, 2013). Twitter followers exhibit ‘long tail’ behavior (Anderson, 2006), with a few elites commanding larger numbers of followers. The architecture of Twitter accentuates sharing through such devices as hashtags and retweets, which allows certain users to quickly amass larger numbers of followers (Page, 2012). Another domain for monitoring how elite sources circumvent news is the political campaign. Campaigns have always pioneered sophisticated communications strategies, reaching voters through pseudoevents (Boorstin, 1961) that get reported in the news and through commercial messages sent out directly to voters. Recently, political campaigns have also focused on working around traditional news channels through digital media. In the USA, the Obama campaign was at the forefront of complementing news coverage and television advertising with sophisticated approaches relying heavily on technological innovations, new media channels, and grassroots organizing (Kreiss, 2012). Its success has spawned efforts by subsequent campaigns to angle themselves toward similar networked politics (Miller, 2013). While candidates for political office are motivated by efforts to persuade voters and reinforce support in their attempts to get elected, government officials face a similar problem of being able to reach their constituencies in novel ways beyond news.

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This desire can be encapsulated in the idea of ‘Government 2.0’, which stresses the ethic of increased transparency and communication through digital media (Chun et al. 2010; Bonsón et  al., 2012). The development of these systems is born out of frustration with bureaucracy and the belief that more information equates to better governance. These are laudable goals, but from the standpoint of this chapter such drives further advocate for public communication outside of traditional journalistic channels, which redefines the role of news in democratic governance. Much of the literature on Journalism Studies limits the universe of elite sources to governmental, institutional, and economic elites. However, as we saw above with Katy Perry and Justin Beiber’s Twitter statistics, celebrities should also be included as elite sources. Like politicians, celebrities who have had to rely on the press to communicate to fans now reach out directly through social media. What needs attention is how this direct contact alters the celebrity–fan relationship. Marwick and boyd (2011) characterized celebrities’ use of Twitter as the appearance of granting ‘backstage’ access (Goffman, 1959) through reducing the mediation of celebrity to just the individual and the audience. Although these exchanges have the appearance of interpersonal communication, they reinforce a power relationship privileging the celebrity as superior. Athletes and musicians too have taken to social media to work around traditional news sources (Pegoraro, 2010; Sanderson and Kassing, 2011; Baym, 2012). For celebrities, the dictates of reputation management require engaging with the public to maintain popularity and to confront potential scandals. Increasingly, this happens directly rather than through the news.

Social media and news sourcing practices However much social media extend the domain of public communication to new

voices, what is plainly visible is that they allow elite sources to become elite communicators capable of bypassing news to reach the public directly. Coupled with the new communicative abilities of public relations practitioners, these developments require a new look at the dynamics between sources and journalists in the realm of social media. Several scholars have examined how the new terrain of public communication alters how journalists interact with sources. Instead of having to go through journalists, sources present their messages directly to the public through social media, which then feeds into news discourse as these messages get sourced in stories (Broersma and Graham, 2012, 2013; Moon and Hadley, 2014). For resource-strapped news organizations, social media messages provide an inexpensive supply of easily attainable content (Broersma and Graham, 2012). We should avoid equating material collected through social media with what is attained through interviews or press releases. Social media afford their own communicative contentions, and how these types of messages affect news sourcing is still developing. Ekman and Widholm (2015) argue one negative consequence of journalists relying on social media for source material may the ‘celebritization’ of political coverage in which the focus on the personal lives of politicians trumps more substantive issues. Beyond elites, Paulussen and Harder (2014) find that the increased use of social media to gather sources for news stories has led to the inclusion of more non-elites voices. This finding dovetails with the example of former NPR producer Andy Carvin’s practice of cobbling together news coverage by curating tweets from on-the-ground witnesses during crises where journalists could not be present or capture the larger picture (Hermida et al., 2014). Although practices vary, the deluge of social-media messages by elites and nonelites forces journalists to confront these sites as a source of public communication full of newsworthy items. These developments have caused journalists to rethink their sourcing

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practices while simultaneously driving investment in new digital skills (Bakker, 2014) and the development of new apparatuses for fact-checking (Diakopouloset  al., 2012). But they also alter the domain of public discourse in which journalists operate. Social media provide journalists with a space to locate sources, but they also provide sources spaces to critique journalists. The example of Maya Arulpragasam starting this chapter provides one case study of how sources unhappy with journalistic accounts can work publicly to undermine reporters and argue for counternarratives. Sources have always had concerns about how they are covered (see Palmer, 2013), but rarely have their qualms entered the public view (for an exception, see Fakazis, 2006). Social media afford sources the ability to publicly air these complaints and to lobby for alternate narratives. Journalists have to expect to be impugned publicly, and in some cases must defend the accuracy of their representations. How this affects news sourcing deserves future study.

A PLURAL PUBLIC SPHERE? OR A NEW ERA OF PRIMARY DEFINERS? This chapter has traced how the trajectories of a digital media environment sporting many channels of communication allow sources to speak directly to the public rather than rely solely on news. But why does this matter? The newfound ability of news sources to take advantage of this environment without journalists as mediators suggests two potential scenarios. Optimistically, what emerges is a pluralistic public sphere facilitating a greater variety of actors than could be seen in limited news spaces (see Chapter 10). Conversely, a pessimistic view sees a media landscape comprising a cacophony of self-interested communicators with no accountability. While the reality likely lies in between these extremes, interrogating these scenarios to

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form a normative perspective of the emergent media environment remains important. In the first scenario, the democratization of public communication continues to open up new channels for speech, increasing the plurality of the public sphere. This vision contains within it a critique of journalism as inadequate to the expectations heaped upon it as the main source of information within democratic normative theory. The literature on news sources reviewed above contains a consistent criticism of journalistic practices as tending to favor elite sources and their frames. For example, Gitlin (1980) connected the patterns of news sourcing with the operation of hegemony in his study of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the USA. Even with a wide range of news outlets, journalists tend to exhibit ‘pack journalism’ by coalescing around certain frames for any given story (Crouse, 1972). In such situations it would be overly simplistic to treat elite sources and journalists as in league with one another. Rather, their relationship is marked by what Eason (1988) calls ‘disobedient dependence’ – a relationship in which journalists simultaneously rely on their sources while also proclaiming their distance. This does not mean journalists are powerless; they still make selections based on arguments for newsworthiness. Yet, over time, surveys reveal that public opinion of journalistic performance and trustworthiness has declined. Optimistically, the ability of sources to speak directly to the public acts as a salve for the excessive power of journalists and their role as a filter of what their audiences see. From the other direction, the public gains the ability to gather information directly from sources to formulate opinions. By contrast, the second scenario takes a dystopian turn in presenting a public communication environment wrought with self-interested actors able to utilize new communicative means to reach audiences without the check on their power historically provided by journalists. This view retains a vision of journalism as not merely conduits

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for information, but a system for verifying information, adding context, and rooting out error (see Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001, for a crystallization of this mode). Conversely, a lack of accountability leads to the preponderance of demagoguery and fabrication or a media environment fragmented to the point of dysfunction. An additional critique strikes at core assumptions about digital media. Despite the rhetoric of inclusion so prominent within discussions of digital media, the architecture of the Web tends to reward those actors who already have fame while punishing those at the margins (Hindman, 2008; Halavais, 2009). Networks tend to favor actors who are well connected, leading elite sources to further their own communicative power. In this environment, elites sources may be thought of as primary definers not due to their privileged access to news texts but through the outsized influence of their direct communication to a significant swath of the public.

CONCLUSION: CONCEIVING OF SOURCES BEYOND NEWS TEXTS Whether or not the bypassing of news media by elite sources leads to enhanced pluralism or impoverished democracy, this bifurcation should help spur a new generation of research on news sources that moves beyond the confines of the journalist–source interaction or the news text to consider the broader ecology of public communication in which journalists are only one part (Anderson, 2013; Domingo and Le Cam, 2015). To a large extent, the study of news sources has tended to examine news texts to ask about who speaks and who does not. Other ethnographic research has looked at the interaction between journalists or sources, including institutionalized practices like press conferences or interviews. But this chapter indicates the need to look outward beyond these practices to examine multiple types of public information flows, of which journalism is only one channel.

Future research on news sources should track flows of information both inside and outside of news texts with a careful eye to how such flows converge and diverge. In particular, more research is needed on how elite sources use digital media tools to contest news frames in their efforts to shape news narratives. Additional work will be needed on how news sources eschew journalism altogether to seek out direct channels of communication with the public. In any case, the research should be sensitive to innovations in both news production practices and technologies. This move to look beyond news texts may be uncomfortable for some in Journalism Studies who are accustomed to the closed scholarly milieu that Schlesinger (1990) once criticized as ‘media-centrism’. Yet the spread of digital media makes it increasingly evident that we cannot account for the totality of public information flows by only examining news texts. Innovative approaches are needed to study both how sources act through news and how they circumvent it (see Chapter 27). But innovative research designs are not enough. The focus must also account for the consequences of these flows for democratic societies. Generations of scholars have warned about the detrimental reliance on elite sources; we now need to ask what is changing as well as interrogate how these changes matter.

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Baym, Nancy K. (2012) ‘Fans or friends?: Seeing social media audiences as musicians do’, Participations, 9(2): 287–316. Bennett, W. Lance (1990) ‘Toward a theory of press-state relations in the United States’, Journal of Communication, 40(2): 103–27. Berelson, Bernard (1948) ‘What “missing the newspaper” means’, in Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (eds), Communication Research 1948–1949, New York: Harper, pp. 111–29. Berkowitz, Dan (1987) ‘TV news sources and news channels: A study in agenda-building’, Journalism Quarterly, 64: 508–13. Berkowitz, Dan (2009) ‘Reporters and their sources’, in Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 102–15. Boczkowski, Pablo J. (2010) News at Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bonsón, Enrique, Torres, Lourdes, Royo, Sonia, and Flores, Francisco (2012) ‘Local e-government 2.0: Social media and corporate transparency in municipalities’, Government Information Quarterly, 29(2): 123–32. Boorstin, Daniel (1961) The Image. New York: Atheneum. Boyer, Dominic (2013) The Life Informatic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Broersma, Marcel and Graham, Todd (2012) ‘Social media as beat: Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections’, Journalism Practice 6(3): 403–19. Broersma, Marcel, and Graham, Todd (2013) ‘Twitter as a news source’, Journalism Practice, 7(4): 446–64. Bruner, Jon (2013) ‘Tweets loud and quiet’, O’Reilly Radar. http://radar.oreilly. com/2013/12/tweets-loud-and-quiet.html Carlson, Matt (2007) ‘Order versus access: news search engines and the challenge to traditional journalistic roles’, Media, Culture & Society, 29(6): 1014–30. Carlson, Matt (2015a) ‘When news sites go native: Redefining the advertising-editorial divide in response to native advertising. Journalism, 16(7): 849–865. Carlson, Matt (2015b) ‘Telling the crisis story of journalism: Narratives of normative reassurance in Page One’. In J. C. Alexander, E. Breese, and M. Luengo (eds), The Crisis of

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Journalism Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming. Chun, Soon Ae, Shulman, Stuart, Sandoval, Rodrigo, and Hovy, Eduard (2010) ‘Government 2.0: Making connections between citizens, data and government’, Information Polity, 15(1): 1–9. Chyi, Hsiang Iris, Lewis, Seth C., and Zheng, Nan (2012) ‘A matter of life and death? Examining how newspapers covered the newspaper “Crisis”’, Journalism Studies, 13(2): 305–24. Coddington, Mark (2015) ‘The wall becomes a curtain: Revisiting journalism’s news–business boundary’, in Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis (eds), Boundaries of Journalism, New York: Routledge, pp. 67–92. Cottle, Simon (2000) ‘Rethinking News Access’, Journalism Studies, 1: 427–48. Couldry, Nick (2003) Media Rituals. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick, and Joseph Turow (2014) ‘Advertising, big data and the clearance of the public realm: marketers’ new approaches to the content subsidy’, International Journal of Communication, 8: 1710–26. Crouse, Timothy (1972) The Boys on the Bus. New York: Random House. Cushion, Stephen, and Justin Lewis (eds) (2010) The Rise of 24-hour News Television: Global Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. Davis, Aeron (2002) Public Relations Democracy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Diakopoulos, Nicholas, De Choudhury, Munmun, and Naaman, Mor (2012) ‘Finding and assessing social media information sources in the context of journalism’, Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2451–60. Domingo, David and Le Cam, Florence (2014) ‘Journalism beyond the boundaries: The collective construction of news narratives’, in Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis (eds), Boundaries of Journalism, New York: Routledge, pp. 137–51. Eason, David (1988) ‘On journalistic authority: The Janet Cooke scandal’ in J. W. Carey (ed.), Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 205–27. Ekman, Mattiasa, and Widholm, Andreas (2015) ‘Politicians as media producers’, Journalism Practice, 9(1): 78–91.

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Entman, Robert (1993) ‘Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm’, Journal of Communication, 43(4): 51–8. Ericson, Richard (1998) ‘How journalists visualize fact’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 560: 83–95. Ericson, Richard, Baranek, Patricia, and Chan, Janet (1989) Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fakazis, Elizabeth (2006) ‘Janet Malcolm: Constructing boundaries of journalism’, Journalism, 7(1): 5–24. Fishman, Mark (1980) Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gandy, Oscar (1981) Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidiaries and Public Policy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Gans, Herbert (1979) Deciding What’s News. New York: Pantheon. Gieber, Walter, and Johnson, Walter (1961) ‘The City Hall “beat”: A study of reporter and source roles’, Journalism Quarterly, 38(3): 289–97. Gitlin, Todd (1980) The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Glasgow University Media Group (1976) Bad News. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Habermas, Jürgen (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halavais, Alexander (2009) Search Engine Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Charles, Jefferson, Tony, Clarke, John, and Roberts, Brian (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hallin, Daniel (1986) The ‘Uncensored War’. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hallin, Daniel (1994) We Keep America on Top of the World. London: Routledge. Hallin, Daniel, Manoff, Robert Karl, and Weddle, Judy (1993) ‘Sourcing patterns of national security reporters’, Journalism Quarterly, 70(4): 753–66. Hermida, Alfred, Lewis, Seth C., and Zamith, Rodrigo (2014) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3): 479–99.

Hindman, Matthew (2008) The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirschberg, Lynn (2010) ‘M.I.A.’s agitprop pop’, New York Times Magazine, http://www. nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/ 30mia-t.html?pagewanted=all Hwang, Sungwook (2012) ‘The strategic use of Twitter to manage personal public relations’, Public Relations Review, 38(1): 159–61. Jamison, Angela, and Baum, Matthew A. (2011) ‘Soft news and the four Oprah effects’, in Robert V. Shapiro and Lawrence R. Jacobs (eds) Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 121–37. Kovach, Bill, and Rosenstiel, Tom (2001) The Elements of Journalism. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Kreiss, Daniel (2012) Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Justin, Williams, Andrew, and Franklin, Bob (2008) ‘A compromised fourth estate? UK news journalism, public relations and news sources’, Journalism Studies, 9(1): 1–20. Macnamara, Jim (2014) ‘Journalism–PR relations revisited: The good news, the bad news, and insights into tomorrow’s news’, Public Relations Review, 40(5): 739–50. Maras, Steven (2013) Objectivity in Journalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Marwick, Alice and boyd, danah (2011) ‘To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter’, Convergence, 17(2): 139–58. McCombs, Maxwell E., and Shaw, Donald L. (1972) ‘The agenda-setting function of mass media’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2): 176–87. Miller, David (1993) ‘Official sources and “primary definition”: The case of Northern Ireland’, Media, Culture & Society, 15(3): 385–406. Miller, William J. (2013) ‘We can’t all be Obama: The use of new media in modern political campaigns’, Journal of Political Marketing, 12(4): 326–47. Moon, Soo Jung, and Hadley, Patrick (2014) ‘Routinizing a new technology in the newsroom: Twitter as a news source in mainstream media’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(2): 289–305.

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Page, Ruth (2012) ‘The linguistics of selfbranding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags’, Discourse & Communication, 6(2): 181–201. Palmer, Ruth A. (2013) ‘Context matters: What interviews with news subjects can tell us about accuracy and error’, Journalism Studies, 14(1): 46–61. Paulussen, Steve, and Harder, Raymond A. (2014) ‘Social media references in newspapers: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as sources in newspaper journalism’, Journalism Practice, 8(5): 542–51. Peer, Limor, and Ksiazek, Thomas B. (2011) ‘YouTube and the challenge to journalism: new standards for news videos online’, Journalism Studies 12(1): 45–63. Pegoraro, Ann (2010) ‘Look who’s talking – athletes on Twitter: A case study’, International Journal of Sport Communication, 3(4): 501–14. Phillips, Angela (2010) ‘Old sources: New bottles’, in Natalie Fenton (ed.), New Media, Old News, Los Angeles: Sage, pp. 87–101. Prior, Markus (2007) Post-Broadcast Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Reich, Zvi (2009) Sourcing the News. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Ryfe, David M. (2013) Can Journalism Survive? Malden, MA: Polity. Sanderson, Jimmy, and Kassing, Jeffrey W. (2011) ‘Tweets and blogs’ in Andrew Billings (ed.) Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption, New York: Routledge. pp. 114–127. Sapienza, Tony (2007) ‘Avoiding a PR and social media disconnect’, Public Relations Tactics, 14(11): 17. Schlesinger, Philip (1990) ‘Rethinking the sociology of journalism: Source strategies and the limits of media-centrism’, in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication: The New Imperatives, London: Sage, pp. 61–83. Schlesinger, Philip, and Howard Tumber (1994) Reporting Crime. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Schudson, Michael (1978) Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books. Schultz, Friederike, Utz, Sonja, and Göritz, Anja (2011) ‘Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media’, Public Relations Review, 37(1): 20–7.

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17 Activists as News Producers Ya n a B r e i n d l

Activists maintain an ambivalent relationship with mainstream media, oscillating between a desire to emancipate themselves from mainstream media’s dominance on public debate and a dependency on the media to reach a broad enough public to bring about change. Protest actors critique professional media for privileging elite voices and rendering an imprecise picture of reality. They can entirely bypass the mass media system. This is notably the case with niche subjects that are either taboo and excluded from public debate, such as extremist speech, and/or only of interest to a small number of people and hence not likely to be published by mainstream media outlets. However, activists’ ultimate goal is to change a given state in society or politics, which often (but not always) means reaching a broad enough audience, a critical mass, to profoundly affect society. Access to the (mass) media is considered vital for all political actors in democracies and even more so for protest actors considered as

lacking visibility due to their nature of ‘outsiders’ to the institutionalized political system (Rucht, 2004: 29). Political campaigning aims at generating awareness, credibility and change (Baringhorst 2009), making media visibility an essential aim for activists no matter what they are fighting for (Cammaerts et al. 2013). Political debates are carried out principally through the media, making journalists privileged targets for activists’ communication efforts. As Hindman (2008) has shown, mainstream media outlets maintain their dominant position in the ‘networked public sphere’ (Benkler 2013, see also Chapter 10), attracting most of the attention. The internet favors the ‘long tail’ phenomenon (Andersen, 2006) a few highly visible sites receive most of the attention while most other sites cater to a relatively small amount of followers. Activists are diversifying their communication strategies and they try not only to reach mainstream and alternative media, but they also self-publish online and offline

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(Rucht 2004; Cammaerts 2005; McCurdy 2008, 2010, 2012: Mattoni 2012). The multiplication of channels to publish activist voices leads to a ‘centrifugal diversification, in which, contrary to the centripetal tendency of communication in the period ­dominated by national public TV broadcasting channels, media recipients have more media options on offer. Thus political campaigning has to be more tailored according to a pluralized media system targeting a highly fragmented audience’ (Baringhorst, 2009: 17). The rise of ‘issue campaigning’, concentrating on narrowly-focused political struggles instead of broad societal questions, involves an ever increasing number of individuals and organizations promoting their issue above  or against other issues in the public sphere, hence the competition is fierce (Koopmans, 2004). Research has shown that the more media attention a protest campaign receives, the more successful it will be in reaching its goals, but the media awareness can also influence the structure of the movement (Gitlin 1980). However, social movement research has rarely explicitly focused on the relation between activists and the media. Instead, it has predominantly assessed protest movements’ mobilizing and opportunity structures as well as their framing processes (McAdam et  al., 1996; Garrett, 2006). Its attempts at explaining why people engage in protest actions and why some movements are more successful than others. A focus on information and communication practices per se is however lacking (but see Cammaerts et  al., 2013). Instead, research aims at identifying structures (organizations and networks) and protest repertoires that are supportive of individuals organizing and engaging in collective action (McCarthy, 1996), as well as institutional and political factors that favour or disfavour political mobilization (McAdam et  al., 1996). A further strand of social movement literature analyzes framing practices, that is, the strategic attempt to shape the narrative

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surrounding a movement and a particular struggle (Zald, 1996). One of the primary objectives of protest groups is to frame or reframe the debate about a given topic or policy in order to convince the public and decision-makers of their position (Benford and Snow, 2000). Frames allow to engage in ‘symbolic politics’, using ‘symbols, actions, or stories that make sense of a situation for an audience that is frequently far away’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 16). While framing is a communicative practice in essence, research has privileged a focus on identifying the types of frames used rather than the practices that lead to the identification and dissemination of these frames. This chapter draws on the rich and vibrant body of research that focuses not only on social movements but on the broader field of online political activism as well as interest representation, while trying to bridge the gap to information and communication and in particular Journalism Studies. Activists are conceptualized as news producers, placing the focus on the way in which individuals deal with information to trigger political change. The chapter therefore analyses how activists use digital media to monitor, select, edit, interpret and disseminate politically relevant information in the networked public sphere. Information is broadly defined as any type of fact, opinion or comment obtained or communicated in order to increase the available knowledge about a given political issue. First, we will discuss the internet’s reinforcing and mobilizing affordances, focusing in particular on the main changes undergone by online political activism and on the protest channels used by activists to communicate their message. Second, we discuss the news production practices developed by activists in the realm of monitoring and disclosing information, the emergence of more radical claims about access to information, and the relationship between activists and journalists. We conclude this chapter by discussing the main findings and proposing new directions for future research.

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ONLINE MOBILIZATION AND THE REINFORCEMENT OF POWER STRUCTURES As with previous technologies, the internet has triggered questions about its mobilizing or reinforcing potential, about whether it facilitates the emergence and engagement of new actors or whether it simply reinforces the power of existing elites. The growing body of evidence shows that digital technologies can both reinforce and challenge existing structures, depending on how they are being used (Dutton 2008). Digital media channels, ‘only partially integrated into commercial systems’ of global reach complete the ‘transnational media regime’ and allow for the distribution of alternative information and the organization of counter-hegemonic movements (Bennett, 2004: 131). Bennett (2003) argues that the change in the global communication infrastructures that came with the rapid adoption of the internet in the 1990s allows ‘ordinary people’ to produce alternative ‘high quality content’ and to diffuse it across national borders, to create large networks connected by that content and the growing permeability of all types of media. For Benkler (2013: 6), the networked public sphere can be described as ‘an arena that is less dominated by large media entities, less subject to government control, and more open to wider participation’ (see also Chapter 10). Similarly for Chadwick (2009: 20), ‘[t]he Internet […] contributes to a more diverse and pluralistic media landscape’. However, empirical research has shown that the democratizing effect of the networked public sphere, where any news contributor is supposed to be equal to any other news contributor, is not always the case. Hindman (2008) in particular has shown that there is a strong power-law distribution of linking patterns online. Although a wide variety of news sources exists, only a few – often traditional – media outlets are at the centre of the attention economy. Alternative news sites can simply not compete

with existing media outlets in terms of readership. Authors such as Benkler (2006) argue nonetheless that by contributing to special-­ interest communities, outsiders can nonetheless reach mainstream media attention backbone by being progressively relied across clusters and communities. Influential bloggers were also shown to be able to influence the mainstream media debate (Drezner and Farrell, 2008), although they are often part of an elite similar to the mass media system (Hindman, 2008; Wallsten, 2007). The networked public sphere has hence not fundamentally altered power law dynamics. However, it presents new opportunities to share information with like-minded individuals and eventually reach broader audiences. Also, content production remains structured by the design of the technical infrastructures that enabled it. Computer code has an inherently regulatory function of social behaviour (Lessig, 1999). It provides new affordances that can lead to new practices of networked collaboration such as the open editing process of Wikipedia or the creation of free or opensource software. Participation can be open and multiple, allowing for weak ties of cooperation, in a decentralized and asynchronous way. Each participant can choose his level of engagement and act autonomously (Fuster Morell, 2009). However, it does not suffice to create an open creation platform for collaboration to emerge. The success depends for instance on the modularity of what is created, that is, whether it can be divided into preferably small modules, and use mechanisms for low-cost integration, including quality controls as well as rules of participation and modes of peer production (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006). The systems’ infrastructure as well as the way it is used matters. Computer algorithms shape what type of information we access and recommend, and automatically filter the content we place on social media sites, shaping our interactions with others (Gillespie, 2013). The major advance of Web 2.0 or social-media platforms

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is that it lowers the thresholds for individuals to create online content, yet control of how and which parts of that content are being displayed and shared remains largely in the hands of corporate entities, the ‘new sovereigns’ as MacKinnon (2012) refers to them. She adds: ‘the political discourse in the USA and in many other democracies now depends increasingly on privately owned and operated digital intermediaries. Whether unpopular, controversial and contested speech has the right to exist on these platforms is left up to unelected corporate executives, who are under no legal obligation to justify their decisions’. Deibert (2013) furthermore argues that the battle for control over code, the internet’s underlying infrastructure, largely takes place behind shut doors beyond public accountability and independent oversight mechanisms. The internet’s open and decentralized characteristics also make it vulnerable for threats from cybercriminals and mass surveillance, as practiced by the NSA and corporate encroachments on fundamental rights (Deibert, 2013). Furthermore, individuals can select their information sources from an ever-­increasing and highly tailored offer. This development has led to fears of balkanization and fragmentation of the common public sphere into a multitude of discursive spaces that reinforce pre-existing ideas and beliefs and function as echo chambers or filter bubbles (Sunstein, 2002, 2009; Pariser, 2012). This polarization has notably been shown within the republican and democrat blogospheres in the USA (Adamic and Glance, 2005) as well as on Twitter (Smith et  al., 2014) but there is also evidence of cross-ideological discussions beyond entrenched party lines (Hargittai et al. 2008). We witness a redefinition of information production within the sphere of traditional journalism as well as alternative media sites. New types of information production, control and diffusion appear; for example, documented and investigative expertise or very subjective forms of expression and reporting.

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‘Still in [their] infancy, new spaces of hybrid information production appear, bringing into contact professionals, activists and amateurs and allowing an expression that can be informative, plural, critique, personal and subjective’ argue Cardon and Granjon (2010: 137; see also Chapter 11). Journalists are no longer the only people able to access, transform and disseminate information. Their gatekeeping role has been undermined by digital media (Hermida, 2011). And while the emergence of ‘participatory journalism’, ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘usergenerated content’ has been relatively well explored in recent literature, the role played by activists’ news practices outside of mainstream and alternative media sites remains under-explored. The following section reviews the principal changes undergone by activism online before turning to the various protest channels used.

THE RISE OF CONNECTIVE ACTION As the internet became accessible to the broad public in the early 1990s, and increasingly so since the emergence of social media or Web 2.0 platforms, action groups of all types have taken to the digital sphere to express their views, disseminate their political claims and engage in politically-oriented networked collaboration. There is a large body of research focusing on various forms of online collective action (Garrett, 2006; Van Laer and Van Aelst, 2009; Earl and Kimport, 2011). Bennett and Segerberg (2012) describe the proliferation of digitally-networked protest movements since the early 1990s as the emergence of ‘connective action’, in opposition to Olson’s (1971) ‘logic of collective action’, in which organizations are allowed to leverage the necessary resources for coordinating political action. Connective action takes the shape of self-organizing networks sustained by personalized communication.

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Organizational costs are reduced to the point where organizations may no longer be necessary for sustaining protest. Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl (2012), and Shirky (2008) describe a similar shift away from formal, hierarchical organizations to more flexible, individualized structures. Personal memes (e.g. ‘We are the 99%’ used during the #occupy campaigns, see Bennett and Segerberg, 2012) travel more easily across social media than ­organizationally-defined frames and can rapidly adapt to new political conditions. Online movements hence emerge as networks of autonomous individuals that work together on targeted issue campaigns. Protest is inextricably interwoven with digital communication networks (Castells, 2012). However, organizations have not completely disappeared and they still structure many forms of collective action. New organizations such as MoveOn in the USA (Karpf, 2012) or Avaaz at the international level (Kavada, 2012) have emerged. These organizations take advantage of social media to foster a sense of common identity and mobilize people in targeted campaigns. Digital features that allow individuals to communicate with the organization and diffuse its message to their networks are included so as to channel individual action in favour of the organizations’ goal. The more the internet’s key affordances such as reduced organizing and participating costs or the reduced need to be physically co-present, are leveraged, the more transformative are the changes in how online collective action is carried out (Earl and Kimport, 2011). Bennett and Segerberg (2012) examine evidence from case studies in the USA and Germany showing that traditional forms of collective action based on organizations providing leadership, framing and mobilizing resources is complemented by new forms of connective action, in which organizations may be involved as brokers without themselves organizing the protests or action emerging from physically dispersed groups such as during the #occupy protests.

Communication is central to all forms of collective and connective action. To bring about political change, activists need to monitor, produce and distribute political information that is often neglected by traditional media outlets. They can use various protest channels to do so.

PROTEST CHANNELS Activists need to convince those that have the power to effect change (Baringhorst et  al., 2009). In practice those are often political decision-makers, but it can also be citizens or corporations depending on the goal of the campaign, whether changing social behaviour or modifying business practices. The interest group literature, which focuses on how groups represent their interests in political decision-making processes, distinguishes between an access and a voice channel (Keim and Zeithalm, 1986; Attarça, 2007), the latter of which is used in particular by public interest groups such as NGOs and other protest actors. The access channel refers to formal or informal contacts with decision-makers, as it is practiced through interest representation and lobbying. Access does not equate to influence, yet is a necessary stage before influence can be exerted (Dür and De Bièvre, 2007; Dür, 2009; Klüver 2009). Access is generally traded for against interest groups’ resources (Mazey and Richardson, 1999/2001), such as legitimacy, political support, knowledge or expertise (Dür, 2008). Citizen interests groups, characterized as more ‘diffuse’ and less concentrated compared to hierarchically-organized business interest groups, are however often deprived of direct access or access alone is not sufficient to influence decision-makers needing hence to find another venue to be heard. The voice channel therefore consists of political mobilization, ‘constituency’ building and ‘grassroots lobbying’, which can be targeted directly at citizens (as is

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increasingly possible via the internet) or indirectly (via the media) to reach both citizens and decision-makers. Legitimacy and credibility are developed over time by providing expertise, claims of representativeness (e.g.  through citizen mobilization or media resonance), and new input. Activists – in particular when operating online – do not draw their legitimacy from membership or economic importance as private interest groups do. They represent a particular perspective of the public interest. Beyond promoting their political goals, activists also need to assert their legitimacy and credibility (Breindl, 2012b).1 The voice channel includes what is frequently categorized as mainstream media, alternative media and self-publication practices. However, the distinction between mainstream and alternative, community or radical media suggests separate empirical practices that are in fact characterized by hybridization (see Chapter 11). What is ‘alternative’ or ‘critical’ is always contextually determined and the boundaries to ‘mainstream’ journalism remain porous. Nonetheless, the perception of alternative and mainstream media as two ideal-types of journalism remains the dominant perspective in the literature on alternative media, characterized by dichotomies along all the main stages of news production: news producers oppose professionals to amateurs, who publish in commercial vs. independent media outlets that are characterized by hierarchical as opposed to grassroots and decentralized organizing structures supported by centralized distribution channels or openly available content, eventually leading to a reception that is elite-biased or critical of established power centres (see for instance Fuchs, 2010, building on Bailey et al., 2008 and Rauch, 2007). While these ideal-types may exist, in practice, journalism is characterized by hybrid practices and fluctuating boundaries between mainstream and alternative media. Alternative media tends to be produced by activists while the barriers to

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reach mainstream media are higher and the competition for awareness fiercer. The rapid appropriation of the internet by activists of all political orientations is far from surprising considering that technology, and media in particular, have played a crucial role in protest activities throughout history. The invention and development of the printing press allowed standardizing and conserving knowledge that had been mainly transmitted orally or through manuscripts until then. It also stimulated the dissemination of opposing points of view and the critique of authority (Briggs and Burke, 2010). New social practices and exchanges emerged, many of which are now considered as ‘mainstream’. Newspapers were discussed in salons and led to the emergence of a variety of public spheres or ‘public opinions’. The Marxist–Leninist revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced their own newspapers (e.g. Karl Marx’s Vorwärts or Engels AntiDühring) to spread communist theories but also to organize protest. Community media emerged in the 1970s when women, environmentalists and other groups initiated alternative radio and television channels to spread their messages and allow citizens to participate in the making of the news. The idea was to produce information in a collaborative manner to increase equality, community ties and empower marginalized groups (Cardon and Granjon, 2010). Contrary to professional journalism’s claim to ‘objectivity’, protest groups have always engaged in news production from a deliberately critical stance. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, new social movements attempted to generate ‘alternative public spheres’ by criticizing the mass media ‘public sphere’, which was considered to have been manipulated by the elites (Baringhorst, 2009). Alternative or radical media were not directed against mainstream media but rather aimed at ‘de-nounc[ing] the more global social system of which mass media are only one component’ (Cardon and Granjon,

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2010:  62). The commercialization and concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few multinational conglomerates has contributed to a decrease in the amounts of political content available to the point where politics in the media is reduced to scandal, crime and personalization (Bennett, 2003). Alternative media aimed at providing more direct and authentic information to engaged audiences on often neglected political issues. However, as discussed previously, to reach a wide public, activists need to gain access to mainstream media. Therefore, protest movements increasingly adapted their media strategies to the selection logic of commercial media and orchestrated their campaigns as ‘media spectacle’ (Baringhorst, 2009: 610) and performative action (Cammaerts, 2012). The persuasion of a mass public became the most important dimension of communication, at the expense of expressive, individual and collective self-expression (Baringhorst, 2009). At the same time, digital media constitute a new opportunity for activists to critique mainstream voices and complement the news by providing their perspective on a given topic. Aiming for social change, activists use all types of communicative action to generate awareness for their cause. Besides targeting the mainstream media or publishing in community-owned media outlets, any individual can now engage in self-publishing through social media, websites, email lists, forums, chats, blogs, and so on, giving rise to what Castells (2009) has framed ‘mass self-communication’. As the internet has become ubiquitous in the Western world, activists have adapted their information practices to the medium, which has been repeatedly described as matching the decentralized character of many protest movements better than any previous media. While research on citizen journalism, user-generated content or participatory journalism has mainly focused on how individuals (often called ‘amateurs’) can contribute to the various stages of professional news-making processes (see Chapter 15), this chapter looks beyond the

institutionalized news channels to the realm of alternative media and activist news production. The following sections demonstrate that activists engage in various news production stages but from a deliberatively critical perspective.

DIGITAL WATCHDOGS: MONITORING AND DISCLOSING POLITICAL INFORMATION While the mass media crisis has led to debates about the eroding ‘fourth estate’ function of the media, activist news producers are increasingly fulfilling this watchdog role holding political institutions and other powerholders accountable for their action. Networked individuals have been ascribed a watchdog function similar to that fulfilled by professional journalism, as the ‘fifth estate’ (Dutton, 2008) or the ‘networked public sphere’ (Benkler, 2013). For these authors, the combined action of people using digital technologies to share information, to organize and mobilize extends even the function of mainstream media by exerting ‘greater social responsibility’ (Dutton, 2008: 4) to a broad array of institutional arenas, not just politics. In the hybrid media environment, ordinary citizens, activists or independent journalists exercise accountability journalism when ­traditional journalism fails to alert the public to corporate or governmental misconduct (see Chapter 10). This development can be viewed within the broader emergence of ‘monitorial democracy’ (Keane, 2009) that characterizes the increasing supplementation of conventional representative democratic practices with monitoring processes by governments, independent institutions and citizens. Public scrutiny is an essential component of renewed forms of citizenship, characterized by the emergence of ‘monitorial citizens’ (Schudson, 1998). Civic monitoring includes the exertion of the watchdog function, through the

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supervision of power centres, the denunciation of abuses and bad practices, the extraction and filtration of information to promote greater transparency, the emergence of alternative news channels that focus on a broader array of topics than mainstream media do, as well as the mobilization of networked citizens (Feenstra and Casero-Ripollés, 2014). Within the emerging networked public sphere, activist information monitoring and disclosure are assuming a significant role, in particular for issues that are not (yet) or insignificantly covered by the mainstream media because they appear too specialized to be sold to a broad audience. This has been, among others, the case of news about intellectual property rights, including copyright and patents. Longtime considered as an obscure area of knowledge (May and Sell, 2006), reserved for lawyers and rights-­ holders, the digitalization of societies has led to a profound struggle and increasing interest in how information should be regulated. In the case of various digital rights campaigns focusing on technical issues such as software patents, copyright and net neutrality that were until recently reserved to a confined public of experts in the EU and in France, Breindl (2012b) and Breindl and Briatte (2012) observed the information disclosure strategy used by activists intervening directly into decision-making processes. Activists directly contacted decision-makers presenting themselves as experts of internet technologies and concerned citizens. This allowed them to gain access to politically relevant information. They then directly informed citizens and the media through frequent press releases, becoming de facto information sources about the particular topics discussed in the policy process. Information disclosure about the policy and lobbying process was the primary objective of all campaigns. The non-profit Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) for instance has been issuing news releases about software patents from 1998 onwards, federating a growing number of opponents to

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the patenting of computer code that significantly contributed to the European Parliament’s historic rejection of the directive on c­omputer-implemented innovations that would have legalized software patents in Europe in July 2005 (Breindl, 2012a; Müller, 2006). By building a large database, also including patent databases, FFII’s website became the main point of reference for other activist groups involved in Europe. Search engines still display FFII sites in its top results today when searching the net for ‘software patents’. The wiki is described as the “most current and comprehensive news source on software patents in the world”.2 Press releases would link to documents and declarations, background information and contact data for journalists. As a not for profit association inspired by free software ideals, FFII allowed anyone to use its material and encouraged its distribution. Access to political material has been democratized by digital media. In the EU for instance, official documents about the policy process were traded for money in the 1990s but are since available to anyone with an internet connection on the Europa web platform, ‘one of the largest information repositories in the world’ (European Commission, 2007). When political institutions engage in information transparency processes such as the EU has done since the mid 1990s, ordinary citizens regardless of geographical location can access information that used to be reserved for journalists and wellresourced lobbyists. By gaining direct access to ­decision-makers, similarly to journalists, they receive news about the policy process at a very early stage and transmit it directly to their followers, becoming news sources themselves. Moreover, even when political institutions refuse to disclose particular types of information, digital media makes them more vulnerable to large-scale data leaks of sensitive information (see Chapter 10). As McCurdy argues, digital media has profoundly changed the practice of leaking, ‘shap[ing] both who

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can be a leaker and how the practice of leaking is carried out’ (2013: 123). Information that is digitized can more easily be accessed, copied, stored and shared than analogue information, allowing, in particular when security guidelines are not followed as in the Manning leaking, anyone with network access and IT skills to obtain that information and disclose it to a broader public. However, leakers remain structurally dependent on commercial technology firms. Private companies such as EveryDNS, Apple, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America, decided to cease hosting WikiLeaks’ domain name, its data and providing financial transactions from supporters, de facto hindering the platform from continuing and expanding its operations (Benkler, 2011).3 The massive leaking of sensitive information shows that to increase the credibility of the leaked information and protect themselves from political backlash, leakers have chosen to cooperate with mainstream media outlets to filter and make sense of the vast amount of information available. Learning from its previous leaks, WikiLeaks decided to cooperate with five quality newspapers (Le Monde, El Pais, Der  Spiegel, the Guardian, the New York Times) to p­ ublish a censored version of the diplomatic cables. Edward Snowden directly contacted Washington Post journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras and the Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald to share the wealth of secret documents he had collected from within the NSA. The leaks show the interdependence between journalists and activists in a hybrid media environment. Journalists need activists to understand the information received while activists need journalists to provide credibility for the information published and provide them a status of journalistic sources, as whistleblowing is not recognized as freedom of the press but espionage by elite political actors. The harsh treatment of whistleblowers such as Manning or Snowden can be seen as a public reassertion of authority over sensitive information and a deterrent to imitators

in a time where political institutions seem less and less in control over digital information. More generally, activists often hold specialized knowledge of the legal system and the political issue they are involved in which makes them interesting sources for media professionals, leading to various forms of cooperation between journalists and activists.

AN ABSOLUTE INTERPRETATION OF ACCESS Political agency is always culturally embedded. It is rooted in the ‘experiential domain of everyday life’ (Dahlgren, 2009: 276). This means that protest forms are multiple, depending on the cultural underpinnings they stem from. The examples of information disclosure chosen here are particular in that they do not only use digital media to disseminate politically sensitive information. They are recursive (Kelty, 2008) in that they are engaged in defending the online realm as a free and open space and advocate an absolute definition of free speech and access to and sharing of information. They are both informed by an ideology of openness and freedom that can be traced back to the computer aficionados and hackers that were instrumental in developing the internet and personal computing in the 1960–80s. Among the core principles of what Levy (1984) identified as the ‘hacker ethic’ is an absolute understanding of access and freedom as d­emonstrated by the first two principles: 1 Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! 2 All information should be free. (Levy, 1984: 39–46)

This spirit of access and freedom to share everything one considers worthy of being shared can be found in subsequent

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movements such as the free and open-source software movement and the open access movement, as well as groups ranging from Anonymous to WikiLeaks, to the Pirate Parties and copyright-reform and pro-net neutrality campaigners (Breindl, 2014; Kelty, 2008; Coleman, 2009). Within free and opensource software groups, ‘[f]reedom is understood foremost to be about personal control and autonomous production’ argues Gabriella Coleman (2009: 428). What matters is the ‘hands-on imperative’, the personal access to and tinkering with data, which questions any form of hierarchical structure. The reassertion of corporate and state power over accessing, transforming and diffusing information manifested by successive waves of regulation led to the politicization of hackers, free and open-source software advocates and internet enthusiasts. The result of which is not only the large-scale sharing of political information but the formulation of such practices as a political claim in itself. WikiLeaks, Anonymous and grassroots techgroups (Hintz and Milan, 2009) are at the forefront of a movement that wishes to make all information public and accessible to the greatest number, hence also questioning journalistic gatekeeping practices. Additionally, activists leverage digital technologies to help others make sense of the mass of available information on a given topic. Monitoring is often backed up by the development of specialized information retrieval and management tools to facilitate the navigation of increasing amounts of information. The idea is hence not simply to add new material to the already exponentially growing digital data but to help users navigate and make sense of that information. IT and analytical skills become ever more important (Breindl, 2014; see also Russell on data-driven practices in Chapter 10). As McCurdy argues ‘while a leaker may help get the information to the public, specialized digital skills may be required to decipher and/or emphasize the public value of such information’ (2013: 135).

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A MULTI-STEP MODEL OF ACTIVISM AND THE NEWS The exponential amount of information available poses new challenges of how to deal with and retrieve relevant information from the abundance available; a challenge for activists and journalists alike. Far from being unilaterally dependent on mainstream media, activists can equally position themselves as bridges or translators between decisionmaking processes and networked audiences. Combining access and voice channels, they position themselves as intermediaries between citizens and power centres, similar to the position fulfilled by journalists. Information diffusion has become a multistep process, which involves, in a decentralized manner, individuals self-publishing practices, the aggregation of political information at the community or alternative media level and interactions with mainstream media outlets. During the recent mobilizations against two US intellectual property rights regulations, Benkler (Benkler et  al., 2013) observed how ‘a network of smallscale commercial tech media, standing nonmedia NGOs, and individuals, whose work was then amplified by traditional media’ fulfilled the fourth estate function and successfully reframed the political debate despite well-resourced lobbying in favour of the legislation. Most notably, Benkler witnessed an ‘attention backbone, in which more trafficked sites amplify less visible individual voices, expert or lay, on specific subjects; for instance, a single Reddit user’s idea (the Go Daddy boycott of December 2011) produced mobilization for action that resulted in largescale political influence’ (Benkler et  al., 2013: 11). Similarly, digital rights campaigning has been described as being composed of various circles of participation: core campaigners, analysts/experts, and occasional contributors (Breindl and Gustafsson, 2011; Breindl, 2012a). Core campaigners are the most

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active campaigners, generally experienced from previous battles and well connected to ­decision-makers as well as the broader activist community. Analysts and experts are generally voluntary supporters, who would spend time and effort analysing amendments, writing memos and exchanging knowledge about the process. They generally operate from a distance, in their homes or offices, but are extremely alert and responsive to the needs of core campaigners. If core campaigners were for instance speaking with decision-makers who asked for additional information, analysts could be contacted and would find and send the information very rapidly, providing an impression of efficiency. Finally, the outer layers are composed of occasional contributors, who engage and diffuse information actively depending on the time available, and followers, who receive and eventually transmit the news developed by the inner core. The circles are permeable, allowing shifts depending on the availability of time and resources. All layers are important in diffusing the activists’ message, especially the outer circles who would spread online the press releases and action alerts developed by the inner circles, thus allowing these to focus on the access channel, directly contacting ­decision-makers. Collaborative online tools

such as wikis are used to coordinate the activities. They are chosen to allow flexible participation, based on their own time and interests. Occasional contributors and followers are essential in raising the visibility of the overall campaign – which is often run by only a handful of individuals. They would spread the information online, generating sometimes ‘viral’ effects. Core campaigners are very aware of this effect and regularly ask followers to diffuse their information or blog about their activities, for instance to increase the ranking of their site when searching for the issue. Figure 17.1 illustrates the various communicative layers of current protest activities. Activists either directly contact decisionmakers or use the voice channel by mobilizing their supporters and aiming to get their message into alternative and mainstream media outlets, which will in turn gain the attention of decision-makers. An emphasis is placed on the two-way directionality of all exchanges within and among the various spheres composed of activists, media and decision-makers. Activists need the media to mobilize supporters and eventually reach decision-makers. The media needs activists as sources and informants about their causes. Decision-makers need activists to provide them with legitimacy and expertise while

Activists Access channel

Core activists

Decision-makers

Analysts

Followers/supporters

Contributors Voice channel

Alternative media

Mainstream media

Figure 17.1  Communication channels and actors in activism

Activists as News Producers

activists aim to convince them of their political goals. Digital tools provide new opportunities for direct communication across all of these layers.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUDING REMARKS Activists are news producers. Activists play a variety of roles in this sphere, which complement and by no means try to replicate traditional journalism. They specialize on a given topic, monitoring its evolution through national, supranational and international decision-making processes by using online tools that allow them to connect with likeminded individuals. Activists hold a central position in the networked public sphere, as brokers or bridges between decision-makers and citizens, similarly to the position upheld by the media in democracies. Because of their specialized interests, skills and monitoring work, they emerge as experts and legitimacy sources for decision-makers and journalists, who trade access to the policy and media system in exchange for information and public support. The legitimacy activists can confer to ­decision-makers and journalists is in turn built on the support they receive from concerned citizens, to whom they provide updated information on specialized issues. Internet tools play a central function in allowing activists to directly interact with both citizens and decision-makers. Nonetheless, reaching mainstream media remains crucial for activists, if they wish to reach concrete changes. The internet may have decreased their dependence on the media but not cancelled it. A direction for future research would be to look at the networks of relations, exchanges and interdependencies existing between activists, as ‘non-professional news producers’, professional journalists and other political actors in framing an issue and setting it on the political agenda. Research needs to

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investigate the practices in which activists and other actors beyond the newsroom are engaging in, as well as the interdependencies and roles emerging through these practices. Furthermore, it would be worthwhile to focus on the identities of activists as news producers and the way in which they conceptualize their role and relationships with media professionals and decision-makers.

NOTES  1  One may think of the incredibly successful viral diffusion of the Kony 2012 Campaign – reaching 100 million views in six days (Invisible Children, n.a.) – which was rapidly criticized for portraying outdated information and being overly simplistic and sensational, failing to reach its campaigning goal – capturing Ugandan militia leader Kony – because of a lack of credibility of the campaign and its film director).  2  Software Patent News, In FFII.org, consulted January 28, 2015, from http://swpat.ffii.org/log/ news/index.en.html  3  WikiLeaks is unfortunately not an isolated incident. PayPal for instance has a.o. ceased to direct payments to the Bradley Manning support group ‘Courage to resist’ in 2011 (Masnick 2011), as well as to allegedly copyright-infringing sites on various occasions (Lasar, 2011).

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McAdam, Doug, McCarthy, John D. and Zald, Mayer N. (eds) (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, John D. (1996) ‘Constraints and opportunities in adopting, adapting, and inventing’, in McAdam, Doug, McCarthy, John D. and Zald, Mayer N. (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–51. McCurdy, Patrick (2008) ‘Inside the media event: Examining the media practices of Dissent! At the HoriZone eco-village at the 2005 G8 Gleneagles Summit’, Communications – The European Journal of Communication Research, 33(3): 295–313. McCurdy, Patrick (2010) ‘Breaking the spiral of silence – unpacking the “media debate” within Global Justice Movements: A case study of Dissent! And the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit’, Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, 2(2): 42–67. McCurdy, Patrick (2012) ‘Social movements, protest and mainstream media’, Sociology Compass, 6(3): 244–55. McCurdy, Patrick (2013) ‘From the Pentagon Papers to Cablegate: How the network society has changed leaking’, in Brevini, Benedetta, Hintz, Arne and McCurdy, Patrick, Beyond WikiLeaks, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp: 123–45. Müller, Florian (2006) No lobbyist as such. SWM Software-Marketing GMBH. Olson, Mancur, Jr (1971) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pariser, Eli (2012) The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. New York: Penguin Books. Rauch, Jennifer (2007) ‘Activists as interpretive communities: Rituals of consumption and Interaction in an alternative media audience’, Media, Culture & Society, 29(6): 994–1013. Rucht, Dieter (2004) ‘The quadruple “A”: Media strategies of protest movements since the 1960s’, in van de Donk, Wim, Loader,

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Brian D., Nixon, Paul G. and Rucht, Dieter (eds), Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements. London: Routledge, pp. 29–56. Schudson, Michael (1998) The Good Citizen: A History of the American Civic Life. New York, NY: The Free Press. Shirky, Clay (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Books. Smith, Marc A., Rainie, Lee, Shneiderman, Ben and Himelboim, Itai (2014) Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters. Washington: Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet. org/files/2014/02/PIP_Mapping-Twitternetworks_022014.pdf Sunstein, Cass R. (2002) Republic.com. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Sunstein, Cass R. (2009) Republic.com 2.0. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Laer, Jeroen and Van Aelst, Peter (2009) ‘Cyber-protest and civil society: The internet and action repertoires of social movements’, in Jewkes, Yvonne and Yar, Majid (eds), Handbook on Internet Crime. Portland: Universia Press, pp. 230–54. Wallsten, Kevin (2007) ‘Agenda setting and the blogosphere: An analysis of the relationship between mainstream media and political blogs’, Review of Policy Research, 24(6): 567–87. Zald, Mayer N. (1996) ‘Culture, ideology, and strategic framing’, in McAdam, Doug, McCarthy, John D. and Zald, Mayer N. (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 261–74.

18 Citizen Witnesses Stuart Allan

INTRODUCTION More often than not in recent years, the person first on the scene of a crisis event with a camera has been an ordinary citizen. For varied reasons, priorities and motivations, socalled ‘accidental photojournalists’ – be they survivors, bystanders, first-responders, officials, law enforcement, combatants, activists or the like – feel compelled to bear witness, often at considerable personal risk (Allan, 2013; Mortensen, 2015; Ritchin, 2013). Critical here is the growing ubiquity of cheaper, easier to handle digital devices, as well as the ease with which ensuing imagery can be uploaded and shared across social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Path, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit or YouTube, amongst others. News organizations have developed sophisticated strategies to manage these spontaneous contributions, particularly when breaking news is unfolding in realtime, albeit often in uneasy, impromptu partnerships beset by tensions. ‘Traditional

photojournalists have most to fear from mobile photographers,’ Richard Gray (2012) observed in the Guardian. ‘If something dramatic happens on the street … sorry, someone’s already there taking a photo of it’. Speaking as a professional news photographer himself, he stressed the vital importance of first-hand witnessing: ‘Your average citizen photojournalist won’t compose as well as a professional, but they will be on the spot to capture the moment and be able to publish immediately’. This chapter contributes to wider discussions of the challenges facing digital journalism research by exploring the evolving dy­­­­­namics of photographic witnessing. Viewed from the perspective of the news media, the capacity of the news photographer – professional and amateur alike – to serve as a trustworthy, reliable witness in the heat of the moment underpins the discursive legitimacy of first-hand reporting. Somewhat paradoxically, however, time and again it is the spur-of-the-moment participation of citizen photographers that throws into

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crisp relief the codified strictures of journalistic impartiality (see also Allan, 2013, 2014; Becker, 2013; Langton, 2008; Mortensen, 2014). The proclaimed capacity of the journalistic gaze to be impersonal, detached and dispassionate in its purview is a tacit, yet telling, feature of the professional ethos, one being actively recrafted under pressure by converging digital imperatives (see Blaagaard, 2013; Caple, 2014; Ellis, 2012; Klein-Avraham and Reich, 2014; Sheller, 2015; Waisbord, 2013; Yaschur, 2012). Far from being a new phenomenon ushered into being by recent technological innovations, however, the intrinsic value of being the first to be there, on the scene, to capture a crisis in visual terms has been prized since the earliest days of photojournalism. Accordingly, in order to clarify several issues at stake for researchers investigating photographic witnessing, this chapter begins by considering the status of the eyewitness, and how it has been idealized in normative terms within journalism over centuries. Next, our attention turns to evaluate pertinent research into media witnessing, devoting particular attention to the moral issues posed by the visual representation of distant suffering. Against this backdrop, we counterpoise the figure of the citizen witness, thereby providing a basis to further elucidate the ethical imperative to bear witness as an epistemic conviction of image-making. In assessing research examining the factors shaping embodied forms of visual documentation in crisis situations, this chapter endeavors to illuminate how digital photojournalism is evolving under pressure to rewrite the relationship between professionals and their citizen counterparts.

EYEWITNESSING AS PROFESSIONAL IDEAL The journalist’s belief in the intrinsic value of eyewitnessing in crisis situations represents a guiding tenet of reportorial practice, one which is recurrently upheld in normative

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terms, not least in editorial guidelines, stylebooks, training manuals, textbooks and the like. This type of first-person documentation provides audiences with what are frequently vivid, personalised insights (‘I was there and this is what happened in front of my lens’), the emotive affectivity of which being difficult, if not impossible, to convey within the time-worn conventions of scrupulously objective reporting. Journalists, when asked, will acknowledge the dangers, but typically insist that they have an obligation to bear witness, to be their audience’s eyes under conditions where individuals less determined to seek out the truth would do well to avoid. Witnessing, few would dispute, is the lynchpin of good reporting. ‘Photographers are many things – historians, dramatists, artists – and humanitarians,’ the photojournalist James Nachtwey (2009) observed. ‘As journalists, one of their tasks is to reveal the unjust and the unacceptable, so that their images become an element in the process of change.’ In this way, he added, photography ‘gives a voice to the voiceless. It’s a call to action’. The journalist as ‘people’s witness’, steadfastly committed to eyewitness fidelity to what he or she has experienced, will not waver when ‘bearing witness of human actuality to those who could not actually be there’ (Inglis, 2002: 3). Philosophical nuances notwithstanding, principles of truth, fact and verification have long served as news reporting’s guiding tenets. In highlighting the significance of eyewitnessing as a professional ideal for journalism, however, it is vital not to overlook everyday pragmatic (even defensive) strategies codified within the strictures of impartial reportage, an epistemological anchoring of facticity that journalism shares with other genres of discourse – in particular legal discourse – where standards of verification feature prominently (see also Pantti and Sirén, 2015; Schwalbe et  al., 2015). Journalism’s respect for tacit rules when processing contingent evidence (including the presumed truth of imagery) ordinarily becomes visible only when they

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have been violated; that is to say, when the act of witnessing is revealed to have compromised its avowed transparency in a particular way to advance an ulterior agenda. In other words, those who subscribe to the familiar adage ‘the camera never lies’ risk overlooking the motivations of the person holding it. In the case of photojournalism, the inscription of eyewitnessing is similarly normalized in typical circumstances, revolving around the presumption that the produced image is a faithful reproduction of the reality it purports to represent. Nevertheless, witnessing necessarily involves a complex process of mediation, despite related rhetorical claims about how ‘the photograph speaks for itself’ in journalistic parlance. Here photojournalism needs to be situated within wider discourses affirming the authority of the eyewitness for journalism more generally. Barbie Zelizer’s (2007) research into photojournalism suggests that the most salient feature of eyewitnessing – namely, ‘its ability to convince publics of the distant experience or event in a seemingly unmediated style’ – goes to the heart of its centrality to all strands of newsgathering (2007: 424). In tracking the evolution of ‘eyewitnessing’ as a keyword of journalistic practice in the US, she helpfully discerns four stages in its development as a means to validate certain preferred norms in the accounting of reality collectively recognized by members of the journalistic community to be appropriate (see also Zelizer, 2012). In the first period, broadly aligned with journalism emerging as a distinctive craft centuries ago, the idea of the eyewitness report appears as a means to express personal experience of public events, Zelizer maintains. Typically, such reports were furnished by ‘nonjournalistic individuals’, whose personal accounts tended to emphasize ‘romanticized, overtly subjective and stylistically elaborate features’ in keeping with the highly emotive – and rather colourful – tenor of most chronicles of the time. The second period, underway by the mid-1800s, signals the expansion of

this role to include a more diverse array of participants, not least journalists themselves, self-consciously acting as eyewitnesses. The style of their reports, Zelizer argues, ‘became more concrete and reality-driven’ – that is, more reliable in their rendering of facts in response to public scepticism about their trustworthiness. Eyewitnessing’s closer association with realism was not without its problems, but increasingly it was being regarded as connoting the mark of authenticity as a value in its own right – news photography, in particular, offering ‘an alternative way of claiming eyewitness status that offset the limitations of verbal narratives’ (2007: 417). The expansion of technology in the early twentieth century characterizes a third period, when alternative kinds of eyewitnessing are made possible to lend credibility and authenticity to a report’s assertions by virtue of the journalist’s enhanced capacity to represent on-site presence. By the end of the Second World War, Zelizer maintains, ‘eyewitnessing had become a default setting for good reportage’, with news organizations speaking of it ‘as if it had almost a mythic status’ (2007: 421). And, fourthly, the contemporary period is discernible on the basis of the journalist’s absence, that is, his or her frequent replacement by technological conveyance (where forms of ‘unmanned’ live coverage have ‘moved style, subjectivity and person from eyewitnessing, leaving it seemingly unedited and disembodied’), on the one hand, or by the private citizen acting as a ‘nonconventional’ journalist performing the work of eyewitnessing, on the other. Concerns about issues such as reliability, accuracy, verifiability, even excessive graphicness, are not being adequately offset, in turn, by journalistic mitigation, including contextualisation, the way they were before. To the extent eyewitnessing is being ‘outsourced’ (see Chapter 14), Zelizer fears, it risks undermining journalism’s cultural authority in public life (see also Azoulay, 2008; Hill and Schwartz, 2015; Kennedy and Patrick, 2014; Leavy, 2007; Linfield, 2010).

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While there is little doubt each of these periods would reward closer critique, here they usefully accentuate the importance of attending to the evolving, socially contingent nature of the imperatives underwriting witnessing in a manner sensitive to historical specificities. Delving into these matters it soon becomes apparent that questions regarding precisely what this process of witnessing entails, especially where genres of visual journalism are concerned, invite a reconsideration of the conceptual vocabulary typically brought to bear in discussions of news imagery and its perceived influence on the perceptions of distant readers, listeners and viewers.

MEDIA WITNESSING In recent years the term ‘media witnessing’ has emerged in related scholarship as a way to describe how digital technologies are transforming this capacity to bear witness, encouraging a number of productive lines of investigation. Definitions tend to vary depending upon disciplinary priorities, but in its most general sense, as Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski pointed out, the term refers to ‘the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media. It is about the systematic and ongoing reporting of the experiences and realities of distant others to mass audiences’ (2009: 1). Here they further specify the term’s remit by suggesting it strives to capture simultaneously ‘the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness, and the positioning of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events’ (2009: 1). In the case of a television news report, for example, it ‘may depict witnesses to an event, bear witness to that event, and turn viewers into witnesses all at the same time’ (2009: 1, emphasis in original). This tripartite distinction deserves further scrutiny for reasons I will explore below, but here we note the theoretical – and

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journalistic – concerns it highlights provide an impetus for research to move beyond the scope of more traditional concepts utilized in analyses of media effectivity. Media-centered approaches invite further questions about modes of witnessing and their persistence in journalism, particularly where discourses of impartiality claim their purchase. In his book Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, John Ellis places the concept of witnessing under sustained, thoughtful scrutiny in a manner that similarly chimes with our purposes here. ‘The twentieth century has been the century of witness’, he suggests, a claim informed by what he regards to be a profound shift in the way that we perceive the world existing beyond our immediate experience (2000: 9). As he explains: During this century, industrial society has embarked upon a course that provides us as its citizens with more and more information about events that have no direct bearing upon our own lives, yet have an emotional effect upon us simply by the fact of their representation and our consequent witness of them. The fact that the representation, on the news, is necessarily skimpy and inadequate, snatched from the living event, makes our role as witnesses all the more difficult. The events cannot be poignant because they are radically incomplete: they exist in almost the same moment as we do when we see them. They demand explanation, they incite curiosity, revulsion and the usually frustrated or passing desire for action. We need, in other words, to work them through. (2000: 80)

This Freudian inflection of ‘working through’ is important to Ellis because it helps to highlight how the media process forms of visual evidence – effectively worrying them over until they are exhausted – when striving to explain the witnessable world in all of its complexity. Television, in particular, ‘works over new material for its audiences as a necessary consequence of its position of witness’, he writes. It ‘attempts definitions, tries out explanations, creates narratives, talks over, makes intelligible, tries to marginalize, harnesses speculation, tries to make fit, and, very occasionally, anathemizes’ (2000: 79).

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For Ellis, then, it is the ensuing ‘sensation of witness’ that is a crucial, yet largely unexplored dimension of this process of mediation, only part of which is expressed in the familiar phrase ‘seeing is believing’ so often used to characterize this dynamic of perception. Media imagery, it follows, draws us into the position of being witnesses, where what is rendered visible in front of the camera becomes undeniable. ‘We live in an era of information’, Ellis maintains, ‘and photography, film and television have brought us visual evidence. Their quasi-physical documentation of specific moments in specific places has brought us face-to-face with the great events, the banal happenings, the horrors and the incidental cruelties of our times’, which makes it impossible for us to claim ignorance as a defence (2000: 9–10). By this logic, we are necessarily implicated as ‘accomplices’ in the events in question, namely because we have seen what happened when they transpired (or, more typically, their distressing aftermath) in the media reportage. Our ‘complicity’ is engendered by this relationship to what is seen, Ellis argues, because knowledge of an event implies a degree of consent to it. Even though we may be witnesses in another time or a different space, the event depicted makes a silent appeal to our conscience: ‘You cannot say you did not know’. Still, he cautions, this is not to suggest that to witness an event ‘in all of its audio-visual fullness’ is the equivalent of being present at the scene in question; ‘There is too much missing, both in sensory evidence (no smell, no tactile sense) and, more importantly, in social involvement’ (2000: 11). At stake, Ellis contends, is the way in which the audiovisual, as a form of witness, offers what he terms ‘a distinct, and new, modality of experience’. This feeling of witness may be one of separation and powerlessness (events unfold, regardless) or, alternatively, the opposite: ‘It enables the viewer to overlook events, to see them from more points of view than are possible for someone physically present: to see

from more angles, closer and further away, in slow and fast motion, repeated and refined’ (2000: 11). Television news, to the degree it affords the viewer a sense of co-presence with the event it seeks to document, turns the act of witness into an everyday, intimate act in the private home. In the years since the publication of Seeing Things, a number of theorists have sought to elaborate further similar lines of enquiry. John Durham Peters (2001), taking his cue from Ellis, proposes that witnessing ‘is an intricately tangled practice’, one that ‘raises questions of truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying, and the trustworthiness of perception – in short, fundamental questions of communication’ (2001: 707; see also Hanusch, 2010). Whilst concurring with Ellis in the main, Peters places greater emphasis on the positive aspects of this ‘common but rarely examined term’ of ‘witnessing’, briefly highlighting how three different domains – law (‘the procedures of the courtroom’), theology (‘the pain of the martyr’) and atrocity (‘the cry of the survivor’) – have endowed it with ‘extraordinary moral and cultural force’. In seeking to clarify matters, he points out that, in journalism, ‘a witness is an observer or source possessing privileged (raw, authentic) proximity to facts’, a commitment it shares with law, as well as literature and history. ‘A witness’, he writes, ‘can be an actor (one who bears witness), an act (the making of a special sort of statement), the semiotic residue of that act (the statement as text) or the inward experience that authorizes the statement (the witnessing of an event)’ (2001: 709). As a verb, he adds, ‘to witness’ signals a double quality: it can be a sensory experience, involving one’s own eyes and ears in the witnessing of an event, as well as a discursive act, where one’s experience is stated for the benefit of an audience elsewhere. ‘Witnesses’, in this latter regard, ‘serve as the surrogate sense-organs of the absent’ (2001: 709). Nevertheless, he readily concedes, this proclaimed ‘presenceat-a-distance’ is fraught with difficulties,

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which warrant much greater attention than they have typically received. ‘In media events’, he writes, ‘the borrowed eyes and ears of the media become, however tentatively or dangerously, one’s own. Death, distance and distrust are all suspended, for good and evil’ (2001: 717; see also Peters, 2009). A continuum of sorts is thus apparent between Ellis, with his emphasis on the ordinary, even mundane everydayness of witnessing via television, on the one end, and Peters, who underlines its extraordinariness, involving ‘mortal bodies in time’ quite likely to be in ‘peril and risk’, on the other. Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski (2009), while aligning themselves with the general position adopted by Peters, attend to alternative emphases. Different events, they suggest, ‘give rise to different modalities of witnessing’, because ‘the ontology of witnessing is dependent on its context’ (2009: 133). Being a witness, it follows, ‘is subject to constant struggle, not privilege; it is something to be accomplished, not simply given’ (2009: 136). In theorizing witnessing as a practice ‘entangled with conflict and power’, they succeed in accentuating the importance of attending to the ‘contested ground of experience’ in a manner that complicates rationalist, reason-based models in advantageous ways. Carrie Rentschler (2004, 2009) similarly stresses the need to think through questions of experience, maintaining that to witness ‘means far more than to just “watch” or “see”; it is also a form of bodily and political participation in what people see and document that is often masked by their perceived distance from events’ (2004: 298). In proposing that witnessing be regarded as a form of participation necessarily implicated in the pain or suffering of others, then, she draws out of the concept of mediation certain tensions associated with complicity highlighted by Ellis (2000) above. ‘Witnessing needs to become part of a larger political and ethical mobilization towards the eradication of violence’, she argues, which will demand a ‘different kind of media documentation, one that can help teach people how to act as

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responsible citizens, with a commitment to social justice, through acts of witness’ (2004: 302; see also Duganne, 2015; Ellis, 2012).

VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DISTANT SUFFERING Few would dispute the globalization of media is crucial in this regard, even if attendant public spheres, as John Keane (2003) argues in Global Civil Society?, ‘are still rather issue-driven and more effective at presenting effects than probing the intentions of actors and the structural causes of events’ (2003: 169; see also Chouliaraki, 2012; Papacharissi, 2010). Anticipating Rentschler’s point above about the teaching of citizenship, Keane suggests that global audiences are frequently being taught lessons in ‘flexible citizenship’, where boundaries between ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’ blur, just as a sense of ethical responsibility converges with a cosmopolitan affectivity (2003: 170). In his words: by witnessing others’ terrible suffering, at a distance, millions are sometimes shaken and disturbed, sometimes to the point where they are prepared to speak to others, to donate money or time, or to support the general principle that the right of humanitarian intervention – the obligation to assist someone in danger, as contemporary French law puts it – can and should override the old crocodilian formula that might equals right. (2003: 171)

Related issues associated with ‘distant suffering’, a recurrent theme in pertinent scholarship, assume an added complexity when con­­­­­­­sidered in relation to how journalistic me­­diations of witnessing encourage (as well as dampen, or dissuade) a shared sense of pathos – the ‘politics of pity’, as Hannah Arendt (1990) described it, or news ‘saturated with tears and trauma’ as Carolyn Kitch (2009) contends – amongst those looking on from afar. ‘The spectacle of the unfortunate being conveyed to the witness, the action taken by

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the witness must in turn be conveyed to the unfortunate’, Luc Boltanski (1999) observes; ‘But the instruments which can convey a representation and those which can convey an action are not the same’ (1999: 17). Public opinion is at stake where effecting change is concerned, which brings the role of the news media to light, namely their position in a chain of intermediaries offering the spectator a ‘proposal of commitment’ to negotiate (important to the spectator for a number of reasons, but particularly when he or she is unable to grasp adequately, let alone interrogate, the intentions of those presenting the unfortunate’s suffering). ‘The spectator can accept the proposal made to him [or her], be indignant at the sight of children in tears being herded by armed soldiers; be moved by the efforts of this nurse whose hands are held out to someone who is starving; or feel the black beauty of despair at the execution of the absolute rebel proudly draped in his crime’, he writes; ‘He [or she] can also reject the proposal or return it’ (1999: 149). Of critical significance, it follows, are conditions of trust, which render abstract notions of mediation concrete in highly affective terms (see also Couldry, 2012; Tait, 2011; Tester, 2001). ‘Trust’, as Roger Silverstone (2006) reminded us, ‘is a slippery thing; it is always conditional, requiring continuous maintenance and evidence of fulfilment’ (2006: 124). To the extent the world has taken a ‘pictorial turn’ (Mitchell, 2011), television news elevates the paradigm of the witness as trustworthy arbiter of visual evidence in a way that recurrently valorizes immediacy as preeminent news value (see also Huxford, 2004; Pantti et al., 2012). Eric Taubert contends: Modern audiences have come too far – they can’t turn back now. They want more than talking heads juxtaposed against lackluster images of smoky ashes. They want the flames. They want the fire. They want to understand what the people who witnessed the unfolding news event experienced. They want to see what breaking news looks like through the eyes of those who saw it. They want to live vicariously through pixels. They expect a 360 degree view of the story. (2012)

And ‘we’ want it now, it seems. ‘Live footage is the genre of the witness, par excellence’, Lilie Chouliaraki (2006) points out. The near-instantaneous presence of the camera at the scene, instrumental to live news’s claim to factuality, she argues, claims to ‘bring back home’ an event in all its raw contingency. ‘This “mechanical witness,” however, needs to be combined with verbal narratives that harness the rawness of the event and domesticate its “otherness”’, thereby offering an explanation of what is happening while, at the same time, protecting viewers from the risks of trauma associated with the act of witnessing (2006: 159). In rendering suffering both ‘cognitively intelligible’ and ‘emotionally manageable’, live footage transforms a tragic scene into a television spectacle. Here Chouliaraki (2010a) suggests witnessing works as an economy of regulation in this regard – that is, to the extent it manages the boundaries of taste, decency and display in ways that invest imagery with a ‘force of authentic testimony’, it leaves little space for the ‘truth’ of the reported event to be questioned. Witnessing, without being explicitly political, she writes, ‘produces forms of pity that primarily rely on the beautification or sublimation of suffering, thereby strategically participating in the political project of imagining community’ (2010a: 522). This invocation of community may well create a sense of shared solidarity between viewers, but in so doing there lurks the danger that suffering will be represented in a manner that construes it as beyond, or simply irrelevant to, direct action as a response. Chouliaraki’s emphasis on witnessing as an economy of regulation privileging certain modes of seeing suffering as authentic (or not, as the case may be) usefully underscores the tensions in the duality of journalistic reporting, namely its requirement to both record (eyewitnessing) and to evaluate reality (bearing witness) in productive ways (2010a: 528, 529). She quotes a statement from the BBC College of Journalism – ‘Good

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journalism in the field is about bearing witness to events that others may wish to hide or ignore; or which are simply too far out of sight for most people to care about’ – which neatly illustrates the assumed subjunctive connection between reporting on events and engaging viewers’ capacity to care (cited in Chouliaraki, 2010b: 305). Precisely what this entails in news media terms, however, is only now gradually becoming clear. She points out that the BBC has appropriated citizen journalism in its own ‘cosmopolitan vision’, thereby encouraging more collaborative conceptions of news increasingly open to ‘ordinary’ voices (see also Silverstone, 2006). The nature of journalistic witnessing is being transformed as a result, she maintains, with the term ‘ordinary’ signifying ‘precisely this break with the monopoly of professional witnessing in favor of a valorization of the “person on the street” as the most appropriate voice to tell the story of suffering’ (2010b: 308). More than widening narrative parameters to be more inclusive, as important as such a strategy often proves to be, this valorisation makes possible an alternative epistemology of authenticity. Specifically, it works to ‘relativise the empiricism of facts in television news, by placing it side by side with the empiricism of emotion’ (2010b: 308). Hierarchical boundaries between professional and citizen notions of fact become blurred, she argues, so that the immediacy of experience redefines what counts as news – and in so doing, endows it with a new moralising force (see also Carlson and Lewis, 2015; Cottle, 2013; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007; Mirzoeff, 2005). In contrast with the pessimism that tends to underlie critiques of journalism’s potential to forge points of solidarity amongst distant peoples around the world, let alone help to fashion global public spheres of dialogue and debate, this more optimistic appraisal discerns cracks in the façade of corporate media hegemony. Still, Chouliaraki cautions, much work remains to be done to investigate how

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the act of witnessing itself is evolving across diverse news platforms (2010b).

PROFESSIONAL AND CITIZEN WITNESSING There would appear to be a growing chorus of journalists expressing their misgivings that first-person witnessing is in a marked state of decline because of this incessant drive to exploit the speed and access afforded by new digital technologies. Some focus on the economic restructuration besetting the news industry, contending that an emergent geopolitics of news and information threatens to prove detrimental to the range and quality of foreign news provision. Diminished resources compound longstanding logistical difficulties, translating into ever-stretching commitments to cover the world’s trouble spots – leaving some crises under-reported, while others are ignored altogether. Others point to the growing casualization of newsgathering teams, that is, the transference of responsibility from professional news correspondents to local citizens pressed into journalistic service. This re-writing of obligations is rarely acknowledged as the outcome of budgetary decisions, however – news organisations being more inclined to justify their changing priorities on the basis of perceived risks to the safety of their employees in the field. Regrettably, this frequently proves to be all too pressing a concern. The number of journalists killed when reporting from conflict and crisis zones in recent years suggests military authorities do not always endorse the validity of their role as dispassionate observers. Evidence continues to mount that an increasing number of journalists are being deliberately targeted by soldiers determined to stop them from bearing witness, either there and then on the ground, or later when making formal testimony before commissions and courts (Cottle, 2009; Hoskins

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and O’Loughlin, 2010; Kennedy, 2009; Seib, 2010; Sontag, 2003; Tumber, 2010). Confronted with this bind, journalists can opt to make themselves suitably conspicuous as members of the press or, alternatively, strive to blend into crowds of bystanders. In the case of the latter, the mobility of portable newsgathering technology (iPhones, handycams, flip-cameras, BGAN satellite terminals and the like) becomes a more practicable consideration than standard-sized equipment. At the same time, an ever-greater emphasis is being placed on the contributions to newsmaking offered by diverse groups, ranging from combatants to NGO activists to displaced refugees, amongst myriad others, caught-up in the swirling chaos of war, conflict and crisis zones (Alper, 2014; Harkin et  al., 2012; Matheson and Allan, 2009; Pantti and Sirén, 2015; Stallabrass, 2013; Rodríguez, 2011; Wall and El Zahed, 2014; Wardle et  al., 2014). The appropriation of these varied forms of visible evidence, typically characterized as ‘amateur’ or ‘user-generated content’ in firm denial of its journalistic qualities, has become so systemized into bureaucratic protocols that it is an almost routine feature of newsgathering. Despite persistent difficulties with verification and authentication, processing this material is relatively affordable, and its appeal for audiences is readily apparent – factors that make it all but irresistible in the eyes of those otherwise defining the scope of their news provision on the basis of bottomline profit maximisation (see also Vujnovic et  al., 2010; Fenton, 2011; Williams et  al., 2011). For photojournalists acutely aware of the competing demands made on the revenue necessary to sustain their livelihoods, attempts made to ‘enhance’ or ‘complement’ their work with non- or semi-professional imagery risked sowing the seeds of their role’s destruction. Such a blurring of boundaries invites awkward questions regarding what counts as ‘real photojournalism’ for dedicated practitioners, and yet evidence is readily available to suggest that audiences

expect to see impromptu contributions from amateurs alongside the work of professionals (see also Allan and Peters, 2015; Waisbord, 2013). It is not unusual to read comments in feedback sections on news webpages, for example, where citizen imagery is praised for the gritty rawness of its authenticity, the very disruption of unspoken rules of composition, framing or technique being upheld as virtuous in its own right. Still, to the extent photojournalism is deprofessionalised, critics have reasoned, these same audiences become increasingly vulnerable to visual misrepresentation (deliberate or otherwise), with accustomed protocols of impartiality being rewritten by those intent on advancing personal, frequently non-journalistic priorities. The profusion of citizen imagery documenting vital aspects of breaking crisis events throws into sharp relief the extent to which news organisations strive to narrativise conflicting truths, a process of mediation valorised, in part, on the basis of news photographers’ privileged claim to expertise. Citizens feeling compelled to generate first-hand, embodied forms of visual reportage – such as cell or mobile telephone imagery, digital photographs or camcorder video footage shared across social networks – raise searching questions for the epistemic certainties of professional norms, values and protocols (Allan, 2014; Liu et al., 2009; Meikle, 2014; Schwalbe et  al., 2015). Few would dispute, however, that should quantity be confused with quality in the heat of the moment, photojournalism’s standards will be jeopardised. In other words, the relationship of equivalence typically posited between the ordinary citizen engaged in bearing witness and the ‘citizen photojournalist’ is problematic in ways typically glossed over by the terms available to articulate attendant complexities. More than a question of semantics, the person inclined to self-identify as someone engaging in a journalistic role – perhaps an independent news photographer or videographer – is likely to differentiate themselves from those who just

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happen to be nearby when a potentially newsworthy incident happens (see Bock, 2014; Borges-Rey, 2015; Gillmor, 2006; Mast and Hanegreefs, 2015). Having the presence of mind to raise a camera-equipped mobile to capture the scene, for example, may well be a laudable achievement under the circumstances, but this represents a different level of engagement. ‘Let’s face it, most of the people who capture this imagery have jobs to work, errands to run, houses to maintain and families to take care of’, crowdsourcing analyst Eric Taubert (2012) maintains. ‘If asked, they don’t consider themselves citizen journalists’, he adds, although they will often welcome the opportunity to have their imagery shared with a wider audience. ‘Great content captured by smartphone-wielding citizens can die on the vine without ever being seen’, he adds, ‘unless that content finds its way into the hands of journalists who know how to wrap a story around it, fact-check it and place it into the distribution chain.’ In other words, unless the citizen in question is prepared to assume this responsibility for themselves – which is getting easier to do by the day via digital media – they will likely turn to a news organization to perform it on their behalf. Accordingly, in formulating an approach to help clarify the relative degree of personal investment in citizen journalism, critical attention will need to focus on the varying levels or registers of witnessing at its heart. In attending to the nuances of these gradations, it is important to resist the temptation – in Taubert’s (2012) words – to throw the term ‘citizen journalism’ on ‘the trash heap of inflammatory archaic jargon’ in favor of narrowing its definitional remit to advantage (see chapter 15). In striving to discern a conceptual basis for formulating an alternative perspective, a primary aim in much of my recent work has been to help to think though the journalistic mediation of witnessing with a view to assessing, in turn, certain wider implications for research investigating ordinary citizens’

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impromptu involvement and participation. More specifically, I have elaborated the concept of ‘citizen witnessing’ as one possible way forward to negotiate the conceptual territory fiercely lit by clashing assertions over whether journalism will thrive or perish with ever-greater public involvement in newsmaking (see Allan, 2013). In meeting this challenge of innovation to facilitate new forms of connectivity, I have argued, journalism will benefit by securing opportunities to reconnect with its audiences in a manner at once more transparent and accountable, while at the same time encouraging a more openly inclusive news culture committed to greater dialogue, deliberation and debate. This question of connectivity, in my view, necessarily highlights the contributions made by ordinary individuals who find themselves – quite unexpectedly, more often than not – spontaneously giving expression to a civic compulsion to intervene. In this performative sense, it is often possible to discern in citizen witnessing an elaboration of what Cottle (2013) calls ‘an injunction to care’ in the motivation people demonstrate to share their experiences under trying, even dangerous circumstances. The reasons why individuals prove willing to put themselves in harm’s way, where the risk of physical violence may be less emotionally traumatic than the sheer frustration of being unable to help those in desperate difficulty, will almost always be left unspoken. Efforts to identify a single, rational explanation overlook the intimate imbrication of subjectivities likely to be conveyed by anyone asked to explain themselves with the benefit of hindsight. Intermingled within such accounts, however, may well be personal commitments to the ideals of citizenship, if not to those of citizen journalism in formal terms. To further develop the concept of what I am calling ‘citizen witnessing’, it will be necessary to disrupt the conceptual purchase of the familiar binarisms associated with the professional versus amateur debate (see chapter 15). To the extent the act of witnessing

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is a conscious choice – and the decision to bear witness (or not) most certainly is a selfreflexive commitment – it may well resonate with a feeling of social obligation, if not a more formal sense of citizenship or public service. It is important not to overstate relations of intentionality in the nature of this act, though, for in contrast with the self-declared citizen journalist deliberately pursuing newsmaking with particular aims or objectives in mind, the citizen witness temporarily grasps this protean subject positionality in order to cope with exigent circumstances (see also Ibrahim, 2010; Liu et  al., 2009; Reading, 2009; Ritchin, 2013). The citizen as witness seizes the opportunity to affirm their imagery’s claim to truth for reasons that may or may not be made evident there and then, either to themselves or to others. While likely to be self-critiqued on the basis of honesty or sincerity – in contrast with journalistic criteria of accuracy, credibility or corrobora­­­­­­­­tion – these motivations cannot be simply read off the compulsion to document or its discursive outcomes in photo-reportage.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter, in striving to trace aspects of this emergent ecology of crisis imagery for studies of digital journalism, has sought to illuminate the shifting contours of professional news photography’s evolving, contingent relationship with its citizen-generated alternatives. That is to say, I have endeavored to illustrate the heuristic value of discerning for purposes of scholarly critique the still inchoate, frequently contested features of new media transitions recasting the tacit norms, values and conventions of photojournalism in a digital age. Pertinent research has been shown to provide important insights into how the crafting of images documenting human crises represents a form of emphatic engagement, one that reaffirms the civic value of photojournalism’s adherence to

upholding a social responsibility to document conflicting truths. Future research into photographic witnessing would benefit from further efforts to understand how its varied inflections continue to evolve across different reportorial contexts. To what extent, we may ask, are customary conceptions of the witness open to reconsideration, not least as moral commitments are redrawn by changing digital imperatives of visual media? Here we recognize that in contrast with much of the ‘accidental photojournalism’ of the ordinary individual in the wrong place at the right time, professionals knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in pursuit of images to help convey stories of violence in all of its dreadful complexity. As we have seen above, however, pertinent research provides evidence that many citizens finding themselves on the scene have felt a personal obligation – in the absence of professionals – to bear witness, and thereby engage in their own form of visual reportage best they are able to improvise with digital technologies at hand. While their relative investment in journalistic intent may be hesitant or tentative, perhaps the compulsion to record and share a traumatic experience by connecting with distant others being a stronger motivation, time and again their precipitous capture of evidence in its ‘raw’ immediacy has been commended for its sincerity of purpose in media commentary. How best to recast digital photojournalism anew, namely by making the most of this potential to forge cooperative relationships between professionals and their citizen counterparts, is thus a pressing question demanding further investigation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This chapter, in several places, draws on material that originally appeared in my book Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning journalism in times of crisis (Polity Press, 2013).

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REFERENCES Allan, S. (2013) Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning journalism in times of crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Allan, S. (2014) ‘Witnessing in crisis: Photoreportage of terror attacks in Boston and London,’ Media, War & Conflict, 7(2), 131–51. Allan, S. and Peters, C. (2015) ‘The “public eye” or “disaster tourists”: Investigating public perceptions of citizen smartphone imagery,’ Digital Journalism, 3(4): 477–94. Alper, M. (2014) ‘War on Instagram: Framing conflict photojournalism with mobile photography apps,’ New Media & Society, 16(8), 1233–48. Arendt, H. (1990) On Revolution. London: Penguin. Ashuri, T. and Pinchevski, A. (2009) ‘Witnessing as a field’. In P. Frosh and A. Pinchevski (eds), Media Witnessing: Testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 133–57. Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Becker, K. (2013) ‘Gestures of seeing: Amateur photographers in the news,’ Journalism (ahead-of-print) 1–20. Blaagaard, B. (2013) ‘Post-human viewing: a discussion of the ethics of mobile phone imagery,’ Visual Communication, 13(3), 359–74. Bock, M.B. (2014) ‘Little brother is watching: Citizen video journalists and witness narratives,’ in E. Thorsen and S. Allan (eds), Citizen Journalism: Global perspectives, Volume 2. New York: Peter Lang, 249–360. Boltanski, L. (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borges-Rey, E. (2015) ‘News images on Instagram: The paradox of authenticity in hyperreal photo reportage,’ Digital Journalism, 3(4): 571–93. Caple, H. (2014). ‘Anyone can take a photo, but: Is there space for the professional photographer in the twenty-first century newsroom?,’ Digital Journalism (ahead-of-print) 1–11. Carlson, M. and Lewis, S.C. (eds) (2015). Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, practices and participation. New York: Routledge.

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Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage. Chouliaraki, L. (2010a) ‘Journalism and the visual politics of war and conflict’. In S. Allan (ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. London and New York: Routledge, 520–32. Chouliaraki, L. (2010b) ‘Ordinary witnessing in post-television news: Towards a new moral imagination’. Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4), 305–19. Chouliaraki, L. (2012) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity. Cottle, S. (2009) Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the global age. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Cottle, S. (2013) ‘Journalists witnessing disasters: From the calculus of death to the injunction to care,’ Journalism Studies, 14(2): 232–48. Couldry, N. (2012) Media, Society, World: Social theory and digital media practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Duganne, E. (2015) ‘Uneasy witnesses: Broomberg, Chanarin, and photojournalism’s expanded field,’ in J.E. Hill and V.R. Schwartz (2015) Getting the Picture: The visual culture of the news. London: Bloomsbury, 272–79. Ellis, J. (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the age of uncertainty. London: I. B. Tauris. Ellis, J. (2012) Documentary: Witness and selfrevelation. London: Routledge. Fenton, N. (ed.) (2011) New Media, Old News: Journalism and democracy in the digital age. London: Sage. Frosh, P. and Pinchevski, A. (eds) (2009) Media Witnessing: Testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frosh, P. and Pinchevski, A. (2009) ‘Introduction: Why media witnessing? Why now?’ in P. Frosh and A. Pinchevski (eds) Media witnessing: Testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–19. Gillmor, D. (2006) ‘The decline (and maybe demise) of the professional photojournalist,’ CitMedia.org, 4 December. Gray, R. (2012) ‘The rise of mobile phone photography,’ the Guardian, 16 November.

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Hanusch, F. (2010) Representing Death in the News: Journalism, media and mortality. London: Palgrave. Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J.L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harkin, J., Anderson, K., Morgan, L. and Smith, B. (2012) ‘Deciphering user-generated content in transitional societies: A Syria coverage case study,’ Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Hill, J.E. and Schwartz, V.R. (2015) Getting the Picture: The visual culture of the news. London: Bloomsbury. Hoskins, A. and O’Loughlin, B. (2010) War and Media: The emergence of diffused war. Cambridge: Polity Press. Huxford, J. (2004) ‘Surveillance, witnessing and spectatorship: The news and the “war of images”,’ Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, 5, 1–21. Ibrahim, Y. (2010) ‘The non-stop “capture”: The politics of looking in postmodernity,’ The Poster, 1(2), 167–85. Inglis, F. (2002) People’s Witness: The journalist in modern politics. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Keane, J. (2003) Global Civil Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, L. (2009) ‘Soldier photography: Visualizing the war in Iraq,’ Review of International Studies, 35, 817–33. Kennedy, L. and Patrick, C. (eds) (2014) The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict. London and New York: I.B. Taurus. Kitch, C. (2009) ‘Tears and trauma in the news,’ in B. Zelizer (ed.) The Changing Faces of Journalism. New York: Routledge, 29–39. Klein-Avraham, I. and Reich, Z. (2014) ‘Out of the frame: A longitudinal perspective on digitization and professional photojournalism,’ New Media & Society, (ahead-of-print), 1–18. Langton, L. (2008) Photojournalism and Today’s News. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Leavy, P. (2007) Iconic Events: Media, politics and power in retelling history. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Linfield, S. (2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liu, S., Palen, L., Sutton, J., Hughes, A.L. and Vieweg, S. (2009) ‘Citizen photojournalism during crisis events’. In S. Allan and E. Thorsen (eds), Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, 43–63. Mast, J. and Hanegreefs, S. (2015) ‘When news media turn to citizen-generated images of war: Transparency and graphicness in the visual coverage of the Syrian conflict,’ Digital Journalism, 3(4): 594–614. Matheson, D. and Allan, S. (2009) Digital War Reporting. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meikle, G. (2014) ‘Citizen journalism, sharing, and the ethics of visibility,’ in E. Thorsen and S. Allan (eds) Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Volume 2. New York: Peter Lang, 171–182. Mirzoeff, N. (2005) Watching Babylon: The war in Iraq and global visual culture. New York and London: Routledge. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2011) Cloning Terror: The war of images, 9/11 to the present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mortensen, M. (2015) Journalism and Eyewitness Images. London: Routledge. Mortensen, T.M. (2014) ‘Blurry and centered or clear and balanced? Citizen photojournalists and professional photojournalists’ understanding of each other’s visual values,’ Journalism Practice (ahead-of-print), 1–22. Nachtwey, J. (2009) ‘Introduction,’ Humanity in War. London: New Internationalist, 3–5. Pantti, M. and Sirén, S. (2015) ‘The fragility of photo-truth: Verification of amateur images in Finnish newsrooms,’ Digital Journalism, 3(4): 495–512. Pantti, M., Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Cottle, S. (2012) Disasters and the Media. New York: Peter Lang. Papacharissi, Z.A. (2010) A Private Sphere: Democracy in a digital age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Peters, J.D. (2001) ‘Witnessing,’ Media, Culture & Society, 23(6), 707–23. Peters, J.D. (2009) ‘An afterword: Torchlight red on sweaty faces,’ in P. Frosh and A. Pinchevski (eds) Media Witnessing: Testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 42–8.

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Reading, A. (2009) ‘Mobile witnessing: Ethics and the camera phone in the “war on terror”,’ Globalizations, 6(1): 61–76. Rentschler, C. (2004) ‘Witnessing: US citizenship and the vicarious experience of suffering,’ Media, Culture & Society, 26(2): 296–304. Rentschler, C. (2009) ‘From danger to trauma: Affective labor and the journalistic discourse of witnessing,’ in P. Frosh and A. Pinchevski (eds) Media Witnessing: Testimony in the age of mass communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 158–81. Ritchin, F. (2013) Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, documentary, and the citizen. New York: Aperture. Rodríguez, C. (2011) Citizens’ Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting violence in Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwalbe, C.B., Silcock, B.W. and Candello, E. (2015) ‘Gatecheckers at the visual news stream: A new model for classic gatekeeping theory,’ Journalism Practice, 9(4): 465–83. Seib, P. (2010) ‘News and foreign policy: Defining influence, balancing power,’ in S. Allan (ed.) The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. London and New York: Routledge, 533–41. Sheller, M. (2015) ‘News now: Interface, ambience, flow, and the disruptive spatiotemporalities of mobile news media,’ Journalism Studies, 16(1): 12–26. Silverstone, R. (2006) Media and Morality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Stallabrass, J. (2013) Memory of Fire: Images of war and the war of images. Brighton: Photoworks. Tait, S. (2011) ‘Bearing witness, journalism and moral responsibilty,’ Media, Culture & Society, 33(8): 1220–35. Taubert, E. (2012). So, you’re still using the phrase citizen-journalism? Dailycrowdsource.

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com. Available at: http://dailycrowdsource. com/content/crowdsourcing/1092-so-you-restill-using-the-phrase-citizen-journalism Tester, K. (2001) Compassion, Morality and the Media. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tumber, H. (2010) ‘Journalists and war crimes,’ in S. Allan (ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. London and New York: Routledge, 533–41. Vujnovic, M. (2011), ‘Participatory journalism in the marketplace: Economic motivations behind the practices,’ in J. Singer et al., Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, Malden. MA: WileyBlackwell, 139–54. Wall, M. and El Zahed, S. (2014) ‘Embedding content from Syrian citizen journalists: The rise of the collaborative news clip,’ Journalism, Online First. Waisbord, S. (2013) Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wardle, C., Dubberley, S. and Brown, P. (2014) ‘Amateur footage: A global study of usergenerated content in TV and online news output,’ Tow Center for Digital Journalism, New York: Columbia University. Williams, A., Wardle, C. and Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2011) ‘“Have they got news for us?” Audience revolution or business as usual at the BBC?’ Journalism Practice, 5(1), 85–99. Yaschur, C. (2012) ‘Shooting the shooter: How experience level affects photojournalistic coverage of a breaking news event,’ Visual Communication Quarterly, 19(3): 161–77. Zelizer, B. (2007) ‘On “having been there”: “Eyewitnessing” as a journalistic key word,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24(5): 408–28. Zelizer, B. (2012) ‘Journalists as interpretive communities, revisited,’ in S. Allan (ed.) The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, revised edition. London and New York: Routledge, 181–90.

19 Hyperlocal News Andy Williams and David Harte

The widespread decline of local commercial news in highly developed media markets is now very well researched. But the internet has enabled a new generation of communityoriented local news outlets, often termed hyperlocal news, which has been seen by many to (at least partially) fill these gaps in news provision, and meet a manifest need or desire for local news (Kurpius et  al., 2010; Metzgar et al., 2011). In the USA, as early as 2007, Schaffer produced survey-based research on 500 hyperlocal citizen media sites which found this kind of news outlet to be ‘a form of “bridge” media, linking traditional forms of journalism with classic civic participation’ (Schaffer 2007: 7). By 2009, distinguished commentators had already accepted that such community news operations had a role to play in sustaining US democracy (Downie and Schudson, 2009). European hyperlocal media have also attracted the attention of researchers. Fröhlich, Quirling, and Engesser (2012), along with Bruns (2011), have researched the

large German community news network MyHeimat. In 2010, Fröhlich’s team found a national network of 37,000 citizen journalists collaborating with a number of regional news operations as well as publishing directly to a series of hyperlocal audiences (Fröhlich et al., 2012). In the Netherlands, Kerkhoven and Bakker identified 123 hyperlocal news websites publishing using a range of business models (Kerkhoven and Bakker, 2014). This chapter, however, will principally focus on recent research into hyperlocal news in the UK and USA, which is where most of the research in this emergent field has been done. We begin with a look at the defining characteristics of hyperlocal news as seen by key commentators and researchers. Next, we move on to a more substantive discussion of what we know about this emergent cultural form, with reference to: who produces it and what motivates them; what kinds and topics of news they cover; how participatory and interactive it is; and emerging differences between franchised hyperlocals attached to

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large media corporations and smaller independent local news providers. Hyperlocal news is often high in civic and community value but low in economic value, so next we address key concerns around the economics and financial security of the sector. There follows a section on theoretical frameworks which have already been, and which could usefully in future be, employed by researchers in the field, before concluding with a discussion of how hyperlocal news media should be studied in future, in the context of the deprofessionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of news that it so often embodies and performs.

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and the fact that producers provide news (or the less prescriptive local ‘information’). It should be noted however, that the meanings implied by the somewhat slippery signifier ‘local’ vary quite widely in different communities and national contexts. There are stark differences, for instance, between the size of audiences addressed by US hyperlocals: some aim to reach a very small audience (e.g. of a few city blocks), and some target towns, cities, or even whole states (Hickman, 2012). Similar variability exists within the UK, but the base line size of audiences tends to be smaller to start with.

Filling gaps in coverage? DEFINING HYPERLOCAL NEWS Any discussion of the academic work around hyperlocal news should consider the range of definitions, and key defining characteristics, that have been attributed to the phenomenon. The term was originally coined in 1991, according to Pavlik, to describe the inclusion of locally-produced television news in the outputs of a 24-Hour news channels in the USA (2013: 9). Since the mid-2000s, however, it began to take on its now commonlyaccepted significance on both sides of the Atlantic when referring to new approaches to providing local (mainly online) news.

How local is hyperlocal? Radcliffe, in his report for the UK innovation charity NESTA, defines this form of community news as, ‘online news or content services pertaining to a town, village, single postcode or other small, geographically defined community’ (Radcliffe 2012: 6). This definition is useful in the way it draws attention to a dominant platform of communication (digital, online), the geographic space and audience addressed (here expressed as a range between single streets and towns),

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adds a comparative element to our understanding of hyperlocal news, implying that it also tends to address deficits in more traditional news provision (FCC 2011: 230). Likewise, in its 2009 Digital Britain report, the then UK Labour Government cited the ‘medium-term potential of online hyperlocal news’ to contribute to a gap in the provision ‘between the old and new’ news media (Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2009: 150). It is the filling of such real or perceived ‘gaps’ that concerns Ofcom and other UK actors who are keen to scrutinise the development of hyperlocal media in light of the decline of commercial local news (Ofcom 2012: 103). Writing about the US context, Metzgar et al. (2011) build on accounts of how the internet facilitates new forms of news participation, and argue that hyperlocal news can ‘fill perceived gaps in coverage of an issue or region and to promote civic engagement’ (2011: 774). Parasie and Cointet (cited in Siles and Boczkowski, 2012) likewise see hyperlocal as a way for readers in small communities to regain at least some coverage of local issues relevant to them. There is some evidence from the USA, however, that there may be an element of wishful thinking to some of these accounts.

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Metzgar et al.’s optimism is measured by the fact that many hyperlocals ‘strive to fill the perceived gap in public affairs coverage’ left by declining local news media, but that many have ‘yet to accomplish that goal’ (2011: 782). Similarly, in a wide-ranging study on the topic for his PhD thesis, Horning concludes the US data ‘does not support the claim that most hyperlocal sites are providing coverage of areas often overlooked by mainstream media’ (Horning 2012, 153). Even so, such an argument does not devalue hyperlocal news’ existing and potential contributions to media plurality, especially in the context of recent declines in, and cuts to, coverage by traditional news publishers. As Barnett and Townend point out in the UK, ‘the current activities and aspirations of most hyperlocal sites suggests a potentially major role in compensating for the decline of traditional local media and making a genuine contribution to local plurality’ (2015: 13). This is further borne out by UK hyperlocal news producers’ common disregard for the practices and outputs of mainstream local media, which many see as intrusive, geographically distant from communities, too deferential to local elites, sensationalist and overly negative (Williams et al 2015: 19).

Participatory online hyperlocal news? As Radcliffe’s definition, above, suggests, it is extremely common to refer to the online nature of hyperlocal news as a defining characteristic. However, a narrow focus on webenabled digital communication may marginalize those community news providers who favour other platforms, such as the growing number who have turned to (mainly free) news or magazine print models in order to bolster advertising revenues (Williams et al 2014). This focus may also exclude older, more traditional, providers of community news such as those in the community radio sector, or producers who were committed to

providing printed community news long before the advent of online communication (such as the longstanding Welsh language network of 58 community news sheets know as the Papurau Bro, which has an estimated total readership of 280,000, each paper supported by a network of around 39 volunteers (Thomas, 2006)). Much of the emerging literature and commentary also suggests that many hyperlocal news providers have, to different degrees, an open and collaborative approach to working with members of the audience to elicit user-generated or coproduced news content (Baines 2010, 2012; Thurman et  al., 2012; Zamenopoulos 2016 forthcoming). Such a move towards user involvement mirrors, argues Mellissa Wall, a ‘broader paradigm shift toward more participation by more untrained people across many areas of society’ (2015: 12).

A working definition of hyperlocal news The least exclusionary, most provisional, and we believe the most useful definition of hyperlocal news comes from Metzgar and colleagues, who suggest that such operations are ‘geographically-based, communityoriented, original-news-reporting organizations indigenous to the web and intended to fill perceived gaps in coverage of an issue or region and to promote civic engagement’ (Metzgar et  al., 2011: 774). This definition has the advantage of: (a) keeping the geographic specificity of the sites broad; (b) focusing on community orientation and attention to civic value (which is common to all definitions we have found); (c) designating the importance of original news or information reporting (which can be produced by news professionals, citizens, or from collaborations between the two); (d) allowing the web, and digital news practice, to be placed centre-stage even if we would advise keeping the possibility open for attention to multiple news platforms; (e) retaining attention to the

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fact that most community news producers at least aspire to fill gaps in coverage; and finally (f), of foregrounding the common attention of many hyperlocals to promoting and fostering civic engagement. Importantly, the authors also stress the provisional nature of these defining characteristics, and how they should be open to revision as the field changes, and as academic enquiry multiplies, deepens, and broadens. We believe that these characteristics could usefully and appropriately be used as normative, as well as descriptive, benchmarks by which to measure and evaluate the practices and content of hyperlocal news producers.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT HYPERLOCAL NEWS There is, as yet, little research into what kinds of people produce hyperlocal news, but one recent study from the USA and another from the UK, shed valuable light. Even though the sector has commonly been associated with ‘bottom up’ grassroots journalism (Cushion 2012: 86–7), and is clearly a part of what McNair has called the ‘decentralisation of journalistic production’ (2012: 81) it would be a mistake to suggest that hyperlocal news is purely the preserve of citizen journalists. Williams et  al. (2014) find that around half of UK hyperlocal news producers have some journalistic experience (in the regional, national, or specialist news media) or training (as part of a University degree or while employed as a media professional), while the other half have no experience (2014a: 12). They also asked participants to choose from a list of descriptions which reflect their practice: the largest group (70 per cent) described what they do as a form of ‘community participation’; 57 per cent favoured ‘local journalism’; closely followed by 55 per cent identifying with the term ‘active citizenship’. In fact, the least popular description was ‘citizen journalism’, chosen by 43 per cent of

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respondents (2014a: 11). Similar proportions of US hyperlocal news workers obtained specialist college degrees in the field of journalism or communications, but there is no data about the previous professional media experience of those producing US hyperlocals (Horning 2012: 120). There is, as yet, limited evidence about why these community news producers do what they do, but emerging research portrays some of their motivations. For instance, Dovey et al. (2016 forthcoming) identify a variety of tightly overlapping motives behind hyperlocal news work which combine personal reasons (often aligned with the acquisition of skills and self actualisation), with others that are more social in orientation (and bound up with the creation of broader citizenship and community benefits). Personal motivations included a wish to meet people and expand social networks while getting to know an area, a wish to learn or practice professional journalistic skills, and an urge to experiment with new technology. In interviews, however, these were always accompanied by mention of more altruistic reasons, such as: enabling local people to make better-informed decisions; letting people know what is going on where they live; supporting or initiating local campaigns; holding authorities to account; bringing communities together and facilitating community action and cohesion; remedying deficiencies in, or the absence of, existing local news media, especially by representing communities (to themselves and the outside world) in a more positive light (Dovey et al., 2016 forthcoming).

What gets covered? One of the striking recurring findings of the few studies to have looked in detail at the content of hyperlocal news stresses their common orientation towards producing news about local politics and civil society. This compares favourably with declining coverage of politics and civic life among declining

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traditional commercial local news providers. Metzgar et al. identify numerous hyperlocals who devote themselves to covering areas of civic and political life under-represented in legacy local news, and all of their case studies cover potentially democracy-enabling areas of news, even if in sometimes uneven ways (Metzgar et  al., 2011: 779). Horning, drawing on a larger and more systematic content analysis of over 300 US hyperlocals, and a big survey of more than 90 producers, confirms much of this. ‘Hyperlocal news’, he writes, ‘provides an exciting new venue for local citizens to learn about the politics that affect them most, and for this reason alone they make a valuable contribution to local democracies’ (Horning, 2012: 151–2). Flouch and Harris, in their study of London’s ‘citizen-led local online ecosystem’ provide valuable insights into the varieties of UK hyperlocal news (2010, 1). Among the types identified include numerous hyperlocals with an emphasis on engaging people with local civic life including ‘local action groups’ (sites belonging to tenants’ associations or other such groups which publish and circulate information on issues of community concern) and placeblogs (citizen journalistic sites set up by single authors to publish news about their area) that are often driven by a commitment to fostering civic participation. They also found sites which were less clearly committed to civil-society oriented goals, but which nonetheless add to local information systems in valuable ways. Williams et  al. (2015) draw on a content analysis, interviews with, and a survey of hyperlocal news producers to generate an understanding of the civic value of such news. In a large 10-day snapshot content analysis of close to 2000 stories on more than 300 hyperlocal news sites, they found a good deal of news about community activities, local politics, civic life and business. Their survey also found that hyperlocal news is very locally-oriented, with nine out of ten cited news sources talking about local issues, and almost all posts being published ‘because of

something which happened at a local level’. The largest category of news they identified (13 per cent) concerned community events such as those organized by local clubs and societies, and the next largest (12 per cent) concerned coverage of local government (2014b: 9). They also find that, even though official news sources (local politicians, business representatives, the police) still get a strong voice, members of the public (local citizens, members of community groups) get more of a platform than in much mainstream local newspaper coverage. The study also yields some (limited) insights into hyperlocal journalism practice. The number of sources quoted in the sample overall was quite low in comparison with studies of traditional local newspapers, and there was little evidence of audiences being exposed to a plurality of competing voices on controversial issues (Williams et al., 2015: 12). Drawing on their interview data the authors explain that even though there was little balanced coverage in the traditional sense, many community journalists have developed alternative strategies to foster and inform plural debate around contentious local issues. Such strategies include a principled rejection of the norm of offering (sometimes intransigent or obstructive) official news sources a right to reply, and spreading coverage of competing perspectives across discrete posts rather than following the more traditional ‘he said, she said’ practice of balancing sources within individual news pieces. The survey and interview data also reveal that a majority of hyperlocal news producers cover (often successful) community campaigns, and a significant minority have initiated their own. They also found that critical public-interest investigations are carried out by what they deem a ‘surprisingly large number of community news producers’ given the resource-intensive and potentially risky nature of challenging local power elites in the public interest. Issues investigated, and campaigned about, ranged from local planning problems and improvements to amenities to more serious topics such as corruption in local government.

Hyperlocal News

Despite these positive developments, researchers worry that news services based on a variable patchwork of citizen news sites will only ever be able to tell a partial story about their communities, and that areas of civic and community life will be left uncovered, or at least under-represented (Metzgar et al 2011: 779). For instance, there is concern that, despite much useful extra coverage of communities being provided by these news start-ups, disadvantaged neighbourhoods may remain underserved because many locals may lack ‘the skills and resources’ to set up and maintain such news outlets (2011: 780). Hyperlocal news in the UK is also somewhat patchy and inconsistent in the coverage it offers to the population as a whole (Harte 2013). For instance, a recent report on media plurality notes such sites ‘may become central to maintaining the accountability of public authorities in the future’ (Moore 2014: 11), but also that they ‘range enormously in distribution, scale, reach, type and regularity of output’ and that there is ‘large variation in the spread of sites across the UK’ (2014: 10).

(Inter)active audiences? A growing body of work helps us understand how hyperlocals approach interacting with audiences, and the strength of participatory news practices in the sector. Metzgar et  al. (2011) find that their examples allow readers the chance to interact with producers, comment on posts, and co-create content in different ways. Horning (2012), likewise, points out that most US hyperlocal sites include spaces for participation from audience members and include coverage of civic opportunities for readers and citizens. But in relation to the civic goals of many producers he writes, ‘it is not entirely true that hyperlocal sites are universally focussed on civic journalism’ (2012: 153). When it comes to many US hyperlocal news producers’ use of participatory tools to encourage interaction with audiences, the practice of most producers in this regard is

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very minimalistic, similarly to mainstream local journalists (2012: 153). It should be noted, however, that in many places served by hyperlocals there are no longer, or never really were, many (or any) local journalists to provide any news to communities, whether it is innovative and collaborative or not. Zamenopoulos et  al. (2016 forthcoming) state that in the UK, while responsibility for the production of hyperlocal news rests primarily with individual producers, it should also be noted that many community news outlets also publish collaboratively produced material. Many have active networks of contributors among the communities they serve who: produce guest posts or regular columns on issues which interest them (e.g. reportages about local sports teams which do not get covered in bigger media outlets); write about things where they have special expertise (e.g. a local garden centre owner writing a gardening column, local councillors producing a politics column); or are willing to participate in crowd-sourcing exercises by submitting material around specific calls. Dovey et al. (2016 forthcoming) point out that as well as giving people information which could help them navigate local life, many UK hyperlocals also often provide readers with tools, such as My Society’s FixMyStreet.com, which enable direct participation in political and community life by facilitating direct communication between citizens and local government. Other recent research from the UK confirms this general tendency towards incorporating the perspectives of community members. One fifth of users of hyperlocal news have ever contributed to their local outlet by posting a comment or uploading a photo, and 10 per cent have created more substantive news content ‘about their local area from scratch’ (Nesta and Kantar Media, 2013: 9). In his UK content analysis, Williams (2013) found that comments are enabled on most news pieces, and there are invitations to share content on a variety of social media platforms. Despite that the overwhelming majority of articles allowed comments, audiences took advantage of these opportunities

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in just less than a third of cases. Around one in ten of the comment strings appended to blog posts involved reactions to the post by audiences without further dialogue, and around the same proportion of posts led to conversations between audience members, or between audience members and the hyperlocal publishers (Williams, 2013). In addition to opportunities to interact online, many producers reported in interviews that they do a lot of their audience engagement work on social media. A complementary survey shows that nine out of ten producers use Twitter, and eight out of ten use Facebook, as part of their hyperlocal news activities (Williams et  al., 2014: 21). They also note strong aspirations among many producers to engage more with audiences, in the face of tight time restrictions. When asked what kind of content they would like to add to their sites, among the most commonly-cited responses were a wish to ‘encourage more submissions from audience members’ (2014a: 35), and when asked about broader improvements many also wrote of ‘a wish to undertake more community engagement activities’ (2014a: 37). It is clear from this emerging research that in their approach to engaging news audiences both UK and US hyperlocals present potential benefits for local community and civic engagement, especially given the ongoing retreat of the traditional commercial local news media in both countries. As Metzgar et  al. (2011) suggest, ‘the interactive media these sites use have not created a perfect Habermasian environment, but they have moved conditions forward toward a more ideal setting than has been possible before’ (2011: 783).

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF HYPERLOCAL NEWS: FRANCHISES VS. INDEPENDENT INITIATIVES Questions of sustainability and the economic viability of hyperlocal news have understandably animated numerous researchers.

