Themes and Critical Debates in Contemporary Journalism [1 ed.] 9781443873703, 9781443895231

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Themes and Critical Debates in Contemporary Journalism

Themes and Critical Debates in Contemporary Journalism Edited by

Verica Rupar

Themes and Critical Debates in Contemporary Journalism Edited by Verica Rupar This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Verica Rupar and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9523-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9523-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Citizenship............................................................................. 5 The Evolution of Citizenship and Journalism Geoffrey Craig Chapter Two: Ethics .................................................................................. 17 Journalism Ethics under Conditions of Disruption Donald Matheson Chapter Three: Detachment ....................................................................... 35 Moving the Boundaries of Civic Discourse Verica Rupar Chapter Four: Transparency ...................................................................... 49 Political Journalism and Two-Sided Transparency Gregory Treadwell Chapter Five: News Exposure ................................................................... 67 What If There Was No News? Holly Cowart and Kim Walsh-Childers Chapter Six: Metrics .................................................................................. 87 We Need To Talk About Metrics Merja Myllylahti Chapter Seven: Innovation ...................................................................... 105 Mastery of Journalism Innovation Nico Drok

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eight: Professionalism ............................................................... 125 Retooling the Professional Journalism Education Katherine Reed Chapter Nine: Imagination ...................................................................... 139 The Journalistic Imagination and the Future of Research Stephen Reese Contributors ............................................................................................. 151 Index ........................................................................................................ 155

INTRODUCTION

A week before this book was submitted to the publisher, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced. Nine journalists and five newsrooms were added to the almost century-long list of the best journalism in the United States. The awards are always a reminder that the public service gene is very strong in all good journalism. Great journalism involves curiosity, patience, dedication, meticulous reporting, lucid writing, distinguished criticism; it illuminates a significant and complex subject, captures events accurately as they occur, provides context, has a moral purpose, sound reasoning, and the power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction…at least that’s how the Pulitzer Jury defines the best of journalism today. But what is journalism today? The old definitions of journalism are under fire; its occupational identity and importance to democracy, public life, and social justice are contested; the content, technologies, practices and cultural conditions of production of news are changing. Contemporary developments signal significant shifts in the ways journalism is practised, conceptualized and taught. This book, written in the context of the World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) held in 2016 at Auckland University of Technology, in New Zealand, offers a collection of essays on some of the key concepts, categories and models that have underpinned WJEC discussions about journalism research and pedagogy. The overall theme of the congress– integrity and the identity of journalism and journalism education across the globe–generated rigorous debate about journalism studies and the distinctiveness, subject matter, and the journalism curriculum today. The congress theme has proved to be an excellent catalyst for rethinking journalism, and its ability to move the boundaries of civic discourse. The book maps the advantages and limits of exploring journalism in the light of key ideas that underpin its contemporary practice: citizenry, ethics, detachment, transparency, news consumption, metrics, innovation, professionalism and imagination. Each essay offers an informed perspective on the topic’s conceptual foundation, current debates and its importance for understanding 21st century journalism examining its intellectual authority, place in society, norms that rule its practice, and pressures it faces in slicing the world into “all the news that’s fit to print”. The book

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Introduction

aims to open the discussion by placing ideas about the work of journalism–producing, reproducing and naturalizing collective conceptions of reality–in a wider and deeper context of political, social, and occupational change. Themes and Critical Debates in Contemporary Journalism starts with the critical examination of one of the most rehearsed professional pledges, journalism’s provision of the information citizens need to engage in public and political participation. While this function persists, Geoffrey Craig argues (Chapter 1), the identity, scope and practices of the citizenry, as well as what it means to be informed, have changed: “The proliferation of expressions of difference that are captured in forms of differential citizenship place extra responsibility on journalists to engage in practices of listening and understanding so that they provide a full and fair portrayal of views and also interrogate the assumptions they bring to the reportage,” he says. Donald Matheson (Chapter 2), examines journalism ethics in times of radical change, calling for journalists bringing more of their culturally-situated selves to the reporting, rather than claiming status outside cultural norms, when seeking to establish trust. Verica Rupar (Chapter 3) revisits journalism’s professional ideology and the norm of detachment, to put forward the argument that the most powerful form of journalism is open, transparent and oriented towards a particular position that requires active engagement and social responsibility. Gregory Treadwell (Chapter 4) looks at the freedom of information regime and the ways it links journalism and its audience. He argues, “Together, they might just be able to ensure the transparency of the powerful.” What would happen if there was no news? ask Holly Cowart and Kim Walsh-Chandlers (Chapter 5). They discuss the possibility that incidental news exposure on social media has lessened awareness of general news exposure arguing that the environment in which news appears is perhaps even more a part of our lives than ever before. The increasingly complex “post-industrial news ecosystem” has interlinked news corporations and social media companies more strongly than ever, and they share the same interest in their most valuable property–the audience, explains Merja Myllylahti (Chapter 6). She argues that the intensified focus on metrics poses a fundamental question for journalism: Are journalists producing public goods and public service or just other sellable commodities? The last three chapters expand discussion about journalism to journalism education and journalism research, engaging with the concept of professionalism in relation to innovation, the classroom turned into a newsroom, and imagination. Nico Drok (Chapter 7) puts forward a convincing argument: that in order to become centres of reflection and

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innovation, journalism schools should no longer focus on journalism as it is today, but on the future of journalism. In that future, the key innovation will be to put the citizen, in his/her capacity as a potential actor in the public sphere, back to the centre of journalism. Katherine Reed (Chapter 8) looks closely at models of journalism education to pose related questions: when the means of producing and distributing information and stories are in the hands of everyone, how do we define the professional journalist as a distinct and invaluable, even incomparable entity? In other words, what do journalists trained for the profession know, and what functions can they perform that others can’t? She argues for the greater presence of newsroom practitioners in faculty-run newsrooms. In the concluding chapter of the book (Chapter 9) Stephen Reese, one of the keynote speakers at the World Journalism Education Congress 2016, brings together journalism, journalism education and journalism research. He advocates for the journalistic imagination, “a kind of scholarly outlook” defined by its simultaneous commitment to the normative concerns for the field, the openness of its methodology, and the prioritising of research around urgent social issues.

CHAPTER ONE: CITIZENSHIP THE EVOLUTION OF CITIZENSHIP AND JOURNALISM GEOFFREY CRAIG

The importance of journalism has always been linked partly to its role of informing the citizenry and yet the “simplicity” of such a role is considerably complicated by the fact that we are living today in a world that is characterized not only by extraordinary technological and media change but also by the increased prominence and political struggle over issues of political and cultural identity and expressions of difference. Journalists in newsrooms and journalism educators in classrooms have to develop skills relating to an ever growing and quickly evolving technological landscape–the technological “plasticity” of a mobile phone, the ability to locate and “read” complex bodies of information in data journalism, the technical details associated with the communicative potential of different kinds of social media. Equally, the pluralism of modern societies and the erosion of traditional value-systems mean that journalists, journalism educators and students need to have greater knowledge and skills to understand and negotiate political and social complexity. These two developments are related: the increasing volume and forms of communication, and the changing dynamics between media producers and “consumers”, help inform a more heterogeneous public life. The issue discussed here is how evolving understandings of citizenship can be mobilized to assist us to engage with such political, cultural, technological and communicative complexity and how they might impact on journalistic content and reportage. This complicated issue can only be sketched within the limits of this chapter but what I will do is provide an overview of the evolution of citizenship, presenting it through a schema that contrasts both: the singularity of citizenship–associated with the unified membership of a broad collective, namely the nation–with its more

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plural expressions–where the rights of difference are claimed and celebrated; and also a “deep,” informed and participatory form of citizenship with a more “shallow,” monitorial citizenship. I will conclude with discussion of some ramifications for the practice and content of journalism with focused discussion on the importance of listening and understanding, and the constitution of the news.

Evolution and Types of Citizenship Citizenship has always been a historically informed concept. Our ideas of citizenship have evolved with the historical concept of modernity, linked to the rise of the nation-state, processes of secularization, and a process of law that is indifferent to the social status of legal subjects. The evolution of modern citizenship was encapsulated in T.H. Marshall’s (1963) categories that noted: firstly, the rise of civil citizenship in the 18th century, characterized by the right to receive justice and exercise freedom of speech; secondly, the rise of political citizenship in the 19th century, characterized by the right to participate in the exercise of political power, manifested in various struggles over the franchise; and thirdly, the rise of social citizenship in the 20th century, which is expressed through the rights of individuals to access welfare and education. Marshall’s work has been subject to critique (Hudson and Kane 2000, Hartley 2010) but nonetheless it suggests the expansion and complication of the concept of citizenship and it also does prompt us to consider further developmental stages of citizenship. We find this in the idea of cultural citizenship (Miller 2006; van Zoonen 2005) that in elementary terms refers to rights of being “included” across a broader cultural and political landscape. As van Zoonen (2005) has noted: That seemingly nominal requirement is behind intense confrontations about national and minority languages or religions; about the validity and legitimacy of particular kinds of knowledges; about cultural heritage and protectionism; and about lifestyles, identities, norms, values, decency, and good and bad taste. (van Zoonen 2005,8)

Cultural citizenship, then, is manifested in various forms of “identity politics” that refer not only to particular expressions of difference–along lines of gender, race and ethnicity, disability, etc.–but also to niche publics organized around matters of style, sub-cultures, lifestyle and various forms of affiliation, ranging from the religious to the environmental (Hartley 2010). In his historical typology of citizenship, Schudson (1999) has also

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recognized this “rights”-based citizenship, growing out of the social movements and cultural revolution of the 1960s. While cultural citizenship is similarly motivated as earlier “forms” of citizenship for inclusion in the broader citizenry body, it also, more so than earlier expressions of citizenship, “thematizes” difference, challenging the homogeneity of the status of citizenship. Contemporary manifestations of citizenship are not only characterized by the promotion of difference, they are also increasingly more individualized and privatized, problematizing the classical delineation of citizenship as a generalized, public form of political subjectivity. This can be seen in the concept of DIY-citizenship. Hartley (1999, 2010) has claimed that such a form of citizenship is based upon a “radically decontextualized network of meanings which locate identity in the mediasphere” (179) and on claims to the right of individual “semiotic selfdetermination” (181). DIY-citizenship is based upon recognition of the way that digital technology and culture, manifested in online and social media communication, provide people with greater means of individual textual production and new forms of civic engagement. The contexts of digital technology and culture have facilitated an explosion of knowledge, increasingly freed from historically conventional institutional sites of knowledge production, producing what Henry Jenkins (2006) has termed a “participatory culture” and Stephen Coleman (2005) has termed a “conversational democracy”. DIY-citizenship, then, privileges individual forms of public engagement, but it also forges new, often informal, kinds of public association. Hartley’s idea of DIY-citizenship has nonetheless been subject to critique. Ratto and Boler (2014) have argued that his definition “appears to assume the problematic atomistic individual long associated with liberalism” and also that there seems to be little scope for difference between DIY citizenship and mere consumerism (11-12). Ratto and Boler posit a much more overtly political identity to DIY-citizenship that they state is “characterized by its emphasis on ‘doing’ and the active roles of interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers” (18). Ultimately, DIY citizenship is a flexible enough phenomenon to span a continuum “with one end representing the overtly political/interventionist and the other end representing those simply channeling creativity and a kind of poesis into everyday practices” (19). Marshall’s schema represents an expansion of a nonetheless singular form of citizenship but this sense of singularity starts to break down with cultural and DIY-citizenship. The rise of these latter types of citizenship attests to the fact that citizenship is now seen as a more heterogeneous, diverse phenomenon. As Peter Dahlgren (2003, 159) has written, citizenship

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is “now … understood as a more plural and mutable form of identity that involves a sense of social engagement and belonging”. Or, as Plummer (2003) has more rhetorically observed: “We seem to have reached a point where a thousand citizenships are ready to bloom.” We have become more familiar in recent years with a range of citizenships, spanning cosmopolitan citizenship, sexual or intimate citizenship, corporate citizenship, and environmental citizenship, just to name a few. Wayne Hudson (2000, 24) has argued that these types of citizenship are encapsulated in the idea of differential citizenship that “emphasizes that political citizens have access to a vast diversity of citizenships which cannot be collapsed into a single inclusive uniformitarian citizenship”. This proliferation of citizenships does not, however, represent an obliteration of the conventional, more singular and distinctly “political” form of citizenship that is associated with membership of a nation-state and indeed the legal and institutional securities of more conventional citizenship identity in contemporary democratic societies can help enable other citizenships to arise and flourish. Nonetheless, there can also be tension between more particular types of citizenship and a broader political citizenship as we see in the example of the recent controversy in North Carolina where LGBT people and supporters have protested against a law that was passed that required transgender people to use the type of public bathroom that corresponds to the sex that is identified on their birth certificate. As Hudson (2000, 24, author’s italics) has noted, the operation of contemporary political citizenship could be expanded “to address how political citizens may be expected to behave across their citizenships”. The explosion in forms of differential citizenship is premised upon recognition that the “universality” and “impartiality” of conventional political citizenship, as it has been historically understood and practised, has in fact perpetuated privileges and facilitated injustices. Iris Marion Young (1989) has made such a claim in her argument for a differentiated citizenship where differences between citizens or groups of citizens are both recognized and taken into account in contrast to conventional understandings of a universal citizenship. Young argues that universal citizenship wrongly equates equality with sameness, emphasizing what people have in common in contrast to how they differ, and also applying rules and laws to all people the same way, indifferent to individual and group differences (250). She demonstrates that “universal” citizenship is actually constituted through relations of difference, occurring in a “realm of rationality and freedom as opposed to the heteronomous realm of particular need, interest, and desire” (253) and that this kind of distinction conflates “oppositions between reason and passion, masculine and

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feminine” (253). She states, then, that we need to have a citizenship that highlights and addresses the “situatedness” of all citizens: I assert, then, the following principle: a democratic public, however that is constituted, should provide mechanisms for the effective representation and recognition of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged within it. (Young 1989, 261)

In addition to the situation that has just been sketched, where greater citizenship plurality and differentiation co-exists with an ongoing singular and more conventionally “political” form of citizenship, we also need to chart contemporary citizenship upon a spectrum of “depth” and “shallowness”. The informational complexity and plurality of information sources in digital culture that was alluded to earlier in comments on DIYcitizenship facilitates not only a more “individualized” form of citizenship but it also enables citizens to more easily acquire a greater “depth” of knowledge and expertise and subsequently to put such knowledge into practice as motivated, engaged citizens who are able to critique mainstream news media reportage and offer alternative accounts, and also challenge institutional sources of information more generally. Normative understandings of citizenship have always maintained that it is more than a form of political identity but crucially involves political practices, (and ideally more than the occasional vote every three or four or five years) and expressions of “depth” or “engaged” citizenship allow this to occur, as we saw in Ratto and Boler’s emphasis on the practices and agency of those engaged in DIY-citizenship. Equally, this form of “engaged” citizenship occurs within, and contributes to, a major structural transformation of the public sphere. As Bruns (2008, 67) has noted, we are experiencing “the slow, casual collapse … of the one-to-many mass media of the industrial age, and [its] … replacement with the many-to-many, user-led media of the networked age”. This new virtual public sphere gives rise to increasingly “niche” or “issue” publics where communities with specific problems or interests–the communities of a “differential” citizenship–can deliberate amongst themselves, and in turn take on leadership in broader public deliberative processes. The “depth” or “engaged” form of contemporary citizenship is, of course, manifested in a range of activities and media practices across citizen journalism, blogging, social media, online advocacy groups, the open source movement, Wikipedia, etc. Through such forms of media “citizens themselves become actors in the play of political engagement … they now directly contribute their own opinions and ideas to the debate”

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(Bruns 2008, 68). End-users have become active co-producers–they have become “produsers” (Bruns 2008, 72). This process offers a challenge to professional journalistic norms as we have “amateur” contributions, subjective reportage, a greater variety of narrative forms and a challenge of the conventional hierarchy of sources. The effects of this “depth” form of citizenship not only challenge journalistic hierarchies but hierarchies of knowledge and expertise more generally. Such a challenge, however, does not mean dissolution of the authority of experts but rather it increases their accountability to the wider public. Such a process is captured in the term “equipotentiality” which refers to a “belief that expertise cannot be located beforehand, and thus general and open participation is the rule” (Bauwens, cited in Bruns 2008, 71). It may be possible for the noted “produsers” to exercise expertise in certain political, social or cultural arenas but such competency across all public issues is beyond the ability of most people, particularly in a digital culture where there is an ubiquity of information sources and corresponding proliferation of content that is continuously updated. This informational culture has thus also given rise, more so than ever before, to “shallower” expressions of citizenship where there is an ongoing surveillance or scanning of the news of public culture. This is a monitorial (Schudson 1999) form of citizenship. As Schudson observed, Walter Lippmann long ago was right (even if we don’t agree with his subsequent conclusions): "if democracy requires omnicompetence and omniscience from its citizens, it is a lost cause” (Schudson 1999, p. 310). This monitorial citizenship is a counter to, or perhaps a necessary complement of, the more focused concerns of a “rights-based” citizenship. Monitorial citizenship is not however a passive, disengaged citizenship. Schudson maintains that citizens should be “poised for action” if their surveillance triggers serious concern. Monitorial citizenship, then, is perhaps the reservoir of generalized civic potential, able to be mobilized when required.

Ramifications for Journalism The question that follows is what ramifications does this historical evolution and critique of contemporary citizenship have for the practice of journalism and for journalism education? There is much that could be said, but I want to observe in particular that it seems to me that we are acutely conscious of the ways that new technologies and social media are initiating radical transformations of the industry and practices of journalism, and we are also acutely aware of the radical changes involved in the status and functions of the consumers of journalism, along with the

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accompanying changing relations between these new “produsers” and journalists, but this upheaval and transformation has perhaps not sufficiently flowed through to correspondingly renewed conceptualisations of citizenship. We may well be aware of the kind of historical evolution of citizenship that I have just referenced and yet a “residual”, normative idea of citizenship still persists, sometimes sitting uncomfortably in the contexts of the transformation I have just described. One of the ramifications for journalism that follows from the overview of citizenship I have provided is the importance of listening and understanding. Listening and understanding become ever more important in a world where there are proliferating expressions of difference that undermine traditional value systems and notions of “common sense.”. Of course, listening and understanding should be central to journalistic practice as reporters seek, gather and make sense of the different voices that are deemed relevant to news stories. News stories are animated not only by individual sources but also by the conjunction of different kinds of sources and opinions. It has been noted that listening is integrated into attempts to reform conventional journalism, as we see variously across peace, public and ecumenical journalism (Lynch 1998; Rosen 1999; Borden 2005; O’Donnell 2009) but more generally it has been claimed that journalists are not good at listening. Dan Gillmor (2009), for example, declares that: Sadly, [listening] is not something most journalists do very well. We pay attention to the sources we interview, and to the people whose press conferences we attend, and to the rich, powerful and/or well-connected people who remain on the trade’s semi-official radar. We don’t pay much attention, however, to anyone else. (Dan Gillmor 2009, 5)

It has been widely claimed that journalism could do better in its reportage on marginalised communities, and that forms of “objective” reportage and a reliance on institutional sources contribute to a reproduction of social hierarchies and privileges. Journalists have been portrayed as “acultural” in that they render the dominant culture “invisible” or taken for granted while the culture and values of “others” is highlighted (Awad 2011). Declarations of the importance of “listening” are important correctives to views that the interests of particular groups and communities can be addressed solely through the provision of “voice” in the form of different communicative channels and types of social media. Such a provision of voice is, of course, important, but we need to remember that the practice of citizenship is relational and the provision of voice needs to work together with effective listening and understanding. Equally, we need to distinguish

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between listening and understanding. As Husband (2009) has noted, listening “is an act of attention, a willingness to focus on the other, to heed both their presence and their communication” but it is only a precursor to understanding which is “an act of empathetic comprehension, a willing searching after the other’s intention and message” (441, author’s italics). Understanding, in turn, must be associated with behavioural change, otherwise it can be limited to a mere commodification of the listener’s moral worth. For Husband (1996), this right to be understood is a necessary complement to the right to communicate–otherwise “the right to communicate becomes too easily a unidirectional and egocentric democracy of Babel”. Taking up the importance of listening for journalism, Penny O’Donnell (2009) observes that listening throws the responsibilities back onto the journalist and more substantively it also challenges the journalistic subjectivity that is brought to such communicative encounters: “journalism-related listening practices … seek more than ‘empathy’ by foregrounding interactions outside individual/group comfort zones, that acknowledge and negotiate power differentials, and engage unfamiliar and/or hostile perspectives” (510). I also believe the issue of “differential” citizenship, and the politicization of practices relating to the “private” sphere, as captured in DIY-citizenship, have ramifications for how we approach the constitution of news and the operations of news rounds. The rise of differential citizenship and its expression through a range of different citizenships– such as multicultural, environmental or sexual citizenship–attest to the increased politicization of activities and forms of identity that were previously not marked as political. As such, we have not just experienced the breakdown of the singularity of the public sphere but also the broadening and complication of what constitutes the public sphere. John Hartley (1996) has written that: The old-fashioned divisions between the public and private sphere, male and female cultural domains, politics and fashion, news and entertainment, have to be rethought in the context of the postmodern media. The traditional political sphere of politics has progressively been privatized, feminized, suburbanized and consumerized ... while the most important new political movements–e.g. environment, ethnic, gender, peace and youth movements–all originate in what used to be seen as the private sphere. (Hartley 1996, 145)

The fault-line between the public and private spheres is where many emerging forms of citizenship are practised and yet often journalism struggles to recognize such activity, and when it does, it struggles to

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allocate it an appropriate place within the news and provide informed coverage and analysis. The historical distinctions between “hard” and “soft” news continue to reproduce a worldview where politics, public affairs, business, and international news are strictly delineated from important issues and cultural activities that inform the changing dynamics of modern everyday life, despite the ways that feminist theorists have highlighted the political and social importance of previously ignored subjects relating to relationships and sexuality (Lehman-Wilzig and Seletzky 2010), and despite the popularity of political satire television programmes, such as The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, that highlight the limitations of conventional journalistic reportage and the importance of the intersection between politics and popular culture. Ethical consumption and sustainable living practices, part of an emerging form of environmental citizenship, are also examples where journalism struggles to report and assign meaning. Such “green lifestyle” news stories “don’t fit”: they are a lesser form of environmental journalism that has a global, structural and more “political” focus, and they sit oddly in the contexts of the consumer-oriented lifestyle journalism that occurs primarily in the weekend newspaper supplements. The people who engage in ethical consumption and sustainable living are not singularly “consumers” nor are they primarily “activists” and journalists sometimes have difficulty finding an appropriate form of subjectivity for such people. In this sense, generic distinctions between “hard” and “soft” news stories can prevent us from acknowledging and understanding how discussion about climate change issues are increasingly linked with the need for lifestyle change, and that “lifestyles” in this sense are not just about the domestic sphere but are also invoked in public policy innovations regarding issues such as city transport. Differential citizenship attests to the emergence of different ways of living and we require a journalism that is flexible enough to respond to such change.

Conclusion Journalism in democratic societies is predicated partly on its provision of a public flow of information so that the citizenry can be informed and engage in public and political participation and while this central function persists, the identity, scope and practices of the citizenry have been changing and the nature of their political, social and cultural knowledge has evolved so that what it means to be “informed” is not as straight forward as it might once have been. While much is made of the more

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“interactive” or “participatory” engagements news organizations now have with their readers, viewers and listeners, there is a tendency to continue to conceive of such audiences in terms of traditional, unified and distinct forms of public subjectivity. Despite this, the chapter has outlined the ways in which the category of citizenship has evolved, expanding the parameters of its political character, embracing more the relevance of cultural concerns, and facilitating more varied and individual expressions. The chapter has also highlighted how the equality of citizenship cannot be equated with “sameness” but rather such a quest for equality demands recognition of different rights and identity, and the reparation of injustices. The chapter has discussed the ways that contemporary citizenship can be exercised at the same time along differing “depths” or degrees of commitment, allowing individuals to develop specialized bodies of knowledge and engage in sustained forms of action while also continuing to monitor the vicissitudes of public life more generally. Finally, it has been suggested that there are some ramifications that need to be considered with regard to reportage and the constitution of the news. The proliferation of expressions of difference that are captured in forms of differential citizenship place extra responsibility on journalists to engage in practices of listening and understanding so that they provide a full and fair portrayal of views and also interrogate the assumptions they bring to the reportage. In addition, it has been noted that the changing ways in which individuals express their citizenship, increasingly across the domain of the private sphere and through practices previously not deemed to be political or civic in nature, also require journalism to recast the frameworks through which news is offered. Note: This chapter was based upon a presentation for the “Journalism and an Informed Citizenry” panel at the World Journalism Education Congress. The author would like to thank his fellow panelists–Professor Kaarle Nordenstreng, Professor Ivor Gaber, and Associate Professor Kerry McCallum–for their contributions to the panel. The author also thanks Associate Professor Verica Rupar for the invitation to organize the panel, her feedback on this work and suggestions for further reading. As always, any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author.

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References Awad, I. 2011. “Latinas/os and the Mainstream Press: The Exclusions of Professional Diversity.” Journalism no.12 (5): 515-532. Borden, S. 2005. “Communitarian Journalism and Flag Displays After September 11: An Ethical Critique.” Journal of Communication Inquiry no. 29:30–46. Bruns, A. 2008. “Life Beyond the Public Sphere: Towards a Networked Model for Political Deliberation.” Information Polity no. 13: 65-79. Coleman, S. 2016. Direct Representation: Towards a Conversational Democracy. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. (Accessed June 15.). http://www.ippr.org/files/ecomm/files/Stephen_Coleman_Pamphlet.pd f?noredirect=1. Dahlgren, P. 2003. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, 151-170, London: Sage. Gillmor, D.2009. “Introduction: Toward a (New) Media Literacy in a Media Saturated World.” In Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas in Communication, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 1-11, New York: Routledge. Hartley, J. 1996. Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. London: Edward Arnold. —. 1999. Uses of Television. London: Routledge. —. 2010. “Silly Citizenship.” Critical Discourse Studies no.7 (4): 233248. Hudson, W. 2000. “Differential Citizenship.” In Rethinking Australian Citizenship, edited by Wayne Hudson, W. and J. Kane, 15-25, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, W, and J. Kane 2000. (eds.) Rethinking Australian Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husband, C. 1996. “The Right to be Understood: Conceiving the MultiEthnic Public Sphere.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences no. 9 (2): 205-215. —. 2009. “Between Listening and Understanding.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies no. 23 (4): 441-443. Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press. Lehman-Wilzig, S. N., and M. Seletzky. 2010. “Hard News, Soft News, ‘General’ News: The Necessity and Utility of an Intermediate Classification.” Journalism no. 11: 37-56. Lynch, J. 1998. “Listening to the Outsiders.” British Journalism Review

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no. 9: 64–9. Marshall, T. H. 1963. Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays. London: Heinemann. Miller, T. 2006. Cultural Citizenship. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. O’Donnell, P. 2009. “Journalism, Change and Listening Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies no. 23 (4): 503-517. Plummer, K. 2003. Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ratto, M., and M. Boler. 2014. “Introduction.” In DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, edited by Matt Ratto, and Megan Boler, 1-22, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rosen, J.1999. What are Journalists for? New Haven: Yale University Press. Schudson, M. 1999. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. van Zoonen, L. 2005. Entertaining The Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Young, I. M. 1989. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics no. 99: 250-274.

CHAPTER TWO: ETHICS JOURNALISM ETHICS UNDER CONDITIONS OF DISRUPTION DONALD MATHESON

In March 2015, the Washington Post Nairobi bureau chief Kevin Sieff reported from rural Nigeria on the country’s landmark elections, the first time since independence that the presidency had peacefully changed hands. In addition to writing news stories and producing videos for the paper’s website, he used Snapchat and Instagram to capture something of the mood of the areas he visited in the days before the vote. He told the Nieman Foundation later: In a lot of the polling sites, because this is rural Nigeria, the ballot boxes never arrived and the polling materials never arrived...So I snapchatted some photos of people waiting outside — it was like 100 degrees — for the polling places to open. There was a little bit of news there. This is one of the most important elections in Africa. To be able to convey that news to people on the spot, and get reactions from people who might or might not read the real story the following morning, was very cool. It felt like I was reaching a totally different audience than I do with my stories. (Lichterman 2015)

Sieff’s experiments with Snapchat are a good place to start because they are typical of a wider reworking of aspects of western journalism practice. Accompanying many of these experiments is widespread discussion not only of what succeeds as public communication, but of how and why these forms of reporting succeed. In the course of that discussion, fundamental questions about journalism lie just below the surface, which are both epistemological (dealing with the knowledge claims being made) and ethical (evaluating that practice as good or right for society).

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A decade ago, a chapter pondering journalism ethics might have taken for granted some of these foundational issues, focusing perhaps more on moments that risked breaching specific social norms such as fairness and dignity–photographing dying people, intruding into privacy, lying to get the story. While those questions remain, the key ethical questions now require a different order of response and in particular a much broader view of ethics. Sieff was conscious that he was reaching audiences in different ways to a newspaper story and, to an extent, reaching different audiences who might not be newspaper readers. These users came with different expectations of the journalist–they chatted with him in ways that crossed professional-personal boundaries. His snaps were immediate, casual, intimate, personal and in doing so followed some of the logics of social media. “New friends,” read one snap of Sieff posed with 11 other men. The content he posted was refracted through his self, including his experience of the 100-degree (38°C) heat and made sense partly in terms of some sense of co-presence between the reporter, the US-based reader and Nigerian voter more than in terms of any specific factual nuggets. These are complex moves within the communicative practices of journalism. In Knight and Cook’s (2013, 132) terms, this is “a sphere that is not quite public, not quite private”, making it difficult to pin down what the public responsibilities of the journalist are, or indeed what ethical parameters the social media users following Sieff or the local voters might think those responsibilities should be. It is difficult to evaluate practice such as this using a traditional journalism ethics model that assumes news journalists report, independently and neutrally, the most important facts and ideas of the day that are in the public interest. Instead, asking about the snapchatting journalist within an ethical frame requires stepping outside–and questioning–existing parameters. For Sieff this was not the “real story” yet it reached people. Old assumptions about the relationship of journalism to the world it reports, to the people reported on and the audience are somehow being confounded. Jennifer Brandel (2016), whose company provides technology to help news organizations engage with audiences, writes that a shift in journalism culture (her focus is on US journalism in particular) is required in the contemporary mediascape, and in particular a shift away from what she diagnoses as a systemic disdain for the audience. “[R]ather than toss content down at them from the mountaintop, hoping they’ll like it, share it, come back for more and maybe one day pay for it,” she writes, news organizations must “build meaningful relationships with the people they serve”. In this she joins a chorus of commentators, among whom one of the most vocal is Jeff Jarvis (2015), arguing that journalists’ relationships

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with publics and with communities must be recast. Beckett (2011) describes an emerging “moral market” in qualities such as trust, authenticity, transparency and collaboration, qualities which depend upon the kinds of relationships and structures fostered by media producers. Such commentary signals the importance of extending discussion of the challenges that news media and journalism practice face well beyond the disruptive effects of emerging media platforms and media user practices into ethical domains and, on the flip side, extending ethical debate beyond the minimal ethics of reducing any harm that journalists do as they carry out their truth-telling ethos. Anderson et al (2014) use the term “post-industrial journalism” to try to encapsulate a sense of the much less stable or coherent status of contemporary journalism within society and politics, which they analyse as both an economic and a cultural problem. They write: “The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.” This chapter seeks to be a little less apocalyptic by suggesting that the loss of clarity they identify has also opened up ethical debate within journalism, encouraging a significantly more reflexive practice. Markham (2009, 1), following the logic of Bourdieu’s field theory, argues that, “in a professional field, morality can only exist if it is supported by structures and mechanisms which give people an interest in morality”. That is to say, the symbolic resources that ethical claims and debate constitute must be used, instantiated in activities such as newsroom ombudsmen, editors’ blogs, readers’ panels, journalists’ tweets about their work or “fifth estate” bloggers (Dutton 2009), for them to have any purchase on journalistic work. Zelizer (2013) has commented that ethics has historically not had much purchase on a highly pragmatic and instinctive news practice that has been “impatient of any form of reflection that doesn’t contribute to a result or which may slow things down” (274; citing Brock 2010). Abstract codes of ethics have been something of a “sideshow”, she argues, for a practice focused on case-by-case and improvisory thinking. Ethical structures are much less a sideshow, however, when the implicit social contract between news makers and audiences is being reworked in new ways of doing the news and when journalists are working hard to defend and articulate their practice in the face of accusations of fake news or source capture. A gap in perception has opened up among news publics between the news and its telling, which journalists are struggling to close again and for which moral claims to truth, transparency, social justice and responsibility to community are becoming important tools. Journalistic impatience with reflection is still

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less sustainable in a context of rapidly dwindling funding as social media giants absorb the majority of the advertising spend and news organizations scramble to adapt. Journalists, including Sieff and Brandel above, are increasingly conscious of, and seeking to justify, the forms in which their reporting takes place. As the “old clarity” vanishes, moral claims about the impact or purpose of journalism are at least as important as new business models in the attempt to re-engage audiences and to respond to attacks on journalistic modes of truth-telling. There is particular value in journalism scholars offering critical, ethical tools to evaluate experiments in media such as the Washington Post’s above and to provide further resources for journalists to engage, listen and respond to shifting societal expectations. This chapter describes some of these ethical tools, putting them into the contexts in which they are being used to address questions about the relationships of journalism to its worlds.

