Network Journalism

Journalistic Practice in Interactive Spheres

Ansgard Heinrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136822438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Drawing on current theoretical debates in journalism studies, and grounded in empirical research, Heinrich here analyzes the interplay between journalistic practice and processes of globalization and digitalization. She argues that a new kind of journalism is emerging, characterized by an increasingly global flow of news as well as a growing number of news deliverers. Within this transformed news sphere the roles of journalistic outlets change. They become nodes, arranged in a dense net of information gatherers, producers, and disseminators. The interactive connections among these news providers constitute what Heinrich calls the sphere of "network journalism."

Part I

Network Journalism

Theories and Concepts

1 The Network Age and its Footprints on Journalism

The spread of the Internet and digital communication technologies in the twenty-first century will see information confirmed as the most important global resource, and journalism as the dominant mode of cultural expression in advanced capitalist societies.

(McNair, 1998: 10)

We are entering a new phase of connectivity. Information exchange now is increasingly being structured around digital communication tools. This change in interaction patterns has severe implications for our societies. Yet how exactly are societies changing and what does this mean for journalistic practice? This chapter will address these questions.

Journalism is widely understood as a vital part of democratic society, constructed on the basis of historical, technological, political and economic factors in its surrounding environment. As McNair explains, ‘journalistic news is a product of the interaction of all the environmental factors within which it is formed’ (McNair, 2006: 48; see also Briggs and Burke, 2005). Journalists then are actors within society, who take the role of informing citizens; they act within and upon society. It follows that if the environment in which journalism exists is transforming, the journalistic profession as well as the modes of information production transform as well.¹

One scholar who is strongly concerned with the interplay between digital technologies and the development of societies is Manuel Castells. He introduced us to the paradigm of the ‘network society’ (1996), where he explains how social structures today change through the use of digital technologies and where the Internet becomes ‘the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age’ (2002b: 1). His model applies to journalism as well. For journalistic practice—just as Castells’ paradigm highlights—the ‘network’ becomes the central pattern of connective interactions. Journalism is staged by the emergence of a ‘network society’ organized around ‘information technology-powered networks’ (Castells and Ince, 2003: 23), bringing with it a restructuring of journalism.

Castells’ concept is strongly associated with the process we have come to call globalization. According to Tomlinson, ‘globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life’ (Tomlinson, 1999: 2). Journalism as a social entity does not stay untouched when globalizing trends of whatever kind influence social, economic or political environments. Processes of globalization push (the practice of) journalism into global settings—acting within and being affected by globally connected networks.

Much has been written about globalization. Debates circle around economic developments and discuss the shape of (global) finance and trade systems. However, as Giddens points out, the issue of globalization is not only to be viewed in economic terms: ‘Globalisation is political, technological and cultural, as well as economic. It has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s’ (1999: 10).²

This is not the place to deliver a complete overview of globalization debates. Other scholars have comprehensively outlined the many facets and differing presumptions of globalization (for overviews see for example Beck, 2000; Sinclair, 2004; Straubhaar, 2007; Thussu, 2000). I will instead point at some ideas here that are useful in order to contextualize journalism within processes of globalization. These are key resources, which assist to better comprehend the shape of societies within which journalists interact.³

1.1. The Dynamics of Globalization Processes

We live in a world of transformations, affecting almost every aspect of what we do. For better or worse, we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us.

(Giddens, 1999: 6 et seq.)

Globalization can be seen as a driving force that triggers changes in social, economical and political environments, or as Straubhaar has formulated it: ‘Globalization is the worldwide spread, over both time and space, of a number of new ideas, institutions, culturally defined ways of doing things, and technologies’ (2007: 81). With all these aspects at play, the sphere of journalism is not left untouched.

The proliferation of digital technologies permits a global exchange of information. Featherstone notes that globalization includes processes that ‘transcend the state-society unit and can therefore be held to occur on a trans-national or trans-societal level’ (1990: 1, emphasis added). Globalization processes thus comprise consequences for connectivity structures and are inevitably bound together with technological advancements: without technological tools, delivering information via distance and through space would not be possible. Technologies facilitate what Tomlinson calls ‘complex connectivity’ (1999: 1 et seq.); they allow interaction across borders and lay the fundament for globalization processes. As Thussu argues, ‘information and communication technologies have made global intercon-nectivity a reality’ (2000: 76). Communication technologies facilitate globalization processes ‘because of the way they overcome space and time, which thus allows individuals to free themselves from physical constraints and also to see themselves in, and adapt to, a global context, regardless of where they are’ (Sinclair, 2004: 67). Or as Robertson (1992: 8) claims, the world is being ‘compressed’ now, as technology connects places and brings them virtually closer together. The media play a vital role here as they render it possible to execute control over this compressed, globalized space:

The media are central to this control, not only for their technological transcendence of space and time as such but also for the interconnectedness inherent in communications, especially in their capacity to give individuals access to global networks. (Sinclair, 2004: 67)

Digital technologies thus enable us to cross time and space distanciations and lead us to a situation anthropologist Hannerz describes with the sen-tence: ‘Distances, and boundaries, are not what they used to be’ (1996: 3).

