Slow Journalism

Megan Le Masurier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367587123
• eBook ISBN: 9780429891618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Slow Journalism has emerged in recent years to enact a critique of the limitations and dangers of the speed of much mainstream contemporary journalistic practice. There have been types of journalism produced and consumed slowly for centuries, of course. What is new is the context of hyper-acceleration and over-production of journalism, where quality has suffered, ethics are compromised and user attention has eroded. Many have been asking if there is another way to practice journalism. The emergence of Slow Journalism suggests that there is.

Many international scholars and practitioners have been thinking critically about the problems wrought by speed, and are utilising the concept of "slow" to describe a new way of thinking about and producing journalism. This edited collection offers theoretical perspectives and case studies on the practice of slow journalism around the globe. Slow Journalism is a new practice for new times. This book was originally published as two special issues of Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism.

ON NOT GOING TOO FAST WITH SLOW JOURNALISM

Erik Neveu

The phrase “slow journalism” is (slowly) entering the dictionary of journalism scholars. Le Masurier’s contribution in this journal in 2015 was a stimulating invitation to understand how “slowness” could summarise many current changes in journalistic practices, and to remind also that “Journalism is a plural noun.” This article firstly questions the polysemy of “slow journalism.” Slowness may wrap many layers of meaning. Slow means far from pack reporting, investigative, and more selective in its targets. But slow could as well suggest: narrative, fair (with its sources and readers), participative, community oriented, and finally, giving priority to untold stories. How can researchers deal with such a richness of meanings? The suggestion here would be double. Slow journalism should be considered as a Weberian ideal-type, questioning, not mirroring, the reality of journalism. A “soft” mapping could invite rethinking the space of slow journalisms in three (overlapping) sub-groups: explanatory, narrative, and mobilised. But claiming the need for “soft” mapping also means paying attention to fuzziness in journalistic practices.

Introduction

New words and categories often mirror changes in practices and behaviours. Journalism, or more exactly journalisms in the plural, are changing and, in the newsroom as in the school of journalism, new words and adjectives are mobilised to coin changes, as is visible in the changing labels of the Pulitzer Prizes. There is no shortage of variations on the theme of the return of literary journalism. Newness can be so striking that it even suggests the existence of a “new-new” journalism (Boynton 2005). Some reporters are claiming the practice of “immersion” journalism, others speak of “empathy” journalism. Perhaps because it seems able to wrap more dimensions of changes, the category of “slow” journalism is gaining increasing currency amongst media commentators and practitioners. The first to use the phrase “slow journalism” was Susan Greenberg (2007), and since then the most developed theoretical reflection so far comes from Megan Le Masurier (2015). This article invites a discussion of this important and stimulating contribution, to challenge it too, exploring its contradictions and potential utility in making sense of the current changes and innovations within the journalistic field.

Le Masurier’s work highlights significant changes among journalism practices. More and more editors and journalists are questioning the dominant trends of their activities. Which levels of fact-checking, of explanations and ethical standards remain possible when excellence in journalism is defined as being able to report events “live?” How is newsworthiness redefined when the logic of breaking news channels transforms the story of a woman fined because she was driving with a “Muslim veil” into the major event of the day, over-covered by press and television news bulletins as a new case of Islamic threat on French identity? The Charlie Hebdo slaughter in Paris in January 2015 gave a pathetic illustration of such situations: the media-pack covered the tiniest and meaningless moves of police forces during the killers’ hunt. A breaking-news channel was even clever enough to air the information that customers had been hidden by an employee in the Jewish supermarket’s cold storage when the terrorist besieged there was still threatening to kill all hostages. Conversely, the experience of living in some of the French “banlieues,” the social-spatial and sometimes ethnic segregation, the feeling of “no future” experienced by part of the youth living there, remained under-reported; and when reporting does occur, it is usually heavily biased by prejudices and clichés (Sedel 2013).

Is transforming the press into a carbon copy of the screens of breaking-news channels a good plan to reconquer audiences or a suicidal spiral? Is it reasonable to consider that the most spectacular, shocking, or outrageous events are those which allow us to make sense of the world we live in? Should one identify news only with hot or moving events, at the risk of under-rating the impact of morphological changes and slow moves in social organisation? Should journalism highlight processes and causes or limit itself to stage the froth of spectacular or ritual events? May I add that, mobilising data and cases from various countries, Le Masurier’s overview escapes from the Anglophone parochialism which too often limits the changes worth being studied to those visible in the United States and the United Kingdom. One can agree with Tunstall’s provocative statement that the media “are American” (Tunstall 1992) (or “were American”; Tunstall 2007) and still pay attention to the innovations in the press and media visible in Amsterdam, Capetown, or Paris.

