Rethinking Journalism Again

Societal role and public relevance in a digital age

Chris Peters, Marcel Broersma, Chris Peters, Marcel Broersma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138860858
• eBook ISBN: 9781317506409
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

It's easy to make a rhetorical case for the value of journalism. Because, it is a necessary precondition for democracy; it speaks to the people and for the people; it informs citizens and enables them to make rational decisions; it functions as their watchdog on government and other powers that be.

But does rehashing such familiar rationales bring journalism studies forward? Does it contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding journalism's viability going forth? For all their seeming self-evidence, this book considers what bearing these old platitudes have in the new digital era. It asks whether such hopeful talk really reflects the concrete roles journalism now performs for people in their everyday lives. In essence, it poses questions that strike at the core of the idea of journalism itself. Is there a singular journalism that has one well-defined role in society? Is its public mandate as strong as we think?

The internationally-renowned scholars comprising the collection address these recurring concerns that have long-defined the profession and which journalism faces even more acutely today. By discussing what journalism was, is, and (possibly) will be, this book highlights key contemporary areas of debate and tackles on-going anxieties about its future.

Part I

Journalism and its societal role

1

Reconstructing journalism’s public rationale

Nick Couldry

For a century or more in so-called developed democracies, it has not been necessary to build a rationale for the public value of ‘journalism’. By ‘journalism’ I mean for this purpose the institutionalized production of facts, information and reference points of common interest for public circulation. Debates have raged about whether particular aspects of journalistic practice meet the standards that society expects (notably and recently, the recent UK phone-hacking scandal). Such debates often rely on the notion of a ‘free press’, but always assume that journalism will continue to exist. It is quite another matter to build normative arguments as to why journalism in general needs to exist and, how, in order for it to exist over the long-term, it should be funded in some form. But that is today’s challenge, and it involves rethinking journalism not so much in its practical implementation, but, more fundamentally, as part of the infrastructure that healthy societies need. The warm glow cast by the principle of a ‘free press’ is insufficient in itself as an argument to re-create a free press in a digital age when, as I will explain, an older model of journalism is under threat.

The legal theorist Edwin Baker captured the sense of vertigo appropriate when discussing such questions in the following passage, whose first version was published back in 1998: ‘democracy is impossible without a free press. At least courts and commentators tells us so … This consensus, however, floats above crucial, but more controversial matters. What type of free press does a democracy need and why does democracy need it? And if governmental policy correctives are necessary … what interventions would promote a more “democratic press” – that is, a press that properly serves a society committed to democracy?’ (Baker, 2002, p. 125). Yet the digital age will almost certainly require us to build precisely such normative arguments rather than float above them. The specific reason derives from recent developments in the advertising industries and the data mining sector that has grown up to support them: those developments are having profound effects on journalism’s potential social role in a digital age.

Joseph Turow (2007) has, in the past decade, carried out pioneering work on the increasing niche specialization of the advertising industry; importantly, in his most recent book The Daily You (2012), he has uncovered how the value of audiences to advertisers is increasingly being redefined, in particular in the USA. A new model of advertising has emerged whereby no longer do audiences represent the speculative value of an aggregate of viewers paying simultaneous attention to mass-targeted advertising content (while really intending to watch something else); audience value becomes the precisely weighted value of the data that can be gleaned about an individual consumer by sending a particular (often customized) advertisement to them at a particular moment when they are online for any purpose whatsoever. The index of advertising cost, and thus of the value of advertising to its sellers, has become less and less the cultural context of mainstream audiences’ collective media consumption, and more and more an instantaneous data-point which lacks any context in the contents that media industries have historically produced. If that is right, the basic economic rationale for advertisers’ historic cross-subsidy of large-scale media content is destined over time to evaporate – at least in the USA and in other countries where, albeit possibly within a different balance between public and private subsidy, the same underlying dynamic of data-driven tracking of audiences is developing. If so, in order to survive longer-term, journalism practices as we know them must either become directly profitable in their own right (something which, with the exception of specialist outlets like the Financial Times, they have not recently been) or must receive new forms of subsidy from other, as yet undiscovered, sources – hence the need for a new public rationale for journalism that can convince all citizens, not just journalists and advertisers, of its necessity.