This effect of technology on the way societies act and interact as well as its effects on journalistic production should not be interpreted in terms of what has become known as ‘technological determinism’. According to the purveyors of technological determinism (see for example Ellul, 1964; Negroponte, 1995, or Meyrowitz, 1985), technology is an independent power, which holds the capacity to administrate control over processes of communication. However, this view misleadingly creates the impression that technology rules over humans, when human beings are not only the users, but also the inventors of a technology.⁴ Technological determinism develops a notion of ‘privileging the printing press and successive technical innovations as the penultimate marker and engine of media modernization and democratization’ (Hamilton, 2003: 296). But to argue with Castells: ‘The fundamental lesson is that technology per se does not do good or bad to societies’ (Castells and Ince, 2003: 59). No matter how strong the impact of technology on human lives might be, the most active part in the interplay between technology and people is still the humans behind the machines and not the machines in themselves: ‘Because technologies are used when a use is found for them, not earlier’ (Ibid.: 30; see also Castells, 2000c: 5).

With regard to journalism, this means that technologies are tools journalists use in order to communicate their information. As Schudson stresses, ‘technological advances in printing and related industries and the development of railroad transportation and later telegraphic communications were the necessary preconditions for a cheap, mass-circulation, news-hungry, and independent press’ (1978: 31). Technologies are instruments in the hands of humans and can affect work procedures, but do not determine them. For Braman, ‘although it is true that technologies have structural effects on society as well as on individual cognition, it is also true that it is society that determines just how technologies will be used’ (2004: 139).⁵ Therefore, specific necessities can trigger the willingness of researchers or engineers to turn experiments into inventions (Nye, 1997).

The history of media technologies serves us with many examples relating to the hows and whens of the introduction and usage of various technologies.⁶ They underline that technology alone is not capable of creating change, let alone creating a revolution. To agree with Winston, who challenges what he judges a ‘myth’ of a present-day ‘Information Revolution’ (1998): the impact of technological changes has to be viewed as the outcome of a history of developments in the social and cultural as well as economical or political environments.

Journalism is embedded within the larger framework of social, cultural, economic and political factors (see also Schudson, 1978; 2003). The evolution of journalism and the adaptation of new technologies thus has to be viewed as a constant flow in which the working procedures of journalists are developed and reshaped. Journalism is an integral part of society, and therefore it must be understood ‘as a form of cultural production’ (Williams, 2006: 339). Journalism is embedded in a social context and this context influences journalistic processes of gathering, processing and presenting the news. As Nerone (1987) argues, the history of the press is also a history of social or political processes in which needs and requirements of a period are answered.⁷ Journalism practice thus is enclosed in and influenced by cultural, social or economical as well as technological developments.⁸ Accordingly, transformations in journalism have to be analyzed and contextualized in relation to these developments (see also Hardt, 1990: 351).

One of the first scholars to analyze how technologies and their worldwide distribution impact societies was Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964). He coined the term ‘global village’, and attributed this development to media technologies, which were in his view capable of ‘shrinking’ the world by overcoming distances. The emergence of satellite technology inspired him to think of a world connectedness and lead to the ‘vision of a thus far unknown inclusion of entire cultures and societies into a ‘global village’, just by being exposed to the same sights and sounds which, as a consequence, transformed, i.e. homogenized, cultural habits’ (Volkmer, 2003: 11). McLuhan inspired much of the discussion about a globalized world and drew attention to the role of communication technologies by stressing that media technologies affected first and foremost societies and not so much the content of media.

What McLuhan also provoked, though, was a way of thinking about the world as a place where global homogenization processes are at play and in which particular (respectively Western) ideas and practices spread across the globe that erase local colorings. Notions of a globalized society emerged, dominated by Western cultural imperialism and paraphrased with keywords such as ‘Westernization’, ‘Americanization’ (see Giddens, 1999: 15 et seq.) or ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer, 1996). Such worldviews propose a convergence of a global culture (e.g. Robins, 1991; for a critique see Beck, 2000: 42 et seq.), in which journalistic organizations become disseminators and proliferators of a ‘cultural imperialism’ (see for example Herman and McChesney, 1997).⁹

