Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age

Steen Steensen, Laura Ahva, Steen Steensen, Laura Ahva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138684072
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134841356
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Given the interdisciplinary nature of digital journalism studies and the increasingly blurred boundaries of journalism, there is a need within the field of journalism studies to widen the scope of theoretical perspectives and approaches. Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age discusses new avenues in theorising journalism, and reassesses established theories.

Contributors to this volume describe fresh concepts such as de-differentiation, circulation, news networks, and spatiality to explain journalism in a digital age, and provide concepts which further theorise technology as a fundamental part of journalism, such as actants and materiality. Several chapters discuss the latitude of user positions in the digitalised domain of journalism, exploring maximal–minimal participation, routines–interpretation–agency, and mobility–cross-mediality–participation. Finally, the book provides theoretical tools with which to understand, in different social and cultural contexts, the evolving practices of journalism, including innovation, dispersed gatekeeping, and mediatized interdependency. The chapters in this book were originally published in special issues of Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.

ACTORS, ACTANTS, AUDIENCES, AND ACTIVITIES IN CROSS-MEDIA NEWS WORK

A matrix and a research agenda

Seth C. Lewis and Oscar Westlund

In contemporary journalism, there is a need for better conceptualizing the changing nature of human actors, nonhuman technological actants, and diverse representations of audiences—and the activities of news production, distribution, and interpretation through which actors, actants, and audiences are inter-related. This article explicates each of these elements—the Four A’s—in the context of cross-media news work, a perspective that lends equal emphasis to editorial, business, and technology as key sites for studying the organizational influences shaping journalism. We argue for developing a sociotechnical emphasis for the study of institutional news production: a holistic framework through which to make sense of and conduct research about the full range of actors, actants, and audiences engaged in cross-media news work activities. This emphasis addresses two shortcomings in the journalism studies literature: a relative neglect about (1) the interplay of humans and technology, or manual and computational modes of orientation and operation, and (2) the interplay of editorial, business, and technology in news organizations. This article’s ultimate contribution is a cross-media news work matrix that illustrates the interconnections among the Four A’s and reveals where opportunities remain for empirical study.

Introduction

Amid the widespread diffusion of digital information technologies, the mediascape is changing in various ways. Perhaps most visibly among these changes, new configurations involving social actors, technological actants, work-practice activities, and different kinds of audiences have become interlinked in ways that confound boundaries between production and consumption, professional and nonprofessional, and intra- and extra-organizational domains. Thus, the nature of who or what—whether human actor or nonhuman technological actant—guides message formation and circulation, and how such media-shaping takes place in relation to whom (certain kinds of audiences) may require some rethinking.

For the study of institutional news production particularly and news work more generally, there is a scholarly need for theoretical frameworks that accommodate and account for the shifting character of these elements and the interconnections among them: human actors (e.g., journalists, technology specialists, and businesspeople); technological actants (e.g., algorithms, networks, and content management systems); and audiences (e.g., assemblages of audiences distinct to certain platforms, devices, or applications)—all potentially intertwined in the activities that constitute cross-media news work. The term cross-media refers to the integration of multiple media platforms. When combined with news work, the concept acknowledges the various forms of journalism within a holistic framework—including editorial as well as business and technology activities, thus rendering a more complete picture of news publishing at the organizational level (Westlund 2011).

In reviewing the literature on actors, actants, audiences, and activities, we argue that there is a lack of comprehensive theorizing that acknowledges these dimensions and their inter-relatedness in contemporary cross-media news work. This article’s contribution is in explicating the “Four A’s,” introducing a matrix for visualizing their relationships, and proposing a research agenda for studying them in a more holistic fashion. Our overall purpose is to develop a heuristic for conceptualizing news production and distribution—and yet, the matrix we propose likewise could be applied to contexts of media creation and circulation more generally.

Toward a Sociotechnical Emphasis in Journalism Studies

During the past two decades, journalism studies scholars have paid special attention to the role of technology in news work (for reviews, see Domingo and Paterson 2011; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009; Steensen 2011). This research has typically drawn upon established theories and concepts for explaining how various elements of technology have been incorporated into (or resisted by) the professional cultures and organizational contexts of journalism (Lewis 2012). These approaches have been helpful in clarifying the changing character of digital news production and the evolving relationship that journalists have with audiences (e.g., Singer et al. 2011). Yet, this line of research has given greater emphasis to human-centric considerations—such as individual role conceptions, organizational constraints, professional norms, national culture or ideology, and other socio-cultural factors—without sufficiently acknowledging the distinct role of technology and the inherent tension between human and machine approaches (exceptions include Anderson 2013; Boczkowski 2004). This human–technology tension is best understood as a continuum between manual and computational modes of orientation and output in contemporary cross-media news work—a way of perceiving the relative gravitational pull of each dimension in shaping news publishing (Westlund 2013).