Reconnecting the professional To do that, it is necessary to distance the current moment from the “high modern” (Hallin 2006) moment of post-World War Two news media. Journalism ethics was dominated in that period by a professional ethics perspective that drew heavily on utilitarianism and on duty-based models. Ethics here could be glossed as the resources that a professional needed to guide her or his conduct in doing journalism in the best way possible. Consequently, ethics was largely individualised and focused on specific actions by that individual. What should the journalist do in a particular situation, weighing up the harms and benefits to the various groups affected? What are the competing duties of the journalist to those different groups? Within journalism this “professionalising project” (Curran 2013) can be thought of as shaped by two forces: firstly, management and industry training, which sought to produce efficient, responsible and regulated practitioners; and, secondly, the desire among news workers for greater autonomy (Örnebring 2009). Ethics became a compromise space in which codes of ethics, ethical instruction during journalism education and the meta-discourse of media accountability systems such as professional journals and media watch programmes (Bertrand 2007) worked to sustain industry self-regulation, a sense of professional self-determination and a degree of social status. For some critics, such as Aldridge and Evetts (2003), the professionalising discourse is connected to the journalistic mythology of the lone, heroic reporter that obfuscated the realities of commercialised industrial journalism. Journalism ethics has always, therefore, been open to criticism that it depoliticises practice and

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disconnects it from structural factors, imagining a largely non-existent individualised journalist able to make considered ethical decisions based on professional norms that were far from secure when examined closely. For this reason Keeble (2001) begins his textbook, Ethics for Journalists, by foregrounding those structural matters and in particular the challenges that a rapidly changing, hyper-competitive news industry closely aligned to dominant ideas in society pose to the ethics of its workers. Professional ethics has also provided justification for the liberal ideology that has shaped Anglo-American journalism in particular from its earliest days. Individual editors making rational and free decisions about the right intervention in public debate became merged in ethical discourse with the professional employee who had the autonomy to exercise freedom of speech. Particularly in newspapers, this ethical tradition has supported a minimalist stance on regulation, where news publications’ responsible exercise of freedom of speech on behalf of the public trumped intrusion into private lives or breach of social rules or even the law. The New Zealand Press Council, for example (a self-regulatory body over most of the newspapers and widely-circulated magazines based in the country), states in its preamble that: There is no more important principle in a democracy than freedom of expression. Freedom of expression and freedom of the media are inextricably bound. The print media is jealous in guarding freedom of expression, not just for publishers' sake but, more importantly, in the public interest. In dealing with complaints, the Council will give primary consideration to freedom of expression and the public interest. (NZPC 2016)

Thus, while the body defines itself as an independent forum where members of the public can resolve complaints against print (and some digital) news media, it does so in a way that privileges media freedom as a prime moral good. As a result, societal expectations are imposed only within bounds, contingent in particular on that imposition not unduly harming a public interest that in turn is defined in terms of the news organization’s freedom of speech. Journalists are accountable to a largely abstract public, an entity that is partly brought into being by journalism’s invocation of it. Ethics in these formulations can be something of a closed shop. Elsewhere, it should be noted, social responsibility theories have been more influential, particularly in broadcast journalism. At the heart of the mixed liberal-professional model of journalism ethics lies the idea of independence. This term should be held distinct from the Kantian notion of moral autonomy, under which an individual is

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morally obligated to act according to his or her own reasoned understanding of the right thing to do (Hill 2012). Independence means something conceptually simpler and more practical. It is not a basic capacity of reasoned people but a state of negative freedom, or the freedom from others’ coercion. In journalistic terms, it is an aspired-to state in which journalists are not dependent on the state, powerful sources, advertisers or others (including perhaps editors) when producing their work. For Ward (2013) independence is what differentiates journalism from propaganda, because in the former the public interest, as defined by the journalist, drives the work, while in the latter an acknowledged or unacknowledged interest does. The term is perhaps made to do too much work, blurring the distinctions between structural freedom from external constraint, the will to think for oneself and the ability to produce objective accounts, and as a negative term it has little to say about what happens in the space of independence that it carves out. But that has also made it a versatile resource for journalists seeking to claim moral status as making their own decisions on what is right. As Brandel’s comment cited above illustrates, there is a risk that modern journalism’s justifications of its practices, whether in relation to news values or moral values, become disconnected from, perceived even as disdainful of, the people that journalists claim to serve. Koljonen (2013) draws on Bauman’s (2001) notion of liquid modernity, in which a stable society built on the authority of the expert and the duties of the citizen has given way to a more consumerist mode of living, to explain new cultural conditions. However wider cultural norms are analysed, there is a wide consensus that journalism faces a task of reconnecting with publics who have, literally and culturally, moved on. From an ethical perspective, the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism is an unsatisfactory base to think through that task, for the consumer promise of personal fulfilment through purchasing is a thin, transactional relationship that says next to nothing about how public communication brings people together in ways that enrich their lives. The rise to prominence of a number of ethical theories of relationship, particularly relationships formed in public communication, can be understood as responses to that problem.

Community In the US, the single largest contribution to journalism ethics has come in attempts to reconnect good journalism with the idea of community. Much of this work has built on the 1990s public journalism movement, which sought to position journalism alongside communities, serving their needs

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rather than standing outside them. But its roots, as Allan (2010) describes, go back further to a deeply felt Deweyian pragmatism that grounds democracy in everyday communities of interaction and particularly in local forms of participatory democracy. In this view, the community is the source of democratic engagement and the legitimacy of power because it is here that people’s concern for the collective good is based. Thus, McBride and Rosenstiel (2014) propose a rewriting of the third pillar of the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, “minimize harm,” to a more concrete responsibility to tell the truth in terms of the needs of a particular community. “[M]inimizing harm is part of a greater contract with the members of a community that journalists serve and the sources they tap into to tell stories,” they write. “It is a promise to act in the interests of informing a community and upholding democracy, acknowledging that the community itself has a substantial ability to contribute to the conversation” (5). Critics of public journalism pointed out already in the 1990s (e.g. Glasser and Craft 1998) that there are risks in privileging concrete community over the more abstract public, including defining journalism in terms of a particular, bounded community rather than a public in which all have a stake and misrepresenting the interests of the news organization as if those were the interests of the community itself. Its great strength comes, however, when communitarian ethics is interpreted more broadly than representing the interests of a community but as the responsibility to perform community or to provide spaces for it to happen. This makes it an ethics of good communication, concerned often with the social good that communication across differences can make, rather than a conservative retreat towards particularism (that is, an ethics focused on what one’s own group holds to be right). Plaisance (2005) seeks to combine communitarianism with a liberal commitment to the individual: “In the communitarian framework, the full self-realization of each individual, both as freedom-loving beings and as engaged members of a community, must be the underlying motive of all media policies” (294). This perspective allows journalism ethics to broaden its liberal remit to tasks such as fostering multiple and diverse perspectives in society and to bring them into contact with each other, drawing out the commonalities between them and enabling mutual understanding. More fundamentally, Plaisance, citing Christians et al (1993), sees the role of the news media as far more than reporting according to a set of ethical rules of what is appropriate but as fostering and modelling “moral agency,” or the capacity to act with reference to a knowledge of what is right or wrong. He points to the New York Times’ self-scrutiny and apology over its erroneous reporting of the

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Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as an instance of the modelling of such agency. At the heart of these ideas lies communitarian theorists’ understanding of the self as constituted through engagement with others, and therefore the moral self as being also a social achievement. Thus the individual’s pursuit of self-perfection through rational reflection is replaced by the pursuit of self-improvement through being part of social practices of reflection. A useful dictum is that moral identity is only found through others. Journalists cannot find their sense of ethical justification for their practices through a self-regulated professional code but only through working with other social groups. Ethics becomes about the process of communication, a communicative ethic, in Habermas’ terms (1989), yet with an eye on ultimate goals of collective self-fulfilment. We are a long way from a minimalist ethics here of doing as little harm as possible while telling truth in the public interest, because the communitarian has a responsibility to bring people together. The Guardian’s attempts to use social media to, in the words of its former head of digital engagement, “engage with readers over contexts of mutual interest, for mutual benefit” (cited in Knight and Cook 2013, 142), can be framed as ethical because the news outlet stands as a place where people are brought together in values-focused communication. A further, critical layer needs to be overlaid here, because simply including all in communication without acknowledging how shot through those relations are with imbalances of power will only perpetuate those imbalances. The Guardian, as its columnist Sarah Smarsh (2016) admonished it (and other mainstream media) over its reporting of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign, has a responsibility not just to the shared ideology of its readers but also to the social reality. Solidarity must, in Christians’ words (see Christians et al 1993, 16), be universal, or at least pushed always outwards in a desire to understand and to engage with the views of those who voted for Trump in 2016 and those whose positions are so easily caricatured as angry poor white men. Indeed, Fraser (2000) would urge journalists to show solidarity precisely for those who feel marginalised and who are symbolically misrecognised and so subordinated by dominant social groups, recognising them instead as full members of public communication. Good journalism is here reframed as a matter of fostering good relationships within society. That may include relationships with specific members of the audience who are answering back on news websites or social media platforms but also the attempt to draw those audience members into relationships with others that serve wider goals of social justice.

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These are not easy concepts to apply in practice, but they are valuable in orienting journalism away from claims of independent fact-based reporting in the public interest, which have less power than they once did to convince. They also begin to evaluate highly complex situations where journalists are operating in interdependent ways. One example is the working relationships of reporters in conflict or post-conflict situations. Here, as Tumber (2010) discusses, journalists can only with difficulty be seen as independent observers, for two reasons. Firstly, they have developed a working relationship with human rights organizations, sharing security, fixers, interviewees and information. Secondly, particularly since the experience of the Rwandan genocide, some reporters and photojournalists have become acutely aware that their presence as witnesses alone carries weak moral force to hold those perpetrating war crimes to wider public account and that their orientation towards human rights, justice and a global, universal public pushes them to a more committed moral position. In this state of “heightened reflexivity” (Tumber 2010, 540) journalists require resources to think through these relationships, to justify whether or not to testify at war crimes tribunals, how far to align themselves with human rights organizations and how far to politicise their work. The emerging doctrine of transparency provides some help here–when journalists are clear with their audiences about their commitments to certain values, such as social justice or human rights, and how they are situated in relation to what they are reporting, audiences can better understand the provenance of material. Transparency, however, has been criticised as insufficient, particularly because it assumes that people themselves know what their intentions and circumstances are in order to disclose them to others but also because it provides ammunition for those wanting to control journalism (Craft and Heim 2009). There are perhaps other, more important, elements to deepening the relationship of journalists and their publics. It might be particularly important to foster an ethically justifiable relationship of the public for viewing others, an acute question when those others are suffering. Linfield (2011) argues that ethical photojournalism in such situations calls on audiences to recognise the reality of other people represented in photographs, to connect “photographs to the world outside their frames” (29), and thereby to participate in a space of global humanity. Here communitarianism’s emphasis on concrete community, that is, on the connection of real people rather than images offered to a generalised public, is particularly useful. And in that kind of move, the ethical base of good journalism moves decisively away from providing an objective account of reality towards producing an intersubjective reality in which the photographer, the

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photographed and the public share. This is distinctly different to Kovach’s (2001) argument that journalists’ first loyalty must be to citizens. He writes: “Newspeople are building a relationship with their audience based on their values, on their judgment, authority, courage, professionalism, and commitment to community.” In a more developed communitarian view, journalists are building a triple communicative relationship between those they report on, audiences and themselves, a multifaceted loyalty that happens more in the text itself and less in a pre-existing ethical code. Again, such an ethics is far from easy: it puts journalistic autonomy at risk, it opens journalists up to competing claims to their loyalty and must be constantly reworked as communicative relationships change. It requires, as Plaisance (2005) says, that journalists and news organizations be able to articulate for their communities their capacity, as moral agents, to judge the right and good ways for them to take part in those communities through their reporting.

The journalist’s obligations of care Once journalism ethics begins to move beyond an ethics of gathering and reporting information towards a more relational ethics, particular focus comes on the challenges of reporting a world of specifiable, real people rather than a world of facts and events. What does it mean to report people truly? The communication ethics literature on how journalists might meet this challenge is not well developed. In Buber’s theoretical terms, moving from an I-It relation to an I-You relation is enormously demanding, because it requires that I bring all of myself to a moment of meeting with all of you, holding myself ready to be transformed by the experience. Cissna and Anderson (2001, 174) describe true dialogue, in Buber’s sense, as only possible in “moments of meeting,” in “sparks of recognition across the gap of strangeness”. These happen so rarely as to realistically function only as an ideal. Hermeneutic theory perhaps provides a better application of these ideas in the notion of true understanding–in Gadamer’s terms, understanding what the other truly means to me so as to extend my horizon of understanding without claiming to truly understand the other in her or his own terms (see Matheson 2009). Given this chapter’s focus on journalists’ relationships with the world and the blurring of journalism with other communicative practice in social and other interactive media, an ethics of care provides a more readily applicable set of ethical ideas. In Steiner’s (2011) feminist use of the term, care is particularly useful as a complement to communitarian positions because it pays close attention to people’s autonomous identity as well as

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their participation in community and because it politicises care. Thus, it is foundational in this position to see people’s relationships of care as basic to their existence and for ethics to involve analysis of people’s enmeshed condition in acts of caring for others, not least relationships of love where they begin to lose themselves in others. Ethics then becomes broadened, perhaps even universalised, from these beginnings, so as to encompass relationships with distant and unknown others and particularly weak-tie relationships that offer all an opportunity to tell their stories and to be heard. In this last aspect, where ethicists have emphasised the exclusion of many from equal participation in public life because of status hierarchies, care becomes a matter of politics. “I see care as relevant,” Steiner (2011) writes, “only if caring is understood politically as an acquired and motivated disposition to be cultivated broadly but whose actual disposition is not always equal” (173). Steiner notes that caring cannot be applied in simplistic ways to journalism, for journalists must be critical. This might involve a standpoint epistemology (Durham 1998) that requires journalists to rethink themselves from the position of those who are marginalised; it might involve paying close attention to listening, particularly critical listening that allows the voices of those who rarely set news agendas to be heard on their own terms (Dreher 2009; Husband 1996); and it might involve reflection on how solidarity with others can be expressed in ways where care for the other is central rather than an ironic solidarity (Chouliaraki 2015) centred on the self and on lifestyle choices. The call to care therefore helps to organise a number of resources to think about interpersonal ethics in what Steiner (2011, 189) hopes can be “sturdy multi-dimensional framework”. Journalists such as Sieff, taking selfies with locals outside polling stations, would find more in such a framework than in one that assumes an impartial reporter. In particular it helps that delicate balance to be struck between acknowledging that the western reporter is an outsider whose interest is passing, while seeking to stand alongside Nigerians waiting to vote, while also seeking to make sense of the politically tense, but historic and perhaps a little holiday-like, atmosphere and communicate all that to casual Snapchat users in the US. Precisely the lack of authority in his Snapchats provides an opportunity for some horizontal communication across very different moments of meaning, a communicative moment that is grounded in a relationship of care towards other people regarded as equals.

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An open ethics The problem of ethical globalised communication is an acute one. As Thussu (2000) notes, so much international reporting operates on the level of prejudicial shorthand, in which Ethiopia stands for famine, Thailand for child prostitution and Colombia for cocaine. Silverstone (2007, 136) argues that journalists, whose power to link disparate spaces and places gives them a particular responsibility, should take on an ethic of “hospitality”, by which he means the obligation to allow people to be seen and heard in their own terms. An obligation to care about distant others and others whose worldviews are fundamentally different to those of the journalist or of his or her home public arises in a number of the frameworks discussed here. But hospitality has a useful specificity in the way it asks the journalist to care or foster the other’s voice, because it posits the journalist not as the knower but as a host. Phillips (2015, 143) builds an argument for a right of reply to be built systematically into news practice, so that those who have been hurt or misrepresented can speak without having to struggle against editorial resistance. But more deeply still, hospitality invites journalists to work in cross-cultural modes, thinking of their audiences as well as their sources as made up of multiple cultural groups, with different norms of conduct. Post-colonial scholars note the particular problem that the very grounds of communication ethics are monocultural, sometimes drawing on alternative terms–ubuntu from southern African cultures (Rao and Wasserman 2007), dé from Confucianism (Luo 2007)–but nearly always adding them onto a European Enlightenment set of norms. Rao and Wasserman (2007) argue against looking for universal norms, but instead for give and take between different cultures about how to draw from each other’s frameworks in ways that are appropriate to that context. Journalism ethics, in other words, cannot be separated from the ethical traditions within a culture or from the relationships of dominance or post-colonial self-assertion between cultures. Ward and Wasserman (2010) specify these ideas further by calling for an open journalism ethics, which would broaden the view of who participates in ethical discourse, both in the sense of who is governed by that discourse and who is able to take part in debate. Journalism ethics thus moves out of a professional space into a cultural one: [M]uch of Western journalism ethics has assumed that journalism codes of ethics were intended primarily for a select group of professional journalists, and citizens had limited means for participating in discussion and reform of those principles. In contrast, an open ethics is a form of ethics discourse where the guidelines are intended for a larger group of

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people, and it places fewer and less substantial limits on the meaningful participation by non-members, including the ability to influence changes to content. (Ward and Wasserman 2010, 277)

The theoretical base for this kind of position integrates many of the points raised in this chapter. Ethics is about ‘us’ as a society not just a professional group; it is therefore about how people are brought together in communicative interaction in news media; it requires an “assertion of media justice” which has “hospitality as its first principle” (ibid: 286; citing Silverstone 2007, 147); and it involves discussion across cultural practices that is sensitive to and challenges imbalances of power. An open ethics looks more like a never-complete, energetic and sometimes politicised discussion than a set of self-regulatory structures.

Conclusion Ward and Wasserman’s call for an open ethics addresses specifically citizen and participatory forms of journalism, because it is there that the ground of the relationship between journalism and publics has been most disrupted, but the argument has much wider application. Across media practices, journalists’ claims to speak on behalf of the public lack their old clarity, in Anderson et al’s (2014) terms. And yet, if relationships need to be recast, the question arises of what a meaningful relationship might look like. It is less likely to be grounded in a claim to professional autonomy that elides the differences of journalist and media corporation and that constructs an abstract and idealised public. A closed shop of professional ethics is less adequate than ever. Much greater reflexivity is demanded of journalists and they therefore need a wider set of ethical resources that can describe what meaningful relations between journalists and publics will look like in different places and media. Journalism ethics must be understood in communicative terms, and each of the three ethical strands above offers ways to understand that communication. A communicative ethics evaluates communication as good when it draws people together in community, when it sets up multifaceted relations of care between people and when it is reflexive and open to debate from a wide range of participants. If there is one key term that has not yet been brought into this discussion and that helps to frame the challenge for journalism practice, it is that of trust. Much has been said about the loss of trust in journalism as an institution. Blöbaum (2014) argues for journalistic professionalism as the necessary guarantor of the trusted journalist and trusted news organization, yet trust is perhaps more useful as a term when understood in

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the more relational terms set out above. As Tulloch (2005) observes, trust is often used as if there was a deficit in trust in the media institution, in Giddens’ (2013) sense of the institutional trust vested in currency or the safety systems around bridges or other “disembedded systems” of modernity. As Tulloch points out, a lack of trust in journalism in the abstract may in fact point to a healthily sceptical and knowledgeable public, for whom a survey question about their trust in the media may be interpreted as a question instead about their gullibility. In the terms of the discussion above, where trust in the system appears to be weakened, journalists should rather seek out ways to engage with the public that foster trusting relationships. Barbalet (2006) calls this “agentic trust” and suggests it has an emotional, relational dimension. Fukuyama calls it an “expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behaviour, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community” (Fukuyama 1996, 26). It makes sense, then, for journalists to bring more of their culturally-situated selves to their reporting, rather than claiming status outside cultural norms, when seeking to establish trust. It also makes sense for journalists to make those norms explicit and open, foregrounding the act of caring or showing solidarity or reaching across cultural boundaries. A number of scholars (Phillips, Ward and Wasserman) argue that sincerity is central to good contemporary journalism, providing audiences with an interpersonal ground for judging news material (that the journalist offers the news as truly what he or she understands and does not hide the shortcomings of the news report, whether its second-hand nature or the limited verification done) rather than a neutralist position of authoritatively providing unembellished facts and quotes. Journalism arguably loses its distinctiveness as a professional project but is able to take part in Beckett’s (2011) “moral market” through making its moral claims more explicit.

References Aldridge, M., and J. Evetts. 2003. “Rethinking the Concept of Professionalism: The Case of Journalism”, British Journal of Sociology no. 54 (4): 547-64. Anderson, C. Bell, E. and Shirky, C. 2014. “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, (December 3). http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalismadapting-to-the-present-2/. Barbalet, J. 2006. “A Characterisation of Trust and its Consequences”, SCARR Working Paper 13. Canterbury: University of Kent.

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https://www.kent.ac.uk/scarr/publications/Barbalet%20Wk%20Paper(2 )%2013.pdf Beckett, C. 2011. Supermedia: Saving Journalism so It Can Save the World. London: Blackwell. Bertrand, C. 2007. “M*A*S: Media Accountability Systems”, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, (April 30). http://www.osce.org/serbia/24858?download=true. Blöbaum, B. 2000. “Trust and Journalism in a Digital Environment”, Working Paper. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Trust%20and %20Journalism%20in%20a%20Digital%20Environment_0.pdf. Brandel, J. 2016. “A Serious Problem the News Industry Does not Talk About”, Medium, (April 19). https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/aserious-problem-the-news-industry-does-not-talk-about346caaa6d1cd#.9bhwdc64z. Cissna, K. N., and R. Anderson. 2002. Moments of meeting: Buber, Rogers, and the Potential for Public Dialogue. New York: University of New York Press. Craft, S., and K. Heim. 2008. “Transparency in Journalism: Meanings, Merits, and Risks”, in The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, edited by Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians, 217-28. Taylor and Francis. Curran, J. 2013. “Mickey Mouse Squeaks Back: Defending Media Studies” (paper presented at the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association conference, (January 25). http://www.meccsa.org.uk/news/mickey-mouse-squeaks-backdefending-media-studies/. Dreher, T. 2009. “Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism beyond the Politics of Voice”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies no. 23 (4): 445-458. Durham, M. G. 1998. “On the relevance of standpoint epistemology to the practice of journalism: The case for strong objectivity”, Communication Theory no. 8 (2): 117-40. Dutton, W. H. 2009. “The Fifth Estate Emerging through the Network of Networks, Prometheus no 27(1): 1-15. DOI: 10.1080/08109020802657453. Fraser, N. 2000. “Rethinking Recognition”, New Left Review no. 3: 10720. Fukuyama, F. 1996. Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Giddens, A. 2013. The Consequences of Modernity. London: John Wiley & Sons.

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Glasser, T. L., and S. Craft. 1998. “Public Journalism and the Search for Democratic Ideals”, Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies no. 19 (1): 7-23. Habermas, J. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hallin, D. C. 2006. “The Passing of the “High Modernism” of American Journalism Revisited”, Political Communication Report no. 16(1) http://www.jour.unr.edu/pcr/1601_2005_winter/commentary_hallin.ht m>. Hill, T. E. 2012. “Kantian autonomy and contemporary ideas of autonomy”, in Kant on Moral Autonomy, edited by Oliver Sensen, 1531. Cambridge University Press. Husband. C. 1996. “The right to be understood: Conceiving the multiethnic public sphere”, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 9 no. 6:205-215. Jarvis, J. 2015. Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News. CUNY Journalism Press. Knight, M., and C. Cook. 2013. Social Media for Journalists: Principles & Practice. London: Sage. Koljonen, K. 2013. “The Shift from High to Liquid Ideals: Making Sense of Journalism and its Change through a Multidimensional Model”, Nordicom Review no. 34: 141-54. Kovach, B., and T. Rosenstiel. 2001. “Journalism’s First Loyalty is to Citizens”, Nieman Reports, (June 15). http://niemanreports.org/articles/journalisms-first-loyalty-is-tocitizens/. Luo, S. 2007. “Relation, Virtue, and Relational Virtue: Three Concepts of Caring”, Hypatia no. 22(3): 92-110. Matheson, Donald. 2009. “Theory Review: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics and Journalism Research”, Journalism Studies no. 10 (5): 709-18. McBride, K., and T. Rosenstiel. 2014. “Introduction: New Guiding Principles for a New Era of Journalism”, in The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century, edited by Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel, 1-6. New York: Sage. New Zealand Press Council. “Statement of Principles”, accessed December 1, 2016. http://www.presscouncil.org.nz/principles. Örnebring, H. 2009. “The Two Professionalisms of Journalism: Journalism and the Changing Context of Work”, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, (February).

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https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/The%20Two %20Professionalisms%20of%20Journalism_Working%20Paper_0.pdf. Phillips, A.2015. Journalism in Context: Practice and Theory for the Digital Age. London: Routledge. Plaisance, P. L. 2005. “The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory”, Communication Theory no. 15 (3):292313. Rao, S., and H. Wasserman. 2007. “Global Media Ethics Revisited: A Postcolonial Critique”, Global Media and Communication no. 3(1): 29-50. Silverstone, R. 2007. Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smarsh, S. 2016. “What Donald Trump Will Have To Accept: Without Journalism There Is No America”, The Guardian, (November 18). https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/18/american-mediajournalism-donald-trump. Steiner, L. 2011. “Feminist Ethics and Global Media”, in The Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Robert S. Fortner, and P. Mark Fackler, 171-92. Chichester: Wiley. Tumber, H. 2009. “Journalists and War Crimes”, in The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, edited by Stuart Allan, 533-41. Taylor and Francis. Ward, S. J.A. 2013. “Why Hyping Transparency Distorts Journalism Ethics.” Media Shift, (November 4). http://mediashift.org/2013/11/why-hyping-transparency-distortsjournalism-ethics/. Ward, S.J.A., and H. Wasserman. 2010. “Towards an Open Ethics: Implications of New Media Platforms for Global Ethics Discourse”, Journal of Mass Media Ethics no. 25(4): 275-92.

CHAPTER THREE: DETACHMENT MOVING THE BOUNDARIES OF CIVIC DISCOURSE VERICA RUPAR

When a prominent French journalist decided to write a personal story “I, Mustapha Kessous, Le Monde journalist and victim of racism” (Le Monde, 23 September 2009) he didn’t expect appraisal. Being tired of the “small humiliations I have to face when I am working on an article or in daily life” he just wanted to tell a personal story about prejudices and cheap shots taken by people obsessed with origin and race. Kessous’ account of being an Arab, Muslim and dark-skinned journalist, listed as one of the best stories about diversity in France, is a powerful, personal, and noncompromising narrative. A minister made a joke asking him to show the papers that proved he was legally in France. His interviewees called the office to report that “a Mustapha guy pretends to be journalist for Le Monde!” People refused to talk to him. Some said he didn’t belong to the community… A journalist of ethnic background talking about his everyday life. No other side. No numerical data, no other voices to support, oppose, comment, and expand what was said. Written in the first person singular voice, the story was about systematic harassment of the “other”. Colleagues described Kessous’ article as the best story about discrimination they could recall. Journalists in France, Italy, Denmark, the UK, Greece, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary and Germany–117 reporters and editors interviewed in the study of reporting ethnicity and religion in Europe (Rupar 2012)–brought a number of similar examples. In Italy, the editor of La Repubblica, boarded a boat with refugees and lived in a refugee camp for months before writing a story. In Denmark, a Politiken’ journalist joined three young “ethnic” males and found that doors were closed to ethnic minority youth in the night clubs. News accounts that create a sense of being there, written as the first person experience, are not

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new. In 1872 the New-York Tribune’s journalist Julius Chambers managed to enter the Bloomingdale Asylum as a patient and his investigation, later published in the book A Mad World and Its Inhabitants (1876) led to the change of lunacy laws. In Germany, Gunter Wallraff constructed fictional identities to denounce racial prejudices and social misconduct. In Russia, Anna Politkovskaya uncovered human rights abuses in Chechnya, and became a voice of conscience for the country. British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk’s work, which combines first-hand reporting with sharp analysis, is led by the idea of pursuing injustice, not by any illusion of objective reporting. American Seymour Hersh transformed the world of investigative journalism not only by having the greatest scoops– the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib abuse–but by demonstrating a reconstruction of reality through multiple standpoints. Philip Gourevitch explained his interest in the aftermath of extreme situations such as the genocide in Rwanda as a desire to go beyond the actual event; as a need to see how people reflect, how people form political societies and individually sort themselves out through massive political turmoil (Conversations, interview at Berkley University, available online). These forms of reporting and their engagement with political, economic and social events influenced the development of modern journalism. The authors continuously produced recognizable work of the highest prominence that stands in sharp contrast with a tenant of journalism practice–the professional norm of detachment. Journalistic practical wisdom, expressed in objectivity and impartiality as “modern analytical and procedural fairness” (Schudson 2011, 161), treats this distinctive signature in terms of innovation, an original writing style, and exceptional reporting skills but not as a canon of professional practice. There is good reason for such an approach, but the body of knowledge about journalism might be significantly extended if we use the work of the best journalists–professionals who challenge the canon–to conceptualize the position of journalism within the wider fields of power. It has been said that the pressures imposed upon journalists to meet deadlines, and the professional demands of impartiality and objectivity, allow those in powerful and privileged institutional positions to have a systematically structured accessibility to the media. As a consequence, the media reproduce existing power structures where those sectors that have privileged access to the news, such as business or politics, become “the primary definers of topics” (Hall et al. 1978, 58)1.

 1

Hall et al. explain: “The important point about the structured relationship between the media and the primary institutional definers is that it permits the

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Journalists declare that their goal is to stay “detached” and “impartial,” while being “accurate,” “fair,” and “balanced” (Lippmann cited in Reston 1991; Cronkite 1997; Woodward 2005) but the extensive scholarship that points towards an absence of “neutral” journalism (see Glasgow University Media Group 1976; Hallin 1986; Carey 1989; Schudson 1995; Bourdieu 2005, for example) indicates that there is a lack of a shared conversational platform to discuss journalism as both individually and socially created field of cultural production. The journalistic field’s interactions with wider society, influenced by journalism’s functions, settings, agents, logic and norms is easily reduced to the issue of whether journalists tell the truth when reporting reality. Communication scholars suggest looking at the news in relation to the set of factors that influence its shape: the political economy of the society, the cultural context and the social organization of news work. The question “What is journalism?” becomes the question “What is news?” generating a wide spectrum of scholarly exploration of issues related to the character of news and the position of the news media in society. What complicates this process is the dynamic within the journalistic field itself. As Carpentier and Camaerts (2006) argued in a dialogue with Chantal Mouffe, journalism is itself an ideology and within that ideology hegemony plays an important role. It defines and draws the line between ‘‘good’’ (or ‘‘acceptable’’) journalism from other forms of journalism: From this perspective, the journalistic profession becomes a field of struggle, where the hegemonic values of objectivity, neutrality or detachment are contested by counter-hegemonic journalistic projects. Examples of these are peace journalism, public journalism, new journalism and human-interest journalism, which each in their own way challenge the hegemonic model of journalism, based on objectivity, detachment, impartiality, autonomy, management, (psychological) property, gatekeeping, professionalism, etc.. (Carpentier and Cammaerts 2006, 966)

These “counter-hegemonic” journalism efforts are visible in the work of journalists with recognizable by-lines. In this chapter I revisit the work of some of the most prominent journalists in the last half of the century to discuss the concept of detachment in journalism. I look at three key features of the journalistic field–the concept of autonomy, the logic of the

 institutional definers to establish the initial definition or primary interpretation of the topic in question. This interpretation then ‘commands the field’ in all subsequent treatment and sets the terms of reference within which all further coverage or debate takes place” (Hall et al.1978, 58–Hall’s emphasis).

