Online Journalism from the Periphery

Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field

Scott A. Eldridge II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138945449
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317370055
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Online Journalism from the Periphery looks at how a range of new media actors, communicating online, have challenged us to think differently about the journalistic field. Emerging from the disruption of digital technology, these new actors have been met with resistance by an existing core of journalism, who perceive them as part of a 'digital threat' and dismiss their claims of journalistic belonging. As a result, cracks are appearing in the conceptual foundations of what journalism is and should be.

Applying field theory as a conceptual lens, Scott Eldridge guides the reader through the intricacies of these tensions at both the core and periphery. By first unpacking definitions of journalism as a social and cultural construction, this book explores how these are dominated by narratives which have reinforced a limited set of expectations about its purpose and reach. The book goes on to examine how these narratives have been significantly undermined by the output of major new media players, including Gawker, reddit, Breitbart, and WikiLeaks. Online Journalism from the Periphery argues for a broadening of ideas around what constitutes journalism in the modern world, concluding with alternative approaches to evaluating the contributions of emerging media heavy-weights to society and to journalism.

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INTRODUCTION

It depends on what you mean by ‘journalism’

Navigate to Google.com in a fresh browser window in early 2017 and start typing ‘is WikiLeaks . . .’ and the top four suggested queries are: ‘is WikiLeaks journalism’, ‘is WikiLeaks real’, ‘is WikiLeaks accurate’, and ‘is WikiLeaks legal’. Start typing ‘are bloggers . . .’, and Google suggests you might complete that search query with: ‘are bloggers journalists’, ‘paid’, ‘entrepreneurs’, or ‘rich’. Swap in ‘Glenn Greenwald’ for ‘WikiLeaks’ or ‘bloggers’, and the suggestions are: ‘is Glenn Greenwald the future of journalism’, ‘a republican’, ‘a liberal’, or ‘a libertarian’. Start your query with ‘is Gawker . . .’, and the search giant will ask if you are interested in whether Gawker is ‘real’, ‘satire’, ‘real news’, or – in a telling remark on the past years for Gawker Media – ‘is Gawker dead yet?’

Suggestions as they may be, these queries draw our attention to uncertainties over what constitutes journalism nowadays, and who we consider journalists in a digital age. Through their media work, each of these has also contributed new information to the public, positioning their work as news in the public’s interest, and have done so in ways that reflect traditional journalistic ideals. Greenwald led reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks, and later on the U.S. drone program for the Intercept, doing so as a watchdog on the powerful in the traditions of the ‘Fourth Estate’ (Hampton 2004). Gawker Media (on its Gizmodo site) revealed that Facebook’s editor-less trending topics were, in fact, controlled by human editors, thereby not only ‘fact-checking’ Facebook, but also informing the public about what was behind a technology they were very likely using (Carlson 2017b). WikiLeaks enabled us to reconsider U.S. military and diplomatic affairs with its releases in 2010, and acting as a watchdog its leaks offered society a path towards ‘monitorial surveillance’ on those in power (Christians et al. 2010). Bloggers, from ‘Atrios’ at Eschaton to ‘Guido Fawkes’ have reported effectively on politicians in both the US and UK, and Matt Drudge notably ‘scooped’ Newsweek to report the personal dalliances of President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998 (Fiedler 2008).

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This book explores these and other cases in order to advance new ways for scholars to consider the journalistic field as it contends with a range of actors, their newswork, and their journalistic identities. It does so by looking at some of the more controversial cases and iconoclastic actors positioning their work as journalists in recent years. Are bloggers journalists? Is Gawker real news? Efforts at making sense of these new types of actors with regard to journalism have exposed conceptual gaps in our understanding that leave these questions difficult to answer, even as they join a wide variety of actors who embrace the core functions of journalism. Adopting newer and newer ways of realizing journalism’s core societal demands, each is holding power to account in their own way, each is injecting information into public discourse, each shapes “specialist knowledge for a non-specialist audience” (Conboy 2013: 2), often while also antagonizing journalists at the core of the field. In this balance, each is also embracing a journalistic adage, first spelled by Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne in 1893: that a journalist’s priority is to ‘afflict the comfortable’ (Dunne 1906), now made possible in new ways online.

