In this essay, I consider the challenges of doing research in a shifting domain, where technology has made the concept of journalism itself problematic. For many years, I have used (in my own work with Shoemaker on media sociology) a levels-of-analysis hierarchy of influences perspective to sort out the factors impinging on the symbolic reality produced by journalism, but a âspatial turnâ has made concepts of fields, spheres, and networks much more relevant. Understanding these spaces requires thinking in less media-centric terms as we identify the newly coupled assemblages put together in producing digital journalism, beyond its traditional institutional containers. These include algorithmically restructured atomic units of news in content and different configurations of global journalism. A new wave of ethnographies has begun to tackle these challenges, using the kind of thick description that characterized the field in the pre-digital era.
The future of journalism requires new thinking, as we try to accommodate the emerging, unsettled, and shifting digital-enabled configurations of newswork with the kind of predictive, generalizable stability sought by social science. In considering this challenge, I would like to explore in this essay some concepts that I have worked with over the years and consider how to adapt them in this new period of our field, what I will call the ânew geographyâ of journalism research. And I find myself approaching this new geography with analytical preferences that have become steadily less linear and more spatial. Although much of the research I am familiar with in journalism studies (what I will also refer to as media sociology) has a decidedly American focus, I observe that many new studies I draw on, particularly in the area of digital journalism, come with a British perspective. With Journalism Studies and newer publications such as Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism, Cardiff University has provided an important platform for an increasingly international community of scholarsâwhich has included strong participation from students and colleagues at my own institution.1 Consequently, I was particularly pleased to be asked to provide a keynote at the 2015 Future of Journalism conference, from which this essay is adapted.
I am accustomed to thinking of media sociology from a levels-of-analysis perspective, as an organizing framework. Of course, I have noticed the âspatial turnâ in the metaphors we use to describe media and journalism: whether networks, fields, or spheres, so in recent years I have tried to address those ideas as best I can, and want to think here about how I might reconcile them within the levels framework. I realize what a difficult field we have to theorize, when the master concept of journalism itself is so problematic and unstable. When Pam Shoemaker and I revisited not long ago our book, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content, I realized how much had changed since the last revision effort we made in 1996âthe industry, profession, and the technology (Shoemaker and Reese 1996, 2014). As a result, we made the case to the publisher for a new title, signifying more than just a third edition. A hierarchy of influences model had worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routinesâand the news organizations that housed them. But both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing have been destabilized and restructured. The public sphere is constituted with new configurations: of news-work, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which have produced new emerging deliberative spaces (Reese 2009). We are all faced with the need to adapt our research thinking to this changing master concept.
A Sociology of News Historiography
Some historical background gives context to this challenge. The early twentieth-century perspectives on journalism were at home in the University of Chicago School of Sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. Communities existed in communication rather than affected by it. That changed when the communication field migrated east to the world of Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton at Columbia with a more narrow media effects focus (Gitlin 1978; Reese and Ballinger 2001). There were a couple of prominent American studies in the 1950s regarding the news gatekeeper and social control in the newsroom, but these did not catch on at the time with the larger field. But several years later social protest and upheaval in the 1960s brought greater concern about how journalism was implicated in a discredited power structure, leading to a broader interest in the inner workings of institutional journalismâas represented most visibly by a number of newsroom ethnographies.
In her recent Journalism Studies essay, Sarah Stonbely (2013) locates a group of such studies in the later 1960s and 1970s that she argues represent a âcornerstoneâ of American media sociology, covering that âlegacyâ period of media development centered around a handful of major broadcast and print media. Among these she identifies Edward Jay Epsteinâs (1974) News from Nowhere (about network television news), Mark Fishmanâs (1980) Manufacturing the News, Gaye Tuchmanâs (1978) Making News (about local newspapers), and Herbert Gansâ (1979) Deciding Whatâs News (about national newsmagazines and television). I would certainly also include Philip Schlesingerâs Putting âRealityâ Together about the BBC (Schlesinger 1978). The Glasgow Media Group would put a critical edge on this work somewhat later in their analyses of âbad newsâ (Glasgow Media Group 1976, 1980, 1982). All of these texts broke with the prevailing communication research tradition by emphasizing news as an organizational product that had to be socially constructed, not simply transmitted to the audience. These became classic examples of newsroom sociology, time consuming but rich in detail, and served to anchor until recently our understanding of how newswork happens. (In our work on Mediating the Message, Shoemaker and I embraced both a variable-analytic and ethnographic tradition, although in my own work and in this essay, as she has pointed out to me, I have gravitated more toward the latter.)