The economic crises in mainstream commercial local newspaper markets in the UK and the USA, are an important backdrop against which these discussions should be interpreted (see Chapter 4). National media and technology companies have also explored the business opportunity of the developing hyperlocal news market. Whilst there has been no universal, or even widespread, move into the hyperlocal sphere by established local news companies in the UK, a number of publishers have dabbled in hyperlocal news, and some have devoted significant resources. For example, the Guardian Media Group launched three shortlived but much-loved ‘hyperlocal beat blogs’ in UK cities in 2010 (Pickard, 2011). A less successful foray into the hyperlocal sphere by a major publisher of regional news is analysed by Baines (2012). He found users did not engage effectively with a hyperlocal news site in the North of England because it was designed to meet corporate, rather than community needs, and because community users were not sufficiently involved in the running of the site. The biggest commitment to hyperlocal news shown by any UK publisher, however, is from Local World’s (formerly Northcliffe Media) ‘Local People’ network of sites. Launched in 2009 with 40 sites, the network had grown to 154 by 2012 (Thurman et al., 2012: 272). A content analysis of four of these sites found that despite aspirations to produce grass roots bottom-up participatory local news, these sites were largely unsuccessful. The large majority of stories, for example, were not written by the community of readers, as originally hoped, but were instead produced by paid professional ‘curators’ (2012: 273). Likewise, the number of comments under posts, often a good indicator of community engagement, were quite scarce (2012: 274). In the USA many debates have focused on the large-scale experiment in hyperlocal news carried out by the Patch network of sites, previously owned by the AOL media corporation (Auletta, 2011; Pavlik,

Hyperlocal News

2013; Wilhelm, 2013). In 2011 the company employed 800 journalists in 850 communities covering 22 states (Auletta, 2011), but after three years of layoffs and cuts AOL sold its majority shareholding in what the New York Times called its ‘troubled hyperlocal news division’ (Kaufman, 2014). St. John III et  al. (2014) note that Patch sites held ‘the potential to offer information that can help construct reciprocal, mutually beneficial, and communicatively integrated communities’ (2014: 207). But their analysis of the content of 345 stories across 90 sites found this potential to be ‘constrained’ by current practice which mimics ‘traditional reporting practices’ rather than those of ‘community journalism’ (2014: 207). They found that posts were dominated by quotes from official news sources, with citizens’ voices being cited relatively little; interactivity with readers was limited, with low proportions of posts containing comments; Patch editors did not encourage interactivity; and that limited external linking practices restricted readers’ exposure to wider perspectives on, and information about, their communities (2014: 207). The findings of research about such corporate-owned franchise hyperlocals in the USA and the UK present a useful comparison with Williams et al.’s study (2014; 2015), which focused more on sites run by independent media producers and identified greater attention to coverage of politics and civic life, along with a greater voice for members of the public. Thurman et al. (2012), on the other hand, find a higher emphasis on what they call ‘soft news’ on their corporate owned sites. The authors attribute this mismatch in part to differences in motivations for setting up hyperlocal websites. Their research suggests that many independently-run sites were initiated with particular action-oriented civic goals in mind, rather than with ‘the intention of creating content for content’s sake’, or for the sake of attracting advertisers (2012: 279). This squares well with the aforementioned findings of Dovey et al. (2016 forthcoming), in relation to the strong civic motivations

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behind many hyperlocal sites. As Barnett and Townend (2015) suggest: ‘[on] the whole, the most successful hyperlocal ventures have been independent. There is little evidence of success in attempts by media companies to roll out hyperlocal-style sites’ (2014: 6). They cite technology journalist Mathew Ingram, who believes hyperlocal journalism will be more successful if it is ‘artisanal’ rather than ‘mass-produced’, if it is based on a close relationship with a local audience, and if is driven by community members themselves rather than by a ‘cookie-cutter version stamped out by an assembly line’ (Ingram, 2013). The emerging evidence in both the UK and the USA suggests the content of franchised hyperlocal news may be of less civic and community value to communities than that produced by smaller independent providers. Similarly, it also seems that many independent providers seem to enact a more open and participatory approach to involving and engaging community members than their mainstream media-owned hyperlocal counterparts. Despite the fate of franchised network projects, and the undoubted economic challenges faced by community news startups, there have recently been some signs that smaller local news publishers may be weathering the storm better than their more established counterparts. The Pew Research Centre recently identified 438 digital organisations that produce original news regularly, most of them local in orientation, and found that these smaller, often non-profit, news sites are the biggest component of a growing US digital news sector (Jurkowitz, 2014). Kurpius et  al. (2010), in one of the most detailed accounts of US business models, echo this measured optimism, suggesting of the independent US hyperlocal market that it ‘appears to hold at least the potential for developing a sustainable model. The low cost of entry and the limited number of entry barriers work in its favor’ (2010: 372). However, they see the long-term future of many existing revenue streams for hyperlocal news as

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precarious: private investors are a short- to medium-term option because they will only continue to invest if a future return seems likely; the use of personal funds is restricted by the limits of producers’ own wealth; foundation grants are typically given over short periods of one to five years, and are contingent on new business models being grown and tested over these initial funding periods; and while all news outlets aimed to generate revenues from sales of advertising space, this was ‘not yet a major source of capital’ for any (2010: 365–6). The successful employment of advertising-based models is hampered, they suggest, by small audience bases, lack of visibility in communities, a lack of detailed knowledge of audiences because of a reliance on relatively basic free analytics software, along with an emphasis on staid and low-value static and banner ads rather than more innovative interactive ads (Kurpius et  al., 2010: 373). Horning (2012) identifies a somewhat less diverse funding picture in his more comprehensive US study, which finds that local advertising is the dominant funding model in the sector. He observes that it is ‘encouraging’ to see many hyperlocals securing local advertising revenue (in some cases enough to pay the wages of a small journalistic team). But both studies conclude that more diversified business models should be encouraged in order to promote greater security should one revenue source be reduced, or end entirely (Horning, 2012: 155; Kurpius et al., 2010: 373). Recent research in the UK suggests a somewhat less developed market, but one which suffers from many similar problems. A survey of 183 hyperlocal news producers concluded that the great majority of sites have relatively small audiences and make very little (if any) money (Williams et  al., 2014). Just over a third of survey participants generate revenues, mostly quite modest amounts, but 63 per cent make no money, and pay the running costs of sites themselves. Advertising is by far the dominant form of

income generation, but a number of other methods are employed (including sponsored features, voluntary donations, subscriptions, grant funding from charities and foundations, and, notably, the production of free printed newspapers to attract a bigger audience to retail on to advertisers). In common with Radcliffe (2012: 6), and with the picture in the USA, these researchers find that UK producers suffer from a relative lack of visibility within their communities (Williams et al., 2014: 23). This is likely to impact upon attempts to monetize sites by attracting advertising, and underscores the need for more diverse funding streams. It is likely to be an important reason why so few local organisations in the UK advertise on hyperlocal sites. Of the £731m spent on online advertising by ‘small consumer-facing’ businesses, only £23m is spent with hyperlocal websites (Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates Ltd, 2013: 5). In aggregate, these researchers find a small cluster of (themselves small) but economically viable community news services, a number of producers who were previously hobbyists who are now struggling to professionalise and monetise their sites (see also Chapter 15), and a much larger group of volunteer-led efforts.

THEORISING HYPERLOCAL NEWS The most widespread theoretical influences on studies of hyperlocal news in the emerging literature focus on traditional notions of the democratic roles of journalism, and rationalist conceptions of citizenship and the public sphere. Barnett and Townend, for instance, draw on and adapt Curran’s formulation of the ‘classic liberal theory of a free press’ when isolating ‘informing, representing, campaigning, and interrogating’ as key, established, democratic roles for news against which hyperlocal content can be measured (Barnett and Townend, 2015). Similarly, Williams and colleagues adapt a

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comparable set of normative benchmarks when they say that news, hyperlocal news included, should operate ‘as a source of accurate information for citizens; as a watchdog/fourth estate; as a mediator and/or representative of communities (a role which can help with community cohesion); and as an advocate of the public in campaigning terms’ (Williams et al., 2015: 2, drawing on McNair 2009: 237–40). Baines (2010) draws on Habermas, finding that when set against an ideal notion of the public sphere the franchised hyperlocal news outlet he studies fails to meet the ‘monitorial’ needs of citizens and neglects to engage with global perspectives (Baines, 2010: 590). The usefulness of invoking these widely established theoretical benchmarks for a healthy news media is clear: they allow scholars to compare the practices, content, and value associated with emergent cultural forms with what has gone before, and what is disappearing in the mainstream provision of local news. This work should continue. However, the dangers of an over-reliance on these theoretical frames include, for instance, the risk of missing, or under-emphasising, emerging values or problems when applying familiar theories to newer digital media.

From spheres to fields A number of researchers have made use of Bourdieu’s field theory to examine the ‘invisible structures of power and recognition’ that shape the field of journalism (Willig, 2013: 384; see also Chapter 26). The work contributes to a shift away from the newsroomcentricity of so much work in Journalism Studies arguing that there has been a methodological presumption that journalism only takes place in specific ‘fields’ (such as newsrooms), and not in others (such as, for example, the home). They note that whilst anthropology has undergone its ‘reflexive turn’ and interrogated established notions of what constitutes its field, the anthropology of journalism has only

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just begun that process as it reacts to the deinstitutionalization and de-professionalization of news and information provision (WahlJorgensen and Bird 2009: 22). Postill (2008, 2011) has argued that an advantage of drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of fields is: ‘that it is a neutral, technical term lacking the normative idealism of both public sphere and community’ (2008: 418). He pays particular attention to the ways in which ‘people, technologies and other cultural artefacts are co-producing new forms of residential sociality in unpredictable ways’. His study of the city of Subang Jaya in Kuala Lumpur noted a ‘vibrant Internet scene’ that contributed to an active culture of participation and debate amongst residents on matters that mattered only to that specific locality (Postill 2008: 422). Ultimately Postill is frustrated at the lack of attention to the ways in which everyday use of internet technologies might support change at the local level by scholars who have favoured the public sphere as a theoretical framework. There is much value, he claims, in studying ‘banal activism’ at a local level, ‘the activism of seemingly mundane issues such as traffic congestion, waste disposal and petty crime’ (2008: 419). We believe that, given the focus of much hyperlocal news on such banal, everyday, issues, and taking into account its propensity for co-creation and collaboration with community members in the act of media production, these theoretical perspectives could provide useful foci for future work.

Citizenship and the everyday Given the near-saturation of digital capture and publishing devices such as smartphones, and increasing access to online digital publishing platforms, the extent to which ordinary people, rather than professional journalists, capture, curate, and publish the ‘everyday’ has become of interest to many academics. Pink’s work (2012), influenced by that of Lefebvre (1991), has focused on

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how the everyday can reveal points of resistance in society. Pink’s approach to studying digital media is valuable, and particularly useful to studying local media, because of its emphasis on geography. She asks that we rethink ‘digital media through a theory of place’ (2012: 131), and argues that ‘placemaking’ happens as much through the ways in which people use online, social technologies as through mainstream media (see Chapter 24). Importantly, as an ethnographer, Pink wants us to see that these online practices happen simultaneously with an offline engagement with place-making (2012: 131). By thinking about everyday, non-journalistic, acts of media creativity and production, scholars have the potential to consider new ways in which we might frame hyperlocal news practice beyond the well-established social ideals that have traditionally informed and shaped journalistic professional norms. Hartley (2009) also advocates for attention to ‘everyday’ expressions of citizenship in the context of what he sees as a shift from an era of one-way ‘read only’, to internetenabled two-way ‘read and write’, news media (2009: 83). He has focused on consumption practices and the ways in which citizenship is mediated in much of his work on media audiences (Hartley, 1987; 2002b). He especially notes the tensions inherent in the debate about the citizen’s position between political and consumer sovereignty (Hartley 2002a). He rejects an either–or dichotomy between the two and argues that consumption, as well as production, can be a vital concept in understanding how citizenship works: ‘our cultural consumption, and in particular our media consumption teach us about our society and how to act in it’ (2002a: 37). Such theoretical insights, we believe, could be particularly important in describing those aspects of the civic and community value of hyperlocal news content which fall outside, or at least on the margins of, the traditional foci of public sphere or democracy-oriented theories. As Hess and Waller (2015) argue, scholars need a ‘greater focus on the social

and cultural dimensions of hyperlocal news alongside its economic and political importance’ (2015: 14). Such a shift might further allow scholars the ability to theorise the value of productive acts of media creation carried out by the full range of professional and non-professional social actors who create hyperlocal news (see also Chapters 27 and 28).

CONCLUSION The economically precarious nature of many hyperlocal news operations is a constant across national contexts. Future research, no matter its theoretical or methodological orientation, would do well to consider this and other likely effects of the de-institutionalisation and de-professionalization which much hyperlocal news represents and enacts in the context of the economic security of the sector. In the UK it is possible that widespread voluntarism may be enough to sustain community news into the short-term future, as it does in other spheres of public life (for example, in elements of the local justice system, local and community politics, or in school governance). But this is by no means certain. We also need further research on the scope and scale of emergent hyperlocal publishing measured explicitly against the declines in established local news markets. If we are to accurately assess hyperlocal news’ ability to plug any of the many gaps in information provision caused by the decline of local newspaper publishing, we need to know, for instance, how many community journalists have replaced the legions of professional reporters made redundant from their jobs in recent years. This attention to economics is needed because there are very well-grounded fears that, without the revenues and, more importantly, the profits needed to remunerate news producers adequately, in the long term the sector will be too precarious to sustain the kind of institutions which have previously

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been necessary prerequisites for a strong, independent, and (sometimes) critical local news in the public interest (McChesney and Nichols: 2010: 81). The theoretical positions outlined above that celebrate citizen participation in news should, we think, be tempered by close attention to the institutional and economic contexts of acts of news production in what Benkler (2006) calls the ‘networked public sphere’ (see Chapter 10). Benkler is right when he observes that ‘the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model […] to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system’ (2009). But we are less sure about those elements of his and others’ work that downplay concerns about the resources needed to support the production of news. Important to Benkler’s thesis about journalism is the notion that online news requires far less money to produce than news on more established platforms. This is manifestly true, except in the area of human resources. Much of the emergent literature addressed above is very clear about the long-term financial precariousness of most hyperlocal news, and this could present real problems. It is incredibly encouraging that so many people are producing varied, important, and necessary public interest journalism, often without the legal and institutional support previously provided by the likes of established local newspaper companies. But the aggregated findings of research into the economics of hyperlocal news are a reminder that a lack of financial security has potentially serious implications for the medium- to longterm viability of these news outlets, and perhaps also for the security, independence, and sustainability of hyperlocal news publishing as a whole. As Radcliffe suggests, ‘this nascent sector faces a number of structural challenges, including funding, discoverability, sustainability and visibility’ (2012: 6). We would add the related potential and actual effects of expecting amateurs, and often illfunded professionals, to carry out potentially critical public interest journalism on their

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own, and without much institutional backup (see Chapter 15). As this field of research matures, we believe that more sustained critical attention should be devoted to studying the news production practices of hyperlocals in their economic contexts; at present there is very little research which seeks to understand, in detail, the way news is produced by hyperlocal news workers. This could most usefully, and rigorously, be done by a new wave of in-depth ethnographic research in both real world and online contexts. We know from the classic works of media ethnography that defined Journalism Studies as a field of enquiry in the 1970s and 1980s that the institutional and economic contexts under which journalists operate determine the nature and content of their work. We now need similar insights into the fragmentary news and information systems currently emerging outside of mainstream newsrooms, hyperlocal news included.

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In Bob F. and Matt C. (eds.) Journalists, Sources, and Credibility: New Perspectives. London: Routledge. pp. 182–194. Cushion, S. (2012) The Democratic Value of News: Why public service media matter. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2009) Digital Britain. London: HMSO. Dovey, J., Alevizou, G., and Williams, A. (2016 forthcoming) The value of creative citizenship. In Hargreaves, I. (ed.) The Creative Citizen Unbound. Bristol: Polity Downie, L., and Schudson, M. (2009) The Reconstruction of American Journalism. New York: Columbia University. FCC (2011) The Information Needs of Communities [online] available from http://transition. fcc.gov/osp/inc-report/The_Information_ Needs_of_Communities.pdf [accessed 31 July 2012] Flouch, Hugh, and Harris, Kevin (2010) Typology of Citizen-Run Neighbourhood Websites. London: Networked Neighbourhoods. Fröhlich, R., Quirling, O., and Engesser, S. (2012) Between idiosyncratic self interest and professional standards. Journalism, 13(8): 1041–1063. Harte, D. (2013) One every two minutes: Assessing the scale of hyperlocal publishing in the UK. JOMEC Journal, Vol 1, No 3. Hartley, J. (1987) Invisible fictions: Television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure. Textual Practice, Vol 1, No 2, pp. 121–38. Hartley, J. (2002a) Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The key concepts. London and New York: Routledge. Hartley, J. (2002b) Uses of Television. Routledge. Hartley, J. (2009) The Uses of Digital Literacy. St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press. Hess, K. and Waller, L. (2015) Hip to be hyper. Digital Journalism, pp. 1–18. Hickman, Jon (2012) I don’t know what hyperlocal media is, but I’ve stopped worrying about that. The Plan, April 27, http://theplan.co.uk/i-dont-know-what-hyperlocalmedia-is-but-ive-stopped-worrying-aboutthat (last accessed October 2014) Horning, Michael (2012) In Search of Hyperlocal News: An examination of the organizational, technological, and economic forces that shape 21st century approaches to

independent online journalism, PhD Thesis, The Pennsylvania State University. Ingram, Mathew (2013) AOL’s hyper-local hubris. GigaOM, December 16, http://gigaom.com/ 2013/12/16/aols-hyperlocal-hubris-patch-isdying-because-local-journalism-is-artisanalnot-industrial (last accessed October 2014) Jurkowitz, Mark, (2014) The growth in digital reporting. Pew Journalism Research Project. http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/thegrowth-in-digital-reporting/ (accessed 26 March 2014) Kaufman, Leslie (2014) Patch sites turn corner after sale and big cuts. New York Times, May 18, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/ business/media/patch-sites-turn-corner-aftersale-and-big-cuts.html?_r=0 (last accessed October 2014) Kerkhoven, M., and Bakker, P. (2014) The Hyperlocal in Practice: Innovation, Creativity and Diversity. Digital Journalism, 2(3): 296–309. Kurpius, David, Metzgar, Emily, and Rowley, Karen (2010) Sustaining hyperlocal media. Journalism Studies, 11(3): 359–76. Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1. London: Verso. McChesney, Robert and Nichols, John (2010) The Death and Life of American Journalism. New York: Nation McNair, B. (2009) Journalism and Democracy. In K.W. Jorgensen and T. Hanitsch (eds.) The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 237–249. Metzgar, E. T., Kurpius, D. D., and Rowley, K. M. (2011) Defining hyperlocal media: Proposing a framework for discussion. New Media & Society, Vol 13, No 5, pp. 772–87. Moore, Martin (2014) Addressing the Democratic Deficit in Local News through Positive Plurality. London: Media Standards Trust. http://mediastandardstrust.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/10/Positive-Plurality-policypaper-9-10-14.pdf (last accessed February 2015) Nesta and Kantar Media (2013) UK Demand for Hyperlocal Media Research Report. London: Nesta. Ofcom (2012) Communications Market Report. Available from http://stakeholders.ofcom. org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/cmr12/CMR_ UK_2012.pdf

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Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates Ltd (2013) Research on Local Advertising Markets. London: Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates Ltd. Pavlik, John (2013) Trends in new media research: A critical review of recent scholarship. Sociology Compass, 7/1, pp.1–12. Pickard, Meg (2011) Guardian Local – an update on the experiment. TheGuardian. com, 27 April, http://www.theguardian. com/help/insideguardian/2011/apr/27/ guardian-local-update (last accessed October 2014) Pink, S. (2012) Situating Everyday Life: Practices and places. London: Sage. Postill, J. (2008) Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, Vol 10, No 3, pp. 413–31. Postill, J. (2011) Localizing the Internet: An anthropological account. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Radcliffe, D. (2012) Here and Now: UK hyperlocal media today. London: Nesta. Radcliffe, D. (2013) Hyperlocal: A small but growing part of the local media ecosystem. In Mair, J., Keeble, R., and Fowler, N. (eds) What Do We Mean By Local? Bury St Edmunds: Arima Schaffer, J. (2007) Citizen Media: Fad or the future of news? The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism. http://www.j-lab.org/_ uploads/downloads/citizen_media-1.pdf (last accessed January 2016). Siles, I., and Boczkowski, P.J. (2012) Making Sense of the Newspaper Crisis: A Critical Assessment of Existing Research and an Agenda for Future Work. New Media and Society, 14(8): 1375–1394. St. John III, B., Johnson, K., and Nah, S. (2014) Patch.com: The challenge of connective community journalism in the digital sphere. Journalism Practice, Vol 8, No 2, 197–212 Thomas, James (2006) The regional media and Wales. In Bob Franklin (ed.) Local Journalism and Local Media: Making the local news. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 49–59

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PART III

Conceptualizations of Journalism C . W. A n d e r s o n

This part explores the tension between older and newer theoretical approaches to framing the study of journalism. The chapters in this part share the premise that the world of news production and consumption is increasingly dispersed and hybrid (as contributors in Part I and II show), but present a diversity of perspectives about whether this complexity is best filtered through ‘old’ theory, ‘new’ theory, or some combination of the two. Perhaps as a result of this complexity and hybridity and the tensions they bring, the authors draw on a variety of metaphors in order to attempt to conceptualize (or reconceptualize) journalism. The chapters in Part III fall into two sets. The first four chapters discuss overarching conceptualizations of journalism in the digital age, ranging from a discussion of normative theories to a consideration of the relationship between humans, technologies, and the news. The following six chapters

also consider different conceptualizations of newsmaking and journalistic practice, but do so using frameworks that in one way or another can be connected to space as a metaphor for the social organization of news production. Daniel Kreiss and J. Scott Brennen (Chapter 20) open Part III with a forceful argument: by emphasizing the values of participation, deinstitutionalization, innovation, and entrepreneurialism, many normative theorists of digital news have abandoned an older, legacy set of guiding commitments of journalism. These earlier commitments included notions that institutions and bureaucracies carried within them democratic potentialities, and that innovation is as much an ideology as it is an argument of economic logic. In this chapter, Kreiss and Brennen take issue with the often uncritical deployment of new theoretical frameworks, not simply to pick fights, but to remind scholars that there is a

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long history of normative claims with regard to journalism, and to point to the benefits of a clearer perspective on how these commitments have shifted over time. In their contribution on audiences, masses, and publics, Laura Ahva and Heikki Heikkilä (Chapter 21) draw inspiration from research on the culture of audiences as well as notions of symbolic interactionism developed by scholars affiliated with the ‘Chicago School’ of sociology in the early twentieth century. Digitization has transformed user practices, they note, but it would be a mistake to collapse all user categories into a single homogeneous body even if the lines between different types of media consumption have been blurred. Continuing to retain distinctions between the ‘mass’, the ‘audience’, and the ‘public’ is important, Ahva and Heikkilä argue, for scholars if they are to make normative claims about media use and impact in the digital age. Rather than explicitly drawing on older bodies of theory to understand digital journalism, Bart Cammaerts and Nick Couldry (Chapter 22) apply media practice theory to the act of sharing news and journalism with others. The chapter adds to our knowledge of an under-explored journalistic concept, and also demonstrates the way we think this Handbook can be used. ‘Sharing’, be it on social media or elsewhere, is a commonly invoked behavior that scholars might wish to study in more depth than they have thus far. By tying this activity into the larger concept of media practices, this provides a useful theoretical hook through which to relate sharing to other, perhaps older ways of using and interacting with media. Seth Lewis and Oscar Westlund (Chapter 23) continue to push theorizing about journalism in more radical directions, claiming that the emerging universe of digital media production requires scholars to consider the operations of technological actants, human actors and audiences, and the activities that bind these actors, actants, and audiences together – a perspective which draws on recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS). With

the concept of ‘actant’, Lewis and Westlund provide a perspective that integrates, but does not privilege, technology in the analysis of digital news production – a perspective which can help scholars grapple with the role of technology in news production. The next six chapters in Part III draw on a variety of spatial metaphors through which to understand news. Chris Peters’ contribution (Chapter 24) begins this spatial turn, again considering the audience but less from the perspective of practice (as in Couldry and Cammaerts) and more from the point of view of the spaces and places in which news audiences operate. After discussing spatiotemporaility as a theoretical construct and reviewing the current environment of digital news consumption, Peters contends that practices will unfold differently depending on where they occur – a theoretical insight particularly useful in our era of dispersed habits. In their chapters, David Ryfe and Tim Vos draw on theoretical frameworks that are already established in Journalism Studies in their call for how to theorize the digital media landscape. Ryfe (Chapter 25) not only analyzes journalism as a series of institutions that overlap, in important ways, with other social institutions, but also makes a provocative argument about the close ties between journalistic transformation and changes in other important institutions of modern society such as politics and the market. These institutions, from which journalism partially draws its legitimacy in a relational fashion, he argues, have changed less than we think and thus constrain the overall transformation of journalism itself. Ryfe makes an explicit and thought-provoking claim that the modern West has decidedly not entered a new era of journalism, and that for such a transformation to occur, both the culture of journalistic professionalism and the larger political environment in which that journalism operates would have to change as well. Vos (Chapter 26) complicates the notion of the ‘journalistic field’, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Rodney Benson but

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also on the work of Kurt Lewin, who makes explicit some of the underlying indebtedness to physics in the ‘field’ metaphor. Vos concludes his chapter by demonstrating the way that the concept of field can help us understand journalistic coverage of major current events. David Domingo and Victor Wiard (Chapter 27) discuss the epistemological and ontological principles of actor-network theory (ANT), demonstrate how these concepts can be fruitfully applied to the study of news, and review the growing body of empirical work that has used ANT to study journalism. While ANT is somewhat controversial in the social sciences, Domingo and Wiard show how the theory offers an important means for grappling with the increasingly complex and hybridized nature of journalism and news production today. In my own contribution (Chapter 28), I discuss the two different ways journalism scholars have understood the metaphor of the ‘news ecosystem’. According to one perspective, scholars discuss news as an ‘ecology’: that is, a dynamic and living organic system in which different aspects of that system (blogs, television stations, newspapers, social media, and so on) contribute to the overall health of the whole system. A second perspective owes more to the ANT discussed by Domingo and Wiard in the previous chapter, and conceptualizes a tangled skein of journalistic diffusion in which messages travel out across the news network and transform as they move. These different ideas of the news ecosystem, while related, each invoke different theoretical assumptions. In the chapter I show how they each tend to privilege different programs of empirical research. Such conceptual clarity could help researchers to better outline what their research into news ecosystems should bring.

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In the last chapter in this part, Anu Kantola (Chapter 29), draws on the theoretical work of Zygmunt Bauman and his notion of ‘liquid modernity’ to suggest that this is the best metaphor for understanding journalism today – contrasting the relative structure and stability of news institutions and fields emphasized by Ryfe and Vos a few chapters earlier. The liquid nature of news has implications for both the profession of journalism (a profession, Kantola argues, that finally seemed to have reached some degree of stability and institutional power by the middle of the twentieth century) as well as the organization of journalistic work. Each of these final three chapters addresses journalism in terms that are less bounded and more fluid than the chapters earlier in the part. They each contend, in different ways, that theoretical perspectives on journalism and the news would be better served by a ‘network’ sensibility than they would by a perspective emphasizing bounded spheres such as fields and institutions. Together, these chapters show that there is no consensus about the ‘best’ theory for studying digital journalism, or the most fruitful way of conceptualizing journalism. Individually, each of these chapters is tremendously compelling, and advances a set of unique and original theoretical insights useful for scholars grappling with the complex nature of journalism today. But readers who read them together will notice that the chapters do not necessarily neatly complement each other. They will find that some of the arguments and perspectives put forward in the chapters are incompatible with one another. This, for us, is one of the main strengths of this part. Taken together, these contributions point to the vibrancy of the Journalism Studies field as a whole and the theoretical variety present in it.

20 Normative Models of Digital Journalism Daniel Kreiss and J. Scott Brennen

INTRODUCTION This chapter provides a survey of the normative arguments that underlie much scholarship on digital journalism published over the past two decades. We argue that four broad values are generally present throughout the literature and unique to theorizing about digital journalism. We also note that these normative claims are often contradicted by much of the empirical literature about how digital news is actually working, including by many of the findings discussed in this book. But this contradiction makes the persistence of these norms more interesting, not less. First, and most prevalent, scholars argue that journalism should be participatory given the affordances of digital and social media and the underlying norms, values, expectations, and knowledge of what scholars suggest are the formerly passive consumers of news. Second, and related, scholars argue

that journalism should be deinstitutionalized, which entails breaking down professional jurisdiction, undermining the gatekeeping power of the legacy press, challenging organizational hierarchies and distinctions between producers and consumers, or disaggregating and decentralizing the process and products of journalism. Third, scholars argue that journalism should be innovative to keep pace with technological change, the evolving expectations and demands of networked publics, and the uncertain and highly precarious media business environment. Finally, scholars argue that journalists should be entrepreneurial, which entails being able to be self-starters, build their own audiences, raise their own funding, and brand themselves in the social media era. While scholars do not always make their underlying normative stances explicit and few embrace all four of these underlying values for digital journalism, these claims are widely found throughout the literature.

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To demonstrate the rise and influence of a new set of normative claims in relation to digital journalism, we contrast this scholarship with a comparatively older body of work primarily articulated in the context of mass media. As we explore in the pages below, normative theorizing around digital journalism has not fully grappled with the ways that participation, deinstitutionalization, innovation, and entrepreneurialism may undermine other valued journalistic roles. These include the ideas that journalists should provide accurate and reliable information and a diverse set of viewpoints to the public, monitor the state and other powerful interests in society, represent the public to elites and serve as a proxy for public opinion, facilitate governance and serve as institutional conduits between elites and citizens and elites themselves, and provide forums for debate and discussion of public issues. Of course, here too, none of the normative roles discussed in this literature are empirical claims; the legacy press often fails to meet these idealized conceptions. But, as Nerone (2013: 456) points out, ‘the norms of western journalism can be inspirational, but not if treated with too much reverence’. At the very least, they provide a language for critique when journalism falls short of these ideals (the question of whether democratic ideals are appropriate for journalism is another matter that we do not address here; see Zelizer, 2013). This chapter also argues that much of the digital journalism literature is oriented normatively towards the ‘citizen participation’ (Christians et  al., 2009) tradition of public communication, yet in ways that are largely shorn of its critical edges and deeply compatible with market logics. In the citizen participation tradition the basis of legitimacy is ‘the idea that the media belong to the people, with an emancipatory, expressive, and critical purpose’ (2009: 25). Christians et  al. argue that historically the citizen participation tradition has focused on citizen engagement, but with a specific emphasis on groups that have been marginalized with respect to public communication, such as the poor, women,

immigrants, and people of color (see also Downing, 2000; Gans, 2004). In the digital journalism literature, however, participation is understood in libertarian terms that emphasize individual freedom of expression and liberty from the state (Christians et  al., 2009: 23). This tradition takes as its theoretical starting point the presumption that there are only individuals. In combining participation with libertarianism, the digital journalism literature generally holds up an ‘unmoored, de-raced, de-classed, and de-gendered’ (Weis, 2008: 295) model journalistic citizen. In the process, the digital journalism literature tends to ignore the fact that there are groups that occupy different positions in social structures, and that this means unequal access to the material, social, and cultural resources necessary to participate in democratic life. This was precisely the concern of the critical scholarship on mass media that argued for positive forms of state subsidy to foster participatory equality. Indeed, a previous generation of critical and cultural scholars contrasted a right to speak with a right to hear, articulated both the need for and value of a socially responsible and professionalized press, argued for the need for journalists to have autonomy from both the state and the market, and demonstrated that market and voluntaristic mechanisms do not provide for the inclusion and diversity democracy needs in its public communication. In the end, this chapter argues that the valuing of participation, deinstitutionalization, innovation, and entrepreneurialism might not be as democratic as many scholars both implicitly and explicitly suggest. And, our analysis suggests that there is marked convergence in thinking about journalism and democracy in states that have very different press systems. This comes even as there is a general lack of ‘Americanization’ of the multinational press (see R.K. Nielsen, 2013) and there were significant differences in the fortunes of news organizations cross-nationally during the last decade (Levy and Nielsen, 2010). This suggests that there is a general

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animating set of ideals in scholarship that have powerfully become articulated around digital technologies and provide an overarching framework for normative evaluation, despite differing media systems and variations in practice across countries (Waisbord, 2013).

PARTICIPATION There are diverse origins to the idea of participatory journalism and it predates digital media. C.W. Anderson (2011: 530) argues that there have been ideal-typical transformations of journalists’ understanding of their profession and audiences over the last half century, including a movement away from a historically-dominant emphasis on professional values, autonomy, and ultimately responsibility for their audiences, to the public journalism movement that emerged in the mid 1990s and sought to place a more dialogic, yet still professionally convened, journalist-citizen relationship at the center of its normative model (see Glasser, 2000). By the 2000s, Anderson argues, the ideals and practices of public journalism migrated into digital journalism. When public journalism reformers such as Jay Rosen turned their attention to digital journalism, normative ideals became subtly reoriented towards the critiques of ‘top down’, ‘one-way’, and hierarchical and industrial forms of communication then rampant in the technology press and business literature (Levine et. al, 2009; Turner, 2006). To overcome the industrial production of journalism and culture, reformers elevated participation as a primary democratic value. For example, in their genealogical analysis of 119 digital journalism articles Borger et al. (2013) demonstrate how interest in normative ideas of participatory journalism began to rise after 2003, which suggests the degree to which scholars and public intellectuals were influenced by the techno-optimism and consumer empowerment rhetoric around Web 2.0, which fit well, if not exactly (see below),

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with many of the ideals of the public journalism movement. These authors reveal how a group of scholars and public intellectuals became what they call the ‘founding fathers’ of participatory journalism, which subsequently became an object of analysis and a normative benchmark for scholars. Digital technologies not only gave rise to this new normative interest in participatory journalism, it was ‘formulated as the idea that digital technologies enable the audience to get involved in making and disseminating news’ (2013: 117). Borger et al. (2013) call journalist Dan Gillmor, public intellectuals and journalism professors Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, media theorist Clay Shirky, and media studies professors Axel Bruns and Henry Jenkins the “founding fathers” of participatory journalism and argue that they espoused “a strong faith in the democratic potential of digital technologies” (2013: 126). Borger et  al. (2013) identify four dimensions to the normative understanding of scholars that have colored both the questions they ask and their analyses of digital journalism. Firstly, scholars have a broad enthusiasm about the democratizing potential of digital technologies. Secondly, scholars are generally frustrated with professional journalism’s resistance to change. Thirdly, scholars are frustrated with professional journalists’ commercial, as opposed to democratic, motivations for facilitating participatory forms. Finally, there is disappointment in the lack of interest in forms of participatory journalism among citizens themselves. The Borger et  al. study reveals a striking consensus in the literature that new media technologies hold democratizing potential (for a comprehensive normative and empirical overview of ‘participatory journalism’ see also Lewis, 2012; Singer et  al., 2011). Peters and Witschge (2014) argue that this literature is marked by rather thin and loose conceptualizations of what ‘participation’ should be. These authors note that despite a lofty discourse of democracy, much of this literature actually has a very narrow object

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in view: ‘not so much on citizen engagement but rather audience or user interaction’ (2014: 1, emphases in the original). In their analysis, the focus in this literature ‘is placed more squarely on journalism/audience interaction as opposed to a broader dialectic surrounding journalism’s democratic function for citizens in society’ (2014). As these authors argue, scholars have conceptualized participation as an unproblematic good, without a clear delineation of what forms of participation matter and for what purposes. Even more, participation in the digital journalism literature is often framed in terms of the individual, not the collective that other strands of normative theorizing of the press offer. Peters and Witschge (2014) also ask whether participation should be the ultimate normative value for journalism in the first place. Indeed, Schudson (1998) suggests that the great strength of the legacy press from the audience’s perspective might be its lack of requiring participation, even as practitioners themselves have remained skeptical of participation from a quality standpoint (C.E. Nielsen, 2013; Singer, 2010). Much scholarship valuing participation embraces the marketplace model for speech, which an earlier generation of critical scholars argued was highly problematic on democratic grounds. For example, the central argument in much of the participatory journalism literature is that if only journalists would cede control, ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006) will become empowered and the internet will provide for an ideally democratic public sphere (see also Deuze et al., 2007; Domingo et al., 2008; Lewis et al., 2010). And yet, as Matt Hindman (2008) has amply demonstrated, there is little empirical evidence that the internet has shifted the balance of expressive power towards the formerly disenfranchised despite the lowered costs of producing and distributing digital journalism (see also Pew, 2015). Even more, despite the seemingly radical promise of democratization promised by digital technologies, it is telling that the ‘founding fathers’ (Borger et al., 2013)

of digital journalism are, indeed, fathers, and white ones at that. There is a tendency throughout the participatory journalism literature to hold up ‘users’ and empowered ‘audiences’ as undifferentiated and previously disenfranchised masses in ways that ignore structural constraints in open markets for speech. As Matt Hindman (2008) has amply demonstrated, there is little empirical evidence that the internet has shifted the balance of expressive power towards the formerly disenfranchised despite the lowered costs of producing and distributing digital journalism (see also Pew, 2015). Indeed, there are historical and structural conditions that privilege well-organized and well-heeled social groups and interests in terms of both access to media and being heard (Baker, 2002; Fiss, 2009; Young, 2000). The ideas of ‘community’ with shared identity and ‘groups’ with a shared set of interests in the citizen participation literature have largely given way in the digital journalism literature to the language of individuals. To the extent that scholars of digital journalism discuss social structure, it is often conceptualized in terms of diffuse and decentralized forms of networked social ties that are individually-realized and voluntaristic forms of identity-based and affiliational attachment (see Benkler, 2006; Castells, 2011). While this has lead many to valorize the ‘networked public sphere’ as a site for the pluralization of cultures and identities, the social locations of individual citizens participating (or failing to) have generally been absent from the normative discussion in the digital journalism literature. And yet, these concerns animate work that embraces a ‘communitarian’ ethic of social solidarity premised, ultimately, on equality fostered through ethical discursive practice. As Christians et  al. (2009: 102–3) summarize a body of work on the normative role of the news media as active facilitators of debate to achieve democratic inclusion: Journalism exhibits its interest in promoting and improving the quality of public life by being ‘thoughtfully discursive, not merely informative,’

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and ‘adequately inclusive and comprehensive’ (Baker, 2002: 148–9). But inclusion does not mean pandering to uninformed and uninterested individuals who remain by choice at the periphery of participatory democracies. It means instead accommodating different voices, different points of view, and even different forms of expression.

Meanwhile, the digital journalism literature echoes the long-standing libertarian tradition of defining liberty in negative terms as freedom from the state, while equality is conceptualized in terms of individual opportunity (as opposed to the conditions that promote diversity) (see Balkin, 2004). Even more, in much of the digital journalism literature the state has a narrow role in promoting commercial competition, not necessarily remedying structural inequalities that privilege the ability of some groups to be heard. In contrast, other scholars have argued for a positive reading of the First Amendment, placing the onus on the state to ensure that every argument has a chance to be heard, not that everyone has a chance to speak. For example, Napoli (2009) argues that a right of access to media, enshrined in policies such as the Fairness Doctrine and public access requirements, was designed as a positive freedom for individual speakers. In the context of digital journalism, Ananny (2014: 360–1) offers a view that cuts against the prevailing grain of normative theory in arguing that it is the right to hear, not the right to speak that should be the test of journalism’s normative value (see also Pickard, 2010). The key issue in our current era, a ‘right to be heard’ (2010: 38), has been roundly ignored given a broad faith that access to digital media entails democratization in terms of disseminating content.

DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION A related value found in the digital journalism literature is deinstitutionalization. Following the organization studies literature, deinstitutionalization refers to the ‘erosion or discontinuity of an institutionalized

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organizational activity or practice’ (Oliver, 1992). ‘Deinstitutionalization’ is a broad term that encompasses institutional delegitimation, the weakened capacity of an institution to carry out taken-for-granted actions, and the erosion of social consensus around that institution (1992). Deinstitutionalization implies deprofessionalization, but the latter refers specifically to the erosion of a profession’s autonomy, jurisdiction, and public legitimacy. While the degree to which deinstitutionalization and deprofessionalization are occurring is a matter of debate (see Ryfe, this volume), there are strong veins of the digital journalism literature that celebrate both on normative democratic grounds. As noted above, the public journalism movement believed that normatively desirable democratic dialogue could be secured through an institutional press and professionals who served as conveners and facilitators of publics. Scholars called for more resources, secured through non-market means, for institutions to support professional journalists’ work with the public (see Glasser, 1999). In contrast, even when digital journalism scholars and public intellectuals avoid or only imply critiques of journalistic institutions and professionalism, or embrace more hybrid forms of professional–amateur collaborations, they generally emphasize the democratic virtues of deinstitutionalized amateur and non-professional forms of ‘produsage’ and ‘participatory cultures’ (Bruns, 2008), ‘citizen journalism” (Allan and Thorsen, 2008), ‘we media’ (Bowman and Willis, 2003; Gillmor, 2006), ‘ambient journalism’ (Hermida, 2010), and media of ‘public communication’ (Raetzsch, 2014). Particularly among those scholars who embrace participation as the primary democratic value, extant institutions of journalism and professionalism are often cast as obstacles to citizen empowerment through expressive engagement. There is, in much of the literature, an implicit or explicit undercurrent of thinking that posits digital media itself as inherently democratic, interactive,

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two-way, and open. Scholars often posit the perceived qualities of digital technologies, meanwhile, against the institution of journalism’s seemingly static, one-way, and closed system of knowledge production. As Flew (2009) has demonstrated, the reality is, of course, more complicated than these simple binaries and the literature is more textured with varying arguments. That said, many scholars of digital journalism have embraced the erosion of the institution of journalism’s legitimacy and control over the processes and products of news, in particular the traditional gatekeeping and agendasetting and framing functions of the press, on democratic grounds (Pavlik, 2001; Russell, 2001). More complex theoretical models suggest that deinstitutionalization is as much an issue now of dissemination as it is of publicity, with scholars normatively embracing ‘second order gatekeeping’, or public control over the visibility of content through sharing on social media (Singer, 2014), and accountability over professional journalism through the public critique of bloggers and citizens (Singer, 2007). Meanwhile, the literature on ‘network gatekeeping’ suggests more subtle forms of control and authority exercised by institutional authorities in new media environments (for a recent review of this literature, see Coddington and Holton, 2014). To many scholars, the deinstitutionalization of journalism is ultimately more democratic than the alternative, whether it means the opening up of professional control, challenges to jurisdiction and autonomy, the proliferation of new news genres, norms, and audience expectations, and more fluid boundaries to the field and new entrants (for a review, see Ryfe, 2013). The valuing of deinstitutionalization is evident in the extensive literature on ‘normalization’, which scholars have analyzed in domains as diverse as hyperlinking (Coddington, 2014) and Twitter (Lasora et al., 2012). These works contrast the seemingly ‘open’ values of the internet with a closed journalism institution, critiquing how

professionals reassert control over digital media, even as hybrids proliferate. Other scholars, however, have looked more skeptically at deinstitutionalization. In a comparatively early piece, Williams and Delli Carpini (2000) emphasized that the disintegration of elite gatekeeping provided new opportunities for citizens to challenge elites, and that it enabled well organized groups with political power to strategically work to shape public debate, even as journalists were finding it harder to focus the public’s attention on matters of consequence. Williams and Delli Carpini argue that the deinstitutionalization of journalism does not necessarily entail the weakening of the power of other social groups. Indeed, it is likely that well organized social and political groups will become more powerful vis-à-vis deinstitutionalized journalism, something digital journalism scholars have not addressed in drawing on models of the public as made up of unattached, uncommitted, and general interest citizens, instead of individuals who are already part of organized groups such as movement organizations and political parties. Following Williams and Delli Carpini’s insight, while many digital journalism scholars normatively value deinstitutionalization, it is worth considering the relative resources and power of journalism vis-à-vis the state and commercial institutions. Fico et. al (2013) analyze how citizen journalism largely fails to provide adequate coverage of local governments to make up for the loss of professional reporting. Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks was a case study in the evanescence of deinstitutionalized forms of information gathering and provision. Benkler (2011) was moved to consider the degree to which ‘networked individuals and cooperative associations’ were largely powerless in the face of the state and its leverage over the commercial providers of the infrastructure of the internet. As Beckett and Ball (2012) argue, WikiLeaks was not only an unstable organizational form ill-equipped to command the resources, audiences, and legitimacy that

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professional news organizations still cling to, the organization actively sought out the legacy press for precisely these reasons. The Snowden affair, meanwhile, reveals the massive infrastructure that the news media as an institution still commands – from legal resources and legitimacy in the courts to the reporters and technical resources that secured Snowden’s leaks. There is, a simple question of the resources available for the routine and reliable provision of public information that haunts much of the literature around digital journalism. At times, scholars hold up deinstitutionalization as a corrective to this problem of resources, a new model of the collective peer production of news and information that can happen entirely outside of formal market systems and make up for the dwindling resources of formal journalism organizations (for example, Benkler, 2006). Still, at the end, we are left with what Dean Starkman (2013), in a widely commented on and shared trenchant critique of the anti-institutionalism of what he labels the ‘Future of News Gurus’ including Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky, argues is: ‘the cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime’. In the end, it may be the very bureaucratic and institutionalized forms of public discourse and journalism that secure many conditions for democratic life. As Schudson (1994) argued in a prescient essay, it is precisely the institutional forms of calling the public and its spheres into being that are the grounding of democratic life. The state not only fulfills many of these functions, it often creates the conditions for institutional journalism to do so. For example, scholars working outside of the normative consensus around digital journalism have explicitly embraced the idea that deinstitutionalization is not necessarily more democratic than the legacy press system, and even more that the

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state has a positive role to play in ensuring the robustness of the public sphere. Napoli (2009), for instance, draws attention to the underlying economic contexts that support democratically desirable journalistic practices (while bracketing specific mediums or extant organizations) such as training, sourcing, news values, and investigative reporting. As Napoli suggests, deinstitutionalization and disaggregation of news products, audiences, and advertising are undermining these practices of legacy institutions that are democratically desirable (for a related argument, see Ananny and Kreiss, 2011). Meanwhile, digital journalism scholars often target journalism professionalism as being anti-democratic. Journalistic autonomy, jurisdiction, and legitimacy are continually defined through relational work and cultural practices that shape how the institution is entangled with other domains of activity (see Schudson and Anderson, 2009). Surprisingly, scholars of digital journalism have generally not considered how aspects of deprofessionalization affect the practices of actors in other, adjacent fields (see Benson and Neveu, 2005; Cook, 1998). This raises significant questions regarding the democratic value of the deprofessionalization processes scholars often celebrate. Considering professionalism relationally directs attention to how new entrants in the journalism field, unsettled economic models, and symbolic delegitimation have reshaped institutional democratic processes given that elected officials, civil society organizations, the judicial branch, executive agencies, etc. have all developed in relation to institutional and professional press norms and routines (Cook, 1998; see Mancini, 2013 for a discussion of the complex dynamics of media fragmentation; see Welch, 2013 for a consideration of hyperdemocracy and normative democratic theory). For example, there are many ways the loss of a coherent professional ideology that helps journalists imagine their work as a public service, see journalism as objective and credible,

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and value autonomy, immediacy, and ethics (Deuze, 2005) may not be democratically desirable. Professional values, such as a commitment to public service, objectivity, and ethics, provide the standards through which the public, actors in other fields, and actors within the journalistic field and along its deeply porous and fuzzy borders, evaluate and hold one another to account, sometimes strategically for gain (see Schudson and Anderson, 2009: 98). It is unlikely that deinstitutionalized information producers have similar orientations to public rather than private interests, and there is no culturally legitimate way of holding them accountable. Of course, historians have documented how journalistic objectivity (Schudson, 1981) and public service (Kaplan, 2002) are historically contingent and realized through the struggle of different actors and fields. However, these values provide starting points for evaluating good journalistic practice for the public and journalists alike and debate over what is legitimate or illegitimate on normative grounds, and these values are in turn shaped by these debates.

INNOVATION The digital journalism literature echoes a much broader trend that Vinsel (2014) identifies across disciplines over the last half century: a focus on ‘innovation’ as a path to social salvation. In journalism, what Vinsel (2014) calls ‘innovation speak’ is ubiquitous. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities (2009) began its recommendations with the call to: ‘Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.’ While the Knight Commission states that the tenets of media policy should be ‘innovation and competition’ (2009), marketplace mechanisms are not the only means of promoting the value of innovation. The Downie and Schudson (2009) report cites

journalistic innovation as opening new avenues for reporting and partnerships between blogs and professional news outlets. In their normative prescriptions, the authors cite that universities, comparatively insulated from economic forces, should be ‘laboratories for digital innovation in the gathering and sharing of news and information’ (2009). Innovation, like entrepreneurialism discussed below, is routinely deployed as a catch-all term that spans the development of novel business models, collaborations, technologies, practices, and content. ‘Innovation’ is generally left undefined in the digital journalism literature, and as such scholars use it expansively. Our concern here is not a concept explication of ‘innovation’ (see Lowrey, 2012 and Boczkowski, 2005 on innovation, institutional orientation, mimicry, and legitimacy seeking), but the ways that scholars and public intellectuals embrace innovation as a normative value. Innovation is not bad in and of itself. As Vinsel (2014) argues, too often the issue with the narrow scholarly embrace of ‘innovation’ is that the concept is ill-defined, called upon to do too much work, and uncritically celebrated. Meanwhile, innovation often stands to benefit those already privileged in social life and may undermine many valuable institutions. Vinsel also argues that ‘innovation speak’ shapes the very questions scholars ask of phenomena, focusing attention on failures to innovate rather than structural economic conditions. As Vinsel (2014) argues: If in the grand scope of social science, asking what factors encourage innovation is incredibly narrow, in the context of our society’s problems, it’s myopic. As a society, we have come to talk as if innovation is a core value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, responsibility, you name it…. Innovation speak worships at the altar of change, but it too rarely asks who those changes are benefitting. It acts as if change is a good in itself. Too often, when it does take perspective into account, it proceeds either from the viewpoint of the manager or the shareholder, that is, from the perspective of people who are interested in profits, or from the viewpoint of the consumer interested in cheap goods. Other social roles largely drop out of the analysis.

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As a concept and a value, scholars and public intellectuals routinely invoke ‘innovation’ in the digital journalism literature to encourage changes in practice, justify and promote new business models, and loosen the grip of professional control over news and information. The most developed line of work in journalism has been in the domain of what Lewis and Usher (2013: 603) call a ‘technologyfocused approach to journalism innovation’. Lewis and Usher argue that there is the increasing transfer of the practices, values, and tools of technologists, specifically from open source communities, to journalism. In the work of these scholars, innovation entails creating new forms of journalism reoriented around the normative values that animate models of open source technical production, such as thinking about the practice of journalism in terms of collaboratively writing code and decentralized knowledge-management. Lewis and Usher observe and celebrate how these values are being carried into traditional journalism through the hiring of workers from the technology industry (see also Agarwal and Barthel, 2013; Ananny and Crawford, 2014), the work of funding agencies such as the Knight Foundation (see also Lewis, 2011: 1623), the migration of normative practices from the open source movement to journalism, and the broader cultural work of ‘meta-journalistic’ (see Carlson, 2006) discourse about the profession’s future. In much of the literature, innovation often works in multiple registers as simultaneously a normative ideal, set of experimental practices, and competitive economic strategy. Scholars often link innovation to the normative ideals of participation and deinstitutionalization. On a technical level, things such as Open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in the news industry invite outside developers to innovate around news products, which scholars argue in turn opens up news organizations and undermines a broader ideology of professional control. As Aitamurto and Lewis (2013: 327–8) argue: ‘news organizations have come to understand that

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specialized knowledge alone – whether in journalism, business or web development – is not sufficient to succeed in the news value ecosystem’. Meanwhile, some scholars see innovation being held back by professional cultures that simply dictate that journalists take up new technologies to do ‘their (traditional) jobs better instead of moving on to the next stage built around a stronger commitment to capitalize on the growing sociotechnical potential’ of digital media (Spyridou et  al., 2013: 77). These normative calls for innovation are often implicitly articulated against the backdrop of older critiques of professional journalism. The professional routines for producing news, for instance, were long seen to be reinforcing the power of elites, the authority of journalists, and the workings of the status quo, while blocking alternative voices or sources of authority (see Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Meanwhile, scholars often declare that what is good from a journalistic perspective is also good from an economic perspective. The cultural challenge, scholars of digital journalism argue, is getting news organizations beyond ‘closed’ business models to embrace an innovative ‘openness’ (which, as Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013 note, can also be a strategic tool of control). It is a failure to innovate that is ultimately placed at the doors of news organizations and in the laps of journalists. Indeed, scholars of digital journalism often posit professional culture, values, practices, and nostalgia as key sources of journalism’s economic woes and failures to innovate. As Usher (2010: 924) concludes her analysis of the final goodbyes of laid off and bought-out journalists: Further, these texts showcase journalists who lack the self-reflexivity to consider their work and ideals in light of a new media world. They fail to see the opportunities for expanding on how their ideals of public service, objectivity and educating the public might be adapted for a new media world. Similarly, their discomfort with the new patterns of production and what new technology means suggests that professional journalism has important cultural work to do to transition journalists to working in

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new media newsroom. New media does not mean an end to professional journalism, but professional journalists must be more inclusive of community participation and production in ways that reverse the one-to-many vision of news production that has existed.

Usher ties together the normative ideals present in much of the digital journalism literature, premised on a critique of professionalism, celebration of participation, and a call to open up professional strictures and innovate in the new, digital world for both the viability of business and the health of democracy. Again, this is not to say that innovation is bad, only that the concept is called upon to do too much work and frames scholarly analysis in particularly narrow ways. The failure to innovate in a new media world cannot explain the deeply complex economic reasons that journalists are being laid off, including news industry consolidations, growing competition for attention in a digital media ecosystem, the comparatively low rates of digital advertising and the emergence of new intermediaries that purvey news, and development of free classifieds (see McChesney and Pickard, 2011). Even the most innovative digital newsroom that embraces new technologies, crafts new production practices, and invites collaboration faces the same economic context, proliferation of outlets, and rise of new intermediaries that have all shaped the fortunes of the journalism industry.

ENTREPRENEURIALISM Finally, and related, the fourth normative value underlying journalism scholarship is entrepreneurialism. While scholars are concerned with innovation in terms of journalistic practice, technical experimentation, and commercial markets, entrepreneurialism entails the normative embrace of a particular state of mind, a willingness to work under precarious conditions, and a new mode of flexible work. As Anderson (2014) argues,

drawing on the research interviews of Caitlin Petre and Max Besbris with journalism school professionals, the concept of ‘entrepreneurial journalism’ entails three distinct claims that journalists need to: a) invent their own jobs through entrepreneurial practices like starting their own companies, b) selfpromote and brand themselves for success in the market, and c) work flexibly and under precarious conditions (for a review of what journalism educators think, see Ferrier, 2013). Even more, entrepreneurialism is, ultimately, held up in much of the digital journalism literature as what will save journalism. If journalists are willing to experiment with new economic models enough in a perpetual state of technological disruption, something will work and journalism will be saved. As the City University of New York’s (2014a) description of its MA in Entrepreneurial Journalism states: Our goal is to help create a sustainable future for quality journalism. We believe that future will be shaped by entrepreneurs who develop new business models and innovative projects – either working on their own, with startups, or within traditional media companies.

At its core, entrepreneurial journalism refers to the honing of a mindset and a set of business skills to help journalists not only weather the ‘disruption’ of the media industry, but ultimately as the CUNY program states, create a ‘sustainable future for quality journalism’ based on the workings of the market, not state support (for a discussion of the latter see McChesney and Pickard, 2011). According to CUNY’s (2014b) MA curriculum, entrepreneurial journalists should have knowledge of business models and management skills, in addition to understandings of both ‘the disruptors and the disrupted’. In turn, entrepreneurial journalists should learn the ‘craft’ and ethics of journalism, gain real world experience, and know how to collaborate across the technological and businesssides of their businesses. In these formulations, while journalists are expected

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to think about ethics, the normative value lies in collapsing the hard distinctions between journalism and its business side, and disruption of extant industries is held out as a normative good. As Jeff Jarvis’s (2014) ‘New Business Models for News’ syllabus as part of the CUNY program makes clear, disruption is not only a technological inevitability given the internet, the good entrepreneurial journalist seeks out potentials for it. The syllabus suggests that disruption is ultimately a good thing (it will create better journalism on the order that Jarvis claims Gutenberg created a better society) and cultivating entrepreneurial habits of mind and skills will create better journalists. It is telling, for instance, that on Jarvis’s syllabus are selections from the early Silicon Valley business call to arms The Clue Train Manifesto (Levine et  al., 2009) that entwined similar logics of entrepreneurship, democracy, and technological utopianism – ‘journalism’ is similar to every other industry in the ideology of entrepreneurialism. As Anderson (2014) argues, the uptake of entrepreneurial values in journalism is, ultimately, a response to the broader crisis in the news industry (for a review, see Levy and Nielsen, 2010; Siles and Boczkowsi, 2012), not the cause of disruption itself. Even more, Anderson (2014) argues that: Both responses of journalism school educators and administrators—the idea of the teaching hospital and the adoption of the entrepreneurial mindset— run the risk of simply adjusting journalism school to the new and exploitative realities that now dominate the journalism industry.

Of course, perceptions of ‘crisis’ proceed from a normative model and particular economic standpoint. To an entrepreneur, ‘crisis’ is ‘opportunity’. In much of the digital journalism literature, scholars celebrate a labour force that is entrepreneurial, embraces risk, and continually reinvents itself (just as scholars tend to normatively celebrate unpaid and amateur peer-produced journalism that occurs entirely outside of market relations).

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As Deuze (2007: 122) notes, speaking of the creative industries more broadly, ‘the dominant theme in the literature is a notion of media workers as free agents, constantly searching for new challenges and better guarantees for their creative autonomy’. However, what is missing from much of the digital journalism literature is precisely Deuze’s point that the upshot of entrepreneurialism is that a majority of workers experience more unstable, unpredictable, and precarious labour and tenuous project-based employment, even as large industrial organizations still structure much of the industry (see also Deuze’s 2011 edited collection, Managing Media Work). For example, a number of scholars note the pressures that entrepreneurialism works upon media workers. As Hedman and Djerf-Pierre (2013) suggest, tools for ‘audience participation and dialogue’ (see also Hermida, 2009; Sheffer and Schultz, 2009) pressure journalists to be ‘active social media users’ (2013: 371) who blend corporate and personal branding. Outside the newsroom, journalists must tackle the blurring lines between employment and private life and on-work and offwork, which is driven by social media’s almost continuous mix of informational updates (Boczkowski, 2005, 2010; Lasorsa et  al., 2012; Williams et  al., 2011). At the same time, scholarship that explicitly calls for journalism to be conceptualized in terms other than the market or non-profit media have been comparatively marginalized (see Clark and Aufderheide, 2009; Goodman, 2008; Pickard and Williams, 2013).

CONCLUSION The embrace of entrepreneurialism is particularly ironic given that much of the digital journalism literature is produced from within the confines of that comparatively marketprotected sanctuary: the university. Indeed, universities offer protection from the

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disruptive economic forces that have wracked journalism and subsidize the production of knowledge, which journalists do not enjoy. Even more, universities grant scholars institutional and symbolic power, and ready access to the foundations that wield their own symbolic and political capital (Lewis, 2011) versus the increasingly deinstitutionalized field of professional journalism. To-date, the normative discussion around digital journalism has been too one-sided. The generally uncritical embrace of participation, deinstitutionalization, innovation, and entrepreneurialism has resulted in a conversation about the future of journalism that has failed to consider how these things may undermine other values for and roles of the press. This includes an institutional press that can work to ensure participatory equality and has the resources and the symbolic power to hold the powerful to account, as well as a profession that can be held to standards of public service, not returns on investment. Indeed, scholars making normative claims for digital journalism and considering the institutional and regulatory contexts that promote democratically desirable practices have unceremoniously recast the key terms of normative debate from an earlier tradition of scholarship. They have blunted the critical edges of the ‘citizen participation’ (Christians et al., 2009) tradition in espousing the belief that there are only individuals, not groups that are differently positioned with respect to the resources necessary to participate in journalism and democratic life more generally. And, contemporary normative theorizing of digital journalism has evacuated any role for, or responsibility of, the state, profession, or institution of journalism to create a robust public sphere. In the process, many digital journalism scholars and public intellectuals have failed to consider the value of a right to be heard, a socially responsible and institutionally powerful press, and inclusive and diverse public communication.

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Peters, Chris and Witschge, Tamara (2014) ‘From grand narratives of democracy to small expectations of participation: Audiences, citizenship, and interactive tools in digital journalism’, Journalism Practice: 1–16. doi:10.1080/17512786.2014.928455. Pew (2015) The State of the News Media: An Annual Report on American Journalism. Available online from: http://www.journalism. org/2015/04/29/state-of-the-news-media-2015/ Pickard, Victor (2010) ‘“Whether the giants should be slain or persuaded to be good”: Revisiting the Hutchins Commission and the role of media in a democratic society’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27(4): 391–411. Pickard, Victor and Williams, Alex T. (2013) ‘Salvation or folly? The promises and perils of digital paywalls’, Digital Journalism, 2(2): 195–213. Raetzsch, Christoph (2014) ‘Innovation through practice: Journalism as a structure of public communication’, Journalism Practice (aheadof-print) 1–13. Rosen, Jay (2006) ‘The people formerly known as the audience’, Pressthink, 27 June, 2006. Russell, Adrienne (2001) ‘Chiapas and the new news: Internet and newspaper coverage of a broken cease-fire’, Journalism, 2(2): 197–220. Ryfe, David M. (2013) Can Journalism Survive: An inside look at American newsrooms. John Wiley & Sons. Schudson, Michael (1981) Discovering the News: A social history of American newspapers. Basic Books. Schudson, Michael (1994) ‘The public sphere and its problems: Bringing the State (back) in,’ Notre Dame JL Ethics & Pub. Pol’y, 8: 529. Schudson, Michael (1998) The Good Citizen: A History Of American Civic Life. New York: Free Press. Schudson, Michael and Anderson, C.W (2009) ‘Objectivity, professionalism, and truth seeking in journalism’, in K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. pp. 88–101. Sheffer, Mary Lou and Schultz, Brad (2010) ‘Paradigm shift or passing fad? Twitter and sports journalism’, International Journal of Sport Communication, 3(4): 472–84.

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21 Mass, Audience, and the Public Laura Ahva and Heikki Heikkilä

INTRODUCTION Digitalization takes us farther and farther away from the era of mass communication. This prompts an assumption that the key concepts through which we used to make sense of newspapers, radio, and television are becoming obsolete too. The assumption seems to hold particularly to the concept of audience. ‘The audience’ as we used to know it, seems to be disappearing because the old structural and technological lacuna between journalists and consumers of news is closing (cf. Schlesinger, 1992: 106). Thus, receivers can become producers if they choose to do so. In addition, in the digital environment, people are simply consuming news differently. Rather than just reading, watching, or listening to the news, they are now reportedly engaged in a number of other activities, such as linking, sharing, recommending, and commenting on the news (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2014). Many of these activities – pertaining to both consumption

and production of news – were not available or even conceivable in the era of mass communication. Due to these changes in the digital context, the generic term ‘the audience’, is typically replaced by the generic notion, ‘the user’ (van Dijck, 2009: 41). Often this discursive shift is tagged with optimism, as it entails more active and dialogical forms of journalism and its uses. It also enables envisioning collaboration between newsrooms and users in all the stages of the digitalized news process: information gathering, gatekeeping, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation (Domingo et al., 2008). However, in empirical terms, this shift is not nearly completed (2008). A recent crossnational survey demonstrates that journalists endorse interaction with users in theory, but they are much more reluctant to incorporate it into their work, particularly at the phases of processing and editing the news (Fengler et  al., 2014). Furthermore, Napoli (2008: 60) argues that – the effect of ‘the long tail’

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(C. Anderson, 2006) notwithstanding – user movement in the digital superhighways tends to gravitate towards a limited number of news services. In his view, this results in the ‘massification of the internet’. The discrepancy of meanings designated to ‘the user’ demonstrates that it is not a very analytical concept to say the least. This chapter builds on an argument that ‘the audience’ is a more useful concept for analyzing the developments in digital journalism than ‘the user’ because it connects to a long tradition of theoretical and empirical media research. Still, instead of trying to cope with just one overarching concept, we suggest a broader framework constituted by three parallel but distinct concepts that we term: ‘the audience’, ‘the public’, and ‘the mass’. It should be emphasized that despite the strong normative or pejorative connotations of the concepts, they are used here as analytical categories only. This conceptual exercise sets outs from the widely held notion within cultural audience research: ‘audiences are not social beings, unknown, but knowable sets of people’ (Ang, 1991: 2). Instead of focusing on who the audiences might be, we aim to study what people do with the news. This emphasis on practices situates news use to the social world of everyday experience. According to Blumer (1954: 7–8), one of the leading proponents of symbolic interactionism, everyday experience should be analyzed against sensitizing and not definitive concepts. For us, this means that rather than organizing our analysis on fixed definitions of what audiences or users are or how they can be aggregated into sets of people, we try to focus on distinctive features in how people use media and the news. Thereafter, it becomes possible to see ‘the audience’ as an analytical category that differs from the two other concepts. In the first half of the twentieth century, Blumer and other scholars in the Chicago School worked on sensitizing concepts of ‘the mass’, ‘the crowd’, and ‘the public’ (see, Blumer 1946[1939]; Park 1972[1904];

Dewey 1991[1927]). In this tradition, the main distinctions between the analytical categories were drawn in connection to the scope and density of social interaction between actors. In the category of ‘the mass’, the level of interaction between participants is minimal or non-existent. Contrary to this, ‘the public’ is constituted by lively social interaction, which is instrumental in drawing broader public attention to the issue under discussion. As analytical categories, ‘the mass’ and ‘the public’ tend to cover the opposite ends of the passive–active continuum. This leaves space for ‘the audience’ as an intermediary concept. In this category, the social interaction takes place in domestic settings where people consume the news and (mass) media (cf. Morley, 1986). In what follows, we try to demonstrate how the analytical reading described above helps our understanding of uses of news today. Our analysis is thus inspired by the tradition of symbolic interactionism, and it refers to an empirical audience research project we conducted 2009–2012 in Finland. Given that some of the findings described in the analysis may already be empirically outdated due to the rapid changes in the digital environment, we try to elaborate on how recent developments may have reshaped the setting. In doing this, we put a special emphasis on practices related to sharing in the digital context (see Cammaerts and Couldry, this volume). This focus stems from the sheer popularity of news sharing. In the USA, for example, it is reported that up to 75 percent of the online news is forwarded to end-users through email or social networking sites (Purcell et al., 2010). An internal innovation report by the New York Times (Sulzberger et al. 2014) suggests that one fifth of the total internet traffic to the news website operates through Facebook. In light of these figures, it seems reasonable to argue that news-related sharing is a new form of ‘cultural currency’ within digital social networks (Hermida et  al., 2012: 817) and that there is a great interest in

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understanding what sharing entails for users themselves as well as for media organizations. While acknowledging the significance of digital sharing, it is also important to note that without a more robust theory on what the users are actually doing with the news, the nature of quantitative data about the width of sharing as practice remains merely indicative. Rather than assuming that digital sharing would be entirely independent from what people usually do (or used to do) with the news, we think it is useful to analyze sharing against the same framework as the use of news in general. This background is described below, as we provide a brief outline of cultural audience research.

CULTURAL AUDIENCE RESEARCH AND THE NEWS From the late 1980s to the end of the twentieth century, the attention of cultural audience studies was mostly on television and popular culture, not on news and journalism. The reawakening interest of audience researchers in the news emerged in the early 2000s, as it was recognized that the news continued to provide a common reference for citizens and probably even more so in the conditions of plurality of the media (Madianou, 2009; Couldry, 2003). Based on this observation, a number of audience studies have analyzed whether and how people connect to the public world through news and how news uses are connected to their other everyday practices (Schrøder and Phillips, 2007; Couldry et al., 2007; Bird, 2011). Another shared objective in the contemporary cultural audience research is the attempt to go beyond the determinate moment of reception: a given act of reading, watching, or clicking (Alasuutari 1999; Spitulnik, 2010: 107). This puts more emphasis on the role of social networks – both online and offline – as the background of media use. Today, the importance of social networks in

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audience research is, as Livingstone (2006: 243) argues, ‘a starting point rather than a discovery’. This realization means that contemporary media is increasingly ‘spreadable’ (Green and Jenkins, 2011), and that the uses of news break into a number of social processes that include other people (Bird, 2011). At the level of everyday life, individuals may render the parallel processes relating to media use meaningful for themselves without analytical rigor, but a more systematic inquiry is required from those who work for or study the media. This is where we tap into the sensitizing concepts of ‘the public’, ‘the audience’, and ‘the mass’. Our empirical audience study focused on what makes journalism relevant and interesting for people. A total of 74 participants, whose various relationships to news and journalism were analyzed over a period of one year (2009–2010), were not treated as representatives of any specific demographic group (young/old, women/men, etc.) within the Finnish population. Rather, they were regarded more broadly as informants on a variety of discursive media-related practices where news and media (both traditional and digital) become part of people’s daily lives. Thus, the empirical focus was not so much in the differences between the groups but in the shared ways by which journalism becomes relevant for people. The main methodological tool used in the project was focus group discussion (N=76) where news and current affairs were tackled from various angles. The videotaped discussions, together with additional empirical materials gathered through individual interviews and media diaries, provided us with rich empirical evidence of how the participants related to news and the public world. Our empirical analysis demonstrated1 that the participants were poly-users of media: independent of their age, gender, or social status, their daily media diets included a variety of print media, television, radio, and online content (news and non-news). Rather than any specific media outlet, the strongest

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common denominator in their media consumption was the salience of news. The news output did not merely constitute a source of new information but also was a central reference point for interpersonal discussions in social networks. The type of conversations the participants said were most meaningful and enjoyable for them often related to structural and social problems, such as economic inequality. The participants thus underlined that news helped them make sense of great concerns in the contemporary world. Alongside these findings, the overlapping and fluctuating nature of news consumption was detected. First, it appeared that people did a number of different things with the news and that some of these were active and others were passive. Second, the meaningfulness of journalism tended to depend on the modes of interaction associated with reading, listening or watching the news. In our framework, the concepts of ‘the public’, ‘the audience’ and ‘the mass’ were deployed to sensitize our analysis on these distinct dynamics in the uses of media.

THE PUBLIC As social formation, ‘the public’ is constituted in relation to issues, not texts, media outlets, or platforms. For Dewey (1991[1927]: 12–16), the public consist of those who identify a problem, are affected by it, and deem it necessary that the problem should be dealt with. This would mean that the institutional decision-makers somehow respond to calls for resolution emanating from the public. Park (1972[1904]) underlined the idea that as the public, people’s interaction is reciprocal. Members of the public respond to each other even though – or particularly because – they disagree on how the problem at hand should be solved. Finally, Blumer (1946[1939]) emphasized that the public is not a fixed group of people; publics are constantly arising and dissolving depending on the issue at hand.

Based on how the concept is described above, it may be possible to imagine that publics emerge without any connection to journalism. However, today this assumption is not very plausible since the media are so closely integrated in our natural and cultural environment that they may not even be recognized as media any more (Jensen, 2010: 64). Rather, it seems evident that most of the issues that require wider attention come to our attention via the media; hence, journalism plays a central role in exposing problems and reporting on them. This is not to say that there is a straightforward correlation between media exposure and the emergence of a public. In our study, many participants had a small selection of issues on their radar. Each time these issues were covered in the news, the participants identified themselves as a public. They found themselves stakeholders in, for example, local urban planning or debates on unemployment benefits. Their discussions on these topics tended to be more regular than the news coverage of these issues. This suggests that ‘the public’ is to some extent independent of the media. This distance became more apparent when we asked the participants, whether they tended to speak to the media about the issues that mattered for them. In most cases, the response was negative. Neither the legacy media nor the digital platforms were regarded appropriate avenues for public action. This points to a general problem in political systems; to the lack of effective ‘action contexts’ where citizens’ public agency might make a difference. Couldry et al. (2007: 121) note that this deficiency is not a question of discursive constraints but rather pertains to the absence of practical platforms for political participation. What appeared to make the emergence of publics even more problematic was that discussions about social problems invoked participants’ ‘deep citizenship’ (Eliasoph, 2000: 90). In Eliasoph’s study, this concept refers to an observation about how people shunned speaking in public events and preferred

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discussing politics in informal settings, such as Sunday lunches, pubs, or even around the water cooler at the office (see also Bird, 2003). This evasiveness resulted partly from the tone of the discussions. The participants in our study took such discussions as exercises of mutual analysis of how the world stands. As these conversations contributed to their self-reflexivity, their conclusions proved to be too broad and complicated to match how the current affairs were covered and discussed in the news. The digital platforms, particularly social networking sites, seem to enlarge citizens’ opportunities to discuss politics with each other. In our study, about half of our participants said they were active on Facebook. Nonetheless, all of them strongly emphasized that they preferred discussing current affairs in an offline environment. The same finding emerged from a survey related to our study, which found that no less than 69 percent of the respondents (N=455) regularly discussed the current affairs face-to-face with other people, and only two percent tended to do so in social networking sites or online discussion boards.2 Given that the news had a prominent status of credible public accounts, it was clear that the participants in our study circulated them to other people. However, sharing as practice took very traditional forms, such as clipping newspapers and verbally recommending interesting news stories to others. Since 2010, most online news services have introduced embedded share and recommend buttons to every news item they publish (van Dijck, 2013), and it is very likely that many use these opportunities to direct other’s attention to issues of mutual interest. Unlike sharing newspaper clips with friends, digital sharing can easily transcend physical barriers and extend the effect of political mobilization. Following this idea, digital sharing can be seen as an elemental instrument in the logic of ‘connective action’, which is said to transform – in a piecemeal fashion, perhaps – the forms of political activism towards

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non-hierarchical networking that utilizes personalized content sharing (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013). The practice of digital sharing can be instrumental for public agency and political participation, where a public emerges and becomes recognized as a politically influential actor. These cases may encourage others to imitate the pattern and catalyze the political uses of sharing. At the same time, we should bear in mind the problem of limited action contexts. Even if groups of concerned citizens are able to mobilize support and activate discussion over political problems that touch them, this does not mean that these initiatives trigger immediate responses from institutional politics. In addition, we should also be aware of that political activism is not all that people are doing on the internet. ‘The public’ is an optional role people can take in relation to media.

THE AUDIENCE More often than as publics, recipients of media can be conceived as audiences. In this context, the media denotes texts (Silverstone, 1994) that are received, selected and made sense of. In other words, the category of ‘the audience’ is the realm of interpretation. The interpretative resources of ‘the audience’ can be instrumental in the formation of identities and taste cultures (Bolin, 2012: 797–8). Structurally, ‘the audience’ is locked in to the receiving end of journalistic production (Ridell, 2006: 241). In the era of mass communication, there were few means to resist this, but in the digital environment, receivers may more easily become producers. Nonetheless, people may remain at the receiving end of the media by choice. In terms of social organization, however, the audience category is elusive. Audiences are, as ratings analysts deplore, ‘dispersed over vast geographic areas, tucked away in homes, businesses and automobiles. They remain

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unseen by those who try to know and manage them’ (Webster et  al., 2006: 1). In the category of ‘the audience’, people normally interact with those physically present at the moment of reception, but digital communications clearly enhance possibilities for talking to others beyond domestic settings. The definition of ‘the audience’ here is drawn from critical cultural studies, which underlines a semiotic approach to media that was formulated in Hall’s (1973) famous encoding/decoding model. This model is designed to describe how cultural and symbolic resources are deployed in the act of interpretation and how those processes relate to social structures (Morley, 1992). According to Morley, members of the audience draw resources for interpretation from their particular social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. This premise found empirical resonance in his famous Nationwide Audience study, where three types of idealtypical readings – dominant, oppositional, and negotiated – found relative matches with the socio-economic statuses of empirical audience groups (Morley, 1980). In our study, the features elemental to the audience category became evident in analysis. Our observation was that the participants were at ease with the structural constraints of their audience position. They were mostly content with their role as receivers, despite their recurring criticism of how the news and the media in general were serving them. In addition, the participants demonstrated vividly how media products – particularly those related to television, celebrities, and popular media – contribute to cultural negotiations about specific taste cultures. It was typical for the participants to identify themselves with references to specific media products or genres. The semiotic nature of interpretation was highlighted in connection to a chosen news example, which the participants were asked to read and discuss. The news item, published in the largest national daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, focused on the

opportunities and experiences of retired people returning to working life. Throughout the discussions, each group resisted the idea that the news story was merely mediating new information. More importantly, they claimed that the news is a form of political discourse and therefore connected to the struggle over meanings in the contemporary public debate. The interpretations drawn in the focus groups triggered political subjectivities, which gravitated towards Morley’s idealtypical categories. For some, the discussed piece of news justified (neo-)liberal policies with empirical evidence, while in some other groups, the same news story was read as a thinly disguised assault on the welfare state and the rights of employees. Both these interpretations proved to be much more explicitly political than what the seemingly neutral tone of the news item had implied. The third variant, the negotiated reading, also appeared in the discussions. While this interpretation was less political, those who drew on the negotiated reading also found the news story less appealing. In their view, it failed to be helpful or interesting, because the story provided very little substance or answers to their Why?-questions. The reception of news also evoked criticism towards media organizations. Newsrooms and individual journalists were seen to exercise power in selecting sources and composing the representations. Some of this criticism amounted to suspicion of the hidden agendas that allegedly inform news coverage. In addition, the criticism was directed at recurring routines of reporting, which seemed dysfunctional or peculiar to the participants. One of such routines was related to ‘excessive attempts to give a voice to ordinary citizens in news stories’ (cf. De Keyser and Raeymaekers, 2012). Many participants also said that they are deliberately screening funny errors in the news, such as unintended puns. This shows that the interpretative work of ‘the audience’ is motivated by humor as well as criticism.

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All these audience activities provide empirical evidence of the semiotic tension between the processes of encoding and decoding. In addition, the uncertainties felt by the audiences about news policies applied in the newsrooms suggest that there is still a structural gap between the producers and recipients of news. Hence, the category of the audience remains strong. Our findings suggest that political worldviews and critical viewpoints are instrumental in the interpretation of news. This dynamic, we believe, pertains to the online environment too; thus, it relates to how and why people share news. In the audience category, sharing aims to address others belonging to the same ‘interpretative community’ (Zelizer, 1997), that is people who share the same worldview, interests, or sense of humor. Given that interpretation is at the core of this category, it is obvious that as audiences people do not share just news stories but also cues for how to interpret them. This may explain Bastos’ (2015) finding about why opinion pieces are among the most popular journalistic items shared in social media. Opinionated journalism opens itself for sharing because they can be tagged with a critical, political, or humoristic argument without the trouble of producing any original output. It would be a mistake to assume that audience sharing is all about news, opinionated journalism, and politics. It seems that sharing is instrumental in creating interpretative bonds around other products of media culture, such as television series, talent shows, and celebrities. This is simply because these topics are easier to have an opinion about and invoke positive responses from the interpretative community.

THE MASS In the category of ‘the mass’, people relate to the media in its material and concrete sense (Silverstone, 1994). The media constitute a

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platform, channel, or source of messages to which people orient themselves. According to social interactionism, the mass requires an object of shared attention to emerge (Blumer, 1946 [1939]). Currently, the ubiquitous presence of media provides multiple objects for attention, which makes the mass position very easily available. It can be taken by tuning in, switching on, or clicking the media, and people may do this over and over again. ‘The mass’ is enacted through routines, which bring order and structure to daily life. In the role of ‘the mass’, media uses are often undifferentiated from other activities, such as working or taking care of the household. Furthermore, even if leafing through a newspaper or checking news updates is what people do individually, these moments are accompanied by the implicit knowledge that many others are also oriented to the same media at the same time. Nonetheless, in this category, people have very little or no interaction with others (Blumer, 1946 [1939]). As ‘the mass’, people remain in atomistic relationships: they consume media among many others, but they do it anonymously. In our research, a rich dataset of empirical materials about mass-like media routines were produced. It appeared that undifferentiated – close to automated – uses of media have in fact intensified due to the introduction of new communications interfaces. As noted above, the participants in our study were ‘poly-users’ of media, and a common denominator in their media routines was the practice of news monitoring. In this routine, the access to the constant flow of information became more important than the news as texts or issues. The routine-like monitoring of the news appeared as an effective means to see ‘what is going on’. Instead of one or two media outlets of their choice, the participants connected to various sources of news. Altogether, practices related to the mass position helped the recipients to connect to the public world at large but not to each other.

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Given that routine-based news monitoring rarely allowed users to immerse themselves in the subject of news, they utilized whatever sources were available. In this regard, the selection criteria proved to be very flexible. As ‘the mass’, the participants did not always look for the newest information available or the best quality journalism they could find. Instead, they said they could be quite happy to browse weekly magazines in the cafeteria if they were available or even delve into week-old issues of newspapers. The ways in which participants talked about the media routines disclosed a paradox, which may be described as a veil of ignorance of some sort. On the one hand, they stressed that their own media diets were by and large wholesome and that they had a good command of what they were doing with the media. On the other hand, many expressed their concerns over whether other people were behaving the same way. A notable amount of anxiety was expressed about imagined others, who may be lured by entertainment or become addicted to the internet. The contrast between ‘the moral self’ and ‘volatile others’ is often found in audience research and sometimes taken as evidence of how viewers’ discourse on media is plagued by double standards (Alasuutari, 1992). In the face of our analysis, we would argue that this contrast is embedded in the concept of ‘the mass’. When we consume media without interaction with others – in the mass category – we have little basis to know what the others are doing: hence, the veil of ignorance. Even if the mass-like uses of news seem as widespread and prevalent as ever, the idea of sharing does not seem to fit well into this category. We may even go as far as saying that in the mass category, people do not share because sharing as a practice is target-oriented: there is an addressee – other stakeholders in the case of ‘the public’ or an interpretative community for ‘the audience’ – with whom the news items are shared. Because the mass operates atomistically and without interaction with others, there is no

one in particular to address. Thus, in this category, sharing appears to be meaningless, or it turns into mere relaying at best. While the mass does not share, it does become an object of flows of sharing. As we mentioned above, in the practice of news monitoring, the sources of news do not matter that much. This means that through social networking sites, in particular, people get the news even when they are not deliberately trying to find out what is happening (Hermida, 2014: 85).

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we questioned the generic use of ‘the user’ as unhelpful in making analytical sense of how people consume news. As an alternative to this, we suggested a framework, which re-instates the analytical relevance of three sensitizing concepts: ‘the public’, ‘audience’ and ‘mass’. This conceptual framework draws – perhaps surprisingly – from theories that precede the networked digital age. The concepts of the ‘public’ and ‘mass’ originate from an era when the mass society and its media system were just emerging. The ‘audience’, in turn, is a concept that was theorized at the height of the mass media. This framework stands against the idea that audiences or users are social beings. Instead, it directs our attention to what people do with the news. Our empirical analysis sheds light on a set of practices, which highlight distinct features through which people try to render the news relevant for themselves. ‘The public’ refers to issue-oriented news use, which is goal-oriented and active. In the position of ‘the audience’, people actively interpret the news – often critically, politically, and humorously. ‘The mass’, in turn, is driven by a desire to keep up with what is going on in the face of abundant media supply. What is important in this frame is that it allows people to switch from one category to another, depending on the situation. We argue that

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the framework proves valid in today’s fast changing media landscape because it does not aim to categorize people or technological platforms in order to understand the uses of journalism. Instead, it provides concepts that help to categorize the agency and interaction through which people adhere to journalism. The proposed perspective of understanding ‘the users’ of digital journalism is thus radically different from the now dominant view in news organizations, which tends to portray users as quantifiable and consuming aggregates (C.W. Anderson, 2011). From our viewpoint, the quantifiable evidence of internet traffic – and its patterns of digital sharing – are no more than indicative of what people are doing with news. A more expounding understanding calls for a solid theory on media-related practices. Given that the current media landscape is more abundant and more fluid than the one we became familiar with in the era of mass communication, a unitary and consistent theory of users is difficult, if not impossible, to find. Therefore, we made an effort to combine elements from symbolic interactionism and cultural audience research. In addition to these components, there is yet another theoretical insight to add to the framework. The additional argument pushed forward in this article is that the relevance of journalism for those who consume news depends on how the news connects to the sociality of people, that is, the ways in which they interact with each other (see also Heikkilä and Ahva, 2015). The categories of ‘the audience’ and ‘the public’ in particular, illustrate the dynamics by which the news and its meanings are distributed through various social networks and the ways in which the news gains more relevance in such social processes. Through data analysis, it has become possible to trace these distribution processes, but even if the big data sifted from the clicks, shares, and recommendations provide insights into what people do as online news consumers, this data alone is not enough. With the available measurement techniques, it is difficult to observe what else – beyond

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the clicks – is taking place in social networks. Therefore, it becomes necessary in digital journalism studies to invest time in research strategies that go beyond quantifying.

NOTES  1  We have reported the study in full in Finnish (Heikkilä et  al., 2012) and with more specific scopes in English (see Ahva et al., 2014; Heikkilä and Ahva 2015).  2  A survey encompassing 455 respondents from three different regions in Finland was conducted in September 2010. The representative sample was drawn from people who subscribed to the biggest newspaper in their respective region. Both the temporal context and the scope of the sample (loyal newspaper readers) partly explain why the contrast between the uses of offline and online discussions was so stark.

REFERENCES Ahva, Laura, Heikkilä, Heikki, Siljamäki, Jaana, and Valtonen, Sanna (2014) ‘A bridge over troubled water? Celebrities in journalism connecting implicit and institutional politics’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 15(2): 186–201. Alasuutari, Pertti (1992) ‘“I’m ashamed to admit but I have watched Dallas”: The moral hierarchy of television programmes’, Media, Culture & Society, 14(4): 561–82. Alasuutari, Pertti (1999) ‘Introduction: Three phases of reception studies’, in Pertti Alasuutari (ed.) Rethinking the Media Audience. London: Sage. pp. 1–21. Anderson, Chris (2006) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion. Anderson, C.W. (2011) ‘Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms’, Journalism, 12(5): 550–66. Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking Audience. London: Routledge. Bastos, Marco Toledo (2015) ‘Shares, pins and tweets: News readership from daily papers to

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social media’, Journalism Studies 16(3): 305–325. Bennett, W. Lance and Segerberg, Alexandra (2013) The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Political Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bird, S. Elizabeth (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. London: Routledge. Bird, S. Elizabeth (2011) ‘Seeking the audience for news: Response, news talk, and everyday practices’, in Virginia Nightingale (ed.) The Handbook of Media Audiences, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 489–508. Blumer, Herbert (1954) ‘What is wrong with social theory?’ American Sociological Review, 19(1): 3–10. Blumer, Herbert (1946 [1939]) ‘Collective behaviour’, in Alfred McClung Lee (ed.) New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, New York: Barnes & Noble Inc, pp. 167–222. Bolin Göran (2012) ‘The labour of media use: The two active audiences’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(6): 796–814. Costera Meijer, Irene and Groot Kormelink, Tim (2014) ‘Checking, sharing, clicking and linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014’, Digital Journalism 3(5): 664–679. Couldry, Nick (2003) Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick, Sonia Livingstone, and Tim Markham (2007) Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Keyser, Jerome and Raeymaekers, Karen (2012) ‘The printed rise of the common man: How Web 2.0 has changed the representation of ordinary people in newspapers’, Journalism Studies, 13(5–6): 825–35. Dewey, John (1991 [1927]) The Public and its Problems. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. Dijck, José van (2009) ‘Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content’, Media, Culture & Society, 31(1): 41–58. Dijck, José van (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Domingo, David, Quandt, Thorsten, Heinonen, Ari, Paulussen, Steve, Singer, Jane B., and Vujnovic, Marina (2008) ‘Participatory journalism practices in the media and beyond: An international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers’, Journalism Practice, 2(3): 326–42. Eliasoph, Nina (2000) ‘Where can Americans talk politics. Civil society, intimacy, and the case for deep citizenship’, The Communication Review (4)1: 65–94. Fengler, Susanne, Eberwein, Tobias, Mazzoleni, Giapietro, Porlezza, Colin, and Russ-Mohl, Stephan (eds) (2014) Journalists and Media Accountability: An International Study on News People in the Digital Age. New York: Peter Lang. Green, Joshua and Jenkins, Henry (2011) ‘Spreadable media: How audiences create value and meaning in a networked economy’, in Virginia Nightingale (ed.), The Handbook of Media Audiences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 109–127. Hall, Stuart (1973) Encoding and Decoding the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Heikkilä, Heikki and Ahva, Laura (2015) ‘The relevance of journalism: Studying news audiences in a digital era’, Journalism Practice, 9(1): 50–64. Heikkilä, Heikki, Ahva, Laura, Siljamäki, Jaana. and Valtonen, Sanna (2012) Kelluva kiinnostavuus: Journalismin merkitys ihmisten sosiaalisissa verkostoissa [The floating relevance: The role of journalism in everyday social networks]. Tampere: Vastapaino. Hermida, Alfred (2014) #TellEveryone: Why We Share & Why It Matters. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Hermida, Alflred, Fletcher, Fred, Korell, Darryl, and Logan, Donna (2012) ‘Share, like, recommend: Decoding the social media news consumer’, Journalism Studies, 13(5): 815–24. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (2010) Media Convergence: The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication. London: Routledge. Livingstone, Sonia (2006) ‘The influence of personal influence on the study of audiences’, The American Annals of Political and Social Science, 608: 233–50.

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Madianou, Mirca (2009) ‘Audience reception and news in everyday life’, in Karin WahlJorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. Oxford: Routledge. pp. 325–37. Morley, David (1980) The ‘Nationwide’ Audience. London: BFI. Morley, David (1986) Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Comedia. Morley, David (1992) Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Napoli, Philip (2008) ‘Hyperlinking and the forces of “massification”’, in Joseph Turow and Lokmain Tsui (eds) The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 56–69. Park, Robert E. (1972 [1904]) The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Purcell, Kristine, Rainie, Lee, Mitchell, Amy, Rosentiel, Tom, and Olmstead, Kenny (2010) Understanding the Participatory Consumer’, Washington: Pew Research Center. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/oldmedia//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Understanding_ the_Participatory_News_Consumer.pdf Ridell, Seija (2006) ‘Yleisö’ [‘Audience’], in Seija Ridell, Pasi Väliaho, and Tanja Sihvonen (eds)

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Mediaa käsittämässä [Understanding media]. Tampere: Vastapaino. pp. 233–58. Schlesinger, Philip (1992 [1979]) Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC News. London: Routledge. Schrøder, Kim Christian and Phillips, Louise (2007) ‘Complexifying media power: A study of the interplay between media and audience discourse on politics’, Media, Culture & Society, 29(6): 890–915. Silverstone, Roger (1994) Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Spitulnik, Debra (2010) ‘Thick context, deep epistemology: A mediation on wide-angle lenses on media, knowledge, production and the concept of culture’, in Christine Bräuchler and John Postill (eds) Theorising Media and Practice. New York: Berghahn Books. pp. 105–26. Sulzberger, Arthur jr. et  al. (2014) Innovation Report March 24, 2014. An internal report of the New York Times. Availabe at: https:// pdf.yt/d/59s-4-I2qSvG6MnA Webster, James, Phalen, Patricia, and Lichty, Lawrence (2006) Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Zelizer, Barbie (1997) ‘Journalists as interpretative communities’, in Dan Berkowitz (ed.) Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader. Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. 410–19.

22 Digital Journalism as Practice Bart Cammaerts and Nick Couldry

INTRODUCTION Sharing can be enjoyable, if banal: for example, sharing a bowl of food, a finite amount of a necessary resource. Sharing becomes more interesting as social creativity when new types of things become shareable, enabling new types of resource to be grasped for the first time as such, as things that can be held collectively, not just individually or institutionally (Belk 2007). New acts of sharing expand the repertoire of possible action. Our historic media infrastructures derive, originally, from the discovery, centuries ago, of new acts of sharing: the production and circulation of new stories as ‘news’ (Rantanen 2009). Digital platforms enable new types of sharing and possibly new types of journalism in digital forms. That is the possibility this chapter will explore, at a time when the word ‘sharing’ has become a guiding metaphor of our times (John 2013). To do so, we will draw on the work of ‘practice theory’ (from wider social theory),

which over the past decade has enabled media scholars to recognise the variety, importance and complexity of the many new things we are doing with digital media. The chapter will include a brief discussion of practice theory in general before we discuss the practice of sharing in particular as the source of new forms of journalism. The notion of ‘practice’ emerged in audience and media anthropology research in the early to mid 2000s (Couldry 2004; Bräuchler and Postill 2010) out of a need to clarify its direction of travel. By the mid 1990s audience research had already expanded far beyond the limits of its early formation, that is, research into how audiences decode particular media texts, and then looking for correlations between that and wider social consequences or underlying social variables. We were already well on the way towards ‘third generation audience studies’ (Alasuutari 1999), that is, research concerned not with audiences interpretations of texts – or even their interpretation of the large set of secondary texts built

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around the media text – but concerned instead with, for example, the open-ended processes of identity formation around the text, with the wider aim of ‘get[ting] a grasp on our contemporary “media culture”’ (1999: 6) as a whole. However, this expansion of focus in audience research had brought with it some important doubts about its feasibility as a long-term research agenda. For Ang (1996: 66) it was important to capture what she called ‘a sense of crisis within the study of audiences’. Ang (1996: 76) considered the audience to be increasingly unresearchable since audiences had become ‘undecideable’. For Ang (1996: 75) the context of what audiences do was now understood in such a complex way that it was impossible even to imagine ‘a full and comprehensive portrait’ of a contemporary cultural formation. The problem, as Ang (1996: 80) saw prophetically, was that ‘the media are increasingly everywhere, but not everywhere in the same way’. Clearly reflected here are the roots of journalism’s expansion beyond its traditional boundaries in the 2000s. In response, one of the authors (Couldry 2004) offered the idea of ‘theorising media as practice’ as a way to better capture the actual diversity of everyday practice with media in which people were becoming involved in the age of taken-for-granted internet access (a need which has only increased in the age of Web 2.0 and ‘user-generated content’). In the next section we will summarise the basic moves of practice theory as applied in the media field, before moving on to discuss ‘sharing’ as an important new practice from this perspective. The second half of the chapter will explore this possibility in greater empirical detail, and consider its implications for wider developments in digital journalism and digital politics.

PRACTICE THEORY A media practice approach asks quite simply: what are people (individuals, groups,

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­professions, institutions) doing in relation to media across a whole range of situations and contexts? How is people’s media-related practice related, in turn, to their wider agency? This may involve the production or reception of a particular text, but very often it will not. Through this simple move away from the primacy of the text, the practice turn considerably expands what we are interested in at the user, or audience, end of media research, but as we argue in this chapter, also at level of the producers of news and information. This move is crucial for grasping the diversity of acts that now come potentially under the heading of ‘journalism practice’.

Origins A practice approach operates with a wide definition of media (it has no reason to do otherwise), thinking about the users of media: basically, all platforms, mobile or fixed, through which content of any sort is now accessible or transmissible. To understand this shift, let us recall one earlier strand within the history of media research. The basic question (‘what [do] people do with media’) was originally asked by Katz in 1959, but the Uses and Gratifications approach that followed from that question focussed on individual usage of bounded objects called ‘media’. The practice approach to media discussed here differs in its social emphasis and in its emphasis on relations not limited to the use of discrete technologies, but was itself foreshadowed in media research of the 1980s and 1990s when writers such as Silverstone were exploring the uses of communications technologies in the home. Over time, researchers began to move beyond the specific contexts of media consumptions: Ang (1996: 70–2) asked: ‘what [does] it mean […] to live in a media-­ saturated world?’, while Couldry (2000: 6) asked ‘what it means to live in a society dominated by large-scale media institutions’.

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Meanwhile in anthropology, by the early 1990s, Ginsburg (1994: 13) defined a distinctively anthropological approach to ‘mass media’ in terms that read like a prediction of where the whole field of media research was heading. Ginsberg observed that: [o]ur work is marked by the centrality of people and their social relations – as opposed to media texts or technology – to the empirical and theoretical questions being posed in the analysis of media as a social form.

A decade later, Bird (2003), an anthropologist specialising in media, echoed Ang’s doubts from a few years earlier, when she wrote that ‘we cannot really isolate the role of media in culture, because the media are firmly anchored into the web of culture, although articulated by individuals in different ways [… because] The “audience” is everywhere and nowhere’ (2003: 2–3). One might say the same of the ‘journalist’. In this history of the developments of audience research lie the origins of a practice approach, and its relevance to the expanding space of contemporary journalism. Similarly, work on alternative media complicated the dichotomy between production and reception in relation to media practices (Bailey, et al. 2008).

Principles Practice theory is interested in the social nature of practices. Behind the recent turn to ‘practice’ in social theory lies an interest in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language which involved understanding language as action in the world. This contrasts with an older view of language as the expression of meanings that must somehow ‘correspond’ to the world. Wittgenstein saw language as a toolkit: ‘think of the tools in a tool box: […] the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these [tool]s’ (Wittgenstein 1978: 6). Just like tools, words for Wittgenstein have a usage that is socially established, not individually chosen.

Wittgenstein’s term for that inherent social dimension was ‘form of life’. The concept ‘form of life’ points to things that humans regularly do, without needing to codify them, practices that have an order which is linked to the organization of life itself, our needs in life, with words being tools in that wider form of life. So can we think about media-related practices, and journalistic practices in particular, as tools within a wider form of life, our way of living with and through media? This gives us a very open approach to make sense of whatever people are doing in the space of journalism. Much more detail is needed of course to give a full sense of the potential of a practice approach. We do not aim in this chapter to develop this wider argument (but see Couldry 2012: chapter 2).

Beyond ‘audience’ practices As originally formulated, a practice approach was strongly biased towards its roots in audience research rather than research on the producers of media. There is, however, no justification for limiting a practice approach in this way. A practice approach to media, while it overlaps with audience studies, can also offer insights into what in the past was called production studies, and indeed into practices which move between production and reception (e.g. alternative media). Indeed, from the beginning a practice approach encouraged us to pay attention to another key area: the uses to which media are put in daily institutional contexts, including work contexts where media are used towards various instrumental ends, for example ‘practices of using media sources in education […] the uses of media in the legal system and in work practices across the public world’ (Couldry 2004: 126). The potential importance of such practices derived from a view of the world very different from that implied by the traditional model of producing, distributing and receiving mainstream media contents that had dominated earlier media studies,

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and that reduced those not institutionally involved in producing or distributing media contents for mass circulation (those outside ‘the media’) to the role of leisure-based media consumption. Already in 2004 this was an inadequate reading of people’s possibilities for acting with media in general, and their engagement with journalism in particular. Subsequent notions of the ‘produser’ simply repeated this point, but using terms which still reflected the divisions of the age of mass media. What needs our attention is the openended space of practices for using and making media to meet purposes which may have nothing to do with those of media industries, but help build or sustain other institutions. In a world of massively accelerated and expanded information circulation characterised, as Wernick (1991) prophetically pointed out a quarter of a century ago, by a huge inflation in promotional culture, many types of work practice now involve consuming media, commenting on media, aggregating media content, and sometimes also making media for some form of circulation. Using Twitter, for example, for work purposes to promote events and business developments, and to circulate reactions to those same events and developments is now routine. But many of such practices are aimed purely at immediate ends that serve institutional purposes: getting a particular word out. There is particular interest, however, in activities that aim to share information and resources towards broader collective ends which do not obviously benefit any particular institution, or individual. For here might be the beginnings of new forms of making stories and information into a common resource, that is, ‘news’ (Rantanen 2009: x–xi). We will approach this topic through developing individual and collective practice of ‘sharing’.

INTRODUCING SHARING AS A PRACTICE We are sharing things with each other in new ways because of the affordances of digital

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platforms which make it easy to share. Some forms of practice already discussed implicitly involve sharing: for example, ‘showing’ – sending someone a weblink, so both showing and sharing it; or ‘presencing’ which inevitably involves sharing many things with a wider group to whom one is ‘present’. The interesting and more general question which these practices raise is whether we are now increasingly thinking about ‘sharing’ in a different way, imagining completely new possibilities for sharing things and so, in effect, marking off sharing as a distinct, perhaps complex, practice in itself. Two types of action we might miss if we do not think about sharing as a separate practice would be first, people uploading resources online so that they can be a common resource. The second would be people doing things collaboratively on the basis of those shared resources which would not be possible otherwise: for example doing journalism in a distributed way. By ‘sharing’ we mean an activity where there is something more going on than the basic act of, say, pointing or connecting to others: where there is a more generalized intent to share a resource for collective use, or to share an experience so that it is no longer bounded as a purely individual ‘experience’. The massive new opportunities to share things in the digital age mean that we will only gradually become used to the new possibilities for sharing what previously were individual actions: ‘sharing’ will be necessarily an emergent practice. One example might be new forms of political activism, with social movements increasingly using social media to mobilise for direct action and/ or disseminate evidence of police violence; or indeed situations where ordinary people post or upload or simply tweet materials for possible collective use, hoping that someone will be able to make use of them, and expose injustice in the process of that practice. But not all sharing is voluntary or hopeful. As Dave Eggers’ recent fable The Circle (2013) analyses, social media platforms now depend on a business model – even a social

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vision – which is based on compulsory sharing with the platform owners: requiring (or strongly incentivising) users to share not only their comments, ideas, experiences, but also the whole history they leave online, so that economic value can be made from it, by selling or analysing the data. We could call this ‘passive sharing’ – sharing which we are assumed to have done when we use a social media or other online platform, but whose exchange we have generally not approved specifically – but it can have active variants, as when healthy individuals are persuaded to ‘share’ regular data on their health via phone or tablet apps (health apps being one of the main growth areas in the increasingly crowded app market, see Bradshaw, 2014). With sharing, we come to one of the key moral and potentially political issues of our age: whether the economy can successfully rely on processes so broad and important, to which consent is so partial and uncertain (Cohen 2012; Crary 2013; Mejias 2013). In this volume, Daniel Kreiss and Scott Brenner tackle these issues at some length. However in this chapter we sidestep these broader issues in order to focus critically on what new practices of voluntary and generally ‘active’ sharing might mean for the expansion of journalism’s domain. One key input (and output) for contemporary journalism which from the start is concerned with sharing – Twitter – provides a good example of why we need a practice approach to capture its diversity. A practice approach will automatically look for the diversity in whatever set of potential practices it is considering: it will avoid assuming, say, that the users of Twitter are doing just one single thing. Twitter, the microblogging platform founded in 2006, supports a number of different practices which, as forms of life, need to be distinguished. To name a few: individuals with indirect access to official media access can use Twitter as a means of unauthorised commentary (for example footballers tweeting of the arrival of a new player ahead of the official club announcement);

second, individuals with personal high media status (celebrities) can use Twitter to maintain a constant online presence, whose informality is geared to building a fan base; third, groups can cohere around a particular twitter address or hashtag, to which commentary or other information can be sent: if successful, this becomes a form of grouping without previous identity or symbolic capital acquiring a digital presence. These are just three distinct practices to start with, and they suggest broader patterns: on the one hand (which does not look like the acts of a mass audience at all) specialist networks on Twitter, such as the community of political commentary or policy debate in London and no doubt many other places, where everyone is both a producer and an audience member; on the other, and looking remarkably like the old mass audience situation, the large numbers that follow the Twitter account of a celebrity but do not generally tweet at all themselves. So it is clear that the degree to which Twitter as platform is integrated into people’s wider daily practices will depend very much on which practice of Twitter use we are talking about: the first pattern may be closely integrated into what people in the policy or political community do in both their work and leisure, while the second may be relatively unimportant to its users’ daily practices (just a passing pleasure).

TWITTER: A PLATFORM FOR SHARING INFORMATION, NEWS AND COMMENTARY In this section we aim to present a number of examples of how the sharing of information and news is changing the journalistic field and producing new and emerging media practices, some of which could be considered hopeful, others more problematic. It could be argued that journalism was traditionally about not sharing in the immediate – think of the important role of ‘the scoop’ in building

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a reputation for a journalist and a media organisation alike. Nowadays the sharing of news, titbits and comments on a rolling basis is one of the main hallmarks of the twentyfirst century networked or distributed journalist (Beckett 2008; Anderson 2011). Sharing practices in traditional journalism are situated at the level of the individual journalist, as well as the media organisation and culture of which they form part – their habitus to put it in Bourdieusian terms. In terms of the latter it could be argued that changes in sharing practices are intimately connected to changes at the level of the temporal dimensions of news production and the field of journalism. The stopwatch culture of deadlines (Schlesinger 1987) and the importance of the scoop have not entirely disappeared, but the news cycle today is dynamic and continuous (24/7) rather than more episodic as was the case in the past (Crary 2013). Not so long ago there were two to three coremoments in the day that news was communicated to audiences; in the morning when the newspapers were published and at noon and/ or in the evening through TV news. Radio enabled more flexibility, but also tended to be limited to hourly bulletins. The emergence of satellite broadcasting, 24/7 news channels and especially the increased prominence of the internet in people’s everyday lives have not only radically changed the temporality of news, but arguably also its spatiality (Rantanen 2005). Today, news and information provision can be seen as a permanent flow ‘shared’ with us on and through a variety of media and platforms, which includes traditional media such as print and broadcasting, but also blogs and above all social media. Twitter has in many ways become the medium par excellence for a variety of actors, journalists and other media professionals, political and cultural elites, political activists as well as ordinary people1, opening up a whole range of new media practices as well as substituting old ones (Murthy, 2011; Hermida 2013). We could argue that the microblogging platform Twitter is used

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by elites as well as activists and audiences ‘to broadcast’, that is, to share information with their peers, fans, the general public and journalists. It is therefore very much a tool in strategies of ‘presencing’; for example, making a piece of private information a common resource, building social capital or using it for personal or organisational branding purposes. Besides this, Twitter and social media more generally have also increasingly become a platform through which news is produced; political and cultural elites use it to broadcast independently, which subsequently gets amplified by journalists and media organisations, but also by ordinary people re-tweeting elite or celebrity discourses. At the same time, ordinary people as well as activists use Twitter to share information and commentary or to make collective struggles visible. Finally, Twitter is also increasingly used by media elites as a generic term gradually replacing references to ‘public opinion’.

Elites’ Twitter practices Elites such as political actors or celebrities will use Twitter as a tool to produce news themselves, to brand themselves and to connect with their constituencies/fans. Ultimately these practices by elites should be seen as attempts to control and steer the news agenda. For example, the UK royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was first announced on Twitter by the Royal Palace (@ClarenceHouse, 16 November 2010). Indicative of the necessity for elites ‘to be’ on Twitter was the recent – and thus very late – joining of Hillary Clinton (in June 2013). As the tweets in Figure 22.1 expose, her use of Twitter cleverly combines the personal with the political and demonstrates that the personal is intricately political. At the same time, Twitter has obviously become a major source of information for journalists, sifting out tweets from political and cultural elites. Some of these tweets in

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Figure 22.1  Selection of Tweets from @HillaryClinton mixing the personal and the political, 2014 Source: @HillaryClinton

themselves become major news stories, like when Hillary and Bill Clinton announced the pregnancy of their daughter Chelsea in a coordinated fashion via Twitter (cf. @ HillaryClinton and @BillClinton, 18 April 2014). Another important use of Twitter by political and cultural elites, and as also shown in Figure 22.1, is providing commentary on an event, the death of another public figure or a news item. This then in turn often gets picked up by mainstream journalists who report it as news, and precisely because it often concerns opinion or commentary by elite voices on

a story or event that is already in the news it ticks many of the news value boxes (cf. Galtung and Ruge 1973). This particular use serves particularly well as a way of establishing presence in the public space. The death of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 led to a deluge of very mixed reactions from cultural, economic and political elites on Twitter. Some examples of the variety of comments posted on Twitter after the announcement: •• Current Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron:

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° ’It was with great sadness that I learned of Lady Thatcher’s death. We have lost a great leader, a great Prime Minister, and a great Briton’. (@David_Cameron, 8 April, 2013) •• Entrepreneur and Member of the House of Lords, Alan Sugar: ° ’Margaret Thatcher died today. A great lady she changed the face of British politics, created opportunity for anyone to succeed in the UK. RIP’. (@Lord_Sugar, 8 April 2013). •• Left-wing Member of Parliament, George Galloway: 2 ° ’Tramp the dirt down ’. (@georgegalloway, 8 April 2013). •• Comedian, Sarah Millican: ° ’A lot of miners are discovering they can dance today’ (@SarahMillican75, 8 April 2013)

After an event like this, Twitter tends to really buzz and this was no different in the aftermath of Thatcher’s death. Unsurprisingly, especially the negative comments generated a lot of moral indignation from the British – pre-dominantly right wing – media.

Political activists’ Twitter practices Just as Hilary Clinton cannot afford to not be on Twitter, neither can a social movement these days. As argued elsewhere by one of us with reference to Foucault (1997), activists use social media as a technology of selfmediation (1) to disclose, with a view to transmit counter-hegemonic discourses or to mobilise for action, (2) to examine and reflect, in order to coordinate and adapt strategies and (3) to remember through capturing, archiving and sharing slogans and images (Cammaerts, 2015). Because social media possess affordances that are relevant to all three levels, the use of social media by protesters became very prominent and observable in recent years. The overlap here with broader practices of ‘showing’, ‘presencing’, ‘sifting out’ and ‘archiving’ already mentioned are clear. We could refer here to the important role social media played for example during the

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protests against the banks and the capitalist system that underpins them, and against the policies of austerity enacted in the wake of the 2008 bail-out of the financial system (cf. Spanish Indignados, Occupy Movement). The Occupy Movement was arguably born on Twitter after the Canadian anti-­consumerism organisation Adbusters.org tweeted the following message: ‘Dear Americans, this July 4th dream of insurrection against corporate rule http://bit.ly/kejAUy #occupywallstreet’ (@Adbusters, 4 July 2011), which then subsequently led to concrete plans for a march on Wall Street two months later. In relation to Occupy, Yochai Benkler (quoted in Preston 2011: np) denoted the role of the internet and social media as ‘critical’ especially because of ‘the ability to stream video, to capture the images and create records and narratives of sacrifice and resistance’, which can be related to the practice of ‘archiving’. The 2011 Arab Spring constituted further evidence that social media played an increasingly important role in terms of mobilising for and mediating protests, also beyond a Western political context. For sure, the inflated claim of Twitter-revolutions in the Middle East is an enormous exaggeration (Khondker 2011), but despite this, it is still undeniably the case that social media did create a distinct set of mediation opportunities (Cammaerts 2012) for activists on the ground. At least, social media served to spread the protests to a variety of Arab countries and above all to internationalise the conflicts and make violent state actions highly visible to a Western and international audience (Hermida, et al. 2012), which in turn led to strong pressures from Western governments and even to a military intervention in the case of Libya. Social media can also become constitutive of resistance rather than merely instrumental or facilitative. In the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death, Twitter and other social media platforms became a space of contestation and resistance, celebrating rather than lamenting her death. As already invoked by George Galloway’s tweet, quoted earlier in

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this chapter, music and protest songs played an important role in this highly symbolic online resistance. Playlists were compiled and shared of anti-Thatcher protest-songs of the 1980s. Besides this a social media campaign was started to get the Wizard of Oz song ‘Ding Dong! the Witch is Dead’, sung by Judy Garland, to number one in the charts. With 52,605 copies sold it reached number two. The BBC was forced to play the song but only played 5 seconds of the 51 seconds song. In a rather patronising tone, Ben Cooper (2013) the controller of BBC Radio 1 justified it as such: […] we should treat the rise of the song, based as it is on a political campaign to denigrate Lady Thatcher’s memory, as a news story. So we will play a brief excerpt of it in a short news report during the show which explains to our audience why a 70-year-old song is at the top of the charts. Most of them are too young to remember Lady Thatcher and many will be baffled by the sound of the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz.

In this example, we see emerging a repertoire of sharing practices aimed at the standard measures of the popular music industry, but with a clear intent to generate political news.

Journalistic Twitter practices When news breaks today it is usually through Twitter first. Rumours and unnamed sources tend to play an important role in this regard. In 2009 the Hollywood entertainment website TMZ beat all the major news organisations to announce Michael Jackson’s death through Twitter and their website3. Using Twitter as a broadcasting tool, sharing spectacular information with the world, enabled this relatively small player to be ahead of all major news networks in the case of this particular news event. TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death 18 minutes after he had been pronounced dead and about 6 minutes prior to the coroner’s office being alerted (Stelter

2009). Unlike TMZ major news organisations such as CNN (which is paradoxically owned by the same company as TMZ, namely AOL– Time Warner) waited for official confirmation and as a result it took them almost two hours longer to come to the same conclusion. This provided TMZ with an invaluable amount of exposure online and increased kudos offline. Harvey Levin (quoted in Collins and Braxton 2009), the managing editor of TMZ, reacting against the lack of crediting by competitors claimed ‘[n]o matter what they say, people know we broke the story’. It was calculated that about one hour after the announcement of Michael Jackson’s death by TMZ more than 30 per cent of all messages on Twitter related to him and his death; Twitter even had problems coping with the sheer amount of messages (Cashmore 2009). However, as argued above, Twitter is not only a platform to break news, but also to gather news. An interesting new phenomenon in this regard are real-time online aggregator pages in the wake of an unfolding story or breaking news. This can be denoted as a beyond audience practice, thriving on the vast amount of information and comments that are shared by elites as well as ordinary people. When a media event or breaking news occurs, the websites of newspapers as well as TV broadcasters increasingly have social media teams at hand who monitor and sift out the online space for links to other websites, tweets, Facebook messages, photos or video-footage. This is then all posted on a live-updated page, in many ways similar to the live newswire of old, but now accessible to us all rather than only to the journalists. So while the self-mediation practices of citizens, social movements, activists and protesters are often individualised accounts of an event, seen collectively they can potentially become a powerful alternative citizen- or activist-based narrative of that event, which can then subsequently be picked up and reenforced by journalists. Kate Day (2009: np), a Social Media and Engagement Editor for the Telegraph at the time, commented on the

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increasingly important role of Twitter when reporting the 2009 G20 protests in London: finally Twitter has shifted from being the story to becoming a tool with which to tell the story. […] It’s been wonderful to sit here at my desk and follow all sorts of observations, pictures and videos coming from people in the heart of the throng in central London as well as from those watching from afar.