Le Masurier reminds us, too, that “journalism is a plural noun.” Social scientists do know that history is always written from the winner’s point of view, however they often fall victim to that fallacy. Journalism is a field (Benson and Neveu 2004). In a field of cultural production the most common situation is the existence of a “legitimate” type of product and skills. One can agree with Schudson (1978) when he describes the triumph of a professional orthodoxy in the history of the American press, or with Chalaby (1996) when he argues that an Anglo-American style of news-gathering and processing was established at the international level as Journalism with a capital J, against the more literary, more politically committed styles of journalism visible in Italy and France. But the existence of legitimate or dominant patterns of journalism should not prevent researchers paying attention to the fact that the journalistic field is a space of competition and permanent innovations. This is visible in the mosaic of “alternative,” “muckracking,” or “intimate” journalisms, in the variety of magazines produced or the endlessly replayed battles of the newcomers versus the established, so visible in Tom Wolfe’s (1973) manifesto of the “New Journalism.” As journalism and the press are currently facing the challenge of extraordinary changes in technologies, audiences’ behaviours, and literacy, such attention to journalism as something plural is more needed than ever. Change is both an opportunity and an imperative for the survival of something called journalism, whatever its future definition between being a compass for citizens in a public sphere and a provider of advice and services for consumers (Brin, Charron, and de Bonville, 2005).

Finally—and ambiguity may start here—the interest of the notion of “slow journalism” comes from its power to work as a shorthand description of the variety of changes and alternatives which are simmering in the field. Born in Italy, the slow food movement mentioned by Le Masurier suggests a fruitful comparison. Slow food is not simply the claim that subtle and tasty cooking requires time. Its Manifesto “Che cos’é Slow Food” values “sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment.”¹ It also pleads for “the respect of the product, of environment and taste,” for an education about the variety and pleasures of food, for a sustainable agriculture. Slow journalism too, combines a great variety of significations. It is what makes the label so attractive and stimulating. But this very variety of meanings may also be what threatens its value in replacing the impoverishing vision of journalism as an homogenous activity by a couplet fast/slow which would, too, over-simplify our vision of the mediascape.

Accordingly, this article will be structured around two major developments from the observations above. The first one explores the polysemy of “slow” journalism. It will also suggest from this starting point the possible contradictions of a concept whose multiple levels of signification may challenge its value for empirical use. The second part of this paper suggests why we should keep “slow journalism” as a useful shorthand to make sense of convergent reactions to the current crisis of journalism. It will conclude by developing some critical suggestions to prevent “slow journalism” becoming a soft or catch-all label.

A Polysemic Category

In his exciting contribution to the epistemology of social sciences, the French sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron highlights a major challenge for any conceptual work. He writes: “Two obstacles, which seem reverse at first sight, are preventing the production and articulation of definitions in social sciences” (Passeron 2006, 97). On the one hand, when researchers are looking for clear analytical categories, they may invent concepts cleverly indexed on the factual relations that they summarise, but at the risk of being so specific to the research in progress that they could never be articulated to other theoretical notions. On the other hand, when using more classical, more long-range theories, the use of such concepts may work as the Trojan horse of a huge and sometimes embarrassing legacy of uses, meanings, and debates. One can think here of notions such as “literary journalism” or “newsgathering” that combine an enormous variety of texts and practices, depending on their time-space location. Passeron concludes about such difficulties in the use and invention of concepts:

Few sociological concepts escape this dilemma: whether being too theoretical (lacking in univocal meaning for having been used to deal with questions both different and close, none of these questions having made the others obsolete) or being not theoretical enough (which means too specific to supply a usable power of analogy or generalisation beyond the specific data whose relation they express as a shorthand). Sociological concepts are “polymorphous” or “stenographic” … they combine the too much and the not enough degrees of abstraction. (Passeron 2006, 97–98)

The notion of slow journalism typically faces such a strain. Looking at first sight as a “stenographic” notion, compressing in a phrase the peculiarity of current changes, its explanatory ambition makes it “polymorphous,” bringing back, as one explores its levels of meaning, many debates as old as journalism.

The more empirical facts a concept is able to grasp, the bigger the risk that it would lack a very precise meaning. One can think here of the endlessly expanding uses of “populism” or “Islamism” in some quarters of academia, politics, and journalism. If slow journalism could be found in “essay,” “muckraking,” “long-form narrative journalism,” “creative non-fiction,” “New journalism,” and “literary journalism,” there is no doubt that common denominators could also be found in these varied genres. But it would also be easy to argue that significant differences question the utility of a common label. Muckraking has always been linked to a critical and political commitment which is not shared by all the “new” or “new-new” (Boynton 2005) journalists. Literary styles of journalism could be used not only for more slow-moving subjects, but also to report “hot” events followed by “herds” of journalists: one could think here of the astounding sketches of the Kuwaiti highways to Iraq covered by scores of burnt cars and trucks and their exhibition of charred and torn corpses in Michael Kelly’s (1993) Martyr’s Day. On the other hand, one could argue that the very polysemy of “slow journalism” is a strength which allows the concept to be tested. In his Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper ([1934] 2002) argues the more precise a theory, the more it faces the risk of empirical denials. Conversely, the more a complex theory faces victoriously the challenge of empirical testing, the more scientific it is. Let us follow this track.