Additionally, this vein of journalism studies has focused heavily, if not exclusively, on the editorial sides of news organizations. The result has been neglect in the literature for socio-technical objects and information technology specialists (exceptions include Ananny 2013; Nielsen 2012), particularly when such technologies and technologists operate beyond the boundaries of the organization. Even in recent studies of computer programmers and related technical specialists, scholars have prioritized the study of editorial implications vis-à-vis a broader reading of organizational change (e.g., Karlsen and Stavelin 2014; Lee-Wright 2008; Parasie and Dagiral 2013). This emphasis is understandable: editorial actors are most associated with shaping media content and its downstream impact on media audiences. Nevertheless, we argue alongside media management scholars that business elements are no less crucial to the overall framework of institutional news production.

Because of these blind spots in the literature—of failing to account more fully for the human–technology dynamic, on the one hand, as well as the organizational interplay of editorial, technology and business on the other—there is an opportunity for developing a sociotechnical emphasis in journalism studies. This emphasis is not a deterministic view that assumes technology is “changing” journalism; on the contrary, by bringing to the fore technologies and technologists as key aspects of study, this approach adds a sociotechnical focus to the ongoing sociocultural research being done about journalism, helping to reveal nuances in the relationships among human actors inside the organization, human audiences beyond it, and the nonhuman actants that cross-mediate their interplay. Additionally, this sociotechnical emphasis acknowledges the extent to which contemporary journalism is becoming interconnected with technological tools, processes, and ways of thinking as the new organizing logics of media work (Deuze 2007; Lewis 2012).¹

Our point of departure is to clarify the larger set of dynamics operating in the human–technology and editorial–business–technology intersections to facilitate a matrix and a research agenda for cross-media news work. We do this by explicating actors, actants, audiences, and activities, in each case describing what we know from extant literature and thereafter suggesting how a sociotechnical emphasis might shed new light on these elements and their relationships.

Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities

Actors

Humans play a central part in shaping media. Sociologically minded scholars have emphasized the social construction of technology and user agency in assessing the “impact” of tools (Boczkowski 2004; Pinch and Bijker 1984). Nevertheless, scholars of communication and technology have concluded that in all but dismissing technological determinism entirely “we may have ‘overcorrected’” (Neff et al. 2012, 300), privileging human power to the point of failing to account for the obvious in contemporary media life: “there are times and places when and where we are not fully in control of our machinescapes” (312). The upshot, Neff and colleagues suggest, is to acknowledge “technical agency,” not in assigning consciousness to technology but in recognizing the constraints that humans may face in working within technical systems of ever-growing complexity and ubiquity.

How might this apply to a study of humans working within cross-media news work? For one, journalists have long worked with both machines (technology) and machine-operators (technicians) to accomplish journalism: from lithographs to typewriters to newspaper pagination to early online journalism to content management systems (CMS). There is nothing inherently new about what Powers (2012, 25) calls “technologically specific forms of work”—forms of news work that are inextricably tied to the technologies associated with them. What is important to recognize, however, is that such forms of work, from photojournalism of yore to programmer-journalism of today, carry certain assumptions about their journalistic legitimacy. To the extent that a news practice is distinctly connected to a technical affordance, it may struggle, at least in an early stage, to be recognized as “real” or simply “ordinary” journalism (Powers 2012). Perhaps journalists discount technically enabled forms of journalism because of their conviction that reporting—a most human endeavor—is central to their professional craft (Anderson 2013). Indeed, historically the broad work of news publishing—the content-centric work of editorial—has carried a manual orientation: journalists and editors manipulated comparatively “dumb” tools to manufacture news information. Digitization, however, has brought with it a variety of technologically specific forms of work, such as social media curation and online aggregation, as well as “smart” algorithms and automated processes that in some instances can replace activities previously performed by humans—typified by the emergence of “robot journalism” and its machine-written forms of news (van Dalen 2012). While many media scholars have directed attention to the increasingly precarious conditions of news workers because of institutional and organizational pressures, less research has focused squarely on the human–technology dimension as an organizing framework. Future research might therefore investigate how editorial workers are negotiating issues of authority, identity, and expertise in connection not only with technologically specific forms of work like programmer-journalism (Lewis and Usher 2013; Parasie and Dagiral 2013) but also with the machine-led processes assuming more responsibility for functions traditionally associated with professional control (Bakker 2012; Lewis 2012; Westlund 2011).