In terms of newsgathering, ordinary people’s social media use can also potentially become news through beyond audience practices. A fascinating example of this, also pointing to the complexity of the spatial dimension, is this tweet by IT consultant Sohaib Athar from Abbottabad, Pakistan. His tweet read: ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)’ (@ReallyVirtual, 1 May 2011). As it turned out, unwittingly he became the first to report on the US operation led by Navy Seals to eliminate Osama Bin Laden. During natural disasters such as earthquakes or accidents such as plane crashes, ordinary citizens also often turn to Twitter and other social media, which is why in such circumstances social media become a prime space for journalists to do crowdnewsgathering – a new form of audiencing of potential long-term significance. The affordance of the #hashtag grouping tweets on similar topics is of crucial importance here as it is precisely the #hashtag and the close monitoring of trends on Twitter which makes Twitter so powerful as a newsgathering tool, but also as a way to construct a communicative space. Finally, as a result of this profuse use of Twitter by elites, ordinary people and journalists alike, social media is increasingly positioned by some as a way to gauge public opinion. It is easy to imagine a political strategist asking: ‘So, what’s the mood on Twitter today?’ In the aftermath of the protests against the shooting of Michael Brown, an African American youngster by US local police in Ferguson, Missouri (August 2014), two journalists of the Washington

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Post wrote an article with the following headline: ‘Twitter starting to wonder why Hillary Clinton has not addressed events in Ferguson, Mo’ (Williams and Butler 2014). Increasingly, Twitter and social media is thus being referred to as if it were a subject with a common will or as a reflection of public opinion. It is not uncommon for Marketing and PR companies to tap into social media and produce ‘emotional’ data for their clients on how they are being perceived, what the sentiments are regarding a story, an event or a person. After Margaret Thatcher died, the marketing company Meltwater (2013) analysed all tweets relating to Thatcher for 12 hours; they concluded that 43% of tweets were negative, 19% positive and 29% neutral. In some way by producing data like this and through its subsequent mediation via mainstream media platforms and social media, it is implied that Twitter opinion is in fact congruous with public opinion.

TENSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS The practices of various actors as discussed above are not free of tensions and issues that could be seen as problematic or open to critique. We will not here develop a wider critique of discourse which constructs the social through ‘social’ media (see Couldry and Van Dijck, 2015), yet even so it is important to avoid the trap of unfettered celebration when it comes to these ‘sharing’ practices. While not denying the opportunities the increased sharing of information and news has for various actors and for journalism there are also serious issues of concern.

Elites The mainstream media’s obsession with political, cultural and economic celebrities, the 24/7 news cycles which requires the

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production of an abundance of content, as well as the practice of re-tweeting by fans, followers and supporters, makes Twitter an ideal tool for elites in terms of perfecting their presencing and self-branding strategies and practices. There is nothing surprising here: elites have always used all the possible media at their disposal to disseminate their views, protect their interests and re-enforce their power. Given the celebrity-obsessed societies many of us live in it is also to be expected that media and journalists would reproduce in bulk elite discourses transmitted via Twitter. However, these presencing practices do elicit a set of tensions and contradictions that are worth considering in conjunction with the opportunities they afford elites. Presencing practices by elites can also lead to a backlash. Voicing opinions that are deemed to be controversial or leftfield is often met with a vigorous response online that can easily turn nasty. On a weekly basis we are confronted with news of a celebrity causing offence and having to deal with the fallout of a tweet they posted. Time magazine, but also other media organisations, even publish lists of the top Twitter controversies each year. Because of archiving practices and the synoptic characteristics of the ‘viewer society’ (Mathiesen, 1997), once out there transgressive statements by elites uttered on Twitter are impossible to fully delete and contain. Especially expressing overt or implicit racist and sexist views seem to cause easy controversy, luckily. A recent example of this was former BBC’s Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson tweeting a photograph of a small black dog in conjunction with the words: ‘This is the latest addition to the pack. He’s called Didier Dogba’ (@JeremyClarkson, 21 April 2014), referring to a football player from Côte D’Ivoire who was playing for Chelsea FC at the time. What all this also exposes are the contentious debates about whether freedom of speech online is different from freedom of speech offline. As a consequence, this also has implications at a legal level, for example

when it comes to legislation to prevent the incitement of racial hatred and discrimination, libel and defamation law or legal restraining orders placed upon the media to prevent it from reporting a story. In recent years there have been a few highly interesting cases in this regard, especially in the UK. One of the most interesting cases from the perspective of media and celebrity transgressions was undoubtedly BBC’s Newsnight false accusation that a ‘senior Conservative’ was a paedophile and child abuser (in November 2012). It was not long before the name of Alistair McAlpine, a member of the House of Lords and advisor to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, started to circulate online. Several media, cultural and political elites started sharing this information through their personal Twitter accounts. After having been cleared – it was a case of mistaken identity – McAlpine subsequently successfully sought libel damages from those he called ‘high profile tweeters’, which he understood to be those with more than 500 followers (Dowell 2012). From a legal perspective, social media in the hands of elites are here being considered as individual broadcasters and they are made responsible for the content they transmit. In this regard, the size of your audience matters: while somebody with 100 followers sharing the name of McAlpine got away with it, someone like Sally Bercow, the wife of the speaker of the House of Parliament, who tweeted ‘Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*’ to her 56,000 followers was taken to court and sentenced. We reach here a natural limit of what ‘sharing’ processes can contribute to news production.

Activists In terms of activists’ and social movements’ usage of social media a different set of tensions and contradictions emerge. Besides emphasising the role of the internet in the

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mobilisations for and spreading of the Occupy movement, Benkler (quoted in Preston 2011: np) also noted that real change ‘will depend on actual, on-the-ground, faceto-face actions, laying your body down for your principles – with the ability to capture the images and project them to the world’. The problem with online enthusiasm for a given cause is that is it often turns out to be rather fleeting and superficial, which is captured by Morozov’s (2009) critique of ‘clicktivism’ in effect being ‘slacktivism’. After analysing a random sample of 25,000 Occupy users on Twitter over a period of 15 months, Conover et  al. (2013: 4) came to similarly pessimistic conclusions. The large majority of #Occupy users on Twitter, they claim, were already connected and politically active before the mobilisations and while highly vocal in the months immediately following the movement’s birth, [they] appear to have lost interest in Occupy-related communication over the remainder of the study period, and have exhibited only marginal changes in their attention allocation habits and social connectivity as a result of their participation.

Along the same lines, it could be argued that the Arab Spring uprisings in various Arab countries and their various mediations have hardly led to genuine structural change in these countries. Take the example of Egypt, which elected a conservative Islamist government and has in the mean time arguably reverted to military rule and a docile reverential media (El Issawi and Cammaerts, 2015). Similarly, while the resistance which emerged after the death of Thatcher was instrumental to vent frustration and to expose the divisive nature of her policies and ideas, it all remained symbolic and inconsequential to the actual structural power relations in society today, which are arguably more asymmetric and unequal than ever before. As the protest singer Billy Bragg wrote on his Facebook page: ‘Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none

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of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don’t celebrate – organise!’ (@ BillyBragg, 8 April 2013). By emphasising social media activities of activists and protesters, there is a danger of deluding ourselves that to generate massive online enthusiasm for a cause and as a result get it onto the short-term news agenda, constitutes victory, while it is only then that the real struggle for social or political transformation (and potential longer-term implications for the future of journalism) commences.

CONCLUSION: SHARING AND THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM Media practices revolving around social media enacted by elites, activists and audiences have serious repercussions for the way news is produced and for journalistic practices more generally. These repercussions also invoke normative and ethical questions about the role of journalism in a democracy in an age of social media and an information and communication saturated society. Questions about what constitutes news today and where the boundaries lie between news, rumour and innuendo. As amongst others the McAlpine case demonstrates, serious mistakes can be made, with real consequences for real people. The sad thing, however, is that the actual Twitter controversy itself also becomes a piece of news. This focus on the here and the now, on the mutterings and commenting of elites at any given moment in time, detracts from the urgent need for more in-depth analysis and well-resourced investigative reporting (Houston, 2010). The huge impact that Twitter can potentially have on our media, at a hyperlocal, but equally on a global level, and the affordance of massive amplification, has also not gone unnoticed by political actors either, be they warring factions in a conflict, politicians or protest movements. This makes the

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media and journalists prone to deception and manipulation strategies, but also to ideological wars of position between antagonistic discourses and interests. What is lacking so far, to our knowledge, outside moments of insurrection or intense political breakdown, are examples of sustained collaborations across social media to shift journalistic agendas and the norms of journalistic practice. All the examples we have considered remain dependent upon the frame of mainstream journalism, often ‘sifting out’ information for us, or refer to symbolic protest at its margins. ‘Sharing’ has not yet emerged as the means, for example, to renew widespread debate about inequality (cf. Piketty, 2014), or to enhance the role of trade unions in sustaining political solidarity (cf. Dardennes’ brothers film, Two Days, One Night, 2014). As the most thoughtful review of networked or ‘connective’ activism up until now concludes, we still do not know what ‘a successful transition [to a different politics through social media] looks like’ (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013: 214). The reason, we suggest, is that the routes to a new journalism (or a new politics for that matter) based on social media – parallel perhaps to the new journalism that emerged around 1960s counter-culture – have yet to emerge. And the reasons why they are still obscured is because, in turn, sharing via social media is also part of the practices that aim to reproduce existing models of journalism and traditional power structures. In addition to this, the mainstream discourses on and practices of sharing are also highly instrumental in terms of re-enforcing intraelite relations as well as an individualistic capitalist value system (John, 2013); it is ‘I’ share, not ‘We’ share. Yet at the same time other, more collective and public-interest, forms of sharing information and knowledge are emerging too (cf. Wikipedia or Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept) and while these forms might be more disruptive at a structural level they are also embedded in a set of values that go

beyond profit and/or personal gain and tend to be focussed on the interests of the many rather than the few. It is by tapping into these newly emerging more alternative forms and principles of collective sharing that public journalism might effectively be revived in a digital age.

NOTES  1  It is important to note in this regard that Twitter has penetrated much less into the everyday life of most ordinary people than, say, Facebook. Certain types of people are more likely to have a Twitter account than others. Studies in the USA suggest an over-­ representation of male, affluent, urban and young users (Duggan and Smith 2013). At the same time, because journalists and media organisations are so plugged into social media and especially Twitter, this microblogging platform affects the ‘reality’ presented to us, whether it is close to our reality or not.  2  ‘Tramp the dirt down’ is the title of an antiThatcher song written by Elvis Costello (1989) in which he sings about the day when he could finally stamp on her grave.  3  http://www.tmz.com/2009/06/25/michael-­ jackson-dies-death-dead-cardiac-arrest

REFERENCES Alasuutari, P. (ed.) (1999) Rethinking the Media Audience. London: Sage. Anderson, C.W. (2011) ‘Blowing up the Newsroom: Ethnography in an Age of Distributed Journalism’, in D. Domingo and C. Paterson (eds.) Making Online News (2nd edn). New York: Peter Lang. pp. 151–60 Ang, I. (1996) Living Room Wars. London: Routledge. Bailey, O., Cammaerts, B. and Carpentier, N. (2008) Understanding Alternative Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Beckett, C. (2008) Supermedia. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bennett, L. and Segerberg, A. (2013) The Logic of Connective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Belk, R. (2007) ‘Why Not Share Rather Than Own?’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611: 126–40. Bird, S. E. (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Bradshaw, T. (2014) ‘Apps: growing pains’, Financial Times, 19 August 2014. Bräuchler, B. and Postill, J. (eds) (2010) Theorising Media and Practice. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Cammaerts, B. (2012) ‘Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure’, European Journal of Communication 27(2): 117–34. Cammaerts, B. (2015) ‘Technologies of SelfMediation: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media for Protest Movements’, in Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard (eds) Civic Engagement and Social Media - Political Participation Beyond the Protest, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 97–110. Cashmore, P. (2009) ‘Michael Jackson Dies: Twitter Tributes Now 30% of Tweets’. Mashable, 25 June: http://mashable.com/2009/ 06/25/michael-jackson-twitter/ Cohen, J. (2012) Configuring the Networked Self. New Haven: Yale University Press. Collins, S. and Braxton, G. (2009) ‘TV misses out as gossip website TMZ reports Michael Jackson’s death first’. LA Times, 26 June: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-jacksonmedia26-2009jun26-story.html Conover, M. D., Ferrara, E., Menczer, F. and Flammini, A. (2013) ‘The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street’, PLoS ONE 8(5): e64679: http://www.plosone.org/article/info% 3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0064679 Cooper, B. (2013) Why we’re playing ‘Ding Dong The Witch is Dead’ on Radio 1’s Sunday 14 April 2013 Chart Show. About the BBC Blog, 12 April: http://www.bbc. co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/posts/ Statement-regarding-Radio-1s-Chart-Show14-April-2013 Couldry, N. (2000) The Place of Media Power. London: Routledge. Couldry, N. (2004) ‘Theorising Media as Practice’, Social Semiotics 14(2): 115–32. Couldry, N. (2012) Media Society World. Cambridge: Polity. Couldry, N. and Van Dijck, J. (2015) ‘Researching Social Media as if the Social Mattered’, Social Media & Society, 1(2): 1–7.

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Crary, J. (2013) 24/7. New York: Verso. Day, K. (2009) ‘Is the G20 summit a turning point for Twitter?’, 1 April: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/kateday/9354707/ Is_the_G20_summit_a_turning_point_for_ Twitter/ Dowell, B. (2012) ‘McAlpine libel: 20 tweeters including Sally Bercow pursued for damages’, Guardian, 23 November: http://www. theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/23/ mcalpine-libel-bercow-monbiot-davies Duggan, M. and Smith, A. (2013) ‘Social Media Update 2013’. Pew Research Internet Project, 30 December: http://www.pewinternet. org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/ Eggers, D. (2013) The Circle. London: Hamish Hamilton. El Issawi, F. and Cammaerts B. (2015) ‘The media’s role in democratic transitions revisited: Lessons from Egypt’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism: Online First. Foucault, M. (1997). Technologies of the Self. In Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault, Essential Works, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjec­ tivity, and Truth. New York: New Press. pp. 223–251. Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. (1973) ‘Structuring and Selecting News’, in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds) The Manufacture of News: a Reader, London: Constable. pp. 52–63. Ginsburg, F. (1994) ‘Culture/media: A mild polemic’, Anthropology Today 10(2): 5–15. Hermida, A. (2013) ‘#Journalism: Reconfiguring Journalism Research about Twitter, One Tweet at a Time’, Digital Journalism 1(3): 295–313. Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C. and Zamith, R. (2012) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions’. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, TX, April: https://online.journalism. utexas.edu/2012/papers/Hermida.pdf Houston, B. (2010) ‘The future of investigative journalism’. Daedalus 139(2): 45–56. John, N. A. (2013) ‘Sharing and Web 2.0: the emergence of a keyword’, New Media & Society 15(2): 167–82. Katz, E. (1959) ‘Mass Communication Research and the Study of Popular Culture: An Editorial Note on a Possible Future for this Journal’, Studies in Public Communication 2: 1–6.

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Khondker, H. H. (2011) ‘Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring’, Globalizations 8(5): 675–9. Mathiesen, T. (1997) ‘The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” Revisited’, Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215–34. Mejias, U (2013) Off the Network. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Morozov, E. (2009) ‘The brave new world of slacktivism’, Foreign Policy, 19 May: http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19/ the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism Murthy, D. (2011) ‘Twitter: Microphone for the masses?’, Media, Culture & Society 33(5): 779–89. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preston, J. (2011) ‘Protesters Look for Ways to Feed the Web’, New York Times, 24 November: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/ business/media/occupy-movement-focuseson-staying-current-on-social-networks.html Rantanen, T. (2005) The Media and Globalization. London: Sage.

Rantanen, T. (2009) When News Was New. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Schatzki, T. (1999) Social Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlesinger, P. (1987) Putting ‘Reality’ Together. London and New York: Methuen. Stelter, B. (2009) ‘TMZ Was Far Ahead in Reporting Death’. New York Times, 26 June: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/ business/media/27media.html?_r=0 Wernick, A. (1991) Promotional Culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Williams, V. and Butler, B. (2014) ‘Twitter starting to wonder why Hillary Clinton has not addressed events in Ferguson, Mo.’, Washington Post, 14 August: http://www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/ wp/2014/08/14/twitter-starting-to-wonderwhy-hillary-clinton-has-not-addressedevents-in-ferguson-mo/ Wittgenstein, L. (1978 [1953]) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

23 Mapping the Human–Machine Divide in Journalism Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund

INTRODUCTION By now, it seems, one cannot talk about contemporary journalism without talking about technology, as the two have become deeply connected in complex and diverse ways (see, for example, Anderson et  al., 2012; Lewis and Westlund, 2015a). Yet, to characterize technology as an inexorable force that is ‘changing’ journalism, as so often happens in popular accounts, is to miss at least three important truths. First, that from the telegraph to the typewriter, technology has long been associated with news production and distribution (Örnebring, 2010; Pavlik, 2000). Second, that in journalism as elsewhere in society, technology is more socially shaped than materially determined, by many accounts (chief among them Boczkowski, 2004; see also Anderson, 2013a; Deuze, 2007). And, third, that identifying a unitary conception of ‘technology’ and its implications for journalism is difficult because of the wide array of ideas and implementations involved: from

content management systems (Rodgers, 2015) to computational journalism (Stavelin, 2014), and from algorithms (Diakopoulos, 2015) to audience analytics (Tandoc, 2014), to name just a few elements of computation and quantification that are increasingly manifest in journalism (Anderson, 2013b; Coddington, 2015; Gynnild, 2014; Lewis, 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015b). Indeed, speaking of the variety in play, this entire handbook is devoted to unpacking the digital in journalism.1 What are we to make, then, of this thing called technology and its relationship with this thing called journalism? In his 1988 sociological analysis of a doorcloser, illustrating the interplay of humans and nonhumans, Bruno Latour suggests that ‘every time you want to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little figure’ (1988: 299). In this chapter, we aim to ‘size up’ the

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role of technology in journalism in precisely this fashion: by conceptualizing the relative dependence that various forms of journalism have on various forms of technology. This question of dependency, derived in part from Emerson’s (1962) power-dependence theory, essentially leads us to ask: All things being equal, to what extent does X form of journalism depend on Y form of digital technology? That is, how might different types of news production and distribution (and the human actors behind them) be dependent, greatly or not, on nonhuman technological actants (see Lewis and Westlund, 2015a)? Such questions are not merely descriptive concerns about the state of digital journalism and its work practices; rather, untangling these issues of dependence allows us to more fully conceptualize and theorize about the interplay of social actors and technological actants in news work. This chapter reviews the literature on journalism and technology, beginning with a more expansive conceptualization of humans and machines in journalism. We acknowledge two specific social actors in news media organizations (namely, technologists and journalists) in addition to developing a more complex representation of technological actants – their inscription by humans and their corresponding influence within networked arrangements. Then, after zooming out to accommodate that wide-angle view, we zoom in on the particular case of news production and distribution. Drawing on power-dependence theory (Emerson, 1962), the chapter concludes by briefly conceptualizing four facets that illustrate how journalism becomes ‘technologically specific’ (Powers, 2012): how it becomes defined by, embedded in, and understood through the particular structural and sociocultural characteristics of technology. The four facets that we propose – (1) human-centric journalism, (2) technology-supported journalism, (3) technology-infused journalism, and (4) technology-oriented journalism – help bring into focus the relative dependence on technology

that is evident in different forms of journalism, and the implications of such dependence for theory and practice.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE HUMAN– TECHNOLOGY DIMENSION While technology has a long history in the development and diffusion of journalism (Örnebring, 2010; Pavlik, 2000), the emergence of information communication technologies (ICTs), especially the World Wide Web in the 1990s, saw the formation of early experiments in digital news production and distribution, as well as corresponding scholarly interest in this ‘digitizing’ of the news (Boczkowski, 2004; see also Deuze, 2001; 2003; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009; Singer, 1998). During the past 15 years, amid tremendous growth in Journalism Studies as a distinct sub-field of communication, a particular emphasis on researching journalistic practice in light of technology has developed – notably, for instance, in the launch of the peer-reviewed journals Journalism Practice (2007) and Digital Journalism (2013), and the founding of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University (2010). As a result, a great many studies have analyzed the role of digital media technologies in a variety of interrelated domains of journalism: everyday practices and newsroom configurations (e.g., Domingo & Paterson, 2011; Hermida, 2013; Hermida et al., 2014; Reich, 2013; Robinson, 2011a; Usher, 2014), professional ideology and occupational culture (e.g., Deuze, 2007; Lewis, 2012; O’Sullivan and Heinonen, 2008; Singer, 2007; Steensen, 2011), organizations and institutions (e.g., Anderson, 2013a; Hemmingway, 2008; Lowrey, 2012; Ryfe, 2012; Westlund, 2011). Some researchers also have studied patterns of distribution and consumption (e.g., Hille and Bakker, 2013; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2010; Robinson, 2014; Singer, 2014), including

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amid the growing importance of social media (Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014) and mobile devices (Westlund and Färdigh, 2015). Much of this research has shown how journalists and news organizations have either appropriated or resisted emerging media technologies (e.g., Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Lasorsa et  al., 2012; Reich, 2014; Singer, 2005; Tameling and Broersma, 2013). This is particularly so as journalists struggle to negotiate their relationship with audiences (Lewis et  al., 2014; Peters and Witschge, 2014; Robinson, 2011b; Singer et al., 2011), as they seek to maintain professional control in a digital media environment that privileges open participation (Lewis, 2012). This line of research, quite naturally, has focused on human journalists, whether at the individual level of social-psychological role conceptions (e.g., Cassidy, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2011; Tandoc and Takahashi, 2014) or at social and institutional levels of rules and routines (e.g., Ryfe, 2006; Shoemaker and Reese, 2014). Not surprisingly then, Journalism Studies scholars have paid little attention to the broader range of social actors involved in news media organizations who are situated (mostly) outside the newsroom – namely, businesspeople and technologists (exceptions include Ananny 2013; Nielsen 2012; Westlund, 2011; Westlund and Krumsvik, 2014).2 Moreover, scholars have given limited emphasis to (digital) technology as a distinct object of study, and to the transforming tensions that emerge between humans and technology (exceptions include Anderson 2013a; Boczkowski 2004; Lewis and Westlund, 2015a). The bottom line is that a focus primarily if not exclusively on journalistic actors and their work and attitudes yields knowledge about only one part of the news media organization. This calls for conceptualizations that take a more holistic perspective. This chapter introduces, synthesizes, and discusses more comprehensively the diverse relationships between journalism and technology, focusing on (human) journalists and technologists as well as technological actants. To set up this

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discussion, we draw upon the sociotechnical emphasis that we outlined in previous research: the 4A’s analytical framework (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a) and the model of journalism (Westlund, 2013). The 4A’s approach accounts for the respective roles and interconnections among human actors (e.g., journalists, technology specialists, and businesspeople); technological actants (e.g., algorithms, networks, and content management systems); and audiences (e.g., assemblages of audiences distinct to certain platforms, devices, or applications). These actors, actants, and audiences may be intertwined through distinct activities, such as cross-media news work (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a) or media innovations (Westlund and Lewis, 2014). For simplicity, this chapter focuses on journalistic activities in terms of human social actors – specifically, journalists and technologists – and their relationships with technological actants. In a related fashion, Westlund’s (2013) model of journalism illustrates how human and technological modes of orientation are associated with particular types of content practices in media work. A 2x2 matrix, the model has two crosscutting axes: a vertical continuum representing the degree to which activities are geared toward customization vs. repurposing, and a horizontal continuum representing the degree to which activities embody a human-driven or technologydriven orientation. For simplicity, we focus here on the human–technology continuum, which conceptualizes the relative gravitational pull of human social actors vis-à-vis technological actants in news publishing. This dimension reveals the relative dependence that humans have on actants to perform journalistic work. In turn, it opens up corresponding questions about the relative value afforded to such ‘technologically specific’ (Powers, 2012) forms of work – in effect, helping us understand the crucial tensions around technology that underlie journalism and its production and distribution in the digital media environment.

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Together, the 4A’s perspective and the model of journalism point to a key contribution of this chapter: a conceptualization of the relationships between journalism and technology through four facets of news production/distribution activities, made possible by a more careful unpacking of the relationships between human social actors and technological actants.

JOURNALISM AND ITS SOCIAL ACTORS External to the firm, there are several actors that reasonably play a role in shaping the news media organization and its activities – from sources and advertisers, to policymakers, hardware/software providers, and audiences (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014). Internal to the news media organization, there are at least three distinct groups of social actors that are crucial to its operations: journalists, technologists, and businesspeople (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a). Journalists include reporters, editors, producers, and others crafting output identified as news. Technologists include information technology (IT) specialists, systems designers, project managers, information architects, product developers, and other programming technicians. Some technologists work on editorial products, others on business activities, and some do neither or both depending on their roles. Businesspeople include marketers, sales associates, customer relationship managers, analysts specialized in big data and behavioral targeting, and market directors. Because journalistic activities – and news production and distribution more specifically – are the focus of this chapter, we emphasize here the relationships between journalists and technologists, while never­ theless acknowledging the importance of looking at a broader set of actors when assessing the comprehensive dynamics of cross-media work (Lewis and Westlund,

2015a), innovation strategies (Westlund and Lewis, 2014), and business-side integration in news media organizations (Achtenhagen and Raviola, 2009; Küng 2008; Nielsen, 2012; Westlund 2011; 2012). As noted above, journalists and the newsroom have been the dominant (and many times exclusive) focus of research on news media organizations within Journalism Studies (see, for example, Domingo & Paterson, 2011; cf. Westlund, 2011). Technologists, by contrast, have received much less attention, in part because only recently have they grown in numbers and prominence in the organization as well as in the journalism field at large (Lewis and Usher, 2013, 2016).3 In some cases, there has been a marked shift as technologists who once played a mostly ‘tech support’ role, subordinate to journalists and their creative work, have been asked to take on more meaningful, content-level roles in producing digital news products: sitting in on editorial meetings, more directly collaborating with journalists, and even building standalone news applications (Parasie and Dagiral, 2013; Weber and Rall, 2013). The line between ‘journalist’ and ‘technologist,’ of course, may be somewhat artificial; many news technologists were trained as reporters but later gained technical skills in working with data and code (Powers, 2012). Nevertheless, the distinction is important because technologists, especially those trained in computer science and data science, quite often work beyond the boundaries of the newsroom as they build business-facing products and services, such as subscription, advertising and customer-relationship management (CRM) systems, or audience information systems that facilitate the data-mining of online user behavior (see, for example, Hunter, 2014). Meanwhile, other technologists work on content management systems and other technological infrastructures that support the production and distribution of news. Technologists, for example, often have roles in developing applications for mobile devices (Westlund,

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2011; 2012) as well as configuring algorithms, databases, and other engines that allow for big-data approaches to journalism (Lewis, 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015b). Additional research on the editorial-facing role of technologists has taken shape in recent years, primarily in studies of computational journalism (e.g., Anderson, 2013b; Coddington, 2015; Diakopoulos, 2012; Gynnild, 2014; Karlsen and Stavelin, 2014; Stavelin, 2014; Young and Hermida, 2015) and other datadriven forms dependent on computer programmers, web developers, and so on (Ananny, 2013; Appelgren and Nygren, 2014; Fink and Anderson, 2014; Lewis and Usher, 2014; Nielsen, 2012; Parasie and Dagiral, 2013).

JOURNALISM AND ITS TECHNOLOGICAL ACTANTS Technological actants reside both inside and outside of news media organizations, covering a broad range of tools, systems, devices, algorithms, and other applications that facilitate forms of news production and distribution – from CMS internally to social media platforms externally to application programming interfaces (APIs) situated in between (Aitamurto and Lewis, 2013; Ananny, 2013). The central importance of such actants for digital news work requires that we clarify the term: ‘Actant’ is derived from the sociological and methodological approach called actor-network theory (ANT, see Chapter 27), for which Latour (2005) acts as a father figure, and which has inspired a growing body of Journalism Studies research on change in news and technology (e.g., Anderson, 2013a; Hemmingway 2008; Micó et  al., 2013; Schmitz Weiss and Domingo 2010). Without presupposing a priori categories, ANT traces the network of associations among human and nonhuman ‘actants,’ inductively building knowledge about how the social and the material are intertwined (Plesner 2009). ANT does not remove all

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distinctions between human and nonhuman, but neither does it prioritize one over the other in articulating the relative ‘force’ through which the social or the technological shapes outcomes (cf. Neff et  al., 2012). In drawing upon but pivoting from ANT, we previously argued that actants can be defined as ‘material objects that are notable for their association with human actors and the activities they undertake in conjunction with such objects’ (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a: 5, emphasis added). Turning to our conceptualization of technological actants, the use of the term ‘technological’ connotes the nonhuman, machine-interface nature of digital actants. It involves asking whether technological actants, such as a news organization’s CMS or database systems, ‘make a difference,’ as Latour (2005: 71) might say, to the activities of social actors. Technological actants are inscribed and instructed by human social actors; some technological actants are encoded for more general purposes, whereas others carry more specific intent in their construction (for example, news APIs vs. APIs more generally – see Ananny, 2013). As such, there are technological actants that have been developed to suit the journalistic, technological and commercial needs of contemporary news organizations. Editorial CMS technologies, such as those provided by Atex or Infomaker, have been inscribed with journalistic news values (cf. Rodgers, 2015), as with other ‘objects of journalism’ that are material artifacts with cultural implications for newswork (Anderson and de Maeyer, 2015). Such technological actants have been instructed to perform tasks such as selecting and publishing content for specific news media and platforms (Gynnild, 2014; Schmitz Weiss and Domingo, 2010; Westlund, 2011). Thus, in contrast to ANT, we argue that it is worthwhile to distinguish nonhuman and technological actants from human social actors. However, in line with ANT, we also argue that both actants and actors may play significant roles in the network, agreeing with

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Latour that all their respective relations are essential to the study and understanding of our world. Human social actors make projections of their own behavior onto diverse technological actants. This projection goes by the name of anthropomorphism, where the integration of anthropos and morphos essentially means ‘what has human shape or what gives shape to humans’ (Latour, 1988: 303). Thus, as Latour explains, humans construct objects (that is, actants) that may be delegated to substitute for the actions of humans, and which also may, in turn, prescribe and shape human action. This relationship and interplay is marked by interdependence between human actors and technological actants. So, for this chapter, to recognize this interplay in a sociotechnical fashion serves to better acknowledge and conceptualize the importance that diverse technologies carry for journalism and its social actors, as well as how social actors shape technological actants. From this view, then, social actors and technological actants need to be accounted for as distinct yet interdependent agents of influence (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a). We next introduce four facets of journalism that help reveal the interrelationships of technological actants and social actors in news production/distribution activities.

TOWARD CONCEPTUALIZING TECHNOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE As a first attempt to illustrate the interplay of human and machine in journalism, we suggest four facets of journalism: (1) humancentric journalism, (2) technology-supported journalism, (3) technology-infused journalism, and (4) technology-oriented journalism. These facets, while not mutually exclusive in their categorization, can serve to illustrate how newswork becomes ‘technologically specific’ (Powers, 2012) – that is, how forms of news production and distribution become increasingly defined by and dependent on

technological actants (and technologist actors). Central to the four facets of journalism, therefore, is the question of dependence. As the sociologist Richard Emerson (1962) argued in his power-dependence theory, dependence is the basis of power: to the extent that X depends on Y for resources through which to achieve her goals, X is at a power disadvantage relative to Y; similarly, mutual dependence between X and Y is associated with a balance of power. Emerson’s theory is applied primarily to illustrating cost-benefit exchanges in a rational-choice framework, but his basic notion of asymmetric dependence among agents in a network is nevertheless useful for this discussion. It underscores why the relative dependence that human journalists have on technological actants matters for understanding larger dynamics and tensions of journalism’s development in the digital era. Moreover, while Journalism Studies scholars have attended to issues of autonomy, control, and power (see, for example, Carlson, 2009; Lewis, 2012; Singer, 2007), they have not focused on technological dependency as such. As discussed earlier, human social actors are interdependent with technological actants. As Latour (1988: 301) notes, ‘when humans are displaced and deskilled, nonhumans have to be upgraded and reskilled’; similarly, when nonhumans are unskilled, they require more skilled human users. This shared interdependency forms a trade-off, according to Latour – what we regard as a compromise between human social actors and technological actants. We ask, therefore: All things being equal, to what extent does X form of journalism depend on Y form of digital technology? In what sense are different types of news production and distribution (and the human journalists behind them) dependent, minimally or maximally, on technological actants (or, for that matter, vice versa)? These distinctions, beyond simply helping us define and describe the state of affairs in digital journalism, can serve a corresponding function in making future research questions more apparent.

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Human-centric journalism involves those forms of newswork that are not dependent on digital technology – they can be accomplished without digital mediation as a prerequisite. In essence, this facet is characterized by human actors (X) performing their journalistic activities largely independent of digital media technologies (Y). For example, this could include interviewing and writing, forms of work that certainly are enhanced by but not entirely dependent on digital tools. The matter of human-centric journalism points researchers to future research questions that may scrutinize both the past (e.g., how were matters of actor–actant dependence negotiated in a pre-digital era?) and the present (e.g., why are journalists less dependent on technology for certain reporting practices and not others?). Technology-supported journalism is a facet mostly marked by human-led practices, but where journalistic work is being supported by digital technologies in the process of news production. It is characterized by human actors (X) being largely autonomous in relation to technological actants (Y), and where journalists are not dependent on technologists even as the latter are needed for dealing with more complicated technological systems. Technological actants, in this case, are primarily user-friendly tools that augment what journalists are already accustomed to doing, such as producing narrative news accounts. Technology-supported journalism is thus the predominant stage of the modern news environment: one in which human journalists (and technologists) carry out their production activities manually, depending on technological actants insofar as digital tools enable or enhance their work. In studying this facet of journalism, scholars could more closely explore how actors determine when and how certain actants support their work. Is there a gradual incorporation of and growing dependence upon technology, or a continual resistance to and departure from digital tools? Technology-infused journalism is about journalists (X) institutionalizing technology

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for production and distribution – and, as a result, becoming increasingly dependent on technological actants (Y) even as they become empowered by them. Consider, for instance, the emergence of online content curation as a key form of media work (Fotopoulou and Couldry, 2014). While many journalists are incorporating social media to some degree in their labor (Hermida, 2013), some journalists are charged with ‘keeping [their] ear to the internet’ (Anderson, 2013c: 1021) as social media editors and aggregation specialists. Their work is not supported by technology so much as deeply dependent on it: Without a networked ecosystem, their type of work literally has no practical application. What has yet to be explored fully in this domain is the degree to which these technologically specific forms are associated with more or less authority, credibility, and value, particularly given the historical struggle that ‘technologically specific forms of work’ such as photojournalism have encountered in being recognized as ‘real’ journalism in the newsroom (Powers, 2012). Technology-oriented journalism adds further technological specification and emphasis. In this facet, social actors (X) and technological actants (Y) are both established as key agents in the news organization, each performing work related to the production and distribution of news. This is because technological actants are becoming programmed with more power and affordances not only for facilitating news distribution, but also for managing processes of news creation. Ultimately, technology-oriented journalism suggests a sort of symbiotic relationship in which these agents – human and machine – are more or less interdependent on one another: for example, both human journalists and actants such as automated-news algorithms may carry out news work, each supported by technologists. This facet marks, in essence, the culmination of technologically supported forms of newswork. Future research should consider how this facet of journalism involves increasingly sophisticated algorithms and machine-learning systems, leading to the displacement of human

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labor both in news distribution (as it already has done) and in news production (as it is may well do via the growth of automated journalism; see Carlson, 2015; Westlund, 2013).

CONCLUSION Digital technology is seemingly everywhere in journalism. Likewise, there is no shortage of research about its role in the transformation of what constitutes news and how it is circulated in society. However, despite the great number of studies about digital journalism, a more nuanced reading of technology and its particular orientations and implications for journalistic work is missing in much of Journalism Studies. The goal of this chapter has been to review the literature on technology and journalism, and contribute to its future development in two primary ways. First, we have offered a more expansive conceptualization of humans (social actors) and machines (technological actants) in journalism, one that acknowledges a broader set of actors in news media organizations (for example, technologists as well as journalists) as well as a more complex representation of actants – their inscription by humans and their corresponding influence within networked arrangements of news production and distribution. This move built upon (yet also departed from) Latour’s (1988; 2005) notion of human–nonhuman relations, showing how such has been applied in Journalism Studies (Lewis and Westlund, 2015a) and media innovation research (Westlund and Lewis, 2014) through the conceptualization of social actors, technological actants, and distinct audiences altogether interconnected through media work activities. Second, and building on that first move, we have argued for understanding the interplay of human and machine in journalism as a question of dependence, made manifest in four facets of journalism: human-centric journalism, technology-supported journalism, technology-infused journalism, and

technology-oriented journalism. These facets, briefly sketched here for illustrative purposes, may provide guidance for future research, both conceptualizations and empirical studies. While neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustively comprehensive, these facets suggest how newswork becomes ‘technologically specific’ (Powers, 2012) – that is, how forms of news production and distribution become increasingly defined by and dependent on technological actants (and technologist actors as well). Recognizing this degree of dependence (Emerson, 1962) among actors and actants (Latour, 1988) matters not simply for categorizing different types of digitally enabled journalism, but also for the generation of more conceptually driven research questions. These should focus on interrogating the power dynamics, asymmetries, and tensions that underlie the changing technological contexts for news work. For example, if technologically specific forms of work are initially dismissed as less legitimate forms of journalism, as Powers’ (2012) framework supposes, what does that mean for the professional reaction to and associated development of data journalism, computational journalism, social media curation, and other technology-infused practices, where the work is not supported by technology but rather deeply dependent on it? Or, looking at technology-oriented journalism, as news organizations become more fully dependent on algorithms – for example, not only for the distribution of human-crafted news but also for the production of machinewritten news – what kind of negotiations occur around the relative ‘power’ that will be afforded to algorithms vis-à-vis human journalists, and through what particular contexts, questions, and news practices? The four facets of journalism that we have introduced, while deserving elaboration and discussion in future work, thus present a starting point for highlighting the transformations of technological specificity, and the corresponding complications for institutionalizing certain forms of journalism as the level of technological dependence grows. Ultimately,

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as journalism writ large becomes increasingly embedded in and interpolated through technology, what does that mean for journalistic authority and autonomy, among other professional features historically defined in terms of manually driven, not machine-led, orientations? These and other questions like them can be more readily articulated and applied in research as we develop a better conceptual mapping of humans and machines, their full complement of social actors and technological actants, at the intersection of journalism and technology.

NOTES  1  We emphasize ‘digital” to acknowledge that analog technologies, such as the manual typewriter, have long histories in journalism, ones that fall outside the scope of this analysis. For a handbook of digital journalism, it is presupposed that digital technologies are the primary interest in this discussion. And so, unless otherwise noted, all references to ‘technology” in this work refer to digital forms of technology.  2  It should be noted that media management scholars have long studied the managers and business concerns of media companies (see, for example, International Journal on Media Management), including specific studies of news broadcasters (e.g., Küng-Shankleman, 2000) and the duality management of newspapers (Achtenhagen & Raviola, 2009). Nevertheless, few studies place businesspeople in connection with other social actors such as journalists and technologists.  3  The description of the roles of technologists in news media organizations, in this section and elsewhere in this chapter, is based in part on the authors’ fieldwork at American, British and Swedish news media organizations.

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Ryfe, D. M. (2012) Can journalism survive? An inside look at American newsrooms. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press. Schmitz Weiss, A. and Domingo, D. (2010) Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice. New Media & Society, 12(7): 1156–71. doi:10.1177/1461444809360400 Shoemaker, P. J. and Reese, S. D. (2014) Mediating the message in the 21st century: A media sociology perspective. New York: Routledge. Singer, J. B. (1998) Online journalists: Foundations for research into their changing roles. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(1). Singer, J. B. (2005) The political j-blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices. Journalism, 6(2): 173–98. doi:10.1177/1464884905051009 Singer, J. B. (2007) Contested autonomy: Professional and popular claims on journalistic norms. Journalism Studies, 8(1): 79–95. doi:10.1080/14616700601056866 Singer, J. B. (2014) User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space. New Media & Society, 16(1): 55–73. doi:10.1177/1461444813477833 Singer, J.B., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Hermida, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Zvi Reich and Marina Vujnovic (2011) Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Stavelin, E. (2014) Computational journalism: When journalism meets programming. The University of Bergen. Steensen, S. (2011) Online journalism and the promises of new technology: A critical review and look ahead. Journalism Studies, 12(3): 311–27. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2010.501151 Tameling, K. and Broersma, M. (2013) Deconverging the newsroom: Strategies for newsroom change and their influence on journalism practice. International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 19–34. doi:10.1177/ 1748048512461760 Tandoc, E. C. (2014) Journalism is twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping. New Media & Society. doi:10.1177/1461444814530541 Tandoc, E. C. and Takahashi, B. (2014) Playing a crusader role or just playing by the rules?

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Role conceptions and role inconsistencies among environmental journalists. Journalism, 15(7): 889–907. doi:10.1177/ 1464884913501836 Usher, N. (2014) Making news at the New York Times. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Weber, W. and Rall, H. (2013) ‘We are journalists’: Production practices, attitudes and a case study of the New York Times newsroom. In W. Weber, M. Burmester, and R. Tille (eds), Interactive Infografken. pp. 161–72. Westlund, O. (2011) Cross-media news work: Sensemaking of the mobile media (r)evolution. University of Gothenburg. Westlund, Oscar (2012) Producer-centric vs. participation-centric: On the shaping of mobile media. Northern Lights, 10(1): 107–21. Westlund, O. (2013) Mobile news: A review and model of journalism in an age of mobile media. Digital Journalism, 1(1): 6–26. doi: 10.1080/21670811.2012.740273

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24 Spaces and Places of News Consumption Chris Peters

INTRODUCTION Many of the success stories about the rise and power of digital media technologies in contemporary journalism bring to light how people’s increasing ease to document the world around them in turn increases the possibilities to see certain places at certain crucial times. These developments have prominent implications for news production, and much of the literature on the digitalization of journalism focuses upon how new media technologies change established relationships and power dynamics between news organizations and audiences. This is especially the case when it comes to the rise of manifest game-changing innovations, such as blogs, user-generated content (UGC) hubs, crowdsourcing, Facebook, and Twitter, to name but a few, and many studies have helped broaden our understandings of how audiences – often in their role as citizens – increasingly find their way into news content (see Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Russell,

2011; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveria, 2012; Allan, 2013; Vis, 2013). In recent years increasing attention has also been placed not just on the content people provide to news outlets but on the changing audience practices made possible by the digital ‘revolution’ of journalism. Scholars have issued similar versions of a provocative but persuasive claim that an audience or user ‘turn’ is necessary in digital Journalism Studies, with a corresponding plea for going beyond a basic focus on changing patterns of use to consider novel meanings and experiences people associate with journalism (see Madianou, 2009; Bird, 2011; Loosen and Schmidt, 2012; Costera Meijer, 2013; Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2014; Heikkilä and Ahva, 2014; Picone, Courtois and Paulussen, 2014). This chapter aims to articulate the significance of this perspective for digital Journalism Studies, placing special attention on the role space plays in this equation. The central argument it advances is that thinking about news audiences requires thinking about the places

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of news consumption. It outlines the conceptual issues at play when thinking ‘spatially’ about the news in a digital era as well as highlighting practical areas for future research. The continual reshaping of news audiences’ consumption practices is a highly complex, uneven, and contingent process and if we want to understand much of what makes journalism meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only what they consume, how and when, but also where. Simply put, the places and spaces of news consumption matter, and matter significantly, for how people choose, interpret, and attend to the news. More broadly, we can say that changing spatiotemporal configurations of media use facilitated by technological development tend to change how information is communicated, and is oftentimes associated with significant sociocultural transformations (Meyrowitz, 1986; Silverstone, 1999). In this sense, it would not go too far to say that the modification and emergence of different spaces of consumption accompanying the rise of new media technologies changes what news is (Peters, 2012). This chapter outlines the gradual recognition of this in digital Journalism Studies (see Nyre, 2012; Schmitz Weiss, 2014; Peters, 2015), with an eye to highlighting pertinent research trajectories. It first explores how the everyday digital geographies of contemporary media, communication, and information flows intersect with the everywhere ‘lived’ geographies of individuals, and how this is changing as we move from an era of mass media consumption to digitalized media practices. It then outlines conceptual issues surrounding the spatial politics of news consumption, questions of geographic scale, mobile news use, and everyday life practices, employing insights from the ‘spatial turn’ in scholarship. Considering spatiotemporal transformations in everyday life provides a useful starting point for thinking about the changing places in which news is available, and the remainder of the chapter explores some of the more prominent of these, namely the

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home, workplace, public, and virtual spaces. Through these various discussions, this chapter hopes to raise awareness in terms of: how the individualized practices of consumption relate to collective spaces of public communication; how the spaces of news production– consumption–distribution pertain to social issues; the development of technology and the formation of new rituals of news use; and the structuring of everyday life through certain habits, places, and patterns of media consumption.

FROM MASS MEDIA CONSUMPTION TO DIGITAL MEDIA PRACTICES For the past couple decades digital eyewitness accounts have increasingly become a substantial part of news coverage and recurrently recast how we expect to see and make sense of different places that appear in the news. Digital technologies bring the unfamiliar close to home in a networked age and make the distant tangible in ever-present ways (Castells, 2011). This shift is indeed remarkable, and much valuable research in digital Journalism Studies has focussed upon how new media technologies allow news organizations to marshal immediate, first-hand experience from – depending on analytic stress – amateurs, users, ‘produsers’ or citizens in different possible places (see Bruns, 2005; Domingo et  al., 2008; Williams et  al., 2011; Kristensen and Mortensen, 2013). While the academic focus on how new media technologies allow different spaces of news to be collected, distributed and seen has been in the ascendancy, the inverse of this relationship has received far less attention. How, exactly, do digital technologies help shape the spaces of news audiences? Put another way, the rise of digital technologies allow the voices, visuals, and visceral reactions of those live and ‘on the scene’ to be transmitted to advantage, but the existence of new media also fundamentally changes what

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those spaces are and how they are potentially experienced by those present (see Allan and Peters, 2015). Of course, it is not merely ‘newsworthy’ spaces which are affected by such presences, commonplace settings such as the home and restaurants are also transformed by the way we interact with new technologies to consume media (the ‘please turn off your cell phone’ request at the cinema is but one of countless examples). More broadly, we might say that one of the fundamental debates in media studies, which resonates and has popular appeal – from the alarmist (Postman, 1993; Putnam, 2000) to the celebratory (Shirky, 2008; Tapscott, 2008) – is about the disruptive potential of new media technologies on different (social) spaces and the ways changing media environments influence how information is communicated. Yet when we tend to think about the impact of such devices in terms of the journalism-audience relationship, the emphasis is generally placed on how the journalism industry is adapting, leveraging, and dealing with the potentialities of new media and the challenges these practices present vis-à-vis their audiences rather than the other way around (see Chung, 2007; Thurman, 2008; Peters, 2009; Anderson, 2011; Witschge, 2011; Lewis, 2012, Tandoc, 2014).1 There is nothing wrong with this, of course, as how news outlets view (and measure) the audience is critical to the craft and the way journalism is produced. However, audiences’ experiences – including their spatiotemporal, situational configurations of news use in new media environments – are underemphasized. To sum: there is a general consensus that digital technologies change how journalism can be consumed by audiences, which has dramatic impacts in terms of the economic, informational, storytelling and experiential realities of journalism (see also Peters and Broesma, 2013; Broersma and Peters, 2014). But there is a tendency to focus more on how journalism adapts to these possibilities rather than on how audiences act upon them, if they do so at all. The naming of academic

disciplines is telling in this respect: the object of Journalism Studies is commonly journalism, while the uses people make of media and its associated phenomenology is often left for Media or Audience Studies. This points to the fact that that we currently risk ignoring much of what grounds the financial viability and democratic remit of journalism. Audiences’ spatiotemporallycontextualized consumption practices have always been important but their miscellaneous character may seem particularly remarkable in a digital era where the ‘deritualization’ of audiences’ former habits is so palpable (Broersma and Peters, 2013). Something has surely changed and journalism is scrambling to adapt. That being said, while there are indeed notable differences between the era of mass media consumption and digitalized media, the seductive appeal of novel technological change should not be emphasized at the expense of a broader conceptual point this chapter raises, which relates to both eras with equal force. The point, quite simply, is that it is beneficial to think of the interweaving relationships between spatiotemporal context, material affordances, and social norms if we want a rich understanding of the experiences of consuming news. Media use in general, and news use more specifically, is a relational practice, bringing humans in contact with nonhuman technologies that perform a fairly remarkable translation on our behalf; they take all the information the designer (journalists and editors) have decided we might want to know and they inscribe this information into a durable material package (a newspaper, radio program, television broadcast, and so on). As audiences, the materiality of news prescribes how we might possibly subscribe to consuming it (it is handy to listen to the radio in the car but less so to read a newspaper) and this is further associated with social norms that are formed around these practices (see Latour, 1988).2 For instance, reading the newspaper at breakfast before dashing out to work may be fine with one’s family but picking it up and reading it

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while your boss is trying to speak to you is likely not. So while much has transformed, the fundamental nature of news consumption as a social, spatiotemporal (i.e. situated) practice is still unchanged. A useful summary of this interrelation between the mass and digital eras is offered by Sheller (2015: 14, emphasis in original) who notes that in this respect, the recent rise of instantaneous, mobile news may not be as novel as we tend to think. Newspapers are crucial to understanding the development of what we now call ‘mobile interfaces’ (such as smartphones). […] we should not forget the cultural histories of newspapers being read during ‘in-between’ times of transit […] The newspaper broadsheet (and especially tabloid) was itself a mobile object designed to be carried through the streets and read on trains, platforms, or subway cars, not simply in isolation, but in a connected social space. […] Thus there is a double relation within the interface between the more interiororiented relation between the reader and the information they are accessing, which can occur in various locations and during travel, and the more exterior-oriented relation between readerequipped-with-mobile-object and a surrounding social space in which they interact both with the body and with the physical and social space.

Sheller’s argument points to a need for specificity in outlining change, especially when it comes to how audiences make sense of the changing devices and affordances through which news can be obtained. She insightfully argues that a key distinction for audiences between the era of analogue newspapers and online and mobile news practices is primarily in terms of how space-time is perceived and felt: ‘ambient flows of news re-situate how we understand where we are, who we are connected with, and what our present moment actually is. The now-ness of news, in other words, offers a new sense of the present’ (2015: 24). News organizations have tried to respond to such changes by marketing their benefits; buzzwords like interactivity, participation, personalization, push notifications and so on speak to outlets trying to manage the spatiotemporal flexibility and uncertainty beget by new media technologies by translating them

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into something they hope audiences will perceive to advantage – a greater say and presence in, and immediacy of, the news. Such observations point to the challenges of studying news audiences and possible shifts in a digital era, for we need to account for, among other considerations: the spatiotemporal contexts of consumption; engagement with the information itself (‘decoding’, in Hall’s [1980] classic sense); the emotional experience of involvement from engaging with the text (Peters, 2011; 2013); and the feelings and preferences more broadly associated with media devices (Madianou and Miller, 2013). By way of summary, we might identify a few prominent differences that help conceptualize the changing audience and alert us to some sensitizing concerns as we shift from mass media consumption to digital media practices: 1 Audiences are increasingly viewed by advertisers and media developers not as a mass aggregate but as individualized targets whose preferences can be calculated (Turow, 2012). 2 The media industry and academic attention also increasingly shifts from a ‘mass communication’ to ‘participation’ paradigm to conceptualize audiences (Livingstone, 2013). 3 News outlets correspondingly begin to emphasize a technological discourse that focuses on audience or user interaction rather than citizen engagement and being part of an informed collective (Peters and Witschge, 2015). 4 Former relatively stable and somewhat predictable patterns of news consumption, highly contingent upon distribution strategies that anchored the possibilities for news use both spatially and temporally, become fragmented and harder to predict (see also Napoli, 2011). 5 Loyalty to individual outlets or a single device is challenged; multi-platform news consumption increasingly becomes the norm (Purcell et  al., 2010). 6 News rituals transform, in unpredictable ways. The very idea of an audience and what they value constantly shifts and is highly contextual.

These changes can be further contextualized based on the established literature on news

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audiences but what this section has hopefully illustrated is that understanding the significance of the spaces and places of news audiences, as we move from an era of mass media to digital consumption practices, requires buttressing by other theoretical concepts and methodological approaches as well (see also Chapter 3, Chapter 12, Chapter 21, Chapter 35 and Chapter 36).

CONCEPTUALIZING THE SPACES OF NEWS AUDIENCES When it comes to the spaces of news audiences it is worthwhile first mentioning that the digital era is an age partially defined by the ‘time-space compression’ brought about by technological change. Harvey (1989: 240) notes that we are now living through ‘processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves’. In terms of news audiences, this points to how a sped-up age may cause people to rethink how and where they want to experience and get a handle on information, how they then interpret it in conjunction with the medium through which it is transmitted, and what values and worth they place on these different opportunities in the course of their everyday life. Space and time accordingly must be thought of together, on equal analytic footing, as part of what defines the ‘situation’ of news use. This runs against the grain of academic inquiry, where space has been ‘treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical. Time, on the other hand was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic’ (Foucault, 1980: 70). Journalism Studies is not immune from this tendency and it is prudent to note from the outset that a conceptual overview based on a literature review of ‘the spaces of news audiences’, literally interpreted, would be quite short. However, we can certainly ‘read’ spatial thinking into many accounts that have

looked into the changing practices of digital news audiences and reinterpret them in this light. But the point remains, ‘if we want to understand much of what makes media use meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only its everydayness, but its everywhereness as well’ (Peters, 2015: 1, emphasis in original). Of course this is challenging as ‘it is often much more difficult for researchers to identify, define, and study situational definitions than it is for the average citizen to navigate them’ (Meyrowitz, 1986: 24). In this regard, a fruitful starting point might be outlining how the ‘spatial turn’ in scholarship helps us to better appreciate the complexity and resonance of space and place.3 Thrift (2003: 85) notes that, As with terms like ‘society’ and ‘nature’, space is not a commonsense external background to human and social action. Rather, it is the outcome of a series of highly problematic temporary settlements that divide and connect things up into different kinds of collectives which are slowly provided with the means which render them durable and sustainable.

Building on the definition above, the influential formulation of Henri Lefebvre is also worth mentioning for the purposes of beginning to ‘think spatially’. Lefebrve (1991: 38–9) notes three concepts key to grasping space, which attempt to encapsulate the intersection of its physical, mental, and social aspects. In simplified terms, these are: 1 Spatial practice: The routines, movement, and surroundings as individuals go about everyday life in society and orient themselves within it. 2 Representations of space: The conception and planning of space by planners, engineers, technocrats, and so forth. 3 Representational spaces: Our thoughts and ideas of spaces, their associated images, imaginaries, and symbols.

Lefebvre’s rather astute point is that to adequately understand space, we must always

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consider the interrelation of these three aspects over time. Similarly, I would argue, to appreciate the significance of media for communicative practices (including news consumption), it is necessary to consider the multifaceted aspects of space. For instance, a systematic understanding of how a technological development – say the internet – impacts journalism demands assessing not only its impact on how the news is collected and disseminated in a planned manner (representations of space), but also how it changes audiences’ everyday patterns of consumption and situational orientation to news use (spatial practice), and how it alters the possible ways we imagine different locales, regions, and ambient spheres (representational space). Indeed, the insights of Lefebvre and other spatial theorists mesh well with some of the observations from the foundational work of Roger Silverstone (1994; 1999) that helped establish media studies as an academic field. He notes, The frameworks from within which we watch and listen, muse and remember, are defined in part by where we are in the world, and where we think we are, and sometimes too, of course, by where we might wish to be. The spaces of media engagement, the spaces of media experience, are both real and symbolic. They are dependent on location, and on the routines that define our positions in time and space (Silverstone, 1999: 86).

Likewise, David Morley’s (1986) pioneering work on the familial functions of television in the household is a highly spatialized account of experience. Yet despite these and other notable works than emphasize the significance of space for media audiences/consumers, bridging insights from (Human) Geography and Media/Communication Studies is still relatively undeveloped from a conceptual standpoint (Adams and Jansson, 2012).4 The challenge then is how best to apply this sort of ‘spatial thinking’ to contemporary, digitalized news consumption. One starting point is to pose questions that embrace its

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complexity and which reject from the outset conceptualizing the spaces of news audiences as steady locations in which ‘action’, such as news consumption, occurs or passes through. The spaces of news consumption are much more than that: they are political, combine a multiplicity of geographic scales, are both mobile and facilitate a sense of mobility, and help shape everyday life experiences.

Politics and space As is perhaps clear from above, the idea behind much spatial thinking is not politically neutral. A significant underlying basis of the established literature points the fact that ‘We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology’ (Soja, 1989: 6). More generally, we could say this is the ‘why it matters’ aspect of advocating for an attention to space. If we accept that spaces are sociallyconstructed, and lived in, then almost by definition they will be political. This is at the heart of Smith’s (2008) work on the uneven development seen under capitalism – political decisions do not just have certain geographic outcomes, geographies help political desires and decisions to be sustained. Seen in this light, ghettos and gentrified neighbourhoods are not unfortunate accidents, they are spatially-ordered ways of living that distinguish between groups and access to resources. Similarly, ways of viewing the world resonate with these politicized spatial aspects. So what are we to make of this when it comes to the spaces of news audiences? For starters, we can think of the communities in which news is consumed. Community, like space, is not only a locative descriptor but also a political one. Banaji and Cammaerts’ (2015) study of European youth notes that those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods,

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who see their locality or cultural space stigmatized in the news, are also generally more likely to have negative views of journalism, are less likely to consume it, and have less material interaction with news products in the spheres they pass through. Similarly, Dickens, Couldry and Fotopoulou’s (2015) study of the practices and motivations of unpaid community reporters in the UK observes that dissatisfaction with local news coverage spurred many of them on to practice journalism, as a way to enhance positive experiences of their geographic situation through the materially-grounded practices of newsmaking. We might think of the role news consumption plays as part of a broader ‘public connection’ (see Couldry et al., 2007; Swart et al., 2016) and in this regard the constellation of media one consumes is contextualized in terms of the communal spaces it represents and the civic spaces it allows one to orient toward. This is the case whether we are speaking of the local, regional, national, or global level.

Scale and space A related notion is the idea of scale, one of the more convoluted but ubiquitous concepts in Human Geography. Scale speaks to facets of size (such as administrative divisions, like counties or provinces), level (local, regional, national) and the relational qualities – both tangible and semiotic – between these (for example, urban versus rural). There is a socio-spatial emphasis embedded in the concept, as ‘Scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world – local, regional, national and global. It is instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents’ (Marston, 2000: 220). In this respect, the politics of space, mentioned in the previous section, align closely with questions of scale. However, in this chapter they have been kept separate as scale speaks to how differences in

the association of human-spatial configurations and different levels are potentially experienced, and how they are oftentimes layered upon each other in moments that news is accessed and consumed. Adding to this, new media technologies tend to further create divisions which are inherently spatial. As Norris (2001) notes, differences exist on the level of a global digital divide (access in industrialized and developing countries), a social divide (between information rich and poor within nations), and democratic divide (those who use digital tools to engage civically versus those who do not). There is a corresponding interest in scale in Journalism Studies, typically centred around globalization and how it changes the news production process. Cottle (2009) summarizes the dominant contrasting foci in this respect as a negative outlook which considers the cultural imperialism and global dominance of large (Western) multinational news outlets versus a more positive, democraticnetworked viewpoint that looks at the spread of a global public sphere. Both of these emphases implicate an audience subject to scalar influences, whether to pessimistic or optimistic ends. We might build further on these observations if we start not only from the prospective of globalization, technological capacity, ownership of digital networks, and the effects these possibly have but from how audiences actualize and embody these divergent levels in practice. A consideration of scale points to a multiplicity of cotemporaneous spatial associations: there is the straightforward ‘plottable’ location where media use takes place and its accompanying socio-spatial characteristics; hierarchies and geographic echelons contained within the story itself; the varied spatial levels in the structures of communication; and a person’s general orientation to the world. For instance, Jansson and Lindell (2015) stress that different macro and micro aspects of geographic scale may simultaneously orient people differently based on a complex spatial-communication nexus, such that ‘the very same technological

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affordances that enable media users to expand their views towards cosmos and the distant other (if they have any such ambitions) are the affordances that may tie people closer to the hearth’ (2015: 83, emphasis in original). A consideration of scale accordingly points us to the assorted range of spatial considerations shaped by communication. The rise of mobile communication complicates this process even further.

Mobility and space Wireless communication technology has spread ‘around the planet faster than any previous communication technology to date’ leading to, amongst other shifts: an emergence of mobile youth culture; a transformation of language by texting; a shift in socio-political mobilization, especially outside formal politics; and shifting practices and conceptualizations of time and space (Castells et al., 2004: 1–3). This rapid uptake in personal uses of mobile technology has been accompanied by a corresponding uptick in academic attention to the inchoate practices surrounding the introduction and integration of mobile phones. This has led to what some call the ‘mobility turn’ in scholarship, which focuses on ‘both the largescale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life’ (Hannam et al., 2006: 1). While earlier studies tended to focus on fairly instrumental uses of mobile technology, more recent theorizing on mobilities has broadened focus to consider three related ‘analytical prisms’ to understand its use in everyday life, namely: ‘environment/place; movement/practice; [and] perception/sensory embodied experience’ (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013: 683). The relevance of mobile technology for understanding the different places of news audiences is fairly evident. Mobile technology

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creates ‘hybrid spaces’ wherein the possibility of an ‘always-on’ connection means that different places are conceived not just in terms of the immediate surroundings but in terms of the potential social and informational connections enabled by the internet – which has the effect of ‘enfolding remote contexts inside the present context’ (de Souza e Silva, 2006: 262). The idea of mobilities points to the flow and movement of media use as a central reconfiguring aspect of our spatial-social relationships. When it comes to digital Journalism Studies, more-and-more has been made of the potentiality and challenges of mobile devices for production and citizen-based content production; however, when audiences’ uses of mobile technology are addressed, studies to date tend to focus more narrowly on perceived use (for a useful overview see Westlund, 2013). In this respect, it might be fair to say that up till now we are only scratching the surface of the complexity of mobile news consumption practices, typically relying on survey-based research that focuses more narrowly on how frequently mobiles are said to be used to access news, by what demographics, and how this correlates to usage of other media (see Mitchell and Rosenstiel, 2012). While such statistics give part of the picture they are limited to the extent they can help us understand the full significance of mobile media, not only in terms of movement but also when considered in conjunction with devices’ geo-locational capacities. Goggin, Martin and Dwyer (2015: 44) perceptively note that the possibly of locative news, is surely a new way of marshalling, mediating, and making sense of place; evidenced in the new kinds of information created through projects of emplacement, and by the movement in and through places by objects, technologies, and users. Thus understood locative news research moves beyond the narrowly technological, to encompass the significant epistemological, phenomenological, and social implications of our mobile locational encounters.

In this regard, the increasingly mobile opportunities for news audiences potentially

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bring about different ways of acting, thinking, and conceptualizing communicative flows, affects, and spatial contexts in everyday life.

Everyday life and space Discussions of everyday life often become tantamount to calendar-based observations of habit, what we do over-and-over again on a daily basis. While part of the equation, the idea of everyday life has greater resonance when we go beyond such a linear notion to also consider the values of ‘everydayness’ we associate with it. The concept itself, as Highmore (2002) notes, is centred on a tension between boredom and mystery and how processes of rationalization take the exceptional and make it mundane over time. This paradox inherent in the concept allows us to think through a user-centred perspective on changes beget by new media, paralleling what Heinderyckx (2014) calls the ‘digital enchantment’ of technology. Speaking in general terms, there is something exciting, almost magical about digital technologies when we first encounter them. However, ‘enchantment’, Heinderyckx reminds, can also mean being under the spell of something. Technology vastly increases the pace and sheer scale of information available, which can tend to overwhelm and make us overlook that which does not immediately pertain. In other words, initial novelty gives way to strategies of control, which we create for ourselves or, potentially, are engineered into the technology (controlling our Facebook news feed, blocking certain Twitter followers, and so on). These realizations point to the necessity of listening to users’ valuebased assessments of digital media and how they construct social norms around their practices, if we wish to understand its impact and particularities. In this regard, coming back to an earlier formulation, the material affordances of digital technology, the places and times we use

them, and social norms surrounding practice all interact through a series of value-based, everyday processes which shape news audiences’ experiences, preferences, and patterns of use. Much of the emphasis in the emerging area of digital Journalism Studies is on the latter when it comes to audiences, employing surveys that focus on digital technology as it pertains to people’s perceived/ declared daily and weekly news use. In the rare instance when space is considered alongside this (see Newman and Levy, 2014; Wolf and Schnauber, 2014) it is generally only as a possible correlate. Such studies are a valuable starting point but do tend toward descriptive accounts, can suffer from over-declaration, and may gloss over central contextual aspects of everyday digital use. Costera Meijer and Kormelink’s (2014: 12) summary of 10 years of quantitative and qualitative-based studies of Dutch news audiences hints at this complexity, finding ‘16 user practices that differ in function, impact and rhythm: reading, watching, viewing, listening, checking, snacking, monitoring, scanning, searching, clicking, linking, sharing, liking, recommending, commenting and voting’. Such distinctions alert us to the fact that a comprehensive look at the spaces of news audiences must be, almost by necessity, focused on the instabilities associated with the lived, material integration of digital media. Consistent with most ‘new’ technologies, we tend to experience them as most disruptive at the outset, before they gradually become habituated as expedient devices in our everyday lives.

DIGITAL PLACES OF CONSUMPTION – HOME, WORK, PUBLIC AND VIRTUAL SPACES For the remainder of this chapter, having outlined broad conceptual concerns, it might be productive to briefly highlight some tangible places of news audiences and key questions in terms of future research agendas.

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Cresswell’s (2009: 1) description of the tripartite components of the more bounded notion of place is useful in this regard: Place is a meaningful site that combines location, locale, and sense of place. Location refers to an absolute point in space with a specific set of coordinates and measurable distances from other locations. Location refers to the ‘where’ of place. Locale refers to the material setting for social relations – the way a place looks. Locale includes the buildings, streets, parks, and other visible and tangible aspects of a place. Sense of place refers to the more nebulous meanings associated with a place: the feelings and emotions a place evokes.

The sheer ubiquity and personal proximity of new media devices increasingly means experiencing multiple places simultaneously and continuously and it is still unclear to what extent this impacts our perception and experience of information, the ways we communicate, the places we traverse in everyday lives, and the world in general. In this regard, four key places – the home, work, public and virtual spaces – are useful entry points to consider in digital journalism. Focusing on these places raises a host of pertinent questions such as: How do familiar places like work and the home change from the lived materiality of new technologies used to access news? What about more abstract but supposedly social aggregates like communities or neighbourhoods (see Mersey, 2009)? Do these change alongside non-relational, ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995) like airports, commuter transport, motorways, supermarkets, and shopping centres? Does the ubiquitous availability of journalism as we move about our environs change the meaning of news and/or our sense of place? Many intriguing questions remain to be raised pertaining to the complex integration of news media use for audiences – as both users and citizens, though not necessarily concurrently – within everyday and ‘everywhere’ life (Peters, 2015). Typically, in social thought, the home and the workplace are treated as a near-binary opposition and there are indeed substantial differences. One is traditionally considered

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private, one is public. One is intimate, the other far more impersonal. The significance we make of these distinctions has been considered crucial to situational role expectations, practices and performances in everyday life (Goffman, 1959). However, the uses of electronic media are often accused of blurring these boundaries. Within such claims is sometimes the suggestion that this blurring means physical locations no longer matter, which seems a misguided overstatement that puts us in the precarious position of embracing an over-compensatory shift – moving from under-appreciating or ignoring the spaces of news consumption to rendering them virtual, relative and thus of equally little value. As Moores (2004) notes, just because boundaries have been opened up by electronic communication this does not necessarily mean we lose a sense of place; instead we might better consider digital media practices in terms of multiplying spaces and our sense of their interconnection. News audiences’ practices create situations where media settings overlay physical locations. In this sense, shifting consumption patterns in the home and the workplace do share a few common analytic factors. For one, they are sites (along with public transit) that have been frequently associated with distribution and consumption patterns for legacy media. Second, up till recently, they have been considered relatively stable in terms of their configurations and patterns – put otherwise, media use in these places typically occurred in relatively predictable spatiotemporal configurations although this constancy is changing. Third, options for media use in both have multiplied extensively, and these spheres now often overlap. Finally, these sites are often associated with social functions of news. We might think how we’d now update Jensen’s (1995) study of television news, which found that it served contextual, often gendered uses within the household, led to familiar routines, served a connective function for the viewer in their various social roles, and gave a sense of diversionary pleasure.

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Schrøder (2015) has recently looked at how such patterns are shifting in the digital age and how these social-situational habits and preferences may stabilize into ‘worthwhile’ news repertoires for audiences. Such studies usefully build on Silverstone’s (1994: 3) deconstruction of the paradigm that abstracted ‘the dynamics of media reception from the social environment in which it takes place’, emphasizing the clear interrelation that daily media habits and routines play in helping order familiar spaces and providing a sense of continuity. This points to new patterns – new continuities, if you will – that are emerging for digital news audiences. Dimmick et al. (2011) have demonstrated that the romance and feelings of excitement initially associated with having mobile news technology may be slowly giving way to ambivalence and routine, finding that news consumption on mobiles tends to take place during the ‘interstices’ of everyday life. Often these occur in public spaces, and on-the-go (Westlund, 2008; Peters, 2012), which indicates the increasing possibilities for, but also complexity of, news audiences’ consumption practices. Media use and availability are increasingly ubiquitous, an ever-present ‘mediaspace’ that encompasses ‘both the kinds of spaces created by media, and the effects that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialize in everyday life. Like cyberspace, the kind of space defined by this concept is a curious, multidimensional one’ (Couldry and McCarthy, 2004: 2). Cyberspace and medispace are increasingly interlinked when it comes to news audiences and their practices; the information shared and broadcast by individuals, redistributed by news organizations, and reinterpreted by audiences is more than just user-generated content. Contributory practices in virtual spheres recurrently recreate what different places are. For instance, the crowdmapping technology pioneered by Ushahidi allows audiences and news organizations to visualize often dangerous spaces in

a virtually safe environment during newsworthy events. This is simultaneously refracted back to those nearby the scene itself, which possibly impacts behaviour and perception. This poignant example illustrates how virtual spaces overlay ‘real’ spaces and how such scalar influences impact those both present and absent. Similar themes are discussed by Papacharissi (2015: 36), who examines how new technologies not only shift news audiences experiences and sense of space, they also reproduce, geo-social, hybrid, and mediated environments [that] can be understood as elsewheres that presence alternative viewpoints, voices, and stories. For citizens, the liminal form of space is crucial, as it permits them to access content in transition and find their own place in the story, alongside journalists, who already possess an institutionally assigned place in the story.

Hermida (2010) touches on similar themes when he discusses the contributional qualities afforded to audiences-as-citizens on Twitter and the rise of ambient journalism. These related observations point to the complexity of speaking of the different places of news audiences, per se. While the idea of produsage may overstate the case dramatically, looking to how different (virtual and physical) places overlap – and the corresponding possibilities afforded by shifting temporal, spatial, and interactional qualities of new(s) media – is imperative if we wish to capture the diverse meanings, connections, structures and experiences that audiences create out of the mediated content they consume, engage with, and potentially augment.

CONCLUSION This chapter has outlined conceptual considerations around space, place and location that point to possibilities for richer accounts in digital Journalism Studies of news audiences’ spatiotemporal, social, and

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materially-situated practices. In this sense, the meaning and practices of situated moments of news use, in any of the many places we can now ‘get’ news, are moulded by the possibilities beget by digital technologies and structures, and bring multiple locations together at the tips of our fingers. Of course such thinking, which conceptualizes places as layered, textured environments created by social interaction, human intervention, and technological extension in the broadest sense, also posits some demanding questions: •• How does news use, as separate or distinct from other media use, fit into this broader equation? •• If news audiences are so evidently contextualized in terms of social, spatiotemporal and material conditions, how can we gain analytic purchase?

Even if we cannot answer these easily, with any luck regarding media use and lived media spaces as inextricably linked helps move digital Journalism Studies closer to a response. As Falkheimer and Jansson (2006: 9, emphasis in original) note, The implementation and appropriation of digital ICT networks blur the boundaries not only between geographical regions (households, cities, etc.), and between types of regions (local-global; privatepublic, etc.), but also between the dimensions that constitute regions themselves – such as material, symbolic and imaginary spaces. Accordingly, contemporary media studies must not only ‘cope’ with new spatial ambiguities. It is also the discipline that has as its very object of study the technological and cultural processes that produce spatial ambiguities.

Following this line of reasoning, advocating for the importance of the spaces of news audiences does not mean casting aside everything we know. Rather it points to increasing this as a key concern, especially if we want to understand the flow, material integration, and social significance of news and information consumption. In an increasingly complex mediascape, thinking ‘spatiotemporally’ helps us distinguish the unique from the routine, the extraordinary from the ordinary, and the significant from the mundane.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter was written as part of the research project ‘The New News Consumer: User-based Innovation to Meet Paradigmatic Change in News Use and Media Habits’, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and 10 leading news organizations. Details on the project – a collaboration between VU University Amsterdam and University of Groningen – can be found at: news-use.com.

NOTES  1  These studies should nonetheless be commended for attending to audiences, which do not possess the standing in Journalism Studies they likely should, given their centrality for journalism’s discursive claims, role perceptions, and financial preservation.  2  Exploration of the materiality of media devices and their interrelation with the spaces of news audiences is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, thinking through the association between humans and nonhuman artefacts, how these shape the immediate socio-spatial context, as well as the broader communicative culture could be fruitful.  3  Outlining the pivotal influences in Human Geography – the broader field much analysis in this chapter draws upon – goes far beyond its remit. A useful introduction is Hubbard and Kitchin (2010).  4  Adams and Jansson’s (2012) conceptual framework is instructive in this regard, specifying four interrelated analytic trajectories for studying questions of ‘communication geography’, namely: ‘representations’ (places in communication), ‘textures’ (communication in places), ‘connections’ (spaces in communication) and ‘structures’ (communication in spaces).

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25 News Institutions David M. Ryfe

Institutionalism, understood as the study of social ‘identit[ies] and [their] rules’ (March and Olsen, 2006: 675), is an old tradition. It stretches back to the very beginnings of the social sciences in the early twentieth century (see, for example, Rutherford, 2011; Stinchecombe, 1997). Mid-century social scientists rejected the approach in favor of more formal and predictive, and less historical and cultural, models of behavior. And so institutionalism fell out of favor. However, in the 1970s and 1980s it saw something of a renaissance, returning in the guise of ‘new institutionalism’ (Beyme, 2008; Meyer and Scott, 1983; Powell and Dimaggio, 1991). Since that time, its advocates have multiplied, and branches of the theory – rational, historical, and sociological – have appeared across the social sciences (Rhodes et. al., 2008). Some of these scholars have found their way to the study of journalism. Cook (1998) and Sparrow (1999) were the first to examine journalism through the lens of institutionalism, but many others have joined

them along the way (see, for example, Ryfe, 2006; Ryfe and Blach-Ørsten, 2011). Today, institutionalism is a widely recognized approach to the study of journalism. As a structural theory of organized action, institutionalism has a reputation for emphasizing the durability of identities and their rules. This reputation, I think, is fairly won. After all, a key point of an institution is that it is relatively resistant to change. Otherwise, it would not be an institution. Most studies of social institutions stress their durability. This certainly has been true in the study of news institutions (see, for example, Lowrey, 2011; Reich, 2014; Ryfe, 2012). Part of what I wish to do in this essay is to explain why this is so, that is, why, from an institutional perspective, identities and rules associated with news production persist even during the present digital revolution in news. However, if institutionalism is to have a place in the study of digital journalism, we must demonstrate its capacity to explain change as well (see, for example, Peters

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et. al., 2005). For while it is true that much of journalism has remained the same, it is also true that digital technologies are changing some aspects, at least, of news production. As many ‘third wave’ institutionalists have insisted (see, for example, Lowndes and Roberts, 2013: 40), institutionalism cannot only be about the durability of institutions. It must also capture the way in which old institutions are challenged or repudiated, and new institutions are invented. So the other part of what I wish to do in this essay is to show just this, that as a theory institutionalism does not necessarily predict persistence. In fact, institutionalism can offer a powerful explanation for how and why changes in identities and rules of journalism occur. To my mind, the key is to gain a proper understanding of a rule – a basic unit of analysis for institutionalists. In what follows, I will focus less on the macro-story told by institutional theory – on path dependency and institutional regimes, critical junctures and punctuated equilibrium – than on its inner structure. Which is to say, I will focus on the nature of social rules. I will pay special attention to the distinction, and the relation between, two kinds of rules, regulative and constitutive. It is here, I think, that we can begin to build an institutional theory of change within journalism. The essay is organized into three parts: an elaboration of institutional rules; a demonstration of why the rules of journalism remain relatively persistent in the age of digital journalism; and finally, a discussion of change in digital journalism, where it is coming from and what it means.

IDENTITIES AND RULES In the course of my research, I have asked many journalists what journalism is, and they almost always respond with a description of what journalists do (Ryfe, 2012). A journalist is someone who does this, and this, and this.

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To the extent that ‘this, this, and this’ are recurring patterns of behavior, we may call them institutions (March and Olsen, 1989). Institutions are nothing more than patterns of behavior stitched together as a series of rules: when producing the news, one must do this, and then this, and then this… The world is pre-fashioned for reporters in this way, organized into patterns of behavior (and attendant rules) that have been etched into the situations they routinely face in the course of doing journalism. Implicit within these situations are preferred roles or identities. When I take up a pattern of behavior, I also take up identities associated with that pattern. When others see me behaving like a journalist, for instance, they naturally assume that I am, in fact, a journalist. Importantly, I begin to see myself in this way as well. For example, as part of my ethnography of newspaper newsrooms, I worked two days per week as a ‘cub’ reporter (Ryfe, 2012). Early on, the behavior seemed foreign to me. I felt strange identifying myself as a reporter to potential sources. The form of writing felt odd, and I had almost no news judgment. By the end of the six months, however, the patterns began to seem familiar. As I increasingly acted like a reporter, so I felt more comfortable being a reporter. Identity and the rules of social situations come hand in hand. This is why, when I ask reporters what journalism is, they naturally describe to me what journalists do. We will return to this point in our discussion of digital journalism. Here, it is enough to note that institutions provide individuals a sense of ontological security. We might ask why such patterns of behavior appear? In part, this is a chicken and egg problem. The fact that humans organize their social world into readily identifiable patterns of behavior is an observable fact with no clear explanation. It may be rooted in a biological instinct for social patterns, or a psychological need for order and stability. For our purposes, let us assume that patterns of behavior (e.g., institutions) exist, and restrict

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our discussion to the question of why new patterns ever come into being. For institutionalists, the answer is a fourpart story. First, individuals face a situation in which prior patterns of behavior no longer work so well. This may happen in one of several ways (see, for example, Sanders, 2008). Society may shift in a dramatic fashion – a war occurs, a revolution happens, or a new technology is invented. Institutionalists call such moments ‘critical junctures’ because they are moments of crisis when old patterns may be abruptly swept away. Old patterns may also decline incrementally. They may lose their meaning slowly, over time, as generations of individuals increasingly fail to see the old routines as relevant. So-called ‘social entrepreneurs’ may also take a pattern of behavior common in one part of society and introduce it into another, effectively pollinating one social situation with the rules of another. By whatever process, new situations arise which weaken the hold of old institutions over people. A second part of the process is that people invent new responses to these situations. They tweak old patterns; they borrow from patterns of behavior that seem to work in other social situations; they invent wholly new patterns of behavior. Eventually, a pattern of behavior emerges that seems to fit the new situation reasonably well. At this point, a third part of the story happens: people mimic success. If the pattern of behavior seems to work for someone else, it might also work for me. Finally, over time, as the new pattern sweeps across a social field, material and symbolic resources pool around it. This can mean anything from status or prestige to real capital. As these resources grow, the institutional field may congeal into what institutionalists call a ‘regime’, a set of rules that lends a field of activity stability for a period of time. Moreover, people may accumulate resources that pool around institutions, and so gain investments in these patterns of behavior. Over time, institutions take on

a veneer of common sense. Behavior that once might have seemed odd and ill fitting becomes simply what one does. Modern journalism composes one such institutional regime. From about 1920 onward, this journalism consisted of a set of mostly stable institutional rules. To my knowledge, no one has cataloged all of these institutions. Surely however, they include the elements Høyer (2005) has referred to as the ‘modern news paradigm:’ news defined as the gathering of facts about discrete events; values of newsworthiness (timeliness, immediacy, impact, proximity, relevance, and so on); the inverted pyramid style of writing; the interview; and objectivity. Some version of these practices appears everywhere that journalism has gained a foothold in society. Others exist as well, but for purposes of our discussion these elements will suffice. Pause for a moment to consider how reporters learn to behave in this way, that is, to gather facts, to determine the newsworthiness of events, to write in the inverted pyramid style, and so on. The answer is that they are shown by example. Another reporter (sometimes in a newsroom, sometimes in a journalism class) presents them with examples of facts properly gathered and news paragraphs well written. Importantly, our fledgling reporter is not presented with formal rules: ‘one must write a paragraph according to this rule!’ This is so for two reasons. First, the rules of journalism have never been codified, agreed upon, and formalized. Textbooks exist, of course, but they are filled with examples, not formal rules. And second, even had they been formalized, the number of instances to which the rules might be applied far exceed their reach. The rules are inadequate to the messy world in which journalists must ply their trade. Any particular journalist might apply the same rule to different situations, and any two journalists might apply different rules to the same situation. A necessary gap exists then, between a rule and its application. Implicit in this gap is the notion that we generalize from an example to other

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instances. We are first shown examples of how to act appropriately, in ways that others in a community will recognize as instances of the behavior. We then set out in the world, generalizing from the examples we have been shown to the new situations we face. To accomplish this, we have no need of rules. Just as language users learn to speak without knowing the rules of language use, so journalists learn to report the news without knowing the rules of news production. It is incorrect, therefore, to say that in producing news, journalists follow the rules of news production. This raises a question: if rules do not guide behavior, then what use are they? Return for a moment to our fledgling journalist who has been taught how to report the news. She knows what sorts of events are newsworthy. She has learned how to gather facts about those events, how to write them up into news stories, and so on. Much like a cell replicates, this reporter then reproduces these actions everyday, over and over again. She is not following rules; she is simply doing journalism. If she is a crime reporter, she produces ‘murder of the day’ stories. If she is a court reporter, she writes stories about the most recent trials. And much like cell reproduction, occasionally, she may make a mistake. The word ‘mistake’ may be strong. I mean by it that she may do something out of the ordinary, unusual, or outside convention. She may, for instance, fail to gather enough facts or gather the wrong facts. Notice that the mistake made is more in the way of, ‘doing something with which others in the community may disagree or not understand’. She cannot know she has made a mistake until someone calls on her to account for her actions. The rules of journalism are a natural response to this call to account for behavior. Suppose, for example, someone challenges the facts our journalist has gathered. ‘These aren’t facts,’ this person may say. ‘They are nothing more than opinion!’ She may respond by saying something like ‘the information I have gathered is factual because it

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has been verified by more than one legitimate source’. Here is a ‘rule’ of journalism: a ‘fact’ is defined as a bit of information that has been confirmed by an authoritative source. Remember that in the ordinary instance our reporter has no need of rules. She simply reports the news as she has been taught. Rules of journalism like ‘facts are bits of information confirmed by authoritative sources’ come into play only as justifications for actions already taken. Most often, a reporter is asked to account for how she has reported the news: Has she sought out the right sources? Has she balanced one source with others who might disagree? Has she attributed key facts to appropriate sources? Challenges to this sort of behavior elicit what we might call regulative rules: rules about how to do journalism. If challenged on whether an item in her story is a ‘fact’, our reporter will respond with a rule about how a reporter typically gathers facts. ‘I checked for facts in this place and wrote them down in this way.’ In my observation, these kinds of challenges happen everyday in newsrooms. Journalists are asked all the time by editors, other reporters and readers to explain their news decisions. Why did you write the lead this way? Why did you put this information first? Why did you use this source? More rarely, journalists encounter a more basic challenge. A reader may ask not ‘Why did you gather these facts…’ but ‘Why are you gathering facts at all?’ Such challenges invite a reporter to consider not how to do journalism, but what journalism, at bottom, is. The proper response to such a question, of course, is that journalists gather facts about events, full stop. Here, we see a different type of rule, a constitutive rule. Constitutive rules do not tell us how to do something; rather, they define what something is. Journalism is an activity in which people gather facts. Whenever we encounter journalists using ‘is’ statements of this kind (news ‘is’ this or that, for example) we know that we dealing with constitutive rules about what counts as journalism.

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We might ask how reporters know that journalism is an activity in which people gather facts, and the only good response is ‘because they say it is’. By ‘they’ I mean members of the community in which journalism is a recognized activity. These folks agree that journalists gather, and ought to gather, facts. In this agreement they make it so. Here we see that institutions, in the end, are nothing more than inter-subjective agreements about how things are, or ought to be, within a community of understanding. Wittgenstein (1958: 241) calls this kind of agreement a form of life. ‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ he has his interlocutor ask. To which he responds, ‘It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life’ [italics in original]. Were someone really to ask our reporter why she must gather facts to write the news, her response is likely to end at ‘Journalism entails fact gathering’. If pressed further, she will simply repeat, ‘this is what journalism is’ (and so this is what I do). We might add an addendum here. When challenged about why she is gathering facts, our reporter may respond, ‘journalism is a practice in which people gather facts’. We may also imagine her going a bit further, to say something like ‘and journalists gather facts so that readers have correct information’. If she made this move, the game might continue. ‘But why should people have correct information.’ ‘So that they can form opinions about the issues discussed in the news.’ ‘Why do they need to form opinions?’ ‘So that policymakers know what the public wishes them to do.’ ‘And why do policymakers need to know what the public wants.’ ‘Because in a democracy, public policy is, or ought to be, guided by public opinion.’ Here we come to another constitutive statement (an ‘is’ statement). Democracy is a political practice that is responsive to public opinion. And we have arrived at a final crucial point: the constitutive rules of journalism are not the

ontological bottom of the practice because journalism is implicated in something larger than itself: the broader constitutive commitments of public life. This is what it means to say that journalism is a public activity. Because it is a public activity, journalism’s constitutive rules are entangled with broader social rules about how things stand, or ought to stand, in public life generally. I take this to be the import of Carey’s (1989: 5) famous statement that the ‘god term of journalism – the be-all and end-all, the term without which the enterprise fails to make sense, is the public. Insofar as journalism is grounded, it is grounded in the public’. The final appeal to what journalism is, and why it is this and not something else, is not to journalism per se, but to the constitutive commitments of the form of public life in which it is embedded. Let us now apply what we have learned about institutional rules to the onset of digital journalism.

PERSISTENCE If the ‘transformation of journalism is unavoidable’, as Anderson et al. (2012) insist in the title of their introduction to ‘PostIndustrial Journalism’, someone forgot to tell journalists. Over the last decade, an impressive number of studies have tracked the onset of digital technologies in journalism, and nearly all agree with Quandt (2008: 735) that the ‘revolution’ in news promised by the internet ‘did not happen’. Even today, a decade or more into this revolution, reporters who work for mainstream news organizations – or, the vast majority of working journalists – mostly gather the same sorts of information from the same kinds of people, and they use the same formulas to turn this information into the same sorts of stories. If anything, the internet seems only to have increased the level of homogeneity in the news (see, for example, Boczkowski, 2010).

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Institutionalism explains this curious fact well. We might think of innovations in news as ‘mistakes’. They are deviations from the normal, or ordinary, or conventional way journalism is practiced. Naturally, when presented with unconventional behaviors, journalists (and others) wish them to be justified: why should we do journalism this way? No good answer has been forthcoming, at least none that conjures a compelling alternative image of what journalism is and is for, and who journalists are when they do it. And so journalists fail to adopt the innovations, at least in any systematic way. Let me briefly describe how this happens with reference to one of the many new situations the practice of digital journalism has presented to journalists. When the internet first emerged in the mid-1990s, newspapers began to put up online editions of their daily content almost as an after-thought. But once the digital editions went up, it became possible for the online platform to ‘scoop’ the newspaper. That is, it became possible for reporters to post their stories online the night before those stories appeared in the next morning’s newspaper. Ostensibly, readers may already have read the online version – for free – hours before the newspaper they paid for arrived on their doorstep. Everyone knew this did not make sense, but no one did much about it. When I began my fieldwork in newsrooms in 2004 the issue remained, and when I finished in 2009 it had still not been solved. Even today, there are no routine ways to deal with the problem (see, for example, O’Donovan, 2014; Swisher, 2014). Longstanding news practices are ill suited to address this issue. Consider, for example, the practice of publishing daily stories in the newspaper. Many journalistic instincts are geared to this enterprise. Reporters know precisely what a daily story looks like, and they shape reporting to these ends. They collect only as much information as is needed for the daily story. They write only as many inches of copy as their editor tells them is needed. They organize the information on the page with an

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implicit understanding that someone will be reading it in a newspaper. These instincts are confounded in digital journalism. News sites need to be refreshed all day not once a day, and its freshest content ought to appear at 8am, hours before most government agencies open, much less produce newsworthy information. In digital journalism, reporters can no longer gather information in the morning and spend the afternoon writing it up for the next day’s newspaper. As I say, it is precisely in such moments – old institutions do not seem to capture the possibilities inherent to new situations – when new institutions tend to emerge. Editors have made halting steps in this direction. One response has been to dissociate the act of reporting from the newspaper. The logic is this: if what reporters do is produce content, why not have reporters produce content indiscriminately? Initially, reporters might post this content on a web page, or perhaps in a content management system. From there, the content could be pulled into the appropriate platform, whether that is a news site, a newspaper, a radio program, a social media platform, or a TV show. Problem solved! Another has been to go ‘digital first’, meaning to ask reporters to post information to the web when they know it, add/delete/revise that information online during the day, tweet out bits of information continuously throughout the day, then follow up with a ‘second day’ story in the next day’s newspaper. These new practices may seem perfectly reasonable, but think about the questions they raise. How long should a story be? How much information should it include? Who edits the stories and when should this occur? How can a reporter write a ‘second day’ story when she has spent all morning posting and tweeting instead of doing additional reporting? Should reporters even write ‘stories?’ These questions had long faded into the background of newspaper journalism. The fact that they were raised again in digital journalism is an indication that the new practices

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are out of the ordinary or unusual. They are ‘mistakes’ set loose in the culture of journalism. Naturally, someone – in this case the editor who initiated the change – was asked to account for it. Journalists asked: why should we produce the news in a stream of undifferentiated content? Why should we ‘post it when we know it?’ As we have learned, for reporters to invest in these practices, the answer has to have something to do with journalism. ‘Because it increases revenue to the company’ is not, this is to say, an adequate justification, at least to most journalists. News managers have struggled to craft justifications for the new practice. Some have likened the practice to the old wire service style of reporting. Others have appealed to reporters’ desire to get a story first. In my observations, even most editors do not really believe these analogies. They end up saying something like, ‘this is just what we have to do’. Reporters react to these failed justifications in one of three ways. Often, they report that the new practices make them feel ‘odd’ or ‘weird’. No longer doing what journalists conventionally do, they feel less and less like reporters. These feelings combine with the deep distrust that has brewed in newsrooms. For the last twenty years, journalists have waged a low-intensity war against what they see as the commercialization of news (see, for example, Fallows, 1996; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001; Roberts and Kunkel, 2005). This has happened even as newspapers have tried everything they can think of to reverse a decades-long decline in market penetration in their communities. Lacking trust, and feeling their professional identities threatened, many reporters react to the new practices in moral terms. They say, ‘This isn’t right!’ Or, ‘this is just another ploy to make money’. Or, ‘These guys [editors] are idiots!’ Another reaction common in newsrooms is more strategic and calculating. When presented with the ‘post it when you know it’ regime, many reporters view it as a slight against ‘good journalism’. They connect this thought to the fact that the newspaper still

brings in over 90 percent of their organization’s revenue. This leads them to believe that ‘post it when you know it’ is not even sensible in terms editors value. Why should we invest our time and energy in practices which we all know are inferior, which will not enhance our status among reporters, and which have only a questionable relationship to the organization’s bottom line? Often, their answer is that they shouldn’t, and so they don’t. This reluctance stems not from a loss of identity, but from a rational calculation of interests. A final reaction has more to do with imagination than investments. Frustrated with the slow pace of change in their newsrooms, many editors have made dramatic gestures. They have created entire new processes to make the newsroom ‘digital first’. Often, this entails cutting some positions in the newsroom, inventing others, then firing the staff and inviting them to reapply for the new jobs. We might ask whether launching an initiative by firing everyone in the newsroom is reasonable. Here, I wish to focus on what happens next, because it illuminates a third way that the rules of journalism persist. When editors create new positions, usually there are few settled understandings of the requirements of the new jobs. What does a web editor, or social media manager do? If reporters understand little about what these new jobs entail, then the sources with whom they interact understand even less. For example, suppose for a moment that you are a member of the local city council. You have ‘learned the ropes’ of how to interact with reporters. When a social media manager approaches, you may be confused. How are you supposed to interact with this person? Can you pitch them stories, and if so where will these stories appear? In what form? Can you trust a social media manager to honor longstanding principles – to honor your request to convey some information ‘on background’, for instance, or ‘not for attribution?’ If a journalist is no longer a reporter, are you no longer a source? And if not, then what role are you supposed to play?

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In such questions we see that the institutions of journalism set a context for journalists to interact with other people who inhabit public life. If those institutions are disrupted, it is easy for people to lose a sense of how to interact with one another. And yet, they must interact. Success for legions of public relations professionals depends on their ability to ‘manage the news’. Journalists need sources to provide them information that can be transformed into news. The result is that reporters make a wave at adopting the new roles, but then field calls from policymakers, public information offices, corporate communication professionals, and others, as they have always done. In these interactions, they act like reporters. Sources pitch them stories; they use their news sense to ask pertinent questions; they make a judgment about the newsworthiness of the story; they then set about producing the story in ways they have done for decades. This is done not out of habit, or out of reporters’ investments, but out of a lack of imagination. Reporters and others can imagine a social media manager, they just cannot imagine being a social media manager and a journalist at the same time. A postscript: note that in this example many people outside newsrooms (for example, city officials, PR professionals) help to reproduce the conventions of journalism. Journalists, it turns out, cannot change journalism alone. As a thoroughly public activity, journalism is entangled in contiguous social fields, like politics and the economy. Individuals in these fields have investments in journalism that may cut against efforts to do journalism differently. Habits, investments, and imagination: these three processes go a long way toward explaining the persistence of news rules during a time of disruption.

CHANGE Much as cancerous cells may reproduce faster and faster in the body, so more and

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more ‘mistakes’ seem to spin out of digital journalism. Think of the variety of news innovations that have been introduced just in the past few years: journalism as coding, journalism as games, aggregation, curation, blogging, citizen journalism, hyperlocal journalism, and ‘branded’ journalism, among others. Journalism also is increasingly produced in many places outside of newsrooms, from corporations to advertising agencies, think tanks to non-profits. To date, few of these ‘mistakes’ have stuck, and so journalism retains its basic shape. But it is no great leap to think that this may not always be true. It stands to reason that as the number of ‘mistakes’ multiplies the chances that journalism may change in some fundamental way rises. Institutionalism suggests that this may happen in one of two ways. It also lends insight into what it will mean to say that journalism has ‘changed’. The most obvious path to change in journalism is via crisis. Institutionalists often argue that absent a strong external shock, institutional regimes tend to persist (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013: chapter 5). External shocks of this kind are rare, occurring as ‘punctuation’ to longer periods of equilibrium. However, once they occur old rules may quickly unravel and new ones form. Think, for instance, of nineteenth-century American journalism. Journalists invented many news forms in that century, from the summary lead to the inverted pyramid style of writing, the interview to objectivity. Over that entire time, however, the party press remained more or less intact, and journalism retained its basic shape (see, for example, Kaplan, 2002; Ryfe and Kemmelmeier, 2010; Schudson, 1998). It was only in the aftermath of crisis, specifically, the breakdown of the third party system in the late 1890s, that journalism dramatically changed. By 1920, forms of news invented decades before had jelled together, and journalism became ‘modern’. Many observers argue that journalism once again faces this sort of crisis. In fact, Nielsen (2014) detects three inter-related crises:

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an economic crisis having to do with the advertising-based business model of news; a professional crisis related to the separation of journalism from other kinds of work; and a symbolic crisis resulting from the rapidly declining public trust in journalism. Journalism is experiencing these crises in different ways in different societies. The economic crisis, for example, afflicts American more than Scandinavian journalism. Together, however, these crises may amount to an external shock to journalism strong enough to cause its old rules to disintegrate. This may be especially the case for American journalism, which represents something of a ‘ground zero’ for all three crises. If such a crisis threatens the ontological status of journalism, it has not happened yet – even in the USA. The past may provide clues as to why. Think again of the last great shock to American journalism – the transition from the nineteenth century press to twentieth modern journalism. It involved not simply a change in journalism, but a widespread societal upheaval. In economics: the coming of the second industrial revolution; in politics: the emergence of mass democracies; in society: the rise of professions; in technology: the invention of printing presses capable of mass production. As a public institution, journalism is entangled in contiguous social fields, especially politics and economics, but also the arts, civil society, and technology. As such, it cannot experience a crisis sufficient to change its basic form absent a wider crisis in these other social fields. This raises the question of whether society is experiencing a transformation of a scale sufficient to cause a crisis in journalism. Observing the current scene, there seems to be only one contender, and that is the rise of a ‘networked society’ (see, for example, Castells, 2009; van Dijk, 2012). Scholars across the humanities and sciences have detected shifts in society away from centralized, homogeneous and bureaucratic forms of life toward decentralized, plural, ‘post-bureaucratic’ forms. Political scientists

write of the rise of new networked political organizations (see, for example, Bimber, 2003; Bimber, et. al., 2012; Howard, 2005; Karpf, 2012; Kreiss; 2012; Nielsen, 2012). Sociologists detect new networked forms of social relations (see, for example, Baym, 2010; Boyd, 2014; Rainie and Wellman, 2012). Economists trace the rise of ‘networked economics’ (see, for example, Goyal, 2009; Knoke, 2012). Everywhere, digital technology seems to be offering new ways of linking ourselves to others (see, for example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). Taken together, the social, political, economic and civic changes wrought by new technologies seem dramatic. Most considered judgments, however, suggest that the various changes represent more of a layering onto than a sweeping away of the old. This is especially the case in politics, where political scientists have been careful to point out that networked politics is an addition to rather than a replacement of the old rules. It is even true in the area of social relations, where the effects of technology are being felt unevenly across age, class, and educational attainment. Contrary to a few breathless pronouncements that ‘everything is changing’ (see, for example, Jarvis, 2009; Shirky, 2009), it turns out that everything is not. We may include journalism in that statement. If new digital forms of economics, politics and so on represent additions rather than upheavals, it is very likely that new journalistic forms represent the same. Conditions on the ground may change, of course, but as of 2015 it does not appear that journalism is experiencing a crisis of a kind and scale that might wipe out its basic institutional rules. This leads us to a second way that change in journalism may occur: incrementalism. Borrowing from theories of social evolution, institutionalists argue that internal and external forces may interact in such a way as to lead to slow-moving institutional change (see, for example, Pierson, 2004; Scott, 2008). Think, for example, of the profound change in news production that has taken place over the last

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generation. Scholars have shown that news across all platforms (including the internet) has become less event-oriented and more interpretive (see, for example, Barnhurst, 2011; Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997; Fink and Schudson, 2014). In the event, news stories have gotten longer and more complicated, and journalists have become much more aggressive about inserting themselves more prominently into their stories. This did not happen all at once, but slowly – so slowly, in fact, that despite the evidence many journalists still refuse to believe it (see, for example, Barnhurst, 2011). How has this change happened? Scholars trace the development of interpretative journalism in part to dynamics external to the profession, especially a political culture that became more adversarial and promotional. Processes internal to the profession also played a role. Journalists became better educated. They gained greater access to data, especially social science data. And in the face of a more promotional public culture, journalists became more suspicious of the public officials, and consequently more aggressive in their questioning. These external and internal factors interacted in such a way that news production slowly changed. A similar story may be playing out in the age of digital journalism. The traditional ad-based business model of news does not appear to work very well online (e.g., Picard, 2014). This is especially the case for regional daily newspapers, which have been hardest hit by the economic decline, and which employ the great majority of daily journalists through the USA. Moreover, technology has opened news production and distribution to many more actors (Annany and Crawford, 2014). We might think of these economic and technology conditions as external forces to which the culture of journalism must adapt. These adaptations may happen slowly, in fits and starts. But they may happen, and as they do journalism may change in dramatic ways. Several sorts of adaptations already seem apparent. Let me discuss two. One is that digital news production seems more service

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and less product-oriented. In its industrial form, journalism produced stories (products) to be read and viewed by consumers. But digital journalists increasingly aggregate, curate, organize, comment on, etc. content produced by others. Digital journalism, this is to say, places less emphasis on content production and more on distribution. Consequently, news organizations hire fewer reporters and more programmers and web designers, people expert in the creation and maintenance of distribution platforms. These programmers and designers are adopting new patterns of behavior, which will require new justifications. In keeping with this new service-model, digital journalism also is becoming less centralized in large, bureaucratic newsrooms, and more distributed and collaborative across smaller organizations (see, for example, Anderson, 2013; Annany, 2012). There are now gradations of journalists, people who are sometimes journalists or wannabe journalists. Many people who produce news today have never stepped foot in a newsroom. Professional journalists often find themselves orchestrating these crowds of content producers more than they produce content themselves. They work with a citizen who happened to get a picture of a breaking news event. They negotiate with a freelancer who is on the scene of an event. They coordinate with experts who instead of serving up quotes for publication in news stories have published their views on personal blogs. Will such adaptations change the very meaning of journalism? Consider what it would mean to say that they had. Suppose a digital journalist aggregates content produced by others. Someone calls her to account: why are you aggregating content? Our critic claims, this is not journalism! For the very meaning of journalism to change, the justifications this journalist summons will have to end in something other than ‘aggregation provides people the information they need to become informed about the issues’. After all, isn’t journalism the practice of informing

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people about issues so that they make up their own minds? Isn’t this our agreement about its contribution to public life (see, for example, Schudson, 1998)? This is what I mean when I say that ultimate limits to change in journalism lie in imagination. It is difficult for us to imagine performing a journalism that is not intended to inform the public. However, it is not hard to imagine the trends toward more service-oriented, distributive journalism intensifying, so much so that new practices emerge. Increasingly, digital journalists will create new patterns of doing this, then this, and then this. These actions will be codified as ‘what digital journalists do’, but they may veer widely from traditional practices. In this event, the constitutive rules of journalism may remain resilient. If asked, a digital journalist may still summons a traditional understanding of what journalism is, and is for. Yet, the regulative rules – the this, and this and this that journalists do – may change dramatically. New justifications may follow these practices. All of this may happen even as the field’s constitutive image remains the same.

CONCLUSION Institutionalism’s reputation for emphasizing the durability of social practices is fairly won. Yet when we focus on how social rules operate, we see that disagreement is built into their reproduction. This is so because it is only when called to account for our behavior that we have need of social rules. As justifications for behavior already taken, social rules allow for much inventiveness. Actors may do just about anything in any situation – so long as they can justify the behavior to others as a legitimate instance of a practice. But there are limits to action, and they lie in imagination: what can be done that is recognizable as an appropriate instance of an activity. As a social practice, journalism’s rules work in a similar way. Ordinarily, journalists

simply do journalism. They have no need of rules unless and until someone calls them to account for their behavior. They turn to rules as resources for justification. If today we are witnessing an upheaval in what journalists do, then it must involve changes in justifications of their work. Coding, aggregation, curation, and the like seem to be new, recurring patterns of behavior. Institutionalism provides a few clues as to how scholars might investigate these new practices: (1) recognize that journalists typically learn the new practices by extrapolating from example; (2) pay attention to how journalists extrapolate to new situations, and the consequences of these generalizations; and (3) focus especially on moments when journalists are asked to account for their actions. It is here that we will discover new rules of journalism, and how persuasive these rules are, to journalists and to others who have investments in the practice of journalism. An institutional view suggests that we do not seem to be witnessing a revolution in journalism’s constitutive rules – what it, at bottom, is, and is for. This sort of revolution entails a more dramatic institutional upheaval than has happened so far. This argument implies a very important point about the study of journalism and change. Strange as it may be to say, detecting large-scale changes in journalism may require more attention to social fields outside of the practice, to whether and how these fields are changing, and to what this may imply for journalism. I think here of the political and economic fields especially, which historically have provided journalism with ballast as it has developed a degree of autonomy and stability. When investigating the future of journalism, it is a natural inclination to focus on, well, journalism. An institutional approach suggests that researchers should resist this inclination, at least to some extent. The constitutive rules of journalism are rooted in broader constitutive commitments of public life. It is in these commitments that we will find the future of journalism.

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REFERENCES Anderson, Chris W. (2013) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Anderson, Chris W., Shirky, Clay, and Bell, Emily (2012) Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present: A Report. Columbia Journalism School. Annany, Mike (2012) ‘Press-public collaboration as infrastructure: Tracing news organizations and programming publics in application programming interfaces’, American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5): 623–42. Annany, Mike and Crawford, Kate (2014) ‘A liminal press’, Digital Journalism, http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.922322. Barnhurst Kevin G. (2011) ‘The problem of modern time in American journalism’, Kronoscope, 11: 98–123. Barnhurst, Kevin G. and Mutz, Diane (1997) ‘American journalism and the decline in event-centered reporting’, Journal of Communication, 47(4): 27–53. Baym, Nancy (2010) Personalized Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beyme, Klaus. (2008) ‘Political institutions – old and new’. In R.A.W. Rhodes, S.A. Binder, and B. Rockman (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 743–58. Bimber, Bruce (2003) Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bimber, Bruce, Flanagin, Andrew, and Stohl, Cynthia (2012) Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boczkowski, P. (2010) News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Abundance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Boyd, dana. (2014) It’s Complicated: The Social lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brynjolfsson, Erik and McAfee, Andrew (2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Carey, James W. (1989). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Castells, Manuel. (2009) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cook, Timothy (1998) Governing With the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fallows, James (1996) Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Pantheon. Fink, Katherine and Schudson, Michael (2014) ‘The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s–2000s’, Journalism, 15(1): 1–18. Goyal, Sanjeev (2009) Connections: An Introduction to the Economics of Networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howard, N. Philip (2005) New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Høyer, Svenni. (2005) ‘The Anglo-American background’. In S. Høyer and H. Pöttker (eds), Diffusion of the News Paradigm, Gothenborg: Nordicom: pp. 9–19. Jarvis, Jeff (2009) What Would Google Do? Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the World. New York: Harper Collins. Kaplan, Richard (2002) Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karpf, David (2012) The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knoke, David (2012) Economic Networks. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kovach, Bill and Rosenstiel, Tom (2001) The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown Publishers. Kreiss, Daniel (2012) Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowndes, Vivien and Roberts, Mark (2013) Why Institutions Matter? The New Institutionalism in Political Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lowrey, Wilson (2011) ‘Institutionalism, news organizations and innovation’, Journalism Studies, 12(1): 64–79.

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March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P (1989) Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: The Free Press. March, G. James and Olsen, P. Johan (2006) ‘Top twenty commentaries’, American Political Science Review, 100(4): 675. Meyer, John and Scott, W. Richard (1983) Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. Beverly Hills: Sage. Nielsen, Rasmus K. (2012) Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nielsen, Rasmus K. (2014) ‘The many crises of western journalism: A comparative analysis of economic, professional, and symbolic crises’. Paper presented at The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: From Technology to Culture workshop. Barcelona, Spain. May. O’Donovan, Caroline (2014) ‘N+1: Learning that print and digital can peacefully coexist’, Nieman Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/ 2014/09/n1-learning-that-print-anddigital-can-peacefully-coexist/ Peters, B. Guy, Pierre, Jon, and King, Desmond S. (2005) ‘The politics of path dependency: Political conflict in historical institutionalism’, The Journal of Politics, 67(4): 1275–300. Picard, R. (2014) ‘Twilight or new dawn of journalism?’, Journalism Studies, 15(5): 500–510. Pierson, Paul (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Powell, W. Walter and Dimaggio, P. J. (eds) (1981) The New Institutionalism In Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quandt, Thorsten (2008) ‘(No) news on the world wide web? A comparative content analysis of online news in Europe and the United States’, Journalism Studies 9: 717–38. Rainie, Lee and Wellman, Barry (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge: MIT Press. Reich, Zvi (2014) ‘Stubbornly unchanged: A longitudinal study of news practices in the Israeli press’, European Journal of Communication, 29(3): 351–70. Rhodes, R. A. W., Binder, S. A., and Rockman, B. A. (eds) (2008) The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roberts Gene and Kunkel, Thomas (2002) Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newsgathering. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Rutherford, Malcolm (2011) The Institutional Movement in American Economics, 1918– 1947: Science and Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryfe, David (2006) ‘Guest editors introduction: New institutionalism and the news’, Political Communication, 23(2): 135–44. Ryfe, David (2012) Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look in American Newsrooms. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ryfe, David M. and Blach-Ørsten, Mark (2011) ‘Introduction’, Journalism Studies, 12(1): 3–9. Ryfe, David and Kemmelmeier, Marcus (2011) ‘Quoting practices, path dependency, and the birth of modern journalism’, Journalism Studies, 12(1): 10–26. Sanders, Elizabeth (2008) ‘Historical institutionalism’. In R. A. W. Rhodes, S. A. Binder, and B. Rockman (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 39–55. Schudson, Michael (1998) The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. New York: The Free Press. Scott, W. Richard (2008) Institutions and Organizations: Ideas and Interests. (3rd edn). Los Angeles: Sage. Shirky, Clay (2009) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press. Sparrow, Bartholomew (1999) Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur (1997) ‘On the virtues of the old institutionalism’, Annual Review of Sociology, 23: 1–18. Swisher, Kara (2014) ‘Can print and online content just get along? California Sunday Magazine hopes so’. Re/Code: http://recode. net/2014/09/15/can-print-and-onlinecontent-just-get-along-california-sundaymagazine-hopes-so/ van Dijk, Jan (2012) The Network Society. (3rd edn) London: Sage. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations (3rd edn) G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans. New York: Macmillan.

26 Journalistic Fields T i m P. V o s

INTRODUCTION The language that scholars use to talk about the phenomena they study can become so familiar that those same scholars eventually become unaware of the import of their language. To refer to a human being as a human subject, for example, is ubiquitous in research, but also telling about the researcher’s theoretical assumptions. Likewise, scholars refer to human beings as respondents, actors, agents, and informants. This language not only echoes the methods that those scholars use, but the worldview from which they operate. Surely, however, not all the language that scholars use is so fraught with theoretical and methodological assumptions. This might be true, for example, for the reference to journalism as a field. A field of work or a field of study is surely just a common sense, everyday metaphor to refer to an area of work or study. It is undoubtedly true that field is used in this way, as a nonscientific and non-­theoretical expression for an object of study. However, to

refer to journalism as a field can entail much more than this. Kurt Lewin, who is one of the founding fathers of modern mass communication research, used the language of a field or fields to signal something far more elaborate – a field theory. A  full generation later, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also used this language to put forward his own take on field theory and used that theory to address the media and journalism as important fields for investigation. Others (see, for example, Benson and Neveu, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2007; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009) have worked in the field traditions, capitalizing on the insights of Lewin and Bourdieu, to advance a research program that addresses key issues in journalism. This chapter is not meant to be an overview of field theory as such. Instead, this chapter explores what it means to conceptualize journalism as a field. This undertaking will inevitably involve consideration of key concepts from field theory, but the chapter considers only those concepts relevant to the task at hand.

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In the process of conceptualizing journalism as a field the chapter arrives at a consideration of two key topics – how the power of journalism can be fruitfully understood and how it is that changes in journalism come about, particularly the change to digital journalism. These topics, of course, can be explained by conceptualizing journalism in other ways. Nevertheless, the approach offered by the field theory tradition offers a useful set of analytical tools that might prove attractive to scholars in Political Communication, Media History, and Journalism Studies. Such an undertaking – conceptualizing journalism as a field – may strike some as an esoteric exercise, detached from the disruption and transformation of journalism in recent years. However, thinking about the forces that constitute fields is a way of thinking about how this transformation happens. Thus, this chapter ends with a consideration of changes in the journalistic field, particularly with changes accompanying digital journalism. Along the way, this chapter uses the field approach to think about how we get the news content – for better or worse – that we do. A consideration of news coverage of the financial and banking crisis of 2008 and beyond will serve to illustrate how a field conceptualization can illuminate journalistic practice. By looking at news coverage of other events and by examining innovations in journalistic practice – ranging from the slow news movement to use of web analytics – this chapter returns to enduring questions about the autonomy and power of the journalistic field.

