The Changing Faces of Journalism

Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness

Barbie Zelizer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135968465
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

The collection is introduced with an essay by Barbie Zelizer and organized into three sections: how tabloidization affects the journalistic landscape; how technology changes what we think we know about journalism; and how 'truthiness' tweaks our understanding of the journalistic tradition. Short section introductions contextualise the essays and highlight the issues that they raise, creating a coherent study of journalism today.

On Technology

Chapter 5
Rethinking Journalism Through Technology

Lokman Tsui

Has technology changed journalism to positive or negative effect? The praise for technological advances and their enrichment of journalism have been accompanied by lamentations over the role of technology in impoverishing the news. While journalism seems to benefit from technological developments in news gathering (digital and smaller cameras, digital voice recorders, convergent technology), distribution (the internet, satellite), and exhibition (the world wide web, colour print, mobile phones), there is also a sense that technology is responsible, partially or wholly, for a devaluation of journalistic standards – amateur bloggers who do not adhere to practices of fact-checking, deadlines that become shorter or even continuous because the internet is “always on”, sloppier writing, and more inaccuracies.

The essays in this section, while hopeful, seem mostly to converge on the idea that technology does more to impoverish journalism than enrich it. Julianne H. Newton suggests that “technology appears to be changing journalism more for negative effect than positive” (p. 78, of this book). Mark Deuze, though cautious, is perhaps more optimistic as he makes the case that trends caused by new technologies open up “creative affordances for individual journalists”; at the same time, however, they potentially restrict journalists’ editorial autonomy (p. 93, of this book). How justified is the pessimism being voiced here? It is worth stepping back momentarily to consider the landscape against which technology’s ascent in journalism has been implemented.

Looking at the relationship between journalism and technology from a historical perspective nearly a decade ago, John Hartley helped us understand that the two domains have always been inextricably intertwined with each other.¹ Modern journalism was born of the necessity to streamline journalistic processes – news gathering, news interpretation, and news distribution – we ended up outsourcing them to specialists, the journalists, who could devote time and energy specifically to gather information deemed relevant for the community. Over time the public increasingly became reliant on what Hartley called “representative journalism.” It is representative because the public granted the journalistic community permission to represent the public and its right to communicate. However its development produced a gap between the ability to read and the ability to write, with journalists taking over the ability to write, particularly in public, and maintaining that right over time as journalism evolved into new forms. Now is the time to ask how this situation has changed with current advances in technology. Has new technology made old constraints obsolete? Is it true, as Ian Hargreaves has argued, that now “everybody is a journalist”? If it is, then what is left of the meaning of journalism?

In that the three essays in this section invite us to rethink the meaning of journalism in the face of technological changes, we need to consider what we mean by journalism – its process, its people, or the news itself? Two ways to address this question are fruitful in light of the essays – journalism as an institution and journalism as a set of principles and values.

Looking at journalism as an institution suggests addressing the enduring rules and constraints that shape journalism and how technology affects them. What changes occur when new technology and its social practices are layered on top of already proven, legitimized and institutionalized practices? When refracted through the lens of the institution, journalism is most often seen as an institution in decline. It tries to catch up with technology but is forced to do so within the organizational constraints of the newsroom and the institutional ecology it operates in. The first essay by Pablo J. Boczkowski illustrates the problem of incorporating technology within the institutional tensions of the existing journalistic organizational field. Boczkowski helps us understand how the longstanding practice of monitoring competitors, accelerated by technology, has changed qualitatively. Coining the term, he argues how technology and the market have produced a trend that nobody actually chooses to practice but that nobody can afford not to practice. Information transparency and the increased mimicry it produces have powerful implications for the normative role of the media in providing a healthy and diverse public sphere.

A second way to think about journalism is as a set of principles and values. Here the exercise reconceptualizes what journalism can and should be, given the new technological constraints and affordances. How would journalism look if we could reinvent it from the bottom up in present time, current technology in hand? In the second essay, Julianne H. Newton engages us in exactly this kind of thought experiment by regarding the brain – and by extension, journalism – as a technology. Arguing that journalism has not benefited enough from advances in cognitive neuroscience and media ecology, Newton calls for a “journalism in the time of the new mind,” which would actively twin the “practices of reporting and conveying information of significance to human perception, survival and decision making” together with “unprecedented opportunities to understand how the brain makes use of information it perceives” (p. 74, of this book). Noting that the space in which journalism operates is being taken over by competitors in persuasion, advertising and entertainment, who exploit an understanding of the new mind to reach audiences, Newton contends that journalism needs to do the same, leaving aside its moral high ground enough to reconceptualize journalism as a technological system run and processed by new minds.

Lastly, Mark Deuze balances a vision of journalism as an existing institution and as a set of principles and values when he explores the implications of new technologies on the agency of individual journalists and their work. Noting how technology both supercharges and accelerates existing practices, Deuze considers how it also opens windows for new kinds of “journalistic acts” – acts that are in themselves journalistic but are not necessarily performed by those whom we traditionally regard as “journalists”. Focusing on the individual, Deuze sensitizes us to a broadened and changing definition of who is a journalist and identifies factors that contribute to this trend.

