Advancing Media Production Research

Shifting Sites, Methods, and Politics

Chris Paterson, David Lee, Anamik Saha, Anna Zoellner, Chris Paterson, David Lee, Anamik Saha, Anna Zoellner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349553037
• eBook ISBN: 9781137541949
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

This anthology explores challenges to understanding the nature of cultural production, exploring innovative new research approaches and improvements to old approaches, such as newsroom ethnography, which will enable clearer, fuller understanding of the workings of journalism and other forms of media and cultural production.

Part I

Debates and Transitions

1

Production Research: Continuity and Transformation

Chris Paterson, David Lee, Anamik Saha, and Anna Zoellner

At the heart of this book is the question: how well do we understand the institutions which create our media, our information, and our culture? Rather than seeking to reveal the substantially hidden world of cultural production (as many works cited in this introductory chapter do well), this anthology explores many of the contemporary challenges to understanding the nature of cultural production – considering the research process, rather than research findings. By doing so, we hope to encourage researchers to push the boundaries of production research beyond the traditional (but still very necessary) ‘newsroom observation’ in order to expand production research across boundaries of genre and medium, to liberally borrow theory and method across previously rigid disciplinary borders, and to confront new challenges which threaten to insulate the creation of media and culture from rigorous independent examination.

Notwithstanding the strong (and justified) continuities in media production studies, research has changed radically since the early formative ethnographic and qualitative studies of the field in the 1970s and 1980s. The growing number of media and communication scholars interested in studying the everyday production of media texts are visible in the growth of related publications, specialized conferences and the establishment of association subgroups such as the International Association of Media and Communication Researchers (IAMCR) working group for Media Production Analysis (established in 1999) and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) working group Media Industries and Cultural Production (established in 2011).

One cause of an expansion in media production research is the development of the media industries themselves. Research agendas and methodologies have been shaped by recent transformations of the media landscape and production practice, exploring new research questions, sites and methodologies. And as the internal workings of media institutions change beyond the recognition of an earlier generation of researchers, and challenges to understand those internal functions become ever greater, there is a need to review what new knowledge is emerging from production research, what gaps remain, what challenges to production research persist, and to debate how those might be overcome. Our hope is to take an international and interdisciplinary approach to exploring in-depth research into processes of cultural production (whether through classically ethnographic immersion or other means) across a wide range of genres and forms of cultural institution, from funding bodies to television public affairs to newspaper journalism.

Early production studies and the development of a ‘field’

Formative research carried out in the 1970s inside US national television news organizations (Gans, 1979; Epstein, 1974; Tuchman, 1978; Altheide, 1976), alongside work undertaken in the UK (Blumler, 1969; Elliott, 1972; Golding and Elliot, 1979), was crucial in establishing ethnographically informed media sociology as a tradition within media and communications research. As Schlesinger argues in this book, media sociology was comprised of a handful of scholars at this period, and this early research was deeply influential for an emerging generation of UK scholars who were also largely focusing on the production of news (Blumler, 1969; Elliott, 1972; Schlesinger, 1978; Golding and Elliot, 1979) as well as research on crime reporting and source relationships (Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), ‘competitor-colleagues’ in news production (Tunstall, 1971), television production (Elliot, 1972) and media organizational culture more generally (Burns, 1977).

This work is now sometimes referred to somewhat problematically as the ‘first wave’ of media sociology (Cottle, 2000; Willig, 2013), with contemporary researchers keen to stress the differences (organizationally, theoretically and methodologically) between this work and contemporary variations undertaken in a different context. There are significant differences. Much of the work cited above focuses on singular news organizations within highly unionized and relatively stable fields of employment. ‘Precarity’, ‘multi-tasking’, ‘insecurity’, and ‘self-exploitation’, all of which have become staple touchstones for contemporary accounts of media production (Banks, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008), are absent from these accounts, which focus on the bureaucratic routines of news organizations (questions of decision-making, news judgements, source relationships) as well as questions of power, influence and ideology. Claims of truth, objectivity and impartiality were deconstructed and critically analysed by this generation of researchers.

Research dealing with media production today must address a field transformed by digital technology as well as the proliferation and fragmentation of creative production roles (Deuze, 2007), a marked shift in the speed of production (what McRobbie (2002a) has termed ‘speeded up creative worlds’), and the impact of social media and so-called ‘citizen’ originated news production (Allan, 2013). As Schlesinger will also suggest in Chapter 2, we increasingly must undertake research in an environment shaped by the global discourse of the ‘creative economy’ as well as in the context of ‘research impact’, with the obligations to show relevance that come with research council funding.

While it is important to recognize the significant differences between media production research historically and today, we must also recognize the continuities. Challenges to such research abound and are escalating, ranging from increasingly secretive corporate cultures which