THE FIELD METAPHOR While various theorists have used the notion of field to refer to a kind of social space, Kurt Lewin (1951) was the first to develop the metaphor into an elaborated theoretical approach. Lewin explicitly drew on the

discipline of physics to articulate a number of psychological and sociological concepts. While it was fairly common in the midtwentieth century for social science to adopt the vocabulary and methods of the natural sciences, Lewin was more careful than most to draw on physics as a metaphor rather than as a literal device (Martin, 2003). The utility of a metaphor is that the new and the abstract can be more easily and fruitfully understood (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, 2003). Metaphors are especially helpful in focusing attention on some dimensions of a phenomenon while downplaying those dimensions that are not germane to theorizing. Metaphors also serve the function of making an argument – ‘the structure of the metaphor itself argues’, according to Foss (2004: 361) – by transferring the legitimacy of one domain to another domain. Lewin no doubt gained legitimacy for his ideas by casting them in terms of a discipline that Albert Einstein and others had glamorized. Regardless, Lewin’s approach borrowed a useful disciplinary vocabulary to make a number of important observations and arguments. Bourdieu and others did the same. Above all, fields have been understood as a kind of social space and as a kind of social force. Essentially all insights about the nature of fields flow from these understandings. In its ordinary, nonscientific usage, a field might refer to a discrete area used for farming or some other practice. Even this common usage offers some insight, since the metaphor suggests a space marked off by discernable boundaries and dedicated to a particular kind of use. A bean field is distinct from a cornfield. The field traditions have used the metaphor, at least in part, in this way as well. In a basic sense, to consider journalism as a field is to suggest a location for a distinct kind of activity or product. Thus, to conceptualize journalism as a field is to address a central debate in the digital era of journalism – what are the boundaries of journalism (de Burgh, 2005; Deuze, 2005; Peters and Broersma, 2013)? In the Western tradition, the answer

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to this question has significant implications, since journalism is afforded legal protections that other activities – even activities that bear a resemblance to journalism – are not. Activities that happen outside the boundaries of the journalistic field, in other words, would not merit the same kinds of legal protections. The conceptualization of journalism as a field – as a delimited space or area – does little to answer the question of how or where, precisely, the boundaries of journalism might be placed. Neverthleless, other conceptual dimensions of the field do help address the question. For example, since the field is understood, at least in part, in terms of shared motivations, the field need not be reduced to a narrow occupational designation. In other words, conceptualizing journalism as a field avoids the debate of whether journalism is a profession and who can belong to the profession. The space or area of journalism is not strictly an occupational or professional space, but a space with shared motivations (more on the nature of journalistic motivations and their role in the structure of the journalistic field below). The reference to a field as a social space, of course, is not meant to be literal. The spatial metaphor suggests that the phenomena being examined are not only within certain boundaries but adjacent, coexistent, and connected. According to Lewin (1951: 240), ‘A totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent is called a field’ (italics in the original). For Lewin, Bourdieu, and others this mutuality and interdependence is central to the concept of a field. A field speaks to the totality and interrelation of factors. The field is also a space with topographical features. Topography refers to the shape and features of the area, not just to its boundaries. Bourdieu (1998a) refers to a field as a structured social space. So, a field is not simply an area where anything is possible. A field’s topography provides certain affordances. Indeed, it is the structure of the field that ultimately shapes the activities that can be

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carried out in the field. But, ultimately, when Lewin and Bourdieu refer to the structure of a field, they have something additional in mind. Here’s where the physics metaphor comes more directly into play; more precisely the physics of electromagnetism. Martin (2003: 5) argues that field theory builds on a number characteristics that come from this discipline; for example, ‘Field theory posits an enveloping gravitational field that we can neither see nor measure except via its effects.’ Interconnection and mutuality is the product of this seemingly invisible gravitational field. The field of journalism, then, is constituted by various kinds of gravitational force, just as ‘a gravitational field may be seen as the product of many objects each with its own gravitational field’ (Martin, 2003: 19). It can be said that various fields constitute each other in that each delimits the others. Put another way, to understand a field requires that we understand it relative to other fields. Fields are constituted by a kind of equilibrium among social forces. This is not to say that fields are equal – the power and autonomy of fields can vary over time. Journalism exists within a larger field of forces, primarily the political and economic fields. At various historical points journalism has been dominated by the political field (Pasley, 2001); at other points in time, journalism has been dominated by economic fields (Baldasty, 1992). And at some points in time, journalism has experienced a degree of autonomy (Schudson, 1978). Hence, ‘the amount that can be explained by the logic of the field varies according to the autonomy of the field’ (Bourdieu, 2005: 34). According to Bourdieu (1977; 1998b; 2005), it is the internal relations and structures of the field that are ultimately the most important to understanding the logic of the field. While Bourdieu makes useful distinctions between endogenous and exogenous forces in a field, these forces are linked. In fact, at least some of the forces within a field can bear the imprint of exogenous forces. In the case of journalism, he identifies a ‘heteronomous

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pole’ within a field that represents ‘forces external to the field (primarily economic)’ (Benson and Neveu, 2005: 4). However, the field also contains an ‘autonomous pole representing the specific capital unique to that field’ (2005: 4). In the case of journalism, this specific capital – also referred to as cultural capital, or the cultural pole – includes dispositions, skills, normative roles, epistemological frameworks, and ethics of the field (Bourdieu, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2007). The opposition of these poles structures the journalistic field. While publishers might seek to maximize profits by publishing advertisements that appear to be news, this tactic would violate long held ethical routines in newsrooms. Thus, a heteronomous economic pole and an autonomous cultural pole would be in conflict. Given the relative strength of each pole in specific news organizations in specific times and places, the outcome of such a conflict would vary. Thus, the structure of the field reflects the array of forces within the field. If the scenario about the publisher’s attempt to use advertising as news played out in most Western news organizations, the publisher would be going against the long established cultural capital of the field (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). The publisher would essentially be challenging the field’s capital and potentially transforming the field. Bourdieu argues that tensions about the structure of the field are endemic of the field. Bourdieu (2005: 30) builds this tension into his own definition of field: a field is a field of forces within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position-takings being aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field.

Bourdieu’s definition suggests the field is dynamic and constantly subject to change. While Bourdieu indeed holds this to be the case, he concludes that ‘most of this activity will tend to largely reproduce the structure of the field’ (Benson and Neveu, 2005: 6).

Thus, Bourdieu also theorizes those forces that conserve and maintain the field in a status quo state. Actors who function within a particular field are members of the field largely because they have accepted the assumptions of the field. They accept the implicit and explicit rules and ways of doing things, or what Bourdieu and others call doxa. Bourdieu (1977: 169) defines doxa as ‘that which is beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by the mere fact of acting in accord with social convention’. Journalists accept that their job is to deliver the news – an assumption that would have been, and was, questioned at times in the nineteenth century in the USA (DickenGarcia, 1989) but is now simply taken for granted and rarely, if ever, debated. Once an idea has entered the ‘universe of discourse’ or into the ‘field of opinion’, then the idea cannot be said to be part of the doxa of the field (Bourdieu, 1977: 168). A similar means of stability in the field is what Bourdieu (1998b: 76–7) calls illusio, ‘the fact of being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is “worth the candle,” or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort’. For example, journalists love chasing the exclusive story, getting the big interview, and covering the big event. They do not question these aims; these are the thrills that come with the game of journalism. While doxa is often implicit or tacit, illusio generally rises to the level of conscious articulation. Agents have surveyed the field and considered the field worth fighting for. Doxa and illusio provide the field with structure; and structure, by its nature, implies a kind of sturdiness and resilience. (More on the stability and instability of the journalistic field below.) Lewin uses a much different vocabulary but also theorizes the forces that structure a field. In his introduction of the concept of gatekeeping Lewin (1951) explains how micro-, meso- and macro-level factors come to bear on individual decision making. The individual is located in a field, so he or she

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never makes decisions in a vacuum. Lewin’s extended example explains how myriad choices and factors come to bear on how a meal ends up at the family table. In this and other examples, Lewin conceives of force as positive and negative valences (Martin, 2003). Positive forces push certain kinds of food choices through the decision-making gates. Negative forces hold back – or at least create friction – for other kinds of food choices. These forces can come from a variety of locations in the field – they might come from environmental affordances, from instrumental institutional pressures, or from individual cognitive resources. Lewin (1951) suggested that such a gatekeeping model might also be suitable for understanding the selection of information or events to be cast as news. His pupil, David White (1950), famously examined how a particular wire editor functioned as a gatekeeper, but did little to advance – or even utilize – Lewin’s underlying field theory approach. Others would illustrate Lewin’s field principles in subsequent journalism scholarship. For example, Gandy (1982) showed how press releases from public relations and public information officers form an information subsidy for news organizations. Press releases and other handouts did the work of journalists – marshaling information and crafting well-written stories – for free (Curtin, 1999). Thus, the information subsidy functioned as a positive gatekeeping force, increasing the likelihood the information would be published. The force had to be understood, however, from within the totality of the field. For example, information subsidies worked in concert with hierarchical organizational structures, prevailing definitions of news, profit-seeking motives, and trust relationships. The chief utility of the elements of field theory described to this point is that they describe how it is that a field is structured. The field’s structure is ontologically real, not because it is simply a natural feature of the social world, but because it is constituted

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by a kind of social space and kinds of social forces. The structure of the journalistic field matters in as much as it explains something of how news comes to turn out the way that it does. In other words, to conceptualize journalism as a field is a means for explaining the construction of news.

EXPLANATION, THE FIELD, AND THE INDIVIDUAL The conceptualization of a field that derives from field theory is characterized by a kind of explanatory disposition. A field that is structured by competing forces is not explainable in terms of simple causal connections between variables. Lewin, in particular, championed the point that ‘any event is a resultant of a multitude of factors’ (1951: 44). Lewin explains this point in terms of physics; however, the argument itself also grew out of his work in Gestalt psychology and from his one-time teacher, Ernst Cassirer. Gestalt psychology, for example, holds that the human mind perceives reality as a global whole, rather than as a series of discrete factors. But, Lewin (1935) is also advancing a more fundamental point. Explanation, he argues, is not reducible to social laws that exclude individuality or individual events. The key to explanation is to hunt out those situations in which the determinative factors of the total dynamic structure are most clearly, distinctly, and purely to be discerned. Instead of a reference to the abstract average of as many historically given cases as possible, there is a reference to the full concreteness of the particular situations (1935: 31).

Bourdieu (1977: 73) makes a similar argument, dismissing ‘theories which explicitly or implicitly treat [social] practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of preestablished’ factors. Both Bourdieu and Lewin see such modes of explanation as

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woefully inadequate for capturing actual human practices. A mechanical means of explanation is inconsistent with the field approach in at least two ways. First, since a field is constituted by the totality of the space and the equilibrium of all forces, reducing explanations to one or two factors is largely impossible. While factors can be conceptually distinct, in the real world they cannot be isolated in a meaningful way. Second, such a mechanical approach makes for a bloodless kind of story in which actual human actors seemingly play an insignificant role. Explanations of phenomena in the social world ‘must pass through individuals (but may not reduce to them) to connect to action’ (Parsons, 2007: 25). It is here where the conceptualization of the field that comes from Bourdieu, and to a lesser extent Lewin, reflects a departure from the agent–structure tension that has persisted as a significant theme in sociological theorizing. Bourdieu (1977: 72) rejects the agent– structure dichotomy as a ‘false dilemma’. To break the dilemma, he introduces the idea of habitus as a significant feature of a field. Habitus is not merely habit, but a lasting ‘system of shared social dispositions and cognitive structures’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 279) that ‘functions every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 83). These perceptions, appreciations, and actions are gained through ordinary lived experience and daily occupational work. Bourdieu (1998b: 25) also calls habitus a ‘kind of practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation – what is called in sport a “feel” for the game’. It is ‘history turned into nature’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 78). However, human actors are not trapped by these ‘structuring structures’ (1977: 72); nor do they have complete agency to ignore or escape these structures. Bourdieu (1977: 95) concludes: Because the habitus is an endless capacity to engender products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its

production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings.

Habitus not only speaks to the structure of the field, it points to how individuals can be both knowing agents and reproducers of the social structure. Individuals will act based on their perceptions of the structure of the field. In fact, their very perceptions and motivations are shaped by their position in the field. Martin (2003: 36–7) concludes, ‘field theory elegantly handles as fundamentally the same two social phenomena usually considered to be antithetical, namely the feeling that there is some social force which constrains individuals externally and the feeling that we act on the basis of our motivations’. The explanatory approach of the field tradition can be illustrated by examining the construction of a variety of media messages; but, news coverage of the financial and banking crisis of 2008 and beyond will serve here as an example. The mainstream news media in the US are generally panned for failing to herald the crisis or give it the weight it deserved (Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014). The financial magazines, business cable channels, and other mainstream news organizations had access to the most powerful figures in the financial and banking industries – the ‘Wall Street executives, traders, rating agencies, analysts, quants, [and] other financial insiders’ (Starkman, 2014: 2). The journalists’ illusio tells them these are the ‘big gets’. To get interviews with these sources, journalists generally believe, is not only the means to the best information but a source of satisfaction in and of itself. This is what the game is about. Journalists’ motivations, in other words, are structured by this illusio. Journalists have come to trust these sources through the doxic performance that is their professional careers. The doxa of the field tells journalists that authoritative news comes from authoritative sources (Schudson, 2003; Shoemaker et al., 2008). Hence, the structure of the field comes to reflect the structure of

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the economic and policy fields with which journalists routinely work. Business journalists told the tale of a housing bubble and other oblique signs that the economy might slow, but the warnings were largely submerged in he said–she said reporting. The business journalists failed to report critically on the financial institutions themselves (Starkman, 2014). The financialization of social institutions had long since become the new normal, unquestioned by business journalists (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001; Chakravartty and Schiller, 2010). Business journalism had taken an infotainment turn in the years before the crisis and was as likely to include flattering profiles of business executives and financial firms as an investigation of the claims made by those executives and firms (Chakravartty and Schiller, 2010). It was an easy and inexpensive form of journalism, particularly well suited to a time of cutbacks to newsroom staffs (Manning, 2013). At an individual, organizational, and institutional level, the structure of the journalistic field pointed to a kind of journalism that missed the financial crisis story until it was too late. The fact that the overwhelming number of journalists who covered the financial beat told the same kinds of stories and systematically missed the warning signs of the crisis is itself a powerful testimony to the structure of the journalistic field. However, not all journalists fell predictably in line. As Starkman (2014) concludes, the emerging crisis was apparent to a range of regulators, defrauded victims, and whistleblowers. ‘A few reporters actually talked to them, understood the metastasizing problem, and wrote about it’ (Starkman, 2014: 2). The reporters who were blowing the whistle came from positions in the journalistic field that were well removed from the positions held by the business and mainstream press. They came from small news organizations with limited resources. But, they also came with different motivations and they came with a different set of cultural capital. These critical

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reporters practiced different newsgathering routines, calling on different kinds of news sources; they found satisfaction in questioning the dominant narratives, keeping an eye on the victims of financial corruption; and they wrote a different style of journalism, expressing righteous indignation when it was called for (Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014). However, these smaller and marginal media organizations failed to command the attention of a broad public. They lacked the social capital to set a policy or public agenda or to transform the field. This example about media performance leading up to and during the financial crisis raises at least two important issues about the nature of journalistic field. First, in what sense is the news media a powerful field? Second, how does change to the journalistic field come about?

JOURNALISM’S POWER What does the press’s performance leading up to and including the financial crisis tell us about the social standing of journalism? Starkman’s (2014) basic thesis is that if the press had only done its job, much of the pain of the ensuing financial crisis could have been avoided. The truth, it is believed, has great emancipatory power. Of course, the fact that the mainstream press did not do its job also speaks to the structural weaknesses of the press and its proclivity to captivity by other social fields. In Bourdieu’s assessment, the Western journalistic field has a limited amount of autonomy and hence a limited amount of power. And while the journalistic field’s power is circumscribed, it is nonetheless keenly felt. Bourdieu (1998a: 68–9) argues: The journalistic field brings to bear on the different fields of cultural production a group of effects whose form and potency are linked to its own structure, that is, to the position of the various media and journalists with respect to their

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a­utonomy vis-à-vis external forces, namely, the twin markets of readers and advertisers.

On the one hand, journalism wields the power of the pen. The exposure that journalism can create can affect the cultural and social capital of actors in other fields. Public figures whose corrupt actions, for example, are exposed to public judgment see their cultural and social capital decrease. This power, such as it is, is only real in as much as citizens and decision-makers act on the information made available to them (Schudson, 2003). In fact, some financial and business journalists argued they had warned of a coming crisis but that the public had not listened (Starkman, 2014). Meanwhile, those actors who are interviewed as experts gain ‘social renown’ and hence have their cultural, social, and, perhaps, economic capital increase (Bourdieu, 1988: 107). Journalism’s power in such situations comes because actors who seek such renown must generally accept ‘journalistic criteria and values’ (1988: 112). It is also true, however, that journalism largely amplifies the voices of the powerful. So, amplification is its own kind of power: ‘the perpetual media repetition’ of narratives by powerful social actors ‘has gradually transformed into a universal common sense’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001: 3). On the other hand, journalism often requires substantial financial resources and is often driven by publishers with aggressive profit expectations. News organizations that upset the status quo can pay a price. News organizations must succeed in the marketplace – if they fail to get ratings, readers or clicks, they will find their financial prospects dwindling (McChesney, 1999; Napoli, 2003). In other words, if the audience finds the message boring, offensive, or simply troubling, they can turn to news elsewhere in the market. Since the audience is ultimately the product that commercial news organizations sell, ‘the pursuit of this product affects the structure of media industries and the behavior of media organizations’ (Napoli, 2003: 6). For example, the

use of web analytics provides media organizations with detailed information on the habits of their audience, but news organizations are still generally oriented to the predicted audience, rather than to the actual or measured audience. The ‘inherent uncertainty’ that comes with the predicted audience factors into media behavior, ‘particularly in terms of their content decisions’ (2003: 11). Simply put, the structure of the journalistic field limits the autonomy of journalists to tell the kinds of stories that might offend certain constituencies. Likewise, telling hard truths may harm organizations’ abilities to maintain working relationships with important sources (Schudson, 2003). Since US law, for example, does not give journalists special rights of access to government sources or information, journalists who rely on access to wellplaced sources can ill afford to be ostracized by those sources. Government sources in particular set the ground rules for how and if they will be quoted or even if the information they hold can be disseminated (Hellmueller, 2014). Government and industry public relations efforts have been established to manage journalists, limiting journalists’ access to key sources and key information (Cutlip, 1994). Thus, Bourdieu (1998a: 69) concludes that government sources have considerable ‘weapons for manipulating the news or those in charge of transmitting it’. Journalists also find themselves under regular scrutiny from media watchdog organizations and other civil society organizations (Wyatt, 2007). The organizations can and do bring political, social, and economic pressure on journalists (Hayes, 2008). Journalism that is perceived as heterodox in any way is subject to pressure from these adjoining fields. Likewise, news and public affairs bloggers are among the latest kind of so-called watchdogs of the watchdogs, monitoring journalistic performance and registering their praise and criticism, mostly criticism (Hayes et al., 2007; Vos et al., 2012). Lewin seems to have little to say about the power of journalism; but his approach would

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be useful in describing how journalistic power is circumscribed. Lewin (1951) explained external pressures in terms of the valence of forces at the gates of the gatekeeping process. The combinations of cajoling and enticing channel news production in a direction that is beneficial to the adjoining fields. By making some information easy to attain and other kinds of information difficult to attain, exogenous fields capitalize on existing features of the journalistic field to manipulate positive and negative pressures. These interactions of fields ultimately create routine channels for the movement of news. Thus, news organizations are complicit in their limited power; but their lack of autonomy is a structural feature of the field that is difficult for journalists to overcome. The pressure on the journalistic field is often construed as a market-based pressure, and while this is no doubt true, it is only part of the story. Bourdieu (1986: 47) argues that capital is largely ‘the same thing’ as power. Capital, of course, refers to the power of the economic pole, a strong magnetic force in the world of commercial journalism. But, it also refers to journalism’s cultural capital. The journalistic field regularly champions its commitment to truth telling, perhaps journalism’s most notable form of cultural capital, putting a sacred social obligation ahead of financial gain (Christians et  al., 2009). Cultural capital can be converted into economic capital, for example, when a Pulitzer Prize is converted into a bigger audience. But cultural capital is not simply power when it is converted to economic capital. Cultural capital constitutes the legitimacy of the field; and it is this legitimacy that ultimately earns journalism its autonomy and power. Indeed, Bourdieu (1998a) concludes that the currency of journalism is largely its own legitimacy. If audiences and sources lose their trust in the legitimacy of journalism, the power that journalists extract from the market and elsewhere will evaporate. Ironically, the social awareness of this legitimacy is the basis of the pressure brought to bear on journalism. Public relations efforts are worth the

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cost if the information that governments and corporations provide to journalists is passed on to the public with the suggestion that journalists have weighed and verified that information. This provides ample incentive to create a system of rewards and punishments to get information through the journalistic gates. Meanwhile, journalists, conscious of the importance of their legitimacy, will protect their legitimacy from attack. Journalists will be cautious in making bold claims if they believe that boldness will merit criticism from powerful players in other social fields, such as authoritative sources, bloggers, and press criticism groups. Journalists have long believed that their legitimacy is rooted in their objective journalistic style, a key feature of US journalistic habitus. A variety of social actors have used journalists’ commitment to balanced treatment of news topics to pressure journalists into telling their side of a story (Dreier and Martin, 2010). Indeed, an entire social field of think tanks and so-called astroturf organizations have found their raison d’etre in providing sources of information and comment to news organizations. Perhaps most notably, years of balanced journalistic coverage of anthropogenic climate change allowed for framing of the issue at odds with scientific consensus (Boykoff, 2007). Again, various social fields have found leverage on the journalistic fields by threatening journalists’ most important form of capital, their legitimacy. All of this seems to leave journalists in a relatively weak position relative to other social fields. Claims about superiority of Western journalism (Siebert et  al., 1973), free from the autocratic tendencies of despotic governments, should be tempered. Press freedom is rarely if ever absolute (Christians et al., 2009).

CHANGE IN THE JOURNALISTIC FIELD The limited autonomy of the journalistic field subsequently plays an important role in

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the prospects of change to the journalistic field; however the story of change is complex and does not begin or end with a consideration of autonomy. As already noted, endogenous and exogenous forces constitute the structure of the journalistic field. Endogenous forces include the doxa, habitus, and illusio of the field. These forces speak to the stability of a field. In fact, the conceptualization of habitus and illusio make it difficult to imagine how the journalistic field might be disrupted. The fixity of the field, however, should not be overstated. In the case of illusio, the rules of the game can, of course, be broken. In fact, veteran journalists sometimes contend that rules are largely for beginners and are allowed to be broken by the more experienced journalists. According to Bourdieu, a ‘field is the site of a more or less overt struggle over the definition of the legitimate principles of the division of the field’ (quoted in, Martin, 2003: 23). Thus, the field is understood – by both Lewin and Bourdieu – as ‘a field of contestation, a battlefield’ (Martin, 2003: 28). For example, journalists have overwhelmingly accepted the rules of the game to get a news story out as fast as possible, to beat the competition. However, the uniformity of the field in following this rule of the game, provides a new competitor, or newly adapted competitor, to differentiate itself by breaking the rule. Thus, the so-called slow news movement breaks the rule by championing the heterodox idea of ignoring the scoop in the interest of getting the story right and in depth (Gillmor, 2009). This is an example of how fields form and function – as field theory explains, ‘groups of actors frame their action vis-à-vis one another’ (Martin, 2003: 42). This example also suggests that the structure of the field can contain the roots of its own transformation. The story of the journalistic field, as already noted, cannot be told without the motivated human actors who perform journalism on a daily basis. Bourdieu (2005) sees at least some of these actors as potential

transformers of the field. While habitus and illusio account for stability in terms of how actors perform their roles, new entrants to the journalistic field would seem less likely to be socialized into the field. Hence, new entrants potentially enter the field with different kinds of cultural capital. While this scenario seems plausible as a means of transformation, beginning journalists are probably also the least likely to jeopardize their new positions by challenging accepted ways of doing things (Hellmueller et  al., 2012). As Bourdieu (1998a) notes, journalists’ positions within the field suggest how transformational those journalists can be. However, the effect of new entrants would likely emerge over a long time span. US journalists who entered the field on the heels of the feminist movement eventually proved more accepting of gender equity than their counterparts from a previous era (Chambers et al., 2004; Creedon and Cramer, 2007). The effect was not immediate, but the change eventually transformed journalism in meaningful ways. But new entrants are not simply a matter of new journalists freshly hired into their first jobs. The field of journalism, particularly in its digital forms, has also absorbed entrants from different fields or from the margins of the field. While some bloggers maintained their distance from the journalistic field, others were hired into the ranks of mainstream news organizations. These bloggers came with their social capital already formed, placing them in a position of relative power. For example, when the New York Times hired Nate Silver to blog about politics and political polling, he already had a sizable following (Bradshaw, 2014). His approach represented a radical departure from the kind of political journalism that was being commonly practiced at the time, and a departure from the epistemology of a whole journalistic subfield (Coddington, 2012). Other bloggers-turnedjournalists, such as Glenn Greenwald, who, for a time, went to work for the Guardian, made similar waves. Greenwald covered government surveillance in a way that most

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mainstream journalists had avoided. He subsequently shared a Pulitzer Prize and turned that cultural capital into an online-only news organization. Online-only news start-ups are another kind of new entrant; so are documentary filmmakers. While it remains an open empirical question, the inclusion of these new entrants to the field has arguably shifted journalistic doxa. Doxa has seemingly given way to heterodoxy, which would be a step in the direction of a new orthodoxy, if such an orthodoxy was to take hold (Bourdieu, 1977). As noted above, the journalistic field harbors the seeds of its own disruption. The case of the slow news movement was one such example. The doxa, illusio, and habitus of the field, for example, set the stage for some actors to differentiate themselves from their competitors. But, a story based on market differentiation is only a partial story. The differentiation is itself a response to both endogenous and exogenous disruptions. The rise of the 24/7 news environment, the downsizing of news staffs, the digitization of journalism, and developments in other fields (changes in technology and changes in market structures) converged to saturate the market with fast news, but news short on context. It should be noted, however, that the slow news movement is not really a story about the transformation of the journalistic field. The development represents a very narrow niche and is unlikely to represent a shift in mainstream journalistic practice. The story of journalistic transparency is a more likely example of a transformational change. Objectivity has been central to journalism’s cultural capital for the better part of a century (Mindich, 1998). It has been fundamental to how journalism is taught and practiced (Schudson, 2001; Vos, 2012). However, transparency has emerged as an alternative epistemology to objectivity in the digital era. Transparency includes values and practices of openness and accountability (Karlsson, 2011; Singer, 2007). Whereas objectivity meant that journalists constructed news largely out of sight from public scrutiny, transparency

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means that anyone who cares enough to monitor or criticize journalists is given the green light to do so (Deuze, 2005). This kind of public intervention into the process of news construction is offered by its advocates as a superior form of arriving at truthful news stories (Hellmueller et  al., 2012). The impetus for this epistemological reorientation does not come solely from within the journalistic field. Actors in government and other social fields have advocated for transparency as a means of truth and accountability (Morris and Shin, 2002). But, while the impetus might come from elsewhere, actors within the journalistic field must ultimately embrace the new epistemology if it is to gain traction. Who those champions of transparency will be remains an open question. Change, if it comes at all, is likely to be slow. Again, new entrants to the field, those raised in a society that values transparency would be the likely agents of transformation. Each of the examples of change – whether minor or major – suggest that actors in the journalistic field respond to a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. Such is the nature of the journalistic field; such is the nature of any field. Journalists – and others – battle over the contours of the field. But the structure of the field itself is a potent source for stability.

CONCLUSIONS The conceptualization of journalism as a field, like any metaphor, focuses our attention to certain features of journalism. In as much as journalism is a field, it is a kind of social space and social force. The field has a structure, and is structured and restructured by those who are members of the field. The field is also structured and restructured by forces external to the field. The structure of the field is constituted by the pull of cultural and economic poles. Ultimately, the economic pole accounts for journalism’s limited

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autonomy. Nevertheless, the journalistic field is the site for an important public sensemaking activity. As limited as the journalistic field’s power and autonomy might be, journalism cannot be overlooked. The stakes are too high. Journalism has been complicit in some of the transformational changes that have faced our world. The US and its allies and enemies have been at war for over a decade; a financial and economic crisis has resulted in years of global economic hardship; the planet is suffering from geography-altering environmental devastation. In each case, journalism has been as much a part of the problem as the solution (Boehlert, 2006; Boykoff, 2007; Starkman, 2014). A conceptualization of journalism that does not help explain how it is that news turns out the way it does should be found wanting. The field theory of Lewin, Bourdieu, and their successors has provided a means to do so. Journalism is in a time of fundamental change (Elliot, 2008; McChesney and Nichols, 2010). The funding model that has supported journalism for well over a century is showing serious signs of wear (Kawamoto, 2003; Kaye and Quinn, 2010) and trust in journalism is scarce (Gans, 2003). Any conceptualization of journalism that does not account for these kinds of changes should be found wanting. Field theory, as developed by Lewin and especially Bourdieu, provide a toolkit for this kind of explanation.

REFERENCES Baldasty, G. J. (1992) The commercialization of news in the nineteenth century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Benson, R. and Neveu, E. (2005) Bourdieu and the journalistic field. Malden, MA: Polity. Boehlert, E. (2006) Lapdogs: How the press rolled over for Bush. New York: Free Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, New York: Greenwood Press. pp. 46–58. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998a) On television. New York: New Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998b) Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2005) The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field. In R. Benson and E. Neveu (eds), Bourdieu and the journalistic field, Malden, MA: Polity. pp. 29–47. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (2001) NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate, Radical Philosophy, 105: 2–5. Boykoff, M. T. (2007) Flogging a dead norm? Newspaper coverage of anthropogenic climate change in the United States and United Kingdom from 2003 to 2006, Area, 39(4): 470–81. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00769.x Bradshaw, P. (2014) Data journalism. In L. Zion and D. Craig (eds), Ethics for digital journalists: Emerging best practices, New York: Routledge. pp. 202–19. Chakravartty, P. and Schiller, D. (2010) Neoliberal newspeak and digital capitalism in crisis, International Journal of Communication, 4: 670–92. Chambers, D., Steiner, L., and Fleming, C. (2004) Women and journalism. New York: Routledge. Christians, C. G., Glasser, T. L., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K., and White, R. A. (2009) Normative theories of the media: Journalism in democratic societies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Coddington, M. (2012) Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge. Retrieved from http://markcoddington.com/natesilver-journalism-politics-knowledge-epistemology/ Creedon, P. J. and Cramer, J. (2007) Women in mass communication. (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Curtin, P. A. (1999) Reevaluating public relations information subsidies: Market-driven journalism and agenda-building theory and

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practice, Journal of Public Relations Research, 11(1): 53–90. Cutlip, S. M. (1994) The unseen power: Public relations, a history. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. de Burgh, H. (ed.) (2005) Making journalists: Diverse models, global issues. New York: Routledge. Deuze, M. (2005) What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered, Journalism, 6(4): 442–64. Dicken-Garcia, H. (1989) Journalistic standards in nineteenth-century America. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Dreier, P. and Martin, C. R. (2010) How ACORN was framed: Political controversy and media agenda setting, Perspectives on Politics, 8(3): 761–92. doi: doi:10.1017/S153759271000 2069 Elliot, D. (2008) Essential shared values and 21st century journalism. In L. Wilkins and C. G. Christians (eds) The handbook of mass media ethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 28–39. Foss, S. K. (2004) Rhetorical criticism: Exploration and practice. (3rd edn). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Gandy, O. H., Jr. (1982) Beyond agenda setting: Information subsidies and public policy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Gans, H. J. (2003) Democracy and the news. New York: Oxford University Press. Gillmor, D. (Producer) (2009) Toward a SlowNews Movement. Retrieved from http:// mediactive.com/2009/11/08/toward-a-slownews-movement/ Hanitzsch, T. (2007) Deconstructing journalism culture: Toward a universal theory, Communication Theory, 17(4): 367–85. Hayes, A. S. (2008) Press critics are the fifth estate: Media watchdogs in America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Hayes, A. S., Singer, J. B., and Ceppos, J. (2007) Shifting roles, enduring values: The credible journalist in a digital age, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 22(4): 262–79. Hellmueller, L. (2014) The Washington, DC media corps in the 21st century: The sourcecorrespondent relationship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hellmueller, L., Vos, T. P., and Poepsel, M. (2012) Shifting journalistic capital? Transparency and objectivity in the 21st century,

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Journalism Studies, 14(3): 287–304. doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2012.697686 Karlsson, M. (2011) The immediacy of online news, the visibility of journalistic processes and a restructuring of journalistic authority, Journalism, 12(3): 279–95. Kawamoto, K. (2003) Digital journalism: Emerging media and the changing horizons of journalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaye, J. and Quinn, S. (2010). Funding journalism in the digital age: Business models, strategies, issues and trends. New York: Peter Lang. Kovach, B. and Rosenstiel, T. (2007) The elements of journalism: What newspeople should know and the public should expect. (1st rev. edn). New York: Three Rivers Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewin, K. (1935) A dynamic theory of personality (D. K. Adams and K. E. Zener, Trans. 1st edn). New York; London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. Lewin, K. (1951) Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers. New York: Harper. Manning, P. (2013) Financial journalism, news sources and the banking crisis, Journalism, 14(2): 173–89. doi: 10.1177/146488491244 8915 Martin, J. L. (2003) What is field theory?, American Journal of Sociology, 109(1): 1–49. McChesney, R. W. (1999) Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McChesney, R. W. and Nichols, J. (2010) Death and life of American journalism: The media revolution that will begin the world again. Philadelphia: Nation Books. Mindich, D. T. Z. (1998) Just the facts: How ‘objectivity’ came to define American journalism. New York: New York University Press. Morris, S. and Shin, H. S. (2002) Social value of public information, The American Economic Review, 92(5): 1521–34.

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Napoli, P. M. (2003) Audience economics: Media institutions and the audience marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press. Parsons, C. (2007) How to map arguments in political science. New York: Oxford Press. Pasley, J. L. (2001) ‘The tyranny of printers:’ Newspaper politics in the early American republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Peters, C. and Broersma, M. J. (eds) (2013) Rethinking journalism: Trust and participation in a transformed news landscape. New York: Routledge. Schudson, M. (1978) Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York: Basic Books. Schudson, M. (2001) The objectivity norm in American journalism, Journalism, 2(2): 149–70. Schudson, M. (2003) The sociology of news. New York: Norton. Shoemaker, P. J. and Vos, T. P. (2009) Gatekeeping theory. New York: Routledge. Shoemaker, P. J., Vos, T. P., and Reese, S. D. (2008) Journalists as gatekeepers. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch (eds), The

handbook of journalism studies. New York: Routledge. pp. 73–87 Siebert, F. S., Peterson, T., and Schramm, W. L. (1973) Four theories of the press: The authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet communist concepts of what the press should be and do. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. Singer, J. B. (2007) Contested autonomy, Journalism Studies, 8(1): 79–95. Starkman, D. (2014) The watchdog that didn’t bark: The financial crisis and the disappearance of investigative reporting. New York: Columbia University Press. Vos, T. P. (2012) ‘Homo Journalisticus’: Journalism education’s role in articulating the objectivity norm, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 13(4): 435–49. Vos, T. P., Craft, S., and Ashley, S. (2012) New media, old criticism: Bloggers’ press criticism and the journalistic field, Journalism, 13(7): 848–66. White, D. M. (1950) The ‘gate keeper’: A case study in the selection of news, Journalism Quarterly, 27: 383–90. Wyatt, W. N. (2007) Critical conversations: A theory of press criticism. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

27 News Networks David Domingo and Victor Wiard

This chapter discusses the opportunities and limitations of adopting an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to Journalism Studies in order to trace the changing configurations of news production, circulation and usage in the digital era. An actor-network perspective proposes to de-emphasize the focus of Journalism Studies on institutionalized journalism in order to make sense of the construction of journalism and news by following news-related practices of the diversity of actors that conform contemporary news networks in situated communities (Domingo et al., 2015). This implies problematizing the scientific notions of journalism (often loaded with implicit normativity) and to expand the research focus beyond the newsroom by following daily news practices of a diversity of actors (journalists, activists, social institutions, digital technologies and citizens), who collectively negotiate the meanings of news, the legitimacy of who produces it and their role in the public sphere. Ideally, this approach would render visible the power exercised by

certain actors over others to impose certain (institutionalized) configurations of the news network, detect alternative news practices, and empower (human) actors to reshape journalism, understood as a socio-technical practice rather than as an institution. The chapter is structured around the three intertwined Journalism Studies research areas to which ANT contributes: (1) the analysis of technological innovation in the newsroom by acknowledging the agency of technical artifacts in their interactions with journalistic work processes, (2) the understanding of the dynamics of the news coverage of controversies and how news narratives are co-constructed through the interactions of a plurality of actors, and (3) the explanation of the evolution of journalism as a contingent but rather stable institution, shaped by power struggles over its role in society that are reproduced in everyday news practices by professional journalists, their sources and their publics. The key concepts of ANT are presented throughout the

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three sections with examples of research projects that have applied the framework within Journalism Studies. The ontological, epistemological and methodological implications of an actor-network approach have been considered refreshing for the research of journalism, especially its ‘general skepticism about essentialised notions’ of the institutional configuration of the media (Couldry, 2008) and how it invites us to deconstruct the ‘firm analytical borders [that] separate news and newsmakers, reporters and audience, press and politics’ (Turner, 2005: 321). The theory has also received criticisms regarding its ability to analyze power inequalities (see Hemmingway 2008: 34; Couldry, 2008) and normative values (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013: 367). The reaction of ANT scholars to these critiques and the complementarity of ANT to other established research paradigms in Journalism Studies are also discussed.

OPENING THE BLACK BOX OF THE NEWSROOM: UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION Actor-network theory1 was initially developed in the 1980s in the context of the sociology of science and technology, in order to explain how scientific knowledge was constructed through the interactions of researchers, organizations and the material elements they work with, their objects of study and the technologies and instruments with which they measure them in the laboratory (Law, 1992). ANT connects to the research tradition of social constructivism, as it focuses on how daily practice shapes the configuration of society. Its emphasis is on the relationships between actors, how they associate to construct social products like science and how do they (re)define each other in that process. That emphasis on interactions is one of the key characteristics of actor-network theory. It is not interested in stable social

structures, but rather in the development of new ideas and technologies, and the breakdowns of institutions that we take for granted (Latour, 2005; see Anderson and De Maeyer, 2014); it proposes to explore the networks of relationships that actors establish and continuously renegotiate to (provisionally) impose their interests over other actors. The hyphen between actor and network points to an important principle of ANT: any actor in a network may eventually be analyzed as a network itself (Callon, 1987), a collection of different elements brought together in an evolving relationship (Latour, 1999). A specific social configuration is the effect of these relationships between actors and their networks, and stability is a hard-earned and always provisional outcome. This perspective makes ANT especially suitable to make sense of innovation and change, and that was the rationale of the first journalism researchers that added it to their scientific toolbox. Hemmingway (2005: 10) saw the newsroom as the journalistic equivalent of the laboratory that Latour and Woolgar (1979) analyzed in a seminal study that would set the foundations of ANT. In borrowing the actor-network perspective, journalism scholars were searching for new frameworks to interpret the processes of adoption of digital technologies in journalism. What was most attractive about ANT was its original approach to conceptualizing technological artifacts as actors on the same ontological level as humans (Latour, 1993; see Couldry, 2008, see Chapter 31): materiality plays a role in the configuration of any social activity, and ANT proposes to analyze it like any other actor in the network in order to explore what it contributes, how it shapes other actors while at the same time it is being shaped by their actions. This principle has often been misinterpreted by the critics of ANT. Plesner clarifies: It could be argued that the materialist orientation of ANT privileges ICTs over other kinds of agencies, but it is rather the case that it keeps technologies in the picture, because of its ambition to bring to

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the foreground the ‘things’ that keep associations tied together […] and tend to be forgotten by sociologists. (Plesner, 2009: 606)

The research on the ‘mutual shaping’ of technology and journalism (Bockzwoski, 1999; Hemmingway, 2005) was a crucial antidote to the techno-deterministic discourses that dominated Journalism Studies in the 1990s (Domingo, 2008a). Instead of treating the internet as an external force that would influence the work of journalists, studies based on ANT and other constructivist approaches understood innovation in newsrooms as a process of negotiation between existing news production practices and the affordances of digital technology (see also Chapter 13). Empirical results show how existing journalistic culture resisted and partially neutralized the potential alternative configurations proposed by innovations. Hemmingway (2005; see also 2008) described how the adoption of a Personal Digital Production (PDP) system at a BBC regional newsroom was strongly contested by journalists and the existing technological arrangements of news production designed for teamwork, taming the revolutionary effects predicted by the media consultant proposing the innovation: Effective news networks are shown to be more resistant to technological onslaught than was perhaps predicted. Such robust negotiations with new technologies occur as a result of the manipulation of a single determinant [PDP] by an amalgam of agents already in place within the network. Those successful manipulations are engineered both by previously established technologies, and also by the deliberate actions of journalists and production staff who are central to the overall process of technological adoption (Hemmingway, 2005: 26)

Domingo (2008b) found that, in four Catalan online newsrooms, not all the features of the internet as a news medium were equally developed into work practices. Immediacy resonated more clearly with existing journalistic values in the newspapers and broadcasters where the online teams were embedded, and the consequent focus on breaking news

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hindered the initial exploration of interactive and multimedia features. The comparative approach of this and other studies also demonstrate that the adoption of innovations is locally shaped by the specific circumstances and dynamics of each newsroom; no single analysis fits all circumstances.2 Hemmingway (2005) proposed the concept of news networks as the shorthand for the collection of human and technical actors that make the production of news possible. In her case study, during the process of mutual shaping, the new technology had agency in changing some news practices, as it enabled journalists to meet tighter deadlines and facilitated an increased number of human interest stories. The news network extends beyond the newsroom partly with the help of a diverse array of technologies that connect it to its journalists in the field, its sources and its publics. Email and Google (at some point innovations adopted by journalists in their daily work) have not substituted the telephone as a core technology constructing the network of newsgathering (Plesner, 2009), but they have made the relationship with the sources more informal and immediate. This has provoked subtle changes in newswork that remain mostly unnoticed by the journalists due to the ‘seamlessness’ (2009: 624) achieved by the technologies after adoption has been naturalized – in the sense that actors perceived them as if they had always been part of their work routines. This naturalization is usually analyzed by ANT-oriented researchers using ethnographic methods: observing the contradictions that surface during newswork and tracing the previous steps in the development of innovations through interviews and document analysis. Anderson and Kreiss (2013) reconstructed the evolution of content management systems at Knight– Ridder, once the largest US group of regional (online) newspapers in order to show how technological design was in the center of the tensions between ‘deeply embedded journalistic culture valorizing the local control of news production [and] the commercial

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imperatives of Knight-Ridder’ (2013: 378). In-depth interviews (Micó et  al., 2013) and even quantitative questionnaires (Spyridou et al., 2013) provide a relevant but partial perspective of the network, that of human actors through their perceptions, while observation in the newsroom allows the researcher to produce thick descriptions of the actual interactions between them and technical artifacts (Hemmingway, 2008; Anderson and Kreiss, 2013; Rodgers, 2015). ANT proposes the term actant as the neutral concept to label human and non-human actors indistinctively, to identify ‘any element in the network that acquires strength in association with others’ (Hemingway, 2008: 24). ‘[P]eople, ideals, symbolic constructions, and material elements are seen as equally important elements to analyze’. (Plesner, 2009: 606). A journalist, a newsroom, a group of activists or objectivity are each of them as much of an actor-network as a computer, a content management system (CMS) or a social media platform like Twitter. They are all actants in a network of relationships, and networks themselves if we analyze them closely. For some of the actants it may be impossible to see the complexity of relationships within other actants they are in touch with, they are a black box for them, another recurrent concept in ANT studies. This is what happens to journalists with many technologies, even if they have been developed ad hoc in the newsroom. From the journalists’ perspective, the inner workings of those technical artifacts are a mystery and they actually do not need any details; that specific piece of equipment is an actant and not a network in the eyes of the journalist. But black boxes do often open up when things do not work well, and that is a crucial moment for the researcher to trace the inner networks within the actants of a given news network. Schmitz Weiss and Domingo (2010) showed how the relationships between web editors and their CMS can be very difficult, as the design of the software was constructed through the interactions between web developers and

the editor in chief of the online newsroom, who interpreted the needs of web editors effectively black-boxing the rationales of the CMS architecture for them. However, when the daily routines of news production did not fit the expectations of story formats and elements embedded in the software, web editors created alternative ways to use some CMS features, partially opening the black box to redefine through practice what had been presented to them as a fixed configuration. Anderson and Kreiss (2013) and Rodgers (2015) also analyzed how journalists interacted with CMS in their daily work as part of wider research projects. For them, ANT was useful ‘to follow the associational traces that connect […] the increasingly dispersed sociotechnical elements of the journalistic field’ (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013: 376), ‘taking software seriously as an object of journalism … acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization’ (Rodgers, 2015: 12). Once we treat human and non-human elements in a network as actants, we can understand how software products, after they have been designed by human programmers, have agency in their relationships with other humans: they ‘introduce forms of standardized decision-making and functionality […] which produces conditions of possibility for journalism practices’ (Rodgers, 2015: 20). But as the actor-network approach ‘gives primacy neither to people nor to technology’ (Plesner, 2009: 612), researchers do not have to presuppose what is going to happen in their interactions, everything is possible. While theories like diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2003) interpret the process as a predictable curve of adoption based on the features of technologies themselves and the characteristics of the organizations, ANT insists that the outcomes of the process are open and often unexpected, an unpredictable path resulting of the tensions ‘between determination and contingency’ (Lievrouw, 2002: 247; see also Micó et  al., 2013): separately, the existing configuration of the networks of relationships within the newsrooms and within the software

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and hardware of new technologies may be relatively coherent and stable, but when they are brought together in a specific setting, the configurations will surely be redefined through their interactions. It is by tracing how they associate that we find the specific ways in which they shape each other.

TRACING THE NETWORK BEYOND THE NEWSROOM: THE PLURALITY OF NEWS PRACTICES Conceiving news production as an actor-network has powerful epistemological consequences for Journalism Studies. When we start to ‘follow the actors themselves’ (Latour, 2005: 12) to trace their relationships, as suggested by ANT to be the core activity of the researcher, our object of study will quickly extend ‘from the machinery of the newsroom, through its personnel, its news technologies, skills and working practices, beyond the newsroom and out into the messy world’ (Hemmingway 2008, 27). ANT provides the framework to analyze the increasingly complex and intertwined landscape of the production, circulation and usage of information without imposing theoretical models that assign roles to the different actors. Instead of focusing on the (blurring) boundaries that may separate the actors in specific sociologic categories like journalist, source or audience, ANT provides a perspective that focuses on the actions that bind them together and shape their respective engagement with news (Domingo and Le Cam, 2015). ‘Blowing up the newsroom’ (Anderson, 2011: 151) as a self-contained and somewhat convenient location to study newswork; that is one of the key contributions of ANT beyond the analysis of innovation processes. Anderson himself clarifies the provocative enunciation of this proposal: I do not want to suggest that the newsroom has no role in contemporary journalistic production.

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Indeed, the research upon which this essay is based concludes just the opposite – the newsroom’s role remains central. However, we can no longer take its primacy for granted; the status of the traditional institutional newsroom must be continually problematized. (Anderson, 2011: 152)

His study of the broader news ecosystem (see Chapter 28) in Philadelphia identifies multiple actors engaging in the news production process, including competing news media companies, local activists, public administration officials and bloggers (Anderson, 2010; 2013a). In a study of the controversy surrounding the arrest of a Muslim woman in Brussels, Le Cam and Domingo (2015) found that social actors (from the police to politicians, radical islamist groups and NGOs advocating for multiculturalism) had very elaborated strategies to interact with journalists and influence mainstream media news narratives. Quite often, though, they would also avoid the journalists and use other channels to reach specific audiences more effectively: text messages, YouTube videos, face-to-face meetings, and so on. In both case studies results suggest that, despite the plurality of voices involved in the circulation of news, professional journalism is still granted by other actants’ actions the prerogative of producing a legitimate account of events: they want to get their version of the story printed or broadcasted as part of their social struggle for hegemony (see Chapter 17). The sensitivity of ANT provides crucial caveats to the centrality of professional journalists: their legitimacy is contested, negotiated or reaffirmed in every interaction with other actants and may evolve over time. The strategy of following the actants implies, from a methodological point of view, that the researcher will agnostically incorporate to her analysis any human or non-human agent that interacts with a previously identified actant. The network constructed through tracing these relationships is not literally a network consisting of a web of nodes such as the internet, it does not exist as a physical and stable object or layout – even though

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its visual representation may sometimes be useful to highlight some of the actors’ multiple relationships (Venturini, 2012), but is rather an intellectual construct, a metaphor that ANT uses to conceptualize the process of studying a social phenomenon, as Latour explained: I take the word network not simply to designate things in the world that have the shape of a net (in contrast, let’s say, to juxtaposed domains, to surfaces delineated by borders, to impenetrable volumes), but mainly to designate a mode of inquiry that learns to list, at the occasion of a trial, the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist. (2011: 799)

In our case, news is the entity of interest, and for it to exist there are a multitude of actants inside and outside the newsroom that mobilize ‘news’ to make it happen. And, according to ANT, we cannot understand each element of this extended news network without analyzing its relationships with the others. This is why the focus of actor-­ network research is on practices rather than on identities. Identities are an effect of the network, the outcome of practices and actions, rather than the reason for them (Law, 1992). In that, ANT is radically different from field theory (see Chapter 26) in its conception of social positions, and it connects much more with the rhizomatic approaches to media ecosystems (see Chapter 28). It is through this emphasis on practice3 that we can study the involvement of the variety of actants in journalism without prejudging their positions and identities (Domingo et al., 2015). Instead of using pre-defined categories, ANT recommends to listen to the actants and how they describe themselves and the world around them. They may not define their engagement with news as journalism, but their practices may be significant in their interaction with others to shape the news coverage. Continuing with the strategy of tracing news networks, the process would include ‘the people formerly known as the audience’

(Rosen, 2006) as diverse actants also enacting practices that have to do with news in different ways that are often unaccounted (Costera Meijer and Kormelink, 2014, see also Chapter 13). As Journalism Studies deals with the challenge of an object of study characterized by blurring boundaries (Carlson and Lewis, 2015), this approach neutralizes ‘the disciplinary or other preconceptions that would automatically read particular actions as, say, “consumption” or “being an audience”, whether or not that is how the actants see their actions’ (Couldry, 2008: 125). As a consequence of its research program, ANT ‘deactivates the dichotomy producers–consumers that lies at the core of theories of journalism studies’ (Domingo et  al., 2015: 57) and allows for an analysis that is better equipped to acknowledge the contribution of each actant to the collective construction of news: Instead of essaying the coinage of new hybrid concepts (produser, citizen journalist) that convey the inefficacy of the existing models to explain what actants are doing in the digital era, [this] antifunctionalist approach makes it easier to acknowledge that professional journalists actually use themselves a lot of news in order to be able to produce their own news stories, or that certain citizens that do not work for media organisations may be very efficient at circulating some news on Twitter and making them trending topics before professional newsrooms take them to produce their own account of the story. (2015: 57)

This radically relativistic perspective does not mean there is no order or specific roles for different actants in the network; they will actually emerge from the process of following their actions. One of the core activities in any social setting is the process of grouping, the formation of clusters of actants within the network (Latour, 2005). Again, rather than a priori defining how different actants involved in journalism belong to one category or another, ANT proposes to observe how do they organize themselves in groups, how do they define those groupings and how do they keep others from being members and performing the tasks they have reserved to

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themselves. Grouping does not break the network into isolated packs of actants, but provides an arrangement of the actants; it is actually a consequence of the interactions and can only exist through them. Actants in a group share common goals and an identity and define themselves in contrast, and therefore in interaction, with other actants. Latour argues that ‘groupings have constantly to be made, or re-made, and during this creation or recreation the group-makers leave behind many traces that can be used as data’ (2005: 34) to explain the dynamics of a social phenomenon and what each actant contributes to it. Micó et  al. (2013) explored how group formation in a public broadcasting company hindered the development of a newsroom convergence project: over the years, radio, television, and internet journalists had defined themselves in opposition to the others in order to legitimize their work. This sharp identity differentiation fostered great resistance to the proposed organizational changes, as they were perceived as a suppression of the existing grouping. Beyond the walls of the newsrooms, ‘to a journalist trained in traditional reporting techniques, all online actors look like sources and can be evaluated according to the criteria by which a reporter judges a source’ (Anderson, 2010: 306), instinctively grouping them as different, without perceiving them as a threat to their legitimacy. Actor-network theory makes yet another epistemological proposition: actor-networks can only be traced if there is conflict or tensions, which is actually more often than not. In the moments when actants manage to (provisionally) stabilize an arrangement, a way of doing something, the arrangement becomes a black box to others, as we saw before, but also to the researcher. The relationships between the actants only are visible when they struggle to change existing arrangements or when new actants (such as a technical innovation) enter the network and others need to realign. To be able to practically trace those relationships, ANT advises to start from controversies.

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Callon (1981) put controversies at the center of the initial research program of ANT, because it is during these moments of conflict that black boxes are more surely to become wide open and the inner workings of an actor-network get exposed in their contradictions. Controversies are complex situations in which an arrangement does not reach complete consensus amongst the actors involved; it represents any matter that is not – yet – stabilized, black boxed, or closed (Venturini, 2010: 260–62). Controversies then take a wider meaning that simply diverging opinions, and describe anything that is a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour, 2004; Latour, 2005: 87–120). Since in journalism, much of news coverage revolves around following social controversies, ANT can be useful to explain how the positions of different social actors evolve over time around a specific topic, such as cloning (Neresini, 2000), and it is also a good strategy to explore how actors negotiate their groupings and what are the interactions that shape the news narratives (Le Cam and Domingo, 2015: 100). It is in this context that concepts such as power and normativity enter the picture. As we will see, these key sociological categories have had a controversial history within ANT.

THE (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF JOURNALISM: ANT, POWER AND NORMATIVITY The principles of ANT explained so far have many virtues when analyzing scenarios of change: it is well equipped to detect new actors and the mutations of the existing ones. The relationships that the researcher traces do not determine static positions, they exist because of (inter)actions performed over time, and they are prone to evolve. If there is one core mission in applying ANT to Journalism Studies, it is to explain the ways in which journalism is changing. Not only what has changed and what not, but more

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precisely the mechanisms of evolution, what actions of what actants have (re)configured news networks over time. This is what the empirical research on innovation reviewed in the first section has done at the level of the newsroom. The challenge now is to apply this knowledge to understand the historical evolution of journalism as a profession, as an institution and as a social practice and identify the factors that are shaping its current configuration. Media scholars have voiced their skepticism regarding the possibility that ANT alone could address such a goal (Couldry, 2008; Anderson and Kreiss, 2013; Anderson and De Maeyer, 2014; Benson, 2014). They definitely appreciate its vindication of materiality as part of our object of study by recognizing the agency of technologies, and its ability to describe the tensions between a diversity of actors without categorizations a priori that could underestimate emerging trends. However, they are unsatisfied with the role that ANT grants to the interpretations that human actors do of the network configurations (Couldry, 2008: 3), ‘the cultural presuppositions, values, and rationales according to which action is made worthwhile and direct towards particular normative ends’ (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013: 367). By focusing on practice and relationships, ANT highlights the unpredictability of social phenomena, but it underemphasizes at the same time the immaterial frameworks that guide human activities. Hemmingway (2008) acknowledged the need to include the reflexivity of human actors in an ANT analysis, breaking away from the strict symmetry of the analysis of actants proposed by the theory. Latour (2013) has more recently proposed the concept of modes of existence to address the overarching cultural frameworks that lay out human expectations in different social domains, including media (Cuntz et al., 2014). Building bridges with other research traditions that have similar critical approaches to social analysis but put the cultural explicitly in the researcher’s lens is the solution proposed by Anderson

and Kreiss (2013). Benson (2014) agrees, suggesting ‘heterodox rather than orthodox interpretations and uses of theory’ to address this challenge. For him, institutional/ field theories (see Chapter 25 and 26) can contribute an explanatory and normative analysis of phenomena initially mapped with an ANT approach. That would compensate ‘the cost[s]’ of ANT’s relativism: ‘First, no explanations – that would privilege some accounts over others. And second, no evaluations – nothing is better or worse than anything else.’ This view on the implications of ANT resonate with the recurrent accusation that the tracing of actor-networks ‘flattens’ power relationships, contributing to an apolitical view of the world where there are no structural inequalities. Latour (2005) has thoroughly addressed this misunderstanding and defended the critical and progressive engagement of ANT: the results of studies of actor-networks actually show how fragile existing arrangements are, how much energy actors need to invest to shape social phenomena to be the way they want them to be. For him, ANT studies are ‘an arena, a forum, a space, a representation’ (Latour, 2005: 256) that may empower social actors to act upon the circumstances the researcher has been able to portray. In an actor–network, change is always possible, but that does not mean there are no power dynamics. Hemmingway provides a good summary of the theoretical grounds for the analysis of power through ANT, consistent with the principles presented in previous sections: it is only through the interactions between actants that we can observe power, when one of them makes others do something in a certain way. ‘[P]ower is not something that one can merely possess’ but rather something that one ‘exerts’ to make others perform an action (2008: 34). The proponents of ANT have developed several concepts to explain power relationships, such as translation and obligatory point of passage. Translation addresses the mechanisms of power that construct and hold together

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an actor-network (Callon, 1986). Actants who are successful in exerting power over others manage to enroll them in their network by translating their views of the world and respective agendas into common agreements. Latour (2005) proposes a distinction between mediators, the actants that translate the meaning of what is at stake and provoke changes in other actants of the network, and intermediaries, that simply transmit the meaning without changing it. With these conceptual tools, it is possible to explain how technical elements in a CMS can privilege some content over another (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013), how emails may change the relationship between editors and contributors (Plesner, 2009), how Google shapes how news is publicized (Sire, 2013) or how the introduction of a digital media hub does not manage to change some news production routines (Hemmingway, 2005). The examples come from research on innovation processes in newsrooms and focus not only on the power relationships between technologies and their human users in shaping the news, but also on how technologies may alter the relationships between human actants. Another example takes us beyond the newsroom, and introduces the last concept in the vocabulary of power in ANT: obligatory point of passage. Journalists may be successful in establishing themselves as the crucial element of the news network, the obligatory point of passage of the actions of social actors that want the public to listen to their point of view (Domingo and Le Cam, 2015). In this case, the centrality of journalists in the network may stand in as a mediator for many of the activities of their sources, forced to translate their positions into media-friendly events and content. This conceptual universe puts the emphasis on the fact that the ways in which actants do things may be constantly renegotiated: obligatory points of passage and mediators need to continuously exert their power to mobilize the other actants in the direction they want and stop alternative groupings. And normativity – values and ideals- is one of the most useful actants that can be

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mobilized to make other actants do what one needs them to do. Conceiving norms as actants is yet another possible way to address the concern about the neglect of cultural presuppositions in ANT analyses. From this standpoint, journalistic norms interact with the rest of the actants in the news network, do shape some or many of the actants’ actions but at the same time can be redefined through those interactions. The explanatory power of ANT is that these relationships with normativity can anchor the long history of journalism, the historical construction of this social activity (Carey, 1974; Schudson, 1997), to the daily practices of the present, articulate macro perspectives that explain where the profession comes from with micro analysis of everyday life where the future is being crafted. Actants, including professional journalists but also their sources (Ryfe, 2012; Le Cam and Domingo, 2015) and the audiences (Costera Meijer, 2012), may engage in metajournalistic discourses that invoke normative ideals that we can trace back to the historical processes that created them; and they can also do it implicitly, through their actions, by repeating a well established routine or, all of the contrary, rebelling against it. Normativity is a powerful mediator even if its an immaterial actant, it holds together journalism despite the many changes in practices that technological innovation and the plurality of actants engaging with it entail. But as any other actant, it has been constructed, and we may be able to open up its tendency to be a black box during controversies. ANT allows us to conceive journalistic norms as a relatively stable actor-network that may change and evolve over time in the process of interaction with the actants that produce, circulate and use news. Tracing norms and values may seem a tricky task compared to following other actants. However abstract it could appear, normative ideas are inscribed into very tangible material objects such as books, professional magazines and websites, they are invoked in university syllabus and newsroom

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guidelines. The analysis of these journalistic meta-discourses (Carlson, 2015) can be a fruitful way to address the power struggles between actants over the definition of what journalism should be, the grouping efforts to grant the legitimacy of producing news accounts to some and deny it to others. Also, the ethnographic observation of news practices can reveal the concrete relationships that actants establish with normativity in the process of making decisions related to news. When the routinized flow of production momentarily flickers as a controversy interferes with it, the usually taken for granted mechanisms of the deployment of normativity become wide open for the researcher to see. Online news editors may have delegated to news agency wire the practice of fact-checking information before publishing, but when a journalist was killed by US army fire during the siege of Baghdad in 2003 the old professional norm of caution paralyzed the newsroom as an electrical shock: it was one of them, and they felt the need to wait before posting the story and search for confirmation (Domingo, 2008c). The norm is still there, even if in a normal day journalists do not invoke it explicitly and their actions seem automated.

CONCLUSION: RECONCILIATIONS Bruno Latour has often regretted that he and his colleagues decided to name their proposal actor-network theory, as it is too ambiguous and is apt to be misinterpreted (1999, 2005). For him, rather than a theory – a model to explain the world – it is ‘a very crude method to learn from the actors without imposing on them an a priori definition’ (Latour, 1999: 20). The sociology of associations or the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986) have been proposed as alternative names for its anti-functionalist approach. Nonetheless, the minimalistic conceptual toolbox of ANT, with its voluntarily generic terminology

(actant, grouping, translation), has important ontological and epistemological implications, as any other theoretical framework. In the context of Journalism Studies, the contribution of ANT could be explained as the reconciliation of research programs that have been disconnected for too long, fostering scholars to explore the interrelations between objects of study that had traditionally been addressed as isolated phenomena: a reconciliation between humans and technology; between professional journalists and other social actors engaging in the co-creation of news; between the newsroom and the life outside its walls; between practices of news production, circulation and usage; between newswork and reception studies; between normativity and contingency; between history and everyday life; between continuity and change. So far, most of the empirical contributions of ANT have mainly focused on the analysis of the processes of adoption of technologies in the newsroom. There is still much to explore about the interaction between human and non-human agencies, and any study informed by an ANT perspective should take into account the materiality of journalism as a factor in the answer of research questions, whichever they are. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to still keep this relationship of journalists and technologies in the foreground of specific research projects, moving from the focus on the adoption to a more ambitious understanding of the processes of design of digital journalism software and hardware. Newsrooms are increasingly engaging in the production of (often open-source) code that enables the journalists to filter information, analyze data, produce visualizations; an ANT sensitivity to the mutual shaping of social and technical processes could greatly contribute to a sociology of computational and algorithmic journalism (Anderson, 2013b). Outside of the newsroom, empirical studies have used ANT to identify the diversity of actants of news production, offering a refreshing panorama of the polyphony of

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voices in journalism beyond the professionals that usually were at the core of research. The analysis of the relationships established between these actors, their groupings and tensions, their practices and identities, needs to be pursued in different cultural settings in order to portray the myriad configurations of news networks. The news coverage of local controversies or very specialized topics are the ideal points of departure to trace news networks, each of them with their own actants and power dynamics. While the focus has been so far on the actants of these networks, ANT studies can also be designed to provide answers about the outcomes of these interactions, the news content they co-produced and its social and political implications; evaluating through very concrete accounts the actual impact of journalism in society, the interfaces between news networks and the rest of actornetworks that are the fabric of social life. The biggest challenge that ANT can still address, stemming from the previous two research objectives, is the evolution of the norms of journalism understood as a sociohistorical construct mobilized in everyday practices, shaping them and being reshaped through them. An ANT perspective can contribute an unorthodox vantage point of questions of normativity, demystifying its position as an immutable benchmark and its default association with professional journalism. The ideal definitions of journalism are negotiated in every interaction between all the actors involved in the co-creation of news. To open up a fruitful discussion about the future of journalism, there is nothing more empowering than acknowledging its contingency, understanding the titanic efforts that journalists engage in in order to keep their profession from dissolving into the messiness of news networks.

NOTES  1  See Latour (2005) for a systematic compilation of the principles and concepts of ANT, and

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­ emmingway (2008) for an introduction from H the perspective of Journalism Studies.  2  See Boczkowski (2005) for similar findings deriving of a social construction of technology approach close to the principles of ANT.  3  Discourses are implicitly treated as a form of practice by ANT.

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Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986 [1979]) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Guildford: Princeton University Press. Law, J. (1992) Notes on the theory of the actornetwork: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity, Systems Practice, 5(4): 379–93. Le Cam, F. and Domingo, D. (2015) The plurality of journalistic identities in local controversies. In Nielsen, R. K. (ed.) Local Journalism: The Decline of Newspapers and the Rise of Digital Media, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Lievrouw, L. (2002) Determination and contingency in new media development: Diffusion of innovations and social shaping of technology perspectives. In Lievrouw, L. and Livingstone, S. (eds) The Handbook of New Media, London: Sage. pp. 181–99. Micó, Josep, L., Masip, Pere, and Domingo, David (2013) To wish impossible things: Convergence as a process of diffusion of innovations in an actor-network, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 118–37. Neresini, F. (2000) And man descended from the sheep: the public debate on cloning in the Italian press. Public Understanding of Science, 9: 359–382. Plesner, U. (2009) An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork, Journalism, 10(5): 604–26. Rodgers, Scott (2015) Foreign objects? Web content management systems, journalism cultures and the ontology of software, Journalism, 16(1): 10–26.

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Rogers, Everett (2003) Diffusion of Innovations (5th edn). New York: Free Press. Rosen, Jay (2006) The people formerly known as the audience. Press Think. Retrieved from: http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ ppl_frmr.html Ryfe, D. M. (2012) Can Journalism Survive: An Inside Look at American Newsrooms. New York: Wiley. Schmitz Weiss, A. and Domingo, D. (2010) Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice, New Media & Society, 12(7): 1156–71. Schudson, M. (1997) Toward a troubleshooting manual for journalism history, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 74(3): 463–76. Sire, G. (2013) La production journalistique et Google: chercher à ce que l’information soit trouvée. Doctoral dissertation. Université de Paris. Spyridou, L.-P, Matsiola, M., Veglis, A., Kalliris, G., and Dimoulas C. (2013) Journalism in a state of flux: Journalists as agents of technology innovation and emerging news practices, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 76–98. Turner, F. (2005) Actor-networking the news, Social Epistemology, 19(4): 321–24. Venturini, T. (2010) Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network theory, Public Understanding of Science, 19(3): 258–73. Venturini, T. (2012) Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods, Public Understanding of Science, 21(7): 796–812.

28 News Ecosystems C . W. A n d e r s o n

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the notion of ‘getting outside’ the newsroom in the digital age, inspired by Zelizer’s argument that much of what matters about journalism today does not take place in the newsroom itself (Zelizer 2004). It begins with a brief overview of the different ways that scholars have understood this process of getting inside and outside newsrooms. The second part of the chapter argues that we must also consider an additional road forward—the ecosystemic approach to journalism research. It begins with a general overview of the increasing prevalence of the phrase ‘news ecosystem’ in the digital era. It then discusses two uses of the term ‘ecosystem’ in the media studies literature, before outlining several examples of research on emerging news ecosystems, each which draws upon a different, if unacknowledged, theoretical tradition. In that way, this chapter marks an attempt to think through two different meanings

of the words ‘news ecosystem,’ and relate those meanings to possible roads forward for journalism research. I call these approaches the ‘environmental’ and the ‘rhizomatic’ approaches. While I think both approaches are intellectually and normatively useful, there is a preference here for more rhizomatic methods: because while the rhizomatic approach has become part and parcel of the current wave of ‘big data analysis’ (Wu et al. 2011) the environmental approach increasingly seems to be applied to more traditional forms of journalism studies research. And so in the pages below I want to argue that the rhizomatic approach ought to be more rigorously applied to journalism studies, and also to argue that there needs to be more of a qualitative, ethnographic element to these largely data-driven studies. I should note from the beginning that this conceptual difference between rhizomatic and environmental approaches was not coined by me; indeed, it is a distinction that has been prevalent in certain domains of materialist

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media theory for over a decade. Rather, my contribution in this chapter is to take these two approaches, describe their major areas of concern and disagreement, and apply them to journalism studies. I also want to provide a quick terminological clarification which may help orient readers coming to these topics for the first time. The theorists I discuss here are not always themselves careful about the labels they provide for their conceptual terms; they often use ‘environment,’ ‘ecology,’ and ‘ecological’ interchangeably. In this chapter, I use ‘ecological’ to refer to both major approaches I discuss here insofar as they are similar in a number of ways. The older body of Neil Postman/Marshall McLuhan theory I refer to as an ‘environmental’ perspective, while I label the newer body of research a ‘rhizomatic’ approach.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE ‘THE NEWSROOM’ In her 2004 book Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy, Barbie Zelizer took ethnographic newsroom research to task for what she called its ‘lack of attention’ to the many varieties of journalism that exist outside the boundaries of the traditional news institution (Zelizer 2004). We can see the similarity between this and Cottle’s proposal that In [the new] interpenetrating [digital] communications environment news production no longer takes place within any one organizational centre of production but has become increasingly dispersed across multiple sites, different platforms and can be contributed to by journalists based in different locations around the world or on the move. (Cottle 2007: 8)

In essence, the goal of all news research has been to answer the following three linked questions: why is news made the way it is? what impact does news have on the world, on readers, or both? And finally, how do these

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news production and consumption practices contribute, in normative terms, to the maintenance of a healthy democracy? Newsroom based approaches, critics contend, ignore the external structural factors that contribute to patterns in news production, pay too little attention to the act of consumption, and neglect to place both production and consumption patterns, as well as newsrooms themselves, into historical context. The argument that ethnography or newsroom research fails to capture the external (usually structural) factors that contribute to the news production processes is an old one; one of the more recent examples of this line of critique can be found in Pickard (2014) in his overview of the recent spate of (centered and ethnographic) journalism research, much of it newsroom, in which he argues: Each of these books gives us a snapshot of what ails the news industry. Together, they shed light on the broader question of the future of journalism. If there’s one overarching critique of these otherwise fine studies, it’s their overall lack of emphasis on the structural roots of the journalism crisis … [insofar as] rank-and-file reporters have often been caught by shifts beyond their control.

A line of journalism research more indebted to political-economic approaches (Sparks 1992) (in which levels of state regulation, differences between national media systems, and macroeconomic forces play a dominant role) can direct the researcher’s attention to powerful forces technically external to the newsroom that impact, even structure, the production of news. Newsroom focused research can not only seem under-structured; it can also, paradoxically, appear to be over-structured insofar as the trend in this research is to focus on systems of production rather than on the way that audiences and citizens consume the news. Indeed, the past two decades have seen something of pendulum swing in journalism studies; from the production studies of the 1970s and 80s to the cultural consumption studies of the 80s and 90s to the research of today,

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which can be said to mark the return of a production-focused approach [cites from this volume probably, if I can]. The most interesting older research on audiences, however, does not take an individualistic approach to questions of the relationship between news and audiences but rather a cultural approach, in which dominant codes and symbolic orientations structure the intersection between news content and citizen action. Once again, traditional understandings of the relationship between journalism and ‘its’ audience draw our attention outside the newsroom to those actors on the other side of the news gates. History is a third (though under-explored) mechanism for interrogating the relationship between ‘the newsroom’ and what lies outside of it. Ethnographic research in newsrooms can be criticized for freezing its subjects in time – in part by focusing on both the phenomenological aspects of news production (what is seen, understood, and experienced by newsroom actors) and in part because of the (relatively) short amount of time any ethnographer can spend in a single location. Even the most extensive ethnographic studies tend to take place over years, rather than decades; this can lead to the reification of temporary phenomena and the detemporalization of newsroom structures, and both these aspects can be exacerbated by rapid technological change. Historical perspectives on the newsroom, by contrast, can put the pulsating technologies of current news production in context, showing how they have evolved, often in unexpected or unintended ways. In the case of historical newsroom research, the outside of the newsroom lies along a temporal as well as spatial dimension. Each of these perspectives – the political/ economic, the cultural, and the historical – marks a way of getting outside the newsroom, in part by renouncing (or at least supplementing) the ethnographic model. Each of them is also a methodological strategy. But are there conceptual strategies through which to ‘blow up’ the newsroom (Anderson 2011)

while still maintaining the insights of ethnography and its granular, phenomenological, meaning-oriented perspective? I argue that there is, and that to simultaneously perch inside and outside the news production space we need to do more than simply catalog the external, structural factors that govern (or in a stronger sense, determine) the production cycles of news. I want to argue that we can also study news ecosystems, which I define as the entire ensemble of individuals, organizations, and technologies within a particular geographic community or around a particular issue, engaged in journalistic production and, indeed, in journalistic consumption. In other words: there have always been more groups making, distributing, and consuming the news than those contained within the traditional newsroom infrastructure; that most ethnographic studies of news have looked primarily at the newsrooms of large, traditional, central news organizations; that different outlets and different institutions produce different forms of news and different story frames that then circulate amongst different demographic groups and different strata of citizens; and that these stories, frames, technologies, and journalists travel across digital and physical space, themselves affecting other stories as well. Studying news ecosystems is not a strategy only for the digital age (there have always been groups, such as pirate radio producers, African American newspaper editors, and alternative weekly reporters, who have created news outside the confines of large journalism outlets) but it has particular resonance in an era where the boundaries of news production are blurring online, and where news travels and ricochets extremely quickly across digital space. In the next section, I want to further refine our common understanding of ‘news ecosystem’ through a brief genealogical excursion before turning to the two primary ways we might understand the meaning of the term, as well as the different ways we can seek, as scholars, to operationalize it in our research.

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THINKING ABOUT NEWS ECOSYSTEMS: A BRIEF GENEALOGICAL EXCURSION Google N-Grams, a software tool that provides a ‘big data’ overview of prevalence of different phrases in Googles’ scanned book corpus, begins to track the rise of the phrase ‘media ecosystem’ starting in 2001; from then on the use of the phrase nearly doubles every year until 2008 (the last year for which data is available). 2001 is also the year that the phrase was first used in an academic context, in an article entitled ‘Convergence? I Diverge.’ In this piece, new media and cultural studies scholar Henry Jenkins argues the basic point that so-called old media are rarely replaced by new media; ‘a medium’s content may shift, its audience may change and its social status may rise or fall,’ Jenkins writes, ‘but once a medium establishes itself it continues to be part of the media ecosystem. No one medium is going to ‘win’ the battle for our ears and eyeballs.’ (Jenkins 2001, emphasis added). Coming from the world of communication and cultural studies, with its analysis of fan communities and alternative media production, it is little surprise that Jenkins shows an innate sensitivity to the actions of discursive producers outside the dominant mainstream. Nevertheless, Jenkins does not specifically reference journalistic work in his paper. A communications ecosystem of the specifically journalistic kind was first mentioned in a 2005 paper by Harvard Berkman Center fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, reporting on the proceedings of a Berkman Center conference and specifically referencing the contributions of internet theorists Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis to the conference (MacKinnon 2005). Despite this attention from the ‘founding fathers’ of digital journalism analysis (Borger et al. 2013) it would nevertheless take nearly five more years for the phrase ‘news ecosystem’ to first appear in peer-reviewed journals, including this author’s publication in the

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journal Political Communication (Anderson 2010) and a number of additional journal articles that cite a Pew study ‘How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem in One American City’ (Pew 2010). By 2012, Google Scholar listed more than 50 articles and books that contained the term ‘news ecosystem.’ These examples, however, certainly do not exhaust the use of ‘ecosystem’ in a specifically communication-related context. Indeed, each of them harkens back to an older understanding of ecosystem – Jenkins’ concern with the material properties of ‘old’ technology, Pew’s focus on information diffusion and transformation, and Rosen’s acknowledged debt, in his 2005 Berkman talk, to the work of ‘media ecologist’ Neil Postman at New York University1. In short, despite the superficial similarity between these different understandings of the term ecosystem and the degree to which they are both broadly driven by the explosion of easily accessible media content, they actually contain different normative orientations and promote different research strategies. I now turn to a discussion of two main strands or thematic areas in the literature on media ecosystems, what I have called, in the introduction to this chapter, the ‘environmental’ approach and the ‘rhizomatic approach.’ I further distinguish, in my discussion of rhizomatic approaches, those that primarily use big data and quantitative methods and those which draw on more mixed methodologies like interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

TWO KINDS OF MEDIA ECOLOGIES Communications in the balance: Media environments A first strand of scholarship concerned with media ecosystems can be found within the odd communications subfield which I call here the ‘environmental’ approach to media

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studies, but which its own practitioners called ‘media ecology.’ It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide anything more than a brief sketch of this tradition, a research area with its own conferences and journals, and one which once branded NYU media studies department before the school changed its name in 2001 to the less eccentric ‘Media, Culture, and Communication.’ The term body of theory first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was arguably part of a larger proliferation of the ‘ecology’ metaphor in a variety mostly interdisciplinary research fields. Officially coined by NYU Professor Neil Postman in 1968 (Postman 2000), but drawing on theories of Marshall McLuhan proposed at least a decade earlier (Levinson 2000) media ecology argued that human beings sit at the center of a media ‘ecosystem’ or ‘media environment,’ and that this ecosystem dramatically affects their perception, their cognition, and thus their behavior. The roots of the media ecology perspective go back far beyond McLuhan, to the early work of University of Toronto professors Harold Innis (1953) and Eric Havelock (1963), along with Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1982). One of the powerful appeals of this environmental perspective (which has also been dubbed the ‘Toronto School’ of communication theory [Blondheim and Watson 2007]) was that its key contributors all hailed from distinct disciplines. Innis, for instance, a political economist and historian, primarily focused his research on the role of communication in control over imperial space and time; Havelock, on the other hand, was a British classics scholar fluent in ancient Greek and interested in the transition from oral to written forms of ancient communication. In short, despite the temptations implicit in calling a particular theoretical tendency a ‘school,’ there remain significant divergences even within the core of the media ecology paradigm and we should be wary of over-generalizing their compatibility.

And yet all of these scholars, as diverse as their thought was, converged on particularly robust understanding of the relationship between media format and the long-term, society-wide impact of that format. This impact was often conceived in particularly naturalistic terms, particularly by McLuhan; the Toronto School, in other words, extend the particularly ‘nature-oriented’ aspect of the communications ecosystem metaphor to the point where it encompasses the evolution, growth, decay, and balance between different media types. Forms of media within this media ecosystem, for example are often understood as different species – they interact, they balance each other and, if the ecosystem is healthy, they harmonize. These species are largely the subset of more general, more expansive species of media: ‘hot media,’ ‘cold media,’ and so on, but also media forms less dependent on McLuhan’s idiosyncratic understanding of the history of technology. These media types, again like species in nature, also occasionally go extinct, or evolve into something more advanced or appropriate for the current environment. Finally, from the media ecological perspective, the importance of this ensemble of communications systems is that it operates on the distinctly human species sitting at the center of the media environment, largely through the power of its symbols and the manner in which these symbols link up with the human brain. As James Carey put it in a 1967 article on Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan: both McLuhan and Innis assume the centrality of communication technology; where they differ is in the principal effects they see deriving from this technology. Whereas Innis sees communication technology principally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought … While McLuhan is intellectually linked to Innis, I think he can be more clearly and usefully tied to a line of speculation in socio-linguistics usually referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (1967: 15)

The media ecologists in general, and McLuhan in particular, have been criticized

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for this techno-determinist tendency; what Raymond Williams called the ‘formalism’ of the McLuhanist position. ‘Much of the initial appeal of McLuhan’s work,’ Williams writes, was his apparent attention to the specificity of media: the differences in quality between speech, print, radio, television and so on. But in his work, as in the whole formalist tradition, the media were never really seen as practices. All specific practice was subsumed by an arbitrarily assigned psychic function, and this had the effect of dissolving not only specific but general intentions. (Williams, 1974: 130)

Through their sensory impact (and only in part because of their content) these naturalistic media forms operate directly upon the health of the average citizen consumer in the electronic age, and they themselves affect each other in a way that can mostly closely be compared to one of those little diagrams of the life surrounding a lake or a pond in a grade-school ecology textbook (Figure 28.1).

Materialist media ecologies: The rhizomatic approach In 2005 Matthew Fuller published Media Ecologies, a book that not only took aim at the tradition of media ecology as coined by Postman but also pulled together a variety of threads lying in the borderland between fields such as media archaeology, design, computer science, and actor-network theory (see Chapter 27) to construct an alternative understanding of the idea (Fuller 2005). The object of study in Fuller’s book is what he sees as a deeply dehumanized media system, one in which the human subject does not sit at the center of a communications environment but is rather one node in a shifting series of symbolic and material media networks. Within these overlapping networks, the outcome is not eventual cybernetic balance (as in the media ecology tradition) but rather dynamic, rhizomatic expansion. This notion obviously draws upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1980) who summarize

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the principal characteristics of a rhizome as follows: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 21)

In his overview of the differences between these two generations of ecological theory, Goddard (2011) contends that the younger generation is material in a way that the more venerable body of theory is not. I hope that my very brief overview of the work of the scholars contributing to the environmental approach helps demonstrate that this is not really the case; materiality is present in both sets of theories, though it is understood in different ways. In the rhizomatic approach to media ecology, material aspects are understood as neither part of a structuring environment or a series of large-scale historical epochs. Instead, the driving research orientation inclines more to questions of sociomaterial interaction, how meanings diffuse and interact across space, and how the power differentials inherent in these interactions and diffusions is reified over time: what are the different kinds of [material] qualities in media systems with their various and particular or shared rhythms, codes, politics, capacities, predispositions and drives, and how can these be said to mix, to interrelate and to produce patterns, dangers and potentials? Crucial to such an approach is an understanding that an attention to materiality is most fruitful where it is often deemed irrelevant, in the immaterial domains of electronic media. (Fuller 2005)

In other words: much as McLuhan argued, all media is material, even – particularly – digital media. But by material this rhizomatic strand of media ecology actually means ‘something that exercises power over other

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Figure 28.1  Materialist media ecologies: The rhizomatic approach

parts of the network,’ and not technological determinism in the sense of a structuring environment that envelops the human subject. The theoretical inspiration here is obviously less American or Canadian and more European, drawing on the work of not only Guattari and Deluze but also De Landa, Steiger, and Latour. There are also radically political undertones to Fuller’s project in a way that is foreign to the Postman tradition; as Michael Goddard (2011) puts it, while the older generation of media environmentalism thought of media as the natural system itself, the newer version of media ecology might be seen as more akin to the environmental movement.

To summarize the comparison: the older approach to media ecology uses the natural world as a guiding metaphor, sees different forms of media as individual ‘species,’ imagines that the dominant mode of interaction between these species is cybernetic (one of balance), and places the human subject (or species) at the center of this natural ecosystem with the primary question of concern being how that species thrives. We might thus call this an environmental approach. The newer approach to media ecology sees no meaningful distinction between the natural and technological world, imagines different media forms as primarily material in nature and historically contingent, imagines

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movement in space to be one of diffusion and the exercise of power rather than balance, and does not consider the human to be at the center of any sort of media system, natural, material, or otherwise. This is what we might call a rhizomatic approach, But: what do these different understandings of ecology mean for journalism research, and how do they help us get outside the newsroom in the manner discussed in the opening section of this chapter? I now want to turn to the application of these ecological metaphors in the journalism studies context.

MEDIA ECOLOGIES AND THE STUDY OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM As argued both in the introduction to this chapter and extensively elsewhere (Anderson 2010; 2011) going beyond the traditional newsroom ethnography in order to study the networks, organizations, social groupings, and institutions that populate the larger ‘news ecosystem’ is obviously the first step in coming to terms with the shifting technological, cultural, and economic structures of digital-age journalism. I want to push this insight further, however, and to do so I want to draw on the distinction between the environmental and rhizomatic understandings of ecosystem that I outlined above. Both of these perspectives can be used to study digital journalism in useful and productive ways, but I would also contend that they ultimately represent different paths forward in the study of news, and ultimately embrace different normative concerns. How might we study journalism if we were to use a more environmental approach? How would the use of a rhizomatic approach shift the focus of our research? And how might we modify the rhizomatic approach – currently primarily part and parcel of large-scale big data analysis – if we want to apply it more thoroughly to journalism research?

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Building healthy media ecosystems The vast majority of digital media studies that go beyond the newsroom have embraced an environmental understanding of journalism and news production. Amongst these I would cite the Knight Commission report on the ‘new information needs of communities,’ (Knight Commission 2009) and the various forms of ecosystem mapping produced by the New America Foundation (for example, Morgan et al. 2010), the Chicago Community Trust, and a variety of organizations operating under the broader Knight Foundation umbrella. Each of these studies can be said to operate along the following lines. They each provide a taxonomy of media and journalistic institutions within a particular geographic or subject area, institutions that include but are not limited to traditional news organizations. They study the information these institutions produce, and conclude with an analysis of how these production outputs (including the oft-valorized ‘original reporting’) contribute to a ‘holistically healthy’ citizen. I want to take the series of Chicago Community Trust (CCT) studies of the local Chicago news ecosystem, conducted between 2009 and 2013 as emblematic of this strand of healthy media ecosystem research. In the four years they were tasked to study the way local news was produced and consumed in Chicago, the CCT compiled a dozen reports focusing on the sustainability and health of local Chicago news. They also compiled a network analysis of online websites in 2011 and 2012, a related but distinct task that transitions us into our second strand of scholarship, one that examines what a more rhizomatic approach to journalism network analysis might look like. The CCT report The New News: The Journalism We Want and Need (2009) focused primarily on the new entrants to the Chicago media ecosystem and largely excluded consideration of large, traditional players like the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

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Roughly half the report was concerned with creating a taxonomic database of new journalistic players in Chicago (nearly 90 in all) while the second half of the report used focus groups with community and non-profit leaders to determine the kind of journalism that would serve residents of Chicago best. The discussion about the type of journalism citizens ‘want’ is an extension of the Knight Commission framework on Information Needs of Communities (Mayer and Clark 2009: 3) and helps establish a normative, baseline model for the type of current affairs information that would be most valuable in a ‘healthy’ local ecosystem. This dovetails closely with the Postman approach to information environments, one that sees the human being at the center of an information environment that makes her healthy, or unhealthy, in a particular way. In letting these community leaders express their opinions as to what news organizations in Chicago are doing well and badly, a framework is established that allows researchers to gauge the success or failure of the news ecosystem as a whole. Later follow up reports from the CCT in 2011 and 2013 integrated more traditional, establishment journalistic players such as the Tribune and the Sun-Times into the analysis, largely by stepping away from their analysis of news production and looking more closely at what consumers said they wanted from the news and what they thought they were getting. While focus groups were once again included in the 2011 study, the heart of the analysis was a random telephone survey of Cook County residents conducted in 2010. This survey gave audience members a chance to weigh in as to how their information needs were or were not being served by the larger media ecosystem. Once again, these studies focused primarily on compiling a databasedriven, environmental overview of the players in the local media production space in Chicago. The most interesting aspect of these followup studies, however, may be the two social

network analyses carried out by researchers at Northwestern University that used IssueCrawler to conduct a co-link analysis of the manner and degree to which digital news sites (many of them initially analyzed in the 2009 report) were linking with each other on the web; this allowed the CCT researchers to discover web sites which lay at the heart of that ecosystem as the different issue communities that formed individual clusters of the local Chicago news network. While this network analysis begins to take the first steps in considering the rhizomatic structure of the news ecosystem as a whole, it does not track the diffusion of local news across that network structure, nor does it monitor the different ways in which it transmutes and transforms as it glides across the network. For that we need to consider a second and distinct set of ecosystemic studies, ones that map the movement of news across a structurally ambiguous digital news environment.

Activating networks in journalism and elsewhere There are far fewer studies of journalism that can be said to explicitly draw upon the second strand of ecological research, and the ones that do are primarily part of an emerging ‘big data and diffusion’ strand of communications studies. A typical example of this sort of study is the paper by Wu et  al. entitled ‘Who Says What to Whom on Twitter?’ Distinguishing between ‘elite’ Twitter users and ‘ordinary,’ Twitter users, as well as between individuals and organizations on the social networking site, Wu and her colleagues revisit the question of the ‘two-step flow’ (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) from the perspective of the twenty-first century and with a plethora of digital tools to actually map the spread of information across networks. Wu et al. determine that the theory of the two-step flow holds up fairly well in the digital age, with a vast majority of individuals and organizations getting the

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majority of attention on Twitter but the majority of users obtaining their news indirectly from a more diffuse ‘middle tier’ of site users. They also discover that certain kinds of content ‘last’ longer within the Twitter-sphere, with attention to news items spiking early and then fading away fast, items from bloggers lasting longer, and video and musing content existing almost perennially as they are discovered and rediscovered by new users. Unlike the previous studies in the ecological tradition, this study of Twitter does not primarily ground its analysis in distinguishing between different species of media content (though it does of course differentiate between bloggers and traditional media, for instance). Rather, the focus here is looking at how messages diffuse across digital and

Figure 28.2  The rhizomatic approach

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physical space, activating particular nodes (human and non human) along the way. The overall perspective is simply different, focusing more on traveling news and informational items rather than on constellations of organizational actors distinguished by their rough technological type. As the message moves around, the different formats and socio-material constellations it encounters play a singular role in determining its path, of course. So far we have seen how environmental perspectives on media ecosystems (perspectives that emphasize balance and species health in the body of the ‘informed citizen’) can shade almost imperceptibly into social network analyses that emphasize more a process of rhizomatic linkages and message diffusion. In essence, we might summarize these two competing approaches by means of

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the following charts outlining the relationship between ‘blogging’ and ‘journalism.’ In the first, there are two forms of journalistic writing, both of them influence each other, and each ultimately contributes to ‘citizen health’ in different ways – like zinc and vitamin D. In the second, ‘blogging’ and ‘reporting’ are folded into a larger, semio-material network. The first approach is typical of an environmental perspective that sorts media types into different species. The second is more typical of a rhizomatic, approach. However, while a growing number of these second sorts of studies turn their attention to journalism, those that do often take a ‘big data’ approach to analyzing a large corpus of digital material. Fewer of them study journalistic diffusion in a more granular way, and almost none of these studies draw upon ethnographic or other forms of qualitative research in order to look at how these rhizomatic processes play out on the ground. This gives many of these studies of journalism a structuralist and technology-driven tinge, as if the overall technological communications environment ‘inevitably’ pushed information in a particular and calculable direction. We can see this by briefly examining a few of the most recent studies of these rhizomatic studies of news and journalism. Eberl et  al. use network analysis to measure the ‘complexity’ of news coverage in tabloids versus broadsheet newspapers, and find that quality newspapers ‘offer issue coverage that is both more interconnected and more focused on a number of hard news issues than that of tabloid newspapers.’ (Eberl et al. 2014) Two recent studies from the Berkman Center use Media Cloud (an content analysis software aiming to map media coverage of current events) to track the development of journalistic issues in the public sphere – the developing Russian media ecosystem (Etling et al. 2014) and the Trayvon Martin case (Graeff et al. 2014) as they travel across the information network. The study of the Martin case concluded that, while television news acted as the key broker in public attention devoted

to the controversial shooting, digital-native activists were able to ‘hack’ the framing of the story in order direct coverage more favorably in their direction. Finally, a third pair of articles by David Ryfe and his collaborators (Ramos et al. 2014) looked at the network of bloggers and traditional media organizations using a social network analysis; these studies, while they use big data and network mapping techniques, are perhaps more similar to the studies of Chicago discussed in the earlier section of this chapter. In the PEJ study of Baltimore, on the other hand, we see a more subtle approach to questions of rhizomatic news diffusion – a hybrid between the more ecologically-oriented studies of news that try to determine how different outlets contribute to particular citizen information needs and those that track the movement of stories across journalistic outlets. Unlike many of the studies just discussed, the supple methodology of the Baltimore study involved determining, first, the population of the Baltimore news ecosystem (60 outlets); second, performing a content analysis of these 60 outlets at staggered times over a day or week; and third, using this content analysis to determine who reported a story first, who picked up on that story, and who added their own original reporting to already published news. The study finds that much of the ‘news’ people receive contains no original reporting. ‘Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information. … And of the stories that did contain new information nearly all, 95%, came from traditional media – most of them newspapers. These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets’ (Pew 2010). While the methodology of the Baltimore study opened itself up to perspectives outside the lens of big data and network analysis, the fact remains that none of the rhizomatic studies discussed so far draw upon ethnographic or other qualitative methods. In that light, I would point to my 2010 study of the ‘Francisville Four’ as the kind of research

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that not only falls within this more hybrid tradition of rhizomatic and newsroom research but also includes an important (indeed an essential) offline component based on fieldwork and interviews with reporters and editors (Anderson 2010). In this 2008 research I analyzed how a single piece of news (the wrongful eviction and arrest of several Philadelphia-area activists) slowly emerged on the internet, exploded into public view, and then faded away, all over the course of just a few days. This study of how news moved across the length and breadth of the Philadelphia media ecosystem focused less on the ‘nutritional value’ of various forms of news and information than to uncovering how fragments of linguistic and material facts diffused across the news network in the city. It paid particular attention to how these fragmented facts activated (or failed to activate) particular parts of the news network within and beyond the city. Amongst these fragmentary facts were not simply news stories (original or not) and blog posts, but things like particular documents, interviews, links, algorithms, web metric software, and so on. The primary finding of the Francisville Four study was that, rather than news moving effortlessly and dynamically across digital and physical space (as if gliding through the news ecosystem of its own accord), it was rather ‘pushed’ by a variety of actors, activists, and interested journalistic parties. Activists strategically publicized their own arrests. Journalists aggressively drew attention to their own stories, sending emails and faxes to reporters and editors at other newspapers, alerting them to recently published material. Traditional reporters made decisions about when to link to a piece, when to draw on other digital material, and what kind of information to trust or not trust. In short, rather than a process of seamless diffusion, the movement of news across digital space was a fraught process with different actors pushing and pulling content against a variety of material and quasi-material structures. And rather than an easy and categorical

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distinction between different types of digital media ‘species’ (for instance, between blogging and journalism, or aggregation and original reporting), different sources and outlets occupied a hybrid liminal zone in which information was originated, synthesized, produced, synthesized again, added to, and so on ad infinitum. The primary advantage of an ethnographic approach to more rhizomatic research, finally, is that it allows us to both see the spread and diffusion of news and also shows us that the process by which this occurs is not solely structural. In other words, digitzation changes the dynamics through which news moves but digitzation and the shape of networks are not the only factors involved in determining the spread of informational content. Journalists, activists, public relations workers, and other actors exercise news judgement and strategic initiative in their attempts to point the news agenda in a particular direction. In big data analysis of news processes, this perspective is often lost. News diffuses and transmogrifies in part because of technological affordances, and the laws governing this process are in part determined by the structural relationship between network hubs and spokes. But it also diffuses because of the daily decisions made by newsrooms all over the world. With the ethnographic perspective on rhizomatic information production, in other words, we are drawn once again back into the newsroom itself, but from the outside in.

CONCLUSION The purpose of this chapter was to identify the different ways we might embrace the post-newsroom concept in our study of journalism, particularly two divergent but not incompatible ways of understanding the concept of the ‘news ecosystem.’ I hope it has made clear some of what is at stake in the choice of which notion of ecosystem we choose, which in turn relies upon the

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questions we want ask about the practice of journalism in the emergent digital world. I think both perspectives are useful, and both mark a step forward from the newsroomcentric notion of journalism studies. But there are also reasons why a form of ecosystem research which draws more heavily on McLuhan and Postman’s notions of a cybernetic environment has become common in more journalism-industry oriented studies while more rhizomatic approaches have been the preserve of big-data analysts who embrace a more structural perspective on the diffusion and spread of news. In particular, I think there are understandings of the ‘healthy citizen’ at work here, perspectives which bias researchers concerned with normative journalism issues toward a particular form of media research. The ultimate understanding of the news consumer in the more environmental approaches to news ecosystems is of an organism at the center of a webbed environment of overlapping influences – but a citizen who is sick due to a lack of proper nutritional sustenance. The decline of journalism has reduced the amount of healthy information in the world, so the argument goes; much like a lack of vitamin D can contribute to osteoporosis and rickets, the lack of good news content can make us all a little ill. These illnesses ultimately feed back into the larger polity, building a healthy democracy – or, more likely, a sick one. The more rhizomatic approach to media ecosystems does not deny that we may have a polity ridden with unhealthy voters and media consumers; rather, it simply declines to make the citizen news consumer the center of its analysis. Instead, it focuses on the news network itself – the way that information, technologies, factual fragments, institutions, reportorial techniques, and many other ‘news objects’ refract across the larger networks of which human beings form only a small part. There is much for researchers to explore in the dynamic of media ecosystem that is unfolding before our eyes. But it is also important

to keep in mind that, as journalism studies scholars, we are more than simply nutritionists of civic health. As empirical researchers, indeed, we cannot afford to ignore the larger networks currently enmeshing human beings and their non-human counterparts – for they represent the future scholarly terrain of our field.

NOTE  1  I asked Jay Rosen if he thought his work with Postman made him more sensitive to the media ecosystem concept. He replied that it did somewhat, but that a more important influence was Postman’s idea of the ‘information/action’ ratio in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

REFERENCES Anderson, C. W. (2010) ‘Journalistic Networks and the Diffusion of Local News: The Brief, Happy News Life of the “Francisville Four”’, Political Communication, 27(3): 289–309 Anderson, C.W. (2011) ‘Blowing Up the Newsroom: Ethnography in an Age of Distributed Journalism.’ In David Domingo and Chris Paterson (eds) Making Online News: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism, New York: Peter Lang. pp. 151–60. Merel Borger, van Hoof, Anita, Costera Meijer, Irene, and Sanders, José (2013) ‘Constructing Participatory Journalism as a Scholarly Object,’ Digital Journalism, 1(1): 117–34. Cottle, S. (2007). ‘Ethnography and News Production: New(s) Developments in the Field.’ Sociology Compass (1): 2007: 1–16. Deleuze, G. and F Guattari (1980) A Thousand Plateaus. (Trans. Brian Massumi). London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972– 1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Eberl, J., Jacobi, Carina, and Schlögl, Stephan (2014) ‘Measuring News Media Complexity Using Network Analysis,’ full paper,

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preconference Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research. University of Vienna. Etling, B, Roberts, Hal, and Farris, Robert (2014) ‘Blogs as an Alternative Public Sphere: The Role of Blogs, Mainstream Media, and TV in Russia’s Media Ecology.’ Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2014–8. Fuller, M (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goddard, Michael (2011) ‘Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: “Media Ecology”, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios’, The Fibrculture Journal, 17. Available at http:// seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/ fcj-114-towards-an-archaeology-of-mediaecologies-%E2%80%98mediaecology%E2%80%99-political-subjectivation-and-free-radios/ Graeff, E., Stempeck, Matt, and Zuckerman, Ethan (2014) ‘The Battle For “Trayvon Martin”: Mapping a Media Controversy Online and Offline’, First Monday 19(2–3). Available at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index. php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/4947/3821 Jenkins, H. (2001) ‘Convergence? I Diverge.’ MIT Technology Review, avalable at http:// www.technologyreview.com/article/401042/ convergence-i-diverge/ Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1955) ‘Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications’ New York: The Free Press. Levinson, P. (2000) ‘McLuhan and Media Ecology.’ Media Ecology Association. Available at http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/ MEA_proceedings/v1/McLuhan_and_media_ ecology.html

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MacKinnon, R. ‘Blogging and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground.’ Paper presented at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School). January 21–22, 2005. Harvard Law School. Available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber. law.harvard.edu/files/webcredfinalpdf_01. pdf Morgan, F. and A. Perez (2010) ‘The Research Triangle, North Carolina.’ Washington DC: The New America Foundation. Pew (2010) ‘How News Happens’, Pew Research Center, 11 January 2010, http:// www.journalism.org/analysis_report/how_ news_happens (accessed July 5, 2011). Ramos, D., Gunes, Mehmet Hadi, Mensing, Donica, and Ryfe, David M. (2013) ‘Mapping Emerging News Networks: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area’, Complex Networks: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 442: 237–44. Ryfe, D., Mensing, Donica, Ceker, Hayreddin, and Gunes, Mehmet (2012) ‘Popularity is Not the Same Thing as Influence: A Study of the Bay Area News System.’ ISOJ Journal 2(2): 144–161. Sparks, C. (1992) ‘The Press, the Market and Democracy,’ Journal of Communication, 42(1): 36–51. Wu, S., Jake M. Hoffman, Winter A. Mason, and Duncjan J. Watts (2011) ‘Who Says What to Whom on Twitter?’ WWW 2011, March 28–April 1, 2011, Hyderabad, India. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Zelizer, B. (2004) Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy. New York: Sage.

29 Liquid Journalism Anu Kantola

In the House of Cards television series, the figure of the young reporter Zoe Barnes came to epitomize the rising generation of digital journalists. In the series, Barnes is an ambitious young reporter who switches from a promising career at an established major newspaper to a position in a new, web-based news outlet, cultivates intimate and somewhat improper relationships with her sources, and, finally, and sadly, gets thrown under a train. Journalism has been one of the central occupations of modernity. Now, however, many ask whether reasonable journalism is becoming a thing of the past and is giving way to scattered and instant news and infotainment. These are the questions hovering around the character of Zoe Barnes as well. While watching the series, one finds oneself thinking: who is Zoe Barnes? Is she a journalist, a member of a profession, or a true revolutionary who challenges the system – or just a flimsy girl, wanting to be famous no matter what it takes?

Here, I address these questions by looking at the theories of modern professionalism. Journalism is a paradigmatic profession of modernity – or, perhaps, even the paradigmatic profession of modernity. Modernity is founded on empirical observation and knowledge with a constant striving for change and betterment (Berman, 1998). Modernity is also characterized by a sense of a break with tradition: moderns believe that the world can be made better by reason, which questions the way the world has been run so far. In a similar way, journalists keep their eye on the immediate today, are ready to challenge any given authority, and, instead, rely on their own reasoning and judgement while making sense (Hartley, 1996) of the world around them. Journalists have also been keen believers in progress by reason. The keywords of modernity, progress, advance, development, emancipation, liberation, growth, accumulation, enlightenment, embetterment, and avant-garde (Therborn, 1995: 4) have been

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keywords for journalism as well. Journalism as a profession has advanced these ideals by observing and reporting facts in the hope of making the society a better place. Now, however, it seems like both modernity and journalism are experiencing fundamental transformations. A central thesis of modernization theory claims that since the 1970s, modernity has undergone a shift from solid to liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000: 6, 113– 25; Wagner, 2008: 65–8). The industriallyorganized, state-led societies with welfare systems have been turned into individualized, mobile and reflexive societies (Beck et  al., 1994) with flexible and consumption-driven production systems. This shift has been felt in journalism as well, as new information technologies, customer orientation and flexible management styles have entered newsrooms (Picard, 2006a: 6–27; Lanchester, 2010). Especially after 2005, the mass-mediated journalism of solid modern societies was drawn into crisis. The symptoms were similar around the world: circulations were falling and newsprint costs rising, while at the same time, advertising revenues slumped and classified advertising was escaping to online venues (Ryfe, 2012: 2). What has this meant for journalism as a profession? As journalists are modern professionals use to daily change, one would think that the shifts in modernity would not be that hard to tackle. However, many accounts suggest that the shifts have not been smooth and easy. Many studies on journalism have found change hard and disruptive (Daniels and Hollifield, 2002; Gade, 2002, 2004; Gade and Perry, 2003; Killebrew, 2003; Sylvie, 2003), involving overt resistance and battles in newsrooms starting in the 1990s and intensifying in the 2000s (Steyn and Steyn, 2009: 48; Ryfe, 2012: 45–55). Why have journalists found it hard to change? I look for an answer in the newsrooms and especially in the ways they have been reorganized in the transformation. Media and newsroom management was, for a long time, a rather neglected area of interest in research

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(Picard, 2006b; Albarran, 2006; Küng, 2008: 3; Sylvie and Weiss, 2012). Since the 1990s, however, media management has become a bubbling area of interest as new management ideas are tried out in newsrooms and journalistic practices have been reorganized in many ways. I suggest that the growing interest in and importance of media management is not an irrelevant issue, but rather challenges the notion of professionalism journalists adopted in the post-war decades. As modernity is shifting from the solid and industrial to the post-industrial and liquid phase, organizations have become major arenas of societal and cultural transformations, and it is useful to look at what happens there. Clearly, for journalism, the changes within organizations have questioned the profession’s self-understanding. As Mark Deuze (2007: 87) has suggested, we need to rethink the notion of ‘organization’ in relation to the journalistic profession. Or, as Stephen Reese (2001: 184) asks: how is professionalism worked out to satisfy the organization’s needs? In this chapter, I draw from theories of modern professionalism and suggest that the battles in newsrooms have been over professional power and control: who gets to say how journalism is done. I focus predominantly on large newspapers and their newsroom management, the traditional core of the profession. I also draw mainly on the Western experience, as the shift in the profession does not take place in similar ways everywhere. At the same time, however, similar issues of autonomous professionalism create tensions in many non-Western newsrooms as well (Jones, 2001; Pintak and Nazir, 2013; Hayashi and Kopper, 2014), and, thus, I hope the Western examples will also resonate with other countries as well.

FROM SOLID TO LIQUID PROFESSION There are good reasons to claim that journalism is not really a proper modern profession.

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Journalism lacks a scientifically grounded knowledge base and does not have officially recognized professional credentials, formal education or licensing systems. Even journalists themselves have had an uneasy relationship with their own professionalism. Many journalists have made a point of overtly resisting any formal qualifications for the profession; instead, they view their work as a highly skilled craft best learned through apprenticeship (Albridge and Evetts, 2003: 550–1). At the same time, however, journalism is not that different from the many other professions of modernity. Especially in the decades following the Second World War, journalism evolved into an occupation that has many characteristics in common with other modern professions such as doctors, teachers, architects or accountants. It is important to note that journalists are not alone in wondering whether they are part of a profession. For most occupations, modern professionalism has not been a given fact but rather a socially constructed phenomenon. Professions can be understood simply only as ‘the knowledge-based category of occupations which usually follow a period of tertiary education and vocational training and experience’ (Evetts, 2003: 397). Instead of trying to draw a hard line between professions and other occupations, one can look at professions as social forms and see how they evolve in their societal context. As a social form, professionalism has been often a strategy: an institutionally supported ideology to reach positions, maintain status and justify legitimacy (Freidson, 2001: 105–6). Originally it was suggested that professions work as regulatory shelters, which occupational groups build up to secure their position in society and to control the market (Larson, 1977; Freidson, 1982). Occupations thrive to establish a monopoly over the provision of services and try to claim exclusive access to a specific domain of knowledge with scientific grounding, educational credentials and licensing systems. More lately,

however, studies of professionalism have widened their scope and looked for the various, more informal processes, which has consolidated the authority of the expert in a certain area (Evetts, 2003). Professional respectability can be gained with softer means ranging from creating media houses to unions and ethical codes (Macdonald, 1995: 197–200). Here, I look at the professional strategies of journalism in terms of power and control: as strategies that aim to control the work of journalism and legitimize its autonomy. Often professionalism is closely linked with the aim of gaining power and control over work practices. Professions have established formal functions and impersonal standards, as well as created collegial organizations and shared identities, in order to gain control over their work. Journalists have employed a variety of strategies to establish a position of authority and autonomy. Professions often develop higher justifications for their work and also demonstrate a normative ‘professional’ alternative to the organization where they work (Evetts, 2003: 400). This applies to journalists who tend to be motivated more by professional rather than organizational values (Mierzjewska and Hollifield, 2006: 54). Journalists are motivated when they feel they are producing high-quality news product that keeps the public informed and they have autonomy (Bergen and Weaver, 1988) and high social status (Demers, 1994). Professions also often justify their expertise by value-free knowledge, which is the base for their professional judgement (MacDonald, 1995: 159). Similarly, journalists of industrial modernity developed a professional ideology of the objectivity norm and factual knowledge, which legitimized their profession’s mission of serving the public interest (Zelizer, 2004; Deuze, 2005; Skovsgaard, 2014: 203). Moreover, professions often demonstrate their trustworthiness: they maintain confidentiality and may conceal knowledge for

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their professional higher purposes. (Evetts, 2003: 400). Journalists clearly embraced this idea by claiming the privilege of not being compelled to disclose their sources, which has in some form been an important part of journalistic practices in Western countries. The professional reporter’s privilege is a professional strategy justifying the exclusive position of the occupation. Journalists also employed various ‘softer’ strategies to demarcate professional boundaries and their position in the market. Unions with regulations for membership helped to separate professionals from amateurs. Ethical codes of conduct formulated an occupational ideology for the profession. Newly built media houses became facades that professed the special role of journalism in society. Journalists, thus, clearly thrived to become a respectable profession in the post-war decades. To paraphrase James Carey (1997a: 132), journalists became professional communicators who were different from the writers, novelists and scholars in the sense that the messages they produce have no necessary relation to their own thoughts and perceptions. As Carey describes: A dimension of the communications revolution was the creation of a distinct occupational category, the development of programs, largely through universities, for training and providing recruits to the role, and the simultaneous growth of occupational associations and codes of professional conduct that conferred distinct role identity and the elements of an occupational ideology upon various classes of professional communicators. (1997a: 133)

Why did this happen? One driving force undoubtedly was the organizations, which needed particular kinds of journalists in increasing numbers. The post-war years were an age of rapid economic growth and expansion of industrial products for mass consumption. The era was characterized by growing industrial organizations, which were able to produce standardized goods and services. Also, journalism became an industry. Advanced technologies, such as print press

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and television, duplicated news at low cost for large, cross-sectional mass audiences. The technologies required huge investments and long-term planning requiring large-scale industrial organizations, which produced standardized products or services for large, relatively homogeneous markets (Küng, 2011: 44–7). Industrial production needed special kinds of employees. The ideal organization for industrial production was bureaucracy: monocratic structures, systematic division of labor, and hierarchically and functionally arranged jobs with specific tasks (Freidson, 2001: 68–9; Clegg et  al., 2006: 324–6). Journalists were also transformed into professionals working in large-scale, bureaucratically arranged organizations. Journalistic flagship organizations, major newspapers and newsrooms in broadcasting companies built departmentalized hierarchies. Journalists learned to work in large-scale organizations and, for that, were deintellectualized and technicalized (Carey, 1997a: 132). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journalism had been predominantly a literary genre; journalists were considered as independent interpreters of events, not solely or even largely as technical writers. The latter half of the twentieth century, however, saw the rise of a new kind of journalist, a more technical and standardized professional (Schudson, 1995: 104–9). In terms of modernization theory, Carey’s ‘professional communicator’ was a professional of industrial modernity. The mass media needed professionals who demonstrated value-free knowledge and expertise and used it in a nonpartisan, professional way to advance the larger cause of their organization. Now industrial modernity, or in terms of modernization theory, the second, heavy or solid modernity, appears to be a special phase in the longer history of modernity. The new mobile logics of industrial production and capital movements questioned industrial production systems and the state-led Keynesian societies as the new information

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technologies sped up the flow of goods and services (Harvey, 1990: 124, 147, 240), the profit–investment cycle accelerated, and profit rates declined (Giddens, 1991: 11). Many companies are uncertain what their main business will be in five or ten years, closely monitoring markets and changing their direction quickly and flexibly to attract customers. The industrial production lines of mass production have been transformed into market-driven network enterprises that deliver ‘just-in-time’ products for niche customers (Castells, 1996: 151–279). This change has hit journalism as well. The solid mass audiences have been turned into liquid and heterogeneous consumer tastes, smaller interests, genres and ‘scenes’. As Robert McDowell (2006: 231) states, the decades-old assumptions surrounding mass communication have fragmented into a far more complex world of ‘satisfying the esoteric needs of audiences’. The homogeneous mass audience has diversified into an everchanging array of new demographic and psychographic niche categories, and audiences have migrated from general interest offerings to a growing array of specialized media products. The old industry titans, the traditional media businesses, such as large newspapers, are especially threatened. For printed newspapers, production costs account for approximately 60 percent of total cost, and, thus, newspapers need mass offerings and wide circulation to survive. At the same time, newspapers need to understand the fragmented audience preferences and answer to them in a meaningful way. Journalism is caught in crossfire: marketwise journalism needs to devise double-edged strategies that both preserve against, and build upon fragmentation (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 126). Consequently, in media business, the locus of operations has shifted from production to consumption (Murdock, 1993: 537). Media management started to focus on the fluctuating market especially since the 1990s, as strategic management and audience market

research entered media houses (Albarran, 2006: 12; Mierzjewska and Hollifield, 2006: 41–9; Picard, 2006b: 27; Redmond, 2006: 123). Branding became popular; media houses launched branding exercises to create customer loyalty in the fluctuating and fragmented markets (McDowell, 2006: 231). How has this affected the work of journalists? For journalists the shifts are felt most concretely in the way their work is organized and managed. Bureaucratic management styles have been transformed by allegedly non-hierarchical and post-bureaucratic management (Diefenbach, 2009: 44), which combines decomposable teams and projects with lean management that cuts all the ‘slack’ out of the organization (Bauman, 2000: 116–23; Harris et al., 2011). The work of journalists has been reorganized using post-bureaucratic methods; hierarchical and departmentalized newsrooms have been turned into integrated newsrooms with multimedia news desks. Production teams and groups serve different media, newspaper, radio, television and the web (McNair, 2011: 47–8). Working methods focus on soft teamwork and peer ­co-operation in flexible news-gathering projects. Lots of time is spent in generating ideas, planning and inventing storylines to keep the issue alive and keep readers engaged, and there is less time and space for the traditional ‘lone ranger’ or ‘lone wolf’ approach (Steyn and Steyn, 2009: 48). The borders between different sections, such as politics, business or city section, have been lowered. Instead, journalists need to be multi-skilled and mobile and provide updates whenever new information becomes available (Schmitz Weiss and de Macedo Higgins Joyce, 2009; Singer, 2011). As in other flexible organizations, in newsrooms the new focus of operations is on customers. Journalists monitor audiences and react accordingly to meet their needs (Deuze, 2007: 142–70, 2008; Ruusunoksa, 2006, 2010: 54–8; Ryfe, 2009; Wiik, 2010; Witschge, 2012). The news desk gathers information – especially clicks on the news

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– and reacts by providing more news on popular items (McNair, 2011: 47–8). Journalists adjust their work to clicks and blog interactively (Ruusunoksa, 2006, 2010; Robinson and DeShano, 2011; Witschge, 2012). Digitalized technologies have accelerated the change, as they provide new means and platforms for more fragmented and specialized media (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 122–5) and change the focus to user attention and interactivity (Mierzjewska and Hollifield, 2006: 49). The emphasis on demand rather than supply is concretized by a print screen on the wall showing in real-time how intensively articles are being read and providing clues to editors on how to proceed.