Does technology impoverish or facilitate journalism? If seen through the lens of journalism as an institution, Boczkowski demonstrates that journalism is struggling to come to terms with the new media environment. Seen as a set of values and principles, Newton points to a vast field of opportunities that technological advances present on which journalism has yet to capitalize. Deuze suggests that technology has raised critical questions about the changing role of the individual in today’s field of journalism. What all three essays in this section show is that technology is at the heart of a reorientation of power and knowledge, where incumbents and new players are seeking to redefine and reinterpret the meaning of journalism. Using technology as a frame for understanding journalism allows us to reflect on what journalism can be and raises normative questions about what journalism should be. The three essays are important contributions in starting to address these questions that have become once again urgent to ask in the new media environment.

Notes

1 Hartley, J. “Communicative Democracy in a Redactional Society: The Future of Journalism Studies,” Journalism 1.1 (2000): 39–48.

Chapter 6
Materiality and Mimicry in the Journalism Field¹

Pablo J. Boczkowski

Analysts increasingly suggest that much has changed in journalism in the past couple of decades, partly in relation to technological developments that have taken place during this period.² This article focuses on one phenomenon – journalists’ tendency to mimic their competitors and other media – to examine the difference that technology makes and to think about the more general role of materiality in journalistic practice. Mimicry in news production can shed light on how materiality matters in contemporary journalistic practice because it has long been recognized as a staple of editorial routines and because technology has been largely overlooked as a relevant factor in scholarly analyses of imitation in the news.³

Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus⁴ is commonly seen as the canonical text on what he called “pack journalism.” The book examines a situation that is extraordinary – news production by journalists who travel together on the campaign trail – and therefore exposes with great intensity certain dynamics related to mimicry that are less visible in more ordinary situations. Two such dynamics are particularly relevant for this article: the primacy of journalists’ unmediated monitoring of the work of colleagues⁵ and the prevalence of risk aversion in decision-making among reporters and editors.⁶

One telling episode about how legendary New York Times reporter Johnny Apple was observed and imitated by many of his colleagues as he was writing up the results of the Iowa caucuses, during the 1972 presidential campaign, illustrates the dynamics of unmediated monitoring:

Johnny Apple … sat in a corner and everyone peered over his shoulder to find out what he was writing. The AP guy was looking over one shoulder, the UPI guy over the other and CBS, NBC, ABC and the Baltimore Sun were all crowding in behind … He would sit down and write a lead, and they would go write leads. Then he’d change his lead when more results came in, and they’d all change theirs accordingly … At midnight, the guy announced that Muskie had 32 per cent and McGovern had 26 per cent, and Apple sat down to write his final story. He called it something like “a surprisingly strong showing for George McGovern.” Everyone peered over his shoulder again and picked it up. It was on the front page of every major newspaper the next day.⁷

Risk aversion in the selection of what stories to cover and in how to cover them has long been paramount in the decision-making processes of reporters and editors. Although exclusives and scoops have “good press,” a reporter knows that her editor is likely to punish her for not having a story that other media outlets have – while running with the pack is normally a safer option. Similar dynamics are in place between section editors and the top editors to whom they report. One typical manifestation of this pattern of risk aversion is the propensity of a journalist to be influenced by wire service content, in part due to the assumption that the content will appear in other media. According to Crouse:

[Reporters] wanted to avoid “call-backs” – phone calls from their editors asking them why they had deviated from the AP or UPI. If the editors were going to run with a story that differed from the story in the nation’s 1,700 other newspapers, they wanted a good reason for it. Most reporters dreaded call-backs. Thus the pack followed the wire-service men whenever possible. Nobody made a secret of running with the wires; it was an accepted practice. At an event later in the campaign, a New York Daily News reporter looked over the shoulder of Norm Kempster, a UPI man, and read his copy. “Stick with that lead, Norm,” said the man from the News. “You’ll save us a lot of trouble.” “Don’t worry,” said Norm. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble from mine.”⁸

Have new technologies, their appropriation by journalists and their incorporation in daily journalistic routine been tied to changes in monitoring and decision-making? If so, have any of these changes affected mimicry in news production? Drawing from an ethnographic study of content production in the leading Argentine online and print newspapers and a content analysis of their resulting news products from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, this chapter addresses these questions so as to make sense of novel connections between materiality and mimicry in contemporary journalism.

Contextual matters

The largest print newspapers in Argentina are national in scope. The industry exhibits clear signs of ownership concentration: the top two players account for half of the national newspaper market and the top five for almost two-thirds of it.⁹ Print newspapers’ share of the advertising pie was in the 40 per cent range during the period analyzed here.¹⁰ The two leading newspapers, Clarín and La Nación, are both headquartered in Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital. Their online editions, produced largely autonomously from their respective print newsrooms throughout the period examined here, are also top players in the national market for online news.

Clarín is the country’s largest daily – with a 36% share of the national newspaper market – and is the flagship news enterprise of Grupo Clarín, a large and mostly privately owned multimedia conglomerate. Clarín has a centrist political orientation and appeals to a broad audience. In the first quarter of 2006 it had an average daily circulation greater than 420,000 and an average Sunday circulation greater than 807,000.¹¹ The paper’s online site, Clarin.com, was launched in March 2006 and had 6.2 million unique users in August 2006.¹²

La Nación is Argentina’s second largest daily, with a 14 per cent share of the national newspaper market, and is part of a family-owned media conglomerate that is smaller and less diversified than Grupo Clarín. La Nación features a conservative political outlook and targets a public with a relatively high socioeconomic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Why Journalism’s Changing Faces Matter
• On Tabloidization
• On Technology
• On Truthiness
• Afterword