Something about these digital actors still irks journalists, though, and they have not been fully embraced by journalism studies either, not least for their ability to inform and inflame in equal measure. By traditional journalists, new actors are addressed as interlopers, seen as claiming a journalistic authority they have no right to claim, and marginalized accordingly (Eldridge 2014; Singer 2003). WikiLeaks is dismissed for a publication style that refuses to conform (Lynch 2012), bloggers adopt an overly aggressive tack to their writing (Baum and Groeling 2007; Wall 2004), and sites like Gawker that embrace gossip within journalism at times push that balance too far (Tandoc and Jenkins 2016). Of course, some of the reaction to these new actors may also be heightened because each of these direct some of their attention towards criticizing journalism in the main, and from their vantage point outside the field they have been strong critics of those they see at the centre. In the pushback to their contrarian approaches to journalism, we are reminded how “the patterns of journalism established in the mid to late nineteenth century still influence how we think about journalism today, and how journalists think about themselves” (Örnebring 2010: 68).

In light of the prominent challenges to these patterns that these actors pose, I will revisit here how we have understood journalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to better understand how it has carried into the twenty-first. For scholars, the focus in this book takes these critiques and probes how we too can make sense of media change, and how we consider the work of those emerging outside more familiar understandings of journalism. This builds on arguments that there has been a journalistic core established throughout modernity, and this core has been particularly adept at resisting new actors, emerging on its periphery, who see their work as journalism (Eldridge 2014). This ‘core’ idea of journalism has become familiar, and is the result of modern journalism’s professionalization project, which has seen journalism referred to as a singular institution with specific democratic roles (Barnhurst and Nerone 2009; Nerone 2015; Schudson and Anderson 2009). Described by Silvio Waisbord as a “consolidated profession”, journalism has been able to centre an understanding of its limits, its roles, its competencies and societal contributions by reinforcing its distinction. Thus, our ideas about journalism have been shaped by journalists’ ability “to settle boundaries and avoid intrusion from external actors” (Waisbord 2013: 11) around this ‘core’.

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This book is also a call to push towards uncomfortable spaces of inquiry, and intentionally takes into consideration digitally oriented media and actors who challenge a sense of familiarity, and sometimes decency, with their approach to news and media. Pierre Bourdieu (2005: 36) describes a field in society as a group of social actors who all agree they are “participating in the same game”, and by exploring journalism as a field, here my focus is on actors who implicitly or explicitly contend they are participating in this game, even as their style of play is more aggressive.

Interlopers and interloper media: challenging journalism’s territorial claims

Saki’s The Interlopers tells a fictional story of two men who meet one night in the wooded hunting grounds their families have long fought over. In this generations-long feud, each man is more certain than the other that the land is rightly his, though one man’s claim is considered official, his ownership ordained by law, the other has “never acquiesced in the judgment of the courts” (Saki 1969). In this story of disputes over territory, and claims and counter-claims of belonging, we see an unyielding pursuit of recognition that frames the antagonist’s identity, and drives his actions into conflict.

In new and emerging types of journalism online, I see the same insistence on belonging, and a similar conflict between those traditionally seen as journalists, and antagonistic interloping newcomers seeking recognition. This was the case when blogs covering the U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 described their work as journalism, and were treated instead as “fleas on the dog” of traditional media (Carr 2008). This was on display again when WikiLeaks gained prominence in 2010, describing itself as a journalistic organization (WikiLeaks 2011), and when its journalistic identity was dismissed, described instead as: “known more for emptying a sackload of secrets than for editing anything” (Preston 2011). We can further trace reactions across a range of cases of news emerging from the ‘fringes’ of the internet (Ball 2012), and see journalistic value downplayed when these actors are marginalized as something other than journalists (Sullivan 2013).

These narratives draw boundaries, and see journalism as centralized around a professional core. This is not some act of democratic altruism, granting certain actors belonging when they are nobly capable where others are not. To wit: In recent years we’ve seen a range of scandals among the most traditional journalists at the core (Carlson 2013; Keeble and Mair 2012), while at the same time seeing journalistic success stories from the periphery where digital actors have notably informed publics – including in the work of actors discussed here. Even where journalists at the ‘core’ working to inform publics in societies do so clearly, journalism’s consolidation is the result of a variety of dynamics of power that have allowed certain actors to emphasize their primacy over information, in contrast to others. This has reinforced a perception that journalism’s core and its periphery are in opposition to each other, and increasingly the shortcomings of this core–periphery distinction are brought to our attention (Deuze and Witschge 2017). Here, I will explore the effectiveness of such distinctions.

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However, while revisiting such distinctions, central ideas of what journalism is should not be dismissed, as those dimensions found in the core of the field are also present in the way interloper journalists see their journalism. As will be seen here, core–periphery tensions are less about whether traditional or new actors are successful at what they do, and more about the legitimacy of claims when expressed by someone on either side of this distinction. This is a dynamic in the ways social spaces take shape around who is determined-as-allowed to belong, and one that has been inflamed by a complicated set of actors who have emerged working online and positioning themselves as journalists and their work as journalism. It also calls for research that first takes into consideration the close proximity Matt Carlson highlights between journalism scholars, their subject of study, and the normative assumptions made about what journalism ‘is’ and what it ‘should’ be (Carlson 2017a), and willingly challenges these.

