News is the very essence of journalism: its heartbeat. A free flow of news is widely regarded as being essential for society, certainly for those societies that claim to be democracies. Yet news is in crisis, and not for the first time (Harcup 2007: 14). There are recurring claims that journalism is experiencing âa crisis of legitimacyâ (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990: 285) and equally persistent predictions of its âdire futureâ, as Professor Barbie Zelizer (2017: 241) has pointed out. The journalism academic, commentator, and blogger Jay Rosen (2016) has warned journalists that âwinter is comingâ, and news itself has been declared âbrokenâ by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (2018: ix). He was not talking only about the economic models under which journalism has traditionally been produced, but also about evidence of catastrophically low levels of trust in the veracity or value of journalistsâ key output: news.
It is not just a question of trust in news, it is also a question of access to it. Polly Curtis (2019) has written of a growing population of âunnewsedâ people who no longer have the habit of accessing professionally produced news, adding that such people tend to be poorer, younger, and to have received fewer years of formal education than those who do tend to access news. Such a situation has damaging implications for democracy, she argues, because the unnewsed are in reality still likely to be receiving some degree of information and comment via social media, albeit in undifferentiated and unsourced forms lacking âthe rigour and standards of traditional journalismâ. Then there are those who deliberately avoid the output of the news industry. An international survey in 2019 found almost a third of people (32%) say they actively avoid the news because it is too depressing, too negative or because they feel there is no point given that there is nothing they can do to influence the events covered. However, there were large variations between countries, with more than half the respondents in Croatia, Turkey, and Greece avoiding the news compared with fewer than a fifth of those in Japan, Denmark, and Finland (Newman et al. 2019: 25).
In this context, it is perhaps little wonder that a group of journalism scholars were recently moved to write a âDear Journalismâ mock letter of resignation, bemoaning the news industryâs tendency to turn a reporter from an autonomous and creative professional into âa cleverly disguised vacuum salespersonâ, and concluding that âjournalism is not what it can, nor what it should beâ (Witschge et al. 2019: 1). Yet, at the same time as criticisms of the industry are seemingly becoming ever louder, there is a âcreative struggleâ going on within grassroots communities âto create their own public spheres and public voicesâ, as Kidd and Barker-Plummer (2009: 489) put it. And there are lessons to be learned from such struggles about the natureâand valueâof news. In addition to producing their own forms of alternative media, marginalised groups have developed ways of âtalking back to news mediaâ (Dreher 2010: 146), for example by monitoring, campaigning and critiquing, and such contributions might help embolden those critical voices that do exist within the news industryâs own structures.
There are question marks over news when it comes to access, autonomy, trust and democracy, and these questions are as much to do with ethics as with economics. As leading journalism studies scholar Professor Linda Steiner (2018: 1854) puts it in her discussion of the âpost-truth crisisâ now said to be confronting the world, twenty-first century journalists are suffering a âcredibility gapâ. In a similar vein, Professor Rodney Benson (quoted in Benavidez 2014) has described the news business as being dangerously close to a tipping point after which it may no longer be of much service to citizens in a democracy. However, not one of Rosen, Benson, Steiner, or Rusbridgerânor this authorâconsider such a stark diagnosis to be a reason to give up all hope.
Benson, for example, argues that, although journalism has long been a crucial part of âa vibrant public sphereâ, there are other civil society actors beyond those professionally employed as journalists who also have roles to play in such a sphere. He urges us to recognise the continuing importance of a journalistic function even as specific business models for news face disruption and, in some instances, elimination. Because the need for such a function will remain: âAs a democracy, we need to think strategically about the kinds of voices and vehicles best equipped to provide the information, critique, and deliberation we need. In many instances, it wonât be journalists who provide thisâyet journalists, broadly defined, will still be crucial as the ones who translate, package, and circulate ideas and information to non-specialist publicsâ (Benson, quoted in Benavidez 2014). And journalists, broadly defined, may include some who ply their trade in what are termed âalternative mediaâ, part of a tradition of critiquing the output of corporate media long before the latter recognised itself to be in an existential âcrisisâ or approaching any kind of âtipping pointâ or âcrossroadsâ.
Today, journalism is ever more frequently being described as being at just such a crossroads, with doubts over its ability to continue to fulfil what Gurevitch and Blumler (1990: 270) refer to as the âdemocratic expectationsâ placed upon it. Expectations such as that journalism can inform society about itself and act as a âwatchdogâ on behalf of citizens, even if it is the breed of watchdog that has sometimes been found to be rather more tame or sleepy than its owners would have us believe. However, the âalarmist toneâ of many such warnings about the future of journalism may be seen as an example of the âwestern biasâ prevalent in too much journalism studies, according to Thomas Hanitzsch (2019: 216), who argues that lamentation about the âcrisis of journalismâ is primarily a concern of the global Northâthe US in particularâthat may not necessarily be applicable in other contexts.
Perhaps âcrisesâ might be a better description than âcrisisâ, given that threats come in different forms in different places and at different times. James Curran (2019: 190) has identified three major issues confronting journalism globally as being âwidespread government censorship ⌠elite sourcing ⌠[and] economic declineâ. Yet, as Tumber and Zelizer (2019: 6) have observed, many of the challenges and âprovocationsâ facing journalism today are actually âage-old problemsâ, including: questions over the occupational and professional identity and autonomy of journalists; doubts over the legitimacy and trustworthiness of journalism in the eyes of other citizens; threats to journalistsâ safety; the political economy of the media; and questions over âjournalismâs representativenessâgeographic, thematic and topicalâ. Such issues pre-date the recent crisis talk and were identified by many criticsâincluding alternative journalists on alternative media outletsâeven when mainstream newsrooms were comparatively heavily staffed and well resourced.
The Purpose of This Study
Whether there is cause for widespread alarm or not, and whether such issues really are old or newâor even if they can be both at the same timeâis perhaps of less ultimate significance than the fact that we recognise that how and why journalism is done has to be open to question, scrutiny, even scepticism (although preferably not cynicism). If journalism really is approaching a crossroads, and that remains an âifâ because there is not just one journalism, then that implies a choice of routes that may be taken. Crossroads or roundabout, the purpose of this study is to explore some of the alternative routes that some journalists and journalistic organisations may choose to take in the service of ethical journalism, notwithstanding the limitations on autonomy under which many journalists work. More specifically, this study will focus on possible choices when it comes to that most fundamental output of journalism: news.
Unless we are hermits, we might get news from family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, and others; but there is another news that is the product of the news industry, or industries. Of course, not everyone subscribes to, or formally consumes, such news outputâand, as we have seen, some actively seek to avoid itâbut in an age of âambient journalismâ (Hermida 2010), some news still gets through, still circulates on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Weibo, as well as by word of mouth, and therefore still has the potential to influence our attitudes and our actions. Some of what circulates on social media is news that emanates from the news industry, meaning that choices made by people working as journalists may impact upon members of the population who never knowingly or actively decide to consume a traditional news product.
Even in this new climate, therefore, decisions made within news organisa...