A new wave of news ethnographies was precipitated by the migration of news online. Prominent examples include the work of Pablo Boczkowski (2004, 2010), especially in showing how technology has affected the newsroom. David Ryfeâs (2012) more recent analysis of three American newsrooms showed that journalists have not adapted very well to change, using the tensions embedded in their profession to reconfirm and justify the same procedures they have used since before the industry upheaval. Within the Gans tradition, Nikki Usher (2014) provides the most recent single-newsroom ethnography of the New York Times. This may, in fact, be the last of its kind, in choosing an elite news organization as the embodiment of the profession. Her participant observation shows that despite the major technological shifts, âmany of the routines and practices of news production observed in the golden era of news ethnography remain constantâ (228). Chris Paterson and David Domingo have collected several international studies, leading to the conclusion that the routines surrounding key values of immediacy, interactivity, and participation show remarkable similarities across a diverse host of other online settings (Domingo and Paterson 2011; Paterson and Domingo 2008). Thus, the newsroom tradition of research has been updated, but analytical challenges remain and begin with the definition of the newsroom itself.
New Spatial Geography
The conceptual boundaries of journalism have shifted with global connectivity, so we have various terms to describe the new journalistic system. But they all suggest a more networked quality. This extends to the broader deliberative arena to which journalism contributes, a space now often loosely deemed a networked public sphere, or even a global networked sphere. Benkler (2011), for example, uses networked fourth estate to refer, along with professional journalists, to those citizen and other social movements that combine to form a more decentralized and redistributed democratic discourse.
Jeff Jarvis (2006) uses networked journalism to refer to the new collaborative relationships between professional and citizen in creating new information; and journalists have become nodes in this larger structure (Haak, Parks, and Castells 2012). Others use the networked institution concept to capture the need for news organizations themselves to become more collaborative (e.g., Anderson, Bell, and Shirky 2012). Journalism can no longer be easily understood within organizational containers but extends across traditional, more well-defined boundaries in unpredictable ways. These spatial metaphorsâwhether networks, fields, or spheresâpoint to the blurring of lines between professional and citizen, and between one organization and another. This is a different way of thinking about media than studies of production within institutions.
Adding a more organic quality to the picture leads to yet other terms like news ecology and eco-system (Anderson 2013), still suggesting interconnected but diverse units, all participating in a similar space with a differentiation of roles. Traditional legacy media provide an anchor for smaller publications, bloggers, and citizens, who react to and supplement what happens in the larger press. Thus, this new organic metaphor captures the practice, product, and institutional dimensions of networked journalism. This eco-system shift is revealed in new forms of newswork. For example, the relentless flow of abundant information has led to a new breed of news aggregators who add value through digesting and repackaging informationâstripping it down to its core components. Mark Coddington (2015), for example, has done innovative recent ethnography on these professionals and their news narratives, traditionally housed within article story structures but which now get broken down into smaller âatomic units.â They can then be restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely sharedâordering them back up into different narrative structures.
Of course, this flow of dis- and re-aggregated information would not be possible without the computational power now available. Journalism, like other forms of knowledge-production, has encountered its big data moment, which has led to theoretical shifts to better understand the restructuring of news and potential for interactivity. Access to new tools brings greater analytical power to journalists but also changes the way they can structure stories to allow greater utility for the audience and enhance w...