THE DIFFICULTY OF CHANGE: MANAGERS MEET PRIMA DONNAS New management models, practices and reforms have not always landed happily, as journalists have questioned and resisted them. The growing pressures to do more with less time, as well as the changing news criteria, have created tensions in the profession. David Ryfe’s five-year fieldwork project in the newsrooms of three American newspapers tracks perceptively the everyday dynamics of resistance in these workplaces. While business strategies and market research are playing increasingly visible roles in newsrooms, newsmaking needs to be more occupied by audiences and readers. Journalists have often been fearful or hostile to the rise of soft news and zoning of target audiences, which they view as threats to their professional autonomy and, more broadly, their role in society (Ryfe 2012: 43–5). New media have enhanced these feelings, as many journalists are not excited about producing blog posts and story updates – work they perceive as sucking time from quality journalism (Ryfe 2012: 86, 95–102). Ryfe contends that journalism has a weak tradition of formal training, and journalists

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have learned to be journalists by doing journalism. As they rely on work practices and habits, journalists are not well equipped to imagine how their work might be done differently. As new managers with new practices continue to arrive, journalists are feeling their identities threatened. They are expected to change the ways they work and give up their established newsgathering methods, yet they are unclear about the new methods they are supposed to adopt. Thus, many journalists have been left at a loss; one journalist said, ‘I just want to feel like a professional’ (Ryfe 2012: 75). Ryfe (2012: 60) suggests that this conservatism still dominates the profession; that is, most journalists ‘fundamentally believe that their traditional values and practices are proper and ought to be preserved’. Moreover, many journalists find it difficult to trust to their work organisations and managers. In the midst of massive layoffs and buyouts, the relations between ‘deeply cynical’ journalists and the organisations for which they work are often characterised as ‘toxic’ (Ryfe 2012: 61). Ryfe is not alone in pointing out the difficulties of change. Many studies of journalists have shown that they are dissatisfied with the present situation. Surveys of European journalists have found that they see the financial forces of corporate profit-seeking growing stronger (Preston, 2009a: 165; Ryfe, 2012: 45–6), and many believe governments should take legal measures to limit media concentration and commercialisation (Guyot, 2009: 109). Journalists cherish the old values (O’Sullivan and Heinonen, 2008) or, as Preston (2008: 318) more bluntly puts it, the newspaper industry has been fearful of innovations and so instead ‘[…] constantly announce[s] the end of its world and [evokes] a golden age nobody but its own practitioners remember’. For instance, many journalists see user participation as dangerous to journalism and its credibility (Hermida and Thurman, 2008: 350; Singer and Ashman, 2009: 13). Moreover, constant managementled reform projects tend to produce a ‘product weariness’ as innovations are often felt to

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question established professional values and editorial goals (Ruusunoksa and Kunelius, 2007:13). Scholars of media management typically point out somewhat cautiously ‘the highly creative employees’ as well as ‘the societal role of the media’ as they differentiate media industries from other types of business (Lavine and Wackman, 1988; Caves, 2000; Albarran, 2006: 3). James Redmond summarizes how journalists often look from the standpoint of business management: To many media workers, the organization is a kind of funding source, with a medical and benefits package, to pursue their creative interests. You can be paid to write, shoot still or video pictures, and/ or perform in front of a camera. This sets up a not uncommon situation where a creative, idealistic journalist works for a pragmatic business concern focused on circulation (or ratings) and profit. (2006: 125)

Redmond (2006: 128) describes the dilemma as having factory workers – laboring under tight production line schedules – who are at the same time creative professionals comparable to doctors and lawyers. The tension between commercial interest and socially responsible professional autonomy is prevalent in the ways management sees journalists. The core ideals of professional ideology such as fairness, balance, integrity, judgement, community leadership and anticommercialism seem to make media business ‘different’; distinct from other business, in fact, in many respects not really businesses at all (Küng, 2008: 176). With people ‘who after all make their living by resisting spin and seeking truth’, management has to be ‘extraordinarily strong in communicating a vision’ (Redmond, 2006: 128). From the perspective of management, journalists have often looked like exclusive free riders in the world of diminishing profits and tightening competition. As Annet Aris and Jacques Bughin (2009: 351) write: ‘A frequent cause for resistance against increasing control is the “prima donna” status of some top creators, which can complicate the acceptance of any kind of rules.’

Of course, not everyone is in opposition; a number of journalists have embraced the new developments. Moreover, reactions often vary within the profession. For instance, older generations might regard the past with nostalgia, whereas the younger ones fight back and focus on maintaining the legitimacy of the profession (Kantola 2012: 77–81; Kantola 2013). However, resistance to change has been widespread and newsrooms have undergone battles whereby journalists feel threatened and resist change. Ryfe (2012:196) calls the prevailing attitude the ‘yes, but’ syndrome. After talking with dozens of journalists, he concludes that a majority of them hold to the ‘yes, but’ attitude; that is, they are fixated on the past. Why is this, though? How did journalists, the most earthy of white-collar professionals, become prima donnas? If journalists are the people who have their finger on the pulse of the day, how did they fail to catch up with the change and adapt to it? In terms of modernization theory, why have journalists, perhaps the most modern of moderns, insisted on the outmoded values of the solid age while they face the liquid society on a daily basis in their surroundings? One needs to look at what is at stake. For journalists, the shift from solid to more flexible organizations challenges in many ways the professionalism they managed to build up in the post-war decades. Just when journalists are about to appear as part of a respectable profession with a societal mission, professional ideals, moral codes, and unions and educational institutions, they are questioned. The managers do not throw away only the organizational charts and pyramids. As newsrooms are reorganized, many journalists are in danger of losing their identity, and, equally importantly, they see their professional powers weakening. If one looks at newsroom management, it is easy to pinpoint aspects of these losses. First, journalists are losing power to business management as the control of newsrooms is shifting from journalists to

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managers. The new management styles have been developed to save expenses, and they have forced media professionals to ‘increase their production time’ and ‘decrease the time spent developing content’. This has often decreased job satisfaction, at least in the short term (Mierzjewska and Hollifield, 2006: 51). Put simply, journalists need to deliver more in less time. The race for scoops has accelerated substantially as the deadline is constantly open. News has become instant news, which needs to be put out immediately in real-time, and many journalists feel that that immediacy endangers the reliability of facts and journalistic autonomous judgement (Deuze, 2009: 316; Weaver, 2009: 396; Phillips, 2010, 2012). Moreover, the individual journalist’s control over story items and lines has been shifted to the hands of the editors and to teamwork. This can be a blow to someone used to writing her own stories. Second, journalists have lost power to their readers, who have a stronger say in the content of their work. The professional news criteria of journalism, which were developed especially for quality journalism, have been challenged. Instead, it is more and more the readers who get to say what journalists write about. Quality journalism now employs new, tabloid-style and better-selling news criteria such as human interest, storytelling and plotting to keep readers engaged (Preston, 2009b: 121–4; Rove, 2010). Third, journalists have lost power to marketing and advertising departments. In many cases, the walls between news departments and businesses, and marketing and advertising have broken down (Picard, 2006a: 6–7). Market research has taken an all the more relevant role in journalism (Redmond, 2006: 123), as newspapers adapt and fine-tune their offerings to the fluctuating customers and advertisers, and extensive market research spots market niches and loyalty drivers. Thus, a major newspaper might pick up the niche of ‘young mums’ and create promotions and products for them, including a new parenting section in the paper, more space

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for health and fitness, fashion shows, and home improvement fairs (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 133–5). Journalists need to adapt and write accordingly, whether it means more stories on home decoration, on car testing or on local food particularities. In advertorial supplements, advertorials and actual stories combine to look like journalism. Finally, journalists are losing their career prospects. The departmentalized bureaucracies offered careers that proceeded upward in the pyramid. An individual journalist could build up a long and successful career by climbing the ladders of the news organization or, alternatively, by specializing on a specific subfield of journalism. As organizational charts grew and new departments, functions and sections proliferated, journalists diversified their work and specialized in certain areas such as politics, economics, labor relations, crime or science. Now, the new newsrooms have become just the opposite. Journalists are not expected to specialize or to crawl their way to the top. Instead, they need to maintain a flexible identity: change jobs and work in teams in order to be able to produce stable, quality content for different media (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 347–61). Peter Lee-Wright and Angela Phillips sum up the new requirements for journalists in the following way: All journalists need to understand how to research, link and source material on and off-line, they need an understanding of social media applications and how they work. Text journalists also need to be able to write fast and compelling copy to different lengths and for different audiences, they should have a clear sense of what works in which environment and the place of search engine optimization. They should also be able to source, and if necessary produce, simple images (both still and video). (2012: 78)

Hierarchically-advancing specialized professional careers have been replaced by horizontal rotation, and many journalists have seen their past achievements degraded. On the contrary, the past, ‘the stock of a creator’, to use the management phrase, has become a

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problem. Past success risks the company getting stuck with the old, and bypassing new opportunities. It has become harder to build careers and obtain positions of power as tasks are rotated. Often, this is brought home very clearly. For instance, all editorial staff may be made redundant, and asked to reapply for posts in the newly configured newsroom (McNair, 2011: 49). Furthermore, all new journalists may be hired as ‘reporters’, with no specialty mentioned in their work contract. Journalists are rotated between departments or production groups. Editors are circulated; they have three-year tracks and, after that, can return to a ‘lower’ position as a reporter. Even the editor-in-chief, sitting among others in the newsroom, can be replaced. Many newspapers also try to keep the age structure of journalists relatively young, with a peak in journalists in their 30s, and offer early retirement packages for older journalists (Nikunen, 2014). Instead of achieving peer respect, old stars are wiped out as easily as inefficient newcomers, as personnel policy identifies ‘low-performing creators’ and phases them out with pension packages. All these management-induced changes are not only a matter of work arrangements. Attached to them is a deeper transformation in the profession’s ideology and autonomy. In order to understand the issues at stake, I have listed the ideals of the solid and liquid ages of journalism (Table 29.1). These tensions do not suggest that journalism has leaped suddenly from solid to liquid

age. Rather, these tensions have characterized newspaper journalism since the 1970s as markets and new technologies challenged societies economically, politically and culturally. Looking at these shifts in ideals, it is easy to see, however, that they fundamentally question the profession’s self-identity. Most of all, they include struggles of power: who gets to rule what journalists do. Journalists are not alone here; many professions have been pushed into similar struggles and find themselves threatened. In solid modernity, many professions such as doctors, lawyers, architects and teachers became trusted and respected authorities in society. As Robert Dingwall describes: In the Golden Age of state welfare, professions formed part of a paternalist complex of governance that assured citizens that their basic human security would be met as a matter of enlightened obligation. Expert public servants would consult fellow experts in the professions and so arrange matters that citizens would be provided for, according to these expert perceptions of their needs and deserts. To the extent that professional services were rationed, this was based on nonmarket principles, of queuing or of social exclusion. States and professions worked in a partnership of benevolent concern. (2008: 137)

Journalists were not quite like other professionals of solid modernity – be they doctors, engineers, teachers or architects. At the same time, however, they formed trade unions and increasingly endorsed the professional education programs of journalism. Most importantly, journalists saw themselves as the

Table 29.1  Shifting ideals of the journalistic profession Main frameworks Institution Ownership Management Product Audience Professional control Career prospect

Solid age

Liquid age

Nation state, Society Fourth estate Family ownership with a face Journalistic Factual reporting Informed citizens Editor-in-chief, Societal relevance Advancing career, Societal and peer recognition

Market Community Business enterprise Chain-owned business with lean management Strategic and lean business management Compelling presentation, Storytelling Customer niches Day-to-day editors, Performance monitoring Less formal career prospects, Dependence on popularity

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Fourth Estate, the press, which had an important social role, and to make this clear, they also developed ethical codes of conduct, suggesting that they were, after all, a true profession with a moral code (Reese, 2001: 175). Thus, while journalists lacked the formal credentials and licensing, they at the same time developed into self-professed professionals with a social role. Their professional credo was a strategy to enhance, stabilize and justify their position in society and to build a shelter that demarcated clearly the line that separated journalists from other writers, thinkers, politicians and PR professionals. In fact, for journalists this ‘borderwork’ was important; they needed a clearly demarcated shelter as their profession was, after all, relatively free and easy to enter with no special schooling and skills. This is also a reason why the current organizational restructuring is potentially damaging for journalism. Journalism is still a ‘weak’ profession without a scientificallygrounded knowledge base and without statebound licensing systems. Instead, journalism is a profession built heavily on its everyday work practices. As James Carey described: Journalists do not live in a world of disembodied details; they live in a world of practices. These practices not only make the world, they make the journalist. Journalists are constituted in practice. So the appropriate question is not only what kind of world journalists make but also what kind of journalists are made in the process. (1997b: 331)

While managers reorganize newsrooms, they at the same time manage, guide and control work practices. Thus management exercises are crucial for journalism: they do not rearrange organizational charts alone, they rearrange the profession and professional identity. Organizational management entails a particular ethic of personhood and puts individuals into ethical work that one performs on oneself. An individual negotiates with the given rules, tries to comply with them, and transforms into an ethical subject within them (du Gay, 2007: 59, 149).

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THE BUSINESS OF PROFESSIONAL POWER The shifts in journalism can be seen as an intrusion of liquid modernity into a profession of the previous solid, industrial and national modernity. In the solid modernity the autonomous professional identity of the profession grew strong; for instance, bypassing their allegiance to their employer as journalists justified their position as professionals of public responsibility (Demers, 1994; Mierzjewska and Hollifield, 2006: 54). Moreover, journalists were overtly anti-commercial and made a point of their lack of market sensitivity, instead promoting themselves as servants of social responsibility. Various professional strategies such as the objectivity ideal, reporter’s privilege, unions, ethical codes and gradually institutionalizing education guaranteed journalists autonomy and control over their own work. At the same time, journalists were also men and women of power who could control the public sphere and impose their ideas and agendas on others. For journalism, at the heart of the professional power strategy was the occupational ideology of autonomy: journalists served no one, and their ideals of objectivity, non-partisanship and social responsibility justified this position and served as a power strategy for the profession. Daniel Hallin (1992: 16) captured well the mentality of the high-modern journalist as being powerful and prosperous, yet, at the same time, independent, disinterested, and, furthermore, beloved by everyone, from the corridors of power around the world to the ordinary citizen and consumer. The journalists of solid modernity became the untouchables of society. As a profession, they seemed to hold the society in their hand, yet at the same time no one could really hold them responsible for what they did. They did not hold political ideas and take part in politics, despite the fact that they spent their life with politicians reporting and writing about

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them. Similarly, businesswise, they were not responsible for the economic consequences of their work and did not have any interest in the business they were serving. From this point we are witnessing a revolution (McNair, 2011: 14). Many authorities, who relied on respected institutions, are questioned, and the seemingly homogeneous societies are breaking up into various lifestyles. Journalism, as a profession, cannot control the public sphere in the way it used to in the age of mass media and mass audiences. Journalists are losing their monopoly on public voice, and many other people claim their right to use their voice in public life. The once powerful professionals cannot rely on the old world anymore and hold positions that are relatively certain and stable. Instead, they need to monitor their environment and respond to it in a reflexive way. Journalists are not the only troubled ones. In recent decades, many professions have lost their monopoly on knowledge production or their right to it has been questioned. Professions, instead of supplying society with the knowledge they create, need to answer to the needs of the market and their customers (Freidson, 2001: 64–5; Dingwall, 2008: 99–100). Journalists share the fate of doctors whose patients come to appointments with a Googled self-diagnosis; and politicians, who carefully choose their slogans only after carefully testing them with focus groups and opinion polls. The more customer-oriented and profitconscious management styles weaken professional power and autonomy by increasing managerial, customer and peer control over an individual journalist. Although the postbureaucratic management in principle tore down high hierarchies, in practice the result is often a hybrid organization, which combines hierarchies and centralized control with flexible management practices (Courpasson, 2000: 158–9; Courpasson and Clegg, 2006: 327). Empirical studies point out that managers have retained control, and they attend formal meetings and informal discussions

and steer work. At the same time, peer control has increased, and employees need to adjust to their teammates and control their work identities even more carefully than before. Teams, projects and collaborative work put even more pressure on the workers than hierarchical regimes (Diefenbach, 2009: 44–45). The iron cages of bureaucracy have not been dissolved; rather management involves ‘an iron fist of strong and centralized control mechanisms, wrapped up in the velvet glove of consent’ (Courpasson and Clegg, 2006: 324). This applies to journalists as well. Their work is managed more closely than before, and they need to adjust to management needs in less time. Strong editors, ‘media maestros’, control and manage, in consulting language, the ‘original content creators’ (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 347). Journalists need to be time conscious and produce more than before in the more controlled work process with teamwork and editing. Thus, the freedoms of the profession have been curtailed at the same time that all the ‘slack’ has been taken out of newsrooms and journalistic organizations. The change threatens the previously ‘sacred’ areas of journalism – namely, the ‘non-commercial’ pure professionalism of the profession. Previously, it was at the core of the profession to not think how many readers they would get by a certain story or title. Journalists instead were free and autonomous. Now newsrooms have real-time tables showing the clicks every piece of news gets, and editors are wound up in trying to figure out the secret of those tables and tracking down the successful titles in order to duplicate them in journalistic work. The fundamental change for journalists seems to be a change from a society-led media to a market-driven media. This shift, however, is partly superficial. For a long time the role of management in newsrooms was played down by both journalists as well as the managers themselves. Owners, business managers and advertising departments of media declared repeatedly that they

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would not interfere with journalism. This, however, had to do as much with the business logic of solid modernity as with ethical standards. Since the 1950s, commercial aspects and interests became more prevalent in media of all kinds, and advertising expenditures and, subsequently, revenues for the media exploded. Large-scale, industriallyorganized newspaper chains prospered, and commercial radio and television became highly profitable (Picard, 2006a: 24). The most successful businesses were the newspapers with profit margins typically exceeding 20 percent a year – a rate rarely reached in any business (Redmond, 2006: 123). The mass media of urbanized societies served the large, politically heterogeneous audiences and, as a result, writers became skilled at constructing nonpartisan and ‘objective’ accounts of events (Carey, 1997a: 137). Both management and journalists went along with this logic. Media management and advertising shied away from newsrooms, and media managers made a strong point of not inferring with journalism while journalists openly criticized their owners. All this, while apparently virtuous and highly ethical, was reasonable businesswise. Ideals of anti-commercial as well as objective and autonomous journalism increased the credibility of the product and helped the sales department. The firewalls between newsrooms and marketing departments were thus built on stern business logic: the best way to make journalism sellable was to keep it separated from business interests. Thus, it is somewhat misguided to blame market forces for destroying journalism. It is just that the liquid market might not buy the product of the solid age.

THE FUTURE: NEGOTIATING IDENTITY What happens to journalism in the future? Will the solid ideals of the profession, such as public service, objectivity, autonomy and immediacy (Deuze, 2005, 2007: 162–4;

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Preston, 2009a: 171–3; Schudson, 2009: 370), survive in some form or another? The clearest losers are the older generations of journalists with their autonomous professional status, which is now giving way to day-to-day work, business and horizontal careers. The new generations develop new and more positive occupational ideologies, which do not capitalize mainly on the sense of loss that perhaps characterizes older generations (Kantola, 2013; Nikunen, 2014). At the same time, the borders of the journalistic profession have been lowered and weakened. An increasing number of people have turned into bloggers, writers, media workers, and freelancers who work independently or for old or new media outlets. The number of ‘actual’ journalists has fallen, while the number of new actors working in the public sphere has multiplied. These people challenge the conventional borders of the profession. They establish new media outlets, at times call themselves journalists, and claim to do journalism, but at times break the solid line between professionals and amateurs (Curran, 2010: 3). The incoming new generations are the Zoe Barneses of current newsrooms. They feel they have a mission to challenge the old and existing structures and authorities within the profession. They try to find their place within the newsroom, negotiate with older generations holding positions of authority, and, finally, some of them also leave the media in order to be able to follow their ideas. At the same time, however, they cannot act in isolation. The political system, for instance, has a long-standing culture that does not change rapidly. Thus, the new generation may feel out of place or is not able to transform the system. This is exemplified perhaps also by Barnes, who is destroyed in political battles. At the same time, however, one needs to be cautious: while journalism is in turmoil, many old practices and news outlets may still survive, albeit in a reorganized form. In the future, some sort of solid profession might bounce back. As new technologies

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revolutionize industrial production systems, they often create a phase of uncertainty and Schumpeterian creative destruction. With time, however, the market starts to stabilize and concentrate as the winners eat the losers and buy out the most inventive newcomers. The times of big media might not be over for good. The dominant media of solid modernity – the larger chains and media corporations – still continue to exist, and the bigger chains most probably will take over many smaller newcomers as the markets stabilize (Coates Nee, 2013: 5–6; Hess, 2014). Strong, established brands can make a difference, and large companies may enhance and devise them to meet the needs of new audiences (McDowell, 2011). Many media are also searching for new social contexts for journalism, for instance, as ‘community leaders’ (Sullivan and Mersey, 2010; Lindén, 2012). Tomorrow’s winners might provide platforms for journalism that are also professionally strong. Journalistic work practices may still have a role to play. Many studies also point out that journalists have not really changed: journalism has maintained its old practices and ethos despite the change (Ryfe, 2012: 3–5). Many accounts of multiskilling emphasize that only technological skills are not decisive, and specialist professional craft is still needed (LeeWright and Phillips, 2012: 79; Witschge, 2012). Instead of giving up their old practices, journalists are negotiating between the old and new ways of working and between the old and new ideals as well. Journalists try to preserve their public service ideals yet embrace novel forms of content creation (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009: 564, 575; Williams et  al., 2011). Some develop an ethos that is based on worker autonomy and freedom, while others fail to meet the new requirements (Ryan, 2009: 656–9; Kantola, 2013). Many times it seems the journalist needs to simultaneously be both solid and flexible (Deuze, 2008; Deuze and Marjoribanks, 2009: 557–8). Thus, for instance, a study on Swedish web broadcasters shows them

caught in the middle of conflicting demands: they try to adhere to the professional principles and standards of broadcast journalism and, at the same time, try to show they can produce unpolished and layman-like material normally associated with unprofessionalism. They try to maintain a critical, factual style in their interviews and simultaneously try to appear informal and spontaneous (Ekström et al., 2013). Finally, newsroom management may also play a role as it tries to address the shift. The new management styles emphasize motivation and identity formation, and creative forms of building commitment (Seeck and Kantola, 2009). Skillful managers understand the ethos of journalism and incorporate it into the organizational change. Thus, for instance, BBC Online was developed with an eye on creating a subculture that would be acceptable for journalists. The original manager left as the venture got off to a false start and was replaced by another leader, who went off to create a strong subculture, which also resisted the BBC bureaucracy. This isolationist culture is built on a can-do spirit, frontier mentality, and sense of adventure, and draws on countercultural tendencies such as using metaphors like ‘parasites’, ‘pirates’ or ‘under the radar’ (Küng, 2008: 278). Many companies today apply a similar, revolutionary style in their management, which has become almost the new normal in management (Kantola, 2009; Kantola, 2014a; Kantola, 2014b). For newspaper managers, journalists are categorized as ‘creators’, who are still decisive in the creation of content (Aris and Bughin, 2009: 341). Management scholars point out that management needs to be sensitive to the ‘arty’ nature of creative labor. Management needs to strike a balance between freedom and the effective transition to new digital processes and between the demands of the day-to-day needs of production and the need for an unfettered creative environment. Another factor in newsroom management is generational time: what would become of Zoe Barnes if she had allowed to live and

Liquid Journalism

continue her work? As the newcomers age, they tend to become middle-aged workers who value achievements and peer respect. Thus, organizations need to find ways to reward the revolutionaries as they age. Therefore, managers still need to be able to manage and motivate journalists, no matter how liquid the organizations are, or they face a potential risk of losing contact with the best and most creative people (Aris and Burgin, 2009: 351). Unless that happens, journalism, which so far has had a certain glow over it, may become just another job that is for the youngish and from which the best ones will go to another more respected and cool profession. Somehow journalists might share the fate of politicians who have lost some of their power to the media since the 1970s (Kantola and Vesa, 2013) – becoming a politician has not been perhaps the most popular career choice for the young and bright. Social theory has often held rather pessimistic views on the liquid phase. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 135) described the new condition in rather dark terms, seeing the central aspect as the ‘acute and prospectless Unsicherheit, penetrating all aspects of individual life’. While insecurity undoubtedly characterizes current journalism, on the other hand, some uncertainty might open up new possibilities and prospects. One is not perhaps tied to a particular country, identity or profession, but can move more freely and formulate one’s identity in a freer and more imaginative way – a central aspect of the classical Enlightenment ideals. In general, the consequences for professions have been twofold: professions have simultaneously tightened up and opened up. As societies have lost faith in the benevolence of professions, they have become subject to increasing regulation and government control (Dingwall, 2008: 138). This does not apply to journalists, who still maintain a profession that is relatively open. Thus, in the midst of the turmoil, there is also space for new kinds of journalism. The upcoming

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generations, for instance, seem to be more ready to express opinions and advance societal discussions and causes than the earlier generations, which were often stuck on objectivity (Kantola, 2013). Perhaps the new journalism is reformulated in a way that gives up the sacred chant of objectivity and becomes more prone to engaging in societal discussion in ways that make a difference and encourage and enrich civic life.

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Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hayashi, K. and Kopper, G.G. (2014) ‘Multilayer research design for analyses of journalism and media systems in the global age: Test case Japan’, Media, Culture & Society, 14(August). Hermida, A. and Thurman, N. (2008) ‘A clash of cultures’, Journalism Practice, 2(3): 343–56. Hess, T. (2014) ‘What is a media company? A reconceptualization for the online world’, International Journal on Media Management, 16(1): 3–8. Jones, A. (2001) ‘The death of barricada: Politics and professionalism in the post-Sandinista press’, Journalism Studies, 2(2): 243–59. Kantola, A. (2009) ‘The rise of charismatic authority styles in corporate capitalism’, Journal of Power, 2(3): 423–40. Kantola, A. (2012) ‘Warriors for democracy: Scandal as a strategic ritual of journalism’, in S. Allern and E. Pollack (eds), Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries, Goteborg: Nordicom. pp. 73–86. Kantola, A. (2013) ‘From gardeners to revolutionaries: The rise of liquid ethos in journalism’, Journalism, 14(5): 606–26. Kantola, A. (2014a) ‘Emotional styles of power: Corporate leaders in Finnish business media’, Media, Culture & Society, 36(5): 578–94. Kantola, A. (2014b) ‘Branded revolutionaries: Circulated gurus as management tools in soft capitalism’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(3): 258–74. Kantola, A. and Vesa, J. (2013) ‘Mediated scandals as social dramas: Transforming the moral order in Finland’, Acta Sociologica, 56(4): 295–308. Killebrew, K.C. (2003) ‘Culture, creativity and convergence: Managing journalists in a changing information workplace’, The International Journal on Media Management, 5(1): 39–46. Küng, L. (2008) Strategic Management in the Media: From Theory to Practice. Los Angeles: Sage. Küng, L. (2011) ‘Managing strategy and maximizing innovations in media organizations’, in M. Deuze (ed.), Managing Media Work, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 43–56.

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O’Sullivan, J. and Heinonen, A. (2008) ‘Old values, new media’, Journalism Practice, 2(3): 357–71. Phillips, A. (2010) ‘Old sources, new bottles’, in N. Fenton (ed.), New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age, London: Sage. pp. 51–68. Phillips, A. (2012) ‘Faster and shallower: Homogenization, cannibalization and the death of reporting’, in P. Lee-Wright, A. Phillips and T. Witschge (eds), Changing Journalism, London: Routledge. pp. 81–98. Picard, R. (2006a) Journalism, value creation and the future of news organizations. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Working Paper Series. Available at: http://www.robertpicard.net/PDFFiles/ValueCreationandNewsOrgs.pdf Picard, R. (2006b) ‘Historical Trends and Patters in Media Economics’, in Alan B. Albarran, Sylvia M. Chan-Olmsted, and Michael O. Wirth (eds), Handbook of Media Management and Economics, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 23–37. Pintak, L. and Nazir, S.J. (2013) ‘Pakistani journalism: At the crossroards of Muslim identity, national priorities and journalistic culture’, Media, Culture & Society, 35(5): 640–55. Preston, P. (2008) ‘The curse of introversion’, Journalism Practice, 2(3): 318–25. Preston, P. (2009a) ‘New times, new news paradigms?’ in P. Preston (ed.), Making the News, London: Routledge. pp. 162–77. Preston, P. (2009b) ‘The cultural air. Ideology, discourse and power’, in P. Preston (ed.), Making the News, London: Routledge. pp. 110–28. Redmond, J.W. (2006) ‘Issues in human relations management’, in Alan B. Albarran, Sylvia M. Chan-Olmsted, and Michael O. Wirth (eds), Handbook of Media Management and Economics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 115–44. Reese, S.D. (2001) ‘Understanding the global journalist: A hierarchy-of-influences approach’, Journalism Studies, 2(2): 173–87. Robinson, S. and DeShano, C. (2011) ‘Anyone can know: Citizen journalism and the interpretive community of the mainstream press’, Journalism, 12(8): 963–82. Rove, D. (2010) ‘Tabloidization: Form, style and sociocultural change’, in V. Rupar (ed.),

Journalism and Meaning-Making, Cresskill: Hampton Press. pp. 121–38. Ruusunoksa, L. (2006) ‘Public journalism and professional culture’, Javnost – The Public, 13(4): 81–98. Ruusunoksa, L. (2010) Making News with Citizens. Public Journalism and Professional Reflexivity in Finnish Newspapers. PhD dissertation. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Ruusunoksa, L. and Kunelius, R. (2007) ‘Professional imagination and the future of the public service newspaper: Challenges for practice and research’, Paper presented at conference on The Future of Newspapers, Cardiff Centre for Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, September 12–13. Ryan, K. (2009) ‘The performative journalist: Job satisfaction, temporary workers and American television news’, Journalism, 10(5): 647–64. Ryfe, D. (2009) ‘Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom’, Journalism, 10(5): 665–83. Ryfe, D. (2012) Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schmitz Weiss, A. and de Macedo Higgins Joyce, V. (2009) ‘Compressed dimensions in digital media occupations’, Journalism, 10(5): 587–603. Schudson, M. (1995) The Power of News. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schudson, M. (2009) ‘Ten years backwards and forwards’, Journalism, 10(3): 368–70. Seeck, H. and Kantola, A. (2009) ‘Organizational control: Restrictive of productive?’, Journal of Management & Organization, 15(2): 241–57. Singer, J. (2011) ‘Journalism in a network’, in M. Deuze (ed.), Managing Media Work, Los Angeles, CA: Sage. pp. 103–11. Singer, J. and Ashman, I. (2009) ‘“Comment is free, but facts are sacred”: User-generated content and ethical constructs at the Guardian’, Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality, 24(1): 3–21. Skovsgaard, M. (2014) ‘A tabloid mind? Professional values and organizational pressures as explanations of tabloid journalism’, Media, Culture & Society, 36(2): 200–18.

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PART IV

Research Strategies Ta m a r a W i t s c h g e

To capture and respond to the many changes in the journalistic contexts and practices highlighted in this Handbook, we need new research strategies. What is more, the varied and, at times, radically new theoretical conceptualizations of journalism demand new research perspectives and methodological tools. As the different contributions to the Handbook demonstrate, the context, practice, and views on journalism have undergone considerable change and development. Scholars in Journalism Studies need to address this in their research. There have been a few contributions in the field that aim to do this (see, for instance, the special issue of Digital Journalism edited by Michael Karlsson and Helle Sjøvaag, 2016, volume 4, 1). Even so, there is still a need for both critical reflections on the methodological perspectives as well as how-to guidance in applying new methods or adapting existing methods to changing practices and contexts

in journalism. This concluding part on research strategies aims to do just that: to critically interrogate and inspire our methodological responses to the changes in the field. The first three chapters deal with researching journalistic production practices. Sue Robinson and Meredith Metzler (Chapter 30) open this part with a thoughtful and provocative chapter on a well-known method used in studying news production: ethnography. They ask to what extent this method is still suited for studying news in the digital era, critically discussing the newsroom-centricity that has been at the heart of this methodology in its application to date. They help to reconceptualize the term ‘ethnography’ and call for developing ethnographic sensibility as an approach rather than a technique, whilst at the same time providing clear and concrete pointers for ethnography of journalism in the digital age.

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The theme of research sensibility is echoed in the chapter by Juliette De Maeyer (Chapter 31), who addresses the material turn in Journalism Studies. With changing work environments and the rise of digital production technologies, scholars grapple with how to research this material context. De Maeyer critically discusses recent studies that have more or less successfully paid attention to the material aspects of news work. The chapter argues that what is needed is a reflective sensibility to materiality to capture the complexity of the production process and the role of different actors within it. De Maeyer provides us with clear pointers on how to take into account the material context in a meaningful way, helping Journalism Studies hone its approach to researching digital journalism in all its facets. The last chapter, focusing on researching news production processes, is by Zvi Reich and Aviv Barnoy (Chapter 32), who provide theoretical reflections and hands-on instructions for applying ‘reconstruction interviews’. Born out of the need to connect production processes to the content produced by journalists, this method aims to provide detailed insights into the way in which news is made. Increasingly popular in the field of Journalism Studies, this is the first time that the methodology is developed as a how-to guide as well as reflected upon: what are the premises and implications of the method? Moving on to the content of journalism and related consumption practices, the chapter of Anders Larsson, Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Karlsson, Eirik Stavelin, and Hallvard Moe deals with issues of sampling (Chapter 33). They identify the difficulties journalism scholars face when trying to define and sample a journalism that is increasingly ‘liquid’ in the digital era. They discuss strategies that help us deal with a boundless object that is fragmented and dispersed, and address the issues faced in the different stages of data collection. They also provide information and instructions on how to computer-code this material.

Following on from this, Axel Bruns (Chapter 34) highlights ways in which we can access the wealth of data more or less readily available to us in the digital era. He discusses the big data produced by journalists, as well as that relating to consumption practices. Bruns offers a critical reflection on the limitations of the type of research associated with big-data analysis. In this way, scholars can find both a helpful introduction to data and tools to collect, scrape, or otherwise access this data, as well as the considerations that need to be taken into account to do so productively and judiciously. The last three chapters in this part include the audience more squarely. Kim Schrøder (Chapter 35) provides a qualitative counterpart to big data for accessing news consumption practices, and focuses on the experience rather than the existing content available in the form of big data. Presenting an answer to the challenges that the researcher into news user practices is faced with, he introduces the Q-method as a way to do justice to the complexity of news audience practices. Taking the user as a ‘point of departure’ and arguing for the need of ‘a non-media-centric, crossmedia perspective’, in-depth interviews featuring Q-methodology are introduced as a way to gain insight into the subjective experiences of users and news media use in everyday life. In similar vein, Irene Costera Meijer (Chapter 36) argues that we need to start from the news user in our research to provide meaningful insights into journalism. She too discusses specific, innovative tools that will help scholars gain access to the complex, fragmented, and diverse nature of news use. Simply adding an audience perspective is not enough, she argues: there is a need for research tools that are as complex as our research object. Moreover, we need a new vocabulary to address what news is for the audience, and what it is for, she argues. Most centrally, she advances the notion of doubt as an answer to the complexity of journalism in the digital era: as scholars we should not

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strive for a neat and coherent understanding of news and news use, but rather through triangulation we should highlight tensions, contradictions, and uncertainties. The last contribution of this part, bringing the Handbook to an end, is by Wiebke Loosen and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt (Chapter 37). Like Costera Meijer, they argue for triangulation, but discuss this more broadly as a research strategy through which we cannot only compare and contrast news use, but more importantly compare and contrast content, use, and production practices. They critically discuss why methods, when used on their own (whether it is content analysis, ethnography, or surveys) are not sufficient to analyze and understand journalism in the digital age. They introduce triangulation and the mixedmethod approach, discuss the theory behind

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this, and provide ample examples of how this can be employed in Journalism Studies. These chapters together provide a rich, reflective, and useful guide to help journalism scholars apply established methods, develop new sensibilities and approaches, and reflect on their practices to date. The research strategies put forward vary in terms of their focus (production, use, content, or a combination), their nature (qualitative or quantitative), and the basis of their inquiry (using existing data or gathering new data), but each in its own way is a response to the challenges and opportunities facing journalism research. The variety and richness of the approaches bodes well for Journalism Studies, and we are confident that the research strategies proposed here will inform, instruct, and inspire journalism research to flourish in all its diversity and vivacity.

30 Ethnography of Digital News Production Sue Robinson and Meredith Metzler

INTRODUCTION Ethnography in news production is experiencing something of a renaissance as scholars (re-)discover the transitioning newsroom and seek to understand how journalistic practice is evolving for the digital age. The methodological technique, with its roots in anthropology and sociology, offers a wonderful opportunity to scrutinize the radical transformations of the news profession embedded as it is within an institution vulnerable to all kinds of forces, from cultural to economic, political to organizational. For media studies, several early ethnographic studies during the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation for traditional press theory today – from Gans’ documentation of news values to Tuchman’s observations of reporters’ ‘strategic rituals’ (1972). Using a combination of techniques and often triangulating data, these newsroom ethnographers employed in-depth interviews, observations, and textual analysis to reveal how workers in the industry labored according to

a common set of principles and abided by an entrenched philosophy about the function of journalism. And then came the internet. The capabilities of interactivity and multimedia were added to the reporter’s arsenal of professional tools and the publisher’s options for production changed what had to that point been a fairly enduring status quo. Media studies scholars rushed to begin documenting the new phenomenon and its effects upon journalists, sources, and audiences from all sorts of perspectives. All of a sudden regular citizens could brandish their own arsenal of tools for one-to-many, mass communicated, public information production. What threw the journalists into turmoil meant wonderful and significant research opportunities for press theorists. Experiments, content analyses and surveys documenting evolving attitudes of audiences, profiling professionals in aggregate, reviewing content, and demonstrating changing perceptions abounded (Boczkowski, 2002; Domingo, 2005; Kopper

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et al., 2000). And each of these studies contributed a bit more to our general knowledge of this extraordinary, seismic shift in an industry – and its production – so pivotal to so many nations’ democracies and ways of life. Yet few of these singular studies could really investigate this massive transformation with any kind of holistic attention. Slowly at first (and then, later, with a rush), academics started gaining entry again into newsrooms to study this ‘online journalism’ phenomenon. In the introduction of one of the first books (Paterson and Domingo, 2008) to catalogue the ‘second’ wave of ethnographic research (Cottle, 2000) for online newsrooms, Chris Paterson expressed keen satisfaction with the ability of ethnography as a method in online journalism to show how ‘any technological development is embedded in an adoption process where social subjects make conscious or unconscious decisions that an observer can trace’ (2008: 1). For Chris Paterson and David Domingo (Domingo and Paterson, 2011; Paterson and Domingo, 2008), ethnography – and particularly those studies based in the anthropological and sociological roots of the method – offered an important check on reconciling what journalists said they did (in interviews, in surveys, and so on) with the work actually performed in newswork. In part, this chapter reviews what this trend has meant for scholarly transformations of methodology. This chapter also considers what makes online news ethnography special from, or at least a different animal than, that first ‘wave’ of newsroom observation during Herbert Gans’ and Gaye Tuchman’s days. Digital ethnography entails a careful consideration of the temporal and spatial dynamics that make observation in a multimodal, interactive production more complex. In terms of space, journalists working in a digital environment are adapting to laptops, mobile devices, chat rooms, email, texts, social media and a number of other artifacts of workplaces. For example, reporters can be home at work, be at play in meetings, and engage with supervisors, colleagues, sources, and audience

members within a number of physical and virtual places (that is, often not in the newsroom itself). Along with these pragmatic spatial dilemmas, notions of time are in flux in such an environment, as spontaneous newsgathering mixes with digital archiving to create altered expectations and routines for work. Reporters work at odd hours, updating stories early in the morning or late at night and tweet, post and blog on the fly. This leads to the very practical question for the academic: How does an ethnographer ‘observe’ or otherwise document such behavior, with such spatial and temporal visibility issues? In addition, a number of more epistemological and also ethical concerns related to research in an online-centric environment emerge in this kind of research. For example, digital newsroom ethnographers grapple with the question of who is an actor in a newsroom that includes not only machines and virtual entities as laborers but also the citizens who were ‘formerly known as the audience’ (to cite Jay Rosen’s 2006 famous line). And, finally, journalists continue to reposition themselves constantly as a newsworker, trying to adapt to constantly changing protocol and keep up with new digital technologies. How does research on such a transitory animal remain relevant – even through publication? Such characteristics demand nimble ethnographic practice that adopts significant flexibility for rapidly changing practices according to platforms, agents, and other new factors affecting how newswork is performed. This chapter will explore these philosophical differences as well as others and also the benefits and limitations of conducting ethnography in the many kinds of newsrooms today. We begin with a historical narrative about the technique itself before tackling the emphases of this chapter – the spatial and temporal dimensions of fieldwork, as it needs to evolve for hybrid virtual–physical sites of inquiry. Our main suggestion for the modern newsroom ethnographer is to achieve a deeper understanding of these shifting dynamics and adopt an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ that blurs

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lines between study sites and analytic work and helps a researcher be flexible in a highly unstable study environment.

ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS: A BRIEF HISTORY Disciplines, methods, and theoretical thinking are subject to trends with particular approaches becoming more ‘en vogue’ from one era to the next. Ethnography is no different. Moreover, ethnographic practices are spread across disciplines, increasing the influence and diversity of practices. At its core, however, ethnography has dealt with a researcher studying a space while inhabiting it, which leads to the particularly individualistic character of studies. Newsroom ethnographies began appearing relatively late in the history of ethnography, with the three key ethnographies (Zelizer, 2004) published by Tuchman in 1978, Gans in 1979, and Fishman in 1980. As they emerged, however, they still had to grapple with the recurring, intertwined, and ever-changing debates central to ethnographic work: theoretical orientation, methods, and ethics. Ethnography’s ‘parent discipline’ is anthropology (Kubik, 2009), where studies are associated with spending extensive times in another region and culture. In fact, fieldwork is often described as the heart of ethnographic work (Kubik, 2009) with anthropologists envisioned as spending ‘lengthy celibate periods among his “tribe”’ (Punch, 1986: p. 11). Though it originated from a scientific, positivistic perspective emphasizing observation and objectivity, anthropologists began questioning problematic assumptions about race, imperialism, and other complex constructs. Denzin and Lincoln (2008) identify eight key developments that have influenced qualitative inquiry today. Perhaps the most important movement, though, was the shift toward a sociocultural perspective in the 1960s with an emphasis on reflexivity emerging in the 1980s (Wedeen, 2009).

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Indeed, the methodology has endured many evolutions over time. Further complicating this question of what is an ethnographic orientation is the fact that ethnography, as a research method, also has been adopted (and abandoned, Weeden, 2009) over its long history by a multitude of disciplines at various sites. This expansion of anthropology brought up more questions about methods for properly executed research. Beyond questioning its premise, how researchers ‘do ethnography’ was – and remains – debatable. Lofland et al. (2006), for example, cite political science and psychology for having a ‘simply “do it” without worry about giving “it” a name’ approach, which they contrast with sociology. While Lofland places a strong emphasis on methods, Punch (1986) eschewed it: Occasionally a ‘school’ develops around a powerful personality or a fieldwork tradition develops, as in Chicago before the war or in southern California in the 1970s. But much of observational research seems to be the work of soloists, who opportunistically react to a sudden chance and who often enjoy little preparation and little formal training (1986: 16).

(Punch even specifically calls out Lofland for being too strictly methodological later in his text.) While accounts of ethnography and its development can be read through the intertwining debates over methods, ethics, and interpretation of results, the one thing that remains constant to each account is the importance and primacy of place – that is, the study site and the subjects’ relationship to that physical location – and the time that the researcher spends within that space. Fieldwork remains a broad term for a practice that can be executed in vastly different manners. In identifying forms of fieldwork, Cassell (1980) defined five variations. At one end is the ‘historically obsolete’ verandah model where a field-worker would send out for research subjects (‘natives’) to be questioned. In the noblesse oblige model, on the other hand, the researcher lives with the society under study but gains access through local

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elite or a powerful patron. The researcher acts as one with those in their surroundings, negotiating day-to-day life as if she was a part of that society, when she acts under the going native model. In the undercover agent, researchers cover up their research intentions in order to expose their subjects’ work. Finally, in the advocate model, as the title suggests, researchers attempt to provide help and power to those that they study. In each of these models, particularly the first three, there is at once a very clear premise of living within a community for an extended period of time. And the manner in which the researcher relates to the space they study is critical to their researcher. More importantly, Cassell (1980) equates these spatial dimensions to the power of the researcher. It is the location of the researcher on a ‘verandah of the government station’ that makes him more powerful than his subjects who are forced to enter a space to which the researcher is supposedly a part of. This concept of research was, in particular, questioned by researchers in the 1960s who became concerned with ‘its complicity in imperial projects and domestic social control, its tendencies toward exoticism and its assumptions about “otherness”’ (Wedeen, 2009). However, once fieldwork moves beyond this controlled model, those researched actually get to define the sanctioned spaces for the researchers. Fenno (1986) described this as ‘interactive observation’ in which ‘much of what you see [sic] is dictated by what they do and say’ (Fenno, 1986: 3). Similarly, in fieldwork, ‘investigators have comparatively little power over those who are studied: informants are usually free to leave the situation or to decline to enter interactions… Those who are studied control the research setting and exert control over the context of research as well’ (Cassell, 1980: 30). From this understanding, it is the study participant who can operate and control the space. Of course, this does not mean that researchers are powerless. Power has been exerted by the researchers in numerous instances to

change the data that they are able to obtain. Deception at times could be seen as an instrument for researchers to gain access to what they wanted to learn about. While review of qualitative social science work originated from biomedical research and the Nuremburg Code, the standards gradually were applied to any research involving human subjects (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004). Controversial studies such as Humphrey’s (1970) study of homosexual men in Tearoom Trade advanced many of these conversations about using deception to gain access to space and the potential harm to subjects from operating in this space. The formation of Institutional Review Boards made ethics central to research and sought to protect those studied through the use of an internal review process and informed consent. Moreover, these ‘procedural ethics,’ as Guillemin and Gillam (2004) refer to them, help researchers prepare themselves for potential ethically challenging situations and mitigate any harm exerted by a researcher’s presence in a study site’s place and time. This concern for exploitation also has found its way into several theoretical developments, complicating the way space is viewed in ethnographic work. There is a ‘call for more participation and less observation, of being with and for the other, not looking at’ (de Laine, 2000). Essentially, observation in a space is not enough. Researchers need to be involved with those in the space. Irwin (2006) traces the development of the contemporary intimacy paradigm in the field to interpretive, feminist, and postmodern traditions. In particular, feminist traditions believe ‘that emotional connection is less exploitative of research participants than an objective stance’ (Irwin, 2006). This approach, despite its claims to improved respect for individuals’ rights, is not without its challengers. Irwin (2006), in particular, found that the intimacy, without regard for structural positions, actually caused more harm to its participants. Moreover, regardless of the theoretical tradition in which you are following, ethical

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dilemmas come up all of the time, ones without easy answers (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004; Irwin, 2006: Punch, 1986).

METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN EARLY NEWSROOM ETHNOGRAPHIES These transitions and emerging concerns for ethics, position of the researcher, and tension over methods can be seen in the work of some of the earliest news ethnographers. Newsroom ethnographies came into their own in the 1970s and early 1980s and ‘were driven by grounded questions that tried to see the world through the news worker’s point of view, tracking primarily decision-making processes regarding who decided what was newsworthy, how, and why’ (Zelizer, 2004: 65). For Fishman (1980), it was a question of ‘the creation of news’ (italics in original). Tuchman examined ‘news as a frame, examining how that frame is constituted’ and news producers as part of a ‘complex organization subject to certain inevitable processes, and upon newsworkers as professional with professional concerns’ (1978: 1) while Gans started asking what America ‘tells itself about itself through the news and why’ and ended up concluding that he studied ‘a national profession’ (2004[1979]: xxiv). Methodologically, these foundational newsroom ethnographies followed templates laid by the sociologists of the Chicago School’s urban ethnographies (Zelizer, 2004). The Chicago School emphasized language, interpretation, action, and considered meaning construction as in flux (Charmaz, 2011). Gans very explicitly states his Chicago School methodological orientation in Deciding What’s News: ‘My approach to participant-observation among journalists differed little from that which I had used in my earlier books, the Urban Villagers and the Levittowners. Observing journalists is not very different from observing other people’

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(2004: 75). Though he does not include a more formal research design or use technical terms, at the beginning of each section, Gans details, essentially, what he did. Tuchman, similarly, outlines her sites of study, describing them, her time in them, and their workforce composition. She more explicitly draws on the conceptual framework of ethnomethodology. Key to Tuchman’s, Gans’, and Fishman’s descriptions of their methods was the time spent in the field. Each very carefully outlines not only the amount of time but also exactly when they were within their sites and what they did during their time there, including attending meetings and sharing meals with those studied. Gans very explicitly, however, notes the limits to his engagements, as he only spends time with reporters in the office and never in their private time. At the same time, both Tuchman and Gans still contend with current ongoing debates, illuminating the transitions within ethnography. Tuchman is distinguishing between positivism/the natural sciences and interpretivism/social sciences, with the help of ethnomethodology, to position her empirical findings in a particular interpretive framework. Gans, on the other hand, identifies the changing currents and trends in the field: I also approached the study without prior explicit values, and when I started my work, I thought I would need to deal only with the value problems that had come up in earlier community studies. I quickly learned otherwise, however, for I began my study during the emergence of the pervasive critique of the professions, the social sciences, and of America generally, in the mid-1960s. I became aware of how my own values affected my analyses, and a little of the resulting self-examination is in the book. (2004[1979]: xxiii)

Here we can see how Gans begins to grapple with the emerging ethical questions and concern over the researcher’s position, though he does not deal with these issues in any depth. With the resurgence in ethnographic newsroom studies, methods will evolve as they did for Gans and Tuchman and new questions will need to be addressed. Space and time

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are emerging as critical methodological challenges. The researcher’s lack of control complicates the process of fieldwork in today’s changing spatial environment. Researchers have always been limited in their ability to control who comes into the space and what kind of informed consent they can obtain. Punch (1986) uses the example of studying the police and watching them arrest individuals. From whom do you need to obtain informed consent? Punch asked. Questions such as this become even more prevalent today, as space extends to its digital mutations. Space no longer represents an immediate physical presence in front of us; much work and discussion occur on-screen in lots of virtual spaces. How do we handle this emerging definition of space? Other questions emerge as well, such as ‘What is the line between surveillance and observation?’ and ‘How do you recruit participants when only one persona of the real person exists on the screen, and little verification of their “real” self exists?’ One solution to this spatial quagmire is a broader understanding of ethnography that emphasizes an ethnographic ‘sensibility’: the term sensibility goes at least partway to transcending artificial distinctions between fieldwork and deskwork, between research site and site of analysis, between researcher and researched, and so on – distinctions that are hard to sustain in a world that defies these binary distinctions. It also avoids reducing ethnography to the process of onsite data collection. Sensibility implies epistemological commitments that are about more than particular methods; in this sense, ethnographic study usually employs multiple tools of inquiry. (Schatz 2009: 6)

‘Sensibility’ allows for a broader and richer understanding of ethnographic work as an orientation. With increasing modern complexity altering relationships to space and time, Schatz contends that approaching all work with sensitivity to the evolving perspectives of those observed brings forth much richer work. In the next section we examine how second-wave newsroom ethnographers

are faced with unique challenges because of digital technologies and how an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ as an approach might offer opportunities to overcome those challenges.

ADOPTING A ‘SENSIBILITY’ FOR NEWSWORK ETHNOGRAPHY After the good work of the 70s and 80s, academics turned their focus to audience and other studies until digital technologies signaled that a return to newsroom observation was in order. In 2005, Pablo Boczkowski released his extensive review of three ethnographic case studies at the New York Times on the Web’s Technology section, HoustonChronicle.com’s Virtual Voyager, and New Jersey Online’s Community Connection. Publication of that book inspired the second wave of newsroom ethnographies that the field had not seen the likes of since the 70s. Spending four to five months in each newsroom and interviewing some 142 journalists, Boczkowski set the bar high for subsequent newsroom ethnographers and now is cited in just about every such venture. This was followed a few years later by several other notable ethnographic studies by a group of young scholars studying media sociology in some form, including (but not limited to) Mark Deuze, David Domingo, C.W. Anderson, Lucas Graves, Nikki Usher, Alfred Hermida, Jane Singer, Thomas Cottle, Emma Hemmingway, Sue Robinson and others as well as the two aforementioned edited volumes collecting their various work by Domingo and Paterson. Even in these early works, we can see how issues of place and time informed the researchers’ conclusions. Theoretically and analytically, spatial and temporal concerns threaded most of these studies. Many of the most recent digital newsroom ethnographers spent a great deal of time talking about how the physical layout of the newsroom combined with

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print-oriented deadlines inhibited innovation, for example (Bechmann, 2011; Boczkowski, 2004; Paulussen et al., 2011; Robinson, 2011; Usher, unpublished manuscript). Boczkowski engaged throughout his book with the relationships the employees had with both their place of work and the changing amount of time ‘innovation’ would take away from the vaunted print product. So did C.W. Anderson in his Rebuilding the News (2013) and Nikki Usher in her book about the New York Times. In ‘Convergence Crises’ (Robinson, 2011), Robinson told the story of a small newsroom’s transformation from a print publication to a digital one through how the reporters and editors interacted with space. Usher took this theme up in subsequent work she did observing the Miami Herald, studying how the organization managed a physical place move from downtown Miami to the outskirts of town by the airport. This new way of doing work changed place/space and time configurations for news production and, consequently, contributed to significant identity complexes for the observed journalists. Thus, many of these scholars inevitably explored the relationship workers have to the objects and artifacts around them, the emotions they attach to routines and surroundings, and the practical realities that constrain and liberate within ephemeral environments and shifting deadlines. Employees in these observed newsrooms had a hard time separating their identity from a writer with a byline in a physicalworld newspaper to one whose work life entailed fluctuating content in realms that did not always accept the ultimate authority of their professional work. This chapter posits that this is also true for academics trying to move from a physical space of research to one dominated by a virtual ambiance that cannot always be accessed at the right time to document the data. Those who perform ethnographies of news typically follow in the footsteps of Gans, Tuchman and others: we enter a newsroom, find our informant, flit from desk to desk, watch people work, ask questions on the fly,

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listen in on conversations, attend meetings and then arrange for interviews at a nearby coffee shop or in the cafeteria to debrief about what we saw and overheard. As we have seen, traditional ethnographers held very straightforward understandings of time and space, thinking about their research as within a newsroom, sitting by an editor’s desk, tracking deadlines. ‘Observing’ necessitated physical-world visits to the site of inquiry. Spending ‘time’ entailed the length of time one must spend in the space to achieve saturation of data, or to have sufficient enough observation and interviews that one could say something significant about the processes being witnessed. In a newsroom where the production of newswork occurred in a linear environment according to a sender–receiver model of communicative transmission, this kind of ethnography worked well. Space meant place. And time referred simply to the temporal occupation of the work.

AN ‘ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY’ FOR NEWSROOM STUDY With digital journalistic scholarship, we have witnessed a significant shift in how we not only think about ethnographic work in newsrooms, but also how we must (re)conceptualize the term. Here it might be helpful to refer back to the previously discussed notion of ethnographic sensibility from political scientist Ed Schatz (2009), who proposed that researchers adopt more of a paradigm about ethnographic research, that the key to drawing knowledge about a community might be more about the approach than a technique. This concept resonates in today’s environment where so much of the work of newsmaking occurs across spaces (virtual and physical) and through different time components (past and present, immediate and archived). We are not arguing that traditional techniques (observation, in-depth interviews) associated with ethnography be forsaken;

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only that the researcher looking to document news production adopt a new methodological sensibility that accounts for the process orientation of news production today. This makes even more sense when we consider how journalists themselves have had to adapt to the transition of journalism as product to journalism as process. The article that resulted from a reporter sitting at her desk, making phone calls, typing away on deadline – all of which could be observed by a researcher – exists only as part of a digitally enhanced process that cannot be seen. Now that article – which itself resulted from a nontraditional process of texts, emails, Facebook comments, linking across the web throughout time, and more often than not, written in spurts on mobile devices, from home or within the newsroom as well as on scene, en route, or even post-deadline – occupies only a small space of the overall content around that news, which also entailed tweets, posts, blogs, comments, shared emails, and so on. The journalism ethnographer today enters that physical-space newsroom, knowing that place represents only a small part of what needs to be observed. Beyond ‘what’ needs to be observed – that is, the action of news production – newsroom ethnography today expands ‘who’ should be observed. Our ethnographic sensibility extends to this idea as well. We have long lain to rest the idea that only journalists can be, well, journalists. Bloggers, commenters, and other ‘citizen journalists’ generate content that can sometimes be called journalism and certainly influence what appears in news feeds. And perhaps it may even be worthwhile to reconceptualize the actor of journalism beyond a person, thinking about agents that produce content or the content itself as an agent. These might include the machinegenerated news briefs (called robotic journalism – becoming a whole new space of research on its own), and also could be a fruitful Facebook group page within which a crowd ‘reports’ together on a singular event or bill or neighborhood party.

A number of these new studies offer avenues of technique to navigate new dimensions of site work. Anderson (2013) described what he did as a ‘network ethnography,’ a term coined by Howard to apply network analysis to a community or organization as a way to know what and who to really observe. Instead of simply choosing the Philadelphia Inquirer to observe (which he also did), he observed an entire ecosystem of news flow in one city. In order to do this in some kind of orderly fashion (lest he become completely overwhelmed, we hypothesize), Anderson called on actor network theory as a methodological approach to his data collecting. In this, he considered not only what he observed in the myriad newsrooms he hung out in, but also the digital flow that occurred around the news being produced in the city – blogs, comments, press releases, Facebook shares, and so on. He expanded the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of traditional observation to include technological agents, bloggers, socio-material objects of content and other kinds of news product and production that all together created the phenomenon he wanted to study. In other words, he tracked the news flow – which was his unit of analysis, as opposed to the article about the news or as opposed to the designated newsroom actors. This shift in focus alone represented a major departure from past work that considered the unit of analysis in any given ethnography the words of the reporter, for example, or the reporter-published content.1 It seems to us that this offers a unique and novel way to resolve the quagmire we presented at the beginning of this chapter: how to observe such unobservable things? In reading Anderson, it strikes us that we were asking the wrong question. One must not force an application of old-world understandings of what is to be studied, but rather rethink the very nature of observation. What does observation mean in this world? Production and product intertwine here, necessarily. A re-articulation of news production itself reorders the observer’s protocol and moves the emphasis of observation from the newsroom to the newsflow.

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This leads us to two conclusions about the place and time of ethnographic digital work: First, the place of digital work will always be in flux at any given moment. A news ethnographer may be positioned in a newsroom but her mobile device allows that researcher to travel to other spaces of news production even during the observation. And this brings us to a second observation: the time of digital work refuses to commit to a 9–5 office visit. As with regular ethnography, spending time in the place of production is essential to capturing the real-time interactions and dialogue that you can never truly reconstruct later (had you missed it and had to ask someone to reiterate it for you). It should also be noted that this concept extends to digital conversations. Obtaining archives of the reporter–editor text exchange or the website’s forum comments that are flying around a news story is important, but being there in the moment to witness the flurry of exchange of a chat, for example, lends to the observer a more authentic ‘feel’ for the impact of the news story or newsroom event. For example, sitting next to a moderator of a chat as you watch the unapproved comments fling into the content management system leads to invaluable appreciation for the atmosphere that helps spur that exchange. One can begin to understand how and why the information flow of the news takes the direction that it does and what influences how the news gets formalized into professional content.

ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES FOR THE DIGITAL NEWSROOM However, articulating that a sensibility approach should be the aim and performing as such are two different things. The actual production of this methodology means shifting how one goes about entering a newsroom – even to the point of not entering the newsroom at all on some observation days, perhaps. Indeed, an acute understanding of these

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digital changes to the observation site will alter even the beginning conceptualizations of the study – from the design to interview templates to application for universities’ Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. For example, early on, it might be warranted to write an IRB protocol that encompasses all realms of ‘work’ – the reporter’s public Facebook posts, emails, texts, and so on. In addition, breaking down the ‘work’ to be observed spatially and temporally might be useful. Internal virtual spaces abound in this new environment and it is essential for the modern ethnographer to consider obtaining access to some of these places of work. Obtaining membership to the newsroom listserve and the intra-office messaging system is as important as getting a newsroom identification badge that lets a researcher come and go as needed throughout the observation period. Once inside, it’s important for researchers to be assertive about asking to be included on email conversation threads, kept informed on newsroom dialogues happening via text, and be allowed access to the newsroom content management system. It should be noted that sometimes this access (which often has to be approved by a chain of command and negotiated with wary IT people) takes some time. External virtual spaces are also important to capture, and thankfully these are somewhat easier to attain access to. Being active on participants’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts reminds them that the observer exists in these realms as well as in the physical newsroom. Another important step is to establish Google alerts and subscribe to free web monitoring systems to notify you about relevant online mentions. Stay up to date on documenting Twitter chats, for example, before they disappear. Take screenshots and develop a good filing system for these hundreds of jpgs of reporters interacting in virtual spaces. This external production observation acknowledges that newswork today is a journalistic process for the story whose life begins well before the reporter makes phone

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calls and well after the editor presses ‘publish’ on the CMS. Digital newsroom ethnography also means adopting an appreciation for the modern reporter wearing multiple hats and charged with lots of different tasks – not all of which resemble reportage. Choosing individual reporters to ‘follow’ and arranging ahead of time where to meet (rather than waiting in the newsroom for only those people who show up) allows a researcher to also understand how those living more digitally than newsroom-focused are working in new spaces.2 Furthermore, many organizations are setting up ‘in-between spaces’ to enable digital work via satellite. Keen observation of the straddling between the physical world and the digital one entails nimble navigation on the part of an ethnographer, too. For example, a researcher might have to ask to be a moderator on comments and online chats that the newsroom holds with the public so he or she can see what is happening in the newsroom itself as well as behind the digital curtain and also in that public virtual realm. In this hybrid space of the moderating program, a researcher can witness what is being rejected and approved, understanding the context of other dialogue happening around the newsroom. It is this documentation of all the little digitally oriented tasks as well as the big interviews they do and the stories they write, this often unseen digital work (such as remembering a password or tagging blog posts) that often erects challenges to innovation, sets stubborn attitudes, and blocks progress – all important data for the researcher to understand. Finally, other kinds of ‘data’ must be collected from the reporter beyond the typical information about, for example, demographics, attitudes, and routines. The digital background and experience of the participant will help contextualize those attitudes and perceptions (Did she play video games as a child? Did he own a smartphone and does he text frequently? What does he think about Facebook philosophically? Is her

family tweeting at all?). One strategy for the researcher while conducting any observation might be to employ a ‘think aloud’ method as the journalists work the content management system or deal with other digital work. ‘Think aloud’ is a kind of interactive interviewing developed by media-studies scholar Sharon Dunwoody as she was observing audience members trying to navigate science websites (Eveland and Dunwoody, 2000). The audience member was encouraged to talk aloud about their experience, what they were thinking, as they meandered through the site. This might be one way of also entering the cognitive space of someone spending so much time in silence, whose interactions are only virtual and cannot often be readily seen. This thinking aloud offers the potential of connecting for the observer that background experience with the actions being taken (a reaction and response to a tweet, for example) and would provide a fuller context of meaning for the scholar.

CONSIDERATIONS, LIMITATIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS From all of this, we see two major limitations to conducting ethnography in digital newsrooms. First, you will note in just about all of these ethnographies some glaring omissions: very little data exists about the internal reportorial digital transactions the reporters had via email, texting, private Facebook chats, direct messaging on Twitter and other analytically imperative data many of us just did not have access to. (Although several of us were given permission to look over people’s shoulders, be a part of the newsroom instant messaging service, or be forwarded important email threads, too much is going on in digital spaces to truly be observed.) Frankly, our suggestions on observing internal virtual spaces are difficult to carry out. Depending on the research questions, this could be problematic. This major limitation not only

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depends on how you approach your participants and what kind of buy-in and support you have from upper management, but also emphasizes even more the importance of researcher–informant relationships. For example, a strong informant relationship can help build trust of the researcher in the newsroom, making people more inclined to share their workspaces. The second limitation in digital newsroom ethnography is that one can never truly achieve saturation – that golden reward a researcher feels in her gut when she starts to just ‘know’ what she will observe next in a situation or what a participant is going to say. That may never happen in this new world and this holds fairly dramatic implications for what we can ever truly know from this kind of methodology. The researcher, faced with innumerable spaces and time periods to observe, can become overwhelmed. It takes much discipline to follow threads of production. Overcoming this limitation requires a large news net (almost in the Tuchman sense, but one more geared to the news process than the news) and an analyst willing to approach the data mess from a big-picture standpoint. This discussion of these limitations naturally leads us to considerations of reliability and validity in digital newsroom ethnography. Ethnographers throughout scholarly history have paid only sporadic attention to these concepts (LeCompte and Goetz, 1982), but they warrant a brief mention here. In our opinion, reliability – that is, can another researcher replicate your findings given the same data – is a concept best approached cautiously in any qualitative work. That said, the researcher perhaps is obligated not to adopt the (fairly quantitative) concept of reliability in the sense of replicability, but rather the spirit of the term. In other words, a digital newsroom ethnographer could approach every site of study with a commitment towards an ethnographic sensibility. This would encourage observation of all spaces and all times of newswork to gain as holistic an understanding of the phenomenon or associations under

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study. Validity – are you measuring what you think you are measuring? – is somewhat more useful. For example, are you asking the right questions in the newsroom to get at the concept of reporter bias? In a digital ethnography, however, a scholar has to recognize that traditional press-theory understandings of concepts such as bias and other value constructs are in flux. Definitions might be changing for reporters as they move between physical and virtual realms of work. The researcher should try to acknowledge these fluctuating belief systems and ask questions in such a way that makes room for these reconceptualizations happening professionally. Another major consideration for the digital newsroom ethnographer centers on research ethics. As we stated above, a number of ethical dilemmas unique to the digital age present themselves: Many more players perform in your ‘newsroom’ spaces. Should all of these people be ‘observed?’ Where does informed consent enter? In a physical place such as a meeting room, the observer’s presence can always be known, and this is not necessarily the case in a digital realm. For example, those commenters on a live chat have no idea a researcher is watching the process of their comment’s approval; is there an obligation there to tell the potential audience that someone other than a journalist is sitting there? The answer is not clear-cut because these spaces hold differing expectations. In our example, we have the physical space of the newsroom (a private place but one in which the researcher’s presence is known), we have the public but virtual place of the chat itself where only an announcement would make the researcher’s presence known, and we have the hidden content management system space that only the moderator and the researcher sees. Should this space be considered part of the newsroom or part of the public space or somewhere in between? And there are other ethical questions that must be dealt with at some point in the ethnography: What if someone posts something publically but later in time, deletes the comment? Is

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the researcher meant to delete the content as well, given the change over time? Some of this will be eked out during the IRB process, but the researcher should have an idea of what matters in terms of information for the research questions.3 Despite all of this, it behooves us to remember the original spirit of ethnography – or indeed, any qualitative work: to capture and understand some phenomenon of social life. Ethnographic observation and interviewing digital-newsroom ethnographies are not meant to be generalized; instead many ethnographers refer to the seeking of a ‘transportability’ of meaning from one site to another. Each case exists on its own to offer a statement about the process of innovation and digital adaption, about how reporters (and perhaps other kinds of journalists) are navigating such uncertain terrain. Studying with an ethnographic sensibility and making the digital culture work for us, with us, we are always going to be standing in the right place, at the right time.

NOTES  1  His book followed on the heels of Emma Hemmingway, who also used ANT to approach a broadcast newsroom, but her ethnography was really more contained to the newsroom itself in a more traditional research undertaking.  2  See, for example, Usher’s (2014) book, Making News at The New York Times, for a discussion about how she did this in an appendix called ‘Methods’.  3  For further study of the ethics of online research, check out the special issue on the topic in Ethics and Information Technology (2002): 4(3).

REFERENCES Anderson, Chris W. (2013) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bechmann, Anja (2011) ‘Closer apart? The networks of cross-media news production’,

in David Domingo and Chris Paterson (eds) Making Online News: Newsroom ethnographies in the second decade of Internet journalism, Vol. 2, New York: Peter Lang. pp. 15–29. Boczkowski, Pablo (2002) ‘The development and use of online newspapers: What research tells us and what we might want to know’, in L.A. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (eds), Handbook of New Media, London: Sage. pp. 270–86. Boczkowski, Pablo (2005) Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. Cassell, Joan (1980) ‘Ethical Principles for Conducting Fieldwork,’ American Anthropologist, 82(1): 28–41. Charmaz, Kathy (2011) ‘Grounded Theory in the 21st Century: Applications for Advancing Social Justice Studies’, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Strategies of Qualitative Research, 4th Edition, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. pp. 359–380. Cottle, Simon (2000) ‘New(s) times: Towards a “second wave” of news ethnography’, Communications, 25(1): 19–41. de Laine, Marlene (2000) Fieldwork, Participation, and Practice: Ethics and Dilemmas in Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Denzin, Norman K. and Lincoln, Yvonna S. (2008) ‘Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research’, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Strategies of Qualitative Research, 3rd Edition, Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. 1–44. Domingo, David. (2005) The difficult shift from utopia to realism in the Internet era. A decade of online journalism research: theories, methodologies, result and challenges. Paper presented at the First European Communication Conference, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Retrieved June 25, 2014 from http://www.makingonlinenews.net/docs/ domingo_amsterdam2005.pdf Domingo, David and Paterson, Chris (2011) Making Online News: Newsroom ethnographies in the second decade of Internet journalism, Vol. 2. New York: Peter Lang. Eveland, W.P., Jr. and Dunwoody, Sharon (2000). ‘Examining information processing on the World Wide Web using think aloud protocols’, Media Psychology, 2(3): 219–43.

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Fenno, Richard F (1986) ‘Observation, Context, and Sequence in the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 80(1): 3–15. Fishman, Mark (1980) Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gans, Herbert J. (2004[1979]) Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Guillemin, Marilys and Gillam, Lynn (2004) ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2): 261–80. Humphreys, Laud (1970) Tearoom trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. London: Duckworth. Irwin, Katherine (2006) ‘Into the Dark Heart of Ethnography: The Lived Ethics and Inequality of Intimate Field Relationships’, Qualitative Sociology, 29(2): 155–75. Kopper, Gerd, Kolthoff, Albrecht, and Czepek, Andrea (2000) ‘Online journalism: A report on current and continuing research and major questions in the international discussion’, Journalism Studies, 2(1): 499–512. Kubik, Jan (2009) ‘Ethnography of Politics: Foundations, Applications, Prospects’, in E. Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 25–52. LeCompte, Margaret D. and Goetz, Judith P. (1982) ‘Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research’, Review of Educational Research, 52(1): 31–60. Lofland, John, Snow, David A., Anderson, Leon, and Lofland, Lyn H. (2005) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 4th Edition. Belmont, CA: Thompson-Wadsworth. Paterson, Chris (2008) ‘Introduction: Why ethnography?’, in Chris Paterson and David Domingo (eds) Making Online News: The ethnography of new media production, Vol. 1, New York: Peter Lang. pp. 1–11. Paterson, Chris and David Domingo (2008) Making Online News: The ethnography of

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new media production, Vol. 1. New York: Peter Lang. Paulussen, Steve, Geens, Davy, and Vandenbrande, Kristel (2011) ‘Fostering a culture of collaboration: Organizational challenges of newsroom innovation’, in David Domingo and Chris Paterson (eds) Making Online News: Newsroom ethnographies in the second decade of Internet journalism, Vol. 2, New York: Peter Lang. pp. 3–14. Punch, Maurice (1986) The Politics and Ethics of Fieldwork. Beverly Hills: Sage. Robinson, Sue (2011) ‘Convergence Crises: News work and news space in the digitally transforming newsroom’, Journal of Communication, 61: 1122–41. Rosen, Jay (2006) The People Formerly Known as The Audience [Pressthink]. Retrieved 12 December 2015 from http://archive. pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html. Schatz, Edward (2009) ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics’, in E. Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 1–21. Tuchman, Gaye (1978) Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press. Tuchamn, Gaye (1972) ‘Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity’, American Journal of Sociology, 77(4): 660–679. Usher, Nikki (2014) Making News at the New York Times. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press. Usher, Nikki (Unpublished Manuscript) ‘Newsroom Moves and the Newspaper Crisis Evaluated: A Spatial Turn’. Wedeen, Lisa (2009) ‘Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise’, in E. Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 75–93. Zelizer, Barbie (2004) Taking Journalism Seriously. Thousand Oaks: Sages.

31 Adopting a ‘Material Sensibility’ in Journalism Studies Juliette De Maeyer

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small provincial printing establishments. Even at Angoulême, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—‘the press groans’ was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble, literally deserved its name of ‘impression-stone’. (Balzac, 2013[1837]: 31)

In the opening sequence for his serial novel that depicts early nineteenth-century journalism (Lost Illusions, published between 1837 and 1843), Honoré de Balzac starts with the printing press in all its material grandeur: we see and hear the press, we feel the ink-balls and the marble. Indeed, journalism has always been a material and technological affair. One could endlessly list the things and the technologies that mattered at some point,

or still matter now, in collecting, making and disseminating the news: carrier pigeons and printing presses, the telegraph, the linotype, the telephone or the telex machine, computers connected to the internet, smartphones and algorithms… Journalism is populated with technological objects. If the interest for technology has permeated Journalism Studies for some time already (Steensen, 2011), a shift has started to occur in recent years: terms such as ‘materiality’, ‘sociomateriality’, and ‘sociotechnical systems’ are slowly replacing the simple concern with ‘technology’. Similar to the trend in other scholarship in Media and Communication Studies (Carlile et al., 2013; Gillespie et al., 2014; Leonardi et al., 2012; Packer and Wiley, 2011; Parikka, 2012), Journalism Studies may be undergoing a ‘material turn’ (Anderson and De Maeyer, 2015; Boczkowski, 2015). As a result, there is an increasing number of explorations of the diverse ‘objects of journalism’, including those technological bits and pieces that

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populate digital newsmaking: content management systems (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013; Rodgers, 2014); email and internet (Plesner, 2009); media hubs, satellite trucks and tools for digital video production (Hemmingway, 2008); the affordances of blogging technologies (Graves, 2007); new software being implemented in newsrooms around the world (Weiss and Domingo, 2010); online interfaces such as commenting systems and page redesign (Braun, 2015); and even boxes and tags used in editing Wikipedia news articles (Ford, 2015). Building on these works, this chapter deals with the methodological implications of adopting an approach that puts materiality at the center of journalism research. I will first briefly describe the theoretical assumptions of these works and show that many of them draw on a shared theoretical background, that of actor-network theory (ANT, see Chapter 27). I will then present the methodological puzzles that those approaches pose, namely the absence of actual methodological guidelines, and the difficulty to make things speak when relying on methodological tools that are aimed at humans. To address some possible solutions to these puzzles, I depart from Journalism Studies and I explore how other media and communication scholarship have addressed similar challenges. This detour provides a series of methodological suggestions that Journalism Studies scholars can consider to embrace a material sensibility.

WHAT IS MATERIALITY AND WHY DOES IT MATTER FOR JOURNALISM STUDIES? Even if perspectives that prominently feature an interest for matter, infrastructure or medium date back to ‘canonical theorists’ in the field of Communication and Journalism Studies, such as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis or James Carey (Anderson, 2015: 353), Journalism Studies seem to have long

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suffered from a neglect of materiality. Within media scholarship of the last decades, the focus on texts and messages, on those who produce and consume them, has meant that the materiality of newsmaking has been left relatively unexplored (Gillespie et al., 2014: 1). However, a renewed interest for materiality has emerged in the last few years, as media and communication scholars scrutinize journalism in the digital era in depth. How can we explain the emergence of such an interest for materiality? First, with the increasing digitization of journalistic activities, tools and technologies emerge as a main concern. As journalists were confronted with new machines and gadgets, the technological nature of their craft appeared in a new light. While at first digital technologies were mainly described as virtual and immaterial, a range of studies also tried to lift the ‘theoretical blockage’ of immateriality (Fuller, 2008: 4). Far from being seamless and immaterial, digital ‘stuff’ seems to make a difference in newsmaking, and as such, tools and technologies become prominent objects of scholarly inquiry. Second, digitization shines a new light on the question of materiality by offering traces of what previously may have been gone unnoticed. New forms of traceability (think of logs, hyperlinks or metadata) reveal how tangible and visible our digital lives can be. It is no surprise that pleas for a ‘material turn’ in Journalism Studies (Boczkowski, 2015) have blossomed in digital journalism scholarship. But more crucially, the ‘material turn’ does not only provide a way to direct our attention to these digital traces and material objects, but also provides a way of escaping the twin pitfalls of excessive technological and social determinism. The (salutary) move against ‘technological determinism’ in media and communication studies since the 1960s (Sterne, 2014) has lead to a strong form of social and cultural determinism that, by the 2000s, became the dominant perspective in the field (Lievrouw, 2014: 22). Pushing back against the supremacy of the social, the material turn is envisioned by its defendants as a

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‘useful middle ground’ (Graves, 2007) that advocates for a ‘more dialectical, mutualshaping or co-production perspective, where artifacts and social action are seen as mutually constitutive and determining’ (Lievrouw, 2014: 23). As such, we can understand the turn to materiality as an attempt to reinstate a sensibility to things, and particularly to technology, while not discounting the important inheritance of social constructivism and cultural studies. Works pertaining to ‘new materialist’ approaches of media, communication and journalism have offered various implicit or explicit definitions of materiality, objects, and sociotechnical system. In this chapter, I will adopt Leonardi’s (2012) definition. In this perspective, materiality is seen as ‘the arrangement of an artifact’s physical and/or digital materials into particular forms that endure across differences in place and time and are important to users’ (Leonardi, 2012: 31). This definition highlights two dimensions that are maybe more obvious, that is, form and durability across space and time. But there is a third dimension that hints at another conception of materiality: if objects are made of particular materials, not all of those materials are important (or ‘matter’) in a particular setting, not all have consequences in particular situations. Therefore, developing a material sensibility we do not only need to pay equal attention to all matter, but also need to identify ‘matters of concern’: elements that, on top of having form and durability, concern actors involved in a particular situation, make a difference in a particular setting. Agreeing that ‘texts, objects, and spaces have a lot to “say” when we read them alongside the living voice of informants and social actors’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011: 217), scholars have approached material culture with varying theoretical, ontological and epistemological lenses: from marxism to structuralism, from semiotics to postcolonial studies (for an overview, see Tilley, 2006). Yet, in the study of journalism, the interest

for objects seems to blossom primarily in one particular theoretical tradition, that of actornetwork theory.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND BEYOND Actor-network theory (ANT) emerged in the sociology of science through the work of Bruno Latour (2005; Latour and Woolgar, 1986), Michel Callon (1986) and John Law (1989), among others. Its goal has been summarized as a quest to ‘explain social order not through an essentialised notion of “the social” but through the network of connections between human agents, technologies and objects’ (Couldry, 2008: 93). ANT’s best-known feature and perhaps most ‘provocative thesis’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011: 51) is that it proposes to treat humans and nonhumans (such as artifacts, tools, documents) in a symmetrical way. In other words, as they reject the dichotomy between ‘ideas’ and ‘matter’ (Couldry, 2008), ANT scholars are comfortable with the assumption that things, as well as humans, can have agency. In this radical redefinition of who and what has agency, ANT takes part in the shaping of ‘posthumanist’, and more specifically, ‘objectivist’ theories (Schatzki, 2001), insofar as it plays down the primacy of human agency and emphasizes the agency of objects, artifact, and nonhumans in general. Among the many other concepts and principles proposed by ANT,1 it is this ‘ontological premise’ (Primo and Zago 2014: p.12) that has attracted the attention of the Journalism Studies scholars (Anderson and Kreiss, 2013; Hemmingway, 2008; Keith, 2014; Micó et  al., 2013; Plesner, 2009; Weiss and Domingo, 2010). Accordingly, they posit, it is not only journalists who do journalism, but also technological artifacts and other objects. This view, argue Primo and Zago (2015), challenges previous epistemological and methodological tenets of Journalism Studies,

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and involves the end of ‘anthropocentrism’ that has permeated traditional definitions of journalism. Along these lines, defining journalism as ‘what (professional) journalists do’ is no longer satisfactory (Primo and Zago, 2015). Researchers should therefore attempt to describe the heterogeneous and contingent networks of actors (humans and nonhumans) that produce journalism, and acknowledge that any thing that modifies a state of affairs by making a difference (Latour, 2005: 71) is worthy of attention. Even though increasingly popular, actornetwork theory is not the only way to adopt a material sensibility to the study of journalism. Scholars have paid attention to its material aspects within other intellectual traditions. For instance, Usher’s analysis of the spatial aspect of newsmaking draws on Manuel Castell’s (2000) spaces and flows of communication (Usher, 2015). Le Cam’s (2015) interest is in the newsroom as a space and how it evolved over time, for which she draws on visual analysis. Graves (2007) draws on affordance theory to understand the materiality of blogging, and Parasie’s exploration of data journalism (Parasie, 2014) is sensible to the role of artifacts in a way that is mostly indebted to science and technology studies (STS). The diversity of the theoretical traditions that are mobilized seems typical of the ‘material turn’. Far from being a homogeneous movement, it pervades media and communication scholarship from a variety of disciplines and scholarly traditions (Gillespie et al., 2014: 5). But even though there are alternative approaches, ANT is a dominant thread that keeps reappearing in many attempts at reorienting Journalism Studies towards materiality.2 In the remainder of this chapter, and in its discussion of the methodological challenges of a material sensibility in Journalism Studies, I therefore focus on ANT. I chose that limited focus not only because ANT is the framework that the proponent of a ‘material turn’ in journalism adopts most commonly, but also because I believe that its

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radical underpinnings (the principle of generalized symmetry and the strong agency given to nonhumans) forces us to think thoroughly about what it means to embrace materiality. As such, we could argue that this approach also holds the most fundamental implications for our analysis of journalism in the digital age. In the following, I will address the question: if we want to take materiality seriously, so seriously that we are willing to give nonhumans the same agency that we usually reserve for humans, what does it means in terms of methodology? The answer to this question holds relevance beyond ANT perspectives. The methodological challenges that ensue from this radical ontological perspective are relevant for other approaches aiming to include a material sensibility, including those that tackle materiality from other theoretical traditions.

METHODOLOGICAL PUZZLES Let us look, then, at the works belonging to Journalism Studies that have tackled materiality from within the framework of ANT. What are the methodological implications that come with its strong ontological stance? In this section I describe the methodological issues that come with espousing actor-network theory: I will address the lack of explicit signposting in terms of methods or methodological techniques and raise the question of whether, and if so how, we can study nonhumans with the same methodological tools we use when we study humans.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s a methodology! Among the scholars who have incorporated ANT in the study of journalism, many have highlighted its methodological virtues. Actor-network theory, they argue, is first and foremost a ‘methodological proposal’

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(Micó et al., 2013: 122), a ‘methodological approach’ (Plesner, 2009: 614), ‘a method for describing what is around us’ (Hemmingway, 2008: 15), and ‘a sociological and methodological approach concerned with tracing associations’ (Lewis and Westlund, 2015: 25, emphasis added). Van Loon even states that ‘ANT’s most important contribution is not the rediscovery of technology, but rather its methodology that allows the thorough description of the processes in which the social settings are shaped’ (Van Loon, 2011; quoted in Primo and Zago, 2015: 44). These quotes give the impression that ANT comes with a sophisticated methodological toolbox, but one of the problems, as I would argue here, is that it does not. ANT as put forth by its key proponents and exemplars (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999) does not say much about methodology. Or rather, it is primarily concerned with a particular flavor of methodology: method of explanation, rather than strategies for data collection and analysis (Bowden, 1995: 64). In so doing, it only addresses one aspect of the multiple meanings of ‘methodology’. Assuredly, the word ‘methodology’ has come to include different steps of the research process: theoretical and epistemological postures, research design, data collection techniques, and approaches to data analysis. ANT focuses on the first of these, the theoretical and epistemological postures, and hardly provides insight into the latter interpretations of methodology. We could see this as a mere reproduction of the distinction between the realm of methodology and that of method (Ackerly and True, 2013; McGregor and Murnane, 2010), where ANT focuses on the former: ‘a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed’ that includes philosophical assumptions about science and the production of knowledge. As such, the latter method, referring to ‘techniques for gathering, producing and analyzing evidence’ (Ackerly and True, 2013: 136) remains underdeveloped. When

ANT explicitly describes ‘rules of method’ (Latour, 1987: 258), it primarily deals with the form of acceptable explanations; that is, theoretical approaches to methodology. We can find hints of methodological techniques, be they about data collection or analysis, but they are scarce. For instance, the researcher who would want to gather practical clues about methods from The Making of Law (2010) (one of Latour’s most accessible works), could feel confused by the entries listed under ‘method of inquiry by the author’ in the index. They refer to dreamy mises-en-scène of the author himself (Latour, 2010: 68) or consist in lapidary watchwords – ‘avoid exoticism’, ‘avoid sociologism and formalism’, ‘distinguish between enunciation regimes’, ‘follow corpus of precedents’ (Latour, 2010: 295). Even when zeroing in on those entries that look more practical (‘follow the paper trail’), the reader does not easily find the usual nitty-gritty of methodological techniques, the audit trail of what has been done including issues such as: how many hours in the field? How was the data analyzed? How did he gain access to the field? How did he introduce himself to the people he observed? What kind of observations were conducted? Were they complemented with interviews? All of these important questions are left relatively unaddressed. Scholars applying ANT to the field of newsmaking have used varying methods of data collection and analysis addressing the core question of how to do justice to the fundamental issue ANT grapples with: how to analyze the agency of things and humans alike.

Making things speak Those who have adopted ANT’s program and applied it to newsmaking have overcome the absence of a concrete methodological toolkit and have proposed a more hands-on approach and therefore had to deal with concrete methodological problems. Treating nonhumans in a way that is symmetrical to how we treat

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humans poses a series of practical challenges. The first challenge could be summarized in a naive question: how can we make things speak? Emma Hemmingway (2008) voices this concern in the opening chapter of her book, a case in point of ANT applied to journalism: Our first problem, once we enter the newsroom, will be with all the objects we discover. We’ll find that it’s crowded with machines and technologies that cannot speak for themselves. If we are to explore the relationships these have with our human actors who we can interview, observe and more clearly understand, how will we find a voice for them? How can we do them justice, if they cannot account for themselves? (Hemmingway, 2008: 45)

Some methods adopted by scholars who have embraced ANT in Journalism Studies (Plesner, 2009; Weiss and Domingo, 2010), such as newsroom observation and interviews with journalists, may pose a challenge inasmuch as they almost naturally direct the researcher’s gaze towards human agency. In their essay discussing the implications of using ANT to study journalism, Primo and Zago cast doubt on the relevance of interviews with journalists and other newsworkers to approach the field in a way that would recount its material aspects. Interviews, they assert, fail to overcome what they call the ‘anthropocentric tale’ of journalism, as they ‘maintain the focus on human agency while other actants are kept “quiet”’ (Primo and Zago, 2015: 44). It is a return to discourse and language, they state, a focus that materiality-centered approaches specifically try to escape, and thus a failure to fully realize the epistemology of ANT. As if, after having theoretically acknowledged the radical ontology of treating humans and nonhumans in a symmetrical way, researchers were inevitably attracted to human agency, because their methodological techniques favor the human side of the story. I will argue later in this chapter that we can turn to discourse to find relevant traces of materiality, but there is an important

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point to be made about humans being the gravitational center of our methods. This critique could be extended to other choices of methodological techniques, and not only those resorting to interviews. Ethnography, and more specifically observation, is generally seen fit to study actor-networks. Bruno Latour’s classic works, such as The Making of Law (2010) or Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1986), are framed as an ‘ethnography’ (Latour, 2010) or as ‘an anthropological approach’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1986), and he regularly stages himself (or other figures of the researcher) as ‘the ethnographer’ (Latour, 2013). When it comes to the nuts and bolts of ethnographic methods, researchers interested in the material aspects of newsmaking can resort to observation and, among the various observation techniques, shadowing (Anderson, 2013a; Anderson and Kreiss, 2013). Shadowing is an observation technique that consists in ‘following selected people for a time in their everyday occupations’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 2014: 44). Amid the advantages of shadowing, we find a great flexibility and mobility that fits ANT’s motto of ‘following the actors’. The metaphor, however, is not trifling: as the name of the technique implies, shadowing requires that the researcher follows someone as a shadow (Vásquez, 2013). Being a shadower implies that there is a ‘shadowee’, the two of them developing an interpersonal relationship. Vásquez (2013) shows that the shadower– shadowee relationship can take shape in different types of shadows (labeled ‘transparent’, ‘opaque’, and ‘shaded’) that vary along with the involvement of the shadower, her influence on the research subject and the level of reflexivity. As Vásquez argues the most prominent feature of shadowing as a methodological technique is its intersubjectivity (2013: 85). The human subject is at the core of the metaphor (we are talking about a human shadow) and of the technique. As such, this could give way to concerns similar to those that Primo

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and Zago (2015) raised about interviewing: shadowing implies to closely follow humans, so does it give primacy to human agency, hence failing to fulfill the initial commitment to symmetry? As I argue in the next section, even if those concerns are legitimate, it does not mean that we have to completely dismiss ethnography or interviewing as relevant methods. Several tricks can ensure that we effectively adopt a posture sensitive to materiality.

METHODOLOGICAL CLUES Developing a sensibility for what is material is not without its methodological challenges, as we see. In the remaining of this chapter I will offer some methodological clues that aim at helping journalism research overcome these challenges in developing this material sensibility. There is a diversity of methodological operations available to journalism scholars to tackle the issue of materiality, which emerges when we incorporate the notion of ‘trace’ and explore how traces may matter in our inquiries. Among the generic ‘rules of method’ explicit in ANT’s core texts, the notion of ‘trace’ occupies an important place. Latour proposes the notion of ‘trace’ to grasp at objects: ‘To be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no trace is produced, they offer no information to the observer and will have no visible effect on other agents’ (Latour, 2005: 79). As I have highlighted above, the notion of ‘trace’ finds a reinvigorated meaning in the digital realm: metadata, logs, hyperlinks and other connective devices – it seems that digital communication technologies produce clearer traces than other forms of communication (Domingo et  al., 2015: 64). The traceability of action allowed by digital technologies, in other words, shines a new light on the operation of networks that ANT tries to grasp (Anderson, 2013b: 1010). Of course, digital traces are not the only way

of deploying a material sensibility, and the following paragraphs therefore briefly hint at other sorts of traces that researchers can explore. These clues do not constitute a onesize-fits-all recipe that one could follow zealously; rather they highlight methodological knots and possible ways to untie them. The methodological tricks that I propose here act at different levels of the research process. A first set of clues concerns fieldwork and datacollection techniques, while the remaining sections address issues related to analysis and writing – with the firm conviction that all these aspects must be strongly and coherently conceived in the research process.

Tracing objects as much as humans The first methodological intervention that this chapter proposes aims at dealing with the issue of including nonhumans in the fieldwork and data-collection techniques – keeping in mind that some of our techniques could be problematically biased in favor of humans, as highlighted above. Even though acknowledging that ‘shadowing people reveals more about their actions than about their networks’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 2014: 1666), some scholars have nonetheless argued that it is possible to carry out observation techniques that are more sensitive to objects, hence diminishing ‘the risk of focusing merely on people and neglecting other actants present in every network’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 2014: 1666). It is possible to adopt observation techniques so as to successfully espouse materiality, by ‘following objects’ (Czarniawska-Joerges, 2014) for instance by ‘shadowing software’ (Bruni, 2005). Researchers who have embraced object-inclusive approaches present several subtle methodological maneuvers necessary to achieve that aim. Following Meunier and Vásquez (2008), I would like here to propose to adapt Latour’s motto to ‘follow the actors’ in a

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methodological program that they label ‘shadowing the hybrid character of action’. They discuss the close relationship between ontological, epistemological and methodological postures, and derive from that discussion three methodological implications where they attempt to connect theoretical and practical matters. First, if the researcher acknowledges the ‘plenum of agencies’ that can be at play, she has to follow the course of action as it unravels. The action may require that she follows a specific object: a bill, a model, a tool, a report. In Journalism Studies, a similar trick has been successfully embraced by Anderson (2013a: 83–99) by minutely following how one story (that of the ‘Francisville Four’) diffused across the online news ecosystem. This allowed him to describe the news ecosystem in action and as a whole, and as such did not fall into the pitfall of limiting the description to the actions of professional journalists and to the stories that they published. Second, Meunier and Vásquez (2008) argue that accounting for humans as well as nonhumans can be applied at the level of data collection and at the level of data analysis. When collecting data, it implies to alternate between a focus on human actors and a focus on objects. A case in point is a study by Bruni (2005), where the researcher focuses his observation on a specific piece of software: in doing so, he does not merely notice that people ‘do something on the computer’, but shifts the observation lens to embrace the agency of the software (CzarniawskaJoerges, 2014: 1642). Such a move is also adopted by Rodgers (2014) when he follows a content management system (CMS) in and out of the newsroom. It is a small shift but an important one, that displaces the researcher’s lens for a while – a subtle move which bears many resemblances with a more traditional approach but which fundamentally relies on the point of view adopted by the researcher, in the focal point towards which the researcher directs her gaze. The human–non-human symmetry also takes shape during the data

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analysis, when the researcher is particularly careful in pulling analytical threads that do justice to the plenum of agencies at play. The scene observed by the researcher may bear resemblance to any other observation (such as a day in the newsroom), but she can lean toward a material sensibility by focusing her analysis on things such as documents, databases, algorithms or written reports instead of solely analyzing what journalists and other human actors say and do. Third, if we adopt a posture that claims to understand both the discursive and the material aspects of action as two inseparable dimensions, as two sides of the same coin, we need ‘tools that allow us to grasp both dimensions’ (Meunier and Vásquez, 2008: 188). For example, video recording as a data-collection instrument (what is sometimes called ‘video-shadowing’) could prove beneficial in allowing researchers to pay attention to visual and material details. Just as the recording and transcription of interviews and conversations allow researchers to thoroughly return to discursive material until the analysis is complete, video-shadowing could be useful in allowing them to iterate over visual and material aspects. Of course, equipping researchers with video camera does not mean that an account of the phenomenon sensible to the plenum of agencies will magically surface – no tool amounts to a methodological miracle cure – and there are concerns related to videoshadowing, as with any other specific technique (for a review of these concerns, see, for example, Cooren et  al., 2007). The point, however, is to proceed by making small adjustments at every stage of the research in order to maximize the likelihood to grasp both human and nonhuman action. In other words, these methodological recommendations do not constitute radical innovations or ‘new’ methods per se, but they embody an always-renewed commitment to its ontological and epistemological premises that needs to be reinstated and questioned again at all steps of the research. For the slope may

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be slippery, and a study that started with a pledge to trace actor-networks and the net of connections in which actors (humans and nonhumans) are contingently positioned can give way to an analysis that only gives prominence to human agency. As there is no methodological guidebook, researchers interested in materiality need to be extra careful and to regularly pause to wonder if and how what they are doing is consistent with their initial engagement to produce inquiries that aim at detailing the diversity of agencies at play.

Traces of what matters As highlighted above, paying attention to material traces can be done at the level of data collection, but also needs to be addressed in the analytical process. This is where I believe we can reintroduce the analysis of discourse as a methodologically viable strategy. In an earlier section of this chapter (see ‘Methodological puzzles’), I have argued that focusing too closely on (human) discourses, for instance by relying on interviews as a main method, unavoidably gives primacy to human agency and ignores nonhumans. Here, I will complicate that argument and suggest that there are interesting, material traces to be found in discursive data – if we adopt the right analytical strategy. Following Cooren (2010), I propose that focusing our analysis on ‘what matters’ in discourse can also be a fruitful way for Journalism Studies to embrace a material sensibility. Cooren (2010) proposes a conceptualization of action and agency in dialogue, with a focus on what he labels ‘ventriloquism’. He describes a model of action and agency that assumes the principle of generalized symmetry, where action is something that a variety of beings can perform (Cooren, 2010: 27). It is a deeply relational and interactionist conception of action. Following Latour, Cooren assumes that whenever one acts, some other (human or nonhuman) enters into action. He

subsequently seeks to apply this principle to communication, arguing that when we speak or write, we do not act alone, but various things also act on our behalf, as our proxy, as our delegates (Cooren, 2010: 28). Let us imagine, for example, that two journalists have a conversation about a piece of legislation that might become the topic of a news story. In their conservation, various things can act: one journalist explains to the other that a memo issued by the justice department says something interesting, the other replies by showing her colleague a report that shows contradictory facts. Quotes from sources are exchanged; a database provides some numbers… Mundane objects such as a notebook are enrolled in action, but also more abstract figures such as ‘editorial policy’ or ‘journalistic ethics’. The two journalists are not alone in their interaction. Promoting a fundamentally material view of communication, Cooren furthermore offers that communication implies production of marks, of signs, of texts. What is of interest and at the core of the idea of ‘ventriloquism’, then, is how ‘an agent makes another agent speak through the production of a given utterance or text’ (Cooren, 2010: 58). Consistent with the material view of communication, these effects of ventriloquism leave marks, signs – traces – in text and speech, and this is exactly what the analyst should focus on. This approach is material in two ways: (1) by acknowledging the variety of agencies at play and by considering that action is always shared and distributed, it includes nonhumans in its model of action; and (2) by promoting a material view of communication and suggesting to look for traces of the plenum of agencies in discourse. As such, this approach reconciles the discursive and the material, arguing that there is no need to ‘reduc[e] the world to terms overly favorable to one or the other – either a discursive/ symbolic or material/technological determinism’ (Cooren et al., 2012: 297). In this light, we could read Parasie’s paper on how the team behind On Shaky Ground

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(a data journalism investigation of the seismic safety of schools in the Bay Area of San Francisco) mobilized various epistemologies (Parasie, 2015), and highlight ‘matters of concern’ that animate the actors. The paper is full of quotes from interviews with journalists and developers who took part in the investigation. In these discursive bits and pieces, we find traces of what matters, traces of what concerned or animated the team of journalists and developers during their investigation: ‘databases’, ‘documents’ (Parasie, 2015: 373), ‘reporters’, ‘maps’, ‘geological faults’, ‘earthquake engineers’ (2015: 375). The discourses bear the traces of the plenum of agencies that is at play, and display a hybrid form of action where humans and nonhumans – journalists and databases, school buildings and earthquake engineers – are intertwined. There is a methodological implication of primary interest to us here: Instead of discarding research based on discursive material (e.g. interviews) as inappropriate to render an approach that is sensitive to materiality – as done by Primo and Zago (2015) – I would like to suggest that we can tackle the materiality of newsmaking through the discourse of those who make the news. Resorting to interviews (or more broadly, the analysis of talk, conversation and discursive interactions) can be a way of embracing a research program that acknowledges both humans and nonhumans. It can do so by emphasizing one dimension of materiality, in the definition presented at the beginning of this chapter: what ‘matters’ to people and of which we can find specific traces in their discourse. Moreover, Cooren’s approach comes with the methods and analytical tools of interactionism, conversation analysis and ethnometodology (Fairhurst and Cooren, 2004): scholars who have adopted this framework carry out fine-grained analysis of text, speech and conversation that could prove useful for journalism scholars to root their analyses in specific discursive traces. Furthermore, embracing a ‘ventriloquist’ analysis could allow Journalism Studies scholars to overcome the long-held critique

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against materiality-centered approaches, and especially ANT: that of ‘descriptivism’ (Benson, 2014). This critique posits that by sticking too closely with the actors, ANT does not account for broader forces such culture, power, norms, values and other phenomena that may at first seem immaterial. But paying attention to matters of concern in discourse is a way of showing how seemingly immaterial entities, such as culture, power and norms, are relationally and materially incarnated, which means that: things such as rules, norms, mutual understandings, and institutions appear, at first sight, to be relatively immaterial (otherwise, why would they need to be incarnated, materialized or embodied?), but that interactions precisely allow us to witness how these rules, norms, mutual understandings, and institutions embody or incarnate themselves in our discussions. (Cooren, 2010: 142)

If the analyst looks for traces of what ‘concerns’ people (in our case, journalists and other newsworkers), she can include whatever entity/agent/thing/idea that is incarnated as long as these things matter. As long as they are ‘incarnately displayed’ in interaction (Cooren, 2010: 142), the analyst can describe how they are invoked, how actors make them talk and how they talk through actors. Applied by Journalism Studies scholars, this approach could allow for detecting how widely studied values and norms (such as ‘objectivity’) are specifically embodied in newsmakers’ discourses and interactions. Again, it is by minutely looking for traces, marks, and signs of that incarnation that we could fully document culture, norms, values or power in action – and hence avoid non sequitur in approaches that promise to take materiality into consideration but then proceed with analyses that invoke culture, norms or values without grounding them in material traces, that is, for example, without showing how they are constituted as ‘matters of concern’ for newsmakers. Coming from a different perspective but pursuing a similar interest in discursive traces,

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De Maeyer and Le Cam (2015) propose to explore online metajournalistic discourses to better understand ‘objects of journalism’. They argue that, if we acknowledge that journalism is populated with objects, we need to reinvest them with the richness of their social histories. In so doing, we embrace the fact that objects and technology are not onedimensional, flat or taken-for-granted things. On the contrary, they carry rich networks of associations. That is, they are invested and reinvested with meanings by different social worlds, and they echo other objects. For example, one of the technologies that has at least partly shaped our understanding of contemporary digital journalism, the blog, can be connected with previous forms of self-publishing such as diaries, fanzines, or samizdats. One way of exploring this social history of objects that matter in journalism is to retrace their existence through metajournalistic discourses, that is, discourses about journalism – or rather, networks of discourses connected through interdiscursive bonds (De Maeyer and Le Cam, 2015). By exploring how journalism is imagined, through metajournalistic discourses, this approach does not supersede the need to study newsmaking in action, but complements it by documenting how objects are at the center of metajournalistic controversies, that are historically and contextually situated. In doing so, the exploration of controversies in metajournalistic discourses effectively rejoins what some have described as the ‘applied’ facet of ANT. For ANT scholars, controversies are seen as a particularly fruitful field of inquiry, as ‘actors are unremittingly engaged in tying and untying relations, arguing categories and identities, revealing the fabric of collective existence’ (Venturini, 2012: 796). Those approaches follow one concrete methodological proposal (even if studying controversies is not limited to that technique) which is to retrace controversies online by following the material embodiment of their interdiscursive nature, that is, the hyperlinks that connect different discourses.

Such techniques have also been developed, in a similar framework, by scholars who seek to describe what they call ‘issue networks’ (Marres, 2004), that is, a ‘heterogeneous set of entities (actors, documents, slogans, imagery) that have configured into a hyperlink-network around a common problematic’ (Marres and Rogers, 2005: 928).

Showing traces in reflexive accounts Finally, this chapter turns to a last level of methodological intervention, unavoidably linked to the others, that of writing reflexive accounts. By being so indebted to (even though not limited to) ethnographic methods, journalism research with a material sensibility shares a long-lasting issue that comes with ethnography: reflexivity. This decadeold issue concerns questions that are still pressing, such as: How do researchers know what they know? How do they make sense of what they study? How is a researcher’s particular position entangled with the phenomenon she studies? How is the researcher’s relationship with actors (including nonhuman actors) affecting them? Decades of ethnography have suggested how to reflexively deal with and report on researchers’ situation vis-à-vis other people involved in the research. Ethnographic methods have created ways of reporting the ethnographer’s attempts to make sense of the world jointly with those studied (Marcus, 1997). They have alternatively adopted a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realist’ (Neyland, 2007) stance that assumes that the researcher could unobtrusively observe the world, a stance focusing on the depiction of the researcher’s ‘role membership’ (Adler, 1987), or a collaborative approach where there are no subjects of observation, only collaborators who need to be interested in the research. I see two challenges that the issue of reflexivity highlights for research interested in the material aspects of newsmaking. The first is to

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continue to embrace the reflexive tradition in describing the researcher’s relationship with humans, the second is to extend this tradition to also describe the researcher’s relationship with nonhumans. First, there is no reason for an approach sensitive to materiality to suddenly neglect what ethnographers have taught us about jointly making sense of the world with the people studied. An approach sensitive to materiality, if attentive to fairly describing a variety of agencies, still involves dealing with humans. The particular relationship that researchers can develop with journalists or newsmakers has been at the center of methodological developments (see for example Brousteau et  al. 2012; Plesner 2011). Incorporating such considerations in approaches sensible to materiality is a challenge that needs to be addressed, as it always needed to be. Second, we need to develop similar reflexive thinking vis-à-vis objects, artifacts and things. If reflexivity is about acknowledging the place of the researcher in her research, particularly in relation to her objects of study, there is no reason to limit it to her relation with humans. She also occupies a specific position in relation with nonhumans that has specific implications for the research. An example of such reflection, we can find in the PhD dissertation of Couture (2012) about source code and how it acts in reconfiguring the internet. Couture reflexively describes his own position towards programming and how it affected his research. A problem that arises in this reflexive thinking concerning our relation to objects, is that we lack guidelines or traditions to exert and express this kind of reflexivity. Recommendations on this matter in methodological literature often insist on the interpersonal relationship between the researcher and those she studies. To deal with this blind spot, Latour (1988) provides a way out with a take on reflexivity that focuses on writing. The text (produced by the researcher) is at the center of his definition of reflexivity (Latour, 1988). In his essay on the ‘politics of explanation’, he

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frames the question of reflexivity as the distance between the text and the setting about which it writes. Latour defines a ‘reflexive’ account as ‘any text that takes into account its own production and which, by doing so, claims to undo the deleterious effects upon its readers of being believed too little or too much’ (Latour, 1988: 166). But he vigorously rejects a common understanding of reflexivity and methodology, that is ‘obtained by adding specific parts about the way texts or discourses should or should not be written’ (Latour, 1988: 167). He also dismisses methodology sections as tedious ‘self-reference loops’ (Latour, 1988: 174), and argues that writing reflexive accounts amounts to ‘just’ (as in ‘merely’) writing. It does not fall within the scope of this chapter to solve the question of enough, too much or too little, or even what is the wrong kind of reflexivity that were virulently discussed in Latour’s 1988 essay and elsewhere (Woolgar, 1988). Instead, I can only emphasize one positive proposition in Latour’s tirade: the importance of text and the care that the researcher should give to writing. For a text to be reflexive, Latour claims, ‘all literary resources that can be mustered to render an account lively, interesting, perceptive, suggestive and so on have to be present’ (1988: 170). If ‘replacing methodology by style’ (Latour, 1988: 170, emphasis added) seems to be an extreme measure, the argument that puts the scholarly text and its stylistic qualities to the forefront is valuable. Similar calls to care for our writing emerge from ethnographers. Neyland reminds us that ‘ethnography’ ‘refers both to the methodology (going out and doing ethnography) and the written text (the ethnography)’ (Neyland, 2007: 125). That second aspect represents a challenge that Journalism Studies need to face to produce reports that fully deal with materiality. As indeed, the written text seems key in providing a convincing argument that the material matters. ANT’s most vibrant accounts,

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such as Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1986), Latour’s Aramis (1996), and The Making of Law (2010) are books which display documents, photographs, verbatims, long description of entire scenes and a variety of other means to make the fieldwork tangible and visible. Of course, showing does not amount to analyzing, and it is how these materials are weaved into a story which produces great accounts. As underlined by Pinch (in Bruni et  al., 2014), the ‘genius’ of Latour’s early pieces was that he weaved everyday objects into ‘little stories which made them analytically interesting’ (Bruni et  al., 2014: 56). For Journalism Studies to take up a material sensibility, there needs to be a shift in writing tradition and a renewed attention for creative ways of producing scholarly texts – an effort that can only be pursued if authors are joined by journal editors, reviewers and other important actors in the long chain that produce academic texts.

A POSSIBLE COMING OF AGE OF MATERIALITY IN JOURNALISM STUDIES The last recommendation of this chapter might sound as an old bromide: methodological triangulation is, more than ever, necessary (see also Chapter 36 and 37). If one posits that the world is made of a plenum of agencies and heterogeneous actors, one needs to collect heterogeneous types of material (Plesner, 2009: 616), and use heterogeneous methods to collect and analyze them. There is a wealth of traces that researchers can unravel to follow the actors, especially as the digitization of news produces plenty of digital trails that are now within the reach of scholarly inquiry (Domingo et al., 2015: 63). If we go back to the three-dimensional definition of materiality that I proposed at the beginning of this chapter – form, durability

and matters of concern – we can see how different methodological choices may emphasize particular dimensions. Shadowing techniques focus on objects in action, that is, their arrangement in particular, situated forms and how they endure across situations. Ventriloquism zeroes in on the third aspect, on matters of concern as they are mobilized in discourse and interactions. And cartography of controversies and the attempts at retracing an object’s social history through interlinked metajournalistic discourses mix a preoccupation for what matters with how objects endure differences through time. For those who want to embrace materiality holistically, using a diversity of methods is indispensable. Having started to undergo a material turn, Journalism Studies can now try to develop their initial impetus to embrace materiality in accounts that are more explicit in terms of methodology. Acknowledging the diversity of agencies at play in newsmaking, on a theoretical level, is only the first step. We should now work on producing convincing and reflexive accounts that show materiality in action, the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, and unpacks what matters in discourse. Producing convincing and reflexive accounts may mean, as this chapter has aimed to show, to devote more energy to methodological explicitness and creativity. If there is no perfect recipe for research with a material sensibility, paying attention to every step of the research process could constitute the main takeaway of this chapter. A focus on materiality demands that we maintain coherence between ontological and epistemological positioning, methodological implications, the choice of methods (for data collection and analysis) and the craft of writing reflexive reports. Doing so would allow Journalism Studies to fully, rigorously and reflexively account for the objects that populate journalism, and to fully embrace the new complexities as well as the possibilities opened by the traceability of journalism in a digital era.