Listing Meanings

The more I read and re-read Le Masurier’s paper, the more I had the feeling of discovering new dimensions and stakes suggested by the two words “slow journalism.” Reception theory has shown how texts are re-interpreted, re-written by their readers. With the hope of being faithful to the author’s analysis, I would argue that her paper suggests seven elements of definition, and questions one more.

A first meaning of slow is linked to the criticism of the cult of speed and live reporting. Here slow means … slow. Journalism needs time to check facts, to gather and process data. Some social groups or activities are resistant to investigation. Such mistrust can be triggered by the fear of being stigmatised or simply by the social distance between reporters and their targets. It can also be explained by the nature of some activities because they are illegal or need secrecy to develop. Slowness may also be the price of gaining a proper understanding of complicated processes or of activities mobilising technical devices or scientific knowledge. The difficulty of reporting financial activities (Davies 2007) is a good illustration of the inescapable slowness of some reporting. Such activities are developing in a close world of insiders and they require the understanding of highly complex dealings. This dimension of slowness should also be understood as a reaction to the “informational whirlwind” (Klinenberg 2000) experienced in newsrooms in the age of “convergence.” Here the idea of deadline has no more meaning, the website or the 24-hours-a-day channel needing its constant information fodder.

A second meaning of slowness could be linked to “investigative,” to the rehabilitation of time-consuming legwork and investigations. One of the most unpleasant experiences of many newcomers in journalism is the discovery that they will be trapped in the space of the newsroom, being connected to the real world by the twin prostheses of a computer screen and a cell-phone. Escaping from the packaged news of the PRs requires time to structure one’s network of sources, to check facts. Wasting time in cultivating contacts and playing the game of the gift and counter-gift of attention and coverage is also the price of good journalism. The stake here is to think of journalism as a practice of gathering and producing news, not of recycling or commenting on it.

In a third layer of definition slow means less. Slow journalism expresses a reaction to the overdose of “news” streaming from breaking news channels, cell-phone screens, radios, and magazines. The criticism also targets the triviality of what is labelled as news, with the emphasis on celebrities and sensational situations, the fascination for artificial dramatisation that transforms micro-events (a prostate check-up by the French president) into a dramatised rollercoaster of narratives on his health. “Better less but better” could be the motto. Slow journalism is selective, explanatory. The choice of some websites to develop only one long story a day is typical of this strategy.

In a fourth dimension slow suggests narrative, and often longer-form writing. If slow journalism can be found in varied styles of reporting, it fits especially well with narrative journalism reaching the size of a short story. Also more length means more time: for the journalist who builds a structured and data-rich article for the viewer-reader. Reading the 160 pages of the French quarterly XXI requires more time than browsing the compact articles of the free daily 20 Minutes whose very title is a time-management programme.

Le Masurier suggests a fifth dimension which could be linked to the idea of fairness. The aim of the slow-food movement is also to insti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Slow journalism: An introduction to a new research paradigm
• 1 On not going too fast with slow journalism
• 2 Reclaiming slowness in journalism: Critique, complexity and difference
• 3 Lessening the construction of otherness: A slow ethics of journalism
• 4 The temporal tipping point: Regimentation, representation and reorientation in ethnographic journalism
• 5 When slow news is good news: Book-length journalism’s role in extending and enlarging daily news
• 6 Slow journalism in Spain: New magazine startups and the paradigmatic case of Jot Down
• 7 Is there a future for slow journalism? The perspective of younger users
• 8 Editing, fast and slow
• 9 Networked news time: How slow—or fast—do publics need news to be?
• 10 Multimedia, slow journalism as process, and the possibility of proper time
• 11 The Sochi Project: Slow journalism within the transmedia space
• 12 Slowing down media coverage on the US–Mexico border: News as sociological critique in Borderland
• 13 Resiliency in Recovery: Slow journalism as public accountability in post-Katrina New Orleans
• 14 Time to engage: De Correspondent’s redefinition of journalistic quality
• 15 “Make every frame count”: The practice of slow photojournalism and the work of David Burnett
• 16 The business of slow journalism: Deep storytelling’s alternative economies
• 17 Slow journalism and the Out of Eden Walk
• Index