This issue is something in which, as a citizen, I have become increasingly concerned. So, with due humility as a non-specialist in journalism studies, I want to explore in this chapter how we might build the normative arguments that can reinforce older rationales for the public subsidy of journalism (where they exist) and support new rationales (where they do not).

Background

We are looking here at the unintended side-effects for democracy of advertisers’ fundamental revision of the subsidy that their industry has long provided to media firms. The argument is not that this revision has occurred universally or is destined to do so, but rather that it has a dynamic which challenges us to rethink the public rationale for journalism in a new and more robust way. But how can we start to get a grip on this problem?

Democracy depends on some effective form of participation, and media institutions have played a major role in sustaining that over the past two centuries. Take Robert Dahl’s (1989) classic theory of ‘polyarchy’, which means the various frameworks that in large societies are necessary before we can have anything like a working democracy in place. For Dahl, polyarchy requires political relations between the state and its citizens based on ‘broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation’ (Tilly, 2007, pp. 13–14). But such consultation in turn requires the common circulation of facts, themes and reference points as background to the issues for consultation. Such shared public reference points go well beyond news (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011); it will be no part of my argument to assume that it is only highly ‘rational’ journalistic content that is needed (nor indeed will I rely at all on public sphere models, which have often argued exactly that).

In diagnosing the dangers facing contemporary media institutions, it is unhelpful to romanticize their past. No one is pretending that journalism of the mass-media age was perfectly socially representative or served democratic needs without fault or without significant cost: there was no golden age. What matters are quite specific shifts in the operating conditions of today’s journalism, which may be undermining journalism’s role as a source for common reference points of both contention and mutual acknowledgement. It is those reference points that enable us to recognize each other as members of the same social and political space. The post-structuralist political theorist Chantal Mouffe (normally quoted for her emphasis on the conflictual nature of democracy) notes in her book The Democratic Paradox that democracy (if it is to be more than disguised violence) requires that social and political adversaries must share some ‘commitment to a system of reference … a way of living, or of assessing one’s life’ (Mouffe, 2000, pp. 74, 97). But how is such a shared commitment sustainable over the longer term when advertisers and marketers are driven by the need for, and professional content producers are increasingly oriented to offering, the personalization of content in ways that mark off one consumer from another?

These concerns go far beyond earlier concerns about the segmentation that came with challenges to public broadcasters due to TV channel multiplication or the early rise of the internet (Katz, 1996; Gitlin, 1998). Today we are potentially seeing a deep personalization: content whose selection has already been decided for citizens on the basis of criteria unknown to them and calibrated not to their actual selection decisions, but to big data-generated assumptions about where those citizens would want to focus their attention or where marketers need those citizens’ attention to be focused. Concerns about something like this have already emerged in the political field regarding the segmentation of information in political campaigns (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008). But the concern here is actually wider: it is the adoption in all public communication of individualized information targeting as an overriding, not an occasional, principle. This development is not the result of a conspiracy to remove people from collective experience or democratic participation. It is just an accidental result – a negative externality, as economists call it – of how the relations and mutual interdependencies between advertising, big data and media content production have developed over the past two decades. And note that it is personalization at the level of news production (in the source of inputs to news circulation) with which I am concerned. I acknowledge entirely that personalization is not the only force at play at the level of news consumption, where the sharing of news is a huge trend.

The key point¹ is expressed in a quotation from Joseph Turow’s book The Daily You: ‘Marketers haven’t ever wanted to underwrite the content industry’, Rishad Tobaccowala, a high-ranking Publicis strategy executive, told Turow in 2010. ‘They’ve been forced’ (Turow, 2012, pp. 111–12). This implies that once advertisers are no longer so forced because they can reach audiences another way, they will cease to do that underwriting. This danger has been noted by commentators on the future of the newspaper form, most trenchantly by Clay Shirky (2009; see also Anderson, Bell and Shirky, 2012). But I hope to show that the concern here goes much wider than a concern for the future of newspapers as particular media formats.