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field and the form of news–and suggest journalism ideology needs revisiting.

Journalism’s interpretative authority Looking at the best of journalism carries some risks. Journalism is an institutional practice of representation (Skinner, Gasher and Compton, 2001) and using the author theory approach to examine journalism as a form of personal expression falls short of capturing the heteronomous nature of the journalistic field. Journalism is inseparable from the political, legal and cultural context of its operation and journalists’ expressions themselves operate within the limits of the unwritten contract with the audience (Hirst et al. 2012). The main clause in this unwritten contract is a promise of a “true” representation of reality (Broersma 2010) and a personal take on reality–so obvious in the work of the most prominent journalists–clashes with traditional understandings of forms set up to make journalism “factual” and distinct from “fictional” forms such as film and literature. Pluralism of forms and styles of journalism enrich professional authority to produce meaning, but the epistemology of journalism primarily engages with the forms of conventional hard news reporting. It is an oversight. Despite being institutionally rooted, journalism practice still rests on the journalist’s actions inside the field and these are determined by the individual’s set of skills, knowledge, and attitudes. This individuality in generating and organizing representations is recognized by the audience, but too fast slips from the radar of journalism studies scholarship. Researchers stress that journalists’ individual characteristics are developed in a long and complex process of socialization both inside and outside the newsroom. Indeed, journalists’ socialized subjectivity, their “habitus” (Bourdieu, 2005), is influenced by the social, political and cultural milieu media operate in as well as their own ownership and institutional structure. A space for creativity and individual development exists but within the boundary of professional ideology is seen “as a collection of values, strategies and formal codes characterizing professional journalism and shared most widely by its members” (Deuze 2005, 445). The authority to interpret reality therefore comes through the processes of interaction and self-reflection, where an individual journalist relies on preexisting knowledge to create a new one. Van Dijk’s (1997) work on news and racism unpacked the process by pointing out how journalists’ reliance on already existing “mental maps” reinforces prejudices and stereotypes. By recognizing the things that already have meaning, journalism’s interpretation of reality becomes a matter of routine handling of meaning.

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However, the production of meaning is not an automatic process, but “a formative process in which meanings are used and revised as instruments for the guidance and formation of action” (Blumer, 1969, 5). Journalism at its best works on both fronts. It relies on long established information gathering tools but its use is under constant scrutiny, prone to an on-going revision. Studies of award winning reporting (Rupar 2010; Rupar and Broesma 2010) reveal what counts as the best of journalism today is not “neutrality” in representing facts and views about people, events and phenomena, as is often assumed, but highly personal accounts of reality. The most prominent journalists are indeed oriented towards a particular disposition of “habitus” (Bourdieu 2001) that underlines not detachment, but active engagement as the key symbolic value relevant for the healthy dialogue with the audience. It does not mean the professional norm of impartiality is abandoned. Reflecting on his career and reporting from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch explains the tension as a difference between objectivity and neutrality: Neutrality in the face of genocide seems to me to be complicity. It's an absurd position. Why would anybody ... what is appealing about neutrality in the face of a genocide? Zero. Yet this was the position. Objectivity is different than neutrality, and objectivity would allow one to say objectively these are war criminals. But neutrality requires you to say, these are war criminals, have a sandwich, have a blanket. Oh, is that a Kalishnikov, please don't show it to me. Oh, you're going to show it to me, please don't shoot me. Oh you shot me, have a sandwich. It was that pathetic. (Gourevitch, Conversations, online)

The dichotomy of detachment, seen as a moral and philosophical foundation for the practice of journalism (Eksterowicz and Roberts 2000, xiii), is intriguing. As Chantal Mouffe (2006) says, “in one sense you want a journalist to be objective, but of course you know they cannot be, but you do not want them to distort the facts either” (In Carpentier and Cammaertz 2006). She suggests distinguishing the notion of factual truth from truth of reason: I think it is important for audiences to be shown that there are different views. People should not be told: this is the correct interpretation. There are always different interpretations, different aspects, and different perspectives. It is important for journalists to be able to show those differences, to make people think by themselves, and not telling them: this is what you should think. It is important to give them enough elements to be able to see the complexity of the situation and to think by themselves. For that you need to have as much facts as possible, but at the same time

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Chapter Three: Detachment you also need to be aware of the different positions that one can take with respect to those facts and events. (Mouffe in Carpentier and Cammaertz 2006)

The idea of professional distance Mouffe is alluding to, has been challenged by the contingency of social relations. Engaging readers in more structural societal developments proves to be challenging in the context of a post-political society, where the political stands for a space of contestation and politics reads as mechanisms and procedures of representative democracy. Journalists struggle to negotiate an all-inclusive semantics at legal, political and policy level, and the exclusion happening at the level of social reality. As Phelan argues: “In post politics, political contradictions are reduced to policy problems to be managed by experts and legitimated through participatory processes in which the scope of possible outcomes is narrowly defined in advance” (Phelan 2014, 6). Journalists’ contribution to the simplification of social life along the lines of institutionally stratified groups has been well documented. Analysing changes in the American press, Kevin Barhurst (2016) found that over a century stories grew longer, included more analysis, expanded from specific locations to broader regions, placed more emphasis on time frames other than the present, and named fewer individuals and more groups, officials, and outside sources. Journalists moved from talking about the people with name, address, profession and a life to be told, to talking about groups and individuals as representatives of groups: While realists news talked about persons in action through stories, modern news shifted to the less concrete terrain of groups. Unlike the physical bodies of individual actors, groups form and un-form and get blurry around the edges of who belongs and who remains outside. Groups are harder to explain because they exist in abstract relations with institutions, part of the monumental expression typical of modernism. (Barnhurst 2016, 53)

Journalism’s interpretative authority has shifted from the privileged position of reporting life to the more privileged position of reporting life that matters. Its ability to separate individual lives from the life of society, became the ability to form and un-form groups. Moving from persons to groups, it developed a professional ideology that required making a distinction between the author’s experiences, feelings, and thoughts and the world journalists report on. This distinction has been highly successful in the post-war environment and the time of high-modernism of American journalism. But the notion of detachment that has driven the logic of the journalistic field has another face too: by constructing a sense of who we are in relation to others, the media participate in the ongoing process of inclusion and exclusion.

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Logic of the field The logic of the field underpins the process of forming and un-forming groups. Let’s start by looking closer at the process of collective identity formation. It involves a constant conflict between hegemonic and antihegemonic forms of identity, shifting the lines between included and excluded. Who is inside and who is outside changes under the external pressures, but also because identities are neither single (Calhoun 1995) nor fixed (Bhabha 1994). In that context, diversity appears as a multilayered corpus of discourses, a meta-narrative (Isar 2006) that underpins stratifying societies along the lines of power. Journalism’s role in relation to the categorization of people and groups is significant. Alexander describes it as a provision of public infrastructure for the civic sphere: Journalistic judgments thus possess an outsized power to affect the shapeshifting currents of contemporary social life, from people’ s movements to legal investigations, foreign policy, public opinion, and affairs of state. The reputation of news media–their ability to represent the public to itself– depends on the belief by their audiences that they are truly reporting on the social world, not making stuff up, that they are describing news factually rather than representing it aesthetically or morally. (Alexander 2016, 10)

While one can easily agree with Alexander that the moral and civic orientation of journalism is a ground for its value as an institution, caution is needed in unpacking everyday journalism practice as recording the experience of civil coexistence. Alexander’s belief in the robust cultural health of the institution of journalism comes from a normative rather than positivist analysis of the journalistic field dynamic. The logic of the journalistic field–if we universalize its various national forms–is not static but changeable and not defined once and for all. After examining immigration news in France and the US, Benson (2013) suggested developing a more sophisticated approach to the journalistic field. He found that a dichotomous relationship between economic and cultural forms of power might be “inadequate to explain the complex dynamics of the ongoing journalistic mediation of public discourse, especially as these processes differ cross-nationally” (13). Journalism’s tasks of serving the public, often rehearsed along with a credo of providing accurate, impartial, fair and balanced reports, are engraved in national and international codes of ethics, reinforced in political speeches and glorified in popular culture. These set of norms, standards, values, protocols, and tradition–journalistic doxa in Bourdieu’s terms–are embedded in everyday journalism practice. They are rarely questioned because they are aimed at keeping the

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autonomy of the journalistic field, and its independence from political and commercial centres of power. The position of a journalist is that of a mediator in pursuit of truth, who overcomes the effects of the singularity of the event and who, by interpreting the event, transforms reported reality into universal “experience” and common shared knowledge. The two distinctive visions of the journalist, the position of “neutral reporter” and of “participant,” are developed in relation to the wider social space. The majority of journalists see themselves as neutral interpreters of events (Hanitzsch 2011), a position that reveals detachment as the main professional value. In making news judgements, gathering information and presenting events and issues, journalists are led by a set of norms that define how this important work should be done, what is good and what is bad, what should be welcomed and what avoided to provide a truthful account of reality.

Veracity of representation The efforts to challenge traditional ways of reporting and change the logic of the journalistic field are oriented towards a particular disposition of “habitus”. For example, Seymor Hersh (2004) questions the journalist’s ability to provide a full picture of the past event. He starts the story about the massacre at My Lai with the simple statement: Nobody saw it all. Wood didn’t even know the extent of the massacre, until the next day. Others, like Charles Skedge, who served that day as Calley’s radioman, saw more than they want to remember. But they all remember the fear that morning as they climbed onto helicopters at LZ Dotti for the assault on Pinkville. (Hersh 2004)

What follows is a reconstruction of the event through multiple standpoints that releases voices of violence through direct speech. What Hersh looks for, and what he tries to convey as a truthful account of reality, is the logic of the event, not a description of the event itself. Hersh’s award winning reports certify why the power of the media lies not in declaring things to be true, but in their power to provide the forms in which the truth appears, to paraphrase Schudson (2001). The form of news personifies the social code that connects journalists and their public. To enforce its claim on truth, Broersma (2010) writes, journalism has developed discursive strategies to make stories as persuasive as possible. It has done so because journalists possess an authority to declare themselves as credible spokespersons of truth. To ensure the effect of truthfulness, journalistic texts rely on a set of professional practices, routines and textual

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conventions developed to guarantee that this construction or representation process is as accurate as possible. Instead of merely transmitting information, journalists frame it in a professional discourse. They have developed specific conventionalized forms articulating the routines they use. By doing so, reporters no longer simply rely on public knowledge; they include knowledge of their own (Matheson 2000). The form of news provides a confirmation of professional routines. Journalism uses a twofold discursive strategy, simultaneously observing professional routines and concealing their shortcomings. On a basic level, the routines are embodied in the news items and recognized as such by the readers. Journalists quote documents, which they describe as reliable sources, and quote various individuals, preferably people who are personally involved, experts and eyewitnesses. Information is attributed to these sources, which makes the facts verifiable and more reliable, especially if explicit references are made to the reliability of the sources and they are checked. Quotes from people with differing views in an article give the impression that all the sides were heard and the reporting is balanced. Journalists also try to give their own eyewitness accounts of events or quotes from sources who were present at the scene. The aim of all these discursive strategies is to persuade readers familiar with journalistic routines that reporters have done all they can to reveal the truth. The analysis of mainstream conventional reporting illustrates the shortcomings of these routines. The “objective” model of reporting assumes passivity, generating stories produced as they were represented by sources, not as they occur (Fowler-Watt and Allan 2013). The best of reporting works the opposite way. What appears to be the most powerful account is a form of engaged journalism, one that opens a space for the polity dynamic beyond existing institutional entities. In the report of a bombing that killed 62 civilians in Baghdad, in a situation when the Americans and British were doing their best to suggest that an Iraqi antiaircraft missile caused the deaths, while all the signs indicated it was an American plane, Robert Fisk (2004) demonstrates how detachment from institutional entities could be expressed: Plane spotting has become an all-embracing part of life in Baghdad. And to the reader who thoughtfully asked last week if I could see with my own eyes the American aircraft over the city, I have to say that in at least sixtyfive raids by aircraft, I have not–despite my tiger-like eyes–actually seen one plane. I hear them, especially at night, but they are flying at supersonic speed; during the day, they are usually above the clouds of black smoke that wash over the city. (Fisk, 2004)

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Questioning the veracity of representation features prominently in the work of award-winning journalists Philip Gourevitch and Ana Politkovskaya too. In the article “What they saw at the Holocaust Museum” Gourevitch writes: What we cannot remember easily, we must imagine through representation, and our response is less immediately to the event than to the medium that has conveyed it to us…Despite complaints of overcrowding, a survey found that 94 percent of the visitors describe their experience as ‘extremely favourable’ or ‘very favourable’, an approval rating most museums administrators can only dream of. But what does it mean to have a ‘favourable’ encounter with this chronicle of absolute evil? (Gourevitch 1995)

After describing how Russian pilots deliberately fired on refugees killing women and children, Politkovskaya says: By allowing such a war to be fought in our own country, without any rules, not against terrorists but against those who hate their own bandits perhaps even more strongly than we do, we are the losers and the loss is irreversible. (Politkovskaya (2004)

The old definitions of good journalism–realistic, independent and detached–resonate differently in the work of these authors. What they do is reporting based on highly personal accounts of reality, characterized by transparency in constructing social identities and systems of knowledge. Robert Fisk explains it plainly in an interview for The Guardian: We must pursue injustice. This is not a football match where you report both sides. This is a massive human tragedy. At Sabra-Shatila did I give equal time to the Phalange? No, I did not. When I reported on a suicide bombing in an Israeli pizzeria did I give equal time to Islamic Jihad? No. You talk to the victims. (In Cook 2008)

More than a decade ago, Hallin (1992) noted that the days of serious, professional journalism–he calls this the era of “‘high modernism’ of American journalism” (14)–had largely passed. Looking back to this text for the readers of the Political Communication Report (PCR), a newsletter that serves the political communication division of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association, Hallin (2006) says that the “high modernist” model of journalism–“a culture of professionalism, centered around the norm of ‘objective’ reporting and rooted in the conviction that the primary function of press

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was to serve society by providing citizens with accurate, ‘unbiased’ information about public affairs” (Hallin 2006)–was a short episode in journalism history. It was an episode based on very specific conditions, which are now passing away: ideological consensus centred on corporatism, the welfare state, and Cold War policy. But in the revised essay for the PCR, he notes: “Journalistic professionalism is not breaking down from the inside, by journalists becoming less committed to it; instead I think professionalism is being squeezed into increasingly smaller niches within the media field” (Hallin 2006). While some authors note that that journalists’ strong commitments to ethical norms such as balance and fairness exist and will continue to be vital for exercising journalism’s sense-making role, providing context for making well-informed decisions (Singer 2006), others have no doubt that “professional and high modern journalism can be considered to have been clinically dead for a long time– but it is unable to die” (Deuze 2006). These two statements are not necessarily in opposition. What counts as the best journalistic achievement, as presented in the work of journalists mentioned here, reflects strong commitment to ethical representation of reality but the account is personal, characterized by transparency in the construction of social identities and systems of knowledge, and open in questioning veracity of representation.

Conclusions The most prominent journalists are oriented towards a particular disposition or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2001), that requires active engagement and social responsibility of journalism as key symbolic values relevant for the healthy development of journalism in the future. Exemplary models of journalistic work indicate that the future of journalism’s engagement with reality can be conceptualized not only in the light of emerging journalistic forms brought about by new media, but by looking at the tension between innovation and the canon within the mainstream media. These innovative authors challenge the canon of detached representations of reality. They go beyond fragmented information on daily occurrences by critically engaging with the fields of power and by doing so move the boundaries of civic discourse. The logic of the journalistic field dictates balancing the institutional equals, but does not guarantee deepening the knowledge about the issue under consideration. One might ask why journalists keep the simplified model of detachment in place. The point de Certeau (1984) makes might help answer this: in journalism - as in everyday life - there are ways of operating that intervene in the field that regulates it (30). The work of most prominent journalists and their efforts to move the

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boundaries of civic discourse by engaging creatively with the norm of detachment might be one case in point.

References Alexander, J. 2006. The Civil Sphere. BY: Oxford University Press. Alexander, J. C. 2015. “The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Cultural Power". Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences no. 8 (1): 9-31. Benson, R. 2013. Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Enlewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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, (29-48). Cambridge: Polity Press. Broersma, M. 2010. “The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism. On Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth”. International Communication Gazette no. 72(1): 21-33. Conversation with Philip Gourevitch at Berkley University, available at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/people/Gourevitch/goure vitch-con0.html. Cooke, R. 2008. “Man of War”. The Observer, (13 April). Deuze, M. 2005. “What is Journalism?: Professional Identity and Ideology of Journalism Reconsidered”. Journalism no. 6 (4): 442-464. —. 2006. “Liquid Journalism”. Political Communication Report (PCR) no. 16 (1). Fisk, R. 2008. “The Curious Case of the Forged Biography”. Independent. (1 February). —. 2004. “Another Day in the Bloody Death of Iraq”. In Pilger, J., Tell Me No Lies. London: Vintage Books, 566-572. Fowler-Watt, K., and S. Allan. 2013. “Journalism: New challenges”. CJCR: Centre for Journalism & Communication Research, Bournemouth University Hallin, D. 1992. “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism. Journal of Communication no. 42 (3): 14-25. —. 2006. “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism Revisited”. Political Communication Report no. 16 (1). Retrieved May 5, 2006 from http://www.mtsu.edu/~pcr/1601_2005_winter/roundtable_intro.htm.

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Hanitzsch, T. 2011. “Populist Disseminators, Detached Watchdogs, Critical Change Agents and Opportunist Facilitators: Professional Milieus, the Journalistic Field and Autonomy in 18 Countries. International Communication Gazette no. 73 (6): 477–494. Hassan, M. 2009. “The NS Interview: Seymour Hersh”. News Statesmen, (26 November). Hirst, M., Phelan, S., and V. Rupar. 2012. Scooped: Politics and Power of Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland: AUT Media. Kessous, M. 2009. “I, Mustapha Kessous, Le Monde Journalist and Victim of Racism”, Le Monde, (23 September). Matheson, D. 2003. “Scowling at Their Notebooks: How British Journalists Understand Their Writing”. Journalism, no. 4 (2): 165–183. Politkovskaya, A. 2006. “Her Own Death Foretold”. Washington Post, (15 October). Rupar, V. 2010. “Investigating Journalism: What Counts as the Best Representation Today”. International Conference Representation Now, Madrid, (16-17 April). Rupar, V., and M. Broersma. 2010. “The Power of Narrative Journalism: A Comparative Approach to Award Winning Reporting”. International Association for Literary Journalism Studies Conference, London, (2022 May). Schudson, M. 2001. “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism”. Journalism, no. 2 (2): 149-170. —. How to Think Normatively About News and Democracy." Oxford Handbooks Online. 7 May. 2017. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019979 3471.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199793471-e-73. Van Dijk, T. (Ed.). 1997. Discourse as Structure and Process: Discourse Studies, A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage Publications. Vertovec, S. 2012. “‘Diversity’ and the Social Imaginary”. European Journal of Sociology, no. 53 (3): 287-312. doi:10.1017/S000397561200015X. Wallraff, G. 2004. “Lowest of the Low”. In Pilger, J. Tell Me No Lies. London: Vintage Books, 158-174.

CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSPARENCY POLITICAL JOURNALISM AND TWO-SIDED TRANSPARENCY GREGORY TREADWELL

In a twist of fate, journalists are finding that the levels of transparency they demand of the elite and the powerful are now expected of them (Revers, 2014). While journalists today struggle to enforce the transparency of the powerful, the argument grows that transparency forms the basis of digital journalism’s own cultural capital, and is displacing the increasingly unsatisfactory and 20th-century idea of objectivity (Weinberger 2009; Hellmueller et al. 2013), an idea that helped distinguish mainstream journalism as an asset to a democratic society. But increased transparency in journalism today is also an attempt to reassure a sceptical audience, which is increasingly open to the argument that today’s corporatised and financialised media companies are associated with the powerful in capitalist society and not so much there to afflict the comfortable any more. Transparency, a “normative construct that is linked inextricably with public accountability and justification of a practice” (Meier 2009, 2), is also considered here as a counter-move by journalism to “the negative effects linked to the introduction of digital technologies such as declining audiences and advertising revenue” (Koliska and Chadha 2016, 55). Transparency “helps establish that the journalist has a public-interest motive, the key to credibility” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007, 92). During the 20th century, journalists came to see their role in Western democracies to demand transparency, not provide it. Journalism came to conceive of transparency as a one-way window on the powerful that needed to be set in stone with some sort of legislative cement, principally freedom-of-information regimes. Transparency was seen as a solution for the almost inevitable problematic actions of power in its own interests. Representing the public gave journalism moral, political and legal rights to

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front-row seats at this window, through which the government was theoretically held accountable for its actions. Transparency, with its intrinsic, instrumental and transformational values (Brooke 2016, 39-50), was fundamental to the relationship between state and citizen in a democracy and news-media processes played a significant role in demonstrating its existence. However, the notion of transparency, in journalistic terms, is fundamentally changed by the upheavals to human communication systems that have occurred in the nascent stages of the digital age and must be grappled with afresh by both news media and journalism educators. The advent of the digital age had the potential to significantly deepen the impact of transparency laws (Davis 2015, 174) but, despite the successes of the open-data movement, this has not been the outcome in realpolitik terms. The transparency that has in the past empowered and, indeed, legitimised the role of the fourth-estate watchdog is now required of the watchdog itself, as it seeks to retain and build trust with an increasingly detached audience. Revers, (2014) following Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007), notes that “[by] being honest and open about their methods, journalists are made reliable, trustworthy, and respectful to audiences” (808). This chapter will discuss the effects of both a retrenched position towards transparency from the powerful in a Western democracy and journalism’s own response to increasing demands for visibility. It aims to outline the ironic position journalists find themselves in today–having legal but unsatisfied rights to transparency (Ellis 2016) while, like almost no other enterprise, expected to provide access to its own decision-making. Drawing on both extant literature and data from semi-structured interviews the author has conducted with experienced journalists in Aotearoa-New Zealand, it will argue that, as difficult as it is to achieve, today’s news media need both the state’s transparency and their own, to be authentic to have success in their role as public defenders and be found as such in the digital melee. It is noted, as a departure for further research perhaps, that regulation has failed to ensure state transparency, but if the news media take up the challenge of authentic transparency–and there are arguments (e.g., Koliska & Chadha 2016) that it will not–then it will be the market of public opinion, not the laws of the land, that has successfully created transparency. Openness, argues Schudson (Treadwell 2015; as cited in Brooks 2016, 25), is, above all else, a cultural force in which freedom of information is instrumental. Aotearoa-New Zealand is considered here as a case study for freedom of information but, with its reputation for openness, is presented as indicative of a worsening situation in the globalising West.

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The darkening sky An experienced journalist from Aotearoa-New Zealand was following a lead in an investigation into the New Zealand Defence Force in 2010/2011 when he became aware that another reporter was also chasing the story, or at least looked as though he might stumble on it. From the safety and comfort of his own home, this second reporter was repeatedly filing numerous and persistent freedom-of-information requests with the Government, while he, the shoe-leather reporter, had travelled overseas and was scouring unfamiliar landscapes, “sweating in the dust and dirt and working painstakingly” (Respondent 5) as he looked beyond the official accounts of the story. He mentioned his frustration to one of his sources, a high-ranking officer, who reassured him confidently that his rival’s requests under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA) would come to nothing. Indeed, the inquiries were being deliberately stalled and Defence Force staff joked about it. He said, ‘Trust me. He ain’t gonna get nothing.’ They actually told me–this source told me–that they had chairs in an office where they’d get his OIA requests and they’d put them on a chair and then they’d wait for a month and then they’d move them to the second chair and that would be the chair for ‘This OIA request is complicated, we need another month’. Then they’d have another chair for ‘We need more time to consult’, and so on (Respondent 5).

A second source, one of the journalist’s best, then told him the officials’ ploy to foil his competitor was later the subject of mirth at an end-of-year party, when even a member of the Office of the Ombudsman (OotO), the agency charged with inquiring into alleged breaches of the OIA, seemed to be in on the joke. “They were basically all having a joke about it together” (Respondent 5). This anecdote, told during an in-depth, semi-structured interview about freedom of information, by an experienced journalist from Aotearoa-New Zealand, is shocking for the disregard for the country’s freedom-ofinformation laws that it reports. The image of New Zealand Defence Force staff laughing away their responsibilities to transparency induces a sense of powerlessness and of the virtually impregnable machine that is the military in the 21st century, even in a relatively open society. It may not be the Abu Ghraib photos (Greenberg & Dratel 2005) but the apparent confidence behind the officials’ rejection of a journalist’s freedom-ofinformation requests is still deeply troubling. After all, in normative terms, transparency is intended as the result of a well-functioning freedom-of-

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information regime, determined as it is by “the extent to which citizens can monitor and influence government processes through access to government information and access to decision-making arenas” (Meijer et al. 2012, 13). Such transparency is now considered a “consensual and administrative norm in public life” (Brooke 2016, 19), yet examples of its abuse abound in both the literature and in anecdote. Many Western transparency theorists, who have little choice but to write in grand terms given their subject’s at-least quasi-constitutional status, consider that its progenitor, freedom of information, is a basic human right; after all, the ground for it to be so valued was prepared by provisions in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Birkinshaw (2006, 4) says freedom of information deserves to be ranked with freedom of speech, access to justice and a fair trial, and protection of privacy. If Defence Force staff in Aotearoa-New Zealand were found to treat any of these important rights with such Kafkaesque disdain, there would rightly be hell to pay. The object at the centre of the Defence Force’s game of musical chairs was not just the work of one journalist but Aotearoa-New Zealand citizens’ precious right to access their state-held information. That’s not something we should laugh at. This report of abuse of freedom-of-information processes will concern those interested in the struggles journalists face every day as they attempt public-interest reporting, even in Aotearoa-New Zealand, where, despite the country’s reputation for transparency, the nation’s ombudsmen has been unable to keep up with the deluge of complaints from information requesters (Treadwell and Hollings 2014), many of whom are journalists. The first ever release of data about individual complaints (Office of the Ombudsman 2017) shows that of 538 complaints received in the six months to December 2016, 102 were from journalists. Newly appointed chief ombudsman Peter Boshier wrote in the office’s annual report for 2015/16 that when he took over he found an office submerged in work and not always handling its expectations of time in assisting people. I noted that there was a substantial backlog of aged files [that] had not been resolved, sometimes for a number of years. But, more critically, we had too many unallocated files simply waiting their place in the queue to receive attention. (Office of the Ombudsman 2017, 10)

The impact of this on public-affairs journalism is important. A study by Grimes (2013) showed that civil society alone could not create transparency and that a free news media, among other things, was corequisite. As Keane puts it,

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…. if, in a democracy, power should be subject to ongoing public scrutiny then more and better targeted media coverage is required to ensure that controversies about secret power are frequent and ongoing; in other words, that there are no zones within states and civil societies that are permanently enshrouded in dark silence. (Keane 1999, 166)

Perhaps the social reality never quite matched the political theory but in general terms, if the news media were seated at the window of transparency, everyone else could get on with their lives. While it is a particularly worrying example of freedom-of-information failure, the game of chairs played by Defence Force staff is by no means an isolated breach. We may live in a still-developing state of “communicative abundance” (Keane 1999) but Governments are, in the midst of that, actually tightening their grip on potentially damaging information. Since the entrenchment of neoliberal policies of privatisation (Kelsey 1993; Roberts 2001) and the launch of the so-called war on terror, transparency in government is increasingly considered to have been on the retreat (Roberts 2006; Ellis 2016; Treadwell 2016) and journalists are finding it harder than ever to get sensitive information, access to which is the true test of openness. Without exception, 17 senior public-interest journalists interviewed as part of this study have lamented the state of freedom of information and the attitude to state transparency from the officials with whom they regularly deal. From the initial analysis of five interviews, using Nvivo coding software, it is clear the OIA is viewed by these experienced journalists as a failing transparency mechanism, not because of inherent flaws in the law, but because officials and politicians deem it a contest, a tug o’ war, over where the final decision to the release or withhold of information will fall. In particular, the journalists interviewed considered the most obstruction they faced was the use of the act’s “free and frank” exclusion clause, which allows the advice ministers receive to be kept secret, and the Cabinet’s “no surprises” policy, introduced to spare ministers from media ambush by requiring officials to inform the relevant minister if politically sensitive information was to be released. The latter may seem fair to politicians, journalists complain, but the pressure it brings to bear on officials to withhold sensitive information is destructive to transparency. Journalists have thick skins and a disregard for authority, noted Respondent 2 in this study, but officials probably don’t and seek to keep on side with those above them. Respondents regularly expressed empathy for the position the no-surprises policy puts officials in, seemingly understanding that if the Minister is at the top of the pile, the official dealing with their request is likely to be at the bottom.

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An acknowledged crisis Numerable indicators have emerged of now-broadly accepted failures of the freedom-of-information regime in Aotearoa-New Zealand–from an investigation by the Chief Ombudsman (Wakem 2015) into the processes used by ministry staff when responding to OIA requests to an admission in 2016 by the then-Prime Minister John Key that his government sometimes withheld sensitive information as long as possible, instead of releasing it to journalists as soon as practicable, as the law requires (McCulloch 2014). The Prime Minister’s attitude was one that, in fact, permeates the corridors of political power: information and the media are potential problems that need to be controlled. The only difference between the two is that government does not own the media, but it does claim ownership of official information that rightly should be seen as the property of the public. (Ellis 2016, 148).

