Media Globalization and Digital Journalism in Malaysia

Network Newswork

Amira Firdaus

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317204213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The media ecology within which conventional mainstream journalism currently operates has undergone major transformations since the advent of social media. These transformations arise from the disruption brought upon by the emergence of networked, interactive platforms and user-driven online applications including social media, blogs and alternative citizen news sites.

This book analyses networked forms of journalistic production at traditional news organizations and their conventional news channels. Focusing on case studies from Malaysia, it examines current transformations to the norms, practices and values of conventional news production. Drawing upon a recent global-comparative turn in journalism studies and parallel efforts to de-Westernize communication theory, this book suggests an innovative 'glocal' comparative approach to analyse 'network newswork' among global, transnational, and local news organizations, including Al Jazeera and Bernama TV, located within the same geographical locality, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This author uses an empirically-grounded conceptual framework for exploring and understanding recent transformations that user-driven networked resources bring to professional journalists' daily work of producing news. Discussing the implications of network newswork on the wider global journalistic sphere, the book elucidates a tiered model of networked sources and expounds upon journalism's deepening of the digital divide in its inadvertent muting of the voices of non-networked communities that are switched off from the global news sphere and its network society.

A fresh perspective on the analysis of globalization in the media and a useful guide for gaining access into media organizations and securing cooperation of organizational members for research, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Asian Media and Communication Studies, Journalism Studies, Political Communication and Sociology of Journalism.

1
The glocality of global media spheres

This book examines how journalists and news organizations across different news spheres integrate user-driven networked social media into long-established, institutionally-driven traditional routines of newswork, a practice I conceptualize as network newswork.

We will attend to network newswork shortly, but before we do so, I wish to open this book by first examining the larger framework of globalization, within which we will later examine global, local, and glocal practices of network newswork. This decision to position the discussion of network newswork within a globalization framework is an important one as it sets the stage for comparing this journalistic practices across news organizations operating in different news spheres (i.e. with differing news agendas and catering to differentiated global audiences). As such, this opening chapter draws upon macroframe conceptions of globalization to present a mesoframe discourse of glocality and glocal-comparative analysis as a methodology for exploring localized interpretations of globalized user-driven networked technologies (i.e. social media), and for setting the stage for theorizing and analyzing how such user-driven technologies can be integrated into institutionally-driven mainstream journalistic practices.

A network paradigm of communication

Since the closing decades of the previous century, following advent of digital technology and the internet, a new communication model featuring ubiquitous network connections, convergent digital technologies, and active media users has penetrated into centralized media systems previously characterized by discrete analog technologies and mass audiences. The mass communication model of national media systems across the world has now evolved and transformed into a globalized networking model of media and communication. (Cardoso, 2008; Castells, 2000).

This network paradigm of communication is relevant to conceptions of contemporary media spheres because it recognizes the significance transformations that new networked media bring into contemporary globalized society, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the continuing relevance of institutionally-driven media outlets (i.e. mainstream or legacy news organizations).

With regards to news and journalism, Cardoso argues that convergence of new and traditional news media result in a “coexistence” (p. 617) of various news models. Journalism, argues Cardoso, has gone beyond the dialectic between opinion (i.e. editorial) and fact, to become an amalgamation with multiplied forms of producers and multiplied models of news which are “diversified in terms of perceived quality, quantity of news displayed, scope of themes chosen, type of sources, etc.” (ibid, p. 618).

Overlapping coexistence: networked media and mass media

Thus, a notable feature of a network paradigm of communication is that it does not negate the relevance of mass media forms. This paradigm recognizes and problematizes transformations related to media use and informational flows in a new media ecosystem. This is an ecosystem in which new networked media complements to mass media (e.g. news aggregators or social media sites that publish analytics of most liked or most shared news stories), whilst also competing with it (e.g. rise in number of people getting news from social media and decline of print newspaper readership). This paradigm of communication recognizes the coexistence of – and the relationship between – institutionally-driven news spheres and user-driven media spheres.