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NOTES  1  For a discussion of the core concepts of ANT and how they can be applied to the study of newsmaking, see Hemmingway (2008) or Domingo, in this volume.  2  Examples of work that adopt an ANT framework include: Anderson, 2013a; Anderson and Kreiss, 2013; Archetti, 2014; Braun, 2015; Domingo et  al., 2015; Hemmingway, 2008; Keith, 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015; Micó et  al., 2013; Plesner, 2009; Primo and Zago, 2015; Rodgers, 2014; Spyridou et al., 2013; Turner, 2005; Weiss and Domingo, 2010.

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Plesner, U. (2009) ‘An actor-network perspective on changing work practices’, Journalism, 10(5): 604–26. Plesner, U. (2011) ‘Studying Sideways: Displacing the Problem of Power in Research Interviews With Sociologists and Journalists’, Qualitative Inquiry, 17(6): 471–482. Primo, A. and Zago, G. (2015) ‘Who and what do journalism?’, Digital Journalism, 3(1): 38–52. Rodgers, S. (2014) ‘Foreign objects? Web content management systems, journalistic cultures and the ontology of software’, Journalism, 16(1): 10–26. Schatzki, T.R. (2001) ‘Introduction: Practice theory’, in T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina, and E. von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge. pp. 10–23. Spyridou, L.P., Matsiola, M., Veglis, A., Kalliris, G., and Dimoulas, C. (2013) ‘Journalism in a state of flux: Journalists as agents of technology innovation and emerging news practices’, International Communication Gazette, 75(1): 76–98. Steensen, S. (2011) ‘Online journalism and the promises of new technology’, Journalism Studies, 12(3): 311–27. Sterne, J. (2014) ‘“What do we want?” “Materiality!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”’, in T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski, and K.A. Foot (eds), Media Technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 119–128. Tilley, C.Y. (2006) Handbook of Material Culture. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Turner, F. (2005) ‘Actor-networking the news’, Social Epistemology, 19(4): 321–24. Usher, N. (2015) ‘The late great International Herald Tribune and the New York Times: Global media, space, time, print, and online coordination in a 24/7 networked world’, Journalism, 16(1): 119–33. Van Loon, J. (2011) ‘How to Be Mediatizated? An invitation to metaphysics in defense of actor network theory’, paper presented at the 2011 ICA Virtual Online Conference, May 23–June 10. Boston. Vásquez, C. (2013) ‘Devenir l’ombre de soimême et de l’autre’, Revue internationale de

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32 Reconstructing Production Practices through Interviewing Zvi Reich and Aviv Barnoy

INTRODUCTION The transformational changes journalism and the news industry have been undergoing in recent years1, pose not only theoretical challenges2 but also methodological ones (McMillan, 2000). In this complex ecosystem, where traditional methods are losing at least some of their effectiveness for studying journalistic production processes, we need alternative methods. To address the complexity of the field, we see that scholars increasingly resort to the reconstruction method to gain insight into journalism practices3. Reconstruction interviews are a method for studying journalistic work processes in a systematic way: A sample of journalists describe their own production process, reflecting on aspects that cannot easily be observed in their published output, such as the contribution of different sources, technologies, and news reporting practices. This kind of ‘reverse engineering’ can help uncover and understand journalists’ logic

behind their news items, including priorities, considerations, judgments, norms, resources, and (other) constraints. The aim of the current chapter is to describe the reconstruction method, its potential and challenge, addressing its suitability for the exploration of new and traditional research settings. To this end, we share the experience, insights, and reservations gained through the implementation of this method in the last decade by the first author, and we do so with greater depth, openness, and practical utility for potential users than we have been able to do before. This implementation has allowed us to address numerous aspects of news production, from how journalists use new and old technology to obtain news and take the initiative, through the impact of time and public relations, ending in a series of comparisons of newswork across media, beat, time, and genders, as well as comparing the work of professional versus citizen journalists (see, for example, Reich, 2008; Reich, 2014; Reich and Golder, 2014). In this

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chapter we highlight the way in which you can access journalism practice in the widest sense through this methodological approach. One of the classic booby-traps for any methodological description is to slide into the prescriptive and mechanistic style of a methodological cookbook. In our effort to avoid that potentially boring mechanism, we reflect on the reconstruction method and expose the  logic behind it. Furthermore, we do so in the context of current news environments and the flows of information in it, and in relation to other methodologies available to access these practices. Reconstructions can be qualitative, quantitative or a mix thereof and both have undeniable advantages.4 We focus here, however, on quantitative ones, in order to share our richer experience in these studies, as well as their greater methodological complexity and potential empirical contribution. After introducing the main premises and addressing the growing difficulties that traditional methods encounter in the effort to systematically and comprehensively capture the richness and complexities of current news environments, the chapter will present the reconstruction interview method. We do not only suggest methodological guidelines, but also share research tips that we found helpful or even essential for successful implementation of this method. Finally, we take this opportunity to describe in unprecedented detail the limitations of reconstruction interviews and point out some potential avenues for developing their use in future studies.

UNDERLYING PREMISES Underlying the development of the reconstruction method is a series of premises about the nature of journalistic processes and the effective ways to explore them. Over the years, some of these premises have gained evidential support. We will present now the most important of these premises while briefly mentioning their methodological

implications. First, journalistic processes matter. Because ‘content is king’ in Journalism Studies, as a methodological object, a research subject, and a democratically vital resource (Lombard et  al., 2002), the concrete processes through which content is formed merit careful research attention. As scholars of transparency suggest, many of the crucial steps determining the quality of the news content (such as leaks, anonymous sources, off-camera sources, plagiarism, external hyperlinks) remain outside the final product, or are intentionally disguised (Hallin et  al., 1993; Karlsson, 2010; Sigal, 1986). Similarly, the epistemic qualities of the news process are also concealed in the final news product, where various published claims go undocumented, some witnesses and their level of access and reliability are not identified, and the reasoning and evidence leading up to factual conclusions are not always apparent. At least some of these can be discovered through the exploration of the journalistic production process rather than the product. Second, journalistic processes are complex and simple at the same time. Hence, an effective research method must be prepared to capture the simplicity, linearity, and structured nature of regular news reporting processes as well as their idiosyncratic, chaotic, and surprising elements, which cannot always be simply and smoothly reduced into rubrics and categories. Schematically speaking, the core of the reporting process remains structured, starting with the journalist hearing for the first time about the existence of a potential item, and ending up with what he or she considers publishable information. In between, there is endless potential for combinations of sources, technologies, and news practices; however, in news reporting these combinations are usually reduced to no more than two or three contacts with sources, using one technology or another. Our third premise is that the journalistic environment is becoming more ‘liquid’ (Bauman, 2000; 2013). This means that

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under mounting commercial and technological pressures, boundaries are shifting between formerly dichotomous entities such as news customers and producers, as well as between different beats and different media types (Bauman, 2013; Deuze, 2008). These changes both merit study and make the study of production practices more challenging. According to our fourth premise, journalists are increasingly surrounded by a dense network of ‘actants’, to use the term from ‘actor-network theory’ (see also Chapters 27 and 31). By ‘actants’ we refer to different human and non-human entities that need to be taken into account as potential players and sources of action (Latour, 2005). News sources and technologies are diversifying, and include a series of new human and nonhuman actors (Rogers, 2014) such as social media, big-data warehouses and ordinary citizens (Hermans et  al., 2014; Sienkiewicz, 2014; Tandoc, 2014), while traditional channels such as documents, telephone interviews, and even firsthand witnessing at news scenes are not rendered obsolete. In order to capture the contribution of all these ‘actants’, a research design must be sensitive enough to not miss the nuances of their contributions on the one hand, while enabling reduction of this ‘thick description’ into significant categories on the other. Our fifth premise suggests that journalistic work processes are becoming less observable and less researchable by traditional methods. One reason is the melting down of the newsroom and processes of ‘placeshifting’ (Anderson et  al., 2012; Berry et  al., 2010), which means that reporters are doing their jobs from multiple work locations using new communication technologies such as cellular or Wi-Fi connection (Jokela et  al., 2009) to report the news from anywhere (Mabweazara, 2011). The unobservability culminates when the research concerns bloggers or citizen journalists whose nesting grounds do not include anything similar to central newsrooms or when dealing with sensitive issues such as news sources, many of

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which remain anonymous (Manning, 2001). In addition, journalistic work is becoming a multistage process that does not necessarily conclude with the first publication (Jarvis, 2009), but includes a series of productive actions such as post hoc corrections and follow-ups. Finally, under the acceleration of news cycles and growing work pressures following several rounds of downsizing, where the remaining journalists are expected to ‘do more with less’ (Van der Haak et  al., 2012; Lund 2012) they are becoming not only more stressed and less free to examine their own work in order to be reflective enough for indepth interviews, but also less open to outside inspection, let alone academic observation. This is especially true where journalists find themselves compromising professional and ethical standards, employing, for example, ‘cut and paste’ journalism, or publishing ‘viral’ stories they do not deem sufficiently newsworthy. Our sixth and final premise suggests that news reporters are still the optimal link in the news chain for studying journalistic work, though other existing and emerging links can be suitable research subjects as well. While not free of their own biases, as addressed below, reporters enjoy a considerable amount of agency – the ability to make relatively autonomous choices. Furthermore, reporters are the only actor with a perspective of the entire chain, covering the contribution of sources, editors and even audiences that supply comments, clicks, and so on.

RECONSTRUCTION INTERVIEWS AND TRADITIONAL METHODS Lacking up-to-date data regarding the most prevalent methodologies in journalism research, we conducted a brief analysis of the methods employed in two leading Journals, Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.5 According to our limited exploration, content analysis is in the lead, consistent with

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previous observations (Kamhawi and Weaver, 2003; Steiner, 2009). Despite being one of the most important methods not only for journalism products, but for the study of broader social and cultural issues (Krippendorff, 2012), content analysis is a dubious method for the study of journalistic production process, since one cannot infer processes from products. They become even more speculative due to their opacity regarding sensitive issues. In swiftly morphing and updating digital environments, the use of content analysis has been likened to chasing a moving target with a microscope (McMillan, 2000). Ethnographic methods such as observations, also commonly used in media research according to our review, are much more suitable for the exploration of journalistic production processes, yielding important insights in both classic researches (e.g. Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979; Ericson et al., 1989) and more recent works (e.g. Domingo, 2008; Anderson, 2013; Usher, 2014). However, the problem is that news environments themselves are becoming less amenable to systematic observation, as mentioned. They miss not only exchanges that take place in other locations, involving citizens, other reporters and other sources, but even exchanges that take place inside the same newsroom, flowing through less observable communication channels (see also Robinson and Metzler, in this Handbook). Interviews, together with observations, are still often used for Journalism Studies according to our brief analysis and other sources (see, for example, Steiner, 2009), and for good reason. Interviewees may not only describe events they took part in, but also contribute insights, thoughts, feelings and evaluations that cannot be obtained in any other way. However, beyond their reliance on self-reports and openness to biases, interviews become particularly problematic when the interviewees are themselves professional interviewers such as journalists, and when self-reflection does not necessarily come naturally (Schön, 1983; Zelizer, 2004).

Moreover, as Steiner (2009) points out interviews and surveys are ‘over used and (thus) decreasingly productive methods’ in the realm of journalism (2009: 124). At the same time, reconstruction interviews – a specific form of interviewing – have been productively conducted by several scholars in different countries and media settings, to explore different aspects of journalistic processes (Albæk, 2011; Anderson, 2013; Barnoy, 2013; Boesman et  al., 2014; Brolin and Johansson, 2009; Brüggemann, 2013; McManus, 1994; Reich, 2009; Shapiro et al., 2013; Van Hoof, 2015; Van Pelt, 2014). A quick review of some of these studies demonstrates the effectiveness of reconstructions in exploring various aspects of journalistic production process, and their empirical flexibility, which allows their implementation in creative combinations and adjustments. The earliest reconstruction study we are familiar with was conducted by the media economist John McManus (1994) to uncover the connections between US television station sizes and their reporters’ patterns of initiative taking. Nineteen years later the Danish media scholar Erik Albæk (2013) used his version of reconstructions to explore whether scientists or journalists are the ones that initiate interviews of scientific experts. Christopher W. Anderson (2013) used reconstructions to study the effect of technology changes on expertise, comparing journalists’ practices and news aggregators, and the Swiss-based scholar Michael Brüggemann (2013) used them to identify different sets of journalistic practices in different news cultures. In between, Lee-Wright, Phillips and Witschge (2011) used reconstruction interviews among other methods, to explore the changes journalism is undergoing and their impact on the individual journalist. Some of these studies developed their own version of reconstructions or mixed them with other methods. Anderson (2013), for example, supplemented content analysis with reconstructions in order to understand ‘what aggregators actually did separate and distinct

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from what interested parties claimed that they did’ (2013: 5), and Lee-Wright, Phillips and Witschge (2011) combined it with an elaborate assortment of methods, including questionnaires, content analysis and interviews. Brüggemann (2013), like Reich (2009), focused solely on reconstructions, but used telephone interviews rather than face-to-face ones, in order to be able to cover journalists from six European countries and 23 newspapers. Van Pelt (2014) and Barnoy (2013) used qualitative reconstructions, the former to explore the impact of PR on news in the Netherlands, and the latter to understand the logic of source selection in Israel and the preference of certain sources over others. In what follows we describe the method in brief and move on to detailing the procedures of reconstruction interviews, with the aim to highlight the rationale behind different choices and suggesting methodological and logistical tips that seem to us crucial for successful execution of a reconstruction study.

What are reconstruction interviews? Before delving into intricate considerations behind reconstruction interviews, let’s clarify briefly their methodological essence and the ways in which they differ from traditional interviews. Basically, reconstruction interviews are a method for studying the genealogy of news production, including sourcing and reporting processes, based on interviews with the journalists or other producers that authored and published them. Unlike regular interviews, reconstructions are itemanchored, that is, instead of free floating discussions of their work processes, interviewees are asked to recreate the formation of specific news items that were pre-selected, purposively or randomly, usually by the researchers. Reconstruction studies involve four basic steps: (1) sampling the producers of news (journalists, citizen journalists or others);

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(2) sampling their output (published news items, comment or other contribution); (3) carrying out the reconstruction interviews either faceto-face, or through the mediation of an audio/ visual channel, typically telephone or Skype; and (4) data analysis. Depending on their specific research design and methodological strategy, interviewers can use either open-ended questions, in which interviewees are asked to describe the ‘biography’ (Brüggemann, 2013) of a particular news output, or a series of specific questions about the presence, the absence or the frequency and intensity of specific phenomena (for example, news actors, communication technologies, news practices and constraints). Interviewees’ testimonies can be presented, recorded, and analyzed either qualitatively or quantitatively. The microaccounts of specific items and work processes of specific reporters is later accumulated and integrated into a ‘bigger picture’ that characterizes broader populations of news actors.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS Having briefly outlined the research methodology, we will here discuss in detail different methodological considerations that will help researchers who wish to employ this tool to gain an understanding of news practices. We arranged the practical lessons, tips and advice that emerge from former studies and the ones that might be relevant for future research in seven major steps that merit attention and planning:

Designing the questionnaire The structure of the questionnaire should strive to reflect as naturally as possible the process of news production and the prevailing patterns of coverage. At the same time it should be open to capture peculiar and

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surprising combinations and scenarios, which are an inevitable part of any social dynamics. With the main aim of the reconstruction method to capture the different layers of the news process, and to gain insight into the links between the sources that inspired the items, the technologies that were used to contact them, and other practices that were used to obtain the sampled items, we specify both a vertical and horizontal axis at this level. The vertical axis enables systematic documentation of each contact (e.g. the type of each source, his or her gender, level of credibility, the technology though which he or she was contacted). The horizontal axis echoes the journalistic work progress (e.g. further contacts, sources and technologies). Such division allows the interviewer to exhaust every studied aspect related to a particular source, before continuing to the next source. Moreover, this structure enables a granular multilayered analysis, testing associations on the contact level. No particular variables are especially suitable for reconstructions, as this method can deal with any datum the interviewees were conscious about during the news process and can memorize reliably during the interview. This includes any aspect of reliance on sources, technologies, practices, and any considerations, resources and constraints that were part of this process. Yet, the theoretical and methodological value of reconstruction studies culminates when implemented in a comparative and contextual manner. For example, even when the research interest is limited to the contribution of a specific news source like citizens, or PR practitioners, reconstructions will yield the richest and most conclusive and explanatory data when encompassing all types of sources. In this way, they may indicate not only the relative contribution of each source, but also yield a rich network of data, that may help expose the logic, the circumstances, the channels, the moves, the journalistic costs and benefits of reliance on this type of source or another. A similar richness can be obtained

when comparing reliance on these sources across time, news cultures or different types of reporters. The recommended structure of the questionnaire keeps both axes perpendicular, enabling not only quick and systematic data recording but also easy detection of inconsistencies of reporters’ replies, for example, when their descriptions of sources and technology do not fit. In addition, to curtail the interview duration, one can limit detailed accounts of the contact level without giving up the effort to obtain information regarding the overall number of contacts for each item. In our case, the decision to limit the detailed recording to a maximum of five contacts per item turned out to have very little effect, since 95 percent of the stories did not have more than five contacts. As source protection can be an issue for the interviewed journalists, researchers should balance carefully between asking necessary questions about each source (for example, its role in the organization, sector in society, level of credibility, past relations with the reporter, and gender) and questions that could be viewed as intrusive or compromising as it would expose the specific identity of the source, thereby infringing on reporters’ ethical commitment to source confidentiality. As specific identity of sources is not the aim of a study of this type, this can be avoided at no cost. In order to save time and enhance the control of the interviewer over the interview process, we chose instead of using an elaborate field manual, to prepare an annotated questionnaire form, in which relevant variables are defined in colored marginal notes. This also included instructions such as skipping certain questions contingent on answers to previous questions, or conditioned questions. All were marked with intuitive graphic icons rather than verbal instructions, to minimize the already existing overload of a text-rich questionnaire.

Defining the variables To enable quantitative and granular (i.e. finely detailed) accounts that relate to the

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‘nano level’ of newswork, the unit of analysis can zero in, not only to the single news item, but even to the single contact with an individual source within the item. While in variables such as type of event covered or the number of sources interviewed will always relate to the item level, the technology used to contact the source and his or her estimated level of credibility relate to the individual contact level. Any variable and category that might be interpreted ambiguously, such as ‘senior sources’ or ‘unscheduled events’, must be carefully and uniformly defined and introduced time and again to the journalists: Who exactly is a ‘senior source’ (examples should be given, including specific roles, military and police ranks, etc. from which on a source is considered senior), what makes a scheduled versus unscheduled events, and so on. For variables that are prone to self-aggrandizing bias, such as receiving a leak, we suggest asking a follow-up question to make sure that reporters’ definition of leaks fits those of the study. In several cases our follow-up questions were answered with retractions and self-corrections.

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Training the interviewers should highlight the logic behind the research, its purposes, design, and tools, as well the different variables and their exact meaning and boundaries. The following four measures help to increase the reliability of interviewees’ replies and the consistency of their interpretation and recording in the questionnaire:

Selecting and training of interviewers

1 Testing and giving feedback to each assistant at the end of the training in a pilot interview, during which he or she are asked to reconstruct two items based on a live interview with a well prepared actor, who plays the role of an interviewed journalist, supplying a detailed and complex description of the news processes behind them; 2 Overseeing each first real interview of each assistant allows to carefully monitor in real time how the assistant records interviewee replies; 3 Instructing interviewers to use the category ‘other’ and detail the characteristics of that ‘other’, whenever reporters’ replies sound ambiguous or do not naturally fit the categories in the questionnaire (recoding re-occurring entries in a new categories); 4 Instructing interviewers to, in more complex items, textually record the case in detail, and consult the principal researcher, who then tries to resolve such peculiarities and idiosyncrasies systematically as possible.

Reconstruction interviews are easily scalable using assistant interviewers. This is especially important in different types of comparative studies. However, assistants must be carefully selected, instructed, trained and inspected. According to our experience, exjournalists may fit the bill no less than ordinary research students, due to their intimate acquaintance with news processes. This limits their dependence on reporters’ accounts, being able to identify inconsistent, illogical and even dishonest replies, as well as their natural accessibility to journalists and news organizations. Ex-journalists who are also academic-friendly, careful listeners and meticulous recorders of evidence can boost the quality of data collection.

To ensure the smoothest possible transition between the complexity of social and cultural phenomena such as news processes, and the reductionist nature of a semi- structured research tool, and to minimize the shocks of such reduction, cooperation of both interviewers and interviewees is essential. Reporters become more helpful if they are acquainted with the logic of the study and its design, while interviewers can be more helpful if they are trained and instructed to be attentive and sensitive to nuances in reporters’ reconstructions and give priority to understanding the progress of the individual item and its logic rather than rushing to fill any coding sheet.

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Sampling the producers Before moving to the next step and sampling the studied content, it must be decided who exactly the studied producers of that content are going to be. Reconstructions can be easily extended to the exploration of emerging (semi) professionals in the current news environment, among whom are not only editorial players such as bloggers, citizen journalists and hyper-local journalists, but also data analysts, hackers, programmers, database administrators, information science staff, product managers, quality assurance team members, research and development staff, and digital designers (Poell and Borra, 2012). Any actor that attracts scholarly interest in his or her work processes and traceable units of output is a candidate for a reconstruction study (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2010; Lahav and Reich, 2011; Wills, 2014). Yet these may require some adaptation of the current research design that was built around news reporters, as mentioned, due to their strategic position in the news chain. Depending on the aim of the study, the sampling of news organizations and individual reporters could focus on maximizing comparability or increasing diversity, considering the implications of mixes such as elite and tabloid journalists; public service and commercial broadcasts; aggregation-based versus original reporting-based; national, local and hyper-local; institutional and citizen-based; investigative and beat reporters. In order to sample interviewees systematically, one may need to obtain or develop a full and updated list of the entire population of journalists and their specific beats of coverage (unless the studied newsrooms are based on generalists). For this, trade directories can be used, but need to be checked to see how up-to-date and comprehensive they are. This is especially pertinent in an era of layoffs, high employment turnover, and contingent labor, in which many reporters are asked to cover more than one beat. For us, despite the existence of some trade directories, it took

two months of byline monitoring until we had a more or less complete map of reporters and beats, which had overcome the natural noise of reporters on leave, or out sick, and their temporary substitutes. With a full and updated list of journalists, the next crucial decision is how many reporters to sample and from which newsbeats. If the aim is to maximize comparability, we would advise that the choice represents the existing mix of beats in the studied news culture, proportionally to their prevalence in the overall sample of reporters. Our decision was to sample ten to eleven reporters per organization from three clusters of beats: political, financial and domestic affairs each of which had shown unique patterns of journalistic work processes (Reich, 2009; 2011a). Journalists who decline to participate, or do not publish a minimal number of items during the sampling period, can be replaced by the next most equivalent reporter with the closest beat affiliation, to sustain the richness of the sample and its comparability. The following tip can rarely be found in a methodology chapter, however might be essential for a successful, large-scale reconstruction study. To minimize reporters’ refusal to collaborate with the study, which can be especially painful after an entire month of following their publications, sometimes even undermining the entire research, we asked a series of ‘middlemen’ who know the reporters personally, to contact and encourage them to take part in the study. These middlemen were personal friends, current and former bosses and colleagues, senior sources, and spokespersons. The middlemen list was prepared ahead of time during several months of ‘intelligence work’ to locate an effective ‘door opener’ for each designated interviewee. With this it is important that the reporter is contacted only after the middleman contacted him or her. At the same time this should not be before the end of the sampling month, so as to avoid potential criticism of reporters’ biased conduct, due to their prior awareness of the forthcoming study.

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Thanks to the middlemen, our refusal rate was never higher than 10 percent. However, we presume that refusals may increase to a certain degree in less close-knit societies than Israel, the country in which we conducted the research.

Sampling journalistic output After establishing which actors are included, their output needs to be sampled. We have found that it is important to balance the itemsampling period so that it is long enough to cover a rich variety of items, event types and news circumstances, but at the same time is short enough not to challenge reporters’ memory during the interviews, especially with regard to their earlier publications. Hence, interviews must be scheduled as close as possible to the end of item sampling. Our experience shows that a one-month period for sampling and another month for interviewing are optimal. During a month of publication, most reporters accumulate a few dozen items, and yet no interviewee had a problem recalling the news process in any of their items across the interview month. In principle, one can stretch the study over a longer period, sampling and interviewing several journalists at consecutive times, but for comparative research it is important to consider the effect of timing. At any rate, longer sampling periods may be needed in the study of subfields such as longform and investigative journalism, due to their lower paces of publication but here there may be better recall of the news process thanks to the relative centrality of their output. Due to our sociological interest, we chose peaceful and routine time periods that represents most journalistic content. Studies that wish to focus on special periods, such as elections or crisis, can obviously choose to do so, but will need to consider how to reach a critical mass of items and reporters, as these events tend to involve only small subsets of

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journalists. Furthermore, in case of unscheduled events, carrying out such an elaborate research design on very short notice becomes a challenge. But by means of preparation of a contingent research plan this can be somewhat mitigated. In media that works with updates of output, such as online and radio, where the same item may be published or aired time and again throughout the day in different versions, we preferred to sample the most advanced version, in order to maximize comparability and test all media at their best performance, avoiding unfair comparisons of the first ‘thinner’ version in updating media with the final ‘thicker’ (and only) version of daily media such as print news. To gauge the process of updating in itself, future research might, however, consider addressing all published versions.

Physical setting of the interview The physical setting of the interview is more than just a technical issue. Despite the obvious extra work involved relative to telephone interviews or Web surveys, we recommend, based on our experience, to conduct the interviews face-to-face. First, since face-to-face interviews enable easier reporters’ access to the sampled items that serve as the basis for the interviews. Second, since it signifies to the interviewees the seriousness of the study, maximizing their attention and securing longer interview time. In addition to the strategic avoidance of asking about the identity of sources, we recommend preserving source confidentiality by using special seating arrangements. In our case, the interviewer and the reporter sat on opposite sides of the table, the interviewer with a pile of questionnaires and the reporter with a pile of his or her sampled items. To avoid violation of source confidentiality, a small screen placed on the table separated the two, so that the interviewer could see neither the pile the reporter was holding nor

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the specific item he or she was describing at any given moment. In other words, while we chose the final mix of stories for the study, the reporter had the opportunity to choose each time a specific story from that pile and reconstruct it. The sampled items were displayed to the interviewees as printouts and transcripts of items for print, radio, and online reporters, and as clickable video clips – placed on the desktop of a laptop or a mobile phone – for television reporters. The questionnaires were filled out by the interviewer, who assigned interviewees’ oral replies to categories in a closed-end quantitative questionnaire. Appropriate timing and location of the interview are also not trivial issues, considering the growing pressures on reporters, and the highly demanding format of this study. It can help maximize interviewees’ attention, patience and minimize delays, distortions, and interruptions. To minimize the lag between publication time and interview time, interviews should be scheduled according to reporters’ preferences, yet as soon as possible, even at short notice. Obviously, larger interview staffs can be more responsive to reporters’ preferences. We recommend avoiding meeting in newsrooms, since some news outlets may be hostile to research, or demand superiors’ permission to be interviewed, and try to pressure reporters in ways that may bias results. The challenge in the design of the study is to balance between the ambition to maximize data collection (more items, a more comprehensive questionnaire) and taxing reporters’ patience: We recommend limiting the interview to 8–11 items per reporter (the lower number is used for television, due to its more complex production processes). In this format, average interviews could last, in our experience, between 60 and 75 minutes, with earlier items requiring somewhat longer interview time compared to the later ones.

Analysis During the final stage, data analysis researchers face two major challenges: how

to integrate the fragments of the raw data, many of which relate to single-contact level, into a broader meaningful picture, and how to detect theoretically-meaningful associations between so many variables? First, one must find non-distortive ways to reduce the extremely detailed raw data, most of which relate to the ‘nano level’ of the single contact, into new working variables. While in the data collection stage, contact level data was a strategy to cover the characteristics of different sources, technologies, practices and so on, during the data analysis stage the strategy shifts to ascending from the single contact level to the entire sample levels with minimal distortion – from the trees to the forest. Take for example the variable ‘gender’ (male, female, undetermined/irrelevant) in an item based on five sources – three female sources, one male and one undetermined. To reduce meaningfully the minute details, we collapsed the data into two variables: percentages of contacts involving female sources (60 percent) and those involving male sources (20 percent). The recoded variables encapsulate the overall contribution of male and female sources to the entire sample of items. In similar fashion, we calculated the share of different source types (e.g. senior, non-senior, PR) and technologies (telephone, email, WhatsApp, Facebook) within each news item, allocating the same weight to every contact. This aggregation allowed us to bring together the fragments of the journalistic practice into solid and meaningful figures that not only uncover the relative contribution of every source, technology, and practice, but also enabled identifying interrelations between these and other news phenomena. This way, we were able to explore potential associations between variables on different levels of analysis, and detect, for example, the links between reliance on PR sources and reduced cross-checking of items they are involved in or the levels of trust in sources and the frequency of their contributions. Second, the capacity of reconstruction interviews to quantify process-oriented data,

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describe relative frequencies of phenomena, and detect associations between variables opens endless options to answer research questions and test hypotheses. However, facing an assortment of dozens of variables, one must resist the temptation to slide into a statistical frenzy, searching blindly for associations between every possible combination of variables, and focus on interesting associations, based on theory and prior research, on prior knowledge and sometimes even on sheer common sense.

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reconstructions have a unique explanatory value in testing hypotheses and detecting and analyzing the association between rich networks of variables which characterize different facets of newswork. The numbers and their variance matter socially, culturally, epistemically, as well as professionally and ethically, marking, for example, levels of diversity, multi-vocality, news access and prevailing standards of responsible knowledge.

Granularity STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS The more the journalistic environment becomes fragmented, virtualized, involving a growing array of human and technological agents, the more we need methods that can trace these diversifying contributors to the published news, relative to older ‘actants’ and practices, and integrate these shattered fragments into a more or less coherent picture. This chapter showed how reconstruction interviews, which have been used in different countries to explore the sources, technologies, practices and processes behind journalistic output, can help explore this increasingly challenging news environment. To summarize their strengths first, reconstruction interviews embody five main research advantages:

The granularity of reconstruction data made it possible to establish a database of hundreds of items and a four-digit number of single contacts with particular news sources, each employing their own communication technology based on interviews with dozens of reporters. This richness offers endless options to answer research questions and test hypotheses. Obviously, since every reporter reconstructs multiple items, and each item can include multiple contacts, there is some interdependence between the studied contacts and items. However, much of this interdependence governs ordinary production and consumption of news in which limited number of journalists contribute several items across a given period.

Contextual understanding

Unlike free floating interviews, in which reporters are asked to summarize phenomena they have little chance to explore – let alone to measure their regularity, especially under their growing work pressures – in reconstruction interviews, their testimony is anchored in a specific sample of their own news items published a short time earlier, and that now lie before them.

Unlike studies that focus on a single source or a single technology, reconstruction interviews enable side-by-side exploration of the entire range of sources and technologies, including mainstream and alternative sources, the new and the old. Hence, it enables determination of the relative contribution of each technology, source and practice, contextualizing their role and minimizing both over-estimations and hypes of innovation-oriented studies as well as their conservative dismissals.

Quantifiability

Comparability

Beyond their descriptive value of mapping the frequency of news phenomena, quantitative

Reconstructions can offer a fruitful research arena to test theories and models, such as

Item-anchored testimony

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those highlighting the growing convergence or isomorphism of different media, news outlets or types of reporters, such as new institutionalism (Benson, 2004; Cook, 1998; Ryfe, 2013; Sparrow, 1999) or those conversely stressing their divergence (Altheide and Snow, 1979; Dahlgren, 1996; Deuze, 2008; Sjøvaag, 2014). Reconstructions make it possible to broaden the comparative research perspective from the traditional international arena, to a more domestic one, across lines of media type, format, news outlet, beat, race, and gender (Hanitzsch and Mellado, 2011; Kian and Hardin, 2009; Machill and Beiler, 2009; Reich, 2011b; 2014). Despite these contributions, like any other method, reconstruction studies have their own shortcomings. Reconstructions, in general, are closer to a rough and grainy old black-and-white ultrasound imaging, where experienced eyes are required to see through the noise of the scattered dots and detect schematic outlines and patterns that cannot be observed directly or in greater resolution. Their most severe shortcoming is that, as with any human agent based testimony, reconstructions are open to a series of biases such as, limited self-reflection (Schön, 1983) and limited knowledge (Milton et al., 2005). With journalists, this problem may be especially severe due to their intuitive conduct (Cohen, 1963; Gans, 1979; Golding and Elliot, 1979) and their uncritical attitudes towards their own routines (Cook, 1998; Gitlin, 1980; Tuchman, 1978). In addition, interviewing professional interviewers is a challenge in and of itself. Living so close to different facade builders, journalists can easily guess the ‘right’ answers to any question. Furthermore, interviewing any professionals about their own conduct can be subjected to different inaccuracies, biases, self-glorification, and underreporting of practices that may be perceived as reflecting poor occupational standards. Yet, for several reasons these concerns should not be over dramatized: First, since in item-anchored interviews reporters are

asked to report actions – not to evaluate performance – and thus their accounts are arguably less susceptible to biases and invalid assessments of phenomena. Second, despite the aforementioned biases, our interviewees chose to describe many cases of poor journalistic conduct, such as relying on PR, on a single source (sometimes with low levels of credibility) without any further crosschecking. Third, because measures such as employing ex-journalists as interviewers, as well as their careful training and the ergonomics of the questionnaire, can help lower the dependence on reporters’ accounts, as it enables interviewers to detect inconsistencies and descriptions that seem odd or do not make sense. Reporters that want to lie can do so despite these measures, however they have to invent on the fly and in real-time complex, multilayered, and internally consistent stories about the formation process of their items. Despite this reasoning, healthy skepticism is recommended when sensitive variables such as reliance on PR or the cross-checking of information are involved, since these may be perceived by the interviewees as reflecting on their professional and ethical image. Where such variables are concerned, we would recommend the use of control questions, trying to investigate the issue somewhat differently, using other words and in other parts of the study. Skepticism, however, does not mean that these data are pointless. Occasional over- and under-estimations could undoubtedly distort the accuracy of the data mainly on the descriptive levels, by overestimating the use of cross-checking or underestimating reliance on PR, for example. Yet even here one can still take for granted, that reliance on PR was not smaller than the reconstructed figures, while the use of cross-checking was not higher. Furthermore, the effect of such biases is generally weaker, if it exists at all, on the explanatory level, where associations between variables such as reliance on PR and source credibility can remain statistically significant. The explanatory level may

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be especially resilient to biases in a comparative context, as long as there are no reasons to suspect that one of the compared populations is more biased than the others concerning the studied matter. Finally, one should bear in mind the blind spots of the method. First, in contrast with content analysis, which is blind to news processes, reconstructions are mostly blind to the published output. Our chosen obligation to avoid matching the news process description with the studied item is a strategic choice to enable the reporter to speak freely about his or her work process, without infringement of source confidentiality. Scholars who find better mechanisms to access the process while preserving a bridge to the content may open new empirical horizons, but they will have to find creative ways to avoid infringement of source confidentiality, and consult the appropriate ethical boards, where necessary. The second blind spot concerns journalistic routines that are not item-specific or ones related to specific items that were eventually not published. This should be taken into special account in studies that focus on the contribution of less powerful actors or actors with less access, such as female, citizen and minority sources, social movements and NGOs, and even PR practitioners, whose share in the trash-bin of the reporter may be dramatically different than their share in the published content. As a final reflection, we would like to consider further application and adaption of the method. First, future scholars who consider using this method should bear in mind that the basic logic behind reconstruction interviews may apply not only to newswork, but also to any complex, repetitive and sufficiently significant social and cultural activity (such as in cultural production, research and development or legislation), in which reverse engineering of the suggested type is not only applicable, but also can expose unnoticed actors, factors, forces and sources that take part in molding them. Second, beyond the obvious sense of updating the research tools

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according to the prevailing technologies, scholars who wish to use reconstructions to explore cutting-edge issues, must keep an eye on both the social, economic, organizational, occupational, and demographic changes in the news ecosystem and the cultural and theoretical trends in Journalism Studies. During the ten years of employing reconstructions so far, we kept introducing new variables, covering online media, citizen journalism, social media as well as reporter and source gender, reporter’s evaluations of their items and time and workload pressures. Last, further studies should not only develop their own sensitivities to variables that are prone to over- and under-estimations, but also relentlessly strive to minimize them, developing their own techniques to reduce dependence on journalists’ accounts. Future studies will be able to combine reconstructions and devices such as big data sources, algorithms and different types of metrics, that may help limit the dependence on subjective accounts, or at least contextualize them and add insight to their interpretation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors thank Tali Avishay-Arbel and Yigal Godler for their most contributive remarks to this chapter. Different stages of the study were supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the Israel Foundation Trustees.

NOTES  1  For example, García-Avilés et al., 2014; Gynnild, 2013, Luengo, 2014; Tandoc, 2014; Wall, 2014.  2  For example, Bennett, 2013; Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Löffelholz and Weaver, 2008; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009; Steensen and Ahva, 2014.  3  Albæk, 2011; Anderson, 2013; Barnoy, 2013; Boesman, d’Haenens and Van Gorp, 2014; Brolin

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and Johanson, 2009; Brüggemann, 2013; McManus, 1994; Reich, 2009; Shapiro et al., 2013; Van Hoof, 2015; Van Pelt, 2014.  4  Qualitative reconstructions can be used either as a pilot study to prepare or update the research tools for quantitative reconstructions, or as a complementary study, or even as a standalone method. As a standalone it has been used so far for two qualitative MA dissertations, the first – to explore sourcing patterns among Israeli journalists (Barnoy, 2013) and the second – to study the impact of PR practitioners on the media in the Netherlands (Van Pelt, 2014). Qualitative reconstructions can be based on semi-structured questionnaires, especially in understudied fields that embody terra incognita, allowing more openness of interviewees and enabling the discovery of serendipitous data that would have remained below the surface in a quantitative study. Even quantitative research can use open-ended questions to address nuanced issues, where researchers want to preserve the personal insights, judgments, perceptions and tone of the individual journalists. Later on these can be recoded into quantitative data.  5  Lacking updated data, we tried to get some general impression on current trends in research methods, analyzing a small sample of issues in two journals, Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice. Our count covered five issues of Digital Journalism (three in 2013 and two in 2014), and four issues of Journalism Practice (from 2014). All in all, these issued included 46 empirically-based papers, 26 of which (57%) were based on content analysis, 11 (24%) on interviews 6 (13%) on observations, and 3 (6.5%) on case studies.

REFERENCES Albæk, E. (2011) The interaction between experts and journalists in news journalism, Journalism, 12(3): 335–348. Altheide, D.L. and Snow, R.P. (1979) Media Logic. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Anderson, C.W. (2013) What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age, Journalism, doi:10.1177/1464884913492460. Anderson, C.W., Bell, E., and Shirky, C. (2012) Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the present. Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Barnoy, A. (2013) Journalists and Sources: A war or a dance. Unpublished master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.

Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2013) Liquid Modernity. John Wiley & Sons. Bennett, W.L. (2013) Changing Societies, Changing Media Systems: Challenges for communication theory, research and education. Retrieved September 3, 2014: http://ccce.com. washington.edu/projects/assets/working_ papers/Bennett-Changing%20Societies ChangingMedia-CCCE-WP2013-1%20.pdf. Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A. (2012) The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5): 739–768. Benson, R. (2004) Bringing the sociology of media back in, Political Communication 21(3): 275–292. Berry, C., Kim, S.Y., and Spigel, L. (eds) (2010) Electronic Elsewheres: Media, technology, and the experience of social space (Vol. 17). University of Minnesota Press. Boesman, J., d’Haenens, L., and Van Gorp, B. (2014) Triggering the News Story: Reconstructing reporters’ newsgathering practices in the light of newspaper type, newsroom centralization, reporters’ autonomy, and specialization, Journalism Studies, (ahead of print): 1–19. Brolin, M. and Johansson, K. (2009) Journalists and their Sources: A Study on the Work with Sources in the Regional Press. MA dissertation. Södertörn University, Sweden. Brüggemann, M. (2013) Transnational trigger constellations: Reconstructing the story behind the story, Journalism, 14(3): 401–418. Cohen, B.C. (1963) The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton University Press. Cook, T.E. (1998) Governing with the News: The news media as a political institution. University of Chicago Press. Dahlgren, P. (1996) Media logic in cyberspace: Repositioning journalism and its publics, Javnost/The Public, 3(3): 59–72. Deuze, M. (2008) The changing context of news work: Liquid journalism for a monitorial citizenry, International Journal of Communication, 2: 18. Domingo, D. (2008) Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: Dealing with an uncomfortable myth, Journal of

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Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(3): 680–704. Ericson, R.V., Baranek, P.M., and Chan, J.B. (1989) Negotiating Control: A study of news sources. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. p. 92. Gans, H.J. (1979) Deciding What’s News: A study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. García-Avilés, J.A., Kaltenbrunner, A., and Meier, K. (2014) Media convergence revisited: Lessons learned on newsroom integration in Austria, Germany and Spain, Journalism Practice, (ahead-of-print): 1–12. Gitlin, T. (1980) The Whole World is Watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Golding, P. and Elliott, P. (1979) Making the News (Vol. 8). London: Longman. Gynnild, A. (2013) Journalism innovation leads to innovation journalism: The impact of computational exploration on changing mindsets, Journalism, doi:10.1177/1464884913486393. Hallin, D.C., Manoff, R.K., and Weddle, J.K. (1993) Sourcing patterns of national security reporters, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 70(4): 753–766. Hanitzsch, T. and Mellado, C. (2011) What shapes the news around the world? How journalists in eighteen countries perceive influences on their work, The International Journal of Press/Politics, doi:10.1177/1940161211407334. Hermans, L., Schaap, G., and Bardoel, J. (2014) Re-Establishing the relationship with the public: Regional journalism and citizens’ involvement in the news, Journalism Studies, (ahead of print): 1-13. Jarvis, J., (2009) Product v. Process Journalism: The Myth of Perfection v. Beta Culture. Seen on May 29, 2014 on: http://buzzmachine. com/2009/06/07/processjournalism/ Jokela, T., Väätäjä, H., and Koponen, T. (2009, September) Mobile Journalist Toolkit: a field study on producing news articles with a mobile device. In Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (pp. 45-52). ACM. Kamhawi, R. and Weaver, D. (2003) Mass communication research trends from 1980 to

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1999, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 80(1): 7–27. Karlsson, M. (2010) Rituals of transparency: Evaluating online news outlets’ uses of transparency rituals in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden, Journalism Studies, 11(4): 535–545. Kian, E.M. and Hardin, M. (2009) Framing of sport coverage based on the sex of sports writers: Female journalists counter the traditional gendering of media coverage, International Journal of Sport Communication, 2(2): 185–204. Kovach, B. and Rosenstiel, T. (2010) Blur: How to know what’s true in the age of information overload. Bloomsbury Publishing. Krippendorff, K. (2012) Content Analysis: An introduction to its methodology. 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lahav, H. and Reich, Z. (2011) Authors and poets write the news: A case study of a radical journalistic experiment, Journalism Studies, 12(5): 624–641. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network-theory, by Bruno Latour, Foreword by Bruno Latour. Oxford University Press, Sep 2005. pp. 316. Lee-Wright, P., Phillips, A., and Witschge, T. (2011) Changing Journalism. Routledge. Löffelholz, M. and Weaver, D.H. (eds) (2008) Global Journalism Research: Theories, methods, findings, future. Blackwell. Lombard, M., Snyder-Duch, J., and Bracken, C.C. (2002) Content analysis in mass communication: Assessment and reporting of intercoder reliability, Human Communication Research, 28(4), 587–604. Luengo, M. (2014) Constructing the crisis of journalism: Towards a cultural understanding of the economic collapse of newspapers during the digital revolution, Journalism Studies, (ahead of print): 1–10. Lund, M.K. (2012) More news for less: How the professional values of 24/7 journalism reshaped Norway’s TV2 newsroom, Journalism Practice, 6(2): 201–216. Mabweazara, H.M. (2011) Between the newsroom and the pub: The mobile phone in the dynamics of everyday mainstream journalism practice in Zimbabwe, Journalism, 12(6): 692–707.

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Machill, M. and Beiler, M. (2009) The importance of the Internet for journalistic research: A multi-method study of the research performed by journalists working for daily newspaper, radio, television and online, Journalism Studies, 10(2): 178–203. Manning, P. (2001) News and News Sources: A critical introduction. London: Sage. McManus, J.H. (1994) Market Driven Journalism: Let citizen beware? Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McMillan, S.J. (2000) The microscope and the moving target: The challenge of applying content analysis to the World Wide Web, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 77(1),: 80–98. Milton, J., McCartney, M., Duggan, C., Evans, C., Collins, M., McCarthy, L., and Larkin, E. (2005) Beauty in the eye of the beholder? How high security hospital psychopathicallydisordered patients rate their own interpersonal behavior, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 16(3): 552–565. Mitchelstein, E., and Boczkowski, P.J. (2009) Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production, Journalism, 10(5), 562–586. Poell, T. and Borra, E. (2012) Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: The social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests, Journalism, 13(6): 695–713. Reich, Z. (2005) New technologies, old practices: The conservative revolution in communication between reporters and news sources in the Israeli press, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 82(3): 552–570. Reich, Z. (2008). How citizens create news stories: The ‘news access’ problem reversed, Journalism Studies, 9(5): 739–758. Reich, Z. (2009) Sourcing the News: Key issues in journalism—an innovative study of the Israeli press. New York: Hampton Press. Reich, Z. (2010) Measuring the impact of PR on published news in increasingly fragmented news environments: A multifaceted approach, Journalism Studies, 11(6): 799–816. Reich, Z. (2011a) Comparing reporters’ work across print, Rradio, and online: Converged origination, diverged packaging, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 88(2): 285–300.

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Communication Association (ICA), Puerto Rico, May. Van Pelt, O. (2014) The Dance Between Journalism and PR. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Holland. Wall, M. (2014) Change the space, change the practice? Re-imagining journalism education with the pop-up Newsroom, Journalism Practice, (ahead of print): 1–15. Wills, A. (2014) The New York Times Innovation Report. New York Times Company, March 24. Zelizer, B. (2004) Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the academy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

33 Sampling Liquid Journalism Anders Olof Larsson, Helle Sjøvaag, Michael Karlsson, Eirik Stavelin, and Hallvard Moe

INTRODUCTION The move to a variety of online environments has affected the ways in which journalism is produced, distributed, and consumed. Such transformations have had clear effects on journalism research. Specifically, these developments into what is sometimes labeled ‘liquid journalism’ have had repercussions for how scholars are able to access, accumulate, and analyze the online presences of, and traces made by, journalists and those citizens who consume their products. ‘Liquid journalism’ (Deuze, 2008; Karlsson, 2012) can generally be understood as journalism in a digital environment with no set or definitive borders. Liquidity, then, signals interconnectedness between different hubs and nodes, versionality in news stories and their positioning, multimodal storytelling, and a blurring of boundaries between journalists and their audience. Liquid digital journalism can both be produced in a centralized space, such as a website, or in a wider

news ecology (Anderson, 2010) where different actors operate in decentralized spaces. Regardless of the space in which such journalism is produced, it is in essence different from traditional journalism which is much more discrete, static and produced by fewer institutions. Thus, the transformations within journalistic practices means the study object has become harder to capture and analyze. Such a destabilization of the empirical material undoubtedly complicates several tasks performed by researchers. With the difficulty of neatly defining and capturing ‘liquid journalism,’ one specific research task that has become more complicated is that of sampling. Defined by Neuendorf as ‘the process of selecting a subset of units for the study from the larger population’ (2002: 83), the aim is often to undertake sampling in such as way that generalizability can be achieved (Krippendorff, 2004: 112). In studying linear media, the universe of available texts is too large to be examined as a whole, and must be limited to a manageable selection.

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This selection needs to be targeted to enable research questions to be adequately answered (2004: 111–13). Traditionally, sampling has been a distinct part of the research process, easy to distinguish from the steps that followed. After sampling, the researcher would go about coding based on the variables, to prepare for the actual analysis. As a consequence, once the sample had been chosen and collected, possibilities for taking a different path later in the research process were limited. When studying liquid journalism, however, the processes related to sampling not only gets more difficult, but also to some extent has to be undertaken in tandem with other steps in the research. The upside is a potential for research to pose new questions. Therefore, liquid journalism presents us with challenges as well as opportunities, and requires us to rethink sampling. This chapter discusses the key challenges, illustrates how they might be tackled, and suggests how journalism research can profit from the opportunities. The chapter is organized in accordance with the characteristics of what can be perceived as two different phases of production and use of online news: a centralized and a decentralized phase. Analytical tools rather than fixed historical periods, these two phases describe a key aspect of online news, which also has great repercussions for the research approach. In the centralized phase, the content to be studied is mainly published, presented and consumed in a universal way on one institutional website. In the decentralized phase, content to a larger extent gets published and republished, and presented and consumed in diverse ways via a plethora of platform and services. To some extent, the former phase coincides with what used to be called Web 1.0, while the latter phase is seen as related to the largely decentralized notions often associated with what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0 (see Allen, 2013 for more on supposed phases of web development). The notion of such a ‘Web 2.0’ is often linked to O’Reilly’s (2005) suggestion that

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online services be more inclusive of or open to reader contributions, and that websites – journalistic or not – should allow for more interaction between users, be they journalists or readers. Social networking services like Facebook and so-called microblogging services like Twitter arguably contribute in amplifying this development. While inclusions of reader output was already a fixture of journalistic practice, debate and scholarship before this purported second phase of the internet (see, for example, Deuze et al., 2007; Larsson, 2012), the changing nature of the underlying technical platforms on which such participation supposedly takes place need to be taken into account when problematizing procedures regarding sampling. With the specific theme of the chapter at hand, the practical circumstances of data sampling and collecting from a newspaper website differ fundamentally from those associated with performing similar operations in relation to social media services, such as gathering data on Twitter conversations regarding news items. This chapter, then, seeks to uncover and discuss some of those circumstances. The centralized and decentralized phases are employed heuristically, to bring attention to a trend in digital journalism, away from the more uniform, consolidated context, to a more amorphous and diversified one. The types of digital services associated with each phase differ from a technical point of view, and these differences come into play when researchers want to sample from the website of a news organization, or indeed the Facebook page or Twitter feed of that same hypothetical media outlet. By providing historical context on how digital journalism researchers have previously approached issues of sampling from online contexts, the chapter problematizes established methods and ideals for data collection – often developed for offline media – and discusses their applicability in various online settings. Moreover, we discuss how issues with sampling and collecting affects the research questions we can pose to digital journalism.

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In what follows, we first elaborate on the concept of liquid journalism and present three core challenges with sampling related to capturing, selecting and comparing. As an illustration of these challenges and a handson discussion of how they can be met when conducting digital journalism research, in the subsequent sections we look at the potential and pitfalls of computer-assistance in different steps of the research process. We look at the data capturing, illustrated with social media, and then discuss the challenge of selecting what to study, or how to design variables that can be operationalized for analysis, focusing on computer coding, underlining the ways in which the computerized process of sampling digital environments now permeate new parts of the research process. This discussion leads us to suggest how computer coding offers possibilities for journalism research to move towards big data analysis.

LIQUID JOURNALISM AND THE CHALLENGES TO SAMPLING Scholars have used many different nomenclatures in attempts to describe and do justice to the specific characteristics of online media and its journalism(s). One of the most fruitful efforts, we argue, is the term ‘liquid journalism’ coined by Deuze (2008) adapted from Zygmunt Bauman’s social theory. Liquid journalism is, in essence, journalism in a digital environment with no set or definitive borders. This refers to, for instance, interactions between users and producers, continuous edits of content and reshuffling of news items, addition or deletion of photos and multimedia and utilizing hyperlinks to expand stories far beyond the boundaries of one specific news outlet or media company (Deuze, 2008; Karlsson, 2012; Matheson, 2004). Liquid journalism has a contour that can be sensed and experienced but, as expanded below, tends to slip through one’s fingers if one tries to pin it down.

The liquidity of online media in general and journalism in particular does not only imply changes in the production, content, and consumption of news but also, as is our focus here, methodological implications with regards to sampling. Indeed, liquid journalism is difficult to adequately capture, store, and analyze with conventional methodological setups. With this in mind, Mitchelstein and Boczkowski have claimed that developments in online journalism – and research on the subject – display a tension between tradition and change (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009: 575). This description also applies to quantitative content analysis, specifically when it comes to the challenges of transforming methods that are usually used to measure linear media formats onto measurements of content on web publications (Kautsky and Widholm, 2008; Keith, et al. 2010; McMillan, 2001; Quandt, 2008; Sjøvaag and Stavelin, 2012; Weare and Lin, 2000: 282). Essentially, there are two different ontologies of how content is constituted depending on whether the base is analogue or digital. Following this, methods and approaches suitable for sampling digital media have to be developed taking into account challenges related to the specifics of digital media. In the following, we will outline three key challenges in the digital journalism sampling process: (1) capturing the data, or archiving the sample, that is, determining the beginning and end of a news piece, (2) selecting the sample, and (3) comparing samples over time/space and offline/online. While the selection of data usually comes first in analogue content analysis, this is not necessarily the case in analyses of digital media. This is due to the liquid and unpredictable nature of digital journalism. With digital data, there is not really a sample to select from (see below) unless one has captured it.

Capturing the data A first key problem of capturing and archiving the data is the underlying assumptions of

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traditional content analysis methods, as it builds on the logic of analogue media (see, for example, McMillan, 2001). This is reflected by expectations that content is, among other things, controllable, delimited, preserved, and non-reactive. Analogue media formats also have a static context, are unaffected by being subjected to analysis, deliver identical messages to all readers, are mostly text-based, and produced almost exclusively by media workers (Berelson, 1971; Krippendorff, 2013; Riffe et  al., 1998). The application of the method for content analysis has traditionally been made possible due to the fact that the analogue media industry serves the content analyst with cut and sliced content on a silver plate through a predictable and recurring publishing rhythm that churns out delimited pieces of information. Analogue media deliver content, to make reference to the liquidity concept, as drops of water. Digital media work with a different logic, which can best be – as described above – labeled liquid. In contrast to separate text items presented linearly, liquid journalism is, as Karlsson (2012: 388) has summarized, ‘an erratic, continuous, participatory, multi-modal and interconnected process that is producing content according to journalistic principles’. In view of this, questions arise about what really constitutes an item, and what the relationship between these ephemeral items really is (Schneider and Foot, 2004; Brügger 2009). Compared to the analogue data collection, liquid journalism is a stream of water where one has to try to create and distinguish the drops oneself. Because online journalism is liquid – it stretches in time and space – it is difficult to pin down when a news article is finished. Online news stories come with a time of publication, but often stories are updated/edited/erased later in the day, or even days after first publication. When sampling such data, the researcher must for instance decide if the first publication timestamp represents the most appropriate version, or if the last updated and amended version is the ­correct one.

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This has consequences for the consistency of the sample, for instance if a story is published on the last day of June and updated on the first day of July – which month does it belong in? More issues like this arise when the story contains links to other websites or similar stories, and when the page contains reader comments and discussions. Where does the story end exactly? For instance, regarding capturing content the researcher has to apply (and possibly invent) tools, techniques and routines that allow the researcher (tool) to be present at the time of publishing and for cutting the ephemeral web into smaller, yet meaningful, pieces. Likewise, these pieces have to be stored over time in a way that does justice to the original publishing context; something that is very difficult, not to say impossible (Brügger, 2009). In an analogue medium such as newspapers, the content is captured and stored in its very mode of distribution, but not so anymore. In addition, the content in journalistic items, the relations between items, as well as an item’s positioning on the website (what attention it receives) potentially changes over time. The first key challenge with sampling, then, relates to the constantly changing character, the amorphous and ephemeral nature of liquid journalism.

Selecting the data The second challenge, once the data has been captured, is to select a subset to study. Weare and Lin noted in 2000 how the size and chaotic structure of the internet ‘complicate efforts to select representative samples of messages for analysis’ (2000: 273). To them, the advantage of doing online news research includes the ability to enlarge and expand samples – and thereby their representativeness. But such advantages undoubtedly also carry with them a series of complications. The clearly defined boundaries of television and newspaper messages represent standardized limits and borders around items of

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information, which also entail an established understanding of their syntax. ‘In contrast, the nonlinear nature of the WWW obscures the boundaries and environment of messages and involves more complex semantics’ (2000: 280). The challenge that arises from this realization primarily concerns the unit of analysis. To simply transfer content analysis schemes from print newspapers to the web is problematic, say Weare and Lin, because ‘Researchers who attempt to define similar logical substructures of Web pages are hindered by our rudimentary understanding of the syntactical and semantic structure of Web pages’ (2000: 282). Because categorization schemes carry with them theories about what characterizes the messages we are looking at, the act of making adequate categorization schemes for online media requires a clear understanding of the syntax, semantics and logics of the media we are studying – the various elements that texts consist of, the rules that govern how elements are presented, and how these elements together make a whole (2000: 284–6). To identify and separate an article from the menus and advertisements surrounding it is a matter of identifying the syntax. To identify for extraction a ‘facts-box’ as a sidebar element by its header ‘Facts’ is a matter of semantics. To identify links as elements that can be followed beyond the current page, or to identify the first few lines of an article as containing the most important information, are examples of identifying the internal media logic. Being able to map these elements according to their function on the page is essential in constructing rigid categories designed to capture and describe content features. Hence, we have to define what we are looking at before we can begin to capture it. The digital content analyst must, as pointed out above, make decisions about where an item begins and ends when sampling data in a digital environment. While the liquidity of web-based journalism creates challenges in capturing and selecting the data for analysis,

this procedure is hardly something that starts from thin air. We already know to some extent what we are looking at, and what we are looking for. News is still a recognizable thing on the web. Because studies looking at the formal attributes of online news tend to operationalize traditional content analysis methods, aiming for a broad description of the medium in question, (see, for example, Barnhurst, 2010; Bozckowski and de Santos, 2007; Chadwick, 2011; Karlsson and Strömbäck, 2010; Song, 2007; Van der Wurff, 2008), methods for online news analysis necessarily builds on the knowledge we have about analogue media – not least because of the enduring institutional nature of journalism (Barnhurst, 2010). We know that journalistic texts should contain answers to the five W’s – who, what, where, when and why. We know they contain sources, that they usually came with pictures and a byline, that the information contained in the text was more often than not produced within a newsroom or a news agency. Some of these features might still apply, though as many authors in this Handbook contend, even these core features are challenged. What we do know for sure, is that analogue news texts did not contain links, videos streams or interactive elements and were generally not stretched over different technical, commercial and institutional platforms. So, an analysis aiming to capture both the tradition and change in online journalism needs to adjust the methodological tools.

Comparing samples over time/ space and offline/online The third challenge, conducting sampling from a single news site online, is already problematic in terms of capturing and selecting the data, as we have seen. Further problems arise in comparative analyses, where the aim is to sample from more than one journalistic outlet or media. Online analyses are often comparative – across markets,

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across platforms, across publications or across time. Such comparisons pose particular problems when it comes to sampling. Not only because the populations from which samples are drawn can be different in a number of respects, but also due to the problem of inferring analysis from theoretically formed questions that aim to measure news that can essentially be produced within very different contexts. This is true also for studies that investigate the use of web specific features in journalism (see, for example, Karlsson, 2011; Quandt, 2008; Steensen, 2010; Van der Wurff and Lauf, 2005). Comparing online and offline journalistic output presents particular challenges in defining the borders of the unit of analysis. These borders are finite when published in linear media, yet they are potentially infinite when published online, as discussed above in relation to how online texts stretch in time and space. As we will argue later in this chapter, computational methods designed to alleviate the arduous process of manual coding cannot escape these problems of sampling, as these approaches create new questions of their own, particularly regarding missing entities in sampling processes. Also, the web creates problems in operationalizing the research, particularly in terms of variable designs that aim to compare between different outlets using computational methods. Digital news platforms (and the editing tools that journalists use) provide different approaches to how links, pictures and contextual features (such as sidebars and context boxes) are included in reports. In order to capture these features in a way that make them comparable, researchers need the proper knowledge about how manual or technical such inclusions are. If features such as links and sidebars have to be manually included in the story, this presents a different picture of the journalistic effort that goes into producing the website than if these features are automatically rendered by the publication tool. Hence, capturing specific digital journalism features, we need to know how ‘deep’ the story goes, how this reflects

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the journalistic efforts involved, and the many different features that can be included in a story. Together, the issues pointed out here raise concerns about how sampling will be carried out in practice, especially since standards and protocols have yet to be developed for the online context, and traditional content analysis method give limited guidance. Consequently, there is need to develop new modes of analysis that, ultimately, will provide guidance on how to relate to and take stock of liquid journalism. We argue that the utilization of computer-assisted modes of data collection and coding promises a path forward. However, the path has several pitfalls that we need to be aware of. Computerassistance is no easy cure for research into liquid journalism. Importantly, though, making use of these opportunities also compel us to rethink the process of sampling. In what follows, we go deeper into possibilities and pitfalls of computer-assisted steps in the research process. First, we look at the data capturing, illustrated with the decentralized arenas of journalism: social media. On that basis, we discuss the challenge of selecting what to study, or how to design variables, focusing on computer coding, and the ways in which it compels us to rethink sampling as the steps traditionally connected with sampling now re-occurs in different forms throughout the research process.

CAPTURING SOCIAL MEDIA DATA As previously discussed, practices of sampling are employed so as to select a representative subset from a larger population – supposedly difficult or impossible to study. Indeed, while approaches to sampling like random, systematic, cluster, snowball or convenience-based varieties are well ­ rehearsed within journalism research, digital technology developments have suggested that such necessities of large-scale projects

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are about to be rendered obsolete (see, for example, Lewis et  al., 2013). Such grand claims are often made under the auspices of ‘Big Data’ (see the chapter by Bruns, in this Handbook) – that the sheer volume of data available will enable researchers to analyze all instances of their object of study, and render all forms of sampling unnecessary. The realities of such promises, and the methodological issues that follow from them, can be illustrated by focusing on social media, using examples from applied research. While the opportunities and challenges with ­computer-assisted data collection is shared also by studies of more centralized forms of journalism, this subsection uses the illustration of social media, arguably a decentralized arena for journalism where challenges regarding sampling appear as quite pronounced. In other words, since sampling procedures when it comes to social media differ from those employed when studying journalistic content through websites, we need to adress these specific differences and, consequently, challenges. Based on what we feel are the most crucial issues pertaining to these developments, we focus on three main topics: (1) the quality of data as gathered from free sources; (2) the commercialization of data access and finally; and (3) the adaptiveness of data and to research practices.

Data quality As with many other online platforms, accessing the application programming interface (API) is one of the more common ways to collect data also from Twitter. Such access can allow for data gathering in a structured and automated manner, letting the researcher at least potentially procure a full sample rather than having to deal with the intricacies of sampling as discussed above. Of course, this all depends on the size of the population of social media content – tweets, Facebook posts, and so on – that one wishes to study. If the theme of the research undertaken is

expected to yield a considerable amount of such traffic, the free versions of APIs often made available by each respective platform might not be suitable. Drawing examples from studies on Twitter, these issues of access to social media data are sometimes clarified by employing metaphors of ‘gardenhose’ and ‘firehose’ imagery so as to suggest the limitations associated with the first type, and the possibilities associated with the second (see also Bruns, in this Handbook). As the metaphor suggests, the former would provide limited access to the flow of data. The precise boundaries of this type of access has been difficult to ascertain in a detailed, empirical manner. It has, however, been suggested that the ‘gardenhose’ provides about one percent of the total amount of tweets at any specified juncture (see, for example, Morstatter et al., 2013). As such, utilizing ‘gardenhose’ access to crawl for all Twitter data will not provide solid results. Instead, successful employment of this limited form of access does require specified search terms dealing with more restricted themes, utilizing thematic keywords (known as hashtags) or specific Twitter user handles as delimiters for search queries (see, for example, Bruns and Stieglitz, 2012). Such studies typically deal with specific events, such as election campaigns (Moe and Larsson, 2012), where a suitable thematic hashtag (or several hashtags, for that matter) has emanated from popular use and can thus be employed as a selector by the researcher. In the context of journalism, Larsson (2013) employed yourTwapperKeeper (see, for example, Bruns and Stieglitz, 2012) in order to track tweets hashtagged as relevant for the first season of the current events talk show Hübinette, which aired on Swedish television during the fall of 2011. Before the show’s premiere in September of that year, staff of the show had established a Twitter presence, encouraging viewers to utilize the #hubinette hashtag in order to discuss the show and the topics discussed. Data collection was thus

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based on this hashtag, which was archived during the entire first season – eight shows aired during two months. The approach was based on a judgment call with regards to the possibilities of the gardenhose API in relation to the amount of traffic expected on the hashtag. While the only way to be completely sure that the final data set could be said to constitute the full population – that is, all tweets being sent – would be to compare this to data procured from a commercial provider, this option was not available at the time of the study due to financial constraints. But keeping the previously mentioned Morstatter’s one percent suggestion in mind, the collected data must be considered as diminutive in the context of the total amount of traffic on Twitter (see also Bruns and Burgess, 2012). The suitability or even success of such an approach very much has to do with the expected scope of activity pertaining to the employed delimiter. As such, using ‘gardenhose’ access to collect data based on what could be expected to be very broad or popular search terms is not recommendable (see, for example, Driscoll and Walker, 2014). It follows that if the more extensive ‘firehose’ access cannot be gained, researchers need to consider their points of entry and, subsequently, search terms acknowledging the implications of the limited scope of the data. In relation to this, Lewis et al. (2013) point out that ignoring these and other limitations might lead to missing ‘chunks’ of data. One way to counter this is to work with several sources for data collection – in the case of Twitter, more than one installed copy of whatever software service is employed for data collection, for instance yourTwapperKeeper (see, for example, Bruns, 2011). Thus, the data is collected from multiple locations, and redundancy is intentionally created to counteract and expose potential missing chunks of data from any of the data collections. These services would then need to be focused on a limited set of search queries – or on a larger set, where activity is not expected to be too extensive. In the post-collection phase, the

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data gathered from each installation can be compared and possibly combined in order to provide a supposedly larger, more comprehensive data set. While such efforts can and should be made, Bruns and Stieglitz (2012) point out that ‘any sufficiently complex system of communication will suffer from a certain level of message loss’ (2012: 179). As such, the key issue here is to be aware of the limitations that the tools employed for data collection carry with them, and to shape one’s conclusion accordingly.

The commercialization of data access Our second topic concerns the costs of data collection. While free-of-charge, opensource solutions for data collection like those discussed above may go a long way in securing suitable samples for comparably smaller or midsize research projects, other possibilities cater to larger sampling goals – though at a cost. As said above, as with many other online platforms, accessing the API is one of the more common ways to gather data from Twitter. However, as Twitter recently put in place considerable restrictions regarding API access (Burgess and Bruns, 2012), this is often considered a first of coming steps to further decrease and monetize access to free data. Indeed, while efforts have been taken on behalf of Twitter to secure free data access to a selection of researchers (Gnip, 2014), such initiatives are likely to be dwarfed by those more commercially sustainable by the companies themselves. As Twitter is partnering with third-party services to handle the day-to-day sales of data, financial issues with regards to data access will most likely become even more prominent for researchers and other not-for-profit actors aiming to access the data than it is today. This can be exemplified by the different types of access allowed to the Twitter APIs. While the socalled ‘firehose’ API is available, featuring a full account of all tweets sent at any

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particular moment, access to it is offered at price levels beyond the reach of most academics (see, for example, http://gnip.com/). As such, a large share of researchers make do with what the ‘gardenhose’ type of access – which again provides free, but comparably limited access to tweets (see, for example, Lewis et al., 2013). The developments outlined here match the observation that ‘people’s online data is often commercially valuable’ (Cantijoch et al., 2014: 204) – but what is relevant here is that commercial value has repercussions for academic research. Arguably, the current delimitations of services are troubling for researchers who, often with limited funding, seek to gauge online practices – journalistic or not – through services like these. As such, there is a clear risk that the increased commercialization of data access will contribute to a further widening of the already existing chasms between ‘data-rich’ and ‘data-poor’ scholars.

The adaptiveness of data Finally, the third topic concerns how, while commercial actors might be able to provide ample or even complete data sets for broader, more wide-reaching search queries, the ways in which such data are provided are often not conducive to the needs and analytical preferences of the research community. While these data, or perhaps rather the way they are presented, can provide valuable insights into the overarching nature of the item or event under study, researchers usually need to access the original data in its raw, unformatted mode. A commercial client might have ‘ready-made’ analyses as their main goal, which can be suitable for a number of needs. More often than not, however, such finished analyses are arguably not the objective of scholarly research. As such, even if researchers would be so fortunate to gain the monetary resources necessary to access the ‘firehose’ stream of data, the way that such

data is delivered and presented is often not conducive to research purposes. It is therefore crucial to make sure that the data to be bought meet the expectancies of the research team. For example, the default data delivery format for the aforementioned Gnip service is set as JSON, which is suitable for database purposes, but which does not necessarily import easily into the various computer programs that researchers often use to perform their analyses. Thus, not only must we be sure as to what data we are ordering – we also need to make very specific demands in what format these data are to be delivered. In sum, while computer assistance and access at first sight promises to solve core challenges with capturing a sample of liquid journalism, there are several pitfalls that demand our attention, illustrated here with liquid journalism in decentralized arenas as an example. If we are able to maneuver around such problems, computer-assisted data collection does, however, provide a way to start to systematically study liquid journalism. Even so, once the data has been collected, as we have argued above, the challenge remains of selecting what to study, or how to design variables. This brings us to look closer at computer assistance in coding.

VARIABLE DESIGN AND COMPUTER CODING Once the data is captured and a sample is selected, the data needs to be sorted according to a set of criteria that can structure the data for analysis. If we are interested in finding out how much politics is in the news, how much sports coverage a site contains, the variety of sources in the stories, or if the story is a national or foreign story, we need to define rules that enable coders to tag each story with predefined values describing the content. With computational methods available to conduct automatic analysis of larger sets of digital journalism texts, these rules need to be

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sufficiently rigid for a computer to understand them (Zamith and Lewis, 2015). Unlike the human coder, a computer cannot ‘interpret’ based on rules, it can only categorize something as either/or, and only the things it has been told to find. As such, when establishing variables for computer coding, we need to know what we are looking for. In this section, we discuss how principles for designing such variables are accounted for in (1) defining the unit of analysis, (2) designing variables, and (3) creating rules for computer coding.

The unit of analysis First, when using machine coding, the level of detail in the unit of analysis is up to the researcher to define. In analyzing analogue media and centralized digital media, units are often predefined as ‘the story’ – one journalistic text – from top to bottom on a page or from beginning to end in a newscast, easily distinguishable for the human coder. But with computational aid, we need to set clear boundaries for where the ‘top’ of the page starts and what signifies the ‘end’ of the text. Hence, computational research designs need to account for the particular features of the web and its underlying structure – the database – as a dominant contemporary form of cultural expression (Manovich, 2001: 220). A clear set of analysis unit needs to be defined in order to structure the collected units as database record(s). Moreover, distinct limits need to be constructed to ‘freeze the flow’ (Karlsson and Strömbäck, 2010) – or capture the data – at a purposeful point in time, so that the liquid, changeable web is stored in finite units. The changeable web needs to be pinned down to ensure that results do not inherit this liquid property. As we will suggest below, some of these issues can be tackled with computer-assisted methods. Moving through the challenge of designing variables, this section concludes by suggesting possible paths for moving sampling procedures into the age of big data.

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Designing variables Second, when a single unit of study is defined, further depth is added by designing variables within the units. A variable is a definable and measurable concept that holds different values for different individual cases or units (Neuendorf, 2002: 95). Variable design, says Robert P. Weber, must be based on what you want to achieve from the analysis (Weber 1990). In order to separate the content variations present in the sample, coders – both human and computer – need specific rules on how to separate values – both to allow units to exhibit variation, and for findings to be informative. The values in a variable must provide an exhaustive account of all units, that is, they need to be able to account for any possible variation. This is problematic because text affords multiple interpretations, and as samples sizes grow, and our sample includes ‘liquid’ elements, it is ever harder to predict and account for all cases. Multiple interpretations is problematic when using human subjects as coders, it is why we perform intercoder reliability tests. When using computational tools to structure the data, problems can arise when we later aim to seek computational help in sorting the sample according to these values, as we aim to ask of a computer one interpretation where there might be several. Interpretation and understanding is a tall order for a machine, and we cannot expect results better than we can of human coders. Separating local news from non-local news, to take one example, would warrant rules as to where to draw the line between different local affiliations. It may be based on geographic boundaries (where the story takes place), or it could be thematically determined (what the story is about). While a human coder could easily distinguish between the two, a computer would struggle to separate a place of reference in the text (for instance that Barack Obama is from the United States) from the location of the actual event (that he is in Oslo to

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receive the Nobel Peace Prize). Furthermore, because having too many variables also limits the extent to which viable conclusions can be drawn, variable designs need to balance detail with manageability. While we might be able to draw thousands of names (of persons and organizations, for instance) from a large corpus of news texts, separating the relevant from the irrelevant could be problematic, as the computer does not know which items are significant and which are not. Coding could also leave items so scattered across the value range that the analysis could warrant merging values. Designing variables therefore is an important element in planning and extracting data, compelling the researcher to define the units of analysis that are possible to capture when studying digital, or liquid, journalism.

Computer coding Third, rules that determine interpretations of content are necessary also for computer coding, however this does not necessarily alleviate problems with achieving appropriate levels of confidence in the coding scheme, particularly for latent variables. In an inductive research design (without predefined values of a variable), for example in a supervised machine learning scheme such as probabilistic classifiers, training data (examples) needs to be provided to ‘teach’ a computer to code. This training data needs to be manually picked, and the model thus inherits the difficulties from manual coding and sampling. Examples of this include sentiment analysis and language detection. In sentiment analysis a typical approach consists of labeling a set of text manually, with labels such as positive, neutral or negative and using this as training data for an algorithm. The algorithms find the traits in the labeled data that best describe that category, and can later be used to label new data with unknown positive/neutral/ negative status. The quality of the manually labeled data lets the algorithm inherit the understanding of the coder coding the

training data (see, for example, Balahur et al., 2014). In a deductive research design (with predefined values of a variable), for example, an unsupervised machine learning scheme for textual analysis such as clustering or topic modeling, the outcome strongly depends on the rules set up to classify/divide the data. Cultural knowledge is exchanged for formal rules and (potentially arbitrary or convenient) threshold values. The ‘right’ rules and thresholds can only be found by evaluating the results themselves, compared to human judgment. Hence, coding strongly depends on tacit knowledge and cultural understanding that allows us to ‘read between the lines’, and computers do not yet have this pronouncedly human skill. An example of this lack of human reading skills can be seen in the results of most cluster analysis of textual data. A very common trait is that at least one cluster (or topic in topic modeling) is entirely nonsensical as a topic in the tradition of news analysis, with keywords or terms that are commonly used words that do not reveal any connection to a traditional category – such as ‘today’, ‘win’, or ‘his’. The computer has detected them as similar based on some threshold, but they are only sufficiently different – contextually far enough – from the other categories to be kept out of the ‘bags’ of more coherent topics, and not necessarily internally consistent. In computer-assisted coding, hard-to-categorize items can create categories of noise where human tacit knowledge would easily have assigned the proper value, or discarded the item as meaningless to larger terms. Human coders must ‘be capable of understanding [the] rules and applying them consistently throughout an analysis’ (Krippendorff, 2004: 127), and for units coded by humans this is still imperative in order to achieve reliable results. For both human and computer coding, the process is conceptually the same: each unit in the sample is examined, measured, categorized, and assessed according to the variables prepared for analysis. Text

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goes in, information about the text comes out. Here, the new and perhaps most exciting coding style for digital content, is computer coding – where we let software do the assessments. However, for computer-coded variables, new issues arise. Latent variables, such as topical categories describing news, can be assigned through machine learning and raises questions of levels of precision/recall (Baeza-Yates, 2009: 75) (how accurate the assessment needs to be) and intercoder reliability relative to human coders (how close to a human coder do we expect the machine to perform?). It also demands more explicit definitions or exemplifications of just what is a category: human coders hold a rough idea of what the category ‘economy’ pertains to, even without a definition, while the computer needs a strict definition – typically in the form of example texts. Both practical and philosophical work regarding efforts to computerize the content analysis in regard to latent variables is still largely lacking and unexplored in Journalism Studies. For manifest variables, that is values that typically do not require human judgment (such as dates, time of publication, number of links), the rules that guide the process of assigning value to variable is expressed as extractors – snippets of code that target each variable and probes for values to assign. This is achieved by exploiting the syntactic structure of the web, and is labeled syntactic web scraping. Web scraping allows us to plainly extract some variables – that come unattached with surplus information – and count others (links, videos, audio-players, images, words, #hashtags, @mentions, and so on) or check for existence or absence (Facebook-share button, comment field, etc). The end state of the process, is collections of rows (for units) and columns (for variables) in a database in accordance with traditional structures of data (Krippendorff, 2004: 143, e.g. Fig 7.2). This scraping approach dependent on the code that centralizes a website – its syntactic architecture – that creates a unified branded

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site that is distinguishable from other sites. Even if the data is collected through an API, the act of extracting the variables from the units in the sample (i.e. a news website) requires rules and knowledge about the domain and content. By measuring a snapshot in time by a properly trained or tuned (for latent variables) and targeted (for manifest variables) set of rules in software code, we can ‘freeze the flow’ and properly analyze liquid media (see Karlsson and Strömbäck, 2010 for an example of how this can be done). The gains of utilizing computers in journalistic content analysis is scale and precision, as computers do not tire or give up, and can apply the given rules to full corpora instead of a sample. Problems include the increased complexity of doing a content analysis by writing software, and dealing with the varied and complex content in online news sites, content that inevitably will change with the new trends, designs, technologies and services of tomorrow. The division of labor between man and machine is up for renegotiation as computerized methods mature. For sampling, the computer-assisted route allows for comprehensive analysis of complete text collections, and thus delays the need to narrow down the sample until some interesting subsets emerge from the corpus. It allows us to move from the ideal of a representative sample to a mode of analysis where we can ‘zoom’ in on interesting patterns and analyze subsets in detail, but also zoom out again and get a bird’s-eye view on sample sizes in a scale beyond what human coders could ever reasonably be expected to cover (see, for example, Elgesem et al, 2010; Sjøvaag et al. 2012; 2015). It is the first step in appropriating the content analysis for big data analysis.

CONCLUSION This chapter has introduced and discussed opportunities as well as challenges that researchers face when approaching

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journalistic practices and content in a variety of online contexts. We have identified the core challenges with sampling liquid journalism to include capturing, selecting, and comparing the data. To ‘capture’ digital journalism in its liquid nature, we have argued that both the explicit content of news stories and context (for example, hyperlinks, user contributions, sharing on social platforms) need to be considered: Sampling liquid online content needs to be purposive, to some extent, to be able to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. Moreover, sampling must take on an inductive approach. When capturing and archiving liquid elements on the web, it is difficult to know beforehand what kind of information will be relevant, or even what will happen in an online news environment. There is no one, solid ‘way out’ of the problems encountered in sampling from the digital realm, only ‘messy but productive’ solutions (Karpf, 2012: 642). Regardless of specific sites, services, and outlets being studied, the dividing line or ‘pros and cons’ between man and machine will nevertheless always be there. As technologies develop, we will most likely see further shifts into computer coding of content. There is a potential here for digital journalism research, but the human element of critical assessment and contextual sensibility will remain necessary also in relation to such future sophisticated tools for analysis, primarily because computers are incapable of what we define as ‘critical assessment’. It follows from this line of reasoning that interdisciplinary approaches – enabling studies of digital journalism from multiple theoretical and methodological approaches – will grow more important in the near future. While ideas like the proposed ‘end of theory’, as coined by Wired editor Chris Anderson, might have a certain lure to them, current as well as future scholarship is more likely to depend more on computational perspectives, as well as those insights that can be provided by human actors well-versed in social theory. As suggested by

González-Bailón, theory is needed in order to ‘disentangle signal from noise’ (2013: 148). Without the application of such conceptual insights, we run a very real risk of drowning in a vast sea of data.

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34 Big Data Analysis Axel Bruns

INTRODUCTION: ‘BIG DATA’ IN AND ON JOURNALISM The concept of ‘big data’ on virtually all aspects of human endeavour has become a driving force in scholarly research and industry practices across a wide range of fields: inter alia, ‘big data’ are being used to inform investment decisions and stock market trades; to support political campaigning and decision-making; to trace the influence of climate change on weather patterns; and to forecast and track the spread of epidemics through the global population. This trend towards the comprehensive quantification both of natural phenomena, of human behaviours, and of complex technological systems has emerged in earnest since the start of the second decade of the new millennium, and is leading to the establishment of entirely new professional roles – from data analysts and even data scientists to the ‘data journalist’: the journalist/ researcher who specializes in working with

‘big data’ sources rather than human informants as the basis of new journalistic stories. Such trends are substantially informed and even driven by the increased availability of sensors and sensor-like objects that generate detailed and continuous data on a wide range of subjects; these data sources range from sensors measuring the properties of the physical world to computational subroutines logging activities in online spaces. In both cases, significant improvements in the availability and affordability of data storage as well as in the processing power and measurement sensitivity of such sensor objects have made it possible to generate increasingly detailed and up-to-date data on a wide range of measurable properties. Further, the emergence of a field of data processing and statistical analysis which is now often referred to as ‘data science’ has contributed substantially to the increased combination and correlation of individual sources of data into a greater whole, and thus into ‘big data’ proper.

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Especially where applications of big data analytics focus on the study of human activities and behaviours, data drawn from online sources have come to play an especially important role. The widespread everyday use of internet-based communication tools at least in developed nations means that data on user activities now represent a substantial portion of total public communication in such countries; as a result, Rogers argues, it becomes possible for internet studies and allied disciplines no longer merely to study ‘the Internet’ as a communications space in itself, but in fact to study ‘culture and society with the Internet’ (2009: 29). Although there are important limits to this broader research agenda, which we will discuss later in this chapter, the potential for internet studies to pursue such aims is enhanced further not just by the availability of rich data on user activities online, but also by significant advances in the development of powerful and innovative research methods that are able to process and analyze such data. Such methodological developments have been described by Berry (2011) as a ‘computational turn’ in media, communication, journalism, and social science research: they draw crucially on computational data analytics methods developed in the computer sciences, mathematics, and statistics, as well as on novel computational modeling and forecasting techniques, but they do so in order to apply these methods to long-standing and well-established questions in the humanities and social sciences. This trend, then, also forms an important basis for the emergence of what has been called the ‘digital humanities’ as a broader scholarly endeavour (cf. Arthur and Bode, 2014). More narrowly, scholars such as Lev Manovich or John Hartley envisage the development of new research endeavours which they describe variously as ‘cultural analytics’ or ‘cultural science’ (Manovich, 2007; Hartley, 2009). These draw on the well-established conceptual and methodological frameworks of cultural studies – and, by extension,

of fields such as Media, Communication, and Journalism Studies – but add to this the computational, quantitatively focussed, conventionally ‘scientific’ approaches emerging through the computational turn in digital humanities research methods, in order to provide cultural studies and related disciplines with a more rigorous and more comprehensive evidence base. Such more thoroughly computationallyinformed social science research methods clearly have their applications in both journalism practice and Journalism Studies. In the first place, big data are immediately valuable in journalism, as the emergence of computational or data journalism as a distinct journalistic practice demonstrates: a direct engagement with and interrogation of increasingly detailed and powerful data sources provides journalists with rich firsthand information that can be used to test the public statements of the stakeholders in a specific debate, and to separate political spin from underlying reality (see Chapter 23, for a more comprehensive discussion of that trend). But in addition to such uses in journalistic practice, big data on journalism also offer important new insights for the news industry and Journalism Studies alike, by providing new evidence on trends in journalism production and reception at an unprecedented level of detail. In particular, the observation and quantification of Web- and social media-based user engagement with the news generates a number of new metrics that advance well beyond conventional television ratings and print circulation figures, measuring not the broad distribution of journalistic content but the specific uses made of it, and responses to it. They measure, in short, the agency of news users in much greater detail than ever before, click by click and tweet by tweet. For better or for worse (and we will examine the threats as well as the opportunities inherent in such big data on journalism later in this chapter), such data enable a quantification of journalistic practice beyond the

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counting of mere column inches and circulation figures, or of their digital equivalents. Drawing on a combination of internal and external data sources that describe the processes of journalism production and the patterns of audience reception (with particular emphasis, at the current stage of the lifecycle of the journalism industry, on reception by online and social media audiences), practitioners as well as scholars are able to investigate the performance, impact, and relevance of journalists and news organizations at levels of resolution ranging from the individual story through the positioning of specific mastheads to long-term trends in the news industry. In particular, such analysis enables journalism researchers to reveal and benchmark some of the institutional emphases and biases across various news organizations, and to uncover the extent to which editorial decisions or story placements may be driven or influenced by the organizations’ own analysis of online audience uses and responses. But the effective use of such journalism analytics also depends on the quality of the underlying data, the appropriateness of the computational methods used to process the data, the skills of the analyst, and the ability of scholars and industry decision-makers to combine data analytics results with other information sources – a face-value acceptance of journalism analytics as the sole source of knowledge on the contemporary journalism industry is likely to substantially misrepresent the real picture. In what follows, we discuss first the types and potential uses of big data on the production and reception of journalistic content. We then explore the opportunities and threats inherent in an embrace of such data as an important source of intelligence on journalistic practices and the positioning of the news industry in wider public debates, for both journalism practitioners and journalism scholars. Finally, we outline the necessary next steps in pursuing productive and effective, but also considered and critical uses of big data on journalism.

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BIG DATA ON THE PRODUCTION OF JOURNALISM Traditionally, at least for researchers without direct access to the newsroom itself, the production of journalistic content has been difficult to measure and quantify, especially on an industry-wide basis. The shift towards an online-first publication of news articles and other journalistic content over the past decades – a shift which is essentially complete by now – has made such measurements considerably easier, however, and there are now a number of readily available means for identifying and tracking the publication of news on a global basis.

RSS and social media feeds One of the earliest mechanisms for doing so was the use of RSS feeds. Rich Site Summary (RSS) documents are available from virtually all mainstream news websites, as well as from citizen journalism sites, news blogs, and many other alternative news sources: they do away with the end-user-oriented layout and formatting of news articles on the web pages of a news site, and present only the core information (usually consisting of article titles, publication dates and other authoring information, a permanent article URL, and an abbreviated article summary) about recently published news articles, in reverse chronological order and in an immediately machine-readable format. Such RSS feeds are intended in the first place for users of news-reading software such as the (now discontinued) Google Reader or current market leader Feedly, where the data contained in subscribed RSS feeds are combined and formatted for more effective use. But beyond such end-user applications, the RSS feeds of news sites can also be captured and processed for journalism research purposes, where they become up-to-date pointers to the new content published through these sites. RSS scraping software can be used to

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add the new articles being advertised through such feeds to a continuing database of news articles, which is then available for further processing and analysis that may identify, for example, the daily patterns of news production and publication, or (with additional processing) the key themes and topics addressed in headlines and article synopses. A further extension of this approach would follow the link to the URL that is included in the RSS feed, and capture the full article text for processing as well (cf. Bruns et al., 2008, which describes this approach in detail for capturing blog posts). This approach may be extended further by also capturing the news updates posted by official news organization accounts or staff journalists to leading social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and again analysing the new articles promoted through such updates. Standard social media content tracking tools (discussed in more detail below) can capture the tweets posted through the official Twitter account of @guardian or @nytimes, for example, or the posts to the official Facebook pages of these publications, and extract from these any links to new articles on the news organization’s website; subsequently, the full publication details and article texts for these stories may be captured from the site itself. Especially in comparison across different social media platforms and with the RSS feed itself, this may reveal different strategies for selecting which articles are promoted through the different social media platforms, for example.

Web scraping and article databases While RSS as well as social media feeds might provide useful core details on the content production and publishing activities of news organizations, then, direct data gathering from the news sites themselves also emerges as an important approach. Capturing web content (also known as web scraping)

generates a momentary snapshot of the target web page as it appeared to the scraper – and by extension, to an ordinary user – at the time of capture; through such scraping, it becomes possible both to gather the full text of a news article, which is not normally included in the RSS feed, as well as a range of important ancillary information which may similarly not be available from other, programmatic data sources. Such information includes the placement and positioning of a given news story on the news site’s entry page; the references to further related articles that may be appended to the central story; and also the reader comments that may be published below the story itself. Indeed, repeated scraping of the same page can reveal the dynamics in such additional details: for example, changes in how the story is advertised on the news organization’s website, or the unfolding user discussion that follows the story. Given the need to separate irrelevant ancillary content (such as advertising, masthead headers and footers, or lists of other popular stories on the same site) from the core information contained in scraped web documents, and in light of disruptions to the scraping process that may be caused by changing page designs (which require the web scraper to be retrained in separating core from ancillary content), even automated web scraping can turn out to be a labour-intensive process, however. Especially where scraping approaches are mainly considered simply in order to capture the full text of news articles, a more workable alternative approach is the use of standard news article databases such as LexisNexis or Factiva: these, too, typically contain the full text of the news article as it was published on the news organization’s website (cf. Vincze, 2014; Wallsten, 2015). Given a set of article titles and/or publication URLs for a given publication as they may be retrieved from its RSS feed, therefore, it becomes possible to automatically extract the corresponding full text for each article from the database, and to combine these sources into a new dataset for analysis. (The software

Big Data Analysis

and tools to do so may need to be developed on a case-by-case basis, however, depending on the specific target sites and data sources available to the researcher.) The problems of generating reliable data on the production output of given news organizations through processing RSS and social media feeds and/or scraping news sites and databases may be largely avoided, of course, if researchers have direct access to the internal article databases of the news organization itself: such databases are likely to contain the full titles and article texts (possibly even across multiple revisions), as well as related authoring and publishing details. However, few news organizations are likely to make such databases available beyond internal use – although it should be noted that some global news leaders such as the New York Times and the Guardian are now offering public Application Programming Interfaces that offer some such information (cf. Bastos, 2014) – and it is especially unlikely that outside researchers may gain such access from multiple news organizations, enabling comparative studies of news publication activities. For such industry-wide work, the retrospective establishment of a comprehensive dataset on news production outputs from a combination of RSS feeds and other sources is likely to remain the only feasible – if itself complex and labour-intensive – option.

Further data processing Once gathered for one or more news organizations, such data may then be processed further, ahead of detailed analysis. In particular, article headlines, synopses, and body texts may be subjected to a number of advanced computational textual analysis techniques to establish key content patterns. Keyword occurrence and co-occurrence measurements can be used to generate comparatively simple indicators of the central themes of each article, and such indicators may be aggregated to trace the rise and fall of

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specific terms and themes over time or show their prominence in specific sections of a publication (cf. Touri and Koteyko, 2014; Vincze, 2014). Additionally, more advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be used for a variety of more sophisticated purposes, including the identification of key named entities – politicians, celebrities, organizations, locations, nations – or attempts at quantifying the sentiment of specific articles. The outcomes of such further processing may then also be correlated with a range of other data points, of course – for example, to examine the relative coverage of specific themes or actors across different news publications, the sentiment towards specific issues across different journalistic authors, or the longitudinal dynamics of such aspects over the course of an extended public debate. Again, yet further comparison and correlation with additional external data sources may also be possible here: such sources may include political polling, economic indicators, casualty figures in current armed conflicts, or other ‘official’ data, as well as the behavioural data provided by tools such as Google Trends, which allows the exploration of global and local trends in Google searches since 2004. In comparison, these different data may provide an indication of the alignment or divergence of journalistic emphases and contemporaneous public opinion.

Potential uses of big data on journalistic production A number of potential uses of big data on journalistic production have already been outlined in passing in the preceding discussion. More generally, both for news organizations themselves and for journalism scholars, a first point of interest in analyzing these composite datasets is likely to be in identifying the trends in publication activity for one or more news outlets. A simple volumetric analysis of news outputs may point to key

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moments of heightened activity; combined with a first thematic review of article titles and contents, the patterns in output volume may also be able to be linked directly to the prevalent themes in public debate at the time. To the extent that individual journalists can be identified as authors, their specific contribution to the journalistic coverage of these themes can also be examined and quantified. Beyond such basic metrics on journalistic production, however, more sophisticated analysis techniques – in particular, computational textual analysis – can also be used to provide a more detailed indication both of key themes as such, and of their dynamics over time; similar techniques may also shed light on the centrality of specific individual and institutional actors in public debate, and make such positioning comparable across different news outlets. This may reveal, for example, coverage emphases or biases across different news organizations, and enable the interpretation of such patterns as motivated variously by different news value frameworks, by diverging political ideologies, by editorial decisions to assume a distinct role in setting public agendas, or by the particular audience demographics of specific news outlets. Similar analyses may also allow for an assessment of journalists’ and news organizations’ sourcing practices: they can identify the prominence of specific sources or source types, from political leaders through domain experts to the vox populi in the form of direct interviews or citations of social media posts, and thus shed light on the relative prominence and relevance which different news outlets accord to these diverse sources. Working with data drawn from scholarly news article databases, Wallsten (2015) explores the sourcing of views from social media during the 2012 US presidential election campaign, for example. It should be noted in this context, however, that such analyses should take care not to treat all news articles contained in their datasets as simply equal: coverage in

a lead article placed at the top of a news Website, and promoted widely through social and other media channels, is likely to have made a much more substantial impact on the news audience than reporting in a minor story hidden in a thematic subsection. Here, analyses of story placement (as enabled by the scraping of the front pages of news websites, and the tracking of social media updates by news organizations, for example) provide important additional data which may serve as proxy indicators for the general visibility of a story, and should be included as multipliers in any comprehensive modelling of thematic and other biases (cf. Lee et al., 2014). The more complex analytical frameworks which are required for any more detailed approximation of such measures also point clearly to the fact that the capture and analysis of big data on journalistic production alone cannot be the final stage of journalism research; rather, it serves as an enabler of a more advanced mixed-methods research agenda that utilizes big quantitative data and combines them with detailed qualitative investigation. Indeed, this is a fundamental point which is often sidelined by the current public and scholarly discussion about the emergence of ‘big data’ analytics as a major new research framework: ‘big data’ methods should not be employed to the exclusion of all other, already well-established qualitative and quantitative methodologies; rather, if deployed appropriately they can complement, support, and integrate with other research methods to enhance the overall quality of the research being conducted. ‘Big data’ analytics, for example, are able to pinpoint particular observable phenomena which should be singled out for further, qualitative study; conversely, smaller-scale qualitative methods are often indispensable in the development of initial research questions and hypotheses which may then be tested at scale by examining much larger datasets. (see Chapter 35 for a further discussion of this point.)

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‘BIG DATA’ ON THE RECEPTION OF JOURNALISM Fortunately, it is not necessary to rely solely on an interpretation of news organizations’ story positioning and promotion activities in assessing the visibility and impact of specific stories, or in examining a news site’s overall market position. Big data on journalism now encompass an especially rich range of sources of data describing the reception of journalistic content, in addition to the sources on journalistic production which we have already encountered. Such data enhance, extend, and complement pre-existing reception data (including circulation and ratings figures for print and broadcast journalism), especially by providing rich, detailed, and real-time insights into the consumption and use of news content in online and social media. In this context, it should be noted that the pre-existing reception data for conventional media are not without their own problems. The limitations of broadcast ratings (in the present case, especially for news and current affairs programming) are already wellestablished: they are extrapolated from often relatively small, demographically representative sample households, and rarely take into account the quality of attention paid to broadcasts (was the TV news on as a background to breakfast or dinner, or did it command its viewers’ attention); additionally, they also continue to struggle at taking into account time-shifted and on-demand viewing (Bourbon and Méadel, 2014). Similarly, newspaper circulation figures may variously capture print and distribution runs, or actual subscriptions and purchases, and again cannot provide any insight into how and to what the extent the paper is read after purchase (do readers engage with the news content cover to cover, or do they pay attention only to the politics, sports, or even job advertisement sections). By contrast, the data which can be generated – both internally, by news organizations themselves, and externally,

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by researchers – for online news reception practices present a considerably more precise perspective on the distribution of different kinds of audience attention; further, in light of the continuing shift towards online news consumption as the dominant mode of access (following especially the increasingly precarious drop in newspaper readership in many markets, and a slower decline in broadcast news audiences in many markets; Christensen, 2013; Pew Research Journalism Project, 2014) makes such indicators especially relevant to the study of journalism audience practices.

Site access and activity data The online equivalent of circulation and ratings figures for news publications is provided by data describing the volume of web access attempts to the servers on which news sites are hosted. Such data are available in the first place only to the operators of these servers, and news organizations are already paying increasingly close attention to their performance on these indicators. However, such server data are rarely available to outside researchers, and therefore especially do not allow for an industry-wide benchmarking of news organizations’ market positioning. For such purposes, alternative metrics are provided (usually on a commercial basis) by a number of online monitoring services which play a role comparable to that of television ratings agencies: companies such as Experian Marketing Services gather general anonymized information on internet users’ web browsing practices, and are able to extrapolate from such data a very detailed and demographically representative picture of what websites are visited by users in specific countries or geographic regions. The largely automated, ISP-level and opt-in panel nature of such data gathering enables them to gather such data on a much larger scale than was possible for television ratings agencies, however: compared to the 3,500 homes

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included in Australian TV ratings agency OzTAM’s data (OzTAM, 2011), for example, Experian Hitwise Australia’s online trends data are drawn from some 1.5 million Australians. Such internally and externally generated data on site accesses are not limited to simple volumetrics alone, however. In addition, they commonly also provide an indication of the upstream and downstream destinations of web users (that is, the sites they visited before and after the news site itself), of the interactions with the news site (pages visited, time spent), and potentially also of any contributions made in the form of on-site comments, Facebook likes, or tweets sharing specific news articles. Especially where users are required to log in to the news site, or where the site is using browser cookies to track individual users, such interactions may also be used to build up a detailed longitudinal profile of user interests across a number of individual visits; this may be done both through the use of internal server analytics tools or by using industry-standard add-ons such as Google Analytics (but in both cases, the data generated are unlikely to be available to external researchers or for industry-wide benchmarking).

Social media engagement data Although such site access and activity data can constitute extremely detailed and highly valuable sources of information on user activity patterns, then, they are rarely available (or at least affordable) for research uses: news organizations tend to treat their internal site statistics and Google Analytics data as commercial-in-confidence, and external agencies’ products are similarly targetted mainly at commercial users, and often priced beyond the reach of publicly funded projects. A second class of audience engagement data are more readily available, however: these provide insights into how the users of mainstream social media platforms are using and

sharing the articles published by news outlets throughout their personal networks. Such research approaches find their predecessors in earlier studies of linkage and citation patterns in the blogosphere, which tracked the content of a population of known blogs (often focussing on political topics) and identified any hyperlinks in their blog posts. Network analyses of these hyperlink connections were used, for example, to study the relative information sourcing behaviours of blogger populations of different political persuasions (Adamic and Glance, 2005; Park and Thelwall, 2008), or to examine the shift in sourcing practices over time and in response to specific current public debates (Highfield, 2011). However, the relatively disorganized, decentralized structure of the blogosphere – comprised of a large collection of individual websites as well as blogs hosted on a range of blog platforms – and the widely divergent publishing formats supported by such sites made a truly comprehensive analysis of such patterns virtually impossible; such studies could generally provide only a glimpse of linkage patterns for their specific sample of blogs, therefore, and were unable to make any more comprehensive observations for national or global blogospheres as such. This has changed with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter as centralized platforms for social media engagement: here, it is possible at least in principle to identify all tweets and all posts that link to a given news site or article, or address a specific topic. The differing affordances of these platforms, and different rules on data access and terms of service, introduce a number of limitations to such possibilities, however.

Facebook For Facebook, the current global market leader in social media, it is generally impossible to identify comprehensively how its users are engaging with specific news services: for the majority of users, access to

Big Data Analysis

their Facebook activities is available only to approved Facebook ‘friends’ or ‘friends of friends’, and we must assume that many users who have made their profiles globally public without such restrictions have done so by accident, out of confusion about Facebook’s frequently changing privacy controls. Under these circumstances, any data about user engagement (through likes or shares) with news sites that is drawn from currently globally public Facebook profiles alone are likely to present a very skewed picture, and should be dismissed as unrepresentative. Similarly, it would be unethical for individual researchers to use their personal Facebook credentials to authenticate a Facebook data-gathering tool and conduct research on the news engagement of their friends without warning them first, and even to do so with the explicit approval of one’s friends would again generate an unrepresentative dataset. What is possible for Facebook is to focus solely on the public engagement of users with the official pages of news organizations. Such engagement, even by accounts whose personal activities on Facebook are protected by the relevant privacy settings, is public, and it can be assumed that users who do participate on these organizational pages are aware of this fact; this limits (but does not entirely eradicate) any concerns about the ethical acceptability of this research approach. (The development of appropriate ethical guidelines for researchers already has a long history in internet research; for more details, see especially the work of the Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Committee at aoir.org/ ethics.) Proceeding in this way means that researchers are able to gather a number of useful data points about the engagement of Facebook users with the news organization, and about the news outlet’s own social media activities on the platform: it becomes possible to track the publication of each new post by the page operators, as well as the public response in the form of likes, shares, and comments attached to the post, and to

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gather some basic information about the overall structure of the Facebook audience. A number of tools for gathering data in such a way exist now, including the stand-alone Facepager application (Keyling and Jünger, 2013) and the FacePy framework for Python programmers (Gorset, 2014).

Twitter The situation for Twitter is somewhat different, due to the different structure and affordances of both the Twitter platform itself, and of the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) through which user activity data may be accessed (Bruns and Stieglitz, 2014). Here, the vast majority of user accounts, and their tweets, are globally public and accessible even to non-registered visitors to the Twitter site; further, the global Twitter ‘firehose’ of all user tweets is searchable and may be accessed through site and API, at least in principle. This flat and open structure of the Twitter network and the user activities that take place within it has also contributed significantly to the predominant role Twitter now plays in disseminating and discussing breaking news, even in comparison to its considerably larger rival Facebook (Dewan and Kumaraguru, 2014): Twitter hashtags, in particular, have played an important role as a gathering point for potentially global ad hoc publics around specific issues and events (Bruns and Burgess, 2011). However, access to the full, unfiltered firehose of all tweets is not generally available to scholarly or commercial researchers, though such access may be purchased at significant cost from third-party data resellers such as Gnip and DataSift (cf. Bruns and Burgess, 2016) and may eventually be provided under certain conditions by the US Library of Congress, which was gifted a full and continuing archive of all tweets by Twitter, Inc. in 2010 but has yet to determine whether and how this archive

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may be made public (Raymond, 2010). But access to Twitter activity streams for specific hashtags, keywords, and other search terms is generally available both through the open, free API and through commercial resellers, although the former is limited to providing no more than one percent of the total current firehose volume, and may therefore be incomplete for hashtags and keywords relating to very significant global events. Further, the API also provides access to underlying user profile and network data which may be valuable in assessing the comparative visibility and impact of different users’ engagement activities. A number of stand-alone open-source research tools have established themselves as virtual standards for scholarly research into Twitter, including yourTwapperKeeper (2012) and DMI-TCAT (Digital Methods Initiative, 2014) – both of which require researchers to have access to a web server for installation. (See Gaffney and Puschmann, 2014, for a more detailed discussion of Twitter research tools.) For our present purposes, such tools may be used to generate a number of key metrics that – similar to the Facebook metrics outlined above – describe user engagement with the organizational presences and content of news outlets. In the first place, for any given institutional Twitter account it becomes possible to track its own promotional activities by capturing all of its tweets, and to similarly capture any tweets that @reply to or retweet its messages. Especially also across a number of competing accounts tracked using this approach, this enables an assessment of the relative Twitter audience response to the account’s activities, pinpointing for example which type of tweet (or which type of news article linked to in the tweet) receives the greatest number of @replies or retweets. Similar research can also be conducted around the Twitter presences of individual journalists, of course, as Hermida et  al.’s study of the role of NPR journalist Andy Carvin during the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrates (2014).

But beyond tracking activity around official accounts themselves, by using the domain names of specific news outlets as search terms researchers are also able to capture those tweets which, independently of tweets from those official accounts, share links to the stories published on the news site. For example, Bruns et  al. (2013) have used this approach to create the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), a long-term longitudinal study which has by now generated more than two years of data on link sharing practices around the 35 leading Australian news and opinion sites (Figure 34.1). On a dayto-day basis, this research approach allows for the identification of currently important themes and topics in Australian news coverage; over time, it enables the assessment both of changing topical interests amongst audience members, and of the gradual evolution of the practice of link sharing itself. Further, the comparatively open structure of Twitter also provides a greater range of additional underlying data which may be utilized to assess the likely impact of such individual acts of user engagement. For both Twitter and Facebook, a number of basic user metrics are available, but only on Twitter is it also possible to build up – if slowly, due to API access limitations – a more comprehensive perspective of the overall network of follower connections and of an individual user’s positioning within it. Both in assessing the impact of an individual user’s actions in engaging with a news brand, and in determining the overall footprint of a news outlet’s followers across the Twittersphere, such underlying data are invaluable, as we will discuss in more detail below.

Potential uses of ‘big data’ on journalistic reception In combination, the large datasets on the reception of journalistic content both in general, and in particular in the spaces of social media, constitute an unprecedentedly detailed

Figure 34.1  Sharing of links to Australian news sites, July 2012 to August 2014

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source of insight into how internet users engage with the news – and it is evident that such online access now increasingly constitutes a first point of engagement with the news, ahead of broadcast or print news. Overall, such data shed new light on the total volume of user attention as well as on the comparative prominence of different news outlets and story themes within this emerging attention economy for the journalistic content. Over time, such data may also be used to trace the relative rise and fall in such attention, of course – and may thus also come to influence the future content strategies of news organizations themselves. Such metrics differ in important ways from conventional ratings and circulation figures, as noted above. Online and social media access generally operates on a ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ basis, where content is deliberately accessed by users, rather than broadly distributed by publishers, and so the user activities measured by site access and social media metrics have a more deliberate quality than audience metrics for other media. The quantifiable metrics for social media platforms, in particular, truly represent user engagement rather than mere readership: here, what is identifiable is whether users choose to like, share, comment on, @reply to, or retweet a news item, while in fact there is no immediately available indicator on whether they have actually read the original news article they are engaging with. A framework which fully integrates such engagement metrics with more conventional ratings and circulation figures has yet to be developed by audience research scholars, but a more sophisticated typology of the different forms of news use and engagement is emerging (see especially Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2014). Even in the absence of such a grand unified theory of audiences, these new online metrics provide invaluable new approaches to assessing the positioning and authority of individual news brands, evaluating the performance of their content, and benchmarking

such indicators against their competitors in a transparent and scientifically rigorous fashion. For news organizations themselves, the aim of such benchmarking may include the assessment of return on investment for specific activities and initiatives (did major exclusives generate significant readership; do the brand’s own social media activities impact on link sharing or site visits); additionally, such research methods may also be used to test the repercussions of specific new initiatives (relating variously to the style of stories, the placement of articles on the site’s front page, or the use of search engine optimization techniques and targeted advertising in promoting specific stories or the entire site). For industry and scholarly researchers alike, further interests may include the identification of specific target audiences for particular content types, forms, and formats, by using the demographic audience breakdowns provided by access data services such as Experian Hitwise; the highlighting of individual highly influential users who serve to amplify the brand’s social media presence through disseminating its updates to their own network of followers, by engaging in further network analysis of underlying social media networks; or even the pinpointing of potential expert sources for future news coverage, by identifying those social media respondents who provide consistently useful comments on news articles either on-site or through social media channels. For journalism scholars, finally, an analysis of the data sources outlined here also offers a unique opportunity to examine the processes of public debate overall, or within specific issue publics (Habermas, 2006; Dahlgren, 2009), within the present-day public sphere or at least those sections of it which operate through public communication in online media channels. Using the approaches outlined here, it is possible not only to examine the activities of the mainstream media (and of the voices commonly enabled to speak within mainstream media

Big Data Analysis

coverage), as most previous studies of the public sphere have done, but also to study on a much more comprehensive level the general public’s responses to and engagement with such mainstream media content, as well as the interactions between these two levels that may ensue as a result.

OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS The big data sources on journalistic production and reception outlined here offer a range of opportunities for both industry practitioners and journalism researchers, then. Drawing on such news sources on audience behaviours, and combining them with their own data on production activities, the news industry is in a position to develop a much more detailed, comprehensive, and evidence-based perspective of its audience’s interests and activities, and thus to better tailor and position its news content. At a time of considerable financial strain, this should assist especially in making well-grounded decisions on both funding cuts and new investment. However, at the same time such a datadriven approach to staffing and funding decisions may not necessarily result in a better journalistic product, even if it generates a more popular news service. There is a danger here that a focus of business decision-making on what might be called ‘big data logic’ to the exclusion of all else could create a very one-sided type of news organisation. Most centrally, news managers whose decisions are solely driven by return on investment as measured by data on article clicks and shares may find it difficult to justify longterm investment in potentially loss-making activities such as in-depth investigative journalism, even though a news organization’s ability to engage in such complex journalistic endeavours may affect its public authority to a considerable degree. There is a danger that such strongly data-driven approaches

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to determining the journalistic and branding objectives of a news organization would result in a wholesale shift towards populist, attention-grabbing headlines and content which is designed simply to attract shortterm readership (and thus to create advertising impressions and generate revenue), even if it fails to build – or even undermines – brand authority. This is an approach which at present is essentially synonymous with the Buzzfeed news brand, whose content is inherently designed to ‘go viral’ on social media (with titles such as ‘There’s Another “Game Of Thrones” Theory And It Changes Everything’) and which closely tracks the performance of its stories by using methods such as those outlined here. However, it should also be noted in this context that Buzzfeed has more recently stated its intentions to use such populist content as a means of drawing in audiences for more sophisticated longform journalism (Stelter, 2011). The success of this strategy remains to be evaluated – and indeed, the ‘datafication’ of news organisations’ decision-making processes has now become an important new area in journalism research, as the impact of non-traditional news models like Buzzfeed on the rest of the industry is being evaluated both quantitatively (through data-driven research into news brands’ changing popularity) and qualitatively (by observing or surveying news professionals’ attitudes towards these new competitors and their working methods). Of course, beyond mere observation some journalism researchers will also work directly with established and emerging news brands to help formulate their operational strategies in a changing media environment. For journalism researchers, then, the data sources outlined here constitute important comprehensive and largely independent sources on the production and reception of journalistic content, and support a range of innovative new research agendas. For both aspects of the journalistic process, they enable both the detailed and essentially real-time tracing of the development of a story, as well

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as the long-term tracking of news articles’ themes and news organizations’ market positioning. Bruns and Sauter (2015) document the dissemination of a single breaking news item across an increasingly international network of social media users over the course of a few hours, for example, while Figures 34.1 and 34.2 document long-term changes in audience attention to differing Australian news sources, measured both by tracking overall access patterns to leading news sites and by tracing the dissemination of links to such sites via Twitter. Where such approaches focus on news production, they are able to engage in what amounts to a reverse engineering of news organizations’ coverage agendas and institutional biases by documenting the presence or absence of specific news themes and actors and benchmarking these measurements against their competitors; taking into account the positioning of articles on the news sites’ front pages as well as any evidence of search engine optimization strategies in headlines and content, the emphasis placed on such elements by individual outlets as well as the audience response to such initiatives may also be examined. (Research into such questions is not entirely new, but the use of such big data sources as we have encountered them here enables a considerably more comprehensive approach than has generally been possible previously.) By contrast, where research approaches focus on news reception, they are able to quantify the overall popularity of news organizations amongst users by using general site access data (see for example Figure 34.2 for a year-long study of the relative use of leading Australian news sites, based on Experian Hitwise data); in combination with further social media data, they can also investigate the role and impact of social media link sharing activities on such access patterns. Overall, these data sources enable researchers to study news organization and audience behaviours ‘in the wild’, outside of controlled laboratory experiments: by drawing on large

and detailed datasets, established without affecting the processes they describe, that cover both the content publication practices of news outlets and the access and engagement activities of audiences, Journalism Studies is for the first time able to investigate news production and reception processes at scale, beyond (but importantly also in useful combination with) smaller-scale case studies, surveys, and interviews. This more systemic perspective on news processes, then, also offers important new perspectives on long-established theories including opinion leadership, the two-step flow, the spiral of silence, or even the public sphere as such: for the first time, it offers strong and large-scale empirical evidence that may be used to examine to what extent such theories still hold or may need to be adjusted to suit the presentday media ecology. However, progress towards these goals is hampered by a number of important obstacles. First, because of their comparative novelty there is a profound lack of well-established methods for working with these new sources of big data on journalistic practices, and even of comprehensive documentation of the methods employed by the leading research teams utilizing such datasets. Further, while we have focussed here especially on the fruitful combination of a number of these diverse data sources in pursuit of greater research questions, access to such large data remains limited and piecemeal for many researchers, and the combination and integration of diverse datasets is still in its infancy. Especially for datasets which were not created by the researchers themselves, significant black box problems also persist: without commercial operators such as Gnip and DataSift providing detailed documentation on how they gathered and processed their data, there are clear limits to the reliability and usability of these sources. Worse yet, the relative novelty and allure of such methods obscures the fact that many journalism researchers (as well as

Figure 34.2  Total visits to Australian news and opinion sites, July 2012 to August 2014

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researchers in the related fields of media, communication, and internet studies) lack the methodological training and research expertise to use big data effectively or even correctly. The computational turn in the humanities and social sciences has barely commenced, and many scholars seeking to work with big data on journalism continue to rely substantially on the help of computer scientists, statisticians, and other extradisciplinary colleagues in formulating their methodological and conceptual research frameworks. Such interdisciplinary collaboration can be highly fruitful, of course, and team-based research approaches are generally advisable in dealing with big data, but it remains incumbent on journalism scholars to develop their own methodological skills both in order to collaborate more effectively with these colleagues, and to ensure that their research strategies are appropriate to the project at hand. Such caveats echo the general warnings about ‘big data’ which have been expressed most articulately by boyd and Crawford (2012). Like theirs, these notes of caution are not intended to dismiss the idea of using big data on journalistic practices altogether, of course; rather, they seek to engender an open and honest discussion about the opportunities and limitations for Journalism Studies that are inherent in such new datasets and methods. Chief amongst these is perhaps the almost inevitable focus which big data on journalism place on internet-based modes of journalistic production and reception; while, as we have argued above, online engagement is now often the first form of engagement with journalistic content, an overemphasis on such online modes to the exclusion of all other modes of production and reception necessarily introduces its own biases. There remain significant questions over the extent that researchers can indeed use the internet as a lens through which they may observe society as a whole – or at least over the amount of distortion that such a lens introduces. In utilizing internet-centric datasets on journalistic

production and reception, we must therefore always also ask what practices are not included in such datasets.