Near the heart of the so-called “dirty politics” scandal, which broke during the 2014 general election campaign, was preferential treatment of the freedom-of-information requests of a right-wing attack blogger with links to the National Party Cabinet table, who, among other allegations, was said to have been released information by a friend and political ally, justice minister Judith ‘Crusher’ Collins, in just 37 minutes. Labour Party MP Grant Robertson told TV3's The Nation it was ‘pretty much unheard [of]’ to receive an OIA response so quickly. ‘It's a good time for a pizza delivery–37 minutes–but you'd never expect that from an OIA’. (Fisher 2014a)

Indeed, investigative reporters (e.g., Hager 2002; Fisher 2014b) have long publicly lamented the state of freedom of information in what is nevertheless often named among the least corrupt, most open societies on the planet. Freedom of information in the 21st century is paradoxical, at best. At a time of previously unimagined and global communicative abilities, there is a strangling of information flows when it matters most to democracy. Many “poorer and more fragile” (Roberts 2006, 9) states around the world have enacted freedom-of-information laws but do not take transparency seriously, having effectively been coerced into doing so

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to give respectability to international trade and finance deals. Others are simply opportunities for further oppression. Banisar, (2006), known for his freedom-of-information audits, says the worst of these is the Zimbabwean Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, whose access provisions are “all but unused probably for fear that any person brave enough to ask for information will be beaten by government supporters” (27). The OIA in Aotearoa-New Zealand, despite its grand purposes of increasing citizen participation in government, tends to lack support from, and even acceptance by, government ministers, some of whom “simply defy its requirements” (Palmer and Butler 2016, 181-182). The increasingly accepted view that the nation’s liberal and once-inviolable freedom-ofinformation laws are producing unsatisfactory results for public-interest journalism (and therefore the citizens it serves), gets further credence with such academic reporting. As journalism seeks to maintain its public advocacy role in the face of shrinking resources and diversifying audiences, journalists must be clear on their rights to state-held information, which at least match those of every other citizen, and determined in their efforts to get it. If journalism, for reasons that are both of the market and existential, is attempting to decide which societal functions it should fulfill in the digital era (Drok and Hermans 2016, 539), then maintenance and even enhancement of state transparency would seem to be a niche it is still reasonably well positioned to fill. While freedom-of-information requests by journalists, and subsequent complaints to the Ombudsman, are fewer than all others, reporters are still the key users of a freedom-of-information regime, in terms of democratic theory, at least. If so-called “slow journalism,” or knowledge-based journalism, is the complementary alternative–or, indeed, a “corrective” (541)–to fast-breaking news, which risks “oversimplification and stereotyping” (540), then freedom-ofinformation requests and the transparency they produce are an opportunity to strengthen the public-interest content of such exhaustive work. Requests for information by members of the public are invariably in the interests of the requester or a small interest group. Journalists are still far more likely to make freedom-of-information demands that are in the interests of the wider community. There is little risk, as journalists will confirm, that information will come from the state at any other rate than “slow,” so transparency seems most comfortable outside the demands of the breaking news stories that tend to feed the 24-hour news cycles of today, and as a key component of slow, public-interest journalism. And those fiercely advocating their right to that information in the face of state intransigence

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must include journalism educators, whose role includes grounding students in the responsibilities of public-interest journalism. However, we can also look beyond our outrage over individual normative freedom-of-information failures (valid though that outrage may be) and consider the Defence Force’s behaviour in the wider context of radical technological and political change faced by journalism and its consumers. It is here that we can find the edges of the paradox that is the notion of transparency today. The digital revolution has created vast, virtually unmeasurable stores of data, which have value in both political and economic terms. Systems have developed for the transfer of those volumes of information with an efficiency that is breathtaking. Personal devices now have the local capacity to store significant amounts of information and cloud storage has created virtually limitless space for information. Transfer technologies can now bring voluminous data at increasing speeds to the citizen’s home or the journalist’s laptop. There has never been an architecture in any way like it for the creation and sustenance of political transparency (the shifting of paper documents from chair to chair over a number of months takes on a deeper cynicism when considered against it) and transparency is regularly cited as a key objective of the open-data movement, as it seeks to make public the digital data collected and stored by government agencies. The Open Government Partnership, for example, which was launched in 2011 and now has 75 countries in its membership (Open Government Partnership n.d.a), has been described as an “international effort to strengthen democracies around the world by cultivating transparency, participation, and accountability in governance” (Harrison and Sayogo 2014, 513). But Aotearoa-New Zealand’s early commitments to the movement mention nothing of transparency and focus instead on the monetising of data sets for the benefit of New Zealanders. Data is seen primarily as having economic value, not democratic value (Open Government Partnership n.d.b). Despite the many successes of the open-data movement, including the establishment of government database sites such as data.gov.uk and data.govt.nz, freedom of information when it matters for democracy has yet to be one of them. The high principles and formalised mission statement of a global movement are arguably distant from the day-to-day “administrative discretion” (Roberts 2002, 176; Treadwell 2016,127) that officials have over their freedom-of-information paperwork. And the illegal withholding of information within ministries has little to do with its digital form but the politicisation of the civil service. The State Services Commission requires state servants to act in politically neutral ways but the prevailing trend appears to be that they are politically

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engaged. They may not act in partisan ways but they do know how to avoid political landmines. The more astute have finely tuned antennae that would impress Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby. (Ellis 2016, 128129).

One of the great ironies of democracy today is that those whose behaviour a freedom-of-regime is intended to regulate are the very people who manage that regulation in operational terms. Freedom-of-information failures in Aotearoa-New Zealand are described here because they have been at the centre of the author’s research. But experiences and findings around the world are resonating with each other and international transparency research is finding common themes. After co-editing a collection of international essays to mark the 10th year of freedom of information in the UK, Felle (2015) wrote: “Many contributors report with alarming similarity the lengths Western governments are now going to, to avoid disclosing information under [freedom of information laws]” (7). In the US, for example, from “dwindling support for state FOI groups to the diminishing threat of media-led FOI litigation, the evidence points to erosion of hard-earned access rights if a course correction fails to emerge in the short term” (Davis 2015, 174). Barack Obama, who swept to power on promises of transparency in 2008, left office eight years later with a reputation as a more secretive president than George W. Bush (Houston 2015, 175). In the UK, Tony Blair, having been an advocate of a disclosure law, lamented in his memoirs that it had been the worst mistake he had made. He told the Associated Press: “What happens in the end is that you make politicians very nervous of actually debating things honestly, because they’re worried about what’s going to happen when there’s a FOI request” (Stringer 2011). In contrast, in a PhD exegesis on transparency, journalist and freedom-ofinformation advocate Heather Brooke (2016) wrote that “access to information is an intrinsic value, essential for the fulfilment of human potential and the proper functioning of democracy, and that investigative journalism plays a crucial role in testing and ensuring that democratic rhetoric is matched in reality” (9). Freedom-of-information requests by journalists, she wrote, were “a canary in the coalmine” (10); the state of freedom of information was “an indicator of democratic reality as opposed to rhetoric” (10). After filing 500 freedom-of-information requests between 2005, when the United Kingdom’s right-to-know law was finally enacted, and mid-2010, and writing more than 60 newspaper and magazine stories about democracy and/or freedom of information, Brooke could only contend that the United Kingdom, despite its hard-won freedom-of-

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information law, was “an elitist political system that is in need of substantial democratic reform” (10). It seems the canary has expired.

The new transparency But even as journalism struggles, often unsuccessfully, to wrestle information from the State, it is itself now the subject of rigorous transparency requirements. The professionalisation of journalism in the 20th century created norms that obscured its processes from the public, even if transparency was for a long time something of a weak ethical “countercurrent” (Revers 2014, 808), and such things as the introduction of reporters’ bylines occasionally took place. With some similarities to doctors and lawyers, journalists operated with exclusive jargon and a professional control that kept the processes generating their journalism largely out of the limelight. Newsroom culture regularly turned to “a nose for a story,” when asked to explain a journalist’s motivation. “A news account, according to this conception, draws its authority exactly from its opaqueness and dissociation from its constructedness. Transparency demands the exact opposite” (808). After decades of considerable opacity, when the justifications for their decisions remained largely behind closed doors and the right to keep sources secret was culturally central to their practice, journalists are now expected to publish their work in the full glare of light. Journalism following the principle of transparency “draws power from revealing how it materializes, who produces it, and under what circumstances” (808). For Singer (2007, 79-80), while a central claim of professions, including journalism, is to autonomy over articulation and enactment of their own norms, the internet has “fostered a news environment in which definitions of professional concepts are open to reinterpretation and in which oversight of professional behavior is shared.” With a shift in the journalistic paradigm triggered by technology, transparency has become part of the expected role behavior of journalists. Journalists are expected to not only operate as independent and objective truth seekers in their communities but also to do so in ways that are transparent to their audiences. Journalists should strive to reveal to the public as much as they can about the manner in which they discover, source, and verify the information they are reporting; the way in which they make decisions about coverage; and disclose errors and relationships that might appear to influence coverage as well as the positions and perspectives that might influence journalists. Such disclosure is believed to be crucial to ensuring fairness, accountability, and independence, all of which underpin ethical reporting. (Koliska and Chadha 2016, 53-54)

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Online journalism and the online individualism of its journalists, particularly on Twitter (Revers 2014, 808), have thrust the newsroom, willingly or otherwise, into the bear-pit of social publishing where its processes and outcomes can be scrutinised and critiqued mercilessly. (This is, of course, a matter for celebration for those who mistrust corporate media.) To maintain a professionalism that makes their news products desirable in such a saturated market, journalists must endure the scrutiny that comes with this transparency. Practices associated with such attempts at transparency include publishing hyperlinks to source documents and databases for reasons of provenance, publishing audio files of interviews with sources involved in the story for broader context to quotations and clips, using readercomment facilities to engage with criticism, and making journalists available online or by email to discuss their stories. Silverman (2014), who emphasises the collaboration with the public required in genuine transparency, urges digital journalists to reveal the reporting and the sources behind their story, to collaborate with the audience, to curate others’ work responsibly, to offer disclosure and value statements, and to correct website and social media errors effectively. He calls transparency “one of the most-discussed and evangelized aspects of practicing ethical journalism in the networked age”. In the digital age, where the emergence of a networked communication system has meant that journalists find their traditional authority undermined by audiences who are able to question, analyze and challenge their work on an unprecedented scale, transparency has increasingly come to be viewed as offering a solution to contemporary challenges, particularly the loss of public trust. (Silverman 2014).

Boundaries and autonomy Of course, this accountability is in part to distinguish journalism from online content that is not published in the interests of the audience and which can make no claim to detachment or ethical processes. It is a transparency designed to encourage, even reignite, trust in journalism and separate it from other content is it at risk of being mistaken for. “Underlying this emphasis on transparency as an ethical norm is the expectation that such changes in journalists’ behavior will have positive implications for the way that their role is perceived and understood by audiences” (Koliska and Chadha 2016, 54). But it is also forced on journalism because of the open, connected and hard-to-control nature of online communication and the demands of having a disaffected audience.

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Bloggers, Singer (2007) found, themselves initiated transparency measures to differentiate themselves from mainstream media. Journalism, notes Revers (2014), feels not only challenged by those it covers, who are now equal participants on online platforms, but also by bloggers, net activists and so-called citizen journalists (809). … these perceived external threats manifest themselves as internal disagreements about how to adapt to new conditions: to draw sharp boundaries and asserting [sic] journalism’s autonomy from other types of news production, according to its own distinctive logic; or to make boundaries more fluid and permeable for practices, norms, and identities, which are more adequate for the new news environment. (Revers 2014, 809)

To navigate the crevasse between these two positions might be to embrace an open model of journalism, based on dialogic participation with the audience (Deuze 2014, 219) and attempts at such a position are increasingly common in online news production, even among establishment publications (The Guardian’s Open Journalism project, for example). But from Donald Trump’s tweets–and the 34 percent of registered US voters in a new Suffolk University-USA Today poll who agreed the mainstream media was the enemy of the people (Borchers 2017)–to the journals of academia, the news media is regularly under attack these days for its perceived self-interest. If journalism is to continue to claim to represent the public in democracies, then journalists and journalism educators must re-engage with the notion of transparency, demand it without hesitation from the State but, having claimed that public-inquirer role, legitimise it and clarify it for the audience through self-administered transparency. It sounds like a good strategy, if time-consuming when the demands on news-workers and the resources with which they are supplied today are considered. Adding social media duties and the provision of source documents to the journalistic role is likely to only decrease time available for transparency work, it can be argued. But there are further complications. Driven as news organizations are primarily by budget concerns, there is a real risk of them paying lip service to authentic transparency when the situation settles. Koliska and Chadha (2016) convincingly argue that, while the notion that transparency will improve journalism is what is fueling the shift to greater openness, organizational restraints have meant “transparency in journalism as a professional value has primarily been a ceremonial one aimed at garnering legitimacy but decoupled from the daily practices of journalists” (52). They argue newsrooms have effectively outsourced transparency to the capabilities of

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the network, providing it through technical linkages, and with “very little active participation, thought or deliberation” (56) from journalists. Employing new institutional theory, they argue “news organizations provide information through technology that can satisfy the ceremonial ‘ritual of transparency’” (56). Allen (2008) says transparency, rather than “serving as a normative standard, has become an instrumental value enlisted to protect institutional legitimacy and stave off criticism” (324). The results of these efforts at transparency have not always met with success from the journalistic perspective. Members of the news media have expressed surprise that even after careful explanation people do not always agree with their decisions. As Byron Calame, the former New York Times’ public editor, told American Journalism Review, ‘The exchange is not always open-minded and raises the question of whether transparency is ever going to have that great an effect if so many people have their minds made up on the left and right’. (Allen 2008, 328).

Conclusion Where then for mainstream journalism, faced as it is with both a crisis of legitimacy and the refusals to grant access of intransigent power? State transparency, critical if journalism is to fulfill its fourth-estate role, is diminishing, despite legislation intended to guarantee it, and digital media transparency, ideologically or economically driven if we are to believe its critics and culturally driven if we are to believe its cheerleaders, is yet to truly engage with the networked society. Despite its pitfalls, there is little chance the evangelism of transparency will end any time soon. Journalists have little choice but to embrace it, to draw power from it the way they used to draw power from opaqueness. It joins, however imperfectly, journalism and its audience. And together, they might just be able to ensure the transparency of the powerful.

References Allen, D. 2008. “The Trouble with Transparency: The Challenge of Doing Journalism Ethics in a Surveillance Society”. Journalism Studies no.9 (3): 323-340. doi: 10.1080/14616700801997224. Banisar, D. 2006. Freedom of Information Around the World 2006: A Global Survey of Access to Government Information Laws. Retrieved from dhttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=1707336.

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Birkinshaw, P. 2006. “Freedom of Information and Openness: Fundamental Human Rights?” Administrative Law Review no. 58: 77218. Borchers, C. 2017. March 9. “1 in 3 US Voters Agrees with Donald Trump that Media is 'the Enemy of the American People'”. Retrieved March 10, 2017 from http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/90222776/1-in3-us-voters-agrees-with-donald-trump-that-media-is-the-enemy-of-theamerican-people. Brooke, H. (2016). “Citizen or Subject? Freedom of Information and the Informed Citizen in a Democracy”. (Doctoral exegesis). Retrieved from http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/15961/ Chadha, K., and M. Koliska. 2015. “Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age”. Journalism Practice no. 9 (2): 215–229. Cunningham, B. 2006. “Skin Deep: When ‘Transparency’ is a Smoke Screen”, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August: 9-10. Davis, C. 2015. “The Sorry State of FOI”. In Felle, T. & Mair, J. (eds), FOI 10 Years on: Freedom Fighting or Lazy Journalism? 174-177. Bury St Edmonds, UK: Abramis. Deuze, M. 2003. “The Web and its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of Different Types of Newsmedia Online”. New Media & Society no. 5 (2): 203-230. doi:10.1177/1461444803005002004. Drok, N.,and Hermans, L. 2016. “Is There a Future for Slow Journalism?” Journalism Practice no.10 (4): 539-554. doi:10.1080/17512786.2015.1102604. Ellis, G. 2016. Complacent Nation. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books. Felle, T. 2015. “Preface”. In Felle, T. and Mair, J. (eds), FOI 10 Years on: Freedom Fighting or Lazy Journalism? 5-12. Bury St Edmonds, UK: Abramis. Fisher, D. 2014a. “Hacker Releases New Collins Conversations”, New Zealand Herald, 1 September. Available online at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=1131 7385. —. 2014b. “OIA a Bizarre Arms Race”. Retrieved from www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objected=11 347187. Greenberg, K.J., and J. L. Dratel. 2005. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grimes, M. 2013. “The Contingencies of Societal Accountability: Examining the Link between Civil Society and Good Government”.

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Studies in Comparative International Development no. 48 (4): 380402. Hager, N. 2002. “A Researcher’s View of New Zealand’s Official Information Act”. International Symposium on Freedom of information and Privacy. Retrieved from www.nickyhager.info/a-researcher%E2%80%99s-view-of-newzealand%E2%80%99s-official-information-act-internationalsymposium-on-freedom-of-information-and-privacy/. Harrison, T., and S. Sayogo. 2104. “Transparency, Participation, and Accountability Practices in Open Government: A Comparative Study”. Government Information Quarterly no. 31: 513-515. Hellmueller, L., Vos, T. P., and M. A. Poepsel. 2013. “Shifting Journalistic Capital? Transparency and Objectivity in the Twenty-First Century”. Journalism Studies no. 14 (3): 287–304. doi:10.1080/1461670x.2012.697686. Houston, B. 2015. “Government in the Sunshine? The Problems and Practices of Journalists’ Use of the US FOIA. In Felle, T. and Mair, J. (eds), FOI 10 Years on: Freedom Fighting or Lazy Journalism? 178185. Bury St Edmonds, UK: Abramis. Keane, J. 1998. “Public Life in the Age of Communicative Abundance. Canadian Journal of Communication no. 24 (2): 165-178. —. 2009. “Monitory Democracy and Media-Saturated Societies”. Griffith Review no. 24: 47-69. Kelsey, J. 1993. Rolling Back the State: The Privatisation of Power in Aotearoa/NZ. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books. Koliska, M., and K. Chadha. 2016. “Digitally Outsourced: The Limitations of Computer-Mediated Transparency”. Journal of Media Ethics no. 31: 51-62. Kovach, B., and T. Rosenstiel. 2007. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Completely Updated and Revised. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. McCulloch, C. 2014. “PM Admits Govt Uses Delaying Tactics”. Retrieved January 3, 2015, from www.radionz.co.nz. Meier, K. 2009. “Transparency in Journalism: Credibility and Trustworthiness in the Digital Future”. Paper presented at The Future of Journalism conference, Cardiff, Wales. Meijer. A. 2009. “Understanding Modern Transparency”. International Review of Administrative Science no. 75 (2): 255-269. doi:10.1177/0020852309104175].

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Meijer, A., Curtin, D., and M. Hillebrandt. 2012. “Open Government: Connecting Vision and Voice”. International Review of Administrative Sciences no. 78 (1): 10-29. Office of the Ombudsman. 2017. Annual report 2015/2016. Retrieved from http://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/resources-and-publications /corporate-documents/annual-reports. —. 2017. “First Release of OIA Statistics”. (January 31). Retrieved from http://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/newsroom/item/first-release-ofoia-statistics. Open Government Partnership. n.d.a. “Participating Countries”. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from www.opengovpartnership.org/countries —. n.d.b. “New Zealand”. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from www.opengovpartnership.org/country/new-zealand. Palmer, G., and A. Butler. 2016. A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press. Revers, M. 2014. “The Twitterization of News Making: Transparency and Journalistic Professionalism”. Journal of Communication no. 64: 806826. Roberts, A. 2001. “Structural Pluralism and the Right to Information”. The University of Toronto Law Journal no. 51 (3): 243-271. Roberts, A. 2006. Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, C. 2014. “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility through Transparency”. (September 24). Retrieved from http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/strategystudies/transparency-credibility/. Singer, J. 2007. “Contested Autonomy”. Journalism Studies no. 8 (1): 7995. Stringer, D. 2011. “Blair Regrets Passing Freedom of Information Law”. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from www.theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/9951464. Treadwell, G. 2015. “Info Freedoms Were Just as Much Cultural in Origin”. Retrieved from https://freedomofinformationnz.wordpress.com. Treadwell, G., and Hollings, J. 2015. “An Increasingly Secret Paradise”. In Felle, T. and Mair, J. (eds), FOI 10 Years on: Freedom Fighting or Lazy Journalism?, 233-242. Treadwell, G. 2016. “FOI Scholarship Reflects a Return to Secrecy”. Pacific Journalism Review no. 22 (1): 121-136. Tolkein, J. 1937. The Hobbit. London, UK: George, Allen and Unwin.

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Wakem, B. 2015. “Not a Game of Hide and Seek”. Retrieved from www.ombudsman.parlia- ment.nz/ckeditor_assets/attachments/399/oia _report_not_a_game_of_hide_and_seek. pdf?1449533820. Weinberger, D. 2009, July 19. “Transparency is the New Objectivity”. Retrieved from http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/07/19/transparency-is-thenew-objectivity.

CHAPTER FIVE: NEWS EXPOSURE WHAT IF THERE WAS NO NEWS? HOLLY COWART AND KIM WALSH-CHILDERS

Imagine waking up tomorrow to a world without news media. There would be no more publicly or privately funded news organizations. There would be no working journalists. If you try this exercise with other professions, say firefighters or elementary school teachers, the impact is obvious. Buildings would burn and schools would be closed. Children would no longer be educated, and fire safety would take on new importance. If journalists were gone, there would be no news products like newspapers and broadcast news, but what would the actual societal impact be? What prompted the subject of this chapter, and the study it describes, were the responses college students offered when faced with this hypothetical scenario. Some students expressed concern that additional forms of news media, such as online websites and aggregators, would be gone. However, many students believed that online news, particularly on social media, would not be widely affected. Their rationale was that as long as social media continue to exist, news will find its way to users. This chapter describes the growing use of social media as a news source and the possibility that incidental news exposure on social media has lessened awareness of general news exposure. It discusses the role of social media companies in producing and vetting news content. It presents evidence that social media users are not actively aware of their news consumption. The result is an environment in which news is perhaps even more a part of our lives than ever before but goes largely unrecognized, a phenomenon that may help to explain the public’s growing disregard (in the United States, at least) for the importance of journalists in a democratic society.

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Growing use of social media In the United States, 86 percent of people 18 to 29 years old use at least one social media site; among Americans overall, about 70 percent of people use social media (“Social Media Fact Sheet” 2017). In addition, more than six of every 10 people now report getting news from some form of social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016). Among 18-to 29-year-olds, that number increases to 90 percent (Perrin 2015). Social media represent an increasingly important platform for news. Between 2013 and 2015, the percentage of US Facebook users who reported getting news specifically from Facebook rose from 47 percent to 63 percent. Among Twitter users, the percentage who reported getting news from Twitter rose from 52 percent to 63 percent in the same period (Barthel, Shearer, Gottfried and Mitchell 2015). Students echo these trends in widespread use of social media in general and news on social media in particular. In fact, 88 percent of 18-to 34-year-olds report getting news from Facebook (American Press Institute 2015). Increasingly, students are getting news where they already are–on mobile devices. Incoming college students have never lived in a world without the Internet. They do not remember life without cell phones. This does not necessarily mean they are less likely to be news consumers, but it does mean they are less likely to consume media in traditional print and broadcast forms. The most influential media channel with which they were raised was social media. Consider the fact that a 22-year-old college senior in 2016 would have been 12 in 2006. In 2006, Twitter launched and started to attract users. The same year, Facebook dropped the requirement that users have a .edu email address, allowing for the widespread expansion of Facebook, as the site was no longer restricted to those affiliated with a college. Middle school students who knew about the social media site’s popularity could join at age 13. Moreover, when Facebook made this significant expansion in 2006, these students had reached the age at which most were just beginning to pay attention to world affairs and national news (Arnett 1995). It took several years for professional news content, in the form we know it now, to appear on social media. Once it did, the line between social media and news media quickly became blurred.

Redefining news The next step in thinking through the relationship between news consumption and social media is considering how “news” is defined. The traditional cues in layout and design, by which news is identified, are less

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common on social media. As a result, a feature story that would run inside a newspaper may appear right after a hard news story on a social media news feed, whereas the news story would have claimed the front page in print. What would normally be a novelty story at the end of a news broadcast may be featured prominently on social media and, depending on its nature, it may be re-posted virally if it is popular enough with users. These changes in traditional news hierarchy and placement leave only a handful of quick visual methods for identifying the importance of news items based on how they are presented. Endorsement can be one indicator of a story’s newsworthiness. News organizations frequently cite the number of re-tweets, likes, or shares a post gets as evidence that the item has gone viral and is therefore newsworthy (Farhi 2009). However, social media are also rife with pandas falling down hills and cats riding robotic vacuum cleaners. Hypothetically, if more than half the American population has seen a certain cat spinning around someone’s kitchen but only a quarter of the population knows the unemployment rate, then endorsements become less reliable measures of newsworthiness on social media. “News” written solely to generate page views and advertising revenue, and not based in reality, can spread quickly on social media. Similarly, highly partisan news stories can take on a life of their own, spreading as shares and likes to increase the stories’ perceived legitimacy (Maheshwari 2016). Questions about what constitutes newsworthiness have long been part of a “soft news” versus “hard news” discussion. A 1965 landmark study of news values, which was a content analysis of foreign press coverage in Norway, identified 12 factors in news selection (Galtung and Ruge 1965). Among the 12 factors, only “unexpectedness” addressed the appeal of novelty stories; none of the factors said anything about the potential value of news that is entertaining. The researchers included news values such as lack of ambiguity, continuity of events, references to elite nations, references to elite people, and references to something negative. These “hard news” attributes reflected the researchers’ understanding of how events became news. More recently, Harcup and O’Neill (2001) sought to expand the research of Galtung and Ruge which focused primarily on events in the news rather than issues and individuals. Harcup and O’Neill’s content analysis of 1,276 British newspaper page leads, directly addressed entertainment by making entertainment its own news category with several subcategories. The subcategories were picture opportunities, references to sex, humour, show business and references to animals. These findings indicate that entertainment news is already a major part of news in the 21st century. The concern that social media endorsement will

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highlight funny animals and therefore erode the “hard news” media agenda may conveniently ignore the existing volume of entertainment news in traditional news sources. The ability to share content and to comment on that content on social media has given more power to the consumer than previously existed in the news industry. Even before social media tied the concept of endorsement to “likes” and “shares”, researchers studied the social value of news as a component of news consumption. In her study of 165 adults and their news-monitoring behaviour, Graber (1988) noted that participants paid attention to topics that were the focus of conversations among friends. Topics that aroused public controversy or were bizarre remained on people’s radar because of the social sharing of this type of news. The idea that the social popularity of content is equated with importance, regardless of news value, can be seen in less-than-newsworthy viral content. For example, endorsement is an important component of a viral meme from 2015 called “the dress”, which originated on the social media site Tumblr. This striped dress appeared gold and white to some people, black and blue to others. Strong opinions expressed by people in both camps resulted in a flurry of “likes”, “shares”, and strongly worded comments on social media (Conway 2015). People in the same room, looking at the same computer screen, reported seeing different colors, and they told their friends. In an article called “How One Dress United the Internet”, the writer notes that bloggers generally believed people shared content that made them look good (Hess 2015). This was a case of users needing other people to confirm their perceptions. As a result, the image was shared and liked until it went viral on every major social media platform. The mainstream news coverage that followed demonstrated how the line between news media and social media is blurred through mass endorsement. The variation in perceived colors would not have been given the same level of attention had it not become viral online. A news consumer now can see a new relationship between news and social media. The idea that individuals would be interested in what their friends are interested in has steadily gained traction in the news business. Mostemailed lists of news stories were an early form of reader influence (Shoemaker and Vos 2009). These were followed by direct endorsement on sites such as Reddit and Digg. In the same way that the New York Times has always labeled itself “All the news that’s fit to print”, Digg declared itself to show “What the Internet is talking about right now”. The steep decline of the newspaper industry occurred as consumers gained greater voices in news content via the Internet. Shoemaker and Reese (2013) point out that print news content has been determined largely on

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journalistic norms because the print format does not offer consumers a role in selecting the stories; the same can be said of traditional broadcast news. The format of online news, however, gives audience-oriented news routines a structure in which to develop, and this is particularly true in the context of news distribution through social media. Online news consumers tend to choose stories based on their popularity with other users before they choose stories selected by other sources, including news editors (Sundar and Nass 2001). This phenomenon is fueled by the “like economy” that exists online (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013). Websites, including news sites that are not social media give their users the ability to “like” or “share” their content on Facebook and Twitter, as well as other social networking sites. As a result, the endorsement is not confined to social media; it is used all over the Internet and allows the social media site or mobile app to become the hub (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). In 2013, incoming web traffic from “shares” to Facebook was up nearly 52 percent from the year before (Wong 2013). In the other direction, the news stories accessed from Facebook now outnumber news stories accessed from Google search (Ingram and Matthew 2015). Gerlitz and Helmond (2011) point to the power of this “like economy” to both decentralize and recentralize data. The consumer is involved in both selecting and endorsing news. Therefore, the process of highlighting certain content over other content may be increasingly in the hands of the consumer. The widespread use of Twitter and Facebook therefore can influence the way people perceive news as a concept. Where once consumers sought out news, increasingly they are letting news find them through their social media accounts. This shift facilitates the perception that news simply exists and is not something a user must pay to obtain. It also may contribute to declining public perceptions of journalists’ contributions to society. A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that only 28 percent of Americans say journalists contribute “a lot” to societal wellbeing; in 2009, the corresponding figure was 38 percent (Reilly 2013).

The role of social media companies Social media, like most other websites and apps, are designed to produce commercial success. In order to make more money, a social media site must hold the user’s interest for as long as possible. If a site fails to highlight content the user considers relevant, it may lose its audience. To help users determine which content is worth their time, social media sites use algorithms to sort news feed content based on complex formulas that

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include factors such as the popularity of posts and user history (McCarthy 2016). The use of these algorithms has been criticized for contributing to the creation of social media echo chambers (Tufekci 2015), in which social media users see the same types of content and the same opinions expressed repeatedly throughout their feeds. So while algorithms serve the user by highlighting content most likely to interest them, these algorithms also may be facilitating selective exposure to information, including news stories. If Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram did not use algorithms to show users the posts most likely to interest them, users likely would view that social media platform as being clogged with junk and spend less time on the website or app (Dewey 2016). In an effort to improve the user’s experience–and to keep the user on that website or app–companies use algorithms to determine what content a user sees and the order in which that content is displayed. One example of an attempt to create a better user experience is Facebook’s response to clickbait, a term that refers to content designed to “bait” social media users into following a link. Typically, clickbait posts have headlines with little information, such as “Parents should never apologize for these 15 things”. Quizzes such as, “What My Little Pony Character are you?” are also often referred to as clickbait. The companies that generate clickbait posts are trying to increase the number of visitors to the company’s websites, which can, in turn, increase ad revenue. In 2014, Facebook recognized that its users were tired of falling for clickbait headlines that linked to stories with little, if any, real information. In order to identify clickbait stories, Facebook began tracking the average amount of time that lapsed between users clicking on a link and when those users returned to Facebook. Clickbait stories were causing users to follow links, but then almost immediately return to Facebook. The company then used the average time spent with stories as a way to differentiate clickbait from more substantial content. Stories identified as clickbait then were less likely to appear in any user’s news feed (Siluk 2016). In addition, Facebook’s algorithm ranks more highly the posts from accounts on which users spend more time. The order in which users see news-related posts from people they follow or companies they like is designed to reinforce the value of these social media products. Therefore, social media companies have an interest in prioritizing established news media, or those news organizations that take advantage of company programmes such as Instant Articles, over lesser-known news organizations. The importance of recognizing priority-setting was demonstrated in 2016 when a former Facebook employee accused the company of suppressing

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conservative content from its Trending topics. Within this section of Facebook, located on the top right rail of the page, topics are listed with hammerhead-style headlines, such as “Mount Everest: Climbers Reach Peak for 1st Time in 2 Years, Officials Say”. Each headline links to a list, set up like a news feed, of posts related to the story from various media sources. The 2016 accusation of political bias in Trending topics made many users aware for the first time that Trending topics were not necessarily the most-often viewed topics. The backlash was quick and substantial (Lee 2016). The primary concern was that people appeared to have assumed that the selection of Trending items was based solely on what was numerically trending. In reality, it turned out that a group of editors had some control over which topics were on the list and how they were listed. Prominent Republicans accused Facebook of bias. Senator John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, proposed a congressional investigation. Facebook responded by releasing its internal guidelines for reviewing Trending topics. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, then met with 12 prominent conservatives to discuss the issue. The initial outrage over editorial control of Facebook’s Trending topics exposed the degree of influence the public believes the company holds. The incident also demonstrated an expectation for Facebook to be impartial, even though the company was under no obligation to present information in a neutral manor. Yet public demand reflected a belief that social media should strive to abide by the ethical standards expected of news media. As a result of the incident, Facebook announced that political scenarios would be included in employee bias training. However, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, clarified the company’s position when the announcement was made: “We’re clear about the industry we’re in and the company we’re in,” Sandberg said. “’We’re a tech company, we’re not a media company. We’re not trying to hire journalists and we’re not trying to write news” (Nunez 2016, para. 8). Four months later, Facebook got rid of human editors for Trending topics entirely. To users who felt that Facebook had betrayed their trust by using editors to select what was popular, the algorithm represented an impartial method of story selection. Of course, the algorithm used was created by people, so potential for bias could still be an issue. However, that change was followed by a series of inaccurate stories finding their way to the Trending topics list. The most publicized was a story focusing on Fox News anchor and well-known conservative Megyn Kelly. The story implied that she had been fired from Fox News and had become a

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Hillary Clinton supporter. There were numerous red flags that this was a hoax, but the algorithm missed them. Social media is also shaping the concept of “fake news”. The term “fake news” can be a reference to more than one type of content. In general, fake news is news that does not have any factual basis but is shared to the point that many consumers view it as legitimate. An example would be a story claiming that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election campaign (Moore 2016). A story such as this, with no basis in reality, can be posted on Facebook without any filter or fact-checking to stop it. In fact, the story about the Pope was posted or shared almost one million times and is estimated to have been seen by tens of millions of people (Isaac 2016a). As the story was shared, the website where it originated, WTOE 5 News, received large amounts of traffic and therefore increased its ad revenue. Although Facebook has taken steps to lessen clickbait, which relies on users clicking on a link, but not necessarily consuming content, the fake news stories are made to look like real news when shared and are therefore not as easily identified by Facebook’s algorithm. The obvious concern is that fake news spreads misinformation and, at times, disinformation. Some critics have argued that fake news, driven by partisan politics, influenced the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election (Solon 2016). One analysis found that in the three months leading up to the election, the top fake news sites on Facebook had more clicks, likes, and shares than the top three major news companies (Silverman 2016). Currently, social media companies are making some efforts to combat fake news. Facebook has announced a better system for flagging suspected fake news and a system for making other users aware when content they are viewing has been flagged (Isaac 2016b). The company is working with Snopes, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org, among others, to determine whether a post should receive a “disputed” designation. The algorithm will place disputed articles lower in the news feed, and sharing a disputed article will result in a popup reminder of the information’s status. Both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps since 2014 to emphasize news content and encourage its publication. Twitter’s Moments feature allows users to see collections of content and follow breaking news events as they happen. For example, during US presidential debates, users who chose to follow the debate in Moments automatically saw tweets related to the debate in their feed without following the specific Twitter accounts producing those tweets. Once the debate ended, the user no longer saw these additional tweets. Moments also offers collections of tweets on current topics that appear with a short summary of the story.