I argue in the pages ahead that a dichotomous view of the journalistic field should be revisited, and will develop a conceptual argument that focuses on the journalistic performances of interlopers to ask whether their subversive visions of the field can be brought into a broader discussion of journalism and what that means for a changing journalistic field. While disruptive in their approaches, and alternative in their forms, these actors express visions of journalism that at once challenge ideas about the journalistic core, while embracing shared ideas about what journalism should be. I will explore the limits of such considerations, and see where in moments or in total new actors fail to reflect ideas of journalism that, while contestable, still hold sway in society. These dynamics are as much apparent in new actors as with those that emerged in the early part of this century, and there are aspects that resonate historically as well. Bringing these discussions together to build a conceptualization of the journalistic field draws on our shared understandings of what journalism ‘is’ to better understand what it has become.

Interloper media: the periphery of the journalistic field

Positioning their work as journalism, alongside sharp critiques of traditional journalists and dominant narratives of what journalism ‘is’, interlopers complicate understandings of journalism by succeeding at gathering, verifying, and sharing information in ways previously unseen. Their work introduces new ways of informing society and understanding power, and new ways of showing this to publics so they can better understand society. Considering these dynamics within the frameworks of field theory, I will introduce new ways of resolving these differences that draw on dynamics of fields, account for contemporary change, and conceptualize the field accordingly. By exploring academic approaches to analysing the journalistic field, this book can better consider those who are dismissed as ancillary to a journalistic core, and ask bigger questions about journalism on the periphery. Through both their work and their ardent journalistic claims, interloping actors have provoked new questions over what defines journalism and journalists in a digital age, and

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challenge us to conceptualize the journalistic field as vast, rather than finite, and define journalism beyond familiar and once distinct genres and forms […] from a wide range of social agents – including a wider range of journalists – now active in creating news products and journalistic content.

(Eldridge 2017a: 50)

Offering unique approaches to reporting and publishing made possible by online technologies, ‘interlopers’ claim to offer a more robust approximation of journalistic ideals, associating their work with the notion of the ‘Fourth Estate’ and the idealized role of being a journalistic ‘watchdog’. They further embrace core understandings of a journalistic disposition, including a sense of news and information, and frequently position their work as serving the public interest with a journalistic ideal. But they do challenge us – none of the examples explored here offer straight- forward resolutions to these tensions, whether because they pose contradictory or even temporary journalistic identities, or because they steep their journalistic work in metajournalistic criticism, or because their imaginations of journalism run roughshod over relatively established notions of liberalism and societal normalcy. This research agenda is, in a word, complicated. Examining these conflicts for what they can tell us about academic approaches to studying journalism in a digital age in particular, and their broader implications for society in general, the effort here is to both appreciate where journalism is occurring beyond the field’s core (and in doing so elevate our consideration of this work) while building meaningful distinctions between journalism’s importance and the practices of those digital actors who fall short of realizing this.

This is not a study of specific digital interlopers so much as it is an effort to conceptualize what they signal about changes for the journalistic field in ways that take a range of new communicative actors and media types into consideration, probing where we can better take new types of media and media actor into account. It does so by looking at the provocations and journalistic claims made by interlopers as challenging basic premises for understanding journalism, and as opening a conceptual space for journalism’s foundational myths to be revisited. Through unpacking the ways that we evaluate journalism and journalists with new types of media actor in mind, we can expand our understanding of journalism in the more dynamic online context by focusing on the construction of a journalistic field as a process of social forces, and as a negotiation of changing concepts not only of journalism, but of journalistic work. Interrogating prevailing concepts within journalism studies as well, this offers ways of unders...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Online Journalism from the Periphery
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: It Depends on What You Mean By ‘Journalism’
• 2 Journalism’s Central Tendencies
• 3 A journalistic Field: Journalism and the ‘Fourth Estate’
• 4 Interrogating the ‘Fourth Estate’: Moving Beyond the Core and the Periphery
• 5 Interlopers and Journalism I: The Field Beyond the Core
• 6 Interlopers and Journalism II: The Observant and the Heretic
• 7 Interlopers and Journalism III: Identity, Intention, and Realization
• 8 Visualizing Journalism: Evaluating the Field, and its Dimensions
• 9 Conclusion: Considering the Journalistic Field Anew
• Index