‘BIG DATA’ ON JOURNALISM: WHERE TO FROM HERE? Finally, then, this overview of current opportunities and threats in the use of big data on journalism must necessarily conclude that significant issues and limitations must still be addressed before such analytical methods, and the datasets they build on, can become an everyday part of the journalism researcher’s toolkit. There are, very obviously, great opportunities in using big data to further this field of research, but these opportunities will not be able to be fully realized without substantial further methodological and conceptual development. This chapter should therefore also be seen as a call to arms: we must work furiously to develop, test, and document our transdisciplinary skills, methods, approaches, and frameworks for the use of big data in Journalism Studies, and engage in a frank and open debate about the limits of such approaches – not in order to dismiss them altogether and defend established journalism research practices from this new disruption, but to determine where they may make a useful contribution to the existing methodological toolkit. Most of all, the use of big data in Journalism Studies must be more than mere number crunching. Big data research approaches are wasted if they only serve to provide simplistic measures of volume and size (of news production, of audience engagement); they must advance beyond these metrics to also examine the impact and importance of journalistic and audience practices both for individual news stories, news outlets, and news audiences, and for public debate, the public sphere, and society as a whole. This more sophisticated and comprehensive perspective also ensures that big journalistic data is

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not used (or abused) simply to justify costcutting exercises or drive an increasingly populist repositioning of news brands and their content. Such more complex and indepth analyses, it should be noted, are also likely to rely on more than mere quantitative data processing: they are set to draw on mixed-methods approaches that utilize both quantitative, big data approaches and qualitative, in-depth exploration. Used in this way, then, big data on journalism may also be used to empower journalists and their audiences, rather than merely providing the tools for news organizations to generate better performance indicators.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this chapter was supported by the Australian Research Council through my ARC Future Fellowship grant Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere, with data on total visits to Australian news and opinion sites courtesy of Experian Hitwise Australia. My thanks also go to my QUT colleague Darryl Woodford for advice on current data gathering facilities for Facebook.

REFERENCES Adamic, Lada and Glance, Natalie (2005) ‘The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog’, Blogpulse, Mar 4. Available at: http://nielsen-online.com/ downloads/us/buzz/wp_PoliticalBlogo​ sphere_Glance_2004.pdf Arthur, Paul Longley and Bode, Katherine (eds) (2014) Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bastos, Marcos Toledo (2014) ‘Shares, pins, and tweets: News readership from daily papers to social media’, Journalism Studies, Mar 5. doi :10.1080/1461670X.2014.891857.

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blogosphere: Towards a new research methodology’, paper presented at the ISEA 2008 conference, Singapore, July 25–August 3. Available at: http://snurb.info/files/Locating% 20the%20Australian%20Blogosphere%20 (final%20-%20long).pdf Christensen, Nic (2013) ‘ABCs: Newspapers see more double digit declines’, Mumbrella, November 8. Available at: http://mumbrella. com.au/abcs-newspapers-3-188553 Costera Meijera, Irene and Groot Kormelink, Tim (2014) ‘Checking, sharing, clicking and linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014’, Digital Journalism, August 1. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.937149. Dahlgren, Peter (2009) Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewan, Prateek and Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam (2014) ‘It doesn’t break just on Twitter: Characterizing Facebook content during real world events’, arXiv: 1405.4820 [cs.SI]. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4820 Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) (2014) Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT, June 12) Available at: https://wiki.digital​ methods.net/Dmi/ToolDmiTcat Gaffney, Devin and Puschmann, Cornelius (2014) ‘Data collection on Twitter’, in Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann (eds) Twitter and Society, New York: Peter Lang. pp. 55–68. Gorset, Johannes (2014) FacePy. Available at: https://github.com/jgorset/facepy Habermas, Jürgen (2006) ‘Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research’, Communication Theory, 16(4): 411–26. Hartley, John (2009) ‘From cultural studies to cultural science’, Cultural Science Journal, 2(1): 1–16. Hermida, Alfred, Lewis, Seth C., and Zamith, Rodrigo (2014) ‘Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3): 479–99. Highfield, Tim (2011) Mapping Intermedia News Flows: Topical Discussions in the

Australian and French Political Blogospheres. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology. Available at: http://eprints. qut.edu.au/48115/ Keyling, Till and Jünger, Jakob (2013) Facepager: An Application for Generic Data Retrieval through APIs. Available at: https:// github.com/strohne/Facepager/ Lee, Angela M., Lewis, Seth C., and Powers, Matthew (2014) ‘Audience clicks and news placement: A study of time-lagged influence in online journalism’, Communication Research, 41(4): 505–30. doi:10.1177/0093650212467031. Manovich, Lev (2007) ‘Cultural analytics’. Available at: http://www.manovich.net/ cultural_analytics.pdf OzTAM (2011) ‘About OzTAM ratings’. Available at: http://www.oztam.com.au/About OzTAMRatings.aspx Park, Han Woo and Thelwall, Mike (2008) ‘Developing network indicators for ideological landscapes from the political blogosphere in South Korea’, Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication, 10(4): 856–79. Pew Research Journalism Project (2014) ‘Key indicators in media & news’, March 26 Available at: http://www.journalism. org/2014/03/26/state-of-the-news-media2014-key-indicators-in-media-and-news/ Raymond, Matt (2010) ‘How tweet it is!: Library acquires entire Twitter archive’, Library of Congress Blog, April 25. Available at: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweetit-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/ Rogers, Richard (2009) The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA. Available at: http://www.govcom.org/ publications/full_list/oratie_Rogers_2009_ preprint.pdf Stelter, Brian (2011) ‘BuzzFeed adds politico writer’, The New York Times: Media Decoder, December 12. Available at: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/ buzzfeed-adds-politico-writer/ Touri, Maria and Koteyko, Nelya (2014) ‘Using corpus linguistic software in the extraction of news frames: Towards a dynamic process of frame analysis in journalistic texts’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, July 3. doi:10.1080/13645579.2014.92 9878

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35 Q-method and News Audience Research Kim Christian Schrøder

A DAY IN THE LIFE WITH THE NEWS ‘First thing in the morning,’ says 48-year-old Kirsten Jensen1, a single early-retired nursery school teacher, ‘I turn on the computer and check my email, then – as I do every day – I continue to Facebook, I just see what’s there, I don’t read any of it at this point, then on to dr.dk [website of DR, national public service broadcaster] to check the news. Here I actually read the morning’s key news stories. ‘Then back to email for a more serious read and some replies, and then Facebook again: Among the various updates from Facebook friends some carry links that alert me to news stories that people have shared. I really get around in the news universe, because my friends are a very diverse crowd who post links to denkorteavis.dk [‘The Short Newspaper’, a born-online rightwing newspaper], avisen.dk [‘The newspaper’, a born-online centerleft newspaper], ekstrabladet.dk [online version of print tabloid Ekstra Bladet], or information.dk [online version of print center-left niche newspaper Information]. Once I’m on those sites I’m easily led astray by the catchy headlines of other stories, so I usually end up spending more time than intended there. In earlier days, I would sometimes join in debates on Facebook about these news stories, or

on the news sites themselves, when other people said something that was just too outrageous, but I’ve increasingly come to find it rather pointless to get involved. It really leads nowhere. There’s also sometimes links to YouTube videos – one of my Facebook friends is an Islam-convert ethnic Dane, and he often posts links to videos about the conditions of Muslims in Denmark. This morning ritual takes about an hour. ‘During the day, then, when I’m doing other things, I regularly repeat this routine: Email, Facebook, dr.dk, etc. Evenings I always watch at least one primetime news broadcast on public service TV. DR1 [national license-fee public service broadcaster] is my mainstay – solid, reliable news programs with both overview and background of things that matter. I do watch TV2 Nyhederne [national public service broadcaster, commercial funding] from time to time, but it’s often too tabloid to my taste. I also like to watch DR2 [sister channel of DR1] documentaries and debate programs, not least their theme evenings on Saturdays. ‘And Google is my friend! Clearly you shouldn’t trust all you find that way, but on the whole Google helps me find answers to all my questions, say if there’s something in the news I want to find out more about. Sometimes the answers are provided by Wikipedia, sometimes I’m taken to more specialized web sources, about religious sects or

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whatever. Once I found – I’m not a lightweight model myself, as you can see – I found something about obesity being genetic, so I posted the link on Facebook!’

This short narrative about the role of news in a day in the life of an ‘ordinary’ – middleaged, averagely-educated – provincial woman comes out of the fieldwork I did in 2014 for a mixed-method study of people’s selection of news media in everyday life. It is obviously not representative of news consumers in Denmark. But it is not untypical either of the way many people today – in Denmark and beyond – navigate in, select from and make sense of the ‘media manifold’ (Couldry 2012: 44) in the contemporary landscape of news in order to stay informed about matters big and small that matter to their lives. Kirsten’s personalized news universe can be characterized as a complex, hybrid media ensemble. News audience researchers are beginning to realize that they need to renew their methodological toolboxes if they want to be able to map and understand people’s complex paths through the cross-media news landscape. In this renewed toolbox we see, for instance, the actual ‘shadowing’ of news users during their news day (Taneja et  al., 2012), or researchers following the ‘digital footprints’ people leave behind online (Vittadini and Pasquali, 2014), and the delving into the subjective motivations and complex understandings of people’s news practices. In this endeavor, it is evident that there exists no one method capable of capturing accurately both the behavioral and the sense-making dimensions of people’s uses of news. This chapter discusses how both well-known and innovative methods, administered separately or in mixed-method research designs, can be used to map and understand how citizen-consumers navigate in, select from and make sense of the multitude of news platforms and formats that surround them in the hybrid-media-saturated society. Only in this way shall we be able to understand how people use the news media

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as resources for everyday life and for democratic engagement.

CITIZEN-CONSUMERS AS NEWS AUDIENCES IN THE HYBRID MEDIA CULTURE Without exaggeration it is safe to say that in the last couple of decades we have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of media platforms and formats, as new generations of digital and social media have joined the ranks of established traditional media like printed newspapers, radio and television. This multiplicity of platforms and the informative affordances they offer to users mean, for instance, that we are no longer limited by time and place when it comes to satisfying our need for news: we can get news anywhere anytime, and at no or little cost (Peters, 2012; Webster, 2014; Wolf and Schnauber, 2014). But it is important not to be carried away by notions of an exclusively digital, participatory culture: we live in a ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick, 2013), in which traditional media and emergent media are interdependent and interwoven, as they collectively form the cross-media ensemble from which people may build their media repertoires. In spite of the increasing participation by audiences in news production, as so-called ‘prosumers’ or ‘produsers’ of user-generated content, audiences are likely to also remain audiences (Carpentier, 2011; Couldry, 2011): the blurring of the boundaries between journalists and audiences is not likely to lead to a situation in which it is appropriate to speak of ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006). Most people for most of the time are firmly placed at the receiving end of the news process, even though they may often share a news story with their networks on social media, and from time to time cast an online vote or write a comment to a news story on Facebook or Twitter. Generally

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speaking the interactive affordances offered by online news media are still rarely used by news audiences, and the least demanding ‘lean back’ types of participation by far outnumber the more time-consuming ‘lean forward’ types of discursive engagement in public sphere discussion (Picone, 2007; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014). It is therefore still both legitimate and productive for news audience research to attempt to map and understand the role played by ‘audience’ practices in the news circuit and in mediated democratic processes: If we wish to understand how the news media function as democratic resources, as well as in everyday life as such, we must investigate how citizen-consumers navigate in the news landscape – in consuming roles as well as in a slowly increasing number of participatory practices, for which the term ‘audiences’ is not a misnomer. The concrete ways in which the news media are central to the formation and maintenance of political practices and identities are multiple and diverse. This chapter focuses on the analytical methods we may use to examine how people select and compose their news repertoires from a hybrid news media landscape, where choices have implications both for the democratic enlightenment of the individual citizen-consumer, and for the democratic strength of the news media system, which is the aggregate product of myriad choices made by these individuals. There is no disputing that the paramount historical role of the news media in Western societies is to be a catalyst of democratic governance (Keane, 1991; McNair, 2003). Traditionally this role – and the audience role as citizens – has been analyzed separately from the other functions of the media, and the political has tended, not least in public sphere theory, to be defined as something going on in a separate and elevated political realm of its own: the political public sphere inhabited by citizens (Habermas, 1962). However, approaches to the audiences of

journalism today have begun to analyze the ways in which citizenship and the political have become pervasive and integral elements in everyday life as such (Beck, 1997; Dahlgren, 2006). It is not that politics and political news are constantly at the top of people’s minds, rather that even trivial conversations between people in everyday life may be infused with dormant political potential, which may erupt into political engagement if the occasion arises (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2006). The rest of this chapter discusses three perspectives, which are central to the agendas of news audience research today: the cross-media nature of audience practices, news consumption as patterned in the form of news media repertoires, and the need for mixed-method research designs.

‘NEW’ VERSUS ‘INNOVATIVE’ VERSUS ‘TRADITIONAL’ METHODS It is one of the eternal imperatives of research that it should constantly strive to improve the quality of the knowledge it produces and the explanatory power of its findings. This has implications not least for the methodological dimension of research: the need to innovate our methods has acquired a new urgency due to both the dramatic changes in the world of media technologies and media consumption, and to the more competitive institutional environment in the world of research. A recent analysis of innovation claims in qualitative social science journals in the period 2000 to 2009 found that researchers were increasingly claiming innovation for their research, while there was limited evidence of wholly new methodologies or research designs actually emerging (Wiles et  al., 2012): ‘What is claimed as “innovative” often relates to adaptations to existing methods or to the transfer and adaptation of methods from other disciplines’ (BengryHowell et al., 2011).

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There is nothing wrong with claiming innovative status for one’s research methods, as long as they open up paths to new kinds of knowledge in a given area of research, even if they are ‘merely’ adopted and/or adapted from another field. However, some of the innovative methods brought into digital media research in recent years are really new, not just innovative. The methods often labeled ‘big data analysis’, which monitor, track, or shadow users’ movements in the online universe, have never been seen or heard of before in the history of social research (see Chapter 34). They were not just not invented before the advent of digital computer-based media and apps – they could not have been invented before this moment in the history of technology, since they tap and exploit the very digital processes that are constitutive of digital media; they are ‘outputs in and of the operation of the system’ (Jensen, 2014: 229). Before the arrival on the methodological scene of big data, people’s (news) media consumption was largely invisible while happening (except for the tracking of television viewing with people meters invented in the 1980s). Researchers therefore had to set up various forms of research encounters in which people were asked to provide verbal accounts of their (news) media use, for registration, analysis and interpretation in quantitative or qualitative form. When big data technologies are programmed into people’s digital devices, their media use becomes digitally visible, as the methods automatically register ‘who did what, with what information, together with whom, when, for how long and in which sequences and networks’ (Jensen, 2014: 229). These digital traces left by people’s journeys through the digital landscapes can then be statistically aggregated and transformed into insights about digital traffic, and potentially be fed into clever algorithms that critically determine people’s likely future news diets. However, critics warn about the inherent reductionism of measuring web traffic and clicks, because

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‘news audiences are being reduced to quantifiable aggregates: herds or masses rather than creative individuals or groups’ (Heikkilä and Ahva, 2014). For examples and discussion of big data in news audience research, see Chapter 34. Alongside the methods that analyze big data, ‘virtual ethnography’, or ‘netnography’, also qualifies as a genuinely innovative method of audience research. Netnography exploits the fact that people’s interactions on social media leave textual traces, which audience researchers can then observe unobtrusively (Kozinets, 1998; Hine, 2000). Virtual ethnography is a method which adapts traditional ethnographic and reception analytical methods for the online analysis of spontaneously generated audience discourses about the gamut of topics from everyday life that people find it worthwhile to share and debate with others. Analyzing discussions on Twitter generated by news programs, reality TV and other media products Deller (2011) argues that the textual record left by Twitter users ‘offers media scholars […] a unique opportunity to witness ‘watercooler’ TV as it happens; to determine […] what it is that gets (some) audiences talking’ (Deller, 2011: 228; see also Graham and Harju, 2011). The key advantage of observing and analyzing people’s conversations and discussions on social media is that the data obtained in this manner is not framed and constructed by the researcher through the more or less artificial ‘speech event’ of the research encounter (Spradley, 1979). For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to highlight that neither big data approaches nor virtual ethnography allow us to capture the ways in which news audiences engage in cross-media fashion with the entire ensemble of news platforms and formats, which is not limited to digital platforms, but also comprises print and broadcasting media. To understand the navigational practices of selective audiences in the news media manifold we need to take the individual news user as our methodological point of departure.

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THE USER AS POINT OF DEPARTURE: A NON-MEDIA-CENTRIC, ­ CROSS-MEDIA PERSPECTIVE In their comprehensive study of young Italians’ lives with digital media, in which they use an array of traditional and new methods under the label of ‘connected ethnography’, Vittadini and Pasquali (2014) argue that audience research must begin with the users and their need to seek information and build social relations and networks in everyday life: it no longer makes sense to do research in which people are seen as ‘television viewers, moviegoers, music or radio listeners, internet users, etc.’ (Vittadini and Pasquali, 2014: 161). Instead, audience research should start from the premise that media use must be explored as a cross-media phenomenon (Schrøder, 2011; Bjur et al., 2014). Taking this argument one step further, it has also been argued that even if we are ultimately interested in exploring what people do with the media, our research designs should acknowledge that media are but one element in everyday life, and are often subordinated and auxiliary to more central pursuits. Therefore it often makes sense to adopt a non-media-centric approach to the analysis, which aims to ‘understand better the ways in which media processes and everyday life are interwoven with each other’ (Krajina et al., 2014: 683; See also Morley, 2009). The methodology described below approximates such a non-media-centric strategy. A genuine audience perspective on news consumption should therefore take its point of departure in the individual citizen-consumer’s everyday need for diverse informative and social resources across the entire news media landscape, and explore their practices and strategies for fulfilling this need: ‘Each medium has a set of distinct properties, while the specific role and use of any medium to some degree depends on the overall matrix of media available. You cannot analyse the role of any single medium independently of the overall matrix of media’ (Finnemann, 2008).

When coupled with the argument above about the cross-media limitations of digital tracking tools, it follows that in order to map the complex terrain of print, broadcast and online news consumption, one has to rely on research tools from the reservoir of well-tried conventional analytical social science methods: surveys, diaries, interviews, and focus groups (see Chapter 36; Schrøder, 2015).

MIXED METHODS FOR COMPLEMENTARITY OF INSIGHTS Many audience researchers are now adopting triangulating mixed-method designs, in which big data analysis is seen as complementary to insights obtained with traditional methods, in order to build complex understandings of people’s lives with the news. For instance, a knowledge interest to understand subjective user perspectives prompted Linaa Jensen and Sørensen (2014) to combine a nationwide survey, focus groups, and online virtual ethnography to study Facebook users. Mixed-method designs have also sometimes been used in direct opposition to big data methods, which are criticized for being unable to ‘capture the richness of the practices people use in living with the media’ (Heikkilä and Ahva, 2014: 11). Heikkilä and Ahva applied a wholly traditional methodological toolbox, and in non-media-centricfashion ‘started with people’ in the form of already existing work-based, interest-based, and leisure-based social networks whose members knew and saw each other regularly. In the research encounters they set up with the 74 participants they focused on ‘the openended variety of things people say and do in relation to media’ (Heikkilä and Ahva, 2014: 3) – a discursive wealth of data harvested over a year from nine audience groups, individual interviews, diaries, and a survey with 455 respondents. Their findings consisted in rich portraits of the media routines, the news

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interpretations, and the forms of public action inspired by the encounter of news discourses and people’s social network discourses, most of which took place in face-to-face situations. In the remaining pages of this chapter I shall present and discuss one specific mixed-method research project which seeks to improve our understanding of the crossmedia hybrid news media culture. It claims innovative potential in a strong sense: The Q-methodological study of news repertoires does not just apply different methods in a sequential, chronological manner, which has by now almost become ‘the new normal’ across the different areas of media research (Bryman, 2001; Jensen, 2002; Greene, 2007). The Q-methodological approach demonstrates how several methods can be integrated into one fieldwork research implement, with the ambition of obtaining greater explanatory power for the analytical findings about the ways in which news users build news media repertoires in everyday life. This chapter also outlines how the Q-methodological approach enables the pursuit of additional knowledge interests, as it incorporates a longitudinal dimension for studying news repertoires across time and the potential for crossnational comparison of news repertoires. Finally, the approach allows for the coupling of a qualitative analysis of news repertoires with a complementary survey analysis of the participants’ engagement and participation in interactions important for democracy – what Couldry et al. (2007) term citizens’ sense of ‘public connection’.

MAPPING THE CROSS-MEDIA LANDSCAPES OF NEWS CONSUMPTION: EXPLORING USERS’ NEWS MEDIA REPERTOIRES I now return to the opening section of this chapter, which portrayed a day in Kirsten Jensen’s life with the news media. The rest of this chapter is devoted to presenting and

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discussing a method that allows us to provide a detailed insight of user perspectives like Kirsten’s at the micro level. I discuss a methodological approach that allows us to (1) systematically trace individual news consumers’ subjective perceptions and evaluations of the available news media, and then (2) map the ways in which these perceptions guide each individual’s patterned selection of news media in the everyday context. Based on the similarities and differences between the individuals’ news media patterns, the method then (3) calculates the finite number of news repertoires that can be identified among the participants. Tracing the concept of ‘media repertoire’ back to Reagan (1996), Wolf and Schnauber (2014: 3) offer the following standard definition: ‘users select among media platforms and content providers many times a day, building stable media usage patterns which consist of regularly used media devices’. This definition sees a media repertoire as a constellation of media that belongs to an individual across the situations of everyday life (Hasebrink and Popp, 2006; Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012). Other researchers define a media repertoire as a location- and situation-bound media ensemble, which an individual may, and normally will, adopt when entering that location (such as in the home, the workplace, while commuting) (Taneja et  al., 2012). The study described below to illustrate the Q-methodology employed the definition that ascribes media repertoires to the individual across different situations. Within this approach to media repertoires, researchers can direct their attention to media technological platforms, media brands or content genres. For instance, interested in the role of mobile media technologies in user’s information repertoires, Wolf and Schnauber (2014) used cluster analysis of survey data to focus on the ways in which mobile users build information repertoires at the level of technological platforms (television, radio, newspaper, computer, and mobile devices).

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They identified six such information technology-related user repertoires in which mobile devices assume different degrees of importance in relation to the other media. To illustrate the way in which we can analyze media repertoires, I discuss a study that aimed to illuminate cross-media news media consumption with respect to technological platforms, types of institutional news provider, and different news genres. The news universe I asked the participants about in this study comprised the following news dimensions: •• News platforms: television, radio, printed newspapers, online news sites, social media, etc. •• News institutions: public service and commercial news media; ‘adopted-’ and born-online news media; morning and tabloid newspapers; national, regional and local news media; etc. •• News genres: primetime news broadcasts; current affairs TV and radio programs; online content genres: news sites, blogs, social media; etc.

I blended these three types of news dimensions, asking the participants about news phenomena that are familiar in their everyday vernacular, for instance ‘national TV news bulletin on a public service channel’, ‘radio current affairs as part of a general radio channel’, ‘local/regional daily printed newspaper’, ‘news on Facebook (news media’s Facebook platforms, and links to news media that you get in your own Facebook newsfeed)’ (see Appendix for the list of news media that was used in Denmark and 11 other countries). Because there is a limit to the number of elements participants can cognitively handle, I decided to include a maximum of 36 news sources for participants to address and did not distinguish between the different technological devices (computer, mobile phone, tablet) on which people may access online news, nor did I ask what device people had watched TV on, as that was not the interest of this particular study. However, these questions too, if researchers desire, can be included in a study on media repertoires.

Adopting a Q-methodological research design To access media repertoires we need to have an innovative methodology that allows us to capture the intertwined nature of media use. Here, I would like to put forward Q-methodology as an integrated mixed method that allows us insight into media repertoires in a unique and comprehensive manner. Practitioners of Q-methodology describe it as being concerned with ‘the scientific study of subjectivity’. It offers a way to ‘objectively describe viewpoints, experiences, and outlooks about life as lived from the standpoint of the person living it’ (Davis and Michelle, 2011: 562). In a Q-methodological study, the researcher gets the participants to respond on the basis of their subjective experience of the elements of a given discursive universe, such as their experience as employees of the management processes of a large health institution, or their perception of organic products (Stephenson, 1953; Brown, 1993; Rogers, 1995; Schrøder et  al., 2003). In the area of media studies the discursive universe could be people’s experience of the fictional world of a blockbuster film such as Avatar (Davis and Michelle, 2011), women’s perceptions of female advertising stereotypes (Popovich et al., 2000), or museum visitors’ experience of an art gallery exhibition (Kobbernagel, 2012). The discursive universe of a Q-methodological study (known as a ‘concourse’) is operationalized as a set of numbered cards, each with a statement about one aspect of the discursive universe. The total set of cards covers all significant aspects of the universe in question (such as the universe of news media). The research participants are given the task of sorting the cards on a pyramidal grid, placing the statements they ‘agree most’ with at the right-hand side of the grid and the ‘agree least’ cards at the leftmost side, and placing cards with statements they are neutral about in the middle region of the grid (for an illustration, see Figure 35.1).

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Figure 35.1  One participant’s completed Q-methodological grid

The columns of the grid have numerical values, for instance from +4 (right) to –4 (left), and zero in the middle column. By placing the cards on this patterned grid, each participant analyzes his or her subjective perception of the discursive universe being investigated. Each individual’s configuration of cards can thus be seen as his or her relational map of the study’s universe of meaning. This relationality is the key contrast to the answers to a traditional questionnaire, which could also be used to ask respondents about each of the statements in turn, which the Q-method puts on the cards. The relational map created by an individual on the grid thus reliably represents the cognitive picture of this individual’s thematic social world, in which everything is indeed structurally related to everything else. The added value of having the participants sort the cards on the grid comes from the factor analysis that can be carried out on the basis

of the numerical scores on the cards when coupled with the values carried by the grid columns (+4 to –4). This factor analysis compares the similarities and differences between all the participants’ card configurations and produces a typology of users whose card sorts are similar to each other and different from the other types of users. The shared configurations of perceptions of the discursive universe – in the context of this chapter: news media repertoires – can then be interpreted and related to the sociocultural context of the study.

Adapting Q-methodology for building repertoires of news consumption To employ the study of news consumption repertoires, the Q-methodological recipe needs to be adapted to fit the aims of the

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researchers, and in our example I adapted it to fit with an essentially qualitative form of fieldwork (See Box 35.1 for an overview of the research stages). Instead of simply starting the research encounter with handing a participant a stack of cards with statements to be sorted, which is the traditional way to do a Q-methodological study, I integrated the method into a narrative and conversational account of ‘a day in the life with the news media’, delivered in participants’ own words, facilitated by an interviewer.

Box 35.1 Q-methodology for news consumption analysis – the six-stage research design: 1. Defining the study’s discursive universe: producing cards with the news media categories and examples 2. News media cards = guide for conversational interview 3. The puzzle stage: participants individually negotiate card placement on the pyramidal grid and create their relational news universe 4. Factor analysis: participants’ individual patterns become news repertoires 5. Interpreting the news repertoires 6. Refining the news repertoires: analyzing the qualitative transcripts of the conversational interview

Q-methodology can be used to discover a range of media repertoires. In my research, I was interested in the connection between news and democratic life, and if participants did not by themselves mention this aspect, the interviewer would raise this specifically. In this way, we could gain insight into the use of (social) media for building public connection to democratic agendas (Couldry et al., 2007). Q-methodology can be integrated into different research designs, and it is important to carefully stage and integrate the method in the research design when combining. I started with half an hour of conversational interviewing, then the Q-methodology combined with the think-aloud method and ended with a short questionnaire to gauge their level of

engagement and participation in democratically important communicative interaction. In illustrating the methodology I will limit myself to explaining the design and aim of the Q-methodology. The participants, after the conversational interview, were handed a stack of 36 numbered cards. Each had a news source written on it as well as a number of well-known examples of news titles that illustrated the category in question. I asked the participants to place the cards, thinking-aloud while doing so, on a pyramid-shaped poster-grid in front of them. The poster had 36 slots arranged as a continuum from ‘Plays a role in my life’ to ‘Does not play a role in my life’ (see Figure 35.1). To ensure the reliability of the method, I concluded this part of the fieldwork by asking the participant to check the accuracy (that is, the validity) of their card sorting. The Q-methodology allows us to ask each participant to rank the relational importance of the various news media that are available to them in the national and international landscape of news: a participant thus accomplishes a self-analysis of his or her personal news universe. Moreover, by combining it with the other methods, most notably the think-aloud method adopted during the interview, I gained access to the subjective experience of news use. To understand these subjective experiences of news use in terms of news repertoires, I coded the individual scores per participant of news platforms, institutions and genres to allow for statistical analysis. Conducting a factor analysis, I was able to reliably calculate the patterns of similarities and differences between the participants’ news universes. This resulted in a finite number of factor-analytical patterns, which represent news consumption repertoires (for further details about the statistical and epistemological aspects of Q–methodological analysis, see Schrøder and Kobbernagel, 2010; Davis and Michelle, 2011; Kobbernagel and Schrøder, 2016). This factor-analytical

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typology offers great methodological gain as it provides a form of ‘fortified’ qualitative generalization that allows us to avoid the fallible-prone process of traditional qualitative generalization, which relies solely on the capacity of the researcher to distinguish between the similarities and differences among the participants’ many-layered discourses (Schrøder, 2012). In meta-methodological terms, this qualitative+quantitative Q-methodological analysis exemplifies the type of mixed method that Jennifer Greene (2007) calls ‘integrated design’. This is when two different methods are not just combined sequentially, but when the data produced with one method may affect the data produced with

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another, and is characterized by ‘the intentional interaction among different sets of data during the study’ (Greene, 2007: 144). Specifically, the Q-methodological form of integrated design exemplifies the transformation of one form of data (quantitative or qualitative) into another, so that the data can be analyzed together (Greene, 2007: 146). The typology arising from the Q-methodological analysis of the news preferences of the 36 participants in our research resulted in six clearly distinguishable news media repertoires. The analysis builds on each repertoire’s entire range of news sources, but is here illustrated by the top five news sources in each repertoire (see Box 35.2).

Box 35.2  Using Q-methodology in mixed-method design: News repertoires

The main five news sources used per repertoires: Repertoire 1: ‘Online quality omnivores’ Using only online sources: National quality newspaper online; Born-online news site; Public service broadcaster online; YouTube; International news provider online. Repertoire 2: ‘Hybrid public service lovers’ Using mainly public services sources: Public service radio news; Online public service news; National quality newspaper online; National public service TV; Public service text-TV. Repertoire 3: ‘(Light) news snackers’ Focusing on overview: Tabloid newspaper online; 24-hour TV news; National public service TV; News from Facebook; News on text-TV. Repertoire 4: ‘Mainstream networkers’ Supplementing use of online networks with traditional news media: National quality print newspaper; News from other social media; International TV news; National public service TV; News from Facebook. Repertoire 5: ‘The intellectual/professional networkers’ Combining social media and depth- and background media: News from Facebook; Radio current affairs; Professional magazines; TV serious current affairs; News on Twitter. Repertoire 6: ‘Print addicts’ Supplementing print media with TV news: Free daily print newspaper; National print newspaper; Local weekly print newspaper; Local daily print newspaper; National public service TV.

By showing the patterns of use, and the repertoires of a typology of news users, the Q-methodology allows us to tentatively point to some democratic affordances in the repertoires. For example all six repertoires show

the prominent role of public service media on TV and various other platforms (radio, online, teletext) for the daily news provision of Danish citizens. This finding corresponds with results from the four-continent study

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of Papathanassopoulos et  al., whose quantitatively derived eight-repertoire typology additionally included a correlation between news consumption and the audience’s knowledge of public affairs. They found ‘a clear association between the level of TV exposure and the level of hard news knowledge across countries. The more citizens watch TV, the better informed they seem to be’ (Papathanassopoulos et al., 2013: 8). Also, by sorting the variety of media platforms and sources, we gain insight into the ways in which people in the current media age mix and match, and it shows the prominence of certain media. In our study we found that four of the six repertoires include news from social media. The study does not tell us whether people get trivial or democratically weighty news via social media (see Bro and Wallberg, 2014), but recent survey-based research shows that social media bring people into contact with a more diverse news universe than they would otherwise have encountered (Newman et  al., 2015: 7). This shows how we need to combine different methods to be able to gain insight into the whole plethora of media used as well as the way in which types of news content are accessed. Our study showed how, combining the Q-methodology with interviews, we gained a rich and in-depth understanding of the repertoires. Here, we can listen to what the informants actually say about their everyday experience of their news diet. In this way verbalized thick description can be added to the more skeletal news media ranking produced by the factor analysis. For instance, one participant (from Repertoire 2) can be seen to cultivate her ‘public connection’ by combining extensive usage of public service platforms with the online versions of the big national newspapers: I think I have a relative fixed way of using news media. I use online media a lot. Obviously I’m really annoyed that you have to pay in order to read real news articles in most online newspapers. […] I used to watch quite a lot of TV news, I don’t think I do anymore. In the morning and in the afternoon

when we’re driving in our car, we listen to the radio flow on DR P1 [intellectual public service radio]. […] I like the way they take the time to discuss things, to explain things thoroughly, instead of merely giving headlines and conflict. […] At work I’m online all the time, so I consult DR online [public service online news], Politiken, Jyllandsposten and Berlingske [the three main national quality newspapers online] every day, but then I run into their paywalls. […] When something really happens somewhere in the world, then we watch a great deal of BBC, not so much CNN, but also Al Jazeera to some extent. (Repertoire 2, female, 54 years, university graduate)

This complementarity of the output from the quantitative factor analysis and the thick account of the conversational interview exemplifies another element of Greene’s integrated design mentioned above (2007). The analytical product of one form of data analysis (here the factor-analytical typology) can be brought in to structure the analysis of another form of data (here the transcribed discourse of the interviews and the think-aloud component). As with any method, the Q-methodological approach has its drawbacks. For instance, for some participants the pyramid grid feels as a straitjacket and as such does not do complete justice to their subjectively experienced news worlds. But, particularly when combining it with other methods, it allows us to have the best of both worlds, qualitative and quantitative. It allows us to translate qualitative data, which is richly contextualized in the informants’ life-worlds, into the standardized form of a generalized and reliable typology.

COUPLING NEWS REPERTOIRE ANALYSIS WITH CROSS-NATIONAL AND LONGITUDINAL PERSPECTIVES News repertoires and cross-national insights It is precisely the possibility of rigorous analytical generalization, in the form of reliably calculated news consumption repertoires, that

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the Q-methodological analysis offers which holds great potential for cross-national research (Courtois et  al., 2015). Crossnational comparisons are close to impossible in qualitative research, due to the obstacles of the transferability of verbal data in different languages, and to the strong contextual anchorage of its analytical findings (Livingstone, 2003). Q-methodology allows us to transcend these obstacles by standardizing the subjective and contextual experiences into a comparable format. Its comparative potential has been demonstrated in, for instance, Richard Robyn’s seven-country analysis of national and supranational identities across Europe (Robyn, 2005) and is currently being explored in a twelve-country Q-methodological study of news consumption.2 One of the main benefits of doing comparative cross-national research with this methodology is that it enables us to ‘de-naturalize’ the media picture, including the news consumption practices, found in any one country. Crossnational differences can show the extent to which citizens of different countries ‘territorialize’, or domesticate, the ‘same’ transcultural media technological innovations and culturalcommunicative developments in different ways (Hepp et al., 2015). These can be explained by incorporating the different national historical trajectories, cultural fabrics, and political regulations of the media sector, in short the different ‘media systems’ (Brüggemann et al., 2014; Perusko et al., 2015). This is an important consideration when using the Q-methodology for national comparison: You need to design a common set of news media cards for participants to sort but still do justice to the differences in media systems in the different countries. As such, in designing the comparison, researchers have to negotiate a common set of news media which have maximum fit across the participating countries’ media systems. In the twelvecountry study mentioned above, researchers came across the following challenges: •• Differences in use of social media: in all countries Facebook is a significant player for news, but

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Twitter shows more variation: for some countries, therefore, news from Twitter should be an independent category, while for others it could just be grouped under ‘other social media’. In the end it was decided to treat Twitter as an independent news media category. •• Differences in prominence of regional media: Some countries have a more regionalized media system than others, especially in the area of broadcasting, while others would be able to manage with cards about only national broadcastings. In the end it was decided to include a card with regional broadcasting, while in the area of newspapers the word ‘regional’ was added on the same card with national tabloid newspapers.

The negotiated compromise can be found in detail in the Appendix. When the analysis has produced a number of nation-specific news repertoires, they will lend themselves to a range of comparative foci. For instance, it will be possible to cast the spotlight on the ways in which selected news media categories figure in the different national repertoire systems, such as the role of public service media and social media across nations. The study will thus be able to add its repertoireoriented insights to the existing bulk of crossnational comparative research in the area, which usually takes the form of reporting aggregate figures for the use of significant news media (Papathanassopoulos et al., 2013; Nielsen and Schrøder, 2014; Helles et al., 2015). It will also be possible to take the national repertoire data beyond this kind of country-by-country comparison, by merging all the country data sets and performing a Q-methodological analysis of this complete transnational data set (Hepp, 2013: 140–1). The end result of such an analysis will be a transcultural set of repertoires – each made up of participants from several countries.

News repertoires and longitudinal insights Usually, studies of news media consumption present the reader with a snapshot of one particular moment in time. Faced with such

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‘synchronic’ findings it can be difficult to determine which insights are really salient, for instance whether a certain level of mobile news use is significant at this point in time. Nor does a synchronic analysis tell us in what direction things are moving and how the use of one news source may be related to the use of another. A longitudinal, or ‘diachronic’, analysis provides insight into an ongoing process of change, showing the direction and magnitude of the changes. A longitudinal analysis therefore equips us to better understand a news system as an ecological entity, populated by different species of news media (devices, cultural forms), and to assess the balance and sustainability of the system: Do ongoing changes strengthen or weaken the system’s ability to serve the functions we expect it to fulfill? The Q-methodological repertoire analysis also lends itself to longitudinal comparison, by mapping news repertoire complexes at different points in time. Because a Q–study of news repertoires was conducted in Denmark in 2009 (Schrøder and Kobbernagel, 2010) it is possible to compare its seven-repertoire picture with the six-repertoire picture of the 2014 study. When doing this, we should bear in mind that the news media landscape itself has changed during this time, and that the representation of the two landscapes in the form of news media cards for the Q-sort has therefore also undergone considerable transformations. In 2014 we asked participants about an expanded range of news sources of 36 items, while the 2009 set had 25 items. However, comparison is still possible: One systematic way to compare the 2009 and 2014 news preferences is to count the news media which appear in the two rightmost, visually distinguished slots on the grid (Figure 35.1). In this way we can show the aggregate occurrence of these most preferred news media among the participants. To illustrate the insights this can provide, I include here the top eight news media of all the participants in 2014 (Table 35.1) and 2009 (Table 35.2).

Such a longitudinal comparison using the Q-method allows us to gain insight in the continuities as well as the changes over time. In our research, for instance, it showed how national TV news continued to be perceived as the most personally relevant news medium across the repertoires. But, if we aggregate the three categories of online legacy news sources (quality newspaper, tabloid newspaper, public service online) like they were in the 2009 study, we can see how legacy online news providers in 2014 soars past TV news into first place. TV current affairs programs continued to be perceived as a significant news source in 2014, while radio news has been relegated from a clear second place to a lower rank. Teletext news, which used to provide a quick overview of the news agenda, has lost out to the online devices, which boasted a superior functionality. Through these examples of comparison, it becomes clear how the Q-method allows for an important comparative perspective, not only over individuals and countries, but also over time.

CONCLUSION: THE ADDED VALUE OF INTEGRATED MIXED METHODS DESIGNS This chapter has discussed the methods that audience researchers may use in order to map the ways in which ‘the people still known as the audience’ navigate in the news media manifold, and how they select and Table 35.1  The most preferred news media in Denmark 2014 1. National TV news 2. National quality newspaper online 3. News on/from Facebook 4. National quality print newspaper 5. TV current affairs serious 6. National tabloid newspaper online 7. Regional/local TV news 8. PSB Radio news

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Table 35.2  The most preferred news media in Denmark 2009 1. National TV news 2. Public service radio news 3. Newspapers and broadcasters online news 4. Current affairs TV (serious) 5. Text TV 6. National quality newspapers (print) 7. News from social media 8. 24-hour TV news and Free newspaper (print)

perceive their cross-media news repertoires. To this end I have outlined an innovative methodology that mixes methods from qualitative and quantitative toolboxes in integrative ways. I have argued that this is a strategy that adds new forms of explanatory power to our understanding of cross-media news consumption. It supplements what we know from research designs that apply a sequential combination of methodological tools, which has become the new normal of media research. It goes without saying that this integrated mixed method approach can easily and fruitfully be combined with the sequential strategy, but my argument here has been that the sequential strategy does not suffice to capture the breadth and depth of today’s media use patterns. The mixed-method approach, using truly innovative methodologies such as the Q-method introduced here, allows us to gain knowledge and insight beyond simple ‘use’ of media. The mixed-method approach integrating Q-method allows insight into the subjective experience of news users and does not simply address them as news consumers. Nor does it necessarily limit the research to their role and activities as citizens. The methodology discussed here, precisely, is aimed at doing justice to the many roles that the audience takes on, including that of consumer and citizen (see Chapter 21). With this chapter I have aimed to contribute to a spirit of methodological experimentation and sophistication, which is necessary

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for mapping and understanding the ways in which citizens and consumers make sense of their lives in a mediatized society and understand news use in contextual and comparatively meaningful ways.

NOTES  1  Kirsten’s story of her life with the news is the author’s account based on a true story, harvested as one of 40 qualitative interviews about news consumption in July–September 2014, at various locations in Denmark. The chapter’s introduction borrows its fictional style from the introduction of Herman Bausinger’s seminal 1984 article about audience ethnography (Bausinger, 1984).  2  This project is directed by Israeli media scholars Hanna Adoni and Hillel Nossek.

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Audience and Reception Studies, 9(2): 798–825. Schrøder, Kim Christian (2015) ‘Reception analysis’, in Gianpietro Mazzoleni (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, New York: John Wiley. Schrøder, K.C., Drotner, K., Kline, S. and Murray, C. (2003) Researching Audiences: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media Audience Analysis. London: Edward Arnold. Schrøder, K.C. and Kobbernagel, Christian (2010) ‘Towards a typology of cross-media news consumption: A qualitative–quantitative synthesis’, Northern Lights: Yearbook of Film and Media Studies, 11: 115–37. Spradley, James (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Stephenson, W. (1953) The Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taneja, Harsh, Webster, James G., Malthouse, Edward C., and Ksiazek, Thomas B. (2012) ‘Media consumption across platforms: identifying user-defined repertoires’, New Media & Society, 14(6): 951–68.

Vittadini, Nicoletta and Pasquali, Francisca (2014) ‘Virtual shadowing, online ethnographies and social networking studies’, in Geoffroy Patriarche et al. pp. 160–73. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin (2006) ‘Mediated citizenship: An introduction’, Social Semiotics, 16(2): 197–203. Webster, James (2014) The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wiles, Rose, Bengry-Howell, Andrew, Nind, Melanie, and Crow, Graham (2012) ‘Methodological innovation: Uptake, impact and response’, National Centre for Research Methods, University of Southampton. Presentation to the COST conference Audience/Society Transformations, Facultés Universitaire Saint-Louis, Brussels, April 12–14. Wolf, Cornelia and Schnauber, Anna (2014) ‘News consumption in the mobile era: The role of mobile devices and traditional journalism’s content within the user’s information repertoire’, Digital Journalism. doi:10.1080/ 21670811.2014.942497

APPENDIX: THE NEWS MEDIA UNIVERSE OF THE 2014 STUDY IN 12 COUNTRIES

Radio news or current affairs (on a radio set or any other technical device or on the Internet)

TV news or current affairs (on a TV set or any other technical device) 1. National TV news bulletin on a public service channel (live or delayed) 2. National TV news bulletin on a commercial channel (live or delayed) 3. Regional/local TV news bulletin (live or delayed) 4. TV current affairs (analysis, debates, TV news magazines), light (live or delayed) 5. TV current affairs, serious (live or delayed) 6. TV news and/or current affairs on national 24-hour TV news channel 7. TV news and/or current affairs from foreign/ international providers (including 24-hour TV news channels; aimed at international audiences or national audiences in other countries) 8. News on Text-TV

  9. Radio news as part of a general public service radio channel (national, regional, international 10. Radio news as part of a general commercial radio channel (national, regional, international) 11. Radio current affairs as part of a general radio channel and/or 24 hour radio news/information channel (national, regional, international)

Printed newspapers and news magazines 12. National daily quality newspaper, print (including specialized dailies) 13. National (Germany: ‘or regional’) daily tabloid newspaper, print 14. Free daily newspaper, print 15. National news magazines or weekly quality newspaper, print (news magazines mentioned first) 16. Local/regional daily newspaper, print 17. Local weekly/bi-weekly/monthly news publications, print

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Newspapers and broadcasters’ online text multimodal news (apps included) 18. National quality newspaper online (any: computer, mobile device)(including specialized) 19. National (Germany: ‘or regional’) tabloid newspaper online (any: computer, mobile device) 20. Free daily newspaper online (any: computer, mobile device) 21. National news magazines or weekly quality newspaper, online 22. Local/regional daily newspaper online (any: computer, mobile device) 23. Local weekly/bi-weekly/monthly, online (any: computer, mobile device) 24. National (Germany: ‘or regional’) public service broadcaster’s online news 25. National (Germany: ‘or regional’) commercial broadcaster’s online news 26. International news providers’ online news (BBC, New York Times, Al Jazeera, Guardian, etc.)

News on social media 27. News on Facebook (news media’s Facebook platforms, and links to news media that you get in your own Facebook newsfeed) (any: computer, mobile device) 28. News on Twitter (news media’s Twitter platforms, and links to news media that you get in your own Twitter newsfeed) (any: computer, mobile device)

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29. News on other social media (news media’s platforms in this social media, and links to news media that you get in your own newsfeed in this social media) (any: computer, mobile device) (examples: LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) 30. News as you know it from ‘the news media’ distributed by online video sharing media (examples: YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) 31. Blogs with news (by journalists or ordinary people) (any: computer, mobile device)

Other news media 32. News as you know it from ‘the news media’ received by email or SMS 33. Professional and party-political magazines (trade union magazines, professional associations’ magazines) 34. News via news aggregators, personalized news services, or news portals (Google News, Flipboard, etc.) 35. News from born-online news media (Huffington Post, etc.) 36. National, regional or international news online, not provided by media (e.g. national or local government, parties, NGOs, EU, Unesco, Greenpeace, etc.)

36 Practicing Audience-centred Journalism Research Irene Costera Meijer

But we must remember that the finger pointing to the moon remains a finger and under no circumstances can it be changed into the moon itself. (D.T. Suzuki, 1949)

Tacit knowledge and imagery about audiences are embedded in journalistic routines, the news product, storytelling conventions and news values (DeWerth-Pallmeyer, 1997). Although these working theories or implicit understanding of audiences govern and guide media professionals (McQuail, 1983), they are still seldom properly examined. Prompted by the crisis in the newspaper industry and the emergence of new digital platforms and devices for the distribution of journalism, there has been growing interest in audience research within the field of Journalism more recent reference is the English version of the Dutch report (Welbers et.al, 2015). Studies albeit with contradictory outcomes. Web metrics for instance, show how users’ news interests apparently focus more on junk news than on important news (Anderson 2011; Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013; Welbers

et.al, 2015). Yet, using quantitative content and ratings data Rosenstiel et  al. (2007) pointed out how such assumptions that govern TV news content are patently wrong. In this chapter I suggest that journalism scholars’ and practitioners’ limited and sometimes even derogatory repertoire about user practices is the result of a deeply ingrained newsroom and media centricity of journalism studies, even when they investigate audiences (cf. Costera Meijer 2010; 2013a, 2013c). What is needed is a strong audience- and user-centered perspective, one that enables us to deal methodologically and conceptually with the complexities involved in changing news use. A richer vocabulary will have to take us beyond jaded contradictions between quality and popularity, professionalism and amateurism, autonomy and commerce, old media and new media. To change the media and newsroom centricity of Journalism Studies, it is crucial to allow room for doubt. Emphasizing doubt as central to research is unusual in academia and

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journalism. Most academics want to be sure of things and focus on validation as core principle for trustworthy statements, while journalists’ credibility is based on the audience’s trust that journalists are telling the truth (Kohring and Matthes 2007; Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007). Precisely because truth and trust are essential values in journalism and journalism studies, integrating the role of doubt in our research process is vital. If we really want to open up our research to include user practices, I suggest we follow the suggestion of Locke et al. (2008) that truth and trust will potentially materialize only when it is possible to subject both to genuine questioning. In my proposal to take doubt seriously as an integral part of our investigations, ‘doubt’ does not feature as an existential, philosophical category. What I want to bring up is the bodily feeling of ‘uneasiness’ (Locke et al. 2008: 909) that we tend to ignore, not only because we are used to thinking about journalism and research in terms of processes of verification, but also because it takes time to pay attention and because it gives rise to physical discomfort. If we want to honor truth and trust we should listen to these everyday feelings of doubt. When doubt manifests itself as gnawing bodily experience, it may well be a sign that something is not quite right. Only after we learn to value doubt as a sign that tells us we need to critically examine our beliefs and practices, we may be able to alter them. Emphasizing the value of doubt in truthseeking processes does not mean that truth does not exist or should be found somewhere in the middle. Nor do I want to suggest that researchers make light of the truth. On the contrary, they take the truth so seriously that those who read journalism or journalism research should be able to base their actions and thinking on it. The integration of doubt in our research protocol will make us more truthfully and more sensitive to indications that our ways of understanding and acting might not be working, which in turn may cause us to alter our approach. To counter the newsroom and media centricity of journalism scholars,

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simply adding audience research either qualitatively or quantitatively is not enough, as I will show in the following section. The second section introduces the concept of requisite variety as starting-point for good journalism research, which refers to choosing a varied set of methods to match the complexity of the investigated phenomenon. Honoring the complexity of news user practices requires us to allow doubt into the research process in combination with the use of research strategies like triangulation, crystallization and thick description. Decentering the newsroom in Journalism Studies also has consequences for journalism ethics. The third and final section of this chapter deals with the question of what changes when existing ethical conceptions of good journalism – sincerity and accuracy – and relatively new ones like transparency and accountability, good listening and hospitality are investigated not in relation to content or to professional or organizational principles and procedures, as is customary, but in relation to the audiences or users of journalism.

SOME LIMITATIONS OF DOMINANT AUDIENCE RESEARCH METHODS IN THE DIGITAL AGE In this section I will explore some limitations of dominant quantitative and qualitative research approaches that illustrate how merely adding audience studies is not sufficient to counter the newsroom centricity of Journalism Studies. How people use news is often traced with eye-tracking methods, online traffic measurements, ratings and clicks on news sites. What we cannot deduce from these methods is what ‘use’ means for people in particular contexts. With eye-tracking, the intensity of the track might suggest the reader finds some particular heading more or less important, but it might also mean that she is just curious about the formulation of a particular heading. Similarly, ratings may show that people are logged in as

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viewers, but they do not disclose their level of concentration (they might be cooking dinner at the same time) or their appreciation (they might be watching the news because they want to kill time). The following examples will illustrate how paying attention to news is not equivalent to finding it important or even having an interest in it. And vice versa, the absence of attention for a particular issue does not necessarily indicate that people have no interest in it, as I will show later. Neither does high frequency of contact necessarily indicate a strong interest. Still, measuring interest or value through frequency or attention is a common research practice.

Measuring actual news use? Recently web metrics are seen as more reliable than surveys or diaries to measure actual news use (Tewksbury 2003; Lee, Lewis and Powers 2014; Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013; Welbers et al., 2015). Because people’s online clicking behavior is seen as the equivalent of selecting a news program on TV it is interpreted as a measure of their interests. News organizations and journalists who want to become more responsive to news users’ preferences are tempted to take these clicks as a directive to their professional news selection and presentation (Anderson 2013). Web metrics, however, suggest that news readers are in essence primarily interested in junk news (= 60 percent of their clicks), giving rise to the concern that an increased audience responsiveness might lead to a trivialization of news, which in turn will endanger our democratic society, as argued by Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) and Tandoc and Thomas (2015). They suggest news organizations should stick to their own criteria of news selection and conclude: do not give people what they want (trivial news), but what they need (important news). Yet, insights that result from tracing and comparing over a period of ten years what news use actually means as part of everyday

life problematize this one-to-one equation of clicking, watching, checking or listening with singling out the news items people are interested in (Costera Meijer 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2013a, 2013c; Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2014). Our investigations of various news user practices suggest that people click, check or scroll over news for a variety of reasons. More importantly, most people value being regularly updated about important news developments. They do so by simply scanning, scrolling or checking the headlines (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2016). These online news user practices however are still untraceable by news organizations because they do not involve any clicking.

Using creative methods? Becoming aware of the complexities of news consumption is reason for some scholars to have more faith in qualitative research methods. For example, Laura Ellingson (2009) and David Gauntlett (2005, 2007) encourage researchers to search for creative methods – such as storytelling, painting, poetry-writing, photography, or making Lego-installations to open up the truths of complex research phenomena. The contradictory research results we were confronted with when investigating young people’s (lack of) interest in news (Costera Meijer 2006, 2007, 2008) occasioned our use of creative methods. On the one hand quantitative ratings studies implied that young people tended to ignore the news, even later in life. Yet, surveys, street interviews and diary methods reassured scholars that news was still important and necessary and that young people followed the news more as they were growing older (see, for example, Gauntlett and Hill 1999). Using mood boards seemed an appropriate method to make sense of this incongruity. A mood board is a type of collage consisting of images, text, and samples of objects meant to visualize a concept, idea, thought or feeling (McDonagh et  al. 2002).

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According to Gauntlett (2007), creative methods offer a positive challenge to the taken-for-granted idea that you can explore the social world just by asking people questions: people think about things differently when making something, using their hands – it leads to a deeper and more reflective engagement. We asked 37 sophomores in communication science to compose a mood board about ‘good or quality journalism’. In spite of having read several texts about the social relevance of popular journalism, the students’ mood boards (and their written explanations) revealed how their notion of news was overdetermined by particular associations. One exemplary mood board showed a picture of a couple of businessmen in grey suits in front of a window high above the world (see Figure 36.1). Quality news is identified with references to the public broadcasters (the British BBC1, BBC2 and Dutch public broadcasting news organization

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NOS News), while the regional news program of a Dutch commercial broadcaster, Editie NL, was considered not to count as quality and its logo was crossed out on the mood board. On this particular mood board, we could furthermore find small pictures of an airplane and of an island, which denoted their idea of a ‘quality’ perspective of the news: from above and from a distance. The byline furthermore indicated that the smiling male news presenter on the right should be serious. Last, this exemplary mood board, according to its byline, compared news to a boring professor who made you fall asleep. All 37 mood boards illustrated how young adults (ages 20–25) found themselves trapped in the dilemma of popular news (which they liked but did not consider real news) versus quality journalism (which was sleep provoking, but the real thing) which I subsequently named the ‘paradox of popularity’ (Costera Meijer 2006; 2007).

Figure 36.1  Mood board about ‘What is good, quality news?’ (Costera Meijer 2006: 34)

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The mood boards illustrate the value of creative research methods. They allowed us to see that both the results from quantitative and from qualitative research were true. Popular news was viewed in a way as fun to watch and they did watch it (measured by ratings), but it was also a genre beneath their dignity: not serious enough to be considered genuine journalism and thus disqualified as ‘news’. Similarly, they regarded serious news as important and in itself worth seeing or reading, but it was also ‘grey’, dull, and boring and thus - as the ratings indicated – seldom actually watched or read. Nevertheless, as measured by surveys, diaries, and interviews, it should not change because change could result in loss of reliability. The mood boards also enabled us to see that young adults’ relation to news could change. When confronted with a similar question – visualizing their experience of well-made journalism – the class of 2014 no longer showed signs of being trapped inside the dilemma of popular journalism versus quality journalism. Unlike the class of 2004, the class of 2014 had no hesitations in selecting pictures for their mood boards that referred to celebrity news, sports news or fashion news as journalism genres they enjoyed. But they also selected news about topics like politics, or the ongoing war in the Middle East. ‘News’ was no longer limited to a particular narrow ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ genre, as was the case in 2004. Presented as a ‘pin it’ collection of a wide variety of news items depicting serious, personal, gossip and music all in one platform, for instance, the recent take on news of our informants gave way to a much broader spectrum of topics and presentation modes. My initial conclusion was that the paradox of popularity had been solved in ten years. Young adults’ actual news interests as in their scope of what counted as news had converged. And yet, something gnawed. Taking my sense of doubt seriously, I compared young

people’s take on news with what journalism itself offered as news, with a remarkable result. Young adults’ broader definition of news in 2014 turned out to reflect the much wider professional news selection even of socalled quality news organizations. We only need to visit the front page of mainstream news organizations at any given moment to see this point illustrated: we will encounter a mixture of the personal, serious, national, and international news. Moreover, new categories of news, such as the label of ‘remarkable news’, absent in 2004, now appears as an appropriate category in online news by public broadcasters and quality newspapers alike. Unexpectedly, these findings suggest that young people’s personal imagination of news did not so much reflect their (italic) changing experience of excellent journalism. Apparently it reflected how professional (It) news conventions had changed in ten years. As such, what this illustrates confirms Buckingham’s (2009) reservations about the use of visual or creative methods as ways to get direct insight into people’s personal preferences and experiences.

REQUISITE VARIETY: OPENING UP THE RESEARCH AGENDA OF JOURNALISM STUDIES The above-mentioned research experiences suggest that if we are to understand the contradictions, practices, and ambivalent evaluations involved in actual news use, it is crucial to problematize claims from single-method research (either qualitative or quantitative). This is not only important in an academic sense, but also because media justify their policies and their financial and personal investments on the basis of these studies. A startingpoint for good research, which incorporates room for doubt, is the principle of requisite variety (Ashby 1956). Sarah Tracy (2010: 841) refers to requisite variety as ‘the need for

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a tool or instrument to be at least as complex, flexible, and multifaceted as the phenomena being studied’. The digitalization, globalization, and increasingly participatory character of journalism and media demand equally complex research approaches. How we should deal with these complexities will be exemplified by some methodological approaches triangulation, thick description and crystallization in actual Journalism Studies.

Doubt and triangulation: matching complexity Dealing productively with multi-layered audience experiences requires researchers to match them with an appropriate strategy. A useful approach is triangulation, broadly defined by Denzin (1978: 291) as ‘the combination of methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon’. The metaphor is derived from navigation that uses three reference points to locate an object’s position. Denzin (1989) distinguishes four types of triangulation: a) data triangulation (the use of a variety of sources in a study), b) investigator triangulation (use of several different researchers), c) theory triangulation (use of multiple perspectives to interpret the results of a study), and d) methodological triangulation (use of multiple methods to study a research problem). This approach promises to compensate for the weaknesses in each single method by the counterbalancing strengths of another. Researchers can improve the accuracy of their judgments and validate and deepen their research by using different types of triangulation and thus collecting different kinds of data bearing on the same research phenomenon. Triangulation is also a very useful protocol to follow up on one’s doubts about one-method research results. Pew Research Center, famous for its probability-based surveys on the impact of digitalization on the consumption of journalism, is valuable as

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opinion research, yet it does not give us insight into how people actually use digital journalism. For instance, we doubted whether Pew’s conclusion about the widely spread need for personalized news (Purcell et al. 2010) would be confirmed in actual user practices. Was the availability of the technology to customize one’s news sufficient reason to make use of it? To investigate this claim, Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer (2014) triangulated (1) an international inventory of the existing options for tailoring news with (2) in-depth interviews with (chief) editors and policymakers about their considerations regarding offering or withholding these options for personalized news with (3) 24 in-depth interviews with news users who represent a wide spectrum. Finally, the frequency of the user patterns were checked in a survey (N=270). In the user interviews we applied several creative methods which included the drawing of their ideal news site (cf. Gauntlett 2007), the thinkaloud protocol (van den Haak et  al. 2007), ranking exercises (Watts and Stenner 2005), and sensory ethnography (Pink 2009). In line with Purcell et al. (2010), our informants stated they liked to personalize news, in particular when news became a source of irritation to them (for example, sports news). However, when applying the synchronous think-aloud protocol to track their actual news use in real time, we signalled a marked difference between what users say they want and what they actually do. It appeared far easier to scroll over less interesting news items than to change smartphone, tablet or laptop settings. In contrast with the results of Purcell et al. (2010), the user patterns found, and whose frequency was subsequently checked through a survey, demonstrated that the vast majority of users simply took the format and content of news sites and news apps for granted. They did not want to miss out on important or interesting news (whatever the topic) and when not interested in particular news items or news genres, they simply skipped them. Usually, it required too much

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of an effort to change settings in order not to have to see particular news anymore. Data triangulation in combination with methodological triangulation offered us a more complex and richer truth of what was postulated on the basis of a single-method study.

Doubt and crystallization: decentring the newsroom When in doubt, triangulation is not the only strategy and it may not even be the most appropriate one. As a method of establishing completeness, it is critiqued by Richardson (2000a; 2000b), who argues that our world has more than three dimensions. She dismissed a fixed position that can be triangulated and moved from geometry to light theory, proposing that we should not triangulate but crystallize. In contrast to triangulation the goal of crystallization is not to provide researchers with a more valid singular truth, but to open up a more complex, indepth, but still thoroughly partial understanding of the issue (cf. Tracy 2010). In hindsight, our above-mentioned study of users’ need for personalizing news sites might count as crystallization rather than triangulation. Not only did we use more research angles than three, it was also not the intention to find a single truth. Even though the respondents confirmed Pew’s claim that they would very much like to personalize their news, in everyday practice they took the news supply and mobile format for granted; some because they did not want to miss out on things, others because it was too much of an effort to change the settings of the application. Using crystallization as research strategy urges us to reflexively examine the various lenses of Journalism Studies. ‘Crystallization, without losing structure, deconstructs the traditional idea of “validity” (we feel how there is no single truth, we see how texts validate themselves), and crystallization provides us with a deepened, complex, thoroughly partial,

understanding of the topic. Paradoxically, we know more and doubt what we know’ (Richardson 2000b: 934). What we see depends upon our angle of repose. Following Tracy and Trethewey (2005) I suggest that their notion of ‘crystallized selves’ might also encourage researchers to investigate different ‘languages of the self’. To make sense of new citizen journalism practices and identities, crystallization helps to study the truth effects created by the real journalist versus lay journalist dichotomy. This is important, not because there are necessarily true differences between professional and citizen journalists, ‘but because people talk and act as if there are’ (Tracy and Threthewey, 2005: 170). From this perspective, simply assuming a clear cut difference between citizen journalists and professional journalists, might obscure how some community reporters often working 20–40 hours a week, in addition to having a regular fulltime job explicitly distance themselves from being called citizen journalists. They do not want to be associated with mainstream journalism which is criticized for habitually spicing up and dramatizing their community (Costera Meijer 2013b; 2013c). Their own stories, so they argued, are more objective, more independent and more honest than the professional ones, because ‘we do not have to earn a living with journalism and we do not have to get high ratings or make a name for ourselves’ (Costera Meijer 2013b: 230). Crystallization with its emphasis on various languages of the self makes it easier to move beyond the concepts and logics – the control – of ‘boundary work’ in journalism (Lewis, 2012). While this scholarly tradition works out well to trace changes in what counts as journalism and who counts as a journalist, it has trouble recognizing a journalistic reality outside the newsroom. If we want to really understand the dynamics of new and changing practices of journalism, concerns about legacy journalism might still serve as starting-point, but they may no longer function as a given or as the central angle of investigation (Borger et al. 2013).

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When using doubt as starting-point of research, triangulation appears as an appropriate strategy to create a multi-layered, stable and better informed truth about a particular object. Crystallization appears as a useful instrument to allow for several truths, because the object changes along with the angle of the research. Both research strategies encourage us to look for vocabularies and methodologies that help us honor, understand, and deconstruct complexity.

Sensitizing concepts: Attention for the particularity of experience Apart from research protocols that optimize our potential for doubt, to make sense of audiences’ and users’ experiences of news and journalism it is crucial to search for a richer vocabulary. In this light, I would like to draw on Dening (1993), Young (2000) and Geertz (1994) who argue for attention to concrete detail or particularity of experience. This can be gained through qualitative research concepts like thick description (Denzin 1989; Geertz 1994) and listening (O’Donnell et  al. 2009) or protocols like actor-network theory (Domingo et  al. 2015; Latour 2011, see chapter 27). These concepts and procedures facilitate researching how people experience news as part of their everyday life. Denzin’s adaptation of Geertz’s ‘thick description’ offers a useful concept for scholars who want to study media users’ crystallized practices. As he notes: A thick description … does more than record what a person is doing. It goes beyond mere fact and surface appearances. It presents detail, context, emotion, and the webs of social relationships that join persons to one another. Thick description evokes emotionality and self-feelings. It inserts history into experience. It establishes the significance of an experience, or the sequence of events, for the person or persons in question. In thick description, the voices, feelings, actions, and meanings of interacting individuals are heard. (Denzin 1989: 83)

An example of studying the particularity of user experience is our aforementioned

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analysis of clicking and not clicking on particular news items in news apps and on news websites (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2014; Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer, 2016). By engaging our 56 research participants in different forms of qualitative research, such as sensory ethnography and the think-aloud protocol, we were able to come up with a thicker description of users’ online news behavior. The participants included younger users (ages 20–35) and older users (ages 50–65), as well as light and heavy digital news users, and early adopters and late adopters. Like Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013), we found a gap between what journalists consider important and the news items users click on. Yet, studying the particularity of their user experience showed how people’s personal browsing behavior instead of their clicking patterns appears to be far more representative of their news interests.

Valuable journalism: resonance of or resonance in? Truly understanding the impact of the digitalization of journalism, demands a more comprehensive toolbox than ratings, shares, or clicks. An investigation of what people do with journalism or why and how they use and value it, will need a richer vocabulary to discuss journalism’s quality and impact. One example of such attempt is the introduction of the notion of valuable journalism which aims at replacing the central focus in Journalism Studies from the quality of the content and the quality of the production circumstances to the quality of the user experience (Costera Meijer 2013a). What kinds of stories make you lean forward? Which journalism do you still remember as having had an impact on your ways of thinking? What form of journalism angers you, makes you feel bored or makes you enthusiastic to change something? What forms of journalism widens or deepens your imagination?

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Usually, the value of journalism for its users is assessed in terms of effect or impact (cf. the critical overview of effect studies by Gauntlett 2005). In this context, Michael Schudson (1989) introduced five useful dimensions to measure the cultural potency of journalism: retrievability, rhetorical force, resonance, institutional retention and resolution. Basic points of reference for cultural potency are whether and how much the journalistic product is findable, changes discourse, resonates, is supported by institutions and results in lasting changes. These questions focus on the resonance of the product. Less attention has been given to questions related to resonance in the users: for instance, what does getting bored, being shaken or being surprised mean to them? The distinction between resonance of and resonance in is important here, because it suggests two different reference points: the cultural product or the users/audiences. In Schudson’s journalism-centered analysis of cultural potency, what counts is the impact of journalism on society and its members. In a user-centered analysis what counts is what happens in the user when he or she is involved in a particular user practice. Unlike the studies putting ‘quality journalism’ central stage, using the concept of valuable journalism as starting point of research encourages a focus on variety and embeddedness of user practices (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2014). The hundreds of users we interviewed over the last ten years differentiated between ease of use, platforms, time of day, context, particular circumstances, and information needs in their evaluation of journalism. When they described their news experiences, these ranged from lean back to lean forward, having something to talk about or just killing time, and from a wish to truly understand something to informing others or habitually checking what’s new. Eventually they labeled their news practices in terms of 16 verbs: reading, watching, viewing, listening, checking, snacking, monitoring, scanning, searching, clicking, linking, sharing,

liking, recommending, commenting, and voting. Because the value of journalism was not automatically linked to a particular genre, ethical values, content or production practices, what became visible is how all 16 news practices could be valuable for users depending on time, space, platform availability and context. Broadening our research horizon can in this way do more justice to the complexity of news use. This is also important for journalists who often experience professional attention for resonance in users as pressure to please and attract a wider audience either by simplifying their work or by feeling compelled to make journalism more entertaining (Langer 1998; Ytreberg 2001).

Voice, lurking or listening? In reflections of researchers and journalists on democracy and journalism they tend to conflate participation in journalism with voice and speech (Bakker 2013; Karaganis 2007; Bruns 2008). From a journalism perspective, this makes sense because measuring the degree of online participation on a scale from merely ‘consuming’ to actually ‘contributing’ content, resembles a familiar distinction between users and producers of journalism. Reasoning from an audience point of view, O’Donnell et  al. (2009: 423) criticized such an analysis of mediated communication because it is solely modeled on a politics of expression – speaking up and out, finding a voice, making oneself heard, and so on. To canvass issues of dialogue and meaningful interaction in the context of journalism, they introduced the concept of ‘listening’ as counterpart to the notion of ‘voice’. Practices of listening as distinctive activities (rather than as a passive mindset) have largely been ignored in Journalism Studies. Passively consuming news, without actively commenting on it, sharing it or adding to it, is sometimes derogatorily called freeloading, or ‘lurking’. Crawford (2009) explains why and how the term ‘lurking’ has hampered

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our experience and understanding of online participation: For example, in the Internet research of the 1990s, lurkers – meaning those who prefer to inhabit the margins of debates, rarely or never contributing in public – were commonly defined as non-participants online. … Rather than freeloading, lurkers are actively logging in and tracking the contributions of others; they contribute a mode of receptiveness that encourages others to make public contributions … They directly contribute to the community by acting as a gathered audience: neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but listening (even if distractedly). (2009: 527)

The inclusion of listening as a concept for online activity and online attention will not only free us from the critical overtones of ‘lurking’ and enrich our vocabulary of online journalism with a user perspective, it also allows researchers to see how communication can only take place when and if someone listens (Dobson 2014). Without listening, voice and speech become meaningless. Fundamental to our understanding of digital journalism is acknowledging the importance and value of listening next to voice as key practices in the digital era.

INCLUDING A USER PERSPECTIVE IN JOURNALISM ETHICS When calling for a user-centered approach to journalism, we need to specifically call to attention the lack of this perspective in the realm of journalism ethics. The angle of the user or audience is virtually absent in this domain, even in specialist handbooks about mass media ethics (Wilkins and Christians 2009), news and journalism (Allan 2010) or online journalism ethics, save for professionally managing audience participation (Friend and Singer 2007; Zion and Craig 2015). What do we gain when ethical reflection moves beyond a professional angle and includes audience perspectives? Let us focus on relatively new ethical strategies, such as

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transparency and accountability, which according to journalism scholars imply a more active role for audiences and users. Deuze (2005: 455) refers to transparency as the new key word for ‘the increasing ways in which people both inside and external to journalism are given a chance to monitor, check, criticize and even intervene in the journalistic process’. De Haan and Bardoel (2011) discuss how accountability encourages news organizations to develop forms of listening to and connecting with the public. In both truthand trust-seeking strategies – transparency and accountability – the role of users in journalism becomes more prominent compared to strategies like objectivity (related to journalistic texts) or trustworthiness (related to news organizations). This section will deal with the question of what happens if these values are studied from an audience point of view.

Truth and trust, sincerity and transparency The digitalization of journalism-enabled news organizations to become more open about the making process of news. By being more transparent, journalists might (re-) establish trust with their audiences. Hayes, Singer and Ceppos (2007) suggest it might even be essential for the survival of journalism in the digital age. Transparency has been called the buzz word in journalism ethics (Ward 2001), and it is reputed to replace objectivity as the number one value of journalism. In journalism practice, it is widely assumed that the public and democracy will benefit from transparency. Transparency is also expected to encourage the dialogue between journalists and the public (Nemeth and Sanders 2001). The ‘transparent newsroom’, for instance, is seen as an instrument ‘to foster conversations between journalists and citizens’, as opposed to the ‘fortress newsroom’ (Smith 2005: 44). Tracy (2010) considers honesty and authenticity with one’s audience as essential. A journalist is sincere

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if and when she shares with her audience the steps she has taken and why these were important or necessary. According to these scholars, this kind of reflexivity or reflexive accountability may help the audience to judge and make sense of the significance of their contributions. However, when transparency is investigated from an audience’s perspective, a different light is shed on these claims (Doeve and Costera Meijer 2013). In research we conducted, we started with 19 in-depth interviews to find out about people’s understanding of transparency and included an exercise in which we let them rank transparency in relation to other news values like reliability and objectivity (see Figure 36.2). In line with scholarly expectations, some respondents loved being informed about the production of news items, preferably in real time, through hyperlinks, tweets from journalists or alternative sources. They also experienced regular

updates as signs of trustworthiness of news. However, the bulk of the participants in our study, including the ones who had trouble understanding the concept of transparency itself, did not experience transparency as a positive value. They preferred to hold on to the ‘magic’ or ‘finished’ quality of news. Getting or expecting updates all the time meant you could never be sure when the news you read represented the ‘full story’ and could therefore be trusted. When the distribution of the user experiences of transparency was checked through a survey (N=270), only a fraction experienced the increasing transparency of the newsgathering process as increasing the reliability of news. Research which takes the perspective of audiences seriously can bring forth unexpected results: while academics are unanimously positive about the value of transparency for audiences, it was far less appreciated (if at all) by the majority of the news users themselves.

Figure 36.2  Reliability (betrouwbaar) as primary value 1 and ‘transparancy’ on place 5 and 7

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Accuracy, hospitality and good listening The above mentioned ranking exercise also suggests the increased importance of reliability at the expense of objectivity (see Figure 36.2; Doeve and Costera Meijer, 2013). Figure 36.2 illustrates how reliable (betrouw-baar) and credible (geloofwaardig) are the most prominent ethical values mentioned by our research participants in relation to valuable journalism. One explanation might be that people are becoming increasingly aware they live in a ‘mediapolis’ (Silverstone 2007) and thus make sense of themselves, the world and each other in and through media (Coleman and Ross 2010). Reasoning from a professional perspective, trust refers to ethical values like ‘accuracy’ or ‘sincerity’. Phillips et  al. (2010) describe accuracy as ‘the disposition to take the necessary care to ensure so far as possible that what one says is not false’ (2010: 53). A related ethical concept, sincerity is described in terms of journalists being true to themselves – as ‘the disposition to make sure that what one says is what one actually believes’ (2010: 53). From an audience perspective, Silver­ stone’s concept of hospitality might make more sense as concept of trust, because citizens emphasize that journalism should acknowledge the experiences (not to be confused with opinions) of people of all walks of life (Costera Meijer, 2010, 2013a, 2013c). If media and journalism are hospitable, then they provide a discursive common space to make sense of oneself, others and the world. People should be able to recognize themselves in the texts as actively acting social and moral beings. The internet is often seen as offering such a space, and yet its openness and its representation of a broad range of opinions is not automatically experienced as a space of hospitality. Adhering to hospitality as ethical value in media and journalism obliges the presence of hosts to listen, to hear and to respond and thus to create ‘the space for effective communication’ (Silverstone,

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2007: 137), because hospitality without a host is felt to be like a space where everyone can speak and no one has to listen. Including good listening as ethical value in journalism is not enough, however. When we want to take users and audiences seriously, we as scholars also need to practice it in our research. In this respect Waks (2010) emphasizes the value and importance of distinguishing two forms of listening: cataphatic and apophatic listening. Cataphatic listening involves the use of prefigured categories. The cataphatic listener organizes the things said in already existing categories and expectations. This might be functional and even necessary in surveys and when these categories are relatively straightforward, such as age, gender, education, cultural background. However, a priori categorizing as scholars do, also to make sense of journalism in the digital age (think for instance of distinctions between innovators, early adopters or laggards) tends to reify these differences instead of explain them. To listen for ‘the unexpected and surprising’ (Dobson 2014: 173), the apophatic listener temporarily suspends her categories and expectations. Listening with an open mind to what is actually being said might surprise us and allows researchers sufficient space for doubt. For professionals, as O’Donnell (2009: 510) suggests, to explore journalism-related listening practices invites audiences and users to move beyond empathy and outside their comfort zones by engaging with ‘unfamiliar and/or hostile perspectives’. A good example is to see how apophatic listening enabled us to doubt the above typology. It made room in our analysis for the unexpected early adoption of the tablet computer by poorly educated Moroccan immigrant women and retired Dutch hibernators in Spain. They welcomed the new technology, not because it was simple, but because it facilitated inexpensive communication via Skype with their families at home. Listening with an open mind, allows for insight into and understanding of a wider scope of user

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practices, which do not necessarily all follow researcher’s predetermined imagery, sampling, concepts and logic (Becker, 1998).

CONCLUSION In this chapter I outlined what we gain by enabling room for doubt in journalism and journalism research. To counter newsroom and media centricity of Journalism Studies, simply adding ‘the’ audience’s perspective will not work. In order to deal effectively and elaborately with the complexities that challenge audience research in the digital age, we need more than an extension of concepts and methods. What we need is a heightened empirical and methodological sensitivity. Paraphrasing the motto of this chapter by Zen master Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki we must start our research with accepting doubt as fundamental to good research and thus with remembering that the finger pointing to the moon remains a finger and under no circumstances can be changed into the moon itself. First, we have to become more sensitive towards what we actually measure in Journalism Studies. This has various advantages. By not equating ratings, shares and circulation figures with interests of users, we provide more sophisticated feedback about audiences and user practices. As a result, both professionals and scholars might lower their resistance to giving audiences and users a more prominent place in journalism. Second, by problematizing the assumptions in studying user frequency, quality, informed citizenship, cultural potency or effect, resonance of or resonance in, we learn that users and audiences might not be that different from journalists. Third, by including listening as analytical category and as good professional practice for both journalists and academics, journalism may become more imaginable as a constructive field of communication. Fourth, paying attention to users’ perspectives impedes the reification and reproduction

of conventional dichotomies between news and information, quality journalism and popular journalism, real journalists and amateur journalists, and invites us to investigate a richer variety of everyday practices and identities of journalism users and producers beyond the living room or newsroom. Because users do not automatically link the value of journalism to a particular place, genre, ethical values, content or production practices, at least 16 different news practices could be meaningful for users depending on time, space, platform availability and context. Fifth, and related, to get an even better handle on the diversity of user practices, we need to more fully understand what people experience under which circumstances as informative, as entertainment, as news, and as journalism. What does it mean for journalism when other genres than journalism are valued as informative or when news is seen as amusing? We also need to know more about people’s (changing) user habits and news imagery. Does a majority still prefer news as completed text, or do more people have learned to appreciate its never-ending quality? Is it still a minority of people that wish to follow its construction process, or has the increasing liveness of news delivered ‘as it happens’ lead to new user habits and expectations? Sixth, rethinking the value of news and journalism as sources and spaces of public commitment and public connection demands an extension of our ethical repertoire. Listening and related concepts like hospitality and empathy may broaden our imagination in relation to professional ethics. They will also enable a wider repertoire to more precisely operationalize various forms of online engagement between content, users and producers of journalism. Most importantly however is how we reconsider the role of doubt in journalism and research. Without doubt it will be close to impossible to approach the value of journalism from the angle of audiences and users. Valuing doubt will encourage us to abandon single method research and to apply

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requisite variety for the analysis of complex user practices. Incorporating room for doubt and in its wake for triangulation, crystallization and thick description as research strategies will increase the likelihood of matching the complexity of the research with the complexity of the phenomena being studied.

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Denzin, Norman K. (1989) The Research Act: A Theoretical Orientation to Sociological Methods. 3d edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Deuze, Mark (2005) ‘What is Journalism? Professional Identity and Ideology of Journalists Reconsidered’, Journalism Studies, 6(4): 442–64. DeWerth-Pallmeyer, Dwight (1997) The Audience in the News. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dobson, Andrew. (2014) Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press Doeve, Martje and Irene Costera Meijer, (2013) ‘The Value of Transparency in Journalism for Audiences and (Public) Media Organizations’, paper presented at the conference Future of Journalism, Cardiff, September 12–13. Domingo, David, Pere Masip, and Irene Costera Meijer (2015) ‘Tracing Digital News Networks: Towards an Integrated Framework of the Dynamics of News Production, Circulation and Use’, Digital Journalism, 3(1): 53–67. Ellingson, Laura L. (2009) Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Friend, C. & Singer, J.B. (2007) Online Journalism Ethics, Traditions and Transitions. Armonk, NY. M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Gauntlett, David (2005) Moving Experiences, Second edition: Media Effects and Beyond. London: John Libbey. Gauntlett, David (2007) Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences. London: Routledge. Gauntlett, David and Annette Hill (1999) TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life. British Film Institute Audience Tracking Study. London and New York: Routledge. Geertz, Clifford, (1994) ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’. In Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre (eds) Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 213–32. Groot Kormelink, Tim, and Irene Costera Meijer (2014) ‘Tailor-Made News: Meeting the Demands of News Users on Mobile and Social Media’, Journalism Studies, 15(5): 632–41. Groot Kormelink, Tim and Irene Costera Meijer (2016) ‘What Clicks Actually Mean: Exploring

Digital News User Practices.’ Paper presented at ICA conference, Fukuoka 9–13. Hayes, A.S., Jane B., and J. Ceppos (2007) ‘Shifting Roles, Enduring Values: The Credible Journalist in a Digital Age’, Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality, 22(4): 262–79. Karaganis, Joe (ed.) (2007) Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. Columbia: Social Science Research Council and Columbia University Press. Kohring, Matthias and Jörg Matthes (2007) ‘Trust in News Media Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale’, Communication Research, 34(2): 231–52. Kovach, B. and T. Rosenstiel (2007) The Elements of Journalism: What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers Press. Langer, John (1998) Tabloid Television: Popular Journalism and the ‘Other News’. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno (2011), ‘Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist’, International Journal of Communication 5: 796–810. Lee, Angela M., Seth C. Lewis, and Matthew Powers (2014) ‘Audience Clicks and News Placement A Study of Time-Lagged Influence in Online Journalism’, Communication Research 41(4): 505–530. Lewis, S.C. (2012) ‘The Tension Between Professional Control and Open Participation: Journalism and its Boundaries’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(6): 836–66. Lewis, S.C. and M.J. Powers (2014) ‘Audience Clicks and News Placement: A Study of Time-Lagged Influence in Online Journalism’, Communication Research, 41(4): 505–30. Locke, Karen, Karen Golden-Biddle, and Martha S. Feldman (2008) ‘Perspective – Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the Role of Doubt in the Research Process’. Organization Science, 19(6): 907–18. McDonagh, Deana, Anne Bruseberg, and Cheryl Haslam (2002) ‘Visual Product Evaluation: Exploring Users’ Emotional Relationships with Products, Applied Ergonomics, 33(3): 231–40. Nemeth, Neil and Sanders, Craig (2001) ‘Meaningful Discussion of Performance Missing’. Newspaper Research Journal, 22(1): 52–64.

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Nieuwsmonitor (2013) ‘Seksmoord op horrorvakantie’: De invloed van bezoekersgedrag op krantenwebsites op de nieuwsselectie van dagbladen en hun websites’. De Nederlandse Nieuwsmonitor. http://www.nieuwsmonitor. net/d/244/Seksmoord_op_Horrorvakantie_pdf O’Donnell, Penny (2009) ‘Journalism, Change and Listening Practices’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23(4): 503–17. O’Donnell, Penny, Justine Lloyd, and Tanja Dreher (2009) ‘Listening, Pathbuilding and Continuations: A Research Agenda for the Analysis of Listening’, Continuum, 23(4): 423–39. Phillips, Angela, Nick Couldry, and Des Freeman (2010) New Media, Old News: Journalism & Democracy in the Digital Age. London: Sage. Pink, Sarah (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Purcell, Kristen, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, and Kenny Olmstead (2010) Understanding the Participatory News Consumer: How Internet and Cell Phone Users Have Turned News into a Social Experience. Pew Research Center, Pew Internet & American Life Project, and Project for Excellence in Journalism. Avaialable at: http://www. pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/ Reports/2010/PIP_Understanding_the_ Participatory_News_Consumer.pdf Richardson, Laurel (2000a) ‘Evaluating Ethnography’, Qualitative Inquiry, 6: 253–55. Richardson, Laurel (2000b) ‘Writing: A method of Inquiry’, in Norman K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp.923–48. Rosenstiel, Tom, Just, M.R., Belt, T.L., Dean, W.C., Pertilla, A. & Chinni, D. (2007) We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schudson, Michael (1989) ‘How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols’, Theory and Society, 18: 153–80. Silverstone, Roger (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, S.A. (2005) A Newsroom’s Fortress Walls Collapse. Nieman Reports, 59(3): 44–5. Suzuki, D.T. (1949) An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New York: The Philosophical Library.

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37 Multi-method Approaches Wiebke Loosen and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

INTRODUCTION ‘Re-’ is arguably the most popular prefix in this age of digital journalism: We are ‘rethinking journalism’ (Peters and Broersma, 2013), ‘rebuilding the news’ (Anderson, 2013), and try to reinvent or redefine journalism at conferences and workshops. The dynamic of journalism’s transformation, situated in a constantly changing communicative environment, is not only a challenge for the field itself, but also for research on it. This transformation seems to have the power to blur all the boundaries journalism research has defined to make journalism observable and thus analyzable: The boundaries between journalists and non-journalists, between news and other forms of (public) communication, between production and consumption – just to mention a few of the long-established distinctions in Journalism Studies (Loosen, 2015). But empirical research cannot do without distinctions – even if it is (with good reasons) ‘delegating’ this

definition work to its objects of investigation by asking them about their underlying distinctions and implicit understandings of ‘news’ or ‘journalism’ (Domingo et  al., 2014). And at the same time as boundaries blur, the field re-establishes attention or shifts focus to certain categories: In a way similar to how journalists are ‘(re-)discovering’ the audience (Loosen and Schmidt, 2012), Journalism Studies are also increasingly engaging with what used to be only an ‘implied category’ (Madianou, 2009: 325), developing approaches to bridge the established scholarly separation between journalism and audience research (Loosen and Dohle, 2014). We understand journalism research as a ‘triality’, accessing its object of investigation via journalistic producing and consuming actors as well as via journalistic coverage. But since we can no longer be certain (as we might have been under conditions of mass media) about how the contexts of production and consumption as well as

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journalistic output are related to each other, we can no longer rely on the distinct methods for accessing these actors and coverage only. To analyze journalism in the digital age, we argue, we also need innovative study designs and theory building drawing from all three basic scientific methods – interviewing, content analysis, and observation. Such multi-method approaches have often been considered the ‘gold standard’ for empirical research and the means to deal with social complexity. It is expected that different methods could complement each other, validate each other, add more depth to findings, and thus widen the perspective on the object of inquiry (Loosen and Scholl, 2012). Such an approach thus could be seen as an ideal way to come to terms with the changed journalistic environment featuring new actors, networked and participating audiences, and increasingly diverse tools for news production and consumption. Even though multi-method approaches seem ideal, perhaps even necessary for researching such a dynamic environment, it is not without difficulties. In particular, the way in which we can relate these methods, and the various findings generated through them, are far from self-evident. Against this background, this chapter has two aims: First to provide a systematic inventory of the different types of methodological combinations within multi-methodological approaches. To this end we briefly look at what could be combined in general, that is, the basic ‘methods toolkit’ in journalism research; we discuss intra-modal versus inter-modal combinations; and consider the functional and structural aspects of multi-method designs. Employing these types of multi-methodological approaches brings up different types of challenges, and we go on to address epistemological and practical challenges. Finally, we situate multi-method designs in the broader context of developments shaping research on digital journalism. The second aim of this chapter is to illustrate and enrich the methodological discussion with examples of multi-methodological

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research and findings, with experiences from actual research. For this purpose we draw on a research project on audience participation in Journalism Studies that investigated how increasing opportunities for audience participation, mainly connected to social media, re-shape the relationship between journalism and (its) audience in four case studies of German journalistic outlets.1 It will become clear that neither the methods applied nor the journalistic segments studied per se were particularly innovative. However, the theoretical frame and empirical design were chosen to cope with the complexity of a changing journalistic environment by assessing and comparing participatory practices and related expectations for journalists and audience members within one integrated theoretical framework. We believe that this example does not only illustrate decisions, challenges and opportunities coming with a multi-method design, but also makes a point on what digital journalism research can gain by widening its focus, by including not only journalists but also audiences into journalism research.

THE ‘METHODS TOOLKIT’ IN JOURNALISM RESEARCH Which combination of methods will be employed within a research design depends on the available ‘methods toolkit:’ Journalism research – like all other research fields – is not per se limited to a particular set of empirical methods, but is drawing from different basic methods. These are interviewing, content analysis, and observation which we understand in a very broad sense as the three ‘generalized modes of scientific perception’ (Scholl, 2011a: 164; own translation). They each include manifold qualitative/non-standardized and quantitative/standardized forms and variants, for example the method of thinking aloud (as a particular type of interviewing), qualitative content analysis and

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discourse analysis (as particular types of content or textual analyses), or log file analysis (as a particular type of observation). Since journalism research mainly focuses on journalists as the central actor or role in the field, they are seen as a primary source or ‘social address’ for data collection. Notwithstanding the problems of defining who could/should count as journalist, the means of first choice in journalism research often is a form of questioning technique such as interviews or surveys (Weaver, 2008; Hanitzsch, 2009; Weaver and Willnat, 2012; Weischenberg et al., 2012). As a consequence, an extensive, even if not exactly quantifiable part of our empirical knowledge about journalism is based on journalistic selfdescriptions (for an innovative approach to gain such self-descriptions, see also the chapter by Reich and Barnoy, in this Handbook). A second dominant method in the field is that of content analysis2 which, in contrast, looks at the output of journalistic production processes, at its visible and manifest performance, and as such does not require any interview or survey participants (Kolmer, 2008). This is one reason why content analysis is generally considered as a ‘non-reactive’ method (Krippendorf, 2013: 45 more adequately describes it as an ‘unobtrusive technique’). Additionally, its object of investigation, the content to be analyzed, is often regarded as ‘immutable’ by the process of analysis and thus understood as ‘fossilized reality’ (Merten, 1996: 67). Newsroom observation, finally, is the third basic method with a long tradition in journalism research (Quandt, 2008). During such an observation a researcher is in the newsroom in order to observe working routines and editorial processes in the actual material setting they occur. While powerful, this method has recently been called into doubt as its ‘newsroom-centricity’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2010) may not be appropriate anymore to investigate the current news environment, where news production no longer ‘takes place within any one organisational center of production’ (Cottle,

2007: 8) exclusively. But this is not merely related to the spatial focus on the newsroom: The call to ‘blow up the newsroom’ relates to a more fundamental move away from the newsroom as it ‘can no longer be viewed in isolation from the media ecosystem that surrounds it’ (Anderson, 2011: 160; on how to apply ethnography for analyzing journalism in the digital age, see Robinson and Metzler in this Handbook). As becomes clear, the different basic scientific modes of data collection (interviewing, content analysis, observation) each provide their own particular access to social reality and to their objects of investigation. Consequently, they also have their particular ‘blind spots’, powers, and limitations (Loosen and Scholl, 2011: 109–10). Interviewing produces self-reports or reports on behavior, but cannot observe the behavior or action itself. Content analysis looks at aspects of (journalistic) output, but cannot directly identify the conditions under which it is produced or consumed – even if, for good reasons, it aims to make ‘inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use’ (Krippendorf, 2013: 24). Observation, in turn, refers to visible practices, but cannot grasp motivations and subjective meanings behind them. It is precisely these limitations that are addressed by multi-method designs: Through combining the methods, the aim is to overcome the particular limitations of each method and in this way to compensate for their respective blind spots. So journalism researchers have of course many different variants of these three differentiated basic research modes available to them (see also the other methodological chapters in Part IV of this Handbook for innovative digital methods, for instance). To address the complexity in the field of journalism (see also Costera-Meijer, in this Handbook), multi-method approaches can (but are of course not restricted to) make use of two or all three of the lenses constitutive for the ‘triality’ of journalism, including content, production and/or consumption. As an

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example, Figure 37.1 illustrates a methodological approach which looks at consumers, producers and content, and uses two of the basic methodological modes: interviewing and content analysis. The interviewing methods allowed for accessing both the producers and consumers: In our example we included five to ten in-depth interviews with newsroom staff of different roles and levels of hierarchy, and interviews with five to ten audience members exhibiting different degrees of participatory involvement. Quantitative online surveys among the full editorial staff as well as among users of the respective websites allowed us to identify participatory practices and expectations on a larger scale, and to measure the congruence between journalists and audience members. Acknowledging that self-reporting has its limitations, and to assess the actual scope and tonalities of audience participation, content analyses of the offline news products as well as of user comments on the website and on Facebook pages provided insight into the actual content produced by the actors interviewed. Finally, two waves of ‘feature analysis’ in consecutive years served to document the scope and development of participatory elements present on the websites and their

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social media profiles. In addition, a feature analysis of the participatory elements of 12 other journalistic outlets allowed for comparison, functioning as benchmarks for the conduct of selected news sites. In our example, the observational approach was not included as it is also very time-consuming and might present additional obstacles for field access, although observations in newsrooms or with users would surely provide yet another angle to examine their news-related practices. Eventually, each case study we conducted resulted in a detailed report of 100 to 150 pages, in which findings from the different methods were combined in varying ways to arrive at thick descriptions of audience inclusion at the case studies (see also Figure 37.1).

INTRA-MODAL VERSUS INTERMODAL MULTI-METHOD DESIGN Literature on ‘mixed methods research’ and ‘triangulation’, (the latter mainly based in the qualitative methodology paradigm, see also Costera Meijer, in this Handbook), is full of typologies to systematize research designs (Flick, 2004; Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2006;

Figure 37.1  Multi-method design in a project on audience participation in journalism

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Johnson et al., 2007). One the one hand, this illustrates the complexity of the field, although Maxwell and Loomis (2003: 244) argue that ‘the actual diversity in mixed methods studies is far greater than any typology can adequately encompass’. On the other hand, each typology shows the need to come up with criteria to define and differentiate at least the core characteristics of multi-method approaches. In this section, we would like to start with a distinction, highlighting the difference between intra-modal and inter-modal method design. This distinction relies on the three basic modes of interviewing, content analysis, and observation, which we introduced above as the fundamental classes of scientific methods to empirically access social reality, each including manifold qualitative/non-standardized and quantitative/standardized forms and variants. In view of this, we understand a multi-method approach not only as a combination of methods from two or more of these basic scientific modes within one empirical study, but also as a combination of different forms or variants of one of these modes (Loosen and Scholl, 2012: 14; Moran-Ellis et  al., 2006: 46).3 From that perspective, a combination of in-depth interviews with a standardized survey within one study is regarded an intra-modal multi-method design (= a combination of interviewing techniques), while a combination of a non-standardized survey with a standardized content analysis is an inter-modal combination. The project mentioned above and depicted in Figure 37.1 illustrates both variants: It starts with an (intra-modal) integration of the qualitative interview method and the quantitative survey method, aiming thus for mutual complementarity (rather than having one approach validate the other; see below). More specifically, findings from both approaches can be combined to give a full picture of the different aspects of participatory practices and participatory expectations, first for journalists and audience members separately: Where needed, quantitative data

can be used to contextualize statements by individuals, for example to show that a certain assumption a chief editor gave us on the professional journalistic image prevalent at her news outlet was indeed supported by the survey of newsroom staff. Second, but equally, the interview data can exemplify or enrich the quantitative findings, in this way adding extra value to both data sources. For example, according to the survey at a weekly political talk show we conducted for our research, journalists saw their duty mostly ‘to inform as objectively and precisely as possible’. At first glance, this seemed counter-intuitive since the talk show format is not about objective information but about subjective opinion. However, the in-depth interviews revealed that the editorial staff regards the talk guests’ opinions as the information to be delivered, and strive to achieve objectivity by a well-balanced cast of talk guests representing different perspectives. A different kind of intra-modal design was employed to compare journalists and their audience more directly. Using the survey method, we measured a similar variable for both journalists and audience members with identical items and scales; for example on (assumed) motivations for giving feedback on journalistic reporting, or on the general assessment of audience participation. Through this design, findings can be compared not only between the different case studies, but also between journalists and audience members (see Schmidt and Loosen, 2014 for a more thorough discussion of the different comparative levels this approach affords). Given the complex workings of newsrooms and other spaces of journalistic production, inter-modal combination of methods – the combination of two or three of the basic modes of scientific perception – can provide even deeper insight to interrelations between aspects of news content, its production and its consumption. In our example, we have employed an inter-modal combination by bringing together different types of

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content analysis with results from interviewing techniques to contrast the self-reports from informants with the manifest output of their actions. More specifically, we discussed results from the content analysis of (offline) journalistic products in conjunction with the information on editorial filtering processes and routines we gathered from the interviews. This combining of data from both sources helped us to demonstrate how certain practices and expectations regarding user participation in journalism actually shape the product. As such we were able to shed light on what normally remains invisible, due to various filtering and validation processes for user-generated content, for example. In particular, it revealed how audience participation creates rather large operational workloads within newsrooms but often has no visible, and thus analyzable ‘correlate’ in the journalistic output. By looking only at either selfreports from interviewing or at findings from content analysis, this imbalance would not have come to light. In a similar vein, we compared and contrasted results from a content analysis of user comments to the discussion of users’ participatory routines as expressed in in-depth interviews. The former allowed us to assess the actual content of user comments, but also the degree to which they referred to or interacted with other audience members. Data from the latter helped us to further contextualize these findings, for example with regard to the intensity of attachment that our informants felt to the ‘user community’ forming in comment sections or on Facebook pages of news outlets. In all these respects, the intraand inter-modal combination of data from different methods provided a more nuanced picture of such aspects of collectivity orientation underlying audience participation than any individual method. Multi-method designs, both as intra- and inter-modal combination of basic modes of scientific perception, often present, but do not principally require a qualitative–quantitative methods mix. Literature on ‘mixed

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methods research’ focuses primarily on the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, while literature on ‘triangulation’ is either concerned with the use of at least two qualitative methods or in combination with quantitative methods. Both fields also often discuss the epistemological questions involved in such combinations (Flick, 2004; Brewer and Hunter, 2006; Johnson et  al., 2007; Teddlie and Tashakkori, 2009). In this context Moran-Ellis et  al. (2006: 46) problematize the often interchangeably used terms of ‘integrating’, ‘combining’, and ‘mixing’ methods whereas they propose ‘that integration in multi-methods/ multi-data research must be understood as a particular practical relationship between different methods, sets of data, analytic findings or perspectives, while triangulation incorporates an epistemological claim about the outcomes of the research’. Whether or not the combination of methods includes quantitative and qualitative approaches is an important aspect of methodological (self-) reflection, but the challenges and follow-up problems within actual research practice are rather similar in both cases. Either way there is a need to deal with the practical consequences of multi-method approaches in a pragmatic way. Hence, the most important question is how and for which purposes different methods are actually related to each other within one research design.

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF MULTI-METHOD DESIGNS After having discussed the difference between intra- and inter-modal combinations as a first important distinction in a systematization of multi-method designs, we now turn to a second distinction. Following Loosen and Scholl (2011: 110), there are two distinct, yet inter-related dimensions of multimethod designs:

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1. A functional dimension: Which purpose does the combination serve? Are the methods supposed (a) to complement, or (b) to support, or (c) to validate each other? 2. A structural dimension: How closely or tightly are the methods linked to each other? Is the implementation of methods at different stages and steps of the research process following a loose or strong coupling?

Let us discuss these dimensions in more detail. First, in terms of the functional dimension, methods complement each other if one method is supposed to address the ‘blind spots’ of another method. A typical example is the combination of an observation with indepth interviews in order to cover motivations and attitudes behind a certain observed action. A study by Tandoc (2014), for example, examines the extent to which journalists integrate audience feedback from web analytics in their newswork. Tandoc complemented the observation data with semi-structured interviews with journalists, focusing on explanations for their editorial decisions and on perceptions of audience influence. Such a ‘complementary mode’ can vary in terms of its structural coupling (the second dimension). It can involve a loose coupling of the chosen methods as they deal with different sub-aspects of an overall research interest, thus supplementing each other. But it is also possible that the complementary combination asks for a much stronger coupling of two methods. Typical for that scenario are approaches that combine public opinion research (via surveys) with analyses of communication content in order to investigate the question: ‘Do news media mould or mirror public opinion?’ (Schulz, 2008: 348). In this case, the combination of methods is already ‘inherent’ to the research question – as typical for the research on media effects. Such research needs to come up with ‘linkage designs’ (Schulz, 2008: 352) that relate the units of analysis (here, respondents and media messages) more or less closely to each other (Neuendorf, 2002: 61) in order to say something on their correlation.

Second, methods support each other or follow a ‘cooperative mode’ if one method is used to design the other. One example of this is a case where qualitative interviews are used to develop response categories for standardized surveys – a typical procedure when it comes to scale development. For example, Kohring and Matthes (2007: 241) arrived at a scale for measuring trust in news media by first conducting almost 60 qualitative interviews from which they gradually developed item sets for a standardized questionnaire. Their approach, following the ‘prioritysequence model’ by Morgan (1998), gave priority to a quantitative method, but which could only be realized with the support of preliminary qualitative interviews. Third, when the purpose of combining methods is the validation of results, a particularly strong coupling between methods is necessary. This ‘competing mode’ can be illustrated with a study by Mellado (2014: 1): She is interested in how professional journalistic role conceptions ‘materialize’ in journalistic output and proposes a ‘standardized operationalization of how different professional roles can manifest in journalistic performance’. Such a question calls for a methodological approach as implemented by Scholl and Weischenberg (1998: 175–80; 357), which combines interview data (what journalists report on their role conceptions) with content analysis data (to establish the extent to which this becomes manifest in their own journalistic output). In this way the combining of methods is designed as to validate journalist’s self-reports with respect to their products. Complementation, support, validation – these different functions or purposes of multi-method approaches have particular consequences for the structural dimension of multi-method designs as different functions call for a more or less strong coupling of the methods. To put it pointedly: Structure follows function, that is, all aspects related to the structural dimension are dependent on the functional dimension. The way in which methods are coupled, and to which end, is

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dependent on a number of decisions made during the research design. To assess these more pragmatic aspects of research practice, we can follow Christmann and Jandura who suggest additional structural aspects of multimethod design (2012: 55, own translation). •• Systematics of planning: Was the method combination part of the initial planning of a research project or was it decided upon after the planning stage? •• Prominence of methods: Are the methods equally weighted or is one method more dominant or important for the overall design? •• Intensity of coupling: Are the methods connected loosely or strongly during the research process? •• Type of sequencing: Are the methods applied in parallel or successively, following a particular and necessary order?

To sum up: A multi-method design does not only pertain to the combinations of inter- or intra-modal and quantitative and qualitative methods, but also relies on decisions regarding its functional and structural aspects. As there are many different combinations possible of relating methods to another in one research design (Christmann and Jandura, 2012: 55, table 2), actual multi-method projects might vary enormously, depending on the decisions taken by the researchers. In our own research, we opted for a multi-method design with complementing, not validating methods (functional dimension), which were strongly related with respect to the intramodal combination (for example, the guideline for the in-depth interviews and the standardized survey both operationalized the same analytical constructs such as ‘professional self image’ or ‘motivations for participation’), and, where applicable, also with respect to the inter-modal combination (user surveys included a question on the group(s) an actively commenting user is speaking for, whereas the comment analysis included a variable ‘addressee of comments’). The close connection of methods became important for the output as well, since the findings were not presented for each method separately, but

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rather entangled with respect to the overall research questions and analytical dimensions.

CHALLENGES OF MULTI-METHOD DESIGN APPROACHES The preceding discussion of functional and structural aspects of multi-method designs has already shown that it is far from selfevident how to relate methods and the various findings generated with them. This section focuses on two more general challenges of multi-method designs, which are of epistemological as well as of practical nature: The challenge of connecting different units of analysis, and the challenge of commensurability of instruments. The first challenge is to determine to what extent and under which conditions a method combination can be used for reciprocal validation. The prerequisite for this seems to be that the methods are applied to the same object of study. But the question then becomes: under which conditions do two different empirical methods look at the same object, the same social phenomenon? The answer to this question is far from self-evident, as the discussion on and the deployment of the methodological term ‘triangulation’ (Kelle and Erzberger, 2004: 174) illustrates. Following the initial idea of triangulation, the use of different methods could increase the validity of results, whereas recent interpretations put the emphasis more on the complementarity of the perspectives: ‘Triangulation is less a strategy for validating results and procedures than an alternative to validation […] which increases scope, depth and consistency in methodological proceedings’ (Flick, 2002: 227). One way to assess this question is to reflect on which level the units of analysis are linked to each other. Taking the example mentioned above of validating journalist’s self-reports with their products, we can ask: Are they linked to each other on the individual level of journalists and their personal output, on an

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organizational level where role-conceptions of a newsroom are compared with its overall output, or on an even more aggregated level that compares representative journalists surveys with a representative sample of journalistic coverage (Loosen and Scholl, ­ 2011: 113)? The second challenge results from the problem of commensurability of instruments or findings: How can we relate data from the various methods (qualitative and quantitative instruments; self-reporting vs. analysis of media texts), when they differ in their degree of representativeness, the depth of knowledge represented in them, and the amount of context of particular situations and individuals they preserve? Again, there is no universal answer to this question, as it depends on the particularities of the research questions and the fields of study. But one has to reflect on these questions throughout all phases of a multi-method project, especially in cases where the different methods lead to (seemingly) contradictory findings. A last example from our research can illustrate this point: The surveyed journalists across all case studies assumed that users participate at least partly ‘to blow off steam’, while surveyed audience members consistently disagreed to that particular item. Yet, the in-depth interviews with users revealed that many of them experienced situations where they participated exactly because they were angered or upset by news coverage (or by other users’ comments) and wanted to release this emotional pressure. When reflecting on this conflict in data, we realized several things: First, and rather obvious, it showed that the survey question included a bias, since respondents in a survey setting will tend to provide socially desirable answers when describing their own behavior. Given the situation of an in-depth interview, where there is more room to elaborate and contextualize as well as to build trust and rapport, users were more likely to explain the subtle nuances of affective motivations for their participation, and the circumstances

under which they might engage in such participation practices. But secondly, we realized that this item discriminated actually very well, since it uncovered an important difference between journalists and audience members: Journalists are, to different degrees of course, confronted with lots of passionate, angry, ranting, obstructive feedback in comments or mails, but they usually lack knowledge about the user’s context – in a similar way as users usually lack knowledge about the context of the newsroom and its production routines. Thus, journalists take the comments at face value, and they conclude that audience participation is a good deal about ‘blowing off steam’. By combining different methods for different actors and their practices and expectations, we were able to paint a more detailed picture of the relationship between journalists and their audience, exactly by acknowledging (rather than covering) the differences revealed by the different instruments.

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK The research drawn on in this chapter to illustrate the multi-method design types, decisions, and issues, has made apparent that multi-method approaches are far less innocuous in empirical practice than they may appear at first glance. Moreover, it is also an example of how they generate various ‘follow-up costs:’ They increase workload extensively and demand special skills regarding data collection and analysis alike. Given the diversity of possible multi-method designs outlined before, the examples we cited cannot make any claim to be representative or complete. However, they have illustrated the typical procedural as well as methodological and epistemological aspects to be taken into consideration when developing and applying a multi-method design. These circumstances are of course not exclusive to journalism research, and all other empirical research

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fields in the social sciences will face similar challenges. But in conjunction with developments specific to research on digital journalism, we can, by way of conclusion, outline the broader context of multi-method approaches in our field. First, we have to acknowledge that digitization has created a methodologically paradoxical situation for journalism research: On the one hand, it has given us access to masses of digital data which only wait to be analyzed by standardized or even by automated means. At the same time, it has disrupted basic analytical categories of ‘journalism’, ‘news’, and ‘the audience’ as well as established concepts traditionally used to research them, such as journalistic role conceptions, news selection criteria, the newsroom and its understanding as the organizational center of journalistic content production, the journalism–audience relationship. The increasing relevance of networked media and its (partly) participating audiences obviously does confront the mass media paradigm which is inherent to the institution of journalism and research into it. We are witnessing the emergence of a new ‘networked architecture of journalism’ (Bastos, 2014: 18), but are yet only able to describe its contours. Thus, it is vital for contemporary journalism research to revisit its core concepts and to reformulate and adapt them to a persistently changing media and communication environment. Second, the recent (technology-driven) transformations in journalism do not only challenge theoretical and analytical concepts of journalism research, but also its basic methodological assumptions. Communication in and via networked media leaves digital traces on an unprecedented scale (Golder and Macy, 2014). While one could argue that the analysis of such traces is to be subsumed under the basic method of ‘observation’, it seems more adequate to treat them as an emerging fourth mode of scientific perception, transforming how we study and understand (journalistic) communication processes (boyd and Crawford, 2012). The increasing importance

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of algorithms in selecting and presenting information – from personalized information feeds to machine-written news and automated journalism – poses another methodological challenge, as is it renders crucial aspects of networked communication unobservable and opaque (van Dalen, 2012; Beam, 2013; Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013). Journalism research might, then, increasingly include analyzing algorithms, observing their results, interviewing their developers. And it might combine new digital methods with traditional ones, for example Twitter analyses with indepth interviews in order to complement the aggregate level of Twitter data with the level of individual understandings of Twitter users (Bastos and Mercea, 2015). These fundamental challenges for theory and methodology come, third, at a time where our ‘academic reward system’ (Hanitzsch, 2014: 705) is fundamentally changing. First, it seems to increasingly value only one particular type of output, the journal paper. As a researcher, there are high incentives to publish empirical studies focusing on rather small questions in order to maximize academic output. Second, researchers are also methodologically socialized, which increasingly includes a preference for certain methods and research paradigms (for example, qualitative or quantitative approaches). Additionally, the advancements within single methods such as content analysis or surveys, not to mention the evolving field of online/digital methods (Fielding et al., 2008; Poynter, 2010; Rogers 2013), also lead to ‘methods experts’, who specialize in particular methods on which most, if not all of their research, is based. Taken together, these developments not only make it increasingly difficult to identify the current state of research in Journalism Studies (one needs, it seems, a full handbook to do so). They also lead to empirical studies which are based on the ever-fresh stream of data out of the networked publics, but which (for reasons of researchers’ time and papers’ space) lack theoretical elaboration or advancement. So on a very basic level, the structures of the

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academic field are obstructing multi-method designs, rather than supporting them. Theory-driven multi-method research has its own particular ‘disciplining effect’ as it requires a theoretical and conceptual framework – at its starting point and also as its (preliminary) end point. Rather than following the simplified linear process given in many introductions to empirical research, we have to acknowledge that scientific problems, social theory, and empirical methods generally stand in a ‘indissoluble circular relationship’ (Scholl, 2011b: 19; own translation) which informs the whole process from the beginning (observation of something that is indicated as a ‘research problem’) to the end (interpreting empirical findings and relating them back to the initial problem and ideally to theory). Multi-method designs multiply this circularity, in a way; they increase complexity at all stages of the research process. This means that, though multi-method designs are an appropriate means with which to come to terms with complex research problems, they also increase the workload as well as the demand for multifaceted method skills regarding data collection and analysis alike. And what may be most important, they call for thorough methodological self-reflection when it comes to interpreting corresponding, complementary and/or contradicting findings gathered with a multi-method design. This is not a ‘threat’, but should be seen as the particular advantage: Diverging or contradicting findings call for a second glance and maybe for interpretation from a different angle – and they can be the starting point for a new research question.