If that quote from a top marketing executive – named recently by Time magazine as one of its five leading ‘marketing innovators’ worldwide – expresses the new direction of travel, its implementation takes a number of potential forms, as Turow and I explain in more detail elsewhere (Couldry and Turow, 2014; see also Anderson, 2013; Carlson, 2013). The first dynamic is the most dominant to date and involves publishers working with advertisers to personalize the signals consumers receive when they encounter particular editorial matter. Using a growing number of data points, marketers and publishers vary their messages according to the types of people, and even the individuals, being targeted. The second dynamic has emerged during this decade and is known as native advertising. A native ad is any form of content that supports the aims of an advertiser (who also pays for it) while mimicking the style of the publisher carrying it – hence the word ‘native’. It is advertising masquerading as something native to the journalistic domain. The New York Times’ new website design seeks to quarantine it within a boundary labelled ‘paid post’, but it is unclear how long this boundary will be meaningful and what the impact will be of a large percentage of what readers see being marketing content of this sort. What if one result is that readers lose their capacity to notice the boundary?

These first two forms of personalized content-creation are advertiser-driven. So far, publishers have not moved so much to change the agenda of material they show visitors or to change the content itself based on what they believe they know about their visitors, but there are signs that this is under way, as Turow (2012) notes. As publishers become used to advertisers’ micro-targeting and as native advertising becomes a part of their everyday landscape, it is easy to see how publishers might develop this third dynamic. They may begin to vary their own material based on their sites’ visitors and what they know about the visitors. We are not there yet, but it is the growing tendency that is of crucial importance. It is captured by this quotation from the industry-oriented newsletter PaidContent (January 2013):

Twitter’s gotten better and better at what’s called ‘entity extraction’ – identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing … Real time entity extraction crossed with signals like those described above is the Holy Grail. This is fundamentally the same goal that both Google and Facebook are focused on as well: how do you show users only things that are relevant to them, and hide those that aren’t – in real time?

(Quoted in Couldry and Turow, 2014, p. 1717, emphasis added)

Note the comment ‘relevant to them’. No one is suggesting, incidentally, that personal relevance will become the only dynamic shaping the news that reaches individuals; indeed, it will always be relevant to individuals to know something of what is relevant to others, just because they must live and compete with others over scarce resources. Rather, the issue is a shift in the balance of forces that influence journalism as it is performed on a daily basis.

Three dynamics are at work here: targeted messaging, embedded ads and content producers’ gradual personalization of content. We can predict that at some point in the not too distant future, they will begin working together, and marketers and publishers will routinely start showing different constructions of reality to people that they categorize differently. People may not realize they are being treated differently and may not understand the reason even if they do. Indeed, the logic (expressed by the PaidContent writer) of ‘hiding’ in advance from individuals what is less ‘relevant’ to them must automatically also conceal the fact that it is operating. Marketers and publishers will try to reduce tensions over this situation by claiming a service of increased – indeed, more ‘personal’ – relevance to their customers. After a while, people may take such personalization for granted as the filter through which they must try to understand the world (compare Pariser, 2011).

For sure, most media institutions have always competed on the basis of targeting audience segments, hoping to offer what seems to suit those segments’ tastes, at least at a generic level. And, to be sure, some pressures today still run counter to personalization. Large media will for the foreseeable future continue to make claims that they speak to the wider population; indeed, governments rely on them to make such claims if there is to be a space of appearances in which politics can visibly get done. As noted above, even personal relevance dictates to some extent that such presences remain. Meanwhile, mega-events do manage to draw people through the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Notes of contributors
• Introduction: Towards a functional perspective on journalism’s role and relevance
• Part I Journalism and its societal role
• Part II Journalism and its public relevance
• Index