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Facebook has introduced a number of programs aimed at publishers and journalists since 2014, including Signal, Instant Articles, and Facebook Live. One that all website users see, but that is not visible on the Facebook mobile app, is the Trending topics list. The Twitter Moments example illustrates users seeking out news on social media. Users are not likely to find themselves interacting with Moments without making an active choice to go to that part of Twitter. However, Facebook users could passively view Trending topics headlines while scrolling through their feed or posting a status. An even greater possibility for incidental news exposure exists within users’ feeds, where they may follow a news organization or see news content a friend has shared. This potential for incidental news exposure is part of what makes viewing news on social media different than on traditional media (Pentina and Tarafdar 2014).

Incidental news exposure Being exposed to greater amounts of information and having access to the almost unlimited resources online has created a climate in which convenience is key. The Internet made news more accessible. As technology has progressed, so has accessibility. Research indicates that incidental exposure to online news is a major and growing factor in how people learn about news events and issues. A Pew Research Center study found that 92 percent of Americans use more than one platform each day to get news (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel and Olmstead 2010). Respondents in the study described social networks as “alert systems” for news. More than half (59 percent) said that they experience incidental news exposure–meaning that they watched or viewed a news story without actively seeking news–every day or almost every day. Yadamsuren and Erdelez (2010) found that incidental news exposure online is becoming a habitual means of consuming news. However, they noted that few respondents perceived incidental news exposure as the “typical” way in which they would get news. Because news exposure through social media is not intentional, the user might not even interpret it as exposure to news information. Rather than sitting down for the nightly news or picking up the local paper, incidental news exposure takes place in less identifiable ways, a phenomenon Hermida (2010) termed “ambient journalism,” which Hermida described as journalism appearing in the context of “broad, asynchronous, lightweight, and always-on communication systems such as Twitter” (298). Using Twitter as an example, Hermida points out that

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unlike email communication, tweets do not command a person’s full attention. Each tweet is part of something larger, existing as “ambient” information. These small pieces of news may be useful to a user, but having made no special effort to discover them, the user may not categorize these pieces of information as news. As such, users exposed to news stories incidentally may be even less likely than those who seek out news from traditional print or broadcast sources or news organization websites to recognize or consider the work journalists have done to bring those news stories to light.

Information overload While incidental news exposure can have positive repercussions in terms of disseminating news information, the amount of information associated with this type of exposure may have the opposite effect. As the limited capacity model of motivated mediated messages suggests, cognitive processing occurs with a limited number of resources (Lang 2006). The feeling of being overloaded by news content has been studied in connection with the number of news platforms used by consumers. Holton and Chyi (2012) surveyed 767 adults and found that while only a few platforms were positively linked to users’ level of perceived information overload, Facebook was among the top three. The authors observed that the ability to access news through Facebook might be overloading its users. Using a content analysis of 112 interviews about information overload and sense making, Pentina and Tarafdar (2014) identified specific ways in which social media contribute to information overload. These included social media increasing the amount of news information, making it impossible to avoid exposure to news, causing concerns about reliability and objectivity, and offering irrelevant content (219). The surplus introduced in information overload applies to the perceptions people have of news in general. If there is more news content than anyone could possibly consume, what is its worth? Particularly in the context of media organizations fighting to remain relevant, the influence of a “surplus” is worth calling into question (Holton and Chyi 2012). The value of news can be addressed at least in part with perceptions of information overload.

Survey on news awareness The gulf that exists between news consumers’ awareness of their incidental news exposure and the reality of how much news they actually

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consume creates a culture in which professionally produced news loses its value. To better understand how wide that gulf is, this study examined the intersection between social media and professionally produced news in terms of user awareness. It asked respondents about their news exposure and compared the amount of time respondents reported spending on social media with their reported news exposure. A survey of 400 people in the United States was conducted in February 2016. Respondents were recruited using Mechanical Turk, which owner Amazon.com describes as “a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence” (General Questions n.d., para. 1) and paid $0.25 for their time. They were demographically representative of the population in terms of age, race, and gender. The survey focused first on the amount of time respondents spent using various social media platforms. Next, respondents completed a series of questions about how often they encounter news. The final section asked respondents to identify their primary sources of news. They were instructed to “consider a hypothetical situation in which media (TV, Internet, print, radio) no longer contained news content. Essentially we are asking you to assume news companies have gone out of business”. Respondents then answered a series of 15 questions about how not having professionally produced news would affect them. For example–how much worse off would you be in terms of “your understanding of national politics?” or “your knowledge of sports”? Respondents were then asked which social media they used most. They answered the same 15 questions in the context of no longer being able to access that social media. On average, respondents reported spending 4.2 hours a day with news. Of that time, they reported half that time (2.1 hours) was spent actively consuming news. The other half of the time reflected passive contact with news, including seeing but not reading news stories on social media and having TV news on in the background but not paying attention to it. The respondents’ average daily social media use was 2.4 hours on Facebook, 1.1 hours on Reddit, and 1.7 hours on Twitter. The total for time spent with social media was 5.2 hour–an hour more than they reported contact with news. Although individuals certainly could use Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit without ever reading or viewing a news story posted to the site, the findings suggest that the respondents may underestimate their exposure to news content. The findings of this study suggest that in spite of spending a considerable amount of time on social media, respondents did not consistently factor that time into their news exposure. The 4.2 hours respondents reported both passively and actively coming in contact with .

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news accounts were about an hour less than the amount respondents reported spending on social media (5.25 hours). This finding demonstrates that consumers often lack awareness of their potential exposure to news on social media. This lack of awareness may have multiple repercussions. This study suggested that the combination of incidental news exposure and information overload could lead to the perception that news is something that exists in surplus. The perceived value of news would ultimately be reduced by a lack of awareness of its presence. In addition to news exposure, this study sought to identify the functions of news and the functions of social media. Respondents answered questions about how their lives would be different without professional news media. They answered the same set of questions about how their lives would differ without social media. More than half of all respondents said the loss of access to professional news sources would leave them at least somewhat worse off regarding information about major news events, local events, politics at all levels, weather, crime, health and medicine developments, science news, and economic issues. Respondents generally believed their knowledge of various topics would suffer more if professional news sources ceased to exist than if they lost access to the social media platform they most often use for news. Specifically, respondents predicted that loss of access to professional news sources would have a greater impact on their ability to plan for weather, their awareness of crime news, health and medical developments, understanding of economic issues, knowledge of international, national and local politics, knowledge of sports, science news, local events and major news events. For social media, more than half of all respondents said loss of access would leave them worse off regarding entertainment, international politics, national politics, awareness of local events, and awareness of major news events. The only topic on this list that had a percentage higher than the news list was entertainment. Although fewer than half of the respondents indicated that losing social media would significantly affect having enough downtime or distractions, the percentage was higher than the corresponding figure referring to loss of professional news. These results show that while social media and news media perform some similar functions, they are not the same functions. The only category for which news and social media did differ significantly was awareness of major news events. This result, in light of the variation in other categories, demonstrates a willingness to use both types of media for major news events, but also a preference for professional news as a source of

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information about specific categories like national politics. The results also reinforce the role of social media as a source of entertainment. One limitation of this study was that the questions did not ask how valuable each item was to the respondents. For example, 65.5 percent of respondents ranked “awareness of crime news” as something they would know less about without professionally produced news. We did not ask how important “awareness of crime news” was to the respondents. For some, “ability to deal with traffic” might be more important that “awareness of crime news”. Thus, we don’t really know how much of a loss respondents might perceive in knowing less about national or local politics, developments in science and medicine, etc. Future research could more thoroughly address not only the impact of news on knowledge, but also what people want from news. The overarching question related to information provided the most surprising finding. The results showed that 60 percent of respondents thought having no access to professional news would negatively affect their ability to get the “information they need”. This number appears to illustrate a greater appreciation for the news media than recently reported (Purcell et al. 2010). On the other hand, 56 percent of respondents thought having no access to their primary social media would negatively affect their ability to get the information they need. So while respondents identified differences between social media and news media in terms of which is a better source for weather forecasts and which is a better source for being entertained, they viewed the two as being almost equally important overall, a finding that may help to explain the decline in perceptions of journalists’ contributions to society. This finding also has implications for the role of news on social media. If social media are viewed as being equally valuable as news media, offering the two together makes sense. Not only is social media where the consumers already are, but it is also already where they find news. The results of this study reflect an observed trend toward significant social media use. They also reflect the widespread use of social media as a news source (Lichterman 2016). Respondents in this study reported that they used Facebook for 2.4 hours per day. Combined with Reddit and Twitter, the reported 5.25 hours spent daily on social media illustrates a high likelihood for incidental news exposure. For someone who sleeps six to eight hours a day, that number indicates that more than a quarter of their day is spent using social media. Thus, if consumption of news via social media has a significant impact on the value individuals assign to professionally produced news content, news organizations need to better understand how those effects occur and what, if anything, they can do to

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increase social media users’ recognition of the journalistic work that enables news to “find them” via Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites.

Re-building public understanding of journalism’s unique contribution In the first few months of 2017, journalists in the United States faced a situation unprecedented in American history: being labeled “the enemy of the people” by the United States president. While Donald Trump later insisted that he was not referring to all news media, but only the “fake news media”, the organizations named in his original “enemy of the people” tweet included the four major broadcast news organizations (ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN; he excluded only the reliably conservative Fox News) and the New York Times, generally regarded as one of most reliable and trustworthy news outlets in the United States, at least, if not the world (Blake 2017). Public opinion research suggests that the majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, are worried about the effects of “fake news,” with 84 percent of respondents to a February Fox News poll saying they are at least somewhat worried that fake news is “hurting the country” (Blanton 2017). More recently, a Quinnipiac University Poll conducted in early March 2017 showed that the majority of Americans (58 percent) disagreed with Trump that the news media are “enemies of the people”; however, responses were sharply split along party lines, with 86 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Independents disagreeing with the criticism of the media and 81 percent of Republicans agreeing. While poll respondents trust the media (53 percent) more than Trump (37 percent) to tell “the truth about important issues”, 53 percent also said they disapprove of the way news organizations have covered Trump;1 six in 10 respondents expressed disapproval of the way Trump talks about news media (“Trump inches up” 2017). While general public disagreement with Trump’s “enemy of the people” comment may be somewhat heartening to news organizations, recent increases in paid subscriptions arguably provide the more convincing evidence that at least some American consumers are recognizing that they cannot rely entirely on social media to bring important news to them. New York Times officials have reported that

 1

It’s worth noting that disapproval of news coverage of Trump could stem either from a belief that the news media are too critical of him or from concern that the coverage has not been critical enough.

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between Trump’s Nov. 8, 2016, election and early December, new subscriptions increased at more than 10 times the rate achieved during the same period of 2015. Paid subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times rose 60 percent during the same post-election period, four times as many as during the comparable period in 2015. New York Times president CEO Mark Thompson attributed the surge in subscriptions to “public anxiety to actually have politicians held to account, and having [a] professional, consistent, properly funded newsroom holding politicians to account” (Vernon 2016, para. 9). Whether Thompson’s assessment is correct and audiences are indeed beginning to recognize once again the unique value of professionally produced news content remains to be seen. In the interim, the results of the study described in this chapter suggest that news organizations likely need to work harder to make certain they provide content audiences recognize as having significant value that goes beyond what the audiences can acquire by reading tweets and Facebook headlines. That effort will require more than diligent “branding” of their content, whether it appears in print, in broadcast, on their own news websites or through shared social media posts. Instead, maintaining and re-building the audience’s perceptions of the value of professionally produced news will require a type of engagement that recognizes that audiences accustomed to participating in defining and sharing news demand more than traditional journalism. These audiences want journalists not only to “speak truth to power”, but to “speak truth to empower” individuals and their communities (emphasis added) (DeJarnette 2016, para. 5). They want news organizations to reach beyond their traditional source lists to ensure that their coverage reflects the concerns of the broader community, not only those of the community’s politicians and power brokers. This type of engaged journalism, DeJarnette argues, “is about listening to community members and their concerns, honoring and amplifying their voices, and strengthening their capacity to engage with one another and with the public officials who represent them” (para. 37). The results of this study suggest that social media represent one of the most promising “locations” news organizations might use for engaging their communities, and thereby strengthening community members’ perceptions of journalists as allies, rather than enemies.

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References American Press Institute. 2015. “How Millennials Use and Control Social Media”. (March 16) Retrieved May 19, 2016, from https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/surveyresearch/millennials-social-media/. Arnett, J. J. 1995. “Adolescents’ Uses of Media for Self-Socialization”. Journal of Youth and Adolescence no. 24 (5): 519–533. Barthel, M., Shearer, E., Gottfried, J., and A. Mitchell. 2015. “The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook”. (July 15). Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-newson-twitter-and-facebook/. Blake, A. 2017. “Donald Trump's Fake Case Against the "Fake News Media." Washington Post. .(Feb. 24). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/24/donaldtrumps-fake-case-against-the-fake-newsmedia/?utm_term=.942cce20dda9. Blanton, D. 2017. “Fox News Poll: Fake News Hurting US. Fox News Politics”. (January 24). Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/24/fox-news-poll-fakenews-hurting-us.html. Conway, B. 2015. Why do we care about the colour of the dress? The Guardian. (February 27). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/27/colourdress-optical-illusion-social-media. DeJarnette, B. 2016. “How Does Engaged Journalism Impact Ethics?” (January 24). MediaShift.com. Retrieved from http://mediashift.org/2016/01/how-does-engaged-journalism-impactethics/. Dewey, C. 2016. “The Real Reason All the Big Social Networks Have Introduced Filtered Feeds”. The Washington Post. (March 16). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/ wp/2016/03/16/the-real-reason-all-the-big-social-networks-haveintroduced-filtered-feeds/. Farhi, P. 2009. “The Twitter Explosion: Whether They Are Reporting About It, Finding Sources On It Or Urging Viewers, Listeners And Readers To Follow Them On It, Journalists Just Can’t Seem To Get Enough Of The Social Networking Service. Just How Effective Is It as a Journalism Tool?” American Journalism Review no. 31 (3): 26–32.

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Galtung, J., and M. H. Ruge. 1965. “The Structure of Foreign News the Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers”. Journal of Peace Research no. 2 (1): 64–90. Gerlitz, C., and A. Helmond. 2011. “Hit, Link, Like and Share. Organizing the Social and the Fabric of the Web in a Like Economy”. Presented at the Paper presented at the DMI mini-conference. Gerlitz, C., and A. Helmond. 2013. “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web”. New Media & Society, (Vol. 24, p. 25). 1461444812472322. Gottfried, J., and E. Shearer. 2016, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms”. (May 26). Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-mediaplatforms-2016/. Graber, D. A. 1988. Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide. New York: Longman Harcup, T., and D. O’Neill. 2001. “What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited”. Journalism Studies, no. 2 (2): 261–280. Hermida, A. 2010. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism”. Journalism Practice no. 4 (3): 297–308. Hess, A. 2015. “How One Dress United the Internet”. Slate. (February 27). Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/02/27/the_dress_was_the_ perfect_meme_how_the_question_of_blue_and_black_or_white.html. Holton, A. E., and H. I. Chyi. 2012. “News and the Overloaded Consumer: Factors Influencing Information Overload Among News Consumers”. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking no. 15 (11): 619– 624. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2011.0610. Ingram, M. 2015. “Facebook Now Drives More Traffic to Media Sites Than Google”. (August 18). Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2015/08/18/facebook-google/. Isaac, M. 2016a. “Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, is Said to Question Its Influence”. The New York Times. (November 12). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/technology/facebook-is-said-toquestion-its-influence-in-election.html. —. 2016b. “Facebook Mounts Effort to Limit Tide of Fake News”. The New York Times. (December 15). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/technology/facebook-fakenews.html.

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Lang, A. 2006. “Using the Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing to Design Effective Cancer Communication Messages”. Journal of Communication no. 56 (s1): S57–S80. Lee, S. 2016. “The Senate is Investigating Whether Facebook Censored Conservative News”. (May 10). Retrieved May 18, 2016, from http://www.newsweek.com/senate-now-investigating-whetherfacebook-censored-conservative-news-458124. Lichterman, J. 2016. “Nearly Half of US Adults Get News on Facebook, Pew Says”. (May 26). Retrieved from http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-sadults-get-news-on-facebook/. Maheshwari, S. 2016. “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study”. The New York Times. (November 20). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-newsspreads.html. McCarthy, S. 2016. “The Age of The Instagram Algorithm is Here”. Christian Science Monitor. (June 4). Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0604/The-age-of-theInstagram-algorithm-is-here. Moore, J. 2016. “Fake News Has Left a Bad Taste in Pope Francis’ Mouth”. (December 8). Retrieved December 21, 2016, from http://www.newsweek.com/pope-francis-compares-consumption-fakenews-eating-feces-529550. Nunez, M. 2016. “Facebook Offers Political Bias Training in Wake Of Trending Controversy”. (June 23). Retrieved July 1, 2016, from http://gizmodo.com/facebook-offers-political-bias-training-in-wake-oftren-1782500645. Pentina, I., and M. Tarafdar. 2014. “From ‘Information’ to ‘Knowing’: Exploring the Role of Social Media in Contemporary News Consumption”. Computers in Human Behavior no.35: 211–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.02.045. Perrin, A. 2015. “Social Media Usage: 2005-2015”. (October 8). Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage2005-2015/. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosenstiel, T., and K. Olmstead. (2010). “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer: How Internet and Cell Phone Users Have Turned News Into a Social Experience. Pew Internet & American Life Project”. Pew Research Center.

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Shoemaker, P. J., and S. D. Reese. 2013. Mediating the Message in The 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective. Routledge. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KSTfAQAAQBAJ&o i=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=shoemaker+mediating+the+message&ots=6odQK vtN8e&sig=9N-tsrfExt8Vk_wsibD3SdddPhg. Shoemaker, P. J., and T. Vos. 2009. Gatekeeping Theory. London: Routledge. Siluk, S. 2016. “Facebook Updates Its News Feed Algorithm to Target Clickbait” Sci-Tech Today. (August 9). Retrieved August 10, 2016, from http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Facebook-AlgorithmTargets-Clickbait/story.xhtml?story_id=021002KF1LCR. Silverman, C. 2016. “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook”. (November 16). Retrieved March 19, 2017, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-newsoutperformed-real-news-on-facebook. Social Media Fact Sheet. 2017. (January 12). Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media/. Solon, O. 2016. “Facebook’S Failure: Did Fake News and Polarized Politics Get Trump Elected?” The Guardian. (November 10). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fakenews-election-conspiracy-theories. Sundar, S. S., and C. Nass. 2001. “Conceptualizing Sources in Online News”. Journal of Communication no. 51 (1): 52–72. “Trump Inches Up, But Still Has Negative Approval Rating, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; US Voters Say Media Is Not Enemy Of The People”. (2017, March 8). Quinnipiac University Poll. Retrieved from https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2436. Tufekci, Z. 2015. “Facebook Said Its Algorithms Do Help Form Echo Chambers, and the Tech Press Missed It”. New Perspectives Quarterly no. 32 (3): 9–12. Vernon, P. 2016. “Subscription Surges and Record Audiences Follow Trump’s Election”. Columbia Journalism Review. (December 6). Retrieved from http://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/trump_journalism_subscription_ surge.php.

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Wong, D. 2013. “[Report] Facebook Referrals Skyrocket: Up 170% In Past Year”. (December 10). Retrieved from https://blog.shareaholic.com/facebook-referrals-skyrocket-12-2013/. Yadamsuren, B., and S. Erdelez. 2010. “Incidental Exposure to Online News”. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology no. 47 (1): 1–8.

             

CHAPTER SIX: METRICS WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT METRICS MERJA MYLLYLAHTI

There are certain topics that journalists and editors have preferred not to talk about. One of these has been audience monitoring and measuring, and how the use of metrics may affect journalistic work and editorial decisions. Increasingly, news organizations have integrated audiencemonitoring tools into their newsrooms, and the intensified focus on metrics proposes fundamental questions for journalism: How do metrics shape journalism and affect the integrity of journalism? What is journalism for? Are journalists producing public goods and public service or just other sellable commodities? There is a real danger that the increasing focus on metrics further enhances the commodity nature of news production and news content. There are some signs that the tide is turning as news publishers are realizing that large-scale metrics don’t work. Some of the large news publishers are retreating from chasing page views, because clickbait has lead them to publish too many stories which “lack significant impact on audience” (The New York Times Company, 2016). This doesn’t mean that the age of metrics is over, but its nature may well be changing as publishers are planning to concentrate more on the audiences who return to their websites. Nevertheless, the challenges for journalism remain. The traditional barriers between newsrooms and management have blurred because news organizations continue to battle against shrinking revenues. In this environment, it is hard for editors and journalists to ignore information about their audience behaviour and ratings. Previous academic studies argue that the business models of Western news publishers are in trouble, and not a single new model has emerged to replace the old business model based on advertising and subscription revenue (Picard 2011; Rosenstiel, Jurkowitz and Hong 2012; Chyi and Tenenboim 2016; Myllylahti 2016a). As news publishers are trying to

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build up digital and other revenue streams, monetising on their audiences has become a matter of urgency. While pursuing larger audiences, publishers have shifted news delivery to social media platforms. In his report, Piechota (2016) found that 81 percent of American and European news publishers are now delivering news content via Facebook. This is done “to increase reach and engagement with publishers’ content and to acquire traffic from Facebook to publishers’ own channels” (Piechota 2016, 48). Publishers growing dependency on Facebook–once more– enhances the need to monitor their audiences. Paradoxically, in 2016 news publishers were still dependent on print readership and revenue. A study of eight large news publishers found that The New York Times (USA), which is heralded as one of the most digitally advanced news corporations in the world, made only 25 percent of its total revenue from digital sources. The same figure for Gannett (USA) was 35 percent, and for Postmedia (Canada) eight percent (Myllylahti 2016a).

News: just a product in a shopping basket? In her book, Saving the Media: Capitalism, Crowdfunding, and Democracy, French academic Julia Cagé (2016) argues that like universities, news media produce information and knowledge, which are fundamentally important to a democratic society. She argues that information is a public good, which “resembles many other cultural goods that the state cannot produce directly” (11-12). She also notes that despite the media’s relatively small size in a “knowledge economy,” it has a significant role as they can reach “a very large portion of the public and is in a position to influence decisions crucial to the power of our democracies” (15). Anderson et al. (2014) argue that journalism functions as a public service because it “exposes corruption, draws attention to injustice, holds politicians and businesses accountable for their promises and duties” (Anderson et al. 2014). Pickard (2015) and Cohen (2015) remind us that journalism has a double role as a public service and as a commodity, although it is the nature of news as a commodity that has “collapsed in recent years” (Pickard 2015, 224). This refers to the failure in news publishers’ revenue models. Pickard elaborates that journalism provides society with public goods and public service which help citizens to be informed: “In its ideal form [journalism] serves as a rich information source for important social issues, and functions as a watchdog and as a forum for diverse voices and viewpoints” (214). Cohen agrees that contemporary journalism still has a public service role “to provide a diversity of representations and perspectives, and to produce information

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necessary for meaningful participation in public life” (114). However, he stresses that journalism has become a commodified business and use of metrics illustrates it. In 1973, Murdock and Golding observed that news corporations are “first and foremost industrial and commercial organizations which produce and distribute commodities” (206-207). Murdock (2011) defines a commodity as any good or service that is sold for a price in the market. For decades, if not centuries, the whole business model of newspapers has been based on selling commodities. Newspapers have sold their news audiences to advertisers to fund journalistic operations. In the past, print publishers knew their audiences well, and, before the arrival of the internet, monetising print audiences was relatively straightforward. There is some evidence that journalism still has “a double life as a public service and a commodity” as many news organizations still provide the public with news and information (Pickard 2015, 224). However, at the same time news organizations invest large sums of money and effort to better commodify their content and audiences. Increasingly, the managers and publishers talk about news content and news audiences in business or marketing terms: news is a product, and readers are consumers. Only rarely do executives of commercial news media talk about journalism in terms of public interest or public service. To exemplify, a Finnish financial newspaper Kauppalehti describes its website as an online shop in which news can be purchased. A New Zealand business newspaper the National Business Review considers routine news content merely as a marketing tool to be used on social media platforms, and to advance its advertising sales (Myllylahti 2016b). News publishers have also started to outsource their routine news production. Already, news commodification is advancing as news organizations automatise parts of their news production. Newman (2017) predicts that robots will soon overtake production of certain news content– including company reports and sports results. Additionally, news companies will tailor their content management systems to “create optimal stories and repackage content quickly for different platforms” (29). These are further examples of commodification of news production. Most news publishers in Western economies have implemented digital subscriptions models. Many of the news sites offer routine or “clickbait” news content free of charge, whereas more valuable content is put behind a paywall. The most paywalled content of two Australasian financial newspapers included hard news and opinion pieces, whereas technology news was mainly offered for free to pull in audiences (Myllylahti 2016b). It can be argued that paywalls advance the commodity nature of routine

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news content, but on the other hand they may work against commodification of the hard news content.

Clickbait: The art of maximising page views When news publishers were producing only print newspapers, measuring audiences was somewhat more straightforward than in the digital environment. They knew the size of their audience, which was measured by circulation, and postal delivery gave them information about their subscribers. Surveys targeted at print readers revealed information about households, their income and other relevant matters. This changed dramatically after the arrival of the internet. In an online environment, news audiences have become increasingly fragmented, and new patterns of news production and consumption have emerged. The internet and new mobile technologies enable audiences to access news anytime, anywhere, and via multiple devices and across multiple platforms. Therefore, monetising news and news audiences has become increasingly difficult: it is hard for news publishers to know their target audience as anyone could click stories on their sites. Suddenly, news publishers were not able to provide reader profiles and audience numbers to their advertisers, and they started to look elsewhere. In addition, the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 seriously affected news publishers’ advertising income. In many Western economies, such as the United States and Britain, newspapers lost revenue and their business models broke down. In this context, news publishers needed to understand and engage better with their online audiences, and new measuring and monitoring tools were deployed. These new audience-monitoring tools utilized by newsrooms mean “each and every user’s IP address and mouse click can be easily tracked, recorded, aggregated and fed into newsrooms” (Nguyen 2013, 147). They also meant it has become harder for newsroom editors and journalists to ignore their audiences. Nguyen states that The problem is that the kind of news that can maximise audiences is often the so-called “news you can use”–news that caters to the lowest common denominator of all tastes, addressing the most basic, least sophisticated and least sensitive level of lifestyles and attitudes. (Nguyen 2013, 152)

She further observes that in the pursuit to reach largest possible audiences, and to maximise the number of people to “click” their stories, the quality of news has started to suffer. Audience maximisation led to new practices: for example, online newspapers started to publish lists of the most popular and most read stories to maximise the number of “clicks”. “Clickbait” can

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be understood as a journalistic practice which is based on offering trivial or scandalous stories to drive traffic and number of page views (clicks) on the site. The more “clicks” you have on the site, the more lucrative it is (in principle) to advertisers. Some publishers are even actively encouraging their writers to produce stories that aim to maximise the number of page views. For example, the online magazine Slant pays its writers $5 for every 500 clicks on its stories (Murtha 2016). In 2016, The Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner noted that In the last few years, many news organizations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment)–but like junk food, you hate yourself when you’ve gorged on it. (Viner 2016)

Some earlier academic studies have described how the “clickbait” affects editorial choices. A 2009 study observing online-only newsrooms of Taloussanomat (a Finnish business daily) found that the journalists working for the news outlet felt pressured to write stories that would attract the biggest possible audience and the highest number of “clicks”. The study noted that the practice was “not surprising given that the revenue from display advertising is directly linked to the number of pages readers view” (Thurman and Myllylahti 2009, 699). Researchers found that if not enough readers were viewing the home page of Taloussanomat, news editors would publish any populist story to attract audiences–one such story published was about David Beckham’s underwear (Thurman and Myllylahti 2009).

Evolving metrics: What they actually measure? Since 2009 metrics have evolved, and publishers don’t just measure page views, but multiple other things. The pressure to maximise audience size is clear in The New York Times Company’s Innovation report. It offers a valuable insight into how serious the issue of audience engagement has become. The report states that “more than ever, the hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom. The realities of a cluttered internet and distracted mobile world require extra effort to get our journalism to readers” (The New York Times Company 2014, 6). The report further notes that because visitor numbers on The New York Times homepage are falling, the problem needs to be addressed, as it states, urgently: “Only a third of our readers ever visit it [home page]. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per

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reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year” (The New York Times Company 2014, 24). No wonder that newsrooms are now using special software tools such as Chartbeat or Newswhip to track how their readers interact with their stories and other content such as videos. Cherubini and Nielsen argue that journalists “not only need analytics”, but they “also want analytics” as they aim to “reach target audiences and do better journalism” (2016, 7). Newsrooms have also created new kind of jobs for audience tracking, and some of the new job titles include “audience editors,” “growth editors” and “engagement managers.” Additionally, news editors now have “audience development” and “analytics teams” to help to monetise on their readers, and to turn occasional visitors into loyal readers or as they say, “customers.” The media start-up Quartz offers an example. The digitally native media outlet, born in 2012, has a “growth team” which includes a director of growth and two other deputy editors (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). Quartz is headquartered in New York, but it also has reporters in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles and Washington. The media company’s deputy growth editor Marta Cooper explains that audience data has become a central feature in the newsroom: “There is sufficient training for staff on how to make the most out of the analytics tools we use, so it’s easy for them to become part of a journalist’s daily workflow” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016, 30). The Wall Street Journal’s emerging media editor, Carla Zanoni, observes that journalists “are extremely hungry for data, they want tools to be able to measure in realtime whether they are doing the right thing” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016, 32). In their report, Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) examine some of the typical audience metrics employed by newsrooms. These include page views, time spent, referred traffic, unique users and social share. One of the most common metrics is pageviews or “clicks” which measures any time a user views a page. Another commonly used measurement is time spent which refers to the time a visitor has spent on the website or a specific page. Most newspapers like to talk about their unique user numbers, which tell how many different people have visited a website in any given period. As newspapers have become more dependent on traffic generated from social media sites, and especially from Facebook, newsrooms are also closely monitoring “social shares”: how many times their story, video or any other content has been shared on the sites. Another measurement used in the context of social media outlets is referred traffic. This includes traffic coming to a news organization’s

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website from other sites including social media outlets, search engines, or hyperlink referrals. However, none of these metrics are very precise or accurate, and the measurements leave room for interpretation. Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) warn that some of these metrics are not perfect and can lead to “both inflated numbers and uneven data quality” (34-35). They add that “even the best editorial analytics continue to be constrained by the difficulties involved in defining and measuring many of the things that news organizations aim to achieve” (7). Rosenstiel (2016) also points out that “most web analytics are a mess. They mostly measure the wrong things” (1). He notes that unique visitors do not measure different people visiting an online site or home page, but it measures the number of devices accessing the site or page. For example, if a person visits a news site via laptop, tablet and mobile, they are counted as three different visitors. “The traffic to most websites is probably over counted by more than double, perhaps more than triple” (1).