Appadurai on the other hand points out that ‘globalization is not the story of cultural homogenization’ (1996: 11). Similarly, Beck proposes a ‘world society’ in which difference and multiplicity are the overarching principles as opposed to unity (2000: 10). Transnational actors enter the scene, influencing society on a global as well as on a local level. Robertson (1992, 1995) has probably set the scene best in this respect by introducing us to what he calls the ‘glocalizing’ aspect of globalization. Here, globalization is not equated with homogenization, but resembles a much more complex idea of heterogenic movements in a globalized world in which communication technologies enable as well as foster multi-directional information flows as opposed to one-way flows of information. Robertson coined the term ‘glocalization’ to describe a cultural pattern, and emphasizes that this process of glocalization leads to an increased transnational interdependence. In essence the world has become part of everyday life: whatever happens on the local level has to be seen as an aspect of, and contextualized within, a global setting. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ merge and as Beck underlines:

From now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world, and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions, our organizations and institutions, along a ‘local-global’ axis. (Beck, 2000: 11)

Cultures thus are becoming increasingly ‘glocal’—influenced by what happens locally as well as globally. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are interconnected—one does not come without the other.¹⁰ The ‘local’ hence is not vanishing, yet to quote Hannerz:

We are just giving up the idea that the local is autonomous, that it has an integrity of its own. It would have its significance, rather, as the arena in which a variety of influences come together, acted out perhaps in a unique combination, under those special conditions. (Hannerz, 1996: 27)

Within this setting, culture has to be seen as an entity that is not only influenced by domestic processes, but also by transcending and therefore trans-societal or trans-national movements. At the heart of this perspective lies an idea of a flow of economic as well as cultural processes that crisscross around the globe, ‘gain some autonomy on a global level’ (Featherstone, 1990: 1) and thereby develop a system of their own going as far as to the formation of ‘transnational cultures, which can be understood as genuine ‘third cultures’ which are orientated beyond national boundaries’ (Ibid.: 6). Cultural flows hence produce transnational cultural exchange.

Communication creates a global flow of information exchanged and traded across nation-state borders, cultural borders and continents.

Appadurai has conceptualized such flows in an increasingly deterritorialized global environment. Defined as ‘scapes’, he identifies the accumula-tion of new flows on the basis of a complex ‘new global cultural economy’ (1990: 296). Characteristic of this global cultural economy is a flow across the globe and Appadurai has categorized five dimensions of such global cultural flows: the flow of people (ethnoscapes), the flow of images (mediascapes), the flow of technology (technoscapes), the flow of money (finance-scapes) and the flow of ideas or ideologies (ideoscapes) (1990: 296–299). Especially important in the context of this study is Appadurai’s definition of ‘mediascapes’:

‘Mediascapes’ refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.) which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media. (Appadurai, 1990: 298 et seq.)

Add satellite television, Internet and mobile phones to the list and the ‘global flow’ character of mediascapes becomes even more evident. Appadurai’s scapes indicate that societies are ‘on the move’, creating ‘symbolic’ worlds, for example, through the creation of global cultural industries, and with media ‘mediating’ these ideas and visions from near and afar (see Appadurai, 1996, as well as Lash and Urry, 1994). These new ‘flow dynamics’ urge new forms of connectivity. With societies (i.e. humans) and their cultures ‘on the move’, the media and its journalists are ‘on the move’, too. ‘Being on the move’ opens up a new space of communication: with people, technology, money, media and ideas in motion, the ways in which humans connect change. With regard to the journalistic sphere, this means that (1) the ways in which users access the news and (2) the ways in which journalists operate within this ‘third culture’ are in a state of motion, too.

In effect, with globalization we have not only witnessed a reconfigured flow of information, but also the advent of a new media infrastructure that is increasingly autonomous from nation-state contexts and enables a ‘transcontinental and transregional flow of political information’ (Volkmer, 2003: 11). Globally distributed news channels such as CNN, Al Jazeera and BBC World embody these new flow structures. They operate differently to nation-based and nation-focused news outlets and ‘with a new dimension of ‘internationalization’ of news, where news is not merely distributed ‘transborder’ but, additionally, transmitted simultaneously in various parts of the world’ (Ibid.: 10). Speaking with Appadurai and his idea of disjunc-tive flows or scapes, such flows are the outcome of a new global cultural economy and these global flows ‘are chaotic, varying in speed and intensity, overlapping, attracting or repelling one another’ (Bell, 2007: 70).

As the various scapes affected by these global flows show, globalization has to be seen as a ‘complex set of processes’ (Giddens, 1999: 12). The information age finds journalists at the very heart of these transformations, because after all, information is their business. Their task is to inform about the world and to deliver this information to their audience. Part of their job then is to transmit information and analysis on globalization issues, explaining the transformations and making sense of them as well as transmitting them according to the new flows of economy and culture around the globe. This includes informing about them as well as moving with them. By doing so, their relationship with societal changes and global changes is twofold. Firstly, their job is part of this transformation as they act within the determinants of globalization and transformation. Secondly, they not only have to react according to transformations as a matter of adapting t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Titl Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Network Journalism
• Part I: Network Journalism Theories and Concepts
• Part II: Network Journalism: Practitioner Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index