Beyond simply recognizing the interplay of journalists and technology on the editorial side, however, a sociotechnical emphasis would also address the roles of other actors, within and beyond the news organization. External to the firm, there are several actors that reasonably play a shaping role—from sources and advertisers, to policymakers and hardware/software providers. Here we wish to focus on two internally situated social groups that historically have been less visible to media researchers and yet are no less relevant in media organizations: technologists and businesspeople. It is crucially important to acknowledge these actors, in both theory and empirical practice, if we are to grasp contemporary changes in news media from an organizational perspective.

The first group of actors would include information technology (IT) specialists, systems designers, project managers, information architects, product developers, and other programming technicians—some working on editorial-facing news applications, some working on business-facing products and services, and others working across departments to support the overall systems of digital production and distribution. Looking at the editorial angle in particular, researchers are only beginning to account for the rise of computational journalism (Anderson 2012) and its diverse manifestations in form and content (Gynnild 2013), as programmers, hackers, and Web developers play an increasingly central role in new and legacy media organizations (Lewis and Usher 2013; Parasie and Dagiral 2013).

The second group of actors, businesspeople, would include marketers, sales associates, customer relationship managers, analysts specialized in big data and behavioral targeting, and others connected with supporting the bottom line of the cross-media enterprise. It likewise could include hybrid arrangements between business and technology, such as data science teams that analyze traffic patterns to help optimize the revenue potential of paywalls and mobile apps. Neither technologists nor businesspeople have received adequate attention in the literature on technological adoption, appropriation, and innovation in journalism. Journalism researchers typically have focused on journalists and their norms and practices (e.g., Domingo and Paterson 2011). Meanwhile, scholars of media management and economics have focused on commercial managers (e.g., Küng 2008). Technologists, in both streams of research, have been mostly “black-boxed” (Latour 1987)—disregarded as key objects of study because they reside so thoroughly in the background. A research opportunity lies in stitching these domains together in a more holistic study of cross-media news work, acknowledging the social construction of technology through the interplay of editorial, technological, and business interests, as Nielsen (2012) did in his study of blogging in legacy news organizations and Westlund (2011, 2012) demonstrated in his analyses of mobile news development.

Finally, this sociotechnical emphasis would also recognize the ways in which technologists are mediating growing forms of cross-awareness and coordination between the editorial and business sides, through the co-development of information products and services for multiple platforms. For example, in what sense have technologists facilitated, if not directed, different projects and outcomes, given their distinct communities of practice, cultural norms, and perceptions of the audience as active participants rather than as commodities or relatively passive recipients? (cf., Lewis and Usher 2013; Nielsen 2012). Additionally, at the intersection of these actors, what might contemporary research reveal about the social shaping of native adve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title-Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Theories of Journalism in a Digital Age: An exploration and introduction
• 1. Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-Media News Work: A matrix and a research agenda
• 2. Who and What do Journalism? An actor-network perspective
• 3. Tracing Digital News Networks: Towards an integrated framework of the dynamics of news production, circulation and use
• 4. The Notion of the “Blurring Boundaries”: Journalism as a (de-)differentiated phenomenon
• 5. The Material Traces of Journalism: A socio-historical approach to online journalism
• 6. Journalism as Cultures of Circulation
• 7. Place-Based Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century: The creation of spatial journalism
• 8. From Grand Narratives of Democracy to Small Expectations of Participation: Audiences, citizenships, and interactive tools in digital journalism
• 9. When News is Everywhere: Understanding participation, cross-mediality and mobility in journalism from a radical user perspective
• 10. The Relevance of Journalism: Studying news audiences in a digital era
• 11. Innovation through Practice: Journalism as a structure of public communication
• 12. Politicians as Media Producers: Current trajectories in the relation between journalists and politicians in the age of social media
• 13. Gatekeeping in a Digital Era: Principles, practices and technological platforms
• 14. Charting Theoretical Directions for Examining African Journalism in the “Digital Era”
• Index