Metrics: news work and news choices As discussed, some earlier academic studies and reports suggest that metrics have become an integrated part of a contemporary newsroom. However, there are contradicting views about how metrics may affect journalistic work and story choices. Some academics argue that metrics don’t influence journalistic work whereas others report that they guide editorial choices (Anderson 2011; Petre 2015; Bunce 2016). Tandoc (2015), for example, notes that the use of metrics “leads editors to use analytics to inform content related decisions, thereby allowing audience preferences to influence editorial judgment” (793). Anderson et al. (2014) believe that audience monitoring is “beginning to shape and reshape journalistic values, norms and practices” even when newsrooms and news organizations are utilising these tools differently. A 2016 survey of 700 journalists in the United Kingdom found that there was a “strong influence of audience research and audience feedback on journalists’ work” (Cornia and Thurman 2016, 43). Most of the journalists surveyed, approximately 80 percent, believed that the impact the audience had on their work had strengthened “a lot over the last five years” (Thurman 2016, 35). In New Zealand, former New Zealand Herald journalist Chris Barton (2016) describes how the metrics impact on newsrooms: “To stay relevant newspapers feel the need to appeal to the widest possible audiences” and therefore they are publishing crowd pleasing content even when there is little evidence that the “clickbait” journalism is actually working (147). He

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asks: “Why does dross rule? Why has journalism become so stupid?” (147). Another New Zealand journalist/blogger Russell Brown highlights the erosion of news values in the country’s leading newspaper: A man went to the supermarket and bought some cheese. It was sliced cheese. After he got home with the sliced cheese, he opened the packet and saw that the cheese had mould on it… For some time last Wednesday, this was the second-lead story on the award-winning website of the New Zealand Herald. (Brown 2016).

He further observes that the New Zealand Herald’s website “has become more crowded than ever with lifts of heavily-contrived Daily Mail stories, things pillaged from social media and the kind of trivia your stupid friend insists on sharing in their Facebook feed”. After observing news practices of Philly.com in Philadelphia, the United States, Anderson (2011) noted that “it is not an exaggeration to say that website traffic often appeared to be the primary ingredient in Philly.com news judgment.” He further elaborates that comments such as “I just pulled this story off the spotlight, it was underperforming, it only had 137 page views” were commonly used in the newsroom (560-561). Also, a study of the digital transformation of The Telegraph and The Financial Times concludes that “the use of data analytics has changed how stories are assessed for significance and duration,” and that there is “evergreater emphasis on data driven models within newsrooms” (Schlesinger and Doyle 2015, 321). These findings are supported by a study of Dutch newspapers. Welbers et al. (2016) analysed print and online editions of five national newspapers and found that “storylines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive attention in subsequent reporting, which indicates that audience clicks affect news selection” (1037). The study discovered there was a discrepancy between what journalists said about the influence of metrics and the actual influence: journalists “are either unaware of this influence or unwilling to admit it” (1049). The researchers argue that because journalists still regard themselves as gatekeepers, they are reluctant to admit that audience preferences influence their work. However, as the economic pressures of newspapers mount, they are inclined to cater content towards the audience preferences. They state that “this discrepancy can be explained as a manifestation of the struggle journalists are engaged in to balance audience preferences with their professional judgment”, and that “what journalists are economically encouraged to do, and what they are normatively inclined to do, are in conflict with each other” (1050).

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Some other studies contradict the above studies, and suggest that metrics may not affect news choices and news production as strongly as many have feared. Usher (2013) studied audience monitoring at Al Jazeera English and found that the media organization did not have “a clear set of organizational norms” for the journalistic use of metrics, and therefore journalists were not concerned with the audience size. She argues that “simply having metrics in the newsroom will not impact news production” (347). She acknowledges that Al Jazeera is a state-owned enterprise, and does not have the same financial and commercial pressures as publicly owned news corporations. Similarly, Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) note that “in many newsrooms, a monitoring of performances and achievements is indeed happening… but these numbers rarely inform editorial decision making” (32). Their findings are based on interviews across Europe and North America–they interviewed over 30 editors, audience engagement managers and editors for their study. While studying the use of metrics among African correspondents, Bunce (2016) also found that “audience data do not seem to be a significant, daily feature of news work”, and that “news values and occupational judgment take priority over building up traffic and metrics” (25-26). In her study, Petre (2015) explored the use of analytical tools at Gawker Media, which was a digital-only media outlet before closing down, and at The New York Times which has both print and digital news operations. She found that the “organizational context is highly influential in shaping if and how metrics influence the production of news”. At Gawker Media, audience data were “highly visible and influential” whereas at The New York Times they were “neither, and seemed–to the extent they were used at all–primarily to corroborate decisions editors have already made”. In his study, Hanusch (2016) examined eight Australian news organizations including digital-only news outlets and news publishers with both print and digital platforms. He found that “analytics are impacting gatekeeping processes by shaping news routines as well as reshaping existing ones” (12-13). He concluded that organizational structures and editorial hierarchy have some influence on use of analytical data. He states that “digital-only newsrooms [are] generally making more data available to individual reporters than newsrooms with a different primary distribution platform” (12-13). Additionally, he suggests that as digital-only newsrooms are somewhat more “consumer-oriented” and have a “closer proximity to the economic field”, they are more prone to base their editorial decisions on metrics (1213).

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All eyeballs on social media traffic, but where is the money? The rise of social media corporations and search engine companies is well documented, and it suggests a significant challenge for news media organizations. News publishers have become more dependent on social media networks as a news delivery platform and potential revenue source. Media academic Emily Bell (2016) observes that “social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything”. Social media companies and search engines have gained in digital advertising revenue instead of news outlets, and it is only natural that news corporations would like to have a bigger slice of the digital advertising pie. In 2015 alone, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter accounted for 65 percent of all digital advertising revenue in the United States (Lu and Holcomb 2016). News consumption has increasingly moved to social media platforms. In 2016, 62 percent of American adults got their news from social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016). In the same year, 30 percent of the traffic of American and European newspapers came through Facebook (Piechota 2016). Approximately 81 percent of news publishers used Facebook to improve their audience reach and engagement. Additionally, 41 percent believed that generating revenue with advertising on Facebook was an important factor (Piechota 2016). However, in 2016 there was some evidence that traffic from social media platforms to news sites was declining. A web analytic company, SimilarWeb, found that Facebook visits to some of the major news sites fell 50 percent between the first and the second quarter of 2016 (Ingram 2016). The statistics showed that the traffic to Gannett’s newspapers fell 26 percent, to The New York Times 25 percent, and Vox media 35 percent (Ingram 2016). Nevertheless, news publishers’ dependency on Facebook and the audience it delivers has intensified focus on traffic and associated metrics. In 2015, Facebook launched Instant Articles, and it now works with hundreds of media outlets making their content available on this platform. The social media corporation shares some revenue with media companies: news publishers keep 100 percent of the advertising revenue from the adverts they have sold themselves, and 70 percent of the revenue from adverts sold by Facebook. Some news outlets have reported that Instant Articles has had a positive impact on their revenue, others not so. Robert Hodges, Sky’ s head of audience development, says that there is a problem with Facebook monetisation. “It doesn’t really feel like Facebook understands the business challenges. Instant Articles has also been difficult

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to get money from” (Southern 2016). Some news publishers note that the money they make from Instant Articles is “pennies not pounds” (Davies 2016). On the other hand, Trinity Mirror, which owns newspapers such as The Mirror and Manchester Evening News, says that it has gained both audiences and revenue from the platform. Trinity Mirror strategy director Piers North comments that “we’re putting tens of millions of impressions down Instant Articles. The money it’s making us isn’t insignificant” (Davies 2016). Because the media outlets don’t disclose specific information about the revenue they make on Facebook and its Instant Articles, it is impossible to evaluate how sustainable this business model is long-term. What is relevant here is that as news delivery has shifted largely to social media platforms, monitoring social media audience and relevant data such as shares, likes and comments, have become more closely monitored. A survey of 700 journalists in the United Kingdom found that the influence of social media on journalistic work has strongly increased (Thurman 2016, 35). Journalists also use social media platforms to harvest content and opinions. Alejandro (2010) notes that journalists use social media platforms for newsgathering “especially during breaking news stories” (42). Based on a survey of 135 journalists in different countries and continents, Alejandro found that journalists use social media to get tips and leads, to monitor beats and to gain interviews (31). It can be argued that it is not only social media metrics which may affect news practices and news values, but it is also the vast amount of data and content which journalists can utilise as their sources and as a part of their storytelling.

Conclusion As discussed in this chapter, the increasingly complex “post-industrial news ecosystem” (Anderson et al. 2014) has interlinked news corporations and social media companies more strongly than ever, and they share the same interest in their most valuable property–the audience. Facebook is constantly launching new tools to make money out of its 1.8 billion users– including news media–and others want to share at least some of its expanding digital revenue. It seems that Facebook has delivered news media outlets bigger audiences, and in some cases, more money. The news publishers need to monetise their digital audiences has brought monitoring, metrics and tools to newsrooms, and they have introduced new “exotic” job titles such as audience engagement managers, which feed audience data to the editors and newsrooms. From all above, it is clear that “metrics are now foregrounded in journalists’ day-to-day work in digital or

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digitized newsrooms, blurring editorial and business interests on an unprecedented scale” (Cohen 2015, 109). While outlining the Boston Globe’s future strategy, editor Brian McCrory described how “we are swimming in metrics. The goal now is to refine, interpret and apply them” (Kennedy 2017). It is evident, that the integration of audience metrics into newsrooms comes from economic pressures, and that the utilization of metrics is in the interest of news companies’ management. Anderson (2011) points out that it was the managers in the Philadelphia newspapers which were “placing a far greater emphasis on website traffic and purposefully encouraging the diffusion of news metrics”, and this was “a major factor in influencing changing editorial practices” (563). He further states that the “specific managerial decisions play an important role in determining how audience measurement technologies will be used to encourage or discourage certain forms of newsroom behavior” (563). Once the audience monitoring tools have been implemented in newsrooms, it is hard for editors and journalists to ignore them: “Such radical changes at the top management, not surprisingly, leave no space for individual journalists to safely ignore and leave audience data to their managers as they would in the ‘old days’” (Nguyen 2013, 149). In this context, it can be argued that metrics have been developed and deployed for business purposes and as a management tool, and therefore implementing them into newsrooms is somewhat questionable: even when some studies argue that “journalists today not only need analytics to navigate an ever-more competitive battle for attention. Many journalists also want analytics” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016, 7). Cherubini and Nielsen argue that audience monitoring can help journalists to become “more data informed” without replacing editorial judgment “with the tyranny of numbers” (9). However, there is a real danger that the increasing use of metrics will mean that news production is further commodified, and journalistic “standards and practices [are] being dumbed further down in the wake of web metrics” (Nguyen 2013, 154). There is also a relevant question about the usefulness of metrics. Similarly to Rosenstiel, Jarvis (2015) argues that news organizations are measuring the “wrong things” and metrics such as page views and unique users are “profoundly corrupting” because they don’t reveal relevant information about audience preferences and engagement. There is no evidence that metrics results in any substantial increase in media companies’ revenue, and a question arises as to why news media outlets invest considerable time, resources and money in audience and traffic

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monitoring if there is no clear evidence that it all pays off? Will they really help to finance newsrooms, journalistic jobs, and journalism in the future? Finally, in its internal report Journalism that stands apart, The New York Times Company states (even when it is measuring and monitoring audience data) that it is not “trying to maximise clicks and to win a pageviews arms race” because its business strategy is based on providing journalism that people are willing to pay for (The New York Times Company 2017). The paper notes that its “most successful and valuable stories are often not those that receive the largest number of pageviews, despite widespread newsroom assumptions”. The report admits that finding a balance between metrics and journalistic judgment is “tricky” as the paper does not want to “equate audience size with journalistic value”. On the other hand, there is no “return to the days when we persuaded ourselves that a piece of journalism was valuable for the mere reason that it appeared” in the paper. This strikes to the core of the matter. Metrics should be seen merely as managerial tools rather than journalistic ones to ensure that core journalistic values and integrity are protected…whatever these mean to any individual media organization.

References Alejandro, J. 2016. “Journalism in the Age of Social Media”. Oxford University: Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, 2010. Accessed November 2, 2016, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Journalism% 20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Soci al%20Media.pdf. Anderson, C. 2011. “Between Creative and Quantified Audiences: Web Metrics and Changing Patterns of News Work in Local US Newsrooms. Journalism no. 12 (5) (2011): 550-556. Anderson, C; Bell, E., and C. Shirky. 2014. “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present.” Tow Centre for Digital Journalism. Accessed November 6, 2016, http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrialjournalism-adapting-to-the-present-2/. Bell, E. 2016. “Facebook is Eating the World.” Columbia Journalism Review. (March 7). Accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php. Barton C. 2016. “Anatomy of a Redundancy: The Suffocation of LongForm Journalism in New Zealand”. In Don’t Dream It’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Emma Johnson, Giovanni Tiso, Sarah Illingworth, and Barnaby Bennett, 144164. Christchurch: Freerange Press.

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Brown, R. 2016. “Obscuring the News.” Public Address, (September 4). Accessed January 16, 2017, http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/obscuring-the-news/. Bunce, M. 2015. “Africa in the Click Stream: Audience Metrics and Foreign Correspondents in Africa.” African Journalism Studies no. 36 (4): 12-29. Cagé, J. 2016. Saving the Media: Capitalism, Crowdfunding, and Democracy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Kindle edition. Cherubini, F., and R. K. Nielsen. 2016. “Editorial Analytics: How News Media Are Developing and Using Audience Data and Metrics.” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Accessed November 7, 2016, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/editorial-analyticshow-news-media-are-developing-and-using-audience-data-andmetrics. Chyi, I. H., and O. Tenenboim. 2016. “Reality Check.” Journalism Practice. Accessed January 18, 2017, doi: 10.1080/17512786.2016.1208056. Cohen, N. S. 2015. “From Pink Slips to Pink Slime: Transforming Media Labor in a Digital Age.” The Communication Review no. 18 (2): 98122. Cornia, A., and N. Thurman. 2016. “Influences on Journalists’ Work.” In Journalists in the UK, edited by Neil Thurman, Alessio Cornia, and Jessica Kunert, 41-50. Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism. Accessed November 1, 2016, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Journalists%2 0in%20the%20UK.pdf. Davies, J. 2016. “UK Publishers Are Mixed on Performance of Facebook Instant Articles.” Digiday, (September 12). Accessed September 20, 2016, http://digiday.com/publishers/uk-publishers-mixed-performancefacebook-instant-articles/. Gottfried, J., and E. Shearer. 2016. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016.” Pew Research Center. Accessed September 28, 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-mediaplatforms-2016/. Hanusch, F. 2016. “Web Analytics and the Functional Differentiation of Journalism Cultures: Individual, Organizational and Platform-Specific Influences on Newswork.” Information, Communication & Society: 116.

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Ingram, M. 2016. “Facebook Traffic to US News Sites Has Fallen by Double Digits, Report Says.” Fortune. (August 16). Accessed August 20, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/08/16/facebook-traffic-media/ Jarvis, J. 2015. “Geeks Bearing Gifts. Metrics.” Medium. (May 12). Accessed January 6, 2017, https://medium.com/geeks-bearing-gifts/metrics89484db7c01b#.tva4m56s9. Kennedy, D. 2017. “No More ‘Paper of Record’: McCrory Offers More Details on the Globes Reinvention.” Media Nation. (January 4). Accessed January 16, 2017, https://dankennedy.net/2017/01/04/nomore-paper-of-record-mcgrory-offers-more-details-on-the-globesreinvention/. Lu, K., and J. Holcomb. 2016. “Digital News Revenue: Fact Sheet”. Pew Research Center. Accessed September 15, 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/digital-news-revenue-factsheet/. Murdock, G. 2011. “Commodities, Gifts and Public Goods.” In The Handbook of Political Economy of Communication, edited by Jane Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa, 13-40. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing. Murdock, G., and P. Golding. 1973. “For Political Economy of Mass Communication.” The Social Register: 205-233. Murtha, J. 2016. “What it’s Like to Get Paid for Clicks.” The Columbian Journalism Review. (July 13). Accessed October 20, 2016 http://www.cjr.org/analysis/the_mission_sounds_simple_pay.php. Myllylahti, M. 2016a. “How Digital Are the News Publishers? A Study of Newspaper Publishers’ Evolving Revenues, and How They May Support Journalism and Future Newsrooms”. Paper presented at the World Journalism Education Congress, Auckland, New Zealand, July 15, 2016. —. 2016b. “What Content is Worth Locking Behind a Paywall.” Digital Journalism :1-12. Accessed, January 6, 2017, doi: 10.1080/21670811.2016.1178074. Newman, N. 2017. “Journalism, Media and Technology Predictions. Digital News Project 2017.” Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism, 2017. Accessed January 16, 2017, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/journalism-mediaand-technology-trends-and-predictions-2017. Nguyen, A. 2013. “Online News Audiences: The Challenges of Web Metrics.” Chapter 9: 146-162. Bournemouth University Centre for

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Journalism & Communication Research. Accessed, November 14, 2016, https://core.ac.uk/display/17200956. Petre, C. 2016. “The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and the New York Times.” Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Accessed on November 8, 2016, http://towcenter.org/research/trafficfactories/. Picard, R. G. 2011. The Economics and Financing of Media Companies. 2nd edition. New York: Fordham University Press. Pickard, V. 2015. “Conclusion: Confronting Market Failure. America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform”: 212-231. Accessed October 30, 2016, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/420/?utm_source=repository.up enn.edu%2Fasc_papers%2F420&ut m_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages. Piechota, G. 2016. “The Facebook-Media Relationship Status: It’s Complicated.” International News Media Association. PDF. Rosenstiel, T. 2016. “Solving Journalism’s Hidden Problem: Terrible Analytics.” Center for Effective Public Management. Accessed November 14, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2016/07/Solvingjournalisms-hidden-problem.pdf. Rosenstiel, T., Jurkowitz, M., and Hong, J. 2012. “The Search For a New Business Model. How Newspapers Are Faring Trying to Build Digital Revenue.” Pew Research Centre for Journalism and Media. Accessed January 4, 201file://localhost/7, http/::www.journalism.org:analysis_report:search_new_business_mod el Southern, L. 2016. “It’s All Powerful and it Knows it: Publishers Reveal Their Biggest Challenges with Facebook.” Digiday, (October 27). Accessed November 11, 2016, http://digiday.com/publishers/powerful-knows-publishers-revealbiggest-challenges-facebook/. Schlesinger, P. and G. Doyle. 2016. “From Organizational Crisis to MultiPlatform Salvation? Creative Destruction and the Recomposition of News Media.” Journalism no 16 (3): 305-323. Tandoc, E. C., and R. Thomas. 2015. “The Ethics of Web Analytics.” Digital Journalism no 3 (2): 243-258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.909122

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The New York Times Company. 2016. “Innovation.” Accessed November 12, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-YorkTimes-Innovation Report#fullscreen&from_embed. —. 2017. “Journalism that stands apart.” Accessed January 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/. Thurman, N. 2016. “Journalism and Change.” In Journalists in the UK, edited by Neil Thurman, Alessio Cornia, and Jessica Kunert, 35-40. Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism. Accessed November 1, 2016, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Journalists%2 0in%20the%20UK.pdf. Thurman, N., and M. Myllylahti. 2009. “Taking the Paper Out of News. A Case Study of Taloussanomat, Europe’s First Online-only Newspaper.” Journalism Studies no 10 (5): 691-708. Usher, N. 2013. “Al Jazeera English Online. Understanding Web Metrics and News Production When a Quantified Audience is Not a Commodified Audience.” Digital Journalism no 1 (3): 335-351. Viner, Kathari. 2016. “How Technology Disrupted the Truth.” The Guardian, (July 12). Accessed September 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technologydisrupted-the-truth. Welbers, K., Van Atteveldt,W., Keinnijenhuis, J., Ruigrok, N., and J. Schaper. 2016. “News Selection Criteria in the Digital Age: Professional Norms Versus Online Audience Metrics.” Journalism no 17 (8): 1037-1053.

CHAPTER SEVEN: INNOVATION MASTERY OF JOURNALISM INNOVATION NICO DROK

Over the past 35 years I have been working in journalism education in a Western-European country (the Netherlands). Looking back, one could say that this period can be divided into two parts. The first 20 years were rather uncomplicated for journalism educators. Journalism was doing very well in our part of the world. Print circulation rose to a historic height in the 90s. Audience ratings and advertisers’ revenues peaked. Our main job as educators was to closely follow this highly successful industry by teaching our students the tricks of the trade, together with some reflection on journalism’s role in society and knowledge about political, social, economic and cultural issues. Being in this “follower mode” has been a rather comfortable position. At the end of the 90s this began to change. The public’s interest in the products of professional journalism stagnated and started to drop. Scholars and media organizations alike began to worry about the future of professional journalism. A BBC-report effectively described quality journalism as “a melting iceberg travelling south” (Barnett and Seymour 1999). For journalism education things became more complicated. The status quo in the industry could no longer serve as the indisputable aim. Journalism schools needed to change from the follower mode to the innovator mode (Deuze 2006), which turned out to be easier said than done. Journalism teachers of high reputation and long-standing experience are not that eager to leave the past behind. Moreover, in many countries, accreditation bodies stimulate conforming to the status quo by persistently considering students’ achievements at an internship and their chances of getting a first job quickly as very important indicators for quality. In order to become centres of reflection and innovation, journalism schools should no longer focus on journalism as it is today, but on the future of journalism. This future, however, is uncertain and brings about a

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new dilemma: should education aim at journalism as it is most likely to develop, given current powers and trends? Or should the discussion be taken to a normative level by aiming at what journalism could or should be (Zelizer 2017)? Christians et al. (2009) seem to support the second option: At issue is not only what is the role of journalism in society but above all what this role should be. Such a perspective of the media’s mission in democracy leads us to a normative level–beyond factual landscapes toward values and objectives (Christians et al. 2009, vii).

Yet, many schools of journalism are reluctant to opt for a more normative approach of innovation through the questioning of the roles, values and goals of professional journalism. In their thinking about renewal they are rather persistent in their inclination to follow the industry and thus define innovation mainly in terms of commerce (e.g. micropayments, entrepreneurship) and technology (e.g. data mining, distribution through new devices). Understandable as that may be, in the current era we need a more fundamental innovation. Over the past years the above-mentioned BBCreport has been followed by many studies that consider journalism as being disrupted (Nieman Reports 2012) and therefore it has to be reconstructed (Downie and Schudson 2010), rethought (Peters and Broersma 2013), reinvented (Waisbord 2013), rebuilt (Anderson 2013), reconsidered (Alexander et al. 2016) and rethought again (Peters and Broersma 2017). Using Bourdieu’s field theory, Ryfe (2017) argues that “detecting changes in journalism may require more attention to social fields outside the practice” (156). In this chapter I will try to follow this line of thought and outline some major developments in late-modern (or post-modern) society, how they trigger the need for innovation in journalism and what the role of journalism education could be. I will argue that a new type of professional is needed, one that is capable of dealing with the economic and technical changes in the direct environment of the craft, but at the same time can contribute to the more fundamental reform of the profession by rethinking its goals and core values.

The crisis in journalism The central role of journalism in modern democracy is so obvious that people are inclined to take it for granted (Christians et al. 2009, vii). Still a journalism that serves the public by providing an insight into important political, economic and socio-cultural conditions, by holding institutions and officials accountable, by supporting citizens to make choices in

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societal and personal contexts, remains indispensable (EJTA 2013). These are tasks for independent professionals and they should not be left in the hands of the state, commerce or amateurs. However, the profession that has to guarantee relevant and trustworthy information and communication is going through a difficult phase that often is referred to as a “crisis”. In fact, professional journalism finds itself in a double crisis: a financial crisis and a functional one. The financial crisis concerns the diminishing reach of professional journalism. The interest for its products is going down, especially among the young (see for instance Mindich 2005; Curran et al. 2014). This often goes hand in hand with a decreasing readiness to pay for news, which clearly is threatening the existence of mainstream news media, especially those in the private sector (Splichal and Dahlgren 2016). The solution for this financial crisis is believed to be found in technological and economic innovations, like the fitting in of new platforms, the development of new business models and the strengthening of entrepreneurial journalism. The functional crisis is also about a diminishing reach, but on a deeper level. It concerns the declining meaning of journalism for society. Blumler (2011) interprets these two crises as follows: “One is a crisis of viability, principally though not exclusively financial, threatening the existence and resources of mainstream journalistic organizations. The other is a crisis of civic adequacy, impoverishing the contributions of journalism to citizenship and democracy” (xv). Within the news industry, the functional crisis is often approached as if it were a financial one. In the problem analysis the causes are considered to be of a technological or economic nature. Therefore the solutions are also looked for in these spheres. What is often lacking is a thorough reflection on the changing function of professional journalism in society and on what this change might mean for the culture of professional journalism, its values and goals (Peters and Broersma 2013). As Franklin puts it in his recommendation of the book The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered (Alexander et al. 2016, see back page), we need more attention for “the too often missed cultural component in explanations of the current crisis facing news, democracy and journalism in an age of digital media”. This appears to be more important than ever, given the thorough changes in the context in which journalism is operating. These changes are comprehensive and sometimes contradictory, but can be understood as a/the transition from the 20th century mass media model to a 21st century network model.

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Professional culture in the mass media model The mass media model has been the basis for the “golden age” of journalism. This refers to the period of exceptional growth in the news industry during the second half of the 20th century (Picard 2013). The mass media model is an essentially sender-oriented model. It is based on a number of specific historical conditions that can be summarized as follows (Briggs and Burke 2002; Bardoel et al. 2002). In the course of the 20th century a mass audience emerges, with a rising level of education, wealth and leisure time. New techniques promote large-scale production and distribution. Applying these techniques leads to a rising degree of capital accumulation, which functions as a barrier to enter the news market and strengthens the concentration trend in the news industry. Professional journalism becomes a monopolistic supplier of a wanted and scarce good. These historical circumstances–mass audience, monopoly, scarcity–have a strong positive impact on journalism in terms of turnover and growth. Picard (2013) has calculated that real income has grown by 300 percent between 1950 and 2000, which he calls: “the unusually lucrative moment of the late 20th century”. This translated into a substantial growth of jobs. For instance: between 1960 and 2000 the number of professional journalists in my country (The Netherlands) grew 10 times as fast as the general population (450 percent against 45 percent). The current professional culture of journalism has its roots in this sender-oriented period of success. Over the years a fair degree of consensus has grown about what should be considered as the core values of professional journalism: independence, objectivity and immediacy (Weaver and Willnat 2012; Deuze 2005; Hanitzsch 2013). Independence concerns practising journalism free from hindrance, limitation or manipulation. Objectivity concerns applying proven methods in order to be able to offer well-balanced and accurate information. Immediacy concerns what most professionals see as the core of their journalistic work: the fast dissemination of news about important events and issues. These interrelated values define the relation of professional journalism to three core concepts: successively power, knowledge and time (Ahva 2010). They set professional journalism apart from public relations, art, fiction or politics (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007). In the favourable second half of the 20th century the professionalization process advanced, for instance through codification (e.g. Code of Bordeaux 1954) and the rapid growth of the number of journalism schools and journalism students. This supported the emancipation of journalism and contributed to the professional quality of journalistic work. However,

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professionalization can have its downsides. As the professionalization process advances, professional values and norms can become relatively autonomous and the profession itself can become–as Bernard Shaw has put it–a conspiracy against the rest of society (Bardoel 2002, 362; cf. Aldridge and Evetts). This is more likely to become the case if core values harden over time. In professional journalism such a hardening process has taken place, to a certain degree. Independence evolved in the direction of a strong desire for full professional autonomy which promoted detachment from the public; objectivity evolved into the direction of claiming neutrality; immediacy evolved in the direction of an ever-growing emphasis on speed. Many professional journalists have become devoted to the role of the neutral and detached mirror of reality, whose main task is to spread objective information as fast as possible (Weaver and Willnat 2012; Hanitzsch 2013). This process of hardening of professional values has widened the gap between the profession and the public. As Steele (1997, 164) has noted: “The creation of a professional class of journalists may have produced an alienation between journalism and the public.” Such an alienation or disconnect is especially problematic for a profession that legitimizes itself on the basis of its democratic function and of its claim to act on behalf of the public (Rosenberry 2010).

Communitarian criticism on the culture of journalism The way professional culture has evolved has been subject to criticism from various traditions throughout the 20th century (Christians et al. 2009; Waisbord 2013). At one end of the spectrum is the (neo)liberal critique, which mainly focused on the autonomy that professional journalists permitted themselves with regard to questions of economic viability and the demands of the markets of advertisers and consumers. At the other end of the spectrum we find the (neo)Marxist critique which considers the professional culture of journalism as a reflection of the economic relations of production and inextricably bound up with the goals, values and norms of an essentially capitalist news industry. Close to this is the Foucauldian critique, which considers journalism as being part of a disciplining power structure where deviations of prevailing social norms are exposed with a certain degree of eagerness (Waisbord 2013). Interesting as they are, none of the above critiques is primarily focused on the disconnect between the journalistic profession and its public. This focus can be found in the communitarian critique, which is related to the work of De Tocqueville and Dewey. Communitarianism emphasizes

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that people are part of social networks in which they can come to public judgement through the process of exchanging views and ideas (Yankelovich 1991: Etzioni 1993; McIntyre 2007). This type of deliberation is seen as the base material a democratic culture is made of. The higher the number and diversity of social groups that are included in the conversation, the higher its democratic value. This calls for a further reaching responsibility for journalists: not only spread the news or be a watchdog, but also support a high quality public conversation and provide the people with information that enables them to act in the public sphere. Such a vision “understands the purpose of the press as promoting and indeed improving the quality of public life–and not merely reporting on and complaining about it” (Christians et al. 2009, xx). Professional journalism, however, has become too much of a top-down, one-way information supplier, strongly focused on the institutional world. Therefore it “rarely considers ways in which journalism can foster citizens’ engagement in public affairs or public conversation. It is oriented toward a completely different set of values” (Waisbord 2013, xx). According to the communitarian critique, the most fundamental problem of 20th century mainstream journalism is its rather technocratic and elitist concept of democracy. This has led to an “under-evaluation of everyday contexts in relation to democracy, participation, and the building of civic values and cultures” (Banaji and Cammaerts 2015, 116). The essential difference between a technocratic and a participative model of democracy has been a central point in the famous Lippmann-Dewey controversy of the 1920s (see Splichal 1999; Rosen 1999). Carey (1999) has concisely summarized the consequences of this important debate for journalism: To Lippmann, the journalist is an eyewitness trying to describe what the insiders are deciding to a passive public whose only function is to vote the rascals in or out. To Dewey the journalist is, at his or her best, a catalyst of conversation, and insiders and citizens alike are active partners in that conversation. The conversation in the end is the medium of democracy, not newspapers. (Carey, 1999, 39)

Bystander or mobilizer, mirror or mover, detached or involved, consumeroriented or citizen-oriented, information or communication: these are some of the dilemmas that have influenced discussions about the nature and function of professional journalism during the 20th century. Despite counter-movements, such as social responsibility journalism in the 40s, new journalism in the 60s or peace journalism in the 70s, it was Lippmann’s view that became dominant in journalism culture. In

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journalism education, being in the follower mode, this trend was echoed: “It was Lippmann’s, not Dewey’s, view that became part of the underlying philosophy of journalism education for most of the 20th century” (Voakes 2004, 2).