Related conceptions of journalistic coexistence highlight the intermeshing of the journalistic sphere with user-driven media spheres, and also gives rise to a new globalization paradigm and a global news sphere. (Volkmer, 2003, p. 12)

The increasing blurry lines between multiple coexisting forms of journalism (Duffy, 2011) and flows of information between them gives credence to the notion of networked journalism. In essence, the term brings forth a notion of “professionals and amateurs… linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives” (Jarvis, 2006, para.2). In this way, networked journalism thus encompasses all forms of journalism models, emphasizing collaboration between professional journalists and non-journalists taking advantage of “the way that social and technological changes are opening up new audiences, distribution methods and communities” (Beckett, 2008, p. 7).

In theorizing a similar journalism model that relates to the news production aspect of networked journalism, Heinrich (2011) proposes a network journalism [sic] model that describes the networking logic that characterizes current journalistic practices in which news organizations take full advantage of technological networks and social networks (professional and personal) to gather, produce, and disseminate news.

Other news models that point to coexistence of multiple media spheres include Bruns’ (2007) notion of first-tier and second-tier media. Drawing from Gans’ (1980) idea of second-tier media simultaneously supplementing and critically monitoring first-tier media, Bruns (2007) argues that “news-related blogs and other alternative news websites could therefore be seen as a second tier to the news media system, acting as a corrective and companion to the traditional news media” (p. 18).

The coexistences of various news models highlights the overlap between the news sphere and the user-driven networked media sphere. This overlap is conceptually useful for narrowing the discussion at hand to current affairs and political news, as opposed to complicating the discussion with the myriad of what Waters (1995) might have called online “symbolic exchanges” in the spheres of culture, entertainment, finance, etc.

Dialectical dimensions of a networked media ecology: news and networked conversations

As noted by Heinrich (2011) in her Network Journalism book, structural transformation of news at the global level is very much intertwined with new technological innovations. Ongoing developments in communication technologies – particularly telecommunications, broadcasting, and satellite – continuously transform international communication and made media a central element of globalization (Flew, 2007; Hachten & Scotton, 2007; Volkmer, 1999, 2006a, 2007). Later advent of the internet alongside a proliferation of transnational satellite news channels, further intensified the globalization of media, and attending structures of “complex connectivity” (Tomlinson, 1999) and a globalized condition of “communicative abundance” (Keane, 1999b).¹

Developments like social bookmarking and content interactivity among news audiences contribute to communicative abundance and allow media users and institutional news producers to interact and to negotiate news and public agendas. While earlier mass media news spheres tended to be self-referential, revolving around a clustered network of institutional information providers that routinely monitor each other’s agendas in a referential network of co-orientation, the communicative abundance of contemporary networked media spheres potentially expands this referential network by facilitating interaction with new sources of news, which include non-institutional media actors, such as the citizen journalist, the political activist, or the layperson on social media (Heinrich, 2011).

From a journalistic perspective, and viewed within a spatial context, complex connectivity and communicative abundance in the networked media ecology facilitates what Giddens (2000) might call a “stretching” of the public sphere, into supranational and subnational “spaces of flows” (Castells, 2000) that exist alongside the conventional national public sphere.

This stretched public sphere speaks with the structures of issue-based micro-spheres (Volkmer, 2003), or what Schneider and Foot (2005) conceptualize as a web sphere. Schneider and Foot conceive of individual web spheres as being a sphere of online digital informational flows revolving around a specific theme defined by an ongoing event, for example an intergovernmental summit, an international sporting event, or an unfolding natural disaster, etc. Driving the informational content and communicative flows of each theme-based web sphere are all manner of online sites and content providers, encompassing user-driven comment posts and user-generated content (including our present-day trending hashtags on social media), as well as institutionally-driven communications in the form of news media or the official websites and social media accounts of institutional actors at the heart of an ongoing issue.