NOTES  1  The project was based on theoretical assumptions and analytical heuristics derived from sociological inclusion theory (Loosen and Schmidt, 2012). In a nutshell: Audience inclusion into journalism is realized through both inclusion practices (e.g. certain patterns of media use) and inclusion expectations (e.g. assumptions about the professional role of journalists) that can be assessed

for either journalists or audience members. The central methodological innovation of the project was to systematically relate and connect methods focusing on either side in order to address the relationship between them.  2  As already mentioned we understand content analysis, like the two other basic methods, as a particular empirical research mode in a very broad sense, subsuming different qualitative approaches often referred to as (linguistic) textual analysis or discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Scholl, 2011a: 164).  3  The experiment is not regarded as a particular method of data collection on its own, but as a particular study design to test causal relationships, in the context of which different methods of data collection can be applied (Brosius and Rossmann, 2012).

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Herausforderungen und empirische Praxis, Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag. pp: 9–25. Madianou, Mirca (2009) ‘Audience Reception and News in Everyday Life’, in Karin WahlJorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies, New York: Routledge. pp: 325–37. Maxwell, Joseph A. and Loomis, Diane (2003) ‘Mixed Methods Design: An alternative approach’, in Abbas Tashakkori and Charles Teddlie (eds), Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social & Behavioral Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp: 241–73. Mellado, Claudia (2014) ‘Professional Roles in News Content: Six dimensions of journalistic role performance’, Journalism Studies (online first). 10.1080/1461670X.2014.922276. Merten, Klaus (1996) ‘Reactivity in Content Analysis’, Communications, 21(1): 65–76. Moran-Ellis, Jo; Alexander, Victoria D.; Cronin, Ann; Dickinson, Mary; Fielding, Jane; Sleney, Judith, and Thomas, Hillary (2006) ‘Triangulation and Integration: processes, claims and implications’, Qualitative Research, 6(1): 45–59. Morgan, David L. (1998) ‘Practical Strategies for Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods: Applications to health research’, Qualitative Health Research, 8(3): 362–76. Neuendorf, Kimberly A. (2002) The Content Analysis Guidebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Peters, Chris and Broersma, Marcel (eds) (2013) Rethinking Journalism: Trust and participation in a transformed news landscape. New York: Routledge. Poynter, Ray (2010) The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and techniques for market researchers. Chichester: Wiley. Rogers, Richard (2013) Digital Methods. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Quandt, Thorsten (2008) ‘Methods of Journalism Research – Observation’, in Martin Löffelholz and David H. Weaver (eds), Global Journalism Research, Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp: 131–41. Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik and Loosen, Wiebke (2014) ‘Both Sides of the Story: Assessing audience participation in journalism through the concept of inclusion distance’, Digital Journalism

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Author Index Aalberg, T., 538, 539 Abramovsky, L., 214 Abt, V., 130 Achtenhagen, L., 344, 349 Ackerly, B., 464 Adam, G., 210 Adamic, L., 102, 253, 516 Adams, P., 359, 365 Adler, P., 470 Adoni, H., 532 Aelst, P. van, 253 Agarwal, S., 307 Agdestein, M., 505 Aguado Terrón, J.M., 213 Ahva, L., 11, 296, 323, 354, 358, 489, 531, 532, 541 Aitamurto, T., 98, 202, 307, 345 Alasuutari, P., 317, 322, 326 Albacete, G.M.G., 101 Albaek, E., 480, 489 Albarran, A., 425, 428, 430 Albert, R., 101, 105 Albrecht, J., 73 Aldridge, M., 224, 225, 426 Alevizou, G., 282, 283, 285, 287 Alexander, V., 566, 567 Alexiou, K., 282, 285 Allagui, I., 150 Allan, S., 40, 132, 133, 134, 135, 146, 147, 153, 166, 170, 179, 222, 223, 225, 228, 266, 267, 274, 275, 303, 354, 356, 555 Allen, M., 495 Allworth, J., 63 Alonso, A., 40 Alper, M., 274 Altheide, D., 488 Altschull, H., 168 Ananny, M., 87, 89, 96, 99, 101, 150, 153, 155, 160, 303, 305, 307, 343, 345, 379 Andén-Papadopoulos, K., 43, 139, 225 Anderson, B., 16, 171 Anderson, C.W., 1, 17, 52, 61, 115, 174, 193, 203, 209, 246, 301, 305, 306, 308, 309, 323, 331, 341, 342, 343, 345, 347, 374, 379, 398, 399, 400, 401,403, 404, 405, 406, 412, 413, 417,421, 452, 453, 454, 460, 461, 462, 465, 466, 467, 473, 479, 480, 489, 494, 546, 548, 562, 564 Anderson, Chris, 243, 250, 316, 506 Anderson, K., 274 Anderson, L., 449 Anderson, M., 38

Andrejevic, M., 39, 136, 230 Andresen, K., 213 Andrews, P., 225 Ang, I., 316, 327, 328 Antheaume, A., 62 Appelgren, E., 345 Archetti, C., 155, 473 Arendsen, M., 559 Arendt, H., 271 Aris, A., 428, 429, 430, 431, 434, 436, 437 Armstrong, D., 165 Arsenault, A., 26 Arthur, P., 510 Artwick, C.G., 115 Arvidsson, A., 101 Ashby, W., 550 Ashley, S., 390 Ashman, I., 429 Ashuri, T., 271 Attarça, M., 254 Atton, C., 165 Aubert, A., 224, 226, 227, 228, 229 Aufderheide, P., 309 Augé, M., 363 Auletta, K., 286, 287 Azoulay, A., 268 Baeza-Yates, R., 505 Bagdikian, B.H., 151 Bagozzi, R.P., 186 Bagwell, K., 59 Bailey, O., 255, 328 Baines, D., 212, 282, 286, 289 Baines, S., 211, 213, 214 Baker, C., 56, 302 Bakker, P., 210, 213, 215, 245, 280, 342 Bakker, T., 554 Bakshy, E., 100 Balahur, A., 504 Balasubramanyan, R., 136 Baldasty, G., 385 Baldwin, T., 304 Balkin, J., 303 Ball, J., 158, 304 Balzac, H. de, 121, 460 Banaji, S., 359 Barabasi, A.L., 101, 105 Baranek, P., 238, 240, 243 Bardoel, J., 241, 479, 555 Baresch, B., 226

578

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Baringhorst, S., 250, 251, 254, 255, 256 Barker, C., 180 Barley, S., 214 Barnes, R., 146, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188 Barnett, S., 282, 287, 288 Barnhurst, K., 379, 498 Barnoy, A., 480, 481, 489, 490, Barthel, B., 82 Barthel, M., 307, 84 Barzilai-Nahon, K., 96, 99 Bastin, G., 213 Bastos, M., 321, 513, 571 Bates, S., 10 Baum, M., 241 Bauman, Z., 39, 297, 425, 428, 437, 478, 479, 496 Bausinger, H., 541 Baym, N., 244, 378 Beam, M., 571 Beam, R.A., 120 Bech-Karlsen, J., 121 Bechmann. A., 453 Beck, U., 425, 530 Becker, H., 96, 558 Becker, K., 267 Beckett, C., 139, 150, 304, 331 Bédard-Brûlé, I., 88, 480, 490 Beiler, M., 488 Beitz, C., 73 Bekhit, E., 210 Belk, R., 326 Bell, E., 1, 61, 174, 341, 374, 479 Belt, T., 546 Ben-Asher, Z., 214 Benford, R., 251 Bengry-Howell, A., 530 Benkler, Y., 27, 152, 156, 159, 160, 250, 252, 256, 258, 259, 291, 302, 304, 305, 333 Benner, C., 207 Bennett, W., 26, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 160, 239, 252, 253, 254, 256, 319, 338, 489 Benson, R., 13, 160, 296, 305, 383, 386, 404, 469, 488 Benton, J., 192 Berelson, B., 239, 497 Bergan, D., 304 Bergen, L., 426 Berger, J., 138, 170 Berglez, P., 154 Bergstrom, A., 181, 182 Berkowitz, D., 238 Berman, M., 424 Bernal, V., 42 Bernardi, A., 214 Bernays, E., 136 Berry, C., 479 Berry, D., 510 Beyme, K., 370 Bianconi, G., 101, 105

Bièvre, D. de, 254 Bikhchandani, S., 105 Bilandzic, H., 543 Bimber, B., 254, 378 Binder, S., 370 Bird, E., 17, 317, 319, 354 Bird, S.E., 180, 289, 328 Bishara, A., 213 Bishop, R., 174 Bjørnestad, S., 355 Bjur, J., 532 Blaagaard, B., 132, 133, 135, 267 Blach-Ørsten, M., 370 Blank, G., 96, 571 Blázquez, J., 214 Blumer, H., 316, 318, 321 Bock, M.B., 275 Boczkowski, P., 1, 3, 87, 160, 181, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199, 200, 202, 214, 240, 281, 306, 309, 341, 342, 343, 374, 407, 436, 447, 452, 453, 460, 461, 489, 496, 546, 548, 553 Bode, K., 510 Boehlert, E., 394 Boehmer, J., 119, 125 Boesman, J., 480, 489 Bohle, P., 207 Boler, M., 168 Bolin, G., 319 Bollen, J., 136 Boltanski, L., 272 Bonilla, Y., 86 Bonsón, E., 244 Boorstin, D., 243 Borger, M., 301, 302, 413, 552 Borges-Rey, E., 275 Borra, E., 484 Bouquillion, P., 230 Bourbon, J., 515 Bourdieu, P., 17, 150, 289, 296, 383–394 Bowden, G., 464 Bowman, S., 303 Bowman, W., 179 Boyd-Barrett, O., 208, 210 Boyd, D., 33, 82, 83, 101, 103, 105, 114, 118, 123, 244, 378, 524, 571 Boyer, D., 240 Boykoff, M., 391, 394 Brabham, D., 100, 224, 226, 229 Bracken, C., 478 Bradshaw, P., 282, 286, 287, 392 Bradshaw, T., 330 Bräuchler, B., 326 Braun, J., 210, 461, 473 Braxton, G., 334 Breed, W., 117 Breindl, Y., 146, 255, 257, 259 Brewer, J., 567

AUTHOR INDEX

Briatte, F., 257 Briggs, A., 255 Briggs, M., 212 Brin, C., 88, 480, 490 Brinkerhoff, J., 40, 42 Bro, P., 538 Brock, G., 194 Broeck, W. van den, 226 Broersma, M., 1, 98, 195, 197, 244, 343, 356, 384, 562 Brolin, M., 480, 489 Bromley, M., 209 Brosius, H., 572 Broustau, N., 471 Brown, C., 38, 45 Brown, M., 213 Brown, P., 274 Brown, S., 534 Brownlee, B.J., 120 Brownstein, B., 172 Brüggemann, M., 539 Brügger, N., 497 Bruner, J., 243 Bruni, A., 466, 467, 472 Bruno, N., 65, 88 Bruns, A., 40, 86, 96, 100, 104, 106, 116, 118, 124, 133, 152, 153, 165, 180, 182, 186, 225, 232, 280, 301, 303, 355, 444, 500, 501, 512, 517, 518, 522, 531, 554 Bruseberg, A., 549 Bryman, A., 533 Brynjolfsson, E., 378 Büchel, F., 539 Buckingham, D., 550 Bucy, E.P., 136 Bughin, J., 428, 429, 430, 431, 434, 436 Bulck, H. van den, 197 Bullas, J., 82 Bunce, M., 213 Burgess, J., 104, 501, 517 Burgh, H. de, 384 Burke, P., 255 Burkholder, N.C., 207 Butler, B., 335 Butler, J., 103 Buzan, B., 39 Cabrera, M.A., 213 Calabrese, A., 37 Caldarelli, G., 101 Callison, C., 18, 87, 99, 106 Callon, M., 398, 403, 404, 406, 462, 464 Cammaerts, B., 250, 251, 255, 256, 296, 333, 337, 359 Campbell, W.J., 81 Candello, E., 267, 274 Canter, L., 227 Cantijoch, M., 502 Caple, H., 228, 267

579

Capocci, A., 101 Cardon, D., 253, 255 Carey, J., 121, 374, 414, 427, 433, 435 Carey, M.C., 181, 186 Carley, K., 500, 501 Carlile, P., 460 Carlson, M., 3, 139, 146, 239, 240, 242, 273, 307, 346, 348, 402, 406 Carpentier, N., 19, 165, 179, 328, 529 Carr, N., 223 Carren, N., 95, 101 Carstens, S., 35 Case, T., 152 Casero-Ripollés, A., 257 Cashmore, P., 334 Cassell, J., 449, 450 Cassidy, W.P., 343 Castells, M., 26, 32, 33, 40, 82, 86, 101, 228, 254, 256, 302, 355, 361, 378, 428, 463, 479 Castro, L., 539 Caves, R., 430 Ceker, H., 423 Ceppos, J., 390, 555 Chadwick, A., 3, 85, 86, 96, 106, 151, 154, 160, 252, 498, 529 Chakravartty. P., 389 Chambers, D., 392 Chan, B., 41 Chan, H.C., 186 Chan, J., 238, 240, 243 Chang, W.Y., 229 Chapain, C., 282, 285 Charmaz, K., 451 Chen, K., 87, 125, 155 Chi, Y., 230 Chinni, D., 546 Choudhury, M. de, 245 Chouliaraki, L., 132, 133, 135, 271, 272, 273 Christensen, C., 63, 194 Christensen, N., 515 Christians, C., 10, 300, 302, 310, 391, 555 Christiansen, C., 36, 44 Christmann, G., 569 Chun, S.A., 244 Chung, D., 181, 356 Chyi, H.I., 89, 240 Citton, Y., 404 Clark, J., 309 Clark, L.S., 156, 160 Clegg, S., 427, 434 Clough, P.T., 129, 131 Coates Nee, R., 436 Coddington, M., 98, 242, 304, 341, 343, 345, 392 Coen, S., 115 Cohen, B., 488 Cohen, J., 330 Cohen, N., 211, 213

580

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Cohen, S., 538, 539 Coleman, G., 259 Colleoni, E., 101 Collins, M., 488 Collins, S., 334 Conlan, T., 209 Connolly-Ahern, C., 102 Conover, M., 103, 105, 337 Constantaras, E., 158 Cook, C., 168 Cook, J., 46 Cook, T., 26–27, 488 Cooper, B., 334 Cooren, F., 467, 468, 469 Costera Meijer, I., 13, 16, 20, 89, 115, 182, 183, 315, 354, 358, 362, 397, 402, 405, 413, 444, 466, 472, 473, 520, 546, 548, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 556, 557 Cottke, S., 95, 96 Cottle, S., 130, 135, 200, 239, 273, 275, 360, 411, 448, 564 Couldry, N., 150, 153, 160, 165, 169, 183, 184, 241, 242, 272, 296, 316, 317, 318, 326, 327, 328, 335, 347, 360, 364, 398, 402, 404, 462, 529, 533, 536, 557 Courpasson, D., 427, 434 Courtois, C., 354, 532, 539 Coward, R., 129, 130, 131 Cozma, R., 87, 117, 125, 155 Craft, S., 390 Craig, D., 392 Cramer, J., 392 Crary, J., 330, 331 Crawford, K., 89, 183, 187, 188, 307, 379, 524, 554, 571 Creedon, P., 392 Cresswell, T., 363 Cronin, A., 566, 567 Crouse, T., 245 Crow, G., 530 Cuntz, M., 404 Curran, J., 10, 15, 115, 165, 435, 538, 539 Curtin, P., 387 Cushion, S., 240, 283 Cutlip, S., 390 Cˇ uvalo, A., 539 Cvetkovich, A., 131 Czarniawska-Joerges, B., 465, 466, 467 Czarniawska, B., 210, 214 Czepek, A., 447–448 D’Amours, M., 211 D’Cruz, P., 207 D’Haenens, L., 52, 57, 489 Dadas, C., 95 Dagiral, E., 209, 215, 344, 345 Dahlgren, P., 19, 20, 131, 132, 258, 488, 520, 530

Dalen, A. van, 571 Daniels, G., 425 Davis, A., 63, 240, 242 Davis, C., 534, 536 Davis, N., 209 Day, K., 334 De Santos, M., 496 Dean, W., 546 Deibert, R., 253 Deleuze, G., 168, 415 Deller, R., 531 Delli Carpini, M., 97, 240, 304 Demers, D., 426, 433 Dening, G., 553, 554 Dennis, E.E., 130 Denzin, N., 449, 551, 553 DeShano, C., 179, 181, 429 Deth, J.W., 101 Deuze, M., 12, 38, 188, 193, 198, 199, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 241, 302, 306, 309, 341, 342, 384, 393, 425, 426, 428, 431, 435, 436, 452, 479, 488, 494, 495, 496, 555 Dewan, P., 517 DeWerth-Pallmeyer, D., 546 Dewey, J., 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 73, 151, 152, 316, 318 Dex, S., 211 Dholakia, U.M., 186 Diakopoulos, N., 181, 245, 341, 345 Dicken-Garcia, H., 386 Dickens, L., 153, 360 Dickinson, A., 168 Dickinson, M., 566, 567 Diefenbach, T., 428, 434 Dijck, J. van, 21, 22, 84, 155, 183, 315, 319, 335 Dijk, J. van, 116, 378 Dimaggio, P., 370 Diminescu, D., 41 Dimitrova, D., 102 Dimmick, J., 364 Dimoulas, C., 307, 400, 473 DiNapoli, J., 38, 39 Dingwall, R., 432, 434, 437 Djerf-Pierre, M., 87, 116, 212, 309 Dlugoleski, D., 30 Dobbie, M., 211 Dobbs, P.S., 100 Dobson, A., 555, 557 Doctor, K., 89 Doeve, M., 556, 557 Dohle, M., 562 Domeyer, H., 533 Domingo, D., 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 85, 88, 115, 160, 179, 180, 181, 183, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 210, 213, 230, 232, 246, 297, 302, 315, 342, 343, 344, 345, 355, 397, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 447, 448, 452, 461, 462, 464, 465, 466, 472, 473, 480, 553, 562

AUTHOR INDEX

Donath, J., 81, 82 Donsbach, W., 120 Dovey, J., 283, 285, 287 Dowell, B., 336 Downie, L., 1, 62, 152, 280, 306 Downing, J., 165, 300 Doyle, G., 52, 54, 193 Dredge, S., 171 Dreher, T., 183, 553, 554 Dreier, P., 391 Drezner, D., 101, 102, 252 Driscoll, K., 95, 501 Drotner, K., 534 Dubberley, S., 274 Duffy, A., 43 Duganne, E., 271 Duggan, C., 488 Duggan, M., 37, 338 Dunlevy, T., 172, 173, 174 Dunwoody, S., 456 Dür, A., 254 Dutton, W., 96, 252, 256 Dworkin, R., 74 Dwyer, T., 361 Earl, J., 253, 254 Eason, D., 121, 245 Eberl, J., 420 Eberwein, T., 315 Edgerly, S., 95 Edo Bolós, C., 213 Edström, M., 211 Eford, A., 97, 115 Eggers, D., 329 Ehrenreich, B., 207 Eide, E., 153, 159, 160 Ekdale, B., 95 Ekinsmyth, C., 211 Ekman, M., 244 Ekström, M., 132, 436 El Issawi, F., 337 El Zahed, S., 274 Elgesem, D., 505 Eliasoph, N., 318 Ellingson, L., 548 Elliot, D., 394 Elliott, P., 488 Ellis, J., 267, 269, 270, 271 Ellison, N., 82 Elmore, C., 211, 213 Elsler, M., 539 Emerson, R., 342, 346, 348 Engelmann, I., 181, 182 Engesser, S., 280, 539 Entman, R., 97, 103, 104, 239 Epstein, E.J., 130 Ericson, R., 238, 240, 243, 480

581

Eriksson, G., 436 Eriksson, T., 207 Erzberger, C., 569 Esser, F., 62 Etling, B., 159, 160, 259, 420 Ettema, J.S., 132 Etter, M., 101 Evans, C., 488 Eveland, W. Jr., 456 Evetts, J., 224, 225, 426, 427 Ewing, S., 186 Eyal, C., 97 Fairclough, N., 572 Fairhurst, G., 468, 469 Fakazis, E., 245 Falkheimer, J., 365 Fallows, J., 376 Faraj, S., 186 Färdigh, A., 343 Faris, R., 159, 160, 259 Farrell, H., 101, 102, 252 Farris, R., 420 Fatima Oliveira, M. de, 32, 85, 86, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 137, 354 Fauser, M., 37, 39 Feaster, J., 364 Feenstra, R., 207, 257 Feldman, M., 547 Fenby, J., 210 Fengler, S., 315 Fenno, R., 450 Fenton, N., 17, 19, 150, 274 Fernández, N., 214 Ferrara, E., 337 Ferrier, M., 308 Fico, F., 304, 497 Fielding, J., 566, 567 Fielding, N., 571 Filloux, F., 89 Finch, T., 198 Fineman, H., 105 Fink, K., 20, 345, 379 Finnemann, N., 532 Fishman, M., 240, 449, 451 Fiske, J., 83, 180 Fiss, O., 302 Fisteus, J., 214 Flammini, A., 103, 105, 337 Flanagin, A., 254, 378 Fleming, C., 392 Fletcher, F., 84, 88, 115, 316 Flew, T., 304 Flichy, P., 225 Flick, U., 565, 567, 569 Flores, F., 244 Flouch, H., 284

582

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Fogarasi, A., 166 Foot, K., 497 Ford, H., 461 Ford, S., 96 Forde, S., 209, 213 Fortunati, L., 181, 211 Foss, S., 384 Fotopoulou, A., 153, 347, 360 Foucault, M., 39, 168, 333, 358 Francisco, M., 103, 105 Frank, T., 172 Franklin, B., 12, 18, 19, 128, 209, 241 Freedman, D., 557 Freelon, D., 43 Freidson, E., 426, 427, 434 Friend, C., 77, 555 Fröhlich, R., 280 Frosh, P., 269 Fuchs, C., 230, 255 Fuentes, M., 214 Fuller, M., 415, 416, 461 Gaby, S., 95, 101 Gade, P., 195 Gaffney, D., 87, 96, 99, 101, 150, 153, 518 Gallo, J., 253 Galtung, J., 332 Gamber, T., 95 Gamson, W.A., 97 Gandy, O. Jr., 240, 387 Gans, H., 14, 18, 240, 300, 394, 447, 448, 449, 451, 453, 480, 448 García Avilés, J., 197, 489 García-Galera, C., 225 Garrett, R., 251, 253 Garrison, B., 196 Garza, A., 86 Gassler, W., 104 Gauntlett, D., 548, 549, 551, 554 Gay, P. du, 433 Geens, D., 453 Geertz, C., 553 Georgiou, M., 16, 38 Gerbaudo, P., 166 Gerlitz, C., 571 Gervais, R., 207 Ghanem, S., 35 Gibbs, A., 185, 187 Gibson, R., 502 Giddens, A., 425, 28 Gieber, W., 238 Gieryn, T.F., 155 Gil de Zúñiga, H., 226 Gil, G., 165 Gillam, L., 450, 451 Gillespie, T., 90, 155, 156, 160, 210, 252, 345, 460, 462, 463, 460. 462, 463

Gilley, K.M., 207 Gillmor, D., 225, 230, 275, 301, 303, 392 Giménez Toledo, E., 213 Ginsburg, F., 328 Gitlin, T., 239, 245, 251, 488 Glance, N., 102, 253, 516 Glasser, T.L., 10, 132, 152, 300, 301, 302, 303, 310, 391 Gleason, B., 87, 95 Glidden, B., 102 Godler, Y., 489 Goetz, J., 457 Goffman, E., 114, 118, 123, 244, 363 Goggin, G., 361 Golden-Biddle, K., 547 Golder, S., 101, 477, 571 Golding, P., 488 Gollmitzer, M., 211, 212 Goncalves, B., 103, 105 González-Bailón, S., 506 González-Ibáñez, R., 104 Goodman, E., 309 Goodwin, J., 131 Gorp, B. van, 489 Gorset, J., 517 Gorton, K., 184 Gottfried, J., 45, 84 Gould, D., 131, 137 Goyal, S., 378 Grabe, M.E., 136 Graber, D., 112 Graeff, E., 87, 96, 99, 101, 150, 153, 420 Graham, T., 98, 244, 531 Granjon, F., 253, 255 Gravano, L., 96 Graves, L., 61, 452, 461, 462, 363 Gray, J., 184, 185 Gray, R., 266 Green, J., 96, 317 Greene, J., 533, 537, 538 Greenwald, G., 28, 29, 40, 151, 258, 338, 392 Griffith, R., 214 Groot Kormelink, T., 89, 115, 182, 183, 315, 354, 362, 402, 520, 548, 551, 553, 554 Gross, K., 97 Gross, S., 39 Grossberg, L., 167 Grossman, G.M., 207 Grueskin, B., 61 Grusin, R., 98 Guattari, F., 168, 415, 416 Guillemin, M., 450, 451 Gulyás, A., 87, 115, 116 Gunes, M., 420 Gürsel, Z.D., 131, 132 Guskin, E., 38, 84, 211 Gustafson, R., 534

AUTHOR INDEX

Gustafsson, N., 259 Guyot, J., 429 Gynnild, A., 170, 211, 216, 341, 345, 489 Haak, B. van der, 479 Haak, M. van den, 551 Haan, Y. de, 555 Habermas, J., 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 130, 159, 237, 286, 520, 530 Hadley, P., 244 Haenlein, M., 82 Hájek, R., 165 Halavais, A., 246 Haller, M., 121 Halley, J., 131 Hallin, D., 10, 11, 16, 17, 20, 120, 239, 433, 478 Hambrick, M.E., 116 Hamilton, J., 30, 52, 54, 55, 56, 145, 154, 164, 165, 166, 170, 223 Hampton, M., 120 Hanegreefs, S., 275 Hanitzsch, T., 12, 15, 16, 52, 343, 383, 386, 488, 564, 671 Hannam, K., 361 Hansen, L.K., 101 Hanson, G., 207 Hanusch, F., 270 Hardaker, C., 181 Harder, R., 244 Hardin, M., 488 Harding, C., 173 Hardt, M., 131 Hargittai, E., 253 Hargreaves, A., 35 Hariman, R., 273 Harju, A., 531 Harkin, J., 274 Harp, D., 102 Harrington, S., 518 Harrington, W., 121 Harris, J., 81 Harris, K., 284 Harris, M., 428 Harrison, T.M., 82, 181 Harro-Loit, H., 181 Harte, D., 147, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 288 Hartley, J., 15, 20, 132, 290, 424, 510 Hartsock, J.C., 121 Harvey, D., 358, 428 Hasebrink, U., 532, 533 Haslam, C., 549 Hassard, J., 398, 406, 464 Hätönen, J., 207 Hay, J., 167 Hayashi, K., 425 Hayes, A., 390, 555 Haywood, W., 166

583

Hedman, U., 87, 116, 212, 309 Heikkilä, H., 296, 323, 354, 531, 532 Heinderyckx, F., 362 Heinonen, A., 14, 17, 18, 85, 88, 97, 98, 152, 168, 181, 193, 199, 201, 213, 224, 227, 230, 301, 302, 315, 342, 343, 355, 429 Helles, R., 539 Hellmueller, L., 390, 392, 393 Helmond, A., 571 Helpman, E., 207 Hemmingway, E., 201, 202, 342, 345, 398, 399, 400, 401, 404, 405, 407, 452, 458, 461, 462, 464, 465, 473 Hemsley, J., 103 Hendrickson, E., 38, 45 Hepp, A., 539 Herlocker, J.L., 100 Hermans, L., 479 Hermida, A., 14, 18, 19, 30, 32, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 115, 116, 118, 136, 137, 138, 150, 152, 153, 155, 168, 179, 180, 181, 182, 193, 199, 201, 225, 230, 244, 253, 301, 303, 309, 316, 322, 331, 333, 342, 343, 345, 347, 354, 364, 500, 501, 502 Herrera, S., 118 Hess, K., 290 Hess, T., 436 Hickman, J., 281 Highfield, T., 512, 516, 518 Highmore, B., 362 Hilbert, M., 61 Hill, A., 548 Hill, J.E., 268 Hille, S., 342 Hills, M., 185, 186 Himelboim, I., 253 Hindman, M., 65, 224, 240, 246, 250, 252, 302 Hine, C., 531 Hino, K., 230 Hintz, A., 259 Hirschberg, L., 236 Hirshleifer, D., 105 Hirst, M., 230 Hoch, S., 54 Hoffman, J., 410, 418 Hofman, J.M., 100 Hoge, J. Jr., 26 Hogenkamp, B., 166 Holcomb, J., 45, 97, 166 Hollifield, A., 425 Hollifield, C., 426, 428, 429, 431, 433 Holt, K., 181 Holton, A., 88, 98, 116, 152, 160, 193, 198, 204, 304, 343 Hoof, A. van, 301, 302, 413, 480, 490, 552 Höpfl, H., 428 Hopkins, L., 186

584

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Hoplamazian, G., 364 Horan, T., 173 Horning, M., 282, 283, 284, 285, 288 Hoskins, A., 273 Houston, B., 337 Hovy, E., 244 Howard, A., 157, 158 Howard, P., 43 Howarth, A., 169 Howe, J., 100 Howley, K., 168, 169 Hoxha, A., 213 Høyer, S., 166, 372 Huang, E., 213 Hubbard, P., 365 Huët, R., 468 Hughes, A., 274, 276 Hughes, H.M., 121 Humphreys, L., 450 Humprecht, E., 542 Hunter, A., 212, 567 Hunter, L., 344 Hunter, M., 63 Husband, C., 38 Hussain, M., 40 Hussain, M., 43, 101, 102 Huxford, J., 272 Hwang, S., 242 Ibrahim, M., 37 Ibrahim, Y., 276 Iezzi, T., 173 Inglis, F., 267 Ingram, M., 99, 287 Irwin, K., 450, 451 Ito, M., 150 Jacobi, C., 420 Jain, R., 101 Jamison, A., 241 Jandura, O., 569 Jansson, A., 359, 360, 365 Jardin, X., 171 Jarvis, J., 150, 301, 305, 309, 378, 413, 479 Jasper, J.M., 131 Jeanne-Perrier, V., 471 Jeffery, C., 207 Jenkins, H., 96, 180, 184, 185, 301, 317, 413 Jenner, E., 30 Jennes, I., 226 Jensen, K., 318, 363, 531, 532, 533, 539 Jeong, H., 101, 105 Jeong, S.H., 89 Johansson, K., 480 John, N., 326, 338 Johnson, K., 183, 287 Johnson, M., 384

Johnson, R., 566, 567 Johnson, W., 238 Johnston, J., 209, 213 Jokela, T., 479 Jones, A., 425 Jones, J., 128 Jones, P., 115, 538, 539 Jong, M. de, 551 Jönsson, A.M., 20, 181 Jordan, T., 345 Josephi, B., 5, 10, 12 Joye, S., 132 Ju, A., 88, 89 Jünger, J., 517 Jurišic´, J., 543 Jurkowitz, M., 287 Just, M., 546 Kalleberg, A., 207 Kallinikos, J., 460 Kalliris, G., 307, 400, 473 Kaltenbrunner, A., 197, 489 Kamhawi, R., 480 Kane, M., 253 Kantola, A., 297, 430, 435, 436, 437 Kaplan, A., 82 Kaplan, R., 377 Kaplan, R., 306 Karaganis, J., 554 Karlsen, J., 121, 345 Karlsson, M., 181, 393, 443, 478, 494, 496, 497, 498, 499, 503, 505 Karpf, D., 254, 378, 506 Kassing, J., 244 Katz, E., 230, 327, 418 Kaufhold, K., 213, 302 Kaufman, L., 287 Kautsky, R., 496 Kavada, A., 254 Kawamoto, K., 394 Kaye, J., 394 Keane, J., 256, 271, 530 Keck, M., 251 Keen, A., 223 Keim, G., 254 Keith, S., 195, 462, 473, 496 Kelle, U., 569 Keller, B., 27 Kelly, B., 173 Kelty, C., 258, 259 Kemmelmeier, M., 377 Kemp, S., 82 Kenix, L., 165 Kennedy, C., 212 Kennedy, L., 268, 274 Kerkhoven, M., 280 Keyling, T., 517

AUTHOR INDEX

Keyser, J. de, 320 Khondker, H., 166, 333 Kian, E., 488 Kiley, J., 84 Killebrew, K., 195, 425 Kim, E.G., 223 Kim, S., 479 Kimport, K., 253, 254 King, D., 370–371 Kirchhoff, L., 512 Kitch, C., 271 Kitchin, R., 365 Klein-Avraham, I., 267 Klein, N., 207 Kline, S., 534 Klinenberg, E., 212 Kloet, J., 13 Klüver, H., 254 Kneip, V., 250, 251, 254, 255, 256 Knobel, M., 105 Knoke, D., 378 Kobbernagel, C., 534, 536, 539, 540 Kohli, V., 62 Kohring, M., 547, 568 Kolmer, C., 564 Kolthoff, A., 447 Konstan, J.A., 100 Koopmans, R., 251 Koponen, T., 479 Kopper, G., 425, 447–448 Korell, D., 88, 115, 316 Koteyko, N., 513 Kouloumpis, E., 104 Kovach, B., 88, 246, 376, 386, 484, 547 Kozinets, R., 531 Kperogi, F., 42, 44, 139, 229 Krajina, Z., 532 Krashinsky, S., 173 Krasovec, P., 213 Kreiss, D., 243, 295, 305, 330, 378, 398, 399, 400, 404, 405, 461, 462, 465, 473 Kressley, K.M., 211 Krippendorff, K., 480, 494, 497, 504, 505 Kristensen, N., 223, 355 Kroon Lundell, A., 436 Krumsvik, A., 343 Ksiazek, T., 240, 529, 533 Kubik, J., 449 Kuebler, J., 150 Kumaraguru, P., 517 Kunelius, R., 153, 159, 160, 430 Küng-Shankleman, L., 349 Küng, L., 63, 344, 425, 427, 430, 436 Kunkel, T., 376 Kurpius, D., 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 288 Kwak, H., 115

585

Laberg, J., 505 Lacy, S., 304, 497 Ladendorf, M., 211 Laer, J. van, 253 Lahav, H., 484 Laine, M. de, 450 Lakoff, G., 384 Lancaster, K., 185, 186, 187 Lanchester, J., 425 Langer, J., 554 Langley, A., 460 Langton, L., 267 Lankshear, C., 105 Larkin, E., 488 Larson, M., 426 Larsson, A., 444, 495, 500 Lasar, M., 261 Lash, S., 425 Lasorsa, D., 88, 97, 116, 118, 152, 193, 198, 213, 309, 343 Latour, B., 13, 341, 345, 346, 348, 356, 398, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 416, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 468, 471, 472, 479, 553 Lauf, E., 499 Lauk, E., 166 Lavine, J., 430 Law. J., 398, 402, 462, 464 Lawrence, R.G., 145, 154 Lazarsfeld, P., 230, 418 Le Cam, F., 246, 401, 403, 405, 463, 470 Leavitt, A., 100, 105 Leavy, P., 268 LeCompte, M., 457 Leder Mackley, K., 361 Lee Kaid, L., 102 Lee-Wright, P., 1, 211, 212, 215, 431, 436, 480, 481 Lee, A., 514, 548 Lee, C., 115 Lee, J.K., 226 Lee, L., 136 Lee, R., 571 Lefebvre, H., 289, 358 Legault, M.J., 211 Lenhart, A., 37 Lenzner, B., 170 Leonard, P., 17.18 Lerman, K., 101 Lessig, L., 252 Levine, R., 301, 309 Levine, R., 173 Levinson, P., 414 Levy, D., 52, 57, 301, 309, 362, 538 Levy, S., 258 Lewin, K., 96, 296, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 390, 391, 392, 394 Lewis, J., 209, 240

586

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Lewis, S., 153, 155, 156, 160, 201, 202, 203, 232, 240, 296, 301, 302, 307, 310, 500, 501, 502, 503, 514, 518 Lichty, L., 320 Lievrouw, L., 196, 400, 461, 462 Lin, H., 186 Lin, W.-Y., 496, 497, 498 Linaa Jensen, J., 532, 543 Lindell, J., 360 Lindén, C-G, 436 Lindlof, T., 462 Linfield, S., 268 Lingenberg, S., 539 Linke, M., 97, 115 Lippmann, W., 13, 14, 15, 20, 75, 227 Littau, J., 38, 45 Liu, B., 136 Liu, H., 500, 501 Liu, S., 274, 276 Liu, X., 104 Livingston, D., 39 Livingstone, S., 47, 317, 318, 357, 360, 533, 536, 539 Lloyd, J., 183, 553, 554, 557 Locke, C., 301, 309 Locke, K., 547 Löffelholz, M., 489 Lofland, J., 449 Lofland, L., 449 Logan, D., 84, 88, 115, 316 Lombard, M., 478 Loomis, D., 566 Loon, J. van, 464 Loosen, W., 354, 445, 472, 562, 563, 564, 566, 567, 570, 572 Lorenz, E., 404 Lorgen, L., 505 Losnegaard, G., 505 Lotan, G., 87, 96, 99, 101, 150, 153 Lowe, W., 101 Lowndes, V., 371, 377 Lowrey, W., 195, 198, 226, 306, 342, 370 Luengo, M., 489 Lund, M., 197, 497 Lunt, P., 131 Lynch, L., 27, 28 Lyon, D., 39 Mabweazara, H., 479 MacBride, S., 37 MacDonald, K., 426 Macedo Higgins, J. de, 428 MacGregor Wise, J., 170 Machill, M., 488 MacInnes, K., 210 MacKinnon, R., 156, 253, 413 Macnamara, J., 241, 242 Macy, M., 571

Maddex, B.D., 83, 84 Maderazo, J., 207 Madianou, M., 36, 44, 45, 132, 317, 354, 357, 562 Maeyer, J. de, 345, 398, 404, 444, 460, 470, 479 Mahdjoub, D., 35 Makau, J., 72 Malik, M., 564 Malthouse, E., 529, 533 Mancini, P., 10, 17, 20, 120, 305 Manning, P., 388, 389, 479 Manoff, R., 238 Manovich, L., 122, 503, 510 Mao, H., 136 Maras, S., 130, 238 March, J., 370, 371 Marcus, G., 470 Mari, W., 43 Marjoribanks, T., 214, 436 Markham, T., 317, 318, 360, 533, 536 Marrara, A., 214 Marres, N., 470 Marston, S., 360 Martin, C., 391 Martin, F., 361 Martin, J., 384, 385, 387, 388, 392 Marty, D., 72 Marwick, A., 83, 114, 118, 123, 244 Masip, P., 13, 16, 20, 115, 183, 202, 213, 345, 397, 400, 402, 403, 462, 464, 466, 472, 473, 553, 562 Masnick, M., 261 Mason, W., 410, 418 Massanari, A., 100 Massey, B., 211, 213 Massumi, B., 129 Mast, J., 275 Matar, D., 44 Matheson, D., 132, 138, 274, 496 Mathiesen, T., 39, 336 Matsiola, M., 307, 400, 473 Matsuo, Y., 96 Matte, F., 467 Matthes, J., 547, 568 Matthews, J., 230 Mattoni, A., 250, 251 Maxwell, J., 566 May, C. (Carl), 198 May, C. (Christopher), 257 Mayhew, C., 207 Mazaid, M., 43 Mazey, S., 254 Mazzoleni, G., 315 McAdam, D., 251 McAfee, A., 378 McCarthy, J., 251 McCarthy, L., 488 McCartney, M., 488 McChesney, R., 215, 291, 308, 390, 394

AUTHOR INDEX

McCombs, M., 96, 97, 103, 239 McCurdy, P., 250, 251, 257, 259 McDonagh, D., 549 McDowell, W., 428, 436 McGregor, S., 464 McManus, J., 480, 490 McMillan, S., 477, 480, 496, 497 McMillian, J., 166 McNair, B., 10, 284, 289, 428, 429, 432, 434, 530 McPherson, M., 46, 102 McQuail, D., 10, 300, 302, 310, 391, 546 McVeigh-Schultz, J., 345 Méadel, C., 515 Meier, K., 197, 489 Meier, W., 52, 57 Meikle, G., 167, 274 Mejias, U., 330 Mellado, C., 488, 568 Mencer, F., 103, 105 Menczer, F., 337 Mensing, D., 420 Meraz, S., 6, 87, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 Mercea, D., 571 Meredyth, D., 186 Merks, M., 559 Merrill, J.C., 130 Mersey, R., 363, 436 Merten, K., 564 Messner, M., 97, 115 Metzgar, E., 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286 Meunier, D., 466, 467 Meyer, H.K., 181, 186 Meyer, J., 370 Meyrowitz, J., 355, 358 Michelle, C., 534, 536 Micó, J., 202, 345, 400, 403, 462, 464, 473 Mierzjewska, B., 426, 428, 429, 431, 433 Mihalcea, R., 504 Milan, S., 259 Milkman, K.L., 138 Mill, J.S., 74 Millard, D., 17, 18 Miller, D., 248, 357 Miller, W., 243 Milton, J., 488 Milton, J. (John), 10, 11, 16 Mindich, D., 393 Mirzoeff, N., 273 Mitchell, A., 84, 88, 97, 100, 166, 316, 357, 361, 551 Mitchell, W., 272 Mitchelstein, E., 87, 181, 342, 436, 489, 496, 546, 548, 553 Modigliani, A., 97 Moe, H., 86, 496, 500, 505 Mollen, A., 539 Möller, J., 539

Montoyo, A., 504 Moon, S.J., 115, 244 Moore, J., 104 Moore, M., 285 Moores, S., 363, 532 Moran-Ellis, J., 566, 567 Morgan, D., 568 Morgan, F., 417 Morgan, L., 274 Morley, D., 35, 316, 320, 359, 532 Morozov, E., 337 Morris, S., 393 Morstatter, F., 500, 501 Mortensen, M., 223, 266, 355 Morton, T., 242 Mosco, V., 119, 208 Mortensen, T., 267 Mouffe, C., 137, 167 Muhammad, K.G., 86 Müller, F., 257 Murdock, G., 428 Muresan, S., 104 Murnane, J., 464 Murray, C., 534 Murrell, C., 213 Murthy, D., 331 Mychajlowycz, K., 88, 480, 490 Naaman, M., 96, 181, 245 Nabili, N., 153 Nachtwey, J., 267 Nah, S., 181, 183, 287 Nahon, K., 101, 102, 103 Napoli, P., 58, 65, 89, 303, 305, 315, 357, 390 Nardi, B., 460 Nazir, S., 425 Neff, G., 345 Nel, F., 59, 65 Nemeth, N., 555 Neresini, F., 403 Nerone, J., 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 166, 300 Neuberger, C., 302, 495 Neuendorf, K., 494, 503, 568 Neuman, R., 53, 61 Neumann, P., 40 Neveu, E., 305, 383, 386 Newman, M., 101 Newman, N., 53, 57, 59, 84, 88, 89, 95, 96, 188, 362, 538 Neyland, D., 470, 471 Nguyen, A., 194 Nicey, J., 146, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231 Nichols, J., 219 Nicolai, T., 512 Nicolini, D., 460 Nielsen, A.N., 101 Nielsen, C., 302

587

588

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Nielsen, R.K., 6, 52, 53, 57, 61, 65, 201, 300, 301, 302, 309, 377, 378, 530, 539 Nies, G., 211 Niesyto, J., 250, 251, 254, 255, 256 Nikunen, K., 432, 435 Nind, M., 530 Nip, J., 186 Nissenbaum, H., 252 Noam, E., 55 Noble, S., 86 Noblet, A., 231 Noguera-Vivo, J.M., 87 Nordenstreng, K., 300, 302, 310, 391 Noronha, E., 207 Norris, P., 360 Nossek, H., 541 Nygren, G., 345 Nyre, L., 355 O’Connor, B., 136 O’Donnell, P., 183, 554, 553, 554, 557 O’Donovan, C., 375 O’Loughlin, B., 274 O’Reilly, T., 82, 495 O’Sullivan, J., 181, 342, 429, 436 Offerhaus, A., 539 Ogan, C., 35 Oiarzabal, P., 40 Øie, K., 355 Okada, E., 54 Okazaki, M., 96 Oliver, C., 288, 303 Olmstead, K., 88, 100, 316, 357, 551 Olsen, J., 370, 371 Olson, M. Jr, 253 Onwuegbuzie, A., 566, 567 Opgenhaffen, M., 117, 118 Orgeret, K., 169 Orlikowski, W., 214 Ørmen, J., 539 Örnebring, H., 20, 146, 181, 208, 209, 214, 215, 224, 341, 342 Ortved, J., 172 Packer, J., 460 Page, R., 243 Palen, L., 274, 276 Palmer, L., 229 Palmer, R., 245 Panek, E., 53, 61 Pang, B., 136 Pantti, M., 43, 130, 131, 134, 267, 272, 274 Papacharissi, Z., 6, 32, 85, 86, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 129, 132, 133, 137, 150, 152, 153, 154, 160, 271, 354, 364 Papathanassopoulos, S., 115, 538, 539 Parasie, S., 209, 215, 281, 344, 345, 463, 468, 469

Parikka, J., 460 Pariser, E., 46, 136, 138, 253 Park, H., 115 Park, H.W., 516 Park, R.E., 316, 318 Park, Y.J., 53, 61 Parks, L., 35 Parks, M., 479 Parsons, C., 388 Pascal, J., 282, 286, 287 Pasley, J., 385 Pasquali, F., 529, 532 Paterson, C., 160, 196, 210, 211, 213, 448, 452 Paterson, R., 211 Patriarche, G., 543 Patrick, C., 268 Patterson, T.E., 120 Paulussen, S., 85, 88, 97, 98, 146, 168, 179, 180, 181, 190, 193, 195, 197, 199, 213, 230, 244, 301, 302, 315, 343, 354, 355, 453 Pavlik, J., 281, 286, 304, 341, 342 Pearce, I., 87, 96, 99, 101, 150, 153 Peck, A., 166 Pedersini, R., 211 Peer, L., 240 Pegoraro, A., 244 Pelt, O. van, 480, 481, 490 Pendry, R., 213 Penney, J., 95 Pentina, I., 115 Pepe, A., 136 Pereira, F., 471 Perez, A., 417 Perline, R., 101 Perry, E., 425 Pertilla, A., 546 Perusko, Z., 539 Peter, G., 370–371 Peters, C., 1, 19, 131, 274, 296, 301, 302, 343, 355, 356, 357, 358, 363, 364, 384, 529, 562 Peters, J., 270, 271 Peterson, T., 10, 80, 391 Pettegree, A., 51, 63, 64 Pfaffinger, C., 181, 182 Pfeffer, J., 500, 501 Phalen, P., 320 Philips, J., 174 Philips, N., 427 Phillips, A., 1, 240, 557 Phillips, L., 317 Picard, A., 172 Picard, R., 12, 17, 19, 22, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 194, 379, 425, 428, 431, 435 Pickard, M., 286 Pickard, V., 303, 308, 309 Picone, I., 182, 184, 187, 354, 530 Pierre, J., 370–371

AUTHOR INDEX

Pierson, J., 226 Pierson, P., 378 Pignard-Cheynel, N., 231 Piketty, T., 338 Pinchevski, A., 269, 271 Pink, S., 289, 290, 361, 551 Pintak, L., 425 Platman, K., 211 Platon, S., 223, 229 Plesner, U., 201, 202, 345, 398–399, 400, 405 Poell, T., 13, 21, 22, 484 Poepsel, M., 392, 393 Poitras, L., 11 Polletta, F., 131 Pool, T., 170–171 Popovich, M., 534 Popp, J., 533 Porlezza, C., 315 Porto, M., 62 Postill, J., 289, 326 Potter, D., 212 Powell, T., 212 Powell, W., 370 Powers, M., 154, 209, 342, 343, 344, 346, 347, 348 Poynter, R., 571 Prashar, B., 38 Preston, J., 333, 337 Preston, P., 429, 431, 435 Primo, A., 462, 463, 464, 465, 469, 473 Prior, M., 53, 239 Punch, M., 449, 451, 452 Purcell, K., 88, 100, 316, 357, 551 Puschmann, C., 518 Putnam, H., 73 Putnam, R., 356 Quandt, T., 14, 17, 18, 85, 88, 97, 98, 168, 179, 180, 181, 193, 199, 213, 230, 302, 315, 343, 355, 374, 496, 499, 564 Quine, W., 74 Quinlan, M., 107 Quinn, S., 195, 197 Quirling, O., 280 Rabinovitch, S., 173 Radcliffe, D., 281, 282, 288, 291 Radil, C., 539 Raetzsch, C., 303 Raeymaekers, K., 320 Rainie, L., 37, 82, 88, 90, 100, 253, 316, 357, 378, 551 Rall, H., 344 Ramesh, R., 207 Ramos, D., 420 Rantanen, T., 208, 210, 326, 329, 331 Rao, F., 101 Rasheed, A., 207 Ratkeiwicz, J., 103, 105

589

Rauch, J., 255 Raviola, E., 344, 349 Raycheva, L., 181 Raymond, M., 518, 571 Reading, A., 276 Reagan, J., 533 Rebillard, F., 226, 232 Redden, G., 167 Redmond, J., 428, 430, 431, 435 Rees, G., 131 Reese, S., 97, 343, 344, 388, 425, 433 Reich, Z., 14, 18, 85, 88, 97, 98, 168, 179, 180, 181, 193, 213, 222, 225, 228, 238, 240, 267, 301, 342, 343, 370, 444, 477, 480, 481, 484, 488, 490, 564 Reid, A., 102 Rentschler, C., 271 Requejo, J.L., 118 Resnick, P., 100 Revelli, C., 231 Reynolds, A., 97 Rhodes, R., 370 Ribeiro-Neto, B., 505 Richards, B., 131 Richardson, J., 254 Richardson, L., 552 Ridell, S., 319 Riedl, J.T., 100 Riffe, D., 497 Ringoot, R., 3 Ritchin, F., 266, 276 Roberts, G., 376 Roberts, H., 159, 160, 259, 420 Roberts, M., 371, 377 Robinson, S., 179, 180, 182, 209, 224, 232, 342, 343, 429, 443, 452, 453 Robyn, R., 539 Rockman, B., 370 Rodgers, S., 202, 341, 345, 400, 461, 467, 473 Rodríguez, C., 274 Rogers, E., 196, 400 Rogers, M., 14 Rogers, R., 470 Rojas, F., 115, 538, 539 Rosa, J., 86 Rosen. J., 27, 150, 223, 301, 302, 402, 413, 448, 529 Rosenstiel, T., 88, 246, 361, 376, 386, 484, 546, 547 Rosnay, J. de, 231 Ross, P., 225, 557 Rossi-Hansberg, E., 207 Rossmann, C., 572 Roumen, D., 222 Rove, D., 431 Rowe, D., 538, 539 Rowley, K., 280, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288 Royo, S., 244 Rucht, D., 250, 251 Ruellan, D., 224

590

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Ruge, M., 332 Rushkoff, D., 103 Russ-Mohl, S., 315 Russell, A., 115, 145, 150, 152, 157, 354 Rutherford, M., 370 Ruusunoksa, L., 430 Ryan, K., 436 Saffo, P., 182 Sakaki, T., 96 Salaman, G., 211 Salaverría, R., 213 Salter, L., 128 Sambrook, R., 31, 154, 157, 209 Sánchez, L., 214 Sanders, C., 555 Sanders, E., 372 Sanders, J., 301, 302, 552 Sanderson, J., 116, 244 Sandoval, R., 244 Sandvoss, C., 185, 186 Sapienza, T., 242 Saunders, B., 232, 512 Sauter, T., 522 Savio, R., 232 Schaap, G., 479 Schaffer, J., 280 Schatz, E., 452, 453 Schatzki, T., 340, 462 Scheerlinck, H., 117, 118 Schellens, P.J., 551 Schifferes, S., 207 Schiller, D., 166, 389 Schlesinger, P., 193, 239, 246, 315, 331 Schlögl, S., 420 Schmidt, J.-H., 354, 445, 562, 566, 572 Schmitt, L., 228 Schmitz Weiss, A., 197, 200, 201, 345, 355, 400, 428 Schnauber, A., 362, 529, 533 Schneider, S., 497 Scholl, A., 563, 564, 566, 567, 568, 570, 572 Schön, D., 480, 488 Schramm, W., 10, 80, 391 Schrock, A., 95 Schrøder, K.C., 84, 89, 115, 160, 183, 317, 343, 358, 364, 444, 514, 530, 532, 534, 536, 537, 539, 540 Schubert, C., 466, 467, 472 Schudson, M., 1, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 52, 62, 120, 129, 130, 155, 238, 256, 280, 302, 305, 306, 377, 379, 380, 385, 388, 390, 393, 405, 427, 435, 554 Schultz, B., 309 Schultz, F., 242 Schulz, W., 568 Schwalbe, C., 267, 274, 496 Schwartz, V.R., 268 Schwarzlose, R., 166 Scott, B., 119, 128

Scott, D., 242 Scott, J., 17, 18 Scott, W., 370, 378 Searls, D., 301, 309 Seave, A., 61 Seeck, H., 436 Segerberg, A., 95, 96, 98, 100, 160, 253, 254, 319, 338, 489 Seib, P., 274 Sell, S., 257, 259 Senft, T., 86 Seo, S., 213 Shao, G., 180, 188 Shapiro, B., 170 Shapiro, C., 54, 55, 57, 60 Shapiro, I., 88, 480, 490 Shapiro, S., 130, 131 Shaw, D., 239 Shearer, E., 84 Sheffer, M.L., 309 Sheffield, H., 208 Sheller, M., 83, 85, 267, 357, 361 Shepard, A., 181 Sheppard, E., 211 Shichor, Y., 42 Shifman, L., 105 Shin, H., 393 Shirky, C., 1, 61, 62, 174, 254, 301, 305, 341, 356, 374, 378, 479 Shneiderman, B., 253 Shoemaker, P., 97, 239, 307, 343, 344, 383, 388 Shore, E., 166 Shulman, S., 244 Siapera, E., 6, 42, 44 Siebert, F., 10, 80, 391 Sienkiewicz, M., 479 Sigal, L., 238, 478 Sikkink, K., 251 Silcock, B., 195, 267, 274, 496 Siles, I., 193, 281, 309 Siljamäki, J., 323 Sill, M., 179 Silverman, C., 88 Silverstone, R., 160, 272, 273, 319, 321, 327, 355, 359, 364, 557 Singer, J., 14, 17, 18, 32, 77, 85, 88, 97, 98, 116, 179, 180, 181, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 213, 230, 235, 301, 302, 304, 315, 342, 343, 346, 355, 390, 393, 428, 429, 452, 555 Singh, V.K., 101 Sintek, M., 214 Sire, G., 405 Sirén, S., 267, 274 Sivek, S.C., 117, 118 Sjøvaag, H., 225, 443, 488, 476, 505 Skok, D., 63 Skovsgaard, M., 426

AUTHOR INDEX

Slack, J., 170 Sleney, J., 566, 567 Sluis, M. van der, 559 Small, T.A., 105 Smith-Lovin, L., 46, 102 Smith, A., 37, 38, 338 Smith, B., 274 Smith, J., 102 Smith, M., 253 Smythe, D., 37 Snow, D., 251, 449, 488 Snow, R., 488 Snyder-Duch, J., 478 Sobers, S., 282, 285 Soja, E., 359 Soloski, J., 238 Solow-Niederman, A., 159, 160, 259 Song, X., 230 Song, Y., 498 Sontag, S., 170, 274 Sørensen, A., 532 Souza e Silva, A. de, 361 Sparks, C., 15, 130, 411 Sparrow, B., 370, 488 Specht, G., 104 Spigel, L., 479 Spitulnik, D., 317 Spradley, J., 531 Springer, N., 181, 182 Spyridou, L.-P., 307, 400, 473 St. John III, B., 183, 287 Stadler, F., 95 Staiger, J., 131 Stallabrass, J., 274 Standing, G., 207 Stanley, A., 241 Stanworth, C., 214 Starkman, D., 151, 305, 388, 389, 390, 394 Stavelin, E., 341, 345, 444, 496, 505 Stearns, C., 212 Stebbins, R., 223 Steel, E., 171 Steel, R., 14 Steensen, S., 6, 11, 118, 119, 120, 121, 133, 196, 200, 342, 460, 489, 499 Steemers, J., 52, 57 Stein, L., 165 Steiner, L., 392, 480 Stelter, B., 212, 334, 521 Stempeck, M., 420 Stenner, P., 131, 551 Stenvall, M., 131 Stephenson, W., 534 Sterne, J., 461 Steyn, E., 425, 428 Steyn, T., 425, 428 Stieglitz, S., 500, 501, 517

591

Stinchcombe, A., 370 Stohl, C., 254, 378 Storey, J., 211 Streeter, T., 240 Strömbäck, J., 498, 503, 505 Stroud, N., 45–46 Sullivan, D., 436 Sulzberger, A. Jr., 316 Sumner, T.R., 122 Sunstein, C., 46, 253 Sutton, J., 274, 276 Suzuki, D., 546, 558 Swart, J., 360 Swisher, K., 375 Sylvie, G., 425 Tait, S., 272 Takahashi, B., 343 Tambuyzer, S., 197 Tameling, K., 195, 197, 343 Tandoc, E. Jr., 138, 341, 343, 356, 479, 489, 568 Taneja, H., 529, 533 Taniguchi, M., 241 Tapscott, D., 83, 356 Tarafdar, M., 115 Tarkov, A., 208, 216 Tashakkori, A., 565, 567 Taubert, E., 272, 275 Taylor, B., 462 Taylor, G., 53, 59 Taylor, J., 467 Teddlie, C., 565, 567 Teo, H., 186 Terveen, L.G., 100 Tessem, B., 355 Tester, K., 272 Tewksbury, D., 83, 84, 548 Thelwall, M., 105, 516 Theocharis, Y., 101 Therborn, G., 424 Thomas, H., 566, 567 Thomas, J., 186, 282 Thomass, B., 52, 57 Thompson, H.S., 75, 121, 122 Thomsen, S., 534 Thorsen. E., 166, 179, 223, 303 Thorson, K., 95 Thrift, N., 358 Thurman, N., 36, 40, 88, 97, 98, 168, 182, 225, 282, 286, 343, 354, 429 Tiffen, R., 115, 538, 539 Tilley, C., 462 Tindall, N., 242 Toane, C., 172, 173 Toffler, A., 225 Torres, L., 244 Touri, M., 513

592

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Townend, J., 282, 287, 288 Townsend, A., 171 Tracy, S., 550, 552, 555 Trandafoiu, R., 41 Trappel, J., 52, 57 Tremayne, M., 102 Trethewey, A., 552 True, J., 464 Tseng, B., 230 Tsoukas, H., 460 Tuchman, G., 154, 212, 238, 447, 448, 449, 451, 453, 457, 480, 488 Tufekci, Z., 90, 99, 156 Tumber, H., 26, 239, 274 Tunstall, J., 227 Turner, F., 301, 398 Turner, L., 566, 567 Turow, J., 59, 242, 357 Turvill, W., 229 Tyler, R., 186 Ugille, P., 168, 195, 197 Ungerleider, N., 171 Urry, J., 361 Usher, N., 193, 194, 199, 203, 307, 308, 342, 343, 345, 452, 453, 458, 463, 480 Utard, J.M., 3 Utz, S., 242 Uzelman, S., 165 Väätäjä, H., 479 Valdivia, A., 225 Valenzuela, S., 226 Valtonen, S., 323 Vandenbrande, K., 453 Varian, H., 54, 55, 57, 60, 100 Vásquez, C., 465, 466, 467 Veglis, A., 307, 400, 473 Veikou, M., 42 Venturini, T., 402, 403, 470 Vesa, J., 437 Vickery, G., 166 Vieweg, S., 274, 276 Villarreal Ford, T., 165 Vincze, H., 512, 513 Vis, F., 88, 115, 116, 354 Vittadini, N., 529, 532 Vogel, H., 53, 54, 57, 60 Volkmer, I., 155 Vos, T., 97, 239, 296, 297, 307, 383, 390, 392, 393 Vozab, D., 539 Vraga, E.K., 95 Vujnovic, M., 14, 17, 18, 85, 88, 168, 179, 180, 181, 193, 199, 213, 226, 230, 235, 274, 301, 302, 315, 343, 355

Wacholder, N., 104 Wackman, D., 430 Wacquant, L., 389, 390 Waever, O., 39 Wagner, P., 425 Wahl-Jorgensen, K., 7, 15, 52, 98, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 153, 154, 191, 229, 232, 272, 274, 289, 309, 355, 436, 530, 564 Waisbord, S., 17, 20, 22, 120, 238, 267, 274, 301 Waks, L., 557 Walker, S., 101, 102, 501 Wall, M., 274, 282, 489 Wallberg, F., 538 Waller, L., 290 Wallsten, K., 252, 512, 514 Walters, A., 88, 98 Walters, E., 211 Wang, C.J., 95, 102 Wang, X., 104 Wang, Y., 12 Wang. P.P., 95, 102 Wanta, W., 35 Ward, S., 502, 555 Wardle, C., 97, 98, 135, 139, 181, 182, 191, 229, 232, 274, 309, 355, 436 Warren, C., 211 Washington, J., 38 Wasko, M.M., 186 Wassenhove, L. van, 63 Wasserman, H., 12, 15, 20 Waters, R., 242 Watts, D., 100, 410, 418 Watts, S., 551 Weare, C., 496, 497, 498 Weaver, A., 83, 84 Weaver, D., 97, 426, 431, 480, 489, 564 Weber, P., 181 Weber, R., 503 Weber, W., 344 Webster, J., 320, 529, 533 Weddle, J., 238, 478 Weeden, L., 449, 450 Weezel, A. van, 210 Wei, F., 104 Wei, K., 186 Weick, K., 90 Weinberger, D., 301, 309 Weis, L., 300 Weischenberg, S., 564, 568 Welch, I., 105, 305 Wellman, B., 82, 90, 378 Wells, C., 95 Wenger, E., 200 Wernick, A., 329 Westlund, O., 59, 115, 193, 201, 215, 296, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348 Wetherell, M., 185

AUTHOR INDEX

White, D., 239 White, R., 10 Widholm, A., 244, 496 Wiener, J., 166 Wiik, J., 428 Wilde, J. de, 39 Wildman, S., 304 Wiles, R., 530 Wiley, S., 460 Wilhelm, A., 287 Wilhoit, G.C., 120 Wilkins, L., 555 Wilkinson, C., 173 Willard, A., 226 Williams, A. (Andy), 139, 181, 182, 209, 229, 232, 274, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 309, 355, 436 Williams, A.D., 83 Williams, A.P., 102 Williams, A. (Alex), 309 Williams, B., 97, 98, 304 Williams, R., 165, 166, 168, 170 Williams, V., 335 Willig, I., 289 Willis, C., 179, 303 Willis, J., 211 Willnat, L., 564 Wills, A., 484 Wilson, J., 512 Wilson, T., 104 Winner, L., 39 Winter, M., 410, 418 Witschge, T., 1, 19, 20, 224, 301, 302, 343, 356, 357, 358, 428, 429, 436, 480, 481 Wittgenstein, L., 328, 374 Wolf, C., 362, 529, 533

593

Wolfe, T., 121 Woolgar, S., 398, 462, 465, 471 Wright, C., 212 Wu, S., 410, 418 Wu, T., 156 Wunch-Vincent, S., 166 Wurff, R. van der, 498, 499 Wyatt, W., 390 Yardi, S., 103, 105 Yaschur, C., 267 Yates, S.J., 122 Young, I., 302 Ytreberg, E., 554 Zagar, I., 213 Zago, G., 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 469, 473 Zald, M., 251 Zamenopoulos, T., 282, 285 Zamith, R., 18, 19, 30, 88, 100, 153, 244, 333, 342, 500, 501, 502, 503, 518 Zangerle, E., 104 Zeithalm, C., 254 Zelizer, B., 1, 4, 10, 11, 155, 238, 268, 300, 321, 410, 411, 426, 449, 451, 480 Zeller, F., 116 Zeng, G., 13 Zhang, M., 104 Zhang, Z., 186 Zheng, N., 240 Zhou, M., 104 Zhu, J.J.H., 95, 102 Zion, L., 555 Zoonen, L. van, 131 Zube, P., 304 Zuckerman, E., 30, 41, 420

Subject Index Absolutism, 74 Abundance, of media, 188, 237, 240, 259 Academic reward system, 571 Accountability, 42, 46, 70, 151, 153, 158, 199, 245, 246, 253, 256, 304, 306, 393, 555–556 Accuracy, 16, 21, 77, 88, 153, 157, 170, 228, 239, 245, 268, 276, 547, 557 Actant, 90, 115, 465, 466, 479, 487. See also ‘Actor-network theory, Actant’. Activism, 18, 20, 42, 44, 119–120, 131, 149, 169, 319, 329 Activist, 153, 159, 250–265, 333, 336–337 Actor, 397, 484. See also ‘Actor-network theory’. Actor-network theory (ANT), 13, 200, 345, 397–409, 462–472. See also ‘Materiality of journalism’. Mediator Translation Actant, 201–203, 341–353, 400–407, 479 Agency of objects, 201, 345, 462 Black box, 400, 403 Epistemology, 398, 401, 403, 406, 465 Following the actors, 401, 465, 466 Grouping, 402, 405 Human agency, 200, 201, 343, 344–345, 465–466, 468, 404, 465–466 Human–non-human symmetry, 462, 464–465, 466–468 Plenum of agencies, 467, 468–469, 472 Trace, 345, 402, 403, 405, 466, 468–472. See also ‘Digital trace’. Ventriloquism, 468, 469, 472 Advertising, 57, 58–59, 288, 357, 431, 434–435 Advertorial, 431 Contentless ~, 60 Native ~, 242 Targeted ~, 520 Advocacy journalism, 120 Affect, 15, 32, 97, 105–106, 129, 137, 153–154, 184–186, 187, 188, 267, 271, 272, 362, 570 Affordance, 86, 95, 101, 104, 106, 132–133, 135, 150, 252, 254, 299, 329, 333, 335, 347, 356, 356, 361, 362, 385, 387, 399, 421, 461, 463, 516, 517, 529–530 Agency, 25, 87, 153, 181, 195,196, 200–202, 258, 318, 319, 323, 388, 479, 510. See also ‘Actor-network theory’. Agenda setting, 88, 97, 239, 331 Algorithm, 89–90, 99, 100, 102, 155–156, 252, 347, 489, 504, 531, 571 Alternative media, 32, 96, 165–166, 169, 171, 223, 224, 250, 253, 255–256, 328, 413

Amateur, 30, 31, 40, 138, 140, 146, 150, 153, 156, 166, 167, 222–234, 253, 255, 256, 266, 274, 275, 291, 303, 309, 355, 427, 435 Ambient journalism, 96, 152, 364 Analogue versus digital media, 282, 357, 496–497 Analytics, See ‘Data analytics’. Ancient Greece, 121 Anderson, Chris, 506 Ang, Ien, 327 Anthropocentrism, 463, 465 Anthropology, 289, 326, 328, 447, 449, AOL, 38, 286–287, 334 Application programming interface (API), 157, 158, 202, 307, 345, 500, 513, 517–518 Apps, 82, 84, 99–100, 101, 103, 170, 229, 330, 343, 344, 345, 511, 517 Arab Spring, 19, 29–30, 42, 43, 87, 95, 104, 137, 333, 337 Aramis, 472 Archiving, See ‘Data Archiving’. Artefact, See ‘Artifact’. Articulation, 167–168, 169, 171,172, 174 Artifact, 345, 397, 398, 400, 448, 453, 462, 463, 471 Assange, Julian, 27–28, 304 Association of Internet Researchers, 517 Attention economy, 53, 252, 520 Audience, 316, 320 Behaviour, 53, 57, 60, 84–85, 182, 317, 362, 416, 522, 529, 551–552, 553 Collapse of, 122 Comments, 181, 182, 184, 224, 285, 456, 529, 565, 567 Community, 16, 134, 185–186, 285, 302, 321, 359–360, 567 Demographics, 46, 59, 84, 338, 428, 514 Engagement, 15, 136, 182, 184–185, 201, 286, 300, 516–518, 520 Ethnic news ~, 35–37 Imagined ~, 122, 123 Mass media use, 84, 97, 355–358 Matrix of media used, 532 News repertoires, See ‘News repertoires’. Participation, 9, 14, 17–18, 19, 83, 84, 88, 97, 133, 134, 150, 152, 158, 180, 187, 194, 230–231, 285, 300, 302, 315, 354, 355, 357, 529–530, 555, 565, 567 People formerly known as the audience, the, 223, 302, 315, 402, 448, 529 Reception, 135, 181, 317–318, 320, 357, 364, 511, 515, 518–520

596

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Reach, 84–85, 122, 241 Recommendation, 57, 88, 100, 319 Routines, 321–322, 363–364, 532, 567 Sense-making, 319, 357, 529 Shares, 188, 316–317, 319, 321, 322, 323, 326, 329–340, 516, 517, 521, 553, 556, 558 Social media, 243, 517 Tweets, 15, 18–19, 20, 43, 86, 89, 98, 100–106, 152–153, 243, 244, 329, 330, 335–336, 500–502, 512, 516, 517–518 User, See ‘User’. Vote, 529 Audience measurement Circulation, 12–13, 56, 62, 99, 510, 515, 558 Clicks, 188, 323, 390, 428–429, 521, 531, 547–548, 553 Eye-tracking methods, 547 Metrics, 434, 510, 515–516, 518, 520, 524, 546, 548 Ratings, 188, 231, 319, 390, 430, 510, 515–516, 546, 547–548 Tracking, 53, 514, 515, 518, 531, 533, 555 Traffic, 21, 53, 89, 138, 156, 173, 316, 323, 501, 531, 547 Volumetrics, 516. See also ‘Audience measurement, Metrics’. Audience research, 183, 317–318, 326, 452, 530, 532, 546 Crossnational comparison, 538–539 Longitudinal research, 539–540 Audience-centered perspective, 328, 362, 532, 546–561 Australia, 228, 229, 516, 518, 522 Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), 518 Authenticity, 118, 134–136, 227, 268, 274, 555 Authority, 32, 75–76, 87, 134 Journalistic, 11, 17, 52, 76, 134, 135, 138, 181, 225, 239, 307, 349, 426, 453, 521 Relational, 87, 101 Sources, 87, 159, 170, 238, 268, 426 Autonomy, 17, 44, 199–200, 300, 390, 391–392, 426, 429, 433, 436, 479 Avaaz, 254 Bauman, Zygmunt, 297, 425, 496 BBC, 45, 57, 58, 139, 181, 208–209, 239, 272–273, 334, 336, 399, 436 Beats, 153, 155, 198, 389, 431, 479, 484, Belgium, 229, 401 Benkler, Yochai, 27, 159, 250, 252, 256, 291, 333 Berkman Center, 159, 413, 420 Big data, 104, 323, 420, 489, 500, 509–527 Logic, See ‘Logic’. Big data analysis, 410, 496, 505, 514, 531, 532 Commercialization of data access, 501–502 ‘Firehose’ method of data collection, 500–502, 517 ‘Gardenhose’ method of data collection, 500–502 Hashtag search, 500 YourTwapperKeeper, See ‘YourTwapperKeeper’.

Black Twitter, 38, 45 Blog, 42–43, 102, 103, 104, 225–226, 392, 420, 463, 470, 516 Bondy Blog, 153 Boundaries, 385, 435, 496, 497–498 Blurring of, 85, 114, 119, 137, 154, 273, 274, 363, 365, 401, 412, 529, 562 Boundary work, 17, 18, 155, 433, 552 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 150, 289, 331, 383–396 Brand, 172, 173, 331, 336, 520, 521, 533–534 Brazil, 62, 84 Breivik, Anders Behring, 123 Broadcasting, 29, 30, 31, 54, 57, 83, 85, 87, 100, 150, 153, 154, 155, 228, 331, 334, 336 Bruns, Axel, 40, 152–153, 182, 186, 301 Business model, 6, 12, 27, 51–67, 62, 128, 194, 286, 287–288, 306, 307, 308–309, 329–330, 378, 379, 428 Buzzfeed, 20, 61, 521 Byline, 116, 453, 484, 498, 549 Capital (Field theory), See ‘Field theory, Capital’. Carey, James, 374, 414, 427 Cascading Activation Model, 97, 104 Castells, Manuel, 26, 32, 40, 82, 86, 256. Catalonia, 399 Celebrity, 33, 39, 53, 105, 138, 225, 241, 243–244, 320, 321, 330, 331, 335, 336, 513, 550 Chadwick, Andrew, 85, 86, 154. Change management, 195 Chicago Community Trust, 417 Chicago School, 296, 316, 451 Chicago Tribune, 208, 417, 418 Churnalism, 57, 209 Citizen journalism, 29–31, 40, 133, 152, 224, 273, 275, 283, 447, 552. See also ‘User-generated content’. Citizen journalist, See ‘Cititzen Journalism’. Citizen participation, See ‘Audience, Participation’. Citizenside, 226 Citizen witnessing, See ‘Witness’. Civic engagement, 15, 19, 103, 281–283, 286 Civic journalism, 152, 230, 285 CNN, 44, 55, 139, 154, 334. Cocreation, 88, 96, 98, 99, 103, 107. See also ‘Collaboration’. Codes of ethics, See ‘Ethics’. Coding, See ‘Data coding’. Cohesion, societal, See ‘Societal cohesion’. Collaboration, 150, 157, 158, 252, 253, 260, 282, 289, 306, 315, 379, 524. See also ‘Cocreation’. Collaborative filtering, See ‘Filtering’. Comments, See ‘Audience, Comments’. Commercial pressures, 479 Commodity markets, 60 Communicative democracy, 13–15

SUBJECT INDEX

Communitarianism, 302 Communities of practice, 200–201 Community reporting, 153, 360 Computation, 341, 406 Computational journalism, 345, 348, 510 Computational textual analysis, See ‘Methodology, Computational textual analysis’. Computational turn, 510, 524 Computer coding, 252, 499, 502–503, 504–505 Computer programming, 157, 344 Content analysis, See ‘Methodology, Content analysis’. Content Management System (CMS), 202, 215, 345, 375, 399–400, 405, 455–457 Contentless advertising, 60. See also ‘Advertising’. Content, 478 Distribution, See ‘Distribution’. Injections, 137 Journalistic / news, 54, 134, 209–210, 215–216, 290, 379 Reception, See ‘Audience, Reception’. Use, 183, 510 Controversies, 336, 397, 403, 405, 407, 470, 472 Convergence, 64, 128, 180, 188, 195, 196, 197, 403, 453, 488 Conversation analysis, See ‘Methodology, Conversation analysis’. Cooper, Anderson, 123 Cooptation, 44, 139–140 Cosmopolitanism, 135–136, 271, 273 Costs, 11, 254, 302, 425, 428, 501 Entry ~, 225, 228 Fixed ~, 52, 54, 55–64, 428 Variable ~, 54, 55, 57, 64 Couldry, Nick, 155, 360 Counterpower, See ‘Power, Counterpower’. Creative destruction, 193, 223, 436 Creative methods, See ‘Methodology, Creative methods’. Credibility, 16, 20, 159, 255, 258, 268, 276, 347, 429, 435, 482, 483, 488, 547 Crisis (in journalism), 85, 309, 378, 411, 425, 546 Critical junctures, 372 Criticism, 10, 68, 79–80, 224, 245, 255, 300, 301–302, 320, 391, 398 Cross-media, 61, 195, 197, 343, 344, 529, 530, 532–534, 540–541 Crowd-centered, 96, 98, 99–100, 101–102, 103–107 Crowdsourced elites, 101, 103 Crowdsourcing, 18–19, 100, 103, 193, 275, 354 Crystallization, 552–553 Cultural studies, 320, 413 Cultural analytics, 510 Cultural audience research, 317 Cultural science, 510 Current affairs, 53, 319, 418, 540–541 ‘Cut and paste’ journalism, 479 Cybernization, 214

597

Dagens Nyheter, 208 Data analytics, 510, 511, 513 Data archiving, 334, 336, 448, 496, 506 Data coding Algorithm, 504 Automated / computer coding, See ‘Computer coding’. Categorization schemes, 498 Confidence level, 504 Deductive research design, 504 Extractors, 505 Human / manual coding, 502–503 Inductive research design, 504 Intercoder reliability, 503, 505 Interpretation, 503, 504 Latent variables, 505 Machine learning, 504–505 Manifest variables, 505 Semantics, 498 Syntax, 498 Unit of analysis, 503 Variable design, 503–504 Web scraping, 505 Data collection, 39, 467 Computer-assisted, 499, 500 Data quality, 500–501 Data journalism, 157–158, 463, 509, 510 Data sampling, 481, 494–508 Comparing data samples, 498–499 Unit of analysis, 484–485 Data science, 344, 509 Datafication, 521 DataSift, 517, 522 Deinstitutionalization, 299–314 Deleuze, Giles, 168, 415 Deliberative democracy, 14–15 Democracy, 9, 14–15, 24, 56, 73–76, 89, 246, 252, 284, 290, 301–303, 305, 308, 374, 448, 530, 533, 536, 555 Denmark, 529–549 Descriptivism, 469 Determinism Social and cultural, 461 Technological, See ‘Technological determinism’. Dewey, John, 13–15, 73, 151–152, 318. Dialogue, 71–72, 74, 98, 133, 134, 152, 156, 180, 184, 188, 273, 275, 286, 303, 309, 455, 456, 468, 531, 554, 555 Diary, See ‘Methodology, Diary’. Diaspora, 40–41, 99 Diasporic media, 16, 40–41 Didion, Joan, 121 Diffusion of innovation, See ‘Innovation’. Digital footprint, 518, 529 Digital humanities Cultural analytics, 510 Cultural science, 510

598

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Digital journalism ethics, See ‘Ethics’. Digital media, 12, 19, 21, 52–53, 56, 58, 61, 64, 68–70, 84, 122, 138, 236–237, 240–246, 250–265, 275, 303, 307, 308, 343, 362, 379, 496 Digital Methods Initiative, 518 Digital practices, 240, 355–358, 375 Digital rights movement, 257 Digital storytelling, 32, 194 Digital strategy, 193, 194–195 Digitalization, See ‘Digitization’. Digitization, 17, 57, 133, 194, 214, 257, 266, 315, 342, 354, 421, 461, 472, 551, 553, 555, 571 Discourse analysis, See ‘Methodology, Discourse analysis’. Disintermediation, 241–243 Distributed journalism, 188, 329, 313, 379 Distribution, 9, 18, 28, 29, 33, 54, 57–58, 64, 81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 133, 152, 171, 194, 211, 252, 255, 257, 315, 323, 328–329, 341–353, 357, 363, 379, 510, 546 DMI-TCAT, See ‘Digital Methods Initiative’. Downsizing, 215, 307–308, 479 Dunwoody, Sharon, 456 Ecology, 187, 540 Environmental approach, 413–415 Media, 97, 414, 522 News, 188, 494 Rhizomatic approach, 415–417, 420–421 Economies of scale, 54 Economies of scope, 54 Ecosystem, 401, 410–423, 412, 454, 467, 477 Egypt, 95, 99, 101–105, 137, 150, 153, 159, 337 Electronic media, 114, 124, 415 Elite, See ‘Sources, elite’. Elite democracy, 14 Emotion, 15, 20, 106, 128–143, 184–185, 335. See also ‘Affect’. End of theory, 506 Engagement, See ‘Audience, Engagement’. Ensemble, 412, 414, 529, 531, 533 Entrepreneurial journalism, 17, 212, 299–300, 308–310 Epistemology Of journalism, 73–74, 121, 132, 135, 138, 238, 273, 392, 393, 478 Of research, 448, 462 Ethics, 70, 135, 305–306, 427, 433, 448 Accountability, See ‘Accountability’. Accuracy, See ‘Accuracy’. As discourse, 71–72 As emergent, 73, 85 Political morality, 72–73 Depersonalized, 79 Digital journalism ~, 6, 68–80, 156–157, 193, 555 Falliblism, 73–74 Hospitality, 557 Imperfectionism, 74 Listening, See ‘Listening’.

Normative interpretation, 74–75 Personalized, 78 Sincerity, 276, 547, 556–558 Transparency, See ‘Transparency’. Trust, 199, 426–427 Truth, 547, 552 Ethnic news audiences, See ‘Audience, Ethnic news ~’. Ethnic news media, 36, 38–39, 40 Ethnicity, commodification of, 37, 38–39 Ethnographic sensibility, 452–455 Ethnography, virtual, 448, 452, 455–458, 531 Limitations, 456–458 Netnography, 531 Network ethnography, 454 Reliability, 457 Researcher–informant relationships, 457 Saturation, 453, 357 Spaces of ~, 448 Validity, 457 Virtual spaces, See ‘Virtual spaces’. Ethnography, 447, 471, 564 Anthropology, See ‘Anthropology’. Epistemology, 451, 452 Ethics of ~, 448, 450–451, 457 Fieldwork, 449–450 History, 449 Informed consent, 450, 452 Intersubjectivity, 465 Location of the researcher, 450 Newsroom ~, 196, 411, 417, 448, 449, 451–455, Observation, 453, 454, 465, 564 Power, 450 Reflexivity, 449, 470–472 ‘Second’ wave of ethnographic research, 448, 452, Shadowing, 456, 465–466, 472 Space, 450, 451–458 Tearoom Trade, 450 Ethnomethodology, 451 European Union, 257 Eurovision Exchange Network (EVN), 211 Everyday life, 362, 450, 529, 530, 531, 553 Experian Hitwise, 516, 520, 522 Experian Marketing Services, 515 Experiment, See ‘Methodology, Experiment’. Experts, 13–14, 426, 432 Eyewitness account, See ‘Witness’. Facebook, 41, 45, 55, 58, 60, 64, 81, 82, 84, 95, 99, 102, 113, 114–115,152, 155–156, 166, 266, 316, 319, 454, 455, 495, 512, 516–517, 528, 565, 567 Facepager, 517 FacePy, 517 Fact gathering, 373, 425 Factiva, 512 Factor analysis, See ‘Methodology, Factor analysis’. Fall of public man, The, 114, 123

SUBJECT INDEX

Fandom, 180, 184, 185–186, 188 Feature journalism, 118, 119, 120–121 Feedly, 511 Ferguson, 45, 86, 154, 156, 164, 335 Field theory, 150, 289, 383–396, 402 Capital, 331, 372, 386, 389–393 Doxa, 386, 388, 392, 393 Gravitation, 385 Illusio, 386 Topography, 385 Filter bubble, 46, 253 Filtering, 252, 567 Collaborative, 100–101 Social, 100–101 Financial crisis of 2008, 151, 194, 384, 388–390 First person narrative, 121 Fixers, 213 Focus groups, See ‘Methodology, Focus groups’. Folksonomic, 104 Foreign correspondence, 5, 26, 29–31, 154–155 Fourth Estate, 11, 19, 76, 124, 172, 256, 259, 289, 432–433. See also ‘Watchdog’. Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, 257 Framing, 26, 86, 95–112, 97, 153, 238–239, 251. See also ‘Networked framing’. Free press act, 119 Freedom of opinion, 118 Freedom of speech, 11, 16, 42, 160, 303, 336 Freelance, 208, 211–212, 226, 229, 231 Freelancers, See ‘Freelance’. French Revolution, 11, 119 Fuller, Matthew, 415–416 Gans, Herbert, 14, 447, 448, 449, 451, 453 Gatekeeping, 26, 87, 95–112, 96–97, 199, 212, 237, 239, 304, 387, 391. See also ‘Networked gatekeeping’. Gatewatching, 100, 232 Gender, 102, 118, 213, 392 Generalizability, 494, 458 Genre, 120–121, 122, 149, 152–153, 269, 272, 427, 533–534, 550, 551, 558 Geography, 290, 360 Germany, 41, 56, 59, 60, 182, 229, 254, 280, 563 Gnip, 502, 517, 522 Goffman, Erving, 114, 118, 123, 244, 363 Goods Experience, 55, 56 Non-rivalrous, 54 Public, See ‘Public Good’. Google, 53, 55, 58, 60, 89, 115, 399, 405, 413, 455. Google Analytics, 516 Google Reader, 511 Google Trends, 513 Græsvik, Fredrik, 113 Gramsci, Antonio, 167 Greenwald, Glenn, 28–29, 40, 151, 258, 338 Guardian, The, 27, 28, 61, 138, 139, 158, 232, 258, 286, 513

599

Habermas, Jürgen, 14–15, 18, 20, 21,159, 184, 286, 289 Habitus, 331, 388, 391, 392, 393 Hackers, 151, 258, 259, 484 Hall, Stuart, 167, 238–239, 320, 357 Hashtag, 18, 21, 86–87, 100, 103, 104–105, 243, 330, 335, 500–501, 517–518 Havelock, Eric, 414 HBO, 165, 172, 173 Herodotus, 121 Historical conjuncture, 167–168 Homogeneity hypothesis, 27 Homophily, 46, 82, 102–103 House of Cards (TV Show), 424 Houston Chronicle, 208 Human interest story, 121, 131, 399, 431 Human-centric journalism, 346, 347 Hybrid media, 87, 529. See also ‘Hybridity’. Hybridity, 85, 87, 89, 98–99, 151, 154, 164–178, 256, 258, 421, 434, 529 Hybridization, 145, 147, 165, 167–168, 169, 171–174, 255, 361 Hyperlinking, 100, 102–103, 304, 516 Hyperlocal, 65, 229, 280–293 Identity, 41, 45–46, 370, 402–403. See also ‘Journalistic identity’. Idle No More Movement, 87, 99 Imagined audience, See ‘Audience, Imagined ~’. Imitation, 195, 225 Immediacy, 87, 117, 133, 135, 193, 199, 225, 227, 272, 273, 276, 306, 357, 372, 399, 431, 435 Independence, 10, 11, 69, 199, 287, 291 In-depth interview, See ‘Interview method’. Indexing, 26, 90 Individualism, 29, 90, 300, 412. See also ‘Networked individualism’. Industrial production, 301, 379, 427 Indymedia, 223, 229 Information overflow, 115, 214 Information subsidies, 240, 387. See also ‘Subsidies’. Innovation, 306–308, 392, 530–531 Adoption, 192–206, 375–377, 398–401, 429–430, 453 Diffusion of ~, 196, 400 Failure to innovate, 307–308 Newsroom ~, 192–206 Social shaping of technology, 195–196, 201, 202, 399, 405, 406, 461–462 ‘~ speak’, 306 Instagram, 41, 82, 84, 229, 266 Instantaneity, 32, 85, 90 Institutional theory, 27, 371 Institutionalism, 305, 370–382, 488 Institution, 27, 328–329, 417, 469 Institution, news, 6, 90, 96, 106, 115, 151, 297, 370–382, 534 Interactionism, 316, 321, 469

600

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Interactivity, 116, 133, 150, 152, 181, 302, 316, 357, 429, 447 Interconnectedness, 363, 385, 401, 494 International reporting, 30. See also ‘Foreign correspondence’. Internet studies, 510 Internews, 158 Interpretism, 74–75 Interview method Analysis, 486–487 Face-to-face, 481, 485 In-depth interview, See ‘Methodology, In-depth interview’. Non-response, 484 Physical setting, 485–486 Reconstruction interview, See ‘Reconstruction interview’. Interviewer Training, 483 Intimacy, 113–127, 184, 450 Intimization of journalism, 88, 113–127 Investigative journalism, 16, 42, 60, 79, 132, 158, 337, 485 Iraq, 27–28, 43, 45, 63, 406 Israel-Palestine conflict, 45, 113

Liquid journalism, 424–441, 478–479, 494–508. See also ‘Liquid modernity’. Liquid modernity, 297, 425, 433. See also ‘Liquid journalism’. Listening, 183, 362, 554–555, 557 Apophatic, 557 Cataphatic, 557 Literary journalism, 121 Live coverage, 268, 334 Lobbying, 245, 254, 259 Local news, 30, 55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 181, 207–208, 216, 280–294, 360, 379, 399, 417–418, 503, 539 Log file analysis, See ‘Methodology, Log file analysis’. Logic, 477 Big data, 521 Business, 435 Digital, 157 Media logic, 96, 497, 498 Participatory, 97 Print, 198–199 Social media, 97 Long-form, 121, 172, 174, Lost Illusions, 460 Lurking, 554–555

J-tweeters, 117 Jarvis, Jeff, 301, 305, 309, 479 Jenkins, Henry, 180, 184, 301, 413 Joint service agreement, See ‘Shared service agreement’. Journalism ethics, See ‘Ethics’. Journalism Studies, 52, 132, 152, 155, 160, 208, 212, 217, 244, 246, 289, 291, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348, 354–369, 370, 397–398, 399, 401–402, 406, 410–411, 422, 425, 443–445, 460–476, 478, 480, 489, 505, 510, 524, 546–561, 562 Journalist, definition of, 76 Journalistic authority, See ‘Authority’. Journalistic identity, 241, 305–306, 371, 430, 432, 453 Journalistic practices, See ‘Production practices’. Journalistic storytelling, See ‘Storytelling’. Journatic, 208, 216

Mailer, Norman, 121 Mainstream media, 18, 26, 41, 43–44, 46, 79, 86, 87, 88, 89, 99, 101, 102, 115, 133, 134, 137, 138, 169, 171, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232, 250, 252, 255–258, 259, 261, 282, 287, 290, 328, 332, 335–336, 401, 520–521 Making of Law, The, 472 Management, 429–433, 521 Media ~, 198, 202, 349, 425, 428, 430, 435 Newsroom ~, 195–198, 200, 203, 376–377, 425, 436 Market failure, 56 Marketing, 39, 69, 136, 140, 145, 171–174, 201, 242, 335, 357, 431, 435 Mass media, use, See ‘Audience, Mass media use’. Mass self-communication, 41, 82, 228, 256 Material sensibility, 460–476 Material turn, 201–202, 461, 463, 472, Materialist media theory, 410–411 Materiality (of journalism), 83, 202, 356, 406, 415–416, 463, 469. See also ‘Actor-network theory’. Artifact / artefact, See ‘Artifact’. Immateriality, 461, 469 Matter (also ‘matter of concern’), 461–462, 469, 471–472 Objectivist theory, 462 Objects of journalism, 202, 345, 460, 470 Posthumanist theory, 462 Sociotechnical system, See ‘Sociotechnical system’. Technological objects, 460 Matrix of media, See ‘Audience, Matrix of Media’. McLuhan, Marshall, 411, 414–415, 422 Media abundance, See ‘Abundance’

Kapus´cin´ ski, Ryszard, 121 Keywords, 500, 513, 518 Knight Foundation, 155, 307, 417 Knight-Ridder, 399–400 Kuala Lumpur, 289 Laboratory experiment, See ‘Experiment’. Laboratory Life, 465 Labour, journalistic, 212, 227, 230, 231, 309, 432 Latour, Bruno, 341, 345–346, 348, 397, 401–406, 416, 462–467, 468, 471–472, 479 Lewin, Kurt, 96, 296, 383–396 LexisNexis, 512 Liberal press systems, 120 Lippmann, Walter, 13–15, 75, 227

SUBJECT INDEX

Media centricity, 446, 447, 448. See also ‘Non-media centricity’ and ‘Newsroom centricity’. Media Cloud, 420 Media criticism, See ‘Criticism’. Media ensemble, See ‘Ensemble’. Media ethics, 68–70 Media framing, See ‘Framing’. Media houses, 9, 89, 426–428 Media indexing, See ‘Indexing’. Media intervention, 168–169 Media logic, See ‘Logic’. Media management, See ‘Management’. Media repertoire, See ‘Repertoire’. Media revolution, 61, 119, 434 Media scarcity, See ‘Scarcity, of media’. Mediapolis, 557 Mediation, 6, 16, 98, 243, 244, 268, 270, 271, 272, 274, 333, 334 Methodology Computational textual analysis, 513, 514. See also ‘Textual analysis’. Content analysis, 479–480, 496–498, 563, 565, 567 Conversation analysis, 469 Creative methods, 548–550 Diary, 317, 470, 532, 548, 550 Discourse analysis, 468, 564 Ethnography, See ‘Ethnography’. Experiment, 73–75, 79, 82, 192–195, 198, 203, 283, 286, 342, 447, 522 Factor analysis, 535–536, 538 Focus groups, 317, 320, 418, 434, 532 In-depth interview, 453, 479, 564–567 Limitations, 487–489, 547–550, 564 Log file analysis, 564 Mixed-method approach, See ‘Multi-method approaches’. Mood board, 549–550 Reconstruction interview, See ‘Reconstrution interview’. Sentiment analysis, 40, 136, 504 Social media analysis, See ‘Methodology, Social media analysis’. Survey, 481–482, 564, 565 Textual analysis, 40, 447, 504. See also ‘Computational textual analysis’. Thinking aloud, 456, 551, 563 Traditional versus innovative, 530–531 Virtual ethnography, See ‘Ethnography, Virtual’. Methodology versus method, 464 Methods, See ‘Methodology’. Metrics, See ‘Audience metrics’. Metro, 210 Micro-blogging services, 116 Mill, James, 74, 119 Mimicry, 195, 202–203 Minority media, 102 Mise-en-scène, 464

601

Mobile devices, 30, 38, 56, 82, 227, 228, 361, 448, 454 Mobile news, 193, 355, 357, 361, 364, 540 Mobile technology, 361 Mobility, 12, 30, 36, 38, 83, 70, 228, 274, 357, 361, 455 Mobilization, 41–42, 999, 137, 252, 260, 319, 333, 337, 402, 405 Modernity, 17, 132, 424–425, 426, 427, 432, 433, 435, 436, Modernization theory, 425 Monetization, 136, 171, 173, 288, 330, 501 Monitorial democracy, 256–258 Monopolistic competition, 237 Morality, 71–80, 267, 270, 273, 276, 430, 433, 557 Moran, Caitlin, 123 MoveOn, 254 Multi-method approaches, 514, 534, 541, 562–574 Challenges, 569–570 Complementarity, 532, 566, 568 Epistemology, 567 Functional dimension, 568 Intra-modal combinations, 565–567 Structural dimension, 568 Validation, 568, 569 Multi-perspectival news, 18 Multimedia, 171, 174, 193, 194, 196, 198, 199, 232, 399, 428, 447 Multimodal storytelling, 494 Narrative journalism, 120, 131 Nasr, Octavia, 117 National Public Radio (NPR), 30, 46, 47, 153, 244, 518 Native advertising, 242. See also ‘Advertising’. Natural Language Processing (NLP), 513 Naturalism, 121, 172, 470 Net neutrality, 156, 257 Netnography, See ‘Ethnography, virtual’. Network, 345–346 Network ethnography, See ‘Ethnography, virtual’. Network society, 95, 193, 378 Network theory, 26 Networked framing, 95–112 Networked gatekeeping, 87, 95–112 Networked individualism, 29, 90, 302 Networked journalism, 253, 305, 453, 487, 571 Networked public sphere, 96, 158–159, 252, 257, 302 Networks Issue networks, 470 Networks of discourses, 470 Neutrality, 20, 120, 152, 153, 154, 156, 224 New Journalism, 121, 338 New media companies, 58 New media power, See ‘Power’. New York Herald, The, 121 New York Times, The, 14, 27–28, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 157, 158, 192, 194, 236, 258, 316, 392 News, 355 Audience conceptions of –, 13

602

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Spatial nature of ~, 331, 448 Temporal nature of ~, 331, 448 News agencies, 31, 42, 146, 208–210, 498 News beats, See ‘Beats’. News chain, 479, 484 News consumption, 115, 315–325, 354–369, 515, 531, 554 News cycles, 150, 335, 479 News diet, 531, 538 News flow, 115, 454 News institution, See ‘Institutions, news’. News organizations, 29–30, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 69, 77, 97, 138, 157, 166, 168, 170, 192, 193, 194, 207–222, 305, 307, 323, 343–345, 348, 386–392, 431, 484, 511, 515, 517, 520, 521, 522 News producers, 52, 83, 115, 154, 207–221, 222–235, 236–249, 250–265, 331, 401, 406–407, 412, 421, 435, 454 News production, 40–42, 52–54, 55, 57, 58, 85, 98, 138, 140, 180, 194, 197, 214–215, 241, 253, 255, 291, 337, 341–353, 354, 379, 399–401, 411, 447–459, 511–514, 522 Place of work, 411–412, 448, 455, 479, 498, 564 Practices, See ‘Production practices’. Producers, See ‘News producers’. News repertoire, See ‘Repertoire’. News reporting, See ‘Reporting’. News rules, 377 News source, See ‘Source’. News values, 32, 44, 85, 90, 99, 106, 138, 301, 305–306, 372, 556 Newspaper, 239, 255, 331, 357, 375, 376, 420, 428 Newspaper bundling, 56 Newspaper industry, 53, 56, 62, 65, 211, 429, 546 Newsroom unbundling, 65, 89, 240 Newsroom centricity, 289, 344, 410, 411–412, 443, 453, 546–547, 564, Newsroom culture, 193–196 Newsroom ethnography, See ‘Ethnography’. Newsroom innovation, See ‘Innovation’. Newsroom integration, 197. See also ‘Convergence’. Newsroom management, See ‘Management’. Newsworthy, 86, 231, 241, 244, 245, 356, 364, 373, 375, 377, 451 NGOs, 79, 149, 154, 159, 274 Non-media-centric approach, 532 Normalization process theory, 198 Normative theory, 10, 245, 303 Normativity, 124, 397, 405 Norms, 26–27, 32, 44, 68–80, 96, 98, 99, 117, 134–135, 150, 152, 153, 181, 198–200, 300, 362, 405, 469. See also ‘Ethics’ and ‘News values’. Norway, 113, 123 Obama, Barack, 136, 241, 243 Objectivity In journalism, 32, 116–117, 120, 129–130, 154, 237–238, 393, 426, 437, 555, 566

In research, 449 Observation, See ‘Ethnography’. Occupy Movement, 87, 101, 102, 103, 104, 137, 171, 223, 333, 336–337 On Shaky Ground, 468–469 Ong, Walter, 414 Online journalism, 77, 128, 192, 193, 196–199, 448, 496, 497, 498, 511, 515 Online newspapers, 122, 123, 182, 194, 202, 375 Ontology, 202, 271, 371, 374, 378, 398, 406, 462–463, 465, 467, 472 Open source, 158, 228, 258–259, 307, 406, 501, 518 Opinion leadership, 522 Oprah Effect, 241 Organizational change, 146, 195, 201, 425 Organizational structures, 196–198, 254, 387, 428, 435 Outsourcing, 146, 154, 207–221, 230 OzTAM, 516 Pall Mall Gazette, The, 119 Park, Robert, 316, 318 Participation, See ‘Audience, Participation’. Participatory culture, 38, 180, 529 Participatory democracy, 14 Participatory journalism, 17–18, 21, 85, 88, 179, 187, 199, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 256, 281, 299, 301–302, 497. See also ‘Audience, Participation’. Participatory logic, See ‘Logic’. Party press system, 120 Pasadena Now, 207–208, 216 Patch, 65, 286–287 Patterns, 371–372, 484, 516, 533, 537 Paywall, 55, 59 Penny gap, 58 Penny press, The, 121 Personal brand, 116, 118, 212, 309 Personal life, 116, 124 Personal opinions, 114, 116, 117 Personalization, 36, 88, 115, 253, 357, 529, 551, 571 Personalized storytelling, 131 Photojournalism, 131, 266–279, 347 Place, 290, 354–369, 449–450, 455 Placeshifting, 479 Platform, 37, 61, 228–229, 282, 319, 326, 429, 495, 499, 516, 529, 533–534 Pluralism, 44, 99, 101, 106, 245, 282, 284, 285, 401, 405 Point of view, 154, 270, 320, 360, 467 Political, 42, 104, 131, 318, 319, 320, 329–330, 331, 334, 337, 359–360, 516, 530 Political news, 334, 550 Politics, 318–319, 331, 433, 437 Polymedia, 132 Pool, Tim, 170–171 Popular culture, 130, 131, 165, 168, 184, 185, 317 Populist mobilizer, 120. See also ‘Advocacy journalism’.

SUBJECT INDEX

Postman, Neil, 411, 413–414, 415, 418, 422 Power, 25–34, 63, 86–87, 101–102, 132, 245, 302, 338, 346, 389–391, 397, 404–405, 415–416, 430–431, 433, 469 Counterpower, 32–33, 137, 149, 255, 304, 333, 334 New media power, 31–33 Old media power, 25–27 Power Law, 101–102, 252 Power-dependence theory, 342, 346 Practice theory, 296, 326–329, 326–340 Practices, 326, 402 Changing, 98, 157, 212, 307, 329, 429, 454, 552 Digital, See ‘Digital practices’. Journalistic, See ‘Production practices’. Pragmatic philosophy, 73–74 Pre-social media journalism, 83, 97, 114, 119 Precarity, 17, 211, 212–213, 216, 217, 225, 231, 288, 290–291, 299, 308, 309 Premediated, 98, 104 Presencing, 329, 331, 333, 336 Presentation of self in everyday life, 118 Press ethics, See ‘Ethics’. Pressens Faglige Utvalg (PFU), 123 Press freedom, 10, 11, 151, 156, 391. See also ‘Free press act’. Print media, 12, 19, 28, 32, 39, 53–65, 70, 83, 84, 122, 139, 180, 237, 240, 282, 288, 317, 331, 425, 427, 428, 453, 460, 485, 486, 498, 510, 515, 520, 528, 529, 531, 532, 541 Privacy, 156, 160, 517 Private/public continuum, 114, 116, 123 Production, See ‘Newsproduction’. Production practices, 36, 42, 230, 246, 251, 291, 305, 308, 315, 334–335, 371, 373, 375, 399, 428, 432, 433, 435, 454, 479, 554 Produsage, 100, 152, 182, 187, 303, 364 Produser, 40, 152, 153, 180, 182, 186, 187, 225, 329, 355, 529 Professional esteem, 125 Professional role, 10, 16, 70, 97, 120, 151, 199, 300, 429, 568 Professional status, 435 Professionalism, 17, 69, 166, 238, 303, 305, 404, 424, 425–429, 434 Professional journalist, 224, 225, 226, 230, 238, 242, 401, 552 ProPublica, 157, 186 Prosumers, 225, 529. See also ‘Produsers’. Public(s), 83, 96, 104, 106, 152, 303, 318–319 Ad hoc, 517 Public connection, 360, 533, 536, 538, 558 Public good, 54, 55, 65 Public journalism, 76, 121–122, 124, 153, 301, 303 Public relations (PR), 63, 69, 136, 209, 241–244, 335, 377, 387, 421, 477. See also ‘Source’. Public service, 10, 89, 374, 433, 435 Public space, 15, 18, 180, 183, 332, 364, 457

603

Public sphere, 14–15, 130, 245, 289, 434 Public subsidies, See ‘Subsidies’. Pull media, 520 Push media, 520 Python, 517 Q-methodology, 533–538 Concourse, 534 Discursive universe, 534–535, 536 Generalization, 537, 538 Pyramidal grid (also patterned grid), 534 Reliability, 536 Qualitative methdology, 478, 481, 490, 514, 521, 535–538, 548, 553, 565–567, 569 Quantitative methodology, 478, 535–538, 566–567 Questionnaire, See ‘Survey’. Radio, 331 Ratings, See ‘Audience measurement, Ratings’. Realism, 121, 135, 268, 470 Recommendation, See ‘Audience, Recommendation’. Reception, See ‘Audience, Reception’. Reconstruction interview, 477–493 Bias, 479, 480, 483, 484, 486, 488–489 Reverse engineering, 477 Reddit, 100, 101, 259, 266 Reflexivity, in research Naturalistic stance, 470 Realist stance, 470 Reflexive account / report, 471, 472 Role membership, 470 Regional news, 280, 286, 549. See also ‘Local news’. Reliability, in research, 457, 483, 522, 557 Repertoire News repertoire, 364, 530, 533, 536–540 Media repertoire, 61, 529–530, 533–539 Reportage, 120–121, 134, 173, 267, 268, 270, 274, 276, 456 Reporters, 31, 155, 198, 227, 245, 305, 344, 371–377, 389, 412, 421, 456, 457, 458, 479, 484–486. See also ‘Reporting’. Reporting, 26, 29–30, 32, 70, 79, 101, 138–139, 150, 151, 152–155, 267, 272–273, 375–376, 478 Representative sampling, 323, 497, 515, 517, 570. See also ‘Generalizability’. Requisite variety, 547, 550, 559 Resources, 51, 197, 304–305, 502 Reuters, 53, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215 Revolution, See ‘Media revolution’. Rhizome, 402, 415. See also ‘Ecology’. Rich Site Summary (RSS), See ‘RSS feeds’. Rosen, Jay, 27, 29, 223, 301, 413, 422 Routine, journalistic, 138, 199, 320, 371, 389, 406, 453 Routine, audience, See ‘Audience, Routine’. RSS feeds, 511–513 Scraping software, 511–512 Rules

604

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Constitutive, 373–374, 380 Regulative, 373, 380 Sampling, See ‘Data sampling’. Scarcity, of media, 236, 237, 239–240 Scotsman, The, 119 Scraping, web, 505, 512–513 Search engine optimization, 431, 520 Self-presentation, 114, 118, 123 Self-promotion, 118 Sennett, Richard, 114, 123–124 Sensitizing concept, 316, 317, 322, 553 Sensory ethnography, 551 Sentiment analysis, See ‘Methodology, Sentiment analysis’. Shared service agreement, 211–212 Sharing, audience, 188, 316–317, 319, 321, 322, 323, 326, 329–340, 516, 517, 521, 553, 556, 558 Shirky, Clay, 62, 254, 301, 305 Silent participation, 179–180 Six Telekurs, 210 Smart TV, 122 Smartphones, 59, 82, 122, 170–171, 226, 275, 289, 357, 460, 551 Snowden, Edward, 28–29, 151, 158, 258, 305 Social filtering, See ‘Filtering’. Social media, 81–94, 113–125, 136, 152, 155, 229, 333, 538 Audience, See ‘Audience, Social media’. Ethics, 123, 517 Guidelines, 79, 117 Persona, 113–114, 121, 123, 125 Self-disclosures, 118, 120 Trending, 21, 402 Social media analysis Content tracking tools, 512, 531 Ethical considerations, 517 Social movements, 87, 131, 251, 329, 333 Social networking, 58, 59, 152, 180, 266, 316, 319, 495 Social networking services, See ‘Social networking’. Social networks, 31, 81, 82, 84, 101, 115, 188, 274, 283, 316–318, 321, 532 Social reform, 79, 119, 166 Social shaping of technology, See ‘Innovation’. Societal cohesion, 21 Sociotechnical system, 460, 462 Soft news, 118, 120, 172, 287, 429 Software, 197, 202, 215, 228, 252, 257, 259, 288, 344, 400, 406, 413, 420, 421, 461, 466, 467, 501, 505, 511, 512 Source, 87, 98, 236–248, 388, 390, 498, 514, 516, 522 Anonymity, 25, 27, 78, 156, 181, 427, 478, 479 Confidentiality, 482, 485, 489 Elite, 18, 87, 153, 237–241, 243–246, 250, 331–332, 335–336, 337 Protection, 482 Public relations (PR), 97, 237. See also ‘Public relations’.

Sourcing practices, See ‘Source’. Spatiality, 83, 331, 335, 354–369, 385, 412, 448, 450, 451–452, 463, 564 Spatial turn, 355, 358–362. See also ‘Spatiality’. Speech, 302 Freedom of ~, See ‘Freedom of speech’. Spiral of silence, 522 Sports journalists, 116, 117 Stakeholder media, 52, 65 Stampen Local Media, 210 Storytelling Digital storytelling, See ‘Digital storytelling’. Journalistic storytelling, 6–7, 128–129, 133, 135, 138, 139, 431 Multimodal, See ‘Multimodal storytelling’. Personalized, See ‘Personalized storytelling’. Stringers, 208, 211, 213, 214 Structuralism, 462 Subjective journalism, 131 Subjectivity (in journalism), 20, 32, 42, 118, 120–121, 130, 268, 437 Subsidies, 51, 62, 237, 240, 300 Survey, See ‘Methodology, Survey’. Sweden, 208, 210, 229 Symbolic interactionism, 296, 316 Synopticon, 39 Syria, 30, 43, 63, 95, 225 Tablet, 330, 534, 551, 557 Tabloid journalism, 15, 20, 130, 420 Talentum, 210 Talese, Gay, 121 Talk show, 130, 500, 566 Technological affordance, See ‘Affordance’. Technological determinism, 125, 155, 203, 415, 416, 461, 468. See also ‘Determinism’. Technological pressures, 479 Technological innovation, See ‘Innovation’. Technology, 9, 135, 155, 201, 214, 362, 399, 414, 460, 470 Technology-infused journalism, 346, 347 Technology-oriented journalism, 346, 347, 348 Technology-supported journalism, 27, 346, 347 Teletext news, 537, 540 Television, 115, 331, 359, 363, 540 Terrorist attack, 123 Textual analysis, See ‘Methodology, Textual analysis’. Thick description, 479, 538, 553, 559 Think-aloud protocol, See ‘Methodology, Thinking aloud’. Thompson, Hunter S., 75, 121, 122 Times, The, 42, 59, 62, 123, 157, 236 Toronto School, 414 Trace, See also ‘Actor-network theory’. Digital, 461, 472, 531, 571 Discursive, 468–469 Trade directories, 484 Transparency, 20, 28, 42, 78, 89, 153, 158, 181, 257, 268, 393, 478, 555–556

SUBJECT INDEX

605

Triangulation, 447, 472, 551–552, 565, 567, 569. See also ‘Multi-method approaches’. Trust (in journalism), 69, 272, 378, 391, 547, 555, 568 TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå), 210 Tuchman, Barbara, 212 TV 2, 113, 123 Twitter, 18–19, 38, 84, 85, 104, 116, 136, 138–139, 242, 243, 330–335, 354, 362, 364, 400, 402, 418–419, 495, 500, 501, 512, 516, 517–518, 571 Twittersphere, 419, 518 Two-step flow model, 103, 418–419, 522 Tyranny of intimacy, See ‘Intimacy’.

Validity, in research, 552 Valuable journalism Resonance, 106, 136, 255, 553–554 Value, See ‘News values’. Verification, 32, 68, 77, 78, 88, 157, 267, 274, 488, 547 VG Nett, 123 Vice News, 25, 164–165, 171–174 Virality, 33, 99, 101, 104, 105, 138, 260, 261 Virtual community, 186, 187 Virtual ethnography, See ‘Ethnography, virtual’. Virtual space, 355, 363, 452, 455 Voice, 131, 238, 554

Union, 207, 211, 427 United Kingdom, 28, 38, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 82, 83, 213, 228, 229, 239, 280–294, 331, 332–333, 336, 360 URL, 511, 512 US Library of Congress, 517 USA, 10, 11, 12, 16, 37, 38, 51–67, 69, 79, 82, 84, 87, 121, 159, 160, 166, 212, 229, 239, 243, 245, 253, 254, 280–294, 316, 338, 379, 417 User, 18, 21, 133, 138, 182, 188, 199, 222–235, 302, 315–317, 323, 327, 330, 354, 362, 444, 532, 547–548, 554, 565, 567, 570. See also ‘Audience’. User engagement, See ‘Audience, Participation’. User experience, 56, 83, 90, 356–357, 364, 534, 536, 553, 554, 556 User-centered approach, See ‘Audience-centered perpective’. User-centered perspective, See ‘Audience-centered perpective’. User-generated content, 17, 40, 129, 133, 137, 139–140, 180, 209, 210, 222–234, 274. See also ‘Citizen journalism’. Utøya, 123

Washington Post, The, 29, 58, 63, 152, 158, 258, 335 Watchdog, 10, 16, 78, 151, 256, 390 Web 1.0, 495 Web 2.0, 82, 97, 98, 100, 240, 252, 253, 301, 327, 495 Web development, 307, 400, 495 Web metrics, See ‘Audience measurement, Metrics’. Web scraping, See ‘Scraping’. Weibo, 13, 82, 152 Whistleblowers, 151, 258, 389 Wikileaks, 25, 27–28, 157–158, 258, 304 Wikipedia, 40, 252, 338, 461 Williams, Raymond, 165–166, 170, 415 Wired, 506 Witness, 29, 40, 121, 134, 150, 152, 170, 238, 267–269, 275, 355 Wolfe, Tom, 121 Workflow, 197, 215 YourTwapperKeeper, 500, 501, 518 YouTube, 25, 30, 84, 95, 155, 164, 166, 230, 241, 266, 401 Zapatista, 149–150