A changing context The social context within which professional journalism operates has changed in many respects over the past decades. These changes are manifold and sometimes contradictory, but they can–with some good will– be summarized by distinguishing four main developments: informatization, internationalization, individualization, and informalization (the 4 i’s; Drok 2007). Informatization concerns the process in which digital information technology becomes all-pervasive, entering almost every aspect of public and private life. Informatization supports many new possibilities for distribution of news, including far-reaching customization of content and diversification of moment of use. On the level of society as a whole, it facilitates the emergence of a new social infrastructure of public information and communication, with connectivity and interactivity as the new keywords (Van der Haak, Parks and Castells 2012). This new structure promotes “disintermediation”, the surpassing of journalism by public or private parties in their communication with the public. Furthermore, it allows everyone to disseminate information by themselves (citizen publishing) or contribute to the professional process of news production (user generated content, co-creation) (Singer et al. 2011; Bowman and Willis 2003; Gillmor 2004; Bruns 2005). The main challenge for journalism is to develop a truly interactive relationship with the public. Internationalization concerns the growing mobility of people, goods and ideas and the increasing economic and political interdependence between nations. Important social issues, for instance sustainability or security, become more complex and can only be understood and solved at a supranational level. At the same time globalizing trends lead to a revaluation of local identity and local community (Kenis, 2009). This twoway development has drastic consequences for professional journalism, that was born and raised in the context of the nation-state and often has become strongly interwoven with national institutional structures. It will become more important to connect the global and the local, according to the motto: “life is global, living is local” (Aldridge 2007). The main challenge for journalism is to develop new journalistic genres and

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practices to deal with complex and long-term issues in a meaningful and constructive way, in order to avoid feeding cynicism or feelings of powerlessness. Individualization concerns the process where individuals break away from traditional social structures and value systems. It stimulates cultural diversity and individual freedom of choice, but it can at the same time enhance centrifugal and fragmenting forces. Individual emotions and experiences become more important as a moral compass, at the expense of a more general ethics of duty (Bennett, 2008). The process of individualization has stimulated the diminishing interest for membership of civil society associations like church, union or political party in many countries, especially among the up-coming generation. At the same time a growing need for forms of collectiveness emerges: large scale events flourish and communities, virtual as well as geographical, are re-valued. Professional journalism might want to fill the space that the erosion of the classical civil society institutions has left. “Good journalism (…) helps to create and strengthen communities, though increasingly these are communities of interest more than those of locale alone” (Van der Haak, Parks and Castells 2012, 2926). The challenge for journalism is to meet the more specialized wishes of the individual consumer as well as the more general needs of citizens and their communities. Informalization is closely connected to individualization, but the primary focus is on the diminishing of social distance, especially with regard to its vertical dimension. This process can lead to changing relations between the general public and elites, experts and authorities. The authority of a teacher, a doctor or a journalist no longer comes automatically with the job, but must expressively be earned. Moreover, it can lead to low levels of trust in professionals (Waisbord 2013). For instance, on average about 40 percent of European citizens tends to trust the press, whereas almost 55 percent does not. 1 The challenge for journalism is to restore the trust of the public and to lay a new basis under its most important asset: credibility.

Journalism in the network model Against the background of socio-cultural, technological and economic trends such as informatization, internationalization, individualization, and informalization, the network model has begun to emerge. The network

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Eurobarometer 80, 2013. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb80/eb80_en.htm

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model has other characteristics than the mass media model. In the technological realm the network model is characterized by a digital infrastructure that is built around nodes and the relationships between them, and in which connectivity is a key concept. Information scarcity, which was one of the central pillars of the mass media model, turns into information overload. In the economic realm the network model is characterized by a smaller scale production structure of partnerships, which are able to react more effectively to a fast changing environment. Furthermore, in a network model the news market evolves into a market with many suppliers. This entails the end of monopoly for both production and distribution of news. In the socio-political realm the mass audience has become far more fragmented and it is being replaced by special interest groups as well as by communities that are focused on general interest (Van Dijk 1991; Castells 1996; Bardoel and Deuze 2001; Van der Haak, Parks and Castells 2012; Heinrich 2013). The changing context of professional journalism, summarized as the transition from the mass media model to the network model, is an extensive and complex process with consequences for the profession, for the public, for the media industry and for society as a whole. It has brought important questions for 21st century journalism to the forefront. How to meet the specialized desires of the individual consumer as well as the generalized needs of engaged citizens and their communities? How to be of value in an environment where news is abundant and concentrated attention is scarce? How to deal with important long-term issues in a way that offers the public perspectives instead of disillusion? How to develop forms and genres that enable the public to come to grips with their problems? These kinds of challenges are difficult to meet if journalists keep considering themselves mainly as detached disseminators of neutral information, as many still do (according to the role perception studies that are carried out around the world; Weaver and Wilnat 2012). In the network model cooperation, transparency and constructiveness are important values. They give new meaning to the three distinguished central values of professional journalism: independence/autonomy, objectivity and immediacy. Obviously, a certain degree of autonomy is indispensable whenever the state or the market tries to suffocate journalism’s freedom of investigation and expression. However, autonomy with respect to the public should be replaced by a willingness to cooperate. Obviously, objectivity in method (valid, accurate, fair) must remain a distinguishing feature of professional journalism. However, the claim that the outcome of journalistic work represents an objective and neutral picture of reality and truth is difficult to maintain. It should be replaced by

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transparency and accountability, as a new basis for establishing credibility. Obviously, immediacy will remain a defining characteristic of news, as the public wants to have up-to-the-minute information to be able to continuously monitor the world that surrounds them. However, ultimately, much of the fast news will be automated or taken over in other ways, and professional journalists will focus more on slower forms of journalism, aimed at investigation and problem-solving. Or as Van der Haak, Parks and Castells (2012, 2934) put it: “Journalists will concentrate on the interpretation, analysis, and storytelling of the slower and more fundamental changes in society.” Over the past years we have seen the emergence of many new labels that try to grasp the direction that journalism might or should take: communitarian journalism, conversational journalism, networked journalism, participatory journalism, interactive journalism, reciprocal journalism, constructive journalism, solution-oriented journalism, community journalism, citizen-based journalism, slow journalism, conciliatory journalism, conflict-sensitive journalism, care journalism, to mention a few. All of them express the need for innovation of journalism’s culture. Most of them are strongly indebted to the civic journalism movement that emerged at the end of the 20th century and lost momentum when web 2.0 appeared on the stage. Nowadays, it is not so fashionable anymore to propagate civic journalism, but almost three decades after it originated, it still offers an interesting framework for thinking about innovating professional journalism. As Hayashi (2017) appropriately remarks, “recent studies (…) have focused on the concept of an openly inclusive news culture that takes care of a community as a point of departure, aiming to contribute to its good” (148). One might conclude that civic journalism was ahead of its timeȄthat it came about two decades too early. As said: it still offers a useful framework and vocabulary for our thinking about innovation in professional journalism. The civic journalism movement started out of discontent with mainstream journalism, which justifies itself in the name of the public, but conceives the public in the role of a passive audience. Civic journalism builds on the communitarian critique on the culture of detachment and disconnect. It positions professional journalism in the heart of civil society, i.e. the public sphere where citizens shape our society, participate in the public debate and settle their differences in a non-violent manner (Alexander 2006). Next to “getting the facts right” civic journalism promotes a second objective: “getting the connections right” (Rosen 1996). This second objective has a twofold meaning: firstly, improving the relationship between citizens and journalists; secondly, improving the relationship between citizens and their community/society. It supported a

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journalism that is inclusive (involves citizens in agenda setting and framing), constructive (gives information on solutions and possibilities to get involved), deliberative (stimulates public judgement in the broadest possible sense) and accountable (is open about and responsible for choices and effects). Because civic journalism arose before the breakthrough of the interactive Internet, it is argued that it is out-dated and that the goals of civic journalism have been overtaken by “the arrival of new possibilities for achieving the same ends by a variety of new media” (McQuail 2013, 49). However, although new technology has supported several new forms of interactive journalism, it has left traditional journalistic values, goals and routines highly unaffected (Borger et al. 2013). The presence of a new interactive communication-structure can be seen as a necessary condition for redefining the role of journalism in society, but it is clearly not a sufficient condition. The prevailing practice is to use the new technology mainly for the fast spreading of “breaking news”. From the perspective of civic journalism this is a step back in the evolution of professional journalism, as civic journalism proposes a “shift in the fundamental purpose of journalism, moving from the Progressive goal of informing citizens, to a Deweyean conception of journalism as a form of public problem-solving” (Ryfe and Mensing 2010, 41). This focus on providing solutions is often considered as the most distinguishing element of the civic approach (Nichols et al. 2006; Rosenberry 2010). Within the ranks of professional journalists it probably has been the most criticized part; according to Ahva (2010) because solution orientation has the deepest impact on journalism’s relation with power (independence), knowledge (objectivity) and time (immediacy). Laying the focus on providing solutions questions the fundamental purpose of the profession: journalism is not seen as part of the “truth business”, but of the “problem solving business” (Campbell, 1999). In a Deweyan view, however, there is little difference between the two: in the end the goal of every quest for truth is problem-solving (Rorty, 1998). This also counts for journalism: the reason for giving attention to social issues is that in the end they will get solved. In traditional journalism the solving is left to experts and officials, in civic journalism citizens are stimulated to take part of the solving process, including the defining of the problem and the future-oriented discussion about possible solutions. Recent research shows that within the generation of the so-called millennials, a substantial group places high value on this mobilizing function of journalism (Drok and Hermans 2016).

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Renewing journalism through education The key innovation for the coming years will be to put the citizen, in his/her capacity as a potential actor in the public sphere, back in the centre of journalism. This will not be easy. The bulwark culture that was inherited from the era of the mass media model is tenacious and will not be easily replaced by a network culture. Especially the tenet of autonomy is very firmly rooted in professional culture: “(…) historical paths to professionalization show that the notion of autonomy has been central to the ideal of professional journalism” (Waisbord 2013, 43). The craving for autonomy is a tough obstacle for a “civic turn”, i.e. engaging people in journalism as well as in their democratic community through journalism. Unfortunately, the normative question to what extent journalism should be autonomous and with regard to what or whom is seldom asked (Ahva 2010, 81; Schudson 2005). Professional autonomy should not mean that journalism keeps a distance from its public. Yet, in daily practice this is often still the case, which fuels the idea that journalism is closer to elites than to the public. It reinforces the image of “a journalism that justifies itself in the public’s name but in which the public plays no role, except as an audience” (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007, 23). The transition from the mass media model to the network model is still in progress, but there can be little doubt that journalism will have to overcome its current “cultural lag”2 by adapting professional culture to the new infrastructural reality. Although research shows some changes for the better, a widely supported cultural innovation has not yet taken place and interesting new technologies are mainly used for achieving traditional ends. This leads to old journalism in new digital bottles. No transformation of an essentially “mass communication” model of public communication has yet occurred, despite more interactivity, participation and an opening to more sources of content. Journalism is largely on the side-lines of this whole process and new online forms are adapted to old purposes” (McQuail 2013, 214).

As stated before, an important reason for this is that within the industry “innovation” is understood as something that belongs to the technoeconomic realm and not as something that relates to the realm of journalism’s culture, to professional goals and values. Research shows that the persistence of this traditional conception is connected to poor

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The term “cultural lag” has been coined by Ogburn in 1922. It refers to the notion that in society culture needs time to catch up with techno-economic innovations.

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reflection within the profession (Willemars 2014). Here lies an important responsibility for journalism schools. Journalism education can be perceived as a way “in which society can intervene to influence the development of journalism” (Curran 2005, xiv). The current transition to a network society requires such an intervention, since “…journalism is of central importance to contemporary society and its future cannot simply be left to chance or its current producers alone” (McQuail 2013, 197). Yet, questions about the role educators should play in making journalism better are “surprisingly rarely asked, but need to be addressed” (Curran, ibid.) The good news is that conditions for renewal of the profession through education are becoming more promising. Nowadays, within the profession itself the idea that something has to change is growing, mainly because journalism has left its “golden age”. Gradually, more value is being attached to having a sustainable relationship with the audience, not only as a professional goal, but also as a prerequisite for any new business model. Furthermore, there appears to be a larger acceptance of the “mobilizer” role by professional journalists. And all of this is strongly supported by a new technological infrastructure that favours interaction and cooperation. Next to that, research suggests that the up growing generation is increasingly distinguishing “News” from “Journalism”; “News” is considered as fast and volatile, it can come from everywhere and it must be available anytime, anywhere and for free, whereas “Journalism” is slow and in-depth, it comes from sources that have proven to be trustworthy and it has to be valuable in public and personal contexts (Drok and Hermans 2016; Drok et al. 2016). There can be no doubt that students should learn to master the essential routines of their future profession, but this is not sufficient in times of change. It is getting more important that they learn to ask critical questions about the prevailing values, goals and practices of journalism in a changing context. “Journalists need to be able to critically reflect the current values and practices and possibly alter their own professional positions and work methods due to this reflection” (Ahva 2013, 20). Such a competence is indispensable for every profession that requires education on the higher level, but even more so for professions that are in crisis, like journalism. The European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) has acknowledged this and taken “Renewing journalism through education” as the central theme for its strategy in the coming years. A key concept in that strategy is that of the “reflective practitioner”.3 In this concept two

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The term ‘reflective practitioner’ became popular through the work of Schön (1983), which strongly linked reflection to action. In EJTA’s strategy the concept includes reflection on the societal function of journalism.

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traditions within European journalism education come together: on the one hand the academic tradition, aimed at reflection and research on a meta level, on the other hand the vocational tradition, aimed at mastering practical skills and knowledge on the executive level. In the concept of the reflective practitioner both dimensions should be combined in a balanced way. In the process of renewing journalism through education, teachers play a pivotal role. In 2017 the European Journalism Training Association will launch a large-scale survey among journalism teachers about their views on the professional values, goals and qualifications of the 21st century. The results will be presented at the 5th World Journalism Education Congress in Paris, 2019. Hopefully this will help to find answers to the question of how professional journalism can keep fulfilling its unique democratic function in a postmodern network society.

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Yankelovich, D. 1991. Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Zelizer, B. 2017. What journalism Could Be. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

CHAPTER EIGHT: PROFESSIONALISM RETOOLING THE PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM EDUCATION KATHERINE REED

To what degree a formal education in journalism should reflect or reshape professionalism in journalism is as old as journalism education itself (Folkerts 2014). From its inception in the late 19th century in either France or somewhere in the United States, depending upon your point of view, journalism education as a distinct field of study and training was determined by the pioneers in the field. Those early influencers in the United States—notably Willard Bleyer and Walter Williams— had definite ideas about what the journalism graduate ought to know and be able to do, though they differed on how much a journalism student’s education should focus on the social sciences versus the development of practical skills. However, a practical journalism education was deemed essential from the start, especially at Columbia University in New York and the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri, two schools that have long had an influence on standards in education. Difficult questions persist about what a professional education ought to comprise, and, specifically, how—even whether—it can or should strive to serve an industry undergoing constant, seismic changes, particularly since the late 1990s and the shift to digital platforms. An equally vexing question: When the means of producing and distributing information and stories are in the hands of everyone, how do we define the professional journalist as a distinct and invaluable, even incomparable entity? In other words, what do journalists trained for the profession know, and what functions can they perform that others can’t? If measured by awards, a journalism education has uncertain value, with more than half of all Pulitzer Prizes, for example, going to journalists who entered newsrooms via some other path than a journalism school

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(Medsger 2002). It’s not a stretch to imagine that a more recent survey of those who have won journalism’s highest awards didn’t receive preparation at a journalism school. It’s also worth pointing out that where most of the public is concerned, awards mean little. What the public wants is to be able to believe what it’s seeing/hearing/reading, so much so that it’s willing to suspend its disbelief if the “facts” fit their bias—whether the information upon which they’re basing important decisions has veracity, or not. The problem of weak news literacy in the public is, more than ever, very much a problem for journalism and journalism education. Polls suggest that the public is less convinced than ever of the value of journalism (Gallup September 2016). What constitutes the most relevant and useful journalism education, therefore, is more worthy of fearless inquiry than ever, setting aside all sensitivities to the often-conflicting demands of the constituencies: the industry (news organizations and professional associations), the communities a journalism school might serve, students and the people paying their tuition bills, and academic institutions themselves. What journalism educators seem to agree on—at least those who gathered in July 2016 at the World Journalism Education Congress—is that those who receive degrees in journalism ought to be strong in a long list of fundamentals, including: Adaptability Audience understanding Commitment to civic responsibility Communication/social skills Contextual understanding Courage Craft skills Creativity Critical thinking ability Cross-Cultural agility Chronic curiosity Embrace of diversity Emotional intelligence

Entrepreneurialism Ethics Flexibility for the future Hustle/initiative Intellect/fostered intellectual development Interviewing ability Openness to change Outreach/engagement skills (A sense of) ownership Research skills Resilience Social media skills Storytelling ability (verbal and visual) Writing ability

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But an experimental frame of mind and the ability to lead media organizations in new directions emerged as two of the most important attributes to develop in journalism students. That group of journalism professors considered the development of leadership as key to addressing the industry’s weaknesses. Where better than in the academic setting to imagine, create and iterate to make journalism graduates agents of change? And yet the absence of flexibility in the academic environment stands in the way for most journalism schools. Even when there’s consensus about what ought to be done, change can prove not merely elusive but often impossible. If an experimental frame of mind about journalism and leadership are two of the most important qualities of the newly minted professional, then the challenge is to create a learning environment that is most likely to produce innovative thinkers. Another important, related goal very much of the moment is shaping leaders who contribute to the preservation of the profession and its crucial role in safeguarding democracies. Because if journalism education doesn’t adopt as its primary mission the restoration of the public’s trust in journalism, journalism graduates will cease to have value. Focusing on the crisis in the relationship between journalism and the public could simplify the design of a journalism education, in many ways. It might suggest that journalism schools ought to focus mainly on news literacy/transparency practices, audience engagement and analysis, investigative/watchdog reporting and perhaps solutions journalism. Creating an environment in which students learn that the journalist’s primary purpose is to build trust within a community or communities, identify its needs, strive to serve them and then measure the impact of their efforts offers a fairly streamlined template for a journalism education.

The preoccupation with the “Teaching Hospital” model of journalism education For almost a decade, anyone interested in the value of experiential education in journalism has heard or read about the “teaching hospital model”, a term apparently first used by former Columbia University graduate journalism school dean Nicholas Lemann. In a 2013 speech in the Netherlands when he was senior adviser to the president of the Knight Foundation, Eric Newton espoused the virtues of the model and expounded on what a true “teaching hospital” journalism education would look like, if such a thing were to be created: 1. Students doing the journalism;

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2. Professionals mentoring them to improve the quality and impact of the journalism; 3. Professors bringing in topic knowledge and raising issues; 4. Innovators pioneering new tools and techniques; 5. Academics doing major research projects; 6. Everyone working together with an emphasis on not just informing a community but engaging it. The sixth element is not a type of person, it’s a way of doing things: working with each other and a community. Newton declared that there was no single true example of such a pedagogy in practice anywhere in the world. But the idea had resonance for many in journalism education already convinced that experiential learning was more important than ever as journalism becomes more technological. Also, there was funding for projects that aspired to the model. But in their white paper, “Blueprint for Change: From the Teaching Hospital to the Entrepreneurial Model of Journalism Education”, Donica Mensing and David Rife (2013) argued against the validity of the “teaching hospital” as metaphor for the ideal journalism education. Noting that the model had influenced foundation funding and curriculum revision, Mensing and Rife pointed out that the trouble with the metaphor was that it implied that journalism is static.

 The metaphor implies that journalism is a settled profession with clear boundaries that needs only to be practiced more rigorously, instead of a field with its most fundamental premises unraveling. Rather than creating conditions for students to help re-think journalistic practices, the teaching hospital model reinforces the conviction that content delivery is the primary purpose of journalism. Put simply, it makes it hard for students to think differently. (Mensing and Rife 2013)

 And yet the clarion call was heard, and numerous new journalism projects were created in schools of all sizes as educators strived to create learning environments and projects that aspired to more accurately mirror the present and near-future reality of the industry while serving the community and nurturing innovation (Francisco, Lenhoff, and Schudson 2012). Journalism schools that didn’t jump on the bandwagon continue to talk about how they might get closer to the ideal.

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Professional education and its perils No single entity seems to track, evaluate (except for purposes of accreditation) and share with journalism educators or researchers data about all of the community-oriented journalism projects underway within journalism schools around the world and their outcomes, though this would be useful to journalism education. However, it is common for journalism schools to use the term “teaching hospital” to brand the education they provide. Arizona State, for example, where Newton is now a professor of practice and Innovation Chief, lists its many journalism projects under the Cronkite News brand:

 Cronkite News is the foundation of the teaching hospital model and serves as the news division of Arizona PBS with 15 full-time editor/professors and more than 120 students who produce daily news content on TV and digital platforms for Arizona audiences. With news bureaus in Phoenix, Washington and Los Angeles, Cronkite News produces a 30-minute daily newscast on Arizona PBS and a mobile-engaged digital news site at cronkitenews.azpbs.org.

Like a teaching hospital in medical education (author’s emphasis), these immersive professional programmes provide intensive learning environments for students, important services to the community and the ability to experiment and innovate. In this case, the community service is providing critically needed, in-depth journalistic content to readers and viewers. In the United States, the University of Florida, the University of Maryland, the University of Missouri, the University of Southern California, the University of California-Berkeley, Northeastern University, the University of Alabama, Northwestern University, the University of Montana, the University of Oregon and the University of Texas-Austin, among many others, all claim to provide some “teaching hospital” or hands-on journalism education, though the connection is not always explicit as part of the programme’s brand and marketing. In Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and some Asian countries, journalism educators increasingly seek to provide students with some kind of immersion, either through a student outlet or a professional project. Some programmes emphasize the high-tech skill set their graduates will receive; others focus more strongly on serving a community or communities. Some projects are ongoing from term to term; others are limited in duration. Some projects are undertaken in partnership with or entirely within existing news organizations; others stand alone in providing content.

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Anyone who has guided students in a hands-on journalism project that has aspirations beyond the campus community knows the enormous challenges to creating a “teaching hospital” journalism education, not the least of which is ensuring the relevance, sustainability and consistency of projects a community deserves. To help students prepare for the rapidly changing digital news environment, the faculty who supervise the projects must be in a state of nearly constant retraining—and that requires funding and a commitment from educational units already financially pressured by declines in enrollment and other factors. Many journalism educators’ teaching load and publishing obligations leave little time for updating their skills. Other challenges posed by such “teaching hospital” projects include: 1) reaching consensus within faculties on what the fundamentals of journalism education are, who should teach them and how projects should build them; 2) incentivizing research faculty and fellows to engage in an ongoing conversation and collaboration with newsroom teaching faculty on questions that need answering and research that needs testing; 3) documenting, assessing and sharing in a systematic way for the greater good of journalism and journalism education those experimental ideas and innovations being tested 4) overcoming the barriers of teaching “silos” to create a truly converged journalism curriculum; 5) preparing students— especially undergraduates—for stressful, real-life reporting situations often far outside their life experience. Faculty supervising the production of journalism with a student staff are called upon to meet many objectives simultaneously, balancing the demands of production against the realities of teaching. It’s a recipe for burnout. Still, the potential benefits of striving for an intense, experiential journalism learning environment are great, especially for the development of the critical thinking skills future journalists need to quickly evaluate news events and situations, report accurately and make ethical decisions. As Robert Picard (2015) put it rather acerbically in his keynote address at a journalism education conference at Ryerson University, “Journalists who can’t think effectively will be even more worthless in the future than they are now”. Such learning environments accelerate learning and improve critical thinking skills by challenging students to make decisions on their own under the supervision of experienced professional journalists-turnedteachers. The downside: What students learn might be built on a crumbling foundation—assumptions about what the purpose of journalism is and what, therefore, people need from it. These can come from the faculty guiding the students because, put simply, faculty teach what they know. Professors of practice who aren’t fresh from an innovative digital

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newsroom, or who aren’t refreshing their skills in one, are unlikely to be able to mentor journalism students in new or nontraditional forms of journalism. That can be an obstacle to graduating students with a flexible and forward-looking relationship to the idea of journalism and some notions about its survival. This is one of the weaknesses Mensing and Rife point out: emphasizing content delivery in a “teaching hospital” newsroom/student laboratory “reinforces the conviction that content delivery is the primary purpose of journalism.” Yet, standing within this equation is the student who hopes to have marketable skills once a degree is earned and an industry that wants people to fit into slots in their organizations, which may or may not appreciate free thinkers with new and disruptive ideas about journalism.

Teaching trust-building through transparency If a degree in journalism—and, by association, a journalism education—is to retain its value, then journalism must reclaim its relevance anywhere it has been undermined by fake news, propaganda, a weak business model and low news literacy. If a journalism school doesn’t see itself as having a crucial role in rebuilding relevance and trust, then it might just be operating according to some old assumptions about journalism’s intrinsic value. Meanwhile, the industry has done little to save its reputation, continuing to behave until quite recently as if it weren’t important to explain how the work is done, who the people are doing the work and what motivates them. (Most news organizations appear to be even unwilling to defend themselves against attack while the credibility index spirals downward.) In the broadest sense possible, journalism schools must play a more active role in building a market for journalism by helping to educate citizens—not just journalism degree-seekers—about journalism and how to evaluate it. Any journalism school that teaches reporting already has the capacity to instruct on the steps of verification, which are presumably part of any curriculum. This is a valuable product whose export should have been considered long ago when the first signs of erosion of the public trust began to appear. And yet it would seem that journalists and journalism educators believed, somewhat arrogantly, that ordinary citizens weren’t capable of understanding and appreciating the mechanics and processes of news-gathering that produce reliable, trustworthy, actionable products. Now is the time to consider partnerships within communities, especially in public school systems, to help young people begin to understand what they see, hear and read in the news media. That is the future consumer of good

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journalism. Dovetailing with that mission is the journalism student, then, who must learn how to play an important role in upholding that trust through the many, small acts of transparency that should accompany news-gathering. These acts should be “baked into” instruction in reporting: 1. getting to know a community first to find out which subjects might need some journalistic inquiry or attention; 2. incorporating into the reporting the ideas and thoughts that come out of that conversation, along with the journalist’s own observations and research 3. explaining to collaborators the process of reporting and how it works, especially verification practices 4. checking and re-checking the accuracy of information gathered (because nothing is more alienating than the perception that a news organization doesn’t care about accuracy) 5. looping back to listen and respond to the community’s feedback about the journalism 6. measuring the reach and impact of the content. The goal isn’t to teach the student that the journalist is beholden only to the community but that the journalist who operates outside the community without an understanding of it or its needs is doomed to produce journalism that lacks the ring of authenticity and, therefore, a potential audience. This approach not only improves understanding of journalism; it emphasizes that journalism serves communities, not the powerful or entrenched. It encourages journalism students to learn how to cross “fault lines” and report on marginalized communities and holds the promise of bringing diverse voices to the forefront. Even the simplest professional journalism education project can be built on this audience-first foundation. Another aspect of the professional journalism education that can contribute directly to the goal of rebuilding public trust is watchdog/investigative journalism. This kind of reporting has maintained its credibility with the public, which perceives it as important, according to Pew Research findings (2009):

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Table 1 Sup pport for the journalists’ watchdog w rolle In 2013, whhen Pew querried the public again on jjournalism’s watchdog w role, the perrcentage of resspondents wh ho expressed ssupport for thaat kind of journalistic activity hadd risen to 68 percent. It seems clear that programmess with the cappacity and wh hose faculty aare truly com mmitted to providing sttudents with the best possible experienntial educatio on should include suchh projects in their t portfolios. These projeects require in nstruction in fundamenntal data journnalism skills— —beginning wiith learning ab bout open records and meetings law ws and how to o request dataa from publicc sources. Students should also leaarn how to in nterrogate dataa and use it ethically. Data visualiization skills are a the next, logical step, bbuilt on a fun ndamental understandinng of coding.. Alongside th hese courses,, students sho ould have opportunitiees to learn “shhoe leather” in nvestigative annd watchdog reporting skills that em mphasize reseearch and interviewing skillls. Teaching this t set of skills ensurees that journallism schools will w continue tto support jou urnalism’s continuing rrole in holdinng the powerrful accountabble. Being traansparent about how tthe work is doone holds thee promise of iimproving thee public’s appreciationn of this fundaamental functiion of journallism and its ro ole in our democracy. Another kind of jourrnalism that has potentiall to increase audience engagementt with journallism is solutions journalism m, which hass become

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part of some journalism curricula in the United States. The Solutions Journalism Network defines this as “critical reporting that investigates and explains credible responses to social problems” (Curry and Hammonds 2014). Preliminary research on readers’ reactions to these stories suggest readers perceive them as different, that they inspire the desire to talk to others about the subjects they explore and perhaps to get involved in some way. They also seem to have the potential to build loyalty to individual journalists and news organizations. The findings suggest that solutions journalism is an essential component of community journalism and, therefore, well worth strong consideration by journalism schools thinking about projects that build and empower audiences. They also inspire the students who participate. When done well, the initiatives buttress civil society. “For the first couple of years of my college experience, I was honestly discouraged by the journalism classes I took because they focused on ‘traditional,’ problem-oriented stories,” said University of Oregon rising senior Erin Hampton. “But when I learned about solutions journalism and was able to apply my natural optimism to rigorous reporting on solutions in my own community, I found a new facet of journalism that encouraged me to look forward to my future in the field.” (Thier September 2016)

At least four US journalism schools—University of Oregon, Arizona State, Texas State and Temple—have already experimented with solutions journalism projects through the Solutions Journalism Network. Kathryn Thier, who taught a class at Oregon, wrote that for her, “the most salient aspect of teaching solutions journalism was that it pushed students to confront the role of journalism and the journalist in society—and whether those roles should adapt. As future leaders of the profession, our students will have to answer that question.” (Thier September 2016). That quality marks this approach to teaching reporting as truly experimental, though it uses traditional methods and tools.