In this way, individual theme-based web spheres cumulatively give rise to a transnational networked public sphere. This networked public sphere, in turn, comprises overlaps between user-driven media spheres and institutionally-driven informational spheres (e.g. news spheres or political communication spheres). The coexistence of each sphere alongside – and overlapping with – the other suggests that there are two dimensions to networked media and communication, namely a news journalism dimension and a public discourse dimension.

The news dimension refers to news reporting or journalistic analysis of politics and current events. It includes professional mainstream news actors (i.e. journalists), alternative media bloggers and citizen journalists, or social media users who actively share and comment upon news stories.

Insofar as we are concerned with networked communication flows, we can argue that a more relevant term to describe public discourse is public conversations, to borrow from Gillmor’s (2004) use of the word “conversation” to describe interaction and informational exchange among and between grassroots citizens and larger societal institutions (e.g. journalism, industry), including both rational critical debate as well as layperson public commentary. While some conversations inevitably remain mere talk – discourse that eventually stops trending and fizzles out – there are also many instances of such networked public conversations extending beyond mere talk as to spur decentralized organization of ephemeral democratic movements. Notable examples include translocal Occupy movements (i.e. Occupy Wall Street) in the early years of the 2010s and concurrent but independent rise of Arab Spring revolutions also, in the early years of this decade. More recently, a similar example of networked public conversations resulting in a global movement can be found in worldwide (mainly online) petitions against US President Donald Trump’s Executive Order banning citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

These insights are not new, of course. The impact that new media is bringing to the world have been discussed, debated, and dissected extensively since the turn of the 21st century. Scholarly and political attention to new media transformations have been continuously intensifying since the explosion of social media around the turn of the 2010s.

Undoubtedly there are many theories and thoughts to explain the power of new media to affect societal and political transformations. One explanatory framework that is particularly relevant here is the idea that globalized networked media serves as an intersection point where the three dimensions of public discourse (i.e. news, rational critical debate, and public commentary) intersect, amalgamate, and create meaningful buzz. Simultaneously, networked media facilitates conversation and discourse between actors in the news sphere, the political sphere, and the grass-roots public sphere, and ultimately redefines the notion of the public sphere and its impact on the political sphere.

In other words, networked public conversations redefine the meaning and the role of the public(s) within the news sphere. Social authorities (including journalists and news media) traditionally held a view of the public as a general news-consuming audience (Nolan, 2006). However, the advent of publicly accessible platforms of public communication allow media users to define their own identities as members of the public, and to thus react to current events accordingly. Similarly, authority-imposed definitions of the public that often influence journalistic norms and news coverage (ibid), may or may not be shared by citizen journalists, bloggers, and social media users who, according to their own notions of the public, are free to decide what is, or is not, in the public interest. Where such news users collectively endorse news content by sharing, reposting, and voting up particular news stories, individual users thus aggregate themselves into a collective public with the institutional clout not only to endorse but to influence news coverage and news agenda (Thorson, 2008). These developments resonate with a sociological tradition of discussing publics and public sphere in which Park’s (1972) notion of “crowds” as “masses in action” is a central assumption (see Butsch, 2007, p. 2). Where journalists and news outlets constantly monitor social media, gather information from networked media users, and incorporate user-generated content into their news stories – thus moving social media content from the realm of the alternative to the mainstream, they too facilitate the possible mainstreaming of public-driven (i.e. user-driven) news agendas.

The coexistence of news journalism alongside public conversations ultimately facilitate a “diversification” (Volkmer, 2003) of a formerly universal national public sphere, into diverse decentralized “microspheres” organized around shared interest i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The glocality of global media spheres
• 2 Network newswork within traditional contexts of news production
• 3 A glocal context for exploring journalistic transformations
• 4 Ideological and organizational influences on network newswork
• 5 Doing network newswork: professional norms and individual preferences
• 6 Network newswork across news spheres
• 7 Network newswork and the wider media ecology
• 8 Making meaningful journalism
• Afterword
• Index