Toward a new metaphor: The Test Kitchen One of the problems of the “teaching hospital” model of journalism education is that it lacks creativity at its core and, in a sense, feels outdated. Journalism has never been more fluid, never more difficult to define in its essential qualities. But what most can agree upon is that it should serve audiences, and that there is often a distinction between what audiences want and what they need from journalism. The group of journalism educators at the World Journalism Education Congress in 2016

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that gathered around the question of professional journalism education found resonance in the idea that a truly experimental environment for teaching journalism ought to have the qualities of a test kitchen where experts in food preparation guide novices as they learn basic skills and then support them as they move beyond into new techniques (World Journalism Education Congress syndicate feedback session, 2016). The metaphor was seen to be particularly useful in thinking about the audience and the importance of learning how to give people what they want and need. Teaching people how to serve up news and information has much more in common with teaching people to cook for (paying) customers than it does teaching people how to provide medical care. Just as anyone with a smart phone can “report”, anyone willing to follow a recipe can cook the basics, though it helps a lot to have someone guide you. Cooking for an “audience”, whether one is running a food truck that makes just a few things or a restaurant with a 40-item menu, is quite another thing. Students must learn how to make something that people like and will pay for, and do so consistently. Journalism that is inaccurate, inauthentic or hopelessly biased is analogous to food that makes people sick or leaves them hungry. It demonstrates a lack of attention to, and respect for, the audience— customer satisfaction. The people formerly known as “the audience” aren’t unwell; they’re hungry for information (what they need), diversion (what they want), and participation (a seat at the table, a place in the kitchen, maybe even a recipe to try at home). What journalism has done in the past that has cost it so much credibility and loyalty is the equivalent of dumping food—and the cheque—on a table and walking away, heedless of whether it’s being eaten, appreciated or dumped in the trash. The “test” part of this metaphor brings into the picture the people who have been almost completely absent from the ongoing professional journalism projects within universities—researchers. The journalism school-based “professional” newsroom would seem to be made to order for the researcher wanting to test a hypothesis about news gathering, presentation or delivery, business models and myriad other subjects. Yet even at universities where journalism schools have both strong research and robust professional journalism projects for students, there seems to be little intersection in the work. Kim Walsh-Childers, a health messages researcher in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Florida, says there are three obstacles to improving the exchange of ideas between teaching newsrooms and researchers: a lack of funding for applied journalism research, greater difficulty publishing

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pragmatic but atheoretical studies, and, in some cases, failure to understand or appreciate the value of research within newsrooms—even those affiliated with a university (K. Walsh-Childers, personal communication, January 15, 2016). But the greatest benefit of rethinking the metaphor for those who value metaphors and are inspired by them is that re-imagining the teaching newsroom as a creative kitchen that serves the public puts journalism’s financial viability front and centre. Journalism schools have been criticized, even by their own graduates, for placing too little emphasis on the business of journalism. Educators have had some healthy wariness of linking the idea of “good journalism” too closely to page views and “shareability” via simpler forms like listicles, slide shows, quickie polls and video. Students themselves express derision toward some of the most popular forms while they enjoy them and share them in their personal lives. In the reporting class I’ve taught at the Missouri School of Journalism for the past 13 years, I have routinely accused my students of producing stories for “the public” that they themselves would never read. The observation has drawn outbursts of guilty laughter and smiles of recognition. But it’s an important disconnect to recognize—that even for students, the path of least resistance is the status quo, and it has the least long-term benefit for them and the survival of journalism. Students placed in a creative, fearless environment where they are encouraged to begin the process of thinking about “the story” as having certain key ingredients but many possible forms are much more likely to come up with something that both serves the audience the essential facts and is, at the same time, compelling. The result of that process is “shareability” and, potentially, good for a news organization’s viability. Metaphorically, it walks the student through the process from start to finish: deciding to make something, creating it, and then offering it to the customer who either consumes it with delight or leaves it untouched. It’s worth keeping front of mind that the customer might share the experience with 800 Facebook friends and 14,000 Twitter followers. Journalism schools that provide a professional education can’t afford to ignore the reality of how news is consumed. Committing to this idea entails finding a path to freedom from influences that hold back real change in journalism education like tooclose ties to professional organizations, alumni and parts of the industry that have ceased to be visionary about journalism and are clinging to the status quo. Those ties bind movement toward meaningful change. It means continuing the unceasing, sometimes-faltering effort to persuade university administrations that providing a good journalism education fits beautifully

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into the university’s mission of contributing to the synthesis of knowledge in society. The individual journalist is a key player in that ongoing drama within democracies and more imperiled than ever. Insofar as the university has always been a refuge for unpopular but important ideas, journalism education deserves sanctuary in it. Pushing forward may also mean re-evaluating the importance of a doctorate and tenure for some positions in journalism schools. Tenure provides some measure of protection for professors of practice who lead university-affiliated news organizations and may actually be in the position of reporting on wrongdoing by their own employer or the government bodies that provide university funding. But schools should think long and hard about the necessity of attaching tenure or its possibility to a particular teaching role if doing so makes it difficult, or impossible, to maintain the flexibility that journalism schools need to remain relevant. By the same token, the doctoral degree as a condition for every position in a school of journalism that hopes to provide a vibrant professional education seems counter-productive. The objective ought to be creating a revolving door for faculty into the profession and vice versa to ensure that fresh ideas enter the learning space and that no faculty remains for too long without opportunities to refresh their professional skills and encounter new ideas. It’s a win-win situation for the industry and education. Journalism educators, who may occasionally have time to think about the implications of certain practices and know how to articulate them, bring a voice to newsrooms not often heard. Newsroom practitioners can offer a spark of dynamism to the faculty-run newsroom in danger of becoming entrenched in old routines. Professional journalism education is a complicated undertaking, always has been, and always will be, because journalism itself is unfixed and more organic than ever. Journalism’s ability to meet its “obligation to the truth” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007) is being undermined by the public’s lack of faith in the news media’s ability to separate fact from fiction. Journalists are equally uncertain of the public’s powers of discernment. The wheel may not need reinventing, but the wheel needs marketing help. That’s where journalism is in 2017, and it’s a sobering realization. The journalism industry and professional journalism education’s co-dependency is rarely directly addressed in a meaningful way. But better late than never to build the constructively critical relationships that improve both—with nothing less than the survival of journalism and democracy at stake.

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References Curry, A. L., and K. H. Hamonds. 2014. “The Power of Solutions Journalism”. (June). Retrieved from engagingnewsproject.org. Folkerts, J. 2014. “History of Journalism Education”. Journalism & Communication Monographs, no. 16, (4): 227-299. (July 22). doi: 10.1177/1522637914541379. Francisco, T., Lenhoff, A., and M. Schudson. 2012. “The Classroom as Newsroom: Leveraging University Resources for Public Affairs Reporting”. International Journal of Communication no. 6: 21. Kovach, B., and T. Rosenstiel. 2007. The Elements of Journalism. Three Rivers Press, New York. Medsger, B. 2002. “Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way”. Zoned for Debate, no.1, (September 16). New York University faculty webforum. Mensing, D., and D. Ryfe. 2013. “Blueprint For Change: From the Teaching Hospital to the Entrepreneurial Model of Journalism Education”. In ISOJ The Official Research Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism no. 2 (2): 144-161). Pew Research Center. 2009. “Strong Support for Watchdog Role, Despite Public Criticism of News Media.” (October. 2). Retrieved from pewresearch.org. Picard, R. G. 2015. “Keynote Address”. In Toward 2020: New Directions in Journalism Education, (eds) Allen, G., Craft, S., Waddell, C., and Young, M. L. Ryerson Journalism Research Centre. Reed, K. 2014. “Before the Teaching Hospital Model: 5 Questions to Ask”. NiemanLab. (October 30). Retrieved from NiemanLab.org. —. 2016. “It’s a Test Kitchen, Not a ‘Teaching Hospital’”. MediaShift. (October 7). Retrieved from Mediashift.org. Swift, A. 2016. “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low”. (September 14). Retrieved from Gallup.com. Their, K. 2016. “Remix: How and Why to Teach Solutions Journalism”. (September 15). Retrieved from MediaShift.org. World Journalism Education Congress. 2016. (July 14-16) “Teaching Hospitals: The Challenge to Meet Modern-Day Demands while Teaching Journalism Fundamentals,” (27-30): Retrieved from wjec.aut.ac.nz/uploads/5/5/8/9/5589827/syndicate_feedback_session_wjec_2016.pdf.

CHAPTER NINE: IMAGINATION THE JOURNALISTIC IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH STEPHEN REESE

In my keynote to the World Journalism Education Congress I was given the task of contemplating the future of research in journalism. Narrowing the terrain from the broader field of communication to journalism research specifically was a helpful focus, but still presented a daunting assignment. Indeed, journalism itself has been an increasingly robust area of scholarly inquiry during the last 20 years, as many have observed (Zelizer 2011), and this in spite of the decline of legacy media industries. Membership in the traditional profession of journalism, most visibly newsroom employees, may have shrunk, but engagement in some kind of journalistic practice has grown, as indicated by still-stable undergraduate enrollments. That’s the type of paradox that makes journalism such an intriguing area of research. In this review, as I consider my own future empirical research direction, I commend useful perspectives and questions about the future of journalism research, which call for a shift in analytical perspective. My review inevitably must be somewhat biographical, but with the exception of legal research I find that my work over the better part of four decades has touched on most of the methods brought to bear on journalism, including the ones represented in the most recent WJEC gathering. That gives me somewhat of a helpful vantage point on the field in advocating for a particular stance toward research that has grown steadily more relevant. I argue that what I’ll call the journalistic imagination provides an important guide to understanding the new networked public sphere. With a nod to C. Wright Mills (1959) and his defence of the “sociological imagination”, I define the journalistic imagination as a kind of scholarly outlook for understanding the social world, characterized by natural

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curiosity beyond a narrow media or technology-centric view to the whole of society, using a variety of methods of investigation organized around social problems, and with deep normative concerns for the healthy functioning of democratic life. And by journalistic imagination I don’t mean the specific routinized aspects of the craft itself, or equate professional practice and its often superficial, cursory observation with more systematic and rigorous scholarly work. Journalism in its actual practice has many blindspots, which include being often decontextualized and ahistorical, often passive and reactive in its relationships with sources, and overly personalitycentered and sensationalized. I’m thinking instead of—at its best— journalism’s larger professional and institutional ethos that has much in common with new areas of journalism research, even if that approach still needs tempering by the deep reflection of scholarly discipline.

Challenging field What are the research questions facing us that require this journalistic imagination? As I’ve observed elsewhere, journalism is a challenging field given that our object of study is rapidly changing—whether industry, technology, or profession (Reese and Shoemaker 2016). The networked public sphere, facilitated by digital platforms and resulting connectivities, incorporates institutional and citizen journalism—meaning that in many respects the news ecosystem is more robust than ever, even as legacy media have suffered. Taking a more expansive definition of what constitutes “news” and its online platforms, more people arguably are paying attention to some form of it than ever before. The non-profit journalism sector has grown, alternative platforms have emerged, and entrepreneurial projects are proliferating, allowing journalism to continue happening—just not in the traditional organizational settings. Future research will naturally follow the global connections in that eco-system with studies of news curation, social, mobile, and other new distribution platforms, new forms of computational journalism, and structured journalism, made possible by easily reconstituting the “atomic units” of news in response to the question at hand. Changes to the user experience, difficult to keep up with given the speed of technological innovation, include the use of chatbots and virtual reality. New research challenges and opportunities are presented as well, as digital traces of social media provide new kinds of empirical data. The site of newswork itself is more fluid, making networked ethnographies more important

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while the prevalence of screen work makes observation at these sites more difficult. The wider societal context also needs to be taken into consideration. We need to account for a wider web of power relationships impinging on the media space, not the least of which the State, with new forms of networked authoritarianism in China, Russia, Turkey, and many other national emulators (Simon 2014). Beyond government itself lies a growing civil society sector, which has appropriated some of the communication functions of traditional media. A significant amount of journalism, for example, is being carried out by advocacy-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These groups provide new “boots on the ground”, augmenting the work of traditional journalists, using many of the same reportorial format and routines, while emphasizing their own credibility through well-sourced information (Powers 2015). Real material, journalistically-relevant resources are being committed to important international arenas, particularly in the developing world where they are direly needed given the cutbacks in traditional news bureaus. As Powers shows in his research (2014), however, greater activity of NGO newsmaking efforts has not brought a radical redistribution of news norms and patterns but has reinforced the prevailing norms of journalism as the similar fields of civil society institutions and journalism play out well entrenched rules of the game. The NGO role has been more adaptive and reinforcing than disruptive. In all the attention to digital activism among citizen actors, the more institutionalized, “organizationally enabled”—to use Bennet and Segerberg’s (2013) term—work of these NGO groups gets overlooked, and yet that’s where a lot of the action still is. These groups are “witnesses” where otherwise no one else would be, but if these global advocates remain hitched to the traditional media for “publicity” they will not live up to their potential. In a less benign and credibility-driven strategy other more ideologically-motivated civic actors have gone beyond traditional complaints about their treatment in the mainstream media, to lay claim to their own forms of journalism. The anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress, for example, released videos purporting to show abortionproviding doctors admitting to crimes. Although debunked, the group said it was engaged in “standard journalistic techniques”. An attorney for Planned Parenthood argued, however, that it is not “standard” technique for journalists to create fake companies, use false IDs and identities, illegally tape people, ignore all evidence that cuts against a pre-ordained conclusion, or lie about people and place them in harm’s way (Fernandez 2016). Guerilla reporter James O’Keefe notoriously used undercover video

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to discredit groups like Planned Parenthood and the liberal community organizing group ACORN, and he continues to use his 501(c)3 Project Veritas, well-funded by conservative donors, to “investigate and expose” corruption. Others may not be motivated by partisan interests but available for hire, using digital tools to monitor and discredit desired targets. The extent and consequences of these practices, outside the traditional norms of professional responsibility, are not well understood—but need to be.

Sociological and journalistic imagination In advocating for the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills opposed what he called “abstracted empiricism”, a bureaucratic style of research he thought made a fetish of method. Instead he urged scholars to take a holistic approach to research questions, to tackle the “entire drift of the age”, to think big, to organize questions around urgent social problems— and to not lose sight of the normative implications of research. The early field of communication was more narrowly rooted in social-psychology and the search for media effects. Theories of journalism, however, have followed a more sociological direction—which brings with it questions of power, control, structures, institutions, class, and community: all concepts that, as Waisbord (2014) observes, have been applied to journalism research more than other communication subfields, yielding an area often called “media sociology”—the area I’ve been most involved with (Shoemaker and Reese 2014). This approach foregrounds issues of press performance and normative concerns of how well journalism is working. So, in this respect, journalism and sociology have been brought closer together—making the work of Mills even more relevant. The journalistic imagination, as I am thinking of it, carries an openness to method. Journalistic practice has embraced a variety of evidence— including interviews, documents, direct observation, and now computational methods—once resisted by math-averse professionals (Coddington, 2015a). And indeed journalism research has moved in that direction, closer to the case-study, mixed-method eclecticism that characterized the University of Chicago sociology programme in the early 20th century—a grounded theory style of inquiry organized around social problems (Reese and Ballinger 2001). Even new big data and other computational approaches still benefit from this call for mixed methods. Network analysis helps identify the key sites for ethnography, and in big data social media analysis, we still need to go beyond visualizing interesting patterns to interrogate what’s going on behind them.

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Journalists have always been advised to “follow the money”, and they follow the facts in general to find where the story leads. In that respect, they would feel at home in the increasingly necessary multi-site ethnography, advocated by anthropologists (Marcus 1995) and comfortable with Actor Network Theory rooted in science studies, which has advised researchers to “follow the actors” (reviewed in Turner 2005). In this respect, the journalistic imagination guides, or at least is in harmony with, these new theoretical perspectives. Being so rooted in the functioning of democratic life, the journalistic imagination naturally carries with it a normative perspective, whether made explicit in specific studies or not. No matter where shifting technologies lead, this normative outlook leads us to ask: What are the criteria by which to judge performance of the news ecosystem? How do global connectivities promote openness? Where are the emerging spaces for free expression? What different arrangements in the networked public sphere serve transparency, accountability, and civic engagement?

Academy and industry: Scholarship vs. craft I want to be sure to distinguish my argument from others who have advocated a stronger place for practitioners in the academy—part of the long-running tension between professional and academic values and not the same as what I have in mind. It’s been 20 years since the US news industry foundation and think tank, the Freedom Forum, brought out a report in 1996 on journalism in the academy by Betty Medsger, the Winds of Change (Medsger 1996). She basically argued that scholarship in journalism wasn’t worth very much, that the academy was overly fixated on the PhD, was hostile to the contributions of professionals and needed to value their work—that journalism itself was an intellectual activity based on investigation and analysis. It struck me as more of a misleading, antiintellectual attack on scholarly work as it was a defence of the craft—and an effort to seek prestige for the news industry by strengthening its toehold in the university (Reese 1999; Reese and Cohen 2000). But the upheavals in the news eco-system have shaken the profession’s confidence in its future, while the journalism research field has spread beyond historic industry concerns and primary focus on legacy media. Thus, it’s harder for any single foundation or professional group to wield the kind of influence it once did. Industry colleagues and scholars have similar questions, creating more room for collaboration and greater spirit of partnership. As other social science disciplines have pursued elaborate mathematical modeling in their studies, we don’t need to apologize for adopting a

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journalistic imagination. In many ways the scholarly and professional project are closer together than ever as the journalistic imagination has taken firmer hold in recent research—including more use of, as I noted previously, case studies, fieldwork, and interviewing. In his early study of bloggers, Stephen Cooper (2010) defined a media frame as the answer to the question, “What’s going on here?” (140) That’s a very journalistic question and a good basis for scholarship. I know in my own research in China (that I’ll get to more below), I intentionally set out to take a more journalistic approach through field work and depth interviews. Even as the news eco-system has changed and the professional opportunities for young people have spread beyond traditional news organizations, the journalistic imagination is still with us and has a lot to contribute to research. In that respect Medsger in her Winds of Change report and I would be in agreement.

Case examples Two emerging areas show how journalism research has advanced beyond a strict focus on news practice and news organizations, illustrating perspectives that were nowhere to be seen 20 years ago. One is the approach to news gatekeeping as a socio-technical system, and the other involves work on media globalization through transnational networks. In keeping with the journalistic imagination, both require flexibility and methodological openness in how we think about how journalism happens. Both require following the actors, and both continue to raise normative issues regarding the logics of decision-making and normative consequences.

News gatekeeping In the familiar example of news gatekeeping, we have to ask whether we are still talking about the same thing given the different shape of the new eco-system. The gatekeeping concept still directs attention to the nownetworked and multi-layered black box of choices shaping the news (Vos and Heinderycks 2015), to explain the results of a socio-technical system: human and computational, algorithmic decision making. Some of these concerns are taken over in the emerging area of “platform studies”. Chris Anderson (2016), for example, has carried out an ethnography of a “structured journalism” team in New York, led by PolitiFact founder Bill Adair. Heather Ford has examined Wikipedia and how editors function in a gatekeeping role (Ford & Graham, 2016). Stefanie Duguay (2016) has studied Facebook Trending, a curation feature introduced by the social

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media giant combining human judgment and algorithms, but which led to controversy over the possibility that a partisan slant may have guided the selection process; she did a similar analysis of the Twitter “moments” feature introduced in 2015 based on a curation process guided by Twitter employees and other publishing partners. Mark Coddington (2015b) has done ethnographic work on the news curation process at aggregators such as Circa, and elsewhere. Regardless of the platform, we are still concerned with evaluative standards by which to gauge the gatekeeping process. The early gatekeeping concept introduced a potentially subversive element into the process, the possibility that subjectivity intruded at all into the process. This potential was rendered unproblematic in the functionalist thinking of the communication field, which assumed the gatekeeper acted benignly on behalf of the community. The reasons given by the editor in explanation of decision-making have given way to social media logic that is continuous, personalized, and live. The new logic-based model continues to problematize the gatekeeping process, against the system’s appeal to its own authority. Twitter Moments, for example, tells the user reaching the end of the list, “You’re caught up”, suggesting the epistemological point that it has successfully culled through the entirety of happenings. Normative concerns remain regarding in whose interests news decisions (by whomever or whatever) are made, particularly given the secretive quality of the guiding algorithms. There previously was an easy benchmark for subjective decision-making (bias), but what is the standard of “logic”? In a Facebook Trending controversy illustrating this unease, conservatives complained their stories were unfairly suppressed, seizing on the most intuitively concerning dimension—human judgment involved. People instinctively want to put a human face on the gatekeeper, and still don’t know what to make of the algorithm’s black box.

Media globalization The second area relates to my own work in media globalization. Journalism operates now within more globalized networks—something I’ve been interested in regarding China in particular, but the journalistic imagination still encourages normative questions (even if not posed within a familiar Western context). My interest began prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics when I wondered how the authoritarian one-party state would handle an international corps of journalists not accustomed to censorship. Given the larger normative questions, I wanted to consider those arrangements that might contribute to greater transparency and free

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expression. Later, in the edited collection with my colleague Wenhong Chen, Networked China, we explored how digital networks contribute to civic engagement (Chen and Reese 2015). In a study of Chinese bridge blogs, Nan Zheng and I examined how these platforms help connect China with international readers, contributing to the gaps in news flow due to the decline in international reporting (Zheng and Reese 2016). In a broader look at transnational environmentalism, I proposed the concept of “mediated spaces”, formed by the combination of professional journalists, citizens, and civic organizations, coming together around public issues—called by some a “green public sphere” (Yang and Calhoun 2007). In this case I deliberately approached the study more like a journalist (even as a foreign correspondent, with help from my local colleagues), conducting interviews with local sources. I identified the largest international NGOs that included environmental concerns as a key part of their mission, and that had at least one office in China (usually Beijing). These international environmental NGOs exemplify a network through which norms are circulated and which serve to globalize mediated spaces in a particular national setting (Reese 2015). Global actors bring a transnational leverage to Chinese contexts, not just by interacting with any specific news organization or specific activist campaign—or doing their own social media—but through engaging with a network of stakeholders and policy activists (necessarily the government but also grassroots NGOs, and policy experts, and of course traditional media). As carriers of a global logic, transnational NGOs exert influence on two levels: the content of their advocacy and specific plans, but also through their connections themselves, and their way of doing business— encouraging transparency, professionalism (including journalistic), and the value of global expertise. This insight broadens the terrain of journalism studies.

Conclusion Early communication research brought a certain split-personality to journalism academic programmes, typically housing faculty with a professional teaching mission but who often were trained in social science disciplines like social psychology or later in communication itself, relying on experimental and survey research. Others like James Carey argued that history and the humanities were more natural disciplinary allies with journalism (Pooley 2016), but that institutional decision was made a long time ago. In the meantime, however, fields like sociology have become more important to journalism studies, leading to an intersectional area

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broadly termed media sociology. Interestingly, when one of the most prominent professionally-oriented outposts of academic (master’s-level) training in journalism, Columbia University, launched a doctoral programme several years ago it recruited, along with James Carey, two sociologists for its small group of faculty, Michael Schudson and Todd Gitlin. This convergence means that in many respects, academic journalism and professional journalism have grown closer, making it more appropriate than ever for them to inform and enrich each other. As we consider the future of journalism research, we can observe a significant shift in analytical concepts that correspond to a shifting news eco-system. References to media content are giving way to discursive spaces. The subjective bias exercised by news gatekeepers is now viewed more appropriately as a matter of socio-technical logic. Single media sites, long the subject of traditional newsroom ethnographies, give way to broader networked assemblages (Anderson 2013). Journalism will continue to be a vibrant field, in spite of turmoil in the traditional media, but to keep up with it we need the appropriate analytical tools, using them to keep asking the big questions with a mix of methods. We need to follow the actors, follow the money, and follow the power—and not forget the normative issues that have always undergirded concerns with journalism. In short, we would be well advised to embrace the journalistic imagination.

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D’Angelo and J. A. Kuypers (Eds.), Doing News Framing Analysis Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (135–155). New York: Routledge. Duguay, S. 2016. “Trending This Moment: Examining Social Media Platforms as Information Gatekeepers Through Facebook’s Trending Topics And Twitter’s Moments”. In International Communication Association. Fukuoka, Japan. Fernandez, M. 2016. 2 Abortion Foes behind Planned Parenthood Videos are Indicted. New York Times. (January 25). Ford, H., and M. Graham. 2016. “Provenance, Power and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital Geographies”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. No. 34(6): 957-970 Marcus, G. 1995. “Ethnography in/or the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography”. Annual Review of Anthropology no. 24: 95–117. Medsger, B. 1996. “Winds of Change: Challenges Confronting Journalism Education”. Arlington, VA: Freedom Forum. Mills, C. W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford. Pooley, J. 2016. James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University’s Margins. New York: Peter Lang. Powers, M. 2014. “The Structural Organization of NGO Publicity Workௗ: Explaining Divergent Publicity Strategies at Humanitarian and Human Rights Organizations”. International Journal of Communication no. 8: 90–107. —. 2015. “The New Boots on the Groundௗ: NGOs in the Changing Landscape of International News”. Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884914568077 Reese, S. D. 1999. “The Progressive Potential of Journalism Education: Recasting the Academic Versus Professional Debate”. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics no. 4 (4): 70. http://doi.org/10.1177/1081180X9900400405. —. 2015. “Globalization of Mediated Spacesௗ: The Case of Transnational Environmentalism in China”. International Journal of Communication no. 9: 2263–2281. Reese, S. D., and J. Ballinger. 2001. “The Roots of a Sociology of News: Remembering Mr. Gates and Social Control in The Newsroom”. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly no. 78 (4): 641–658. Reese, S. D., and J. Cohen. 2000. “Educating for Journalism: The Professionalism of Scholarship”. Journalism Studies no. 1 (2): 213– 227. Reese, S. D., and P. J. Shoemaker. 2016. “A Media Sociology for the

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Networked Public Sphere: The Hierarchy of Influences Model”. Mass Communication & Society no. 19(July): 389–410. http://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2016.1174268. Shoemaker, P., and S. D. Reese. 2014. Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective. New York: Routledge. Simon, J. 2014. The New Censorship Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press. Turner, F. 2005. “Actor-Networking the News”. Social Epistemology no. 19 (4): 321–324. Vos, T., and F. Heinderycks. 2015. Gatekeeping in Transition. New York: Routledge. Waisbord, S. 2014. “Introduction: Reappraising Media Sociology”. In Media Sociology: A Reappraisal. Malden, MA: Polity. Yang, G., and C. Calhoun. 2007. “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China”. China Information no. 21 (2): 211– 236. http://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X07079644. Zelizer, B. 2011. Journalism in the Service of Communication. Journal of Communication no. 61 (1): 1–21. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01524.x. Zheng, N., and S. D. Reese. 2016. “Emerging Networks In The Global News Arena: Theorizing The Structural Role Of Chinese Bridge Blogs”. Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 1-17. 1464884916643681. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916643681.

CONTRIBUTORS

Holly Cowart is a lecturer in the multimedia journalism programme within the communication arts department at Georgia Southern University. She received her doctoral degree in mass communications from the University of Florida. She earned both her BA in communication and MA in rhetoric and composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Prior to moving to Florida, she taught as an instructor at Tennessee Tech University. Her research interests include the agenda-setting functions of news content on social media, the influence of mobile platforms on news credibility, and the role of design elements in online news presentation. Her recent published research includes an analysis of the visual narrative created on Twitter by the mainstream media of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. Geoffrey Craig is Professor and Head of Research in the School of Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology (AUT). He is the author of Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences (Polity 2016) and The Media, Politics and Public Life (Allen & Unwin 2004), the co-author of Slow Living (Berg 2006) and the coeditor of Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (Pearson 2009). He most recently taught at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has published broadly in the areas of political communication and environmental communication. Nico Drok has been working in journalism education for more than 35 years. He studied Institutional Economics and Sociology at the universities Rotterdam and Groningen, and did his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Nijmegen. He is President of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), which has 60 members in 25 European countries. Furthermore he is member of the Steering Committee of the World Journalism Education Council (WJEC). He was chairman of the Organization Committee of the World Journalism Education Congress, which was held in 2013 in Belgium. He is professor of Media & Civil Society at Windesheim University of Applied Science, Zwolle, The Netherlands. His main research interests are civic journalism, journalism

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education and news media use of young people. He is married, has two daughters and four grandchildren. Gregory Treadwell is a former reporter, photographer and newspaper editor, and is a senior lecturer in journalism at Auckland University of Technology, where he teaches news reporting, the public right-to-know and photojournalism. His research takes a political-science approach to journalism’s role in giving effect to the public right to know, contrasting the constitutional elegance of freedom-of-information regimes with its realpolitik state at the coalface of public-affairs journalism. His doctoral studies have a particular focus on the problems journalists in AotearoaNew Zealand face when seeking state-held information. Other research interests include production journalism and its response to the age of digital media. Donald Matheson is an associate professor of media and communication at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is the author of two books, Media Discourses (Open Univ Press, 2005) and Digital War Reporting (Polity Press, 2009, with Stuart Allan). He is the co-editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and immediate past-president of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. He writes on journalism practice and culture, public communication in social media and communication ethics. In a previous life he was a journalist. Merja Myllylahti, a former financial journalist and London correspondent, is currently a researcher and project manager at the Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) research centre based at Auckland University of Technology. She is also media studies lecturer at AUT and Massey University. She is an award-winning researcher, and her current research interests lie in media transformation and digital media economy, news business models, paywalls and media ownership. Her academic articles have been published in academic journals such as Journalism Studies and Digital Journalism. Her most recent publications include a book chapter “Newspaper paywalls and corporate revenues: A comparative study” published in Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (2017). Katherine Reed is an associate professor on the Print and Digital faculty in the Missouri School of Journalism. She teaches reporting, a course taken by undergraduate and graduate students who are pursuing degrees in

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photojournalism, magazine and print and digital media. She is an editor at ColumbiaMissourian.com where she supervises students covering public safety (crime and the courts) and health care. Reed came to MU from Prague in the Czech Republic where she was the editor of Prague Business Journal and an instructor at the Center for Independent Journalism. She was a reporter and copy editor for several years and taught journalism before moving to the Czech Republic. In the 1990s, she was a victim’s advocate and a consultant for the National Victim’s Center, focusing primarily on training victim assistance staff in how to understand and interact effectively with the media. She has done work with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University and the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri and now teaches a standalone course on covering traumatic events. Stephen D. Reese is the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas, USA. His research focuses on questions relating to press performance, including the sociology of news, media framing of public issues, and the globalization of journalism. Along with some 50 articles and book chapters, Reese is co-author with Pamela Shoemaker of Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective (Routledge, 2014), a follow-up volume to its predecessor, named by Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ)as one of the "significant journalism and communication books" of the 20th century. His edited volume, Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the Social World (Erlbaum, 2001), has been widely cited, and his most recent edited volume (with Wenhong Chen) is Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement (Routledge). He has served as book review and associate editor for JMCQ, and on its editorial board and 14 others. Verica Rupar is associate professor at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. She has been involved in number of international projects on media and politics in Europe, north of Africa and Asia Pacific. Her publications include Journalism and Meaning-Making (Hampton Press, 2010), Scooped: Politics and Power of Journalism in Aoteraoa New Zealand (co-edited with Sean Phelan and Martin Hirst, AUT Media 2012), and Getting the Facts Right: Reporting Ethnicity and Religion (IFJ, 2012). Rupar has written on media, politics and journalism in historical and comparative contexts. She has worked previously as a journalist in Serbia, Slovenia and Hungary, and taught journalism in New Zealand, Serbia, Australia and the UK.

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Kim Walsh-Childers is a former newspaper health reporter who teaches journalism, mass communication theory and a seminar in mass media and health at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Her research focuses on news coverage of health issues, the effects of health news coverage on individual health and health policy, and individuals’ use of online health information in making health decisions. Her work has been published in Health Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Science Communication, and the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, among others. Her research has been supported by grants from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Defense, and she was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland during the 2004-2005 academic year.

INDEX

accountability 10, 20, 49, 58, 59, 114, 143 accreditation 105 active engagement 2, 7, 14, 39, 45, 110 agents of social change 26 applied journalism research 135, 142 atheoretical studies 136 audience 14, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 30, 38, 50, 58, 59, 81, 87, 89, 90, 92, 98, 108, 113, 117, 127, 133, 135 autonomy 20, 26, 29, 37, 42, 59, 109, 113, 116 citizen journalism 114, 152 citizenship 6-11, 113 civic discourse 41, 45 civic sphere 41, 116 clickbait 76, 80, 88, 90, 91, 93 communitarian critique 109, 110, 114 computational journalism 142 connectivity 111, 113 constructiveness 113 conversational democracy 7 critical thinking 126, 130, 134 environmental journalism 13, 146 gatekeeping 95, 144, 145 habitus 38, 39, 42, 45 hard and soft news 13, 69 imagination 140, 142-144 immediacy 108, 113-114 impartiality 9, 36, 37, 39 independence 21, 22, 42, 58, 108, 109, 113, 115 information overload 76, 78, 113 innovation 13, 36, 45, 91, 106, 114, 116, 128, 130, 140



institutional sources 9, 40, 43, 140 interpretative authority 38, 40 investigative reporting 36, 127, 132 journalism crisis 106, 107 journalism culture 44, 58, 108, 109, 116 journalism education 20, 105, 106, 108, 116, 117, 125, 129-137 journalism ideology 21, 37, 40 journalistic imagination 140, 142144 listening 11-12, 20, 27, 81 marginalized communities 132 media frame 144 media sociology 142, 147 mediated spaces 146 metrics 87, 89, 93, 95, 98 modernity 6, 22, 30 nation-state 6, 111 network analysis 142, 145 network model 112-113 networked public sphere 139, 143 neutrality 37, 39, 109 news awareness 76-79 news consumption 67, 70, 90, 96 news curation 140, 144-145 news literacy 126-127, 131 news rounds 12 objectivity 36, 39, 49, 76, 108-109, 113, 115 producers 5, 10, 19, 117 professional autonomy 20, 26, 37, 42, 60, 109, 116 professional culture 44, 58, 77, 108, 116 public sphere 9, 12, 110, 116, 139, 143, 146 reflective practitioner 117-118 representation 9, 38, 42, 45, 88

156 social media 9, 11, 18, 20, 26,68, 70-72, 74, 77-79, 88, 91, 96-97, 145 social responsibility 19, 24, 45, 110, 142 solutions journalism 115, 127, 134 structured journalism 140, 144 subjectivity 12, 14, 38, 145





Index teaching hospital 127-131, 134 test kitchen model 134-135 transparency 19, 25, 44, 49-52, 56, 58, 113, 131, 145 trust-building 131 verification 132 watchdog journalism 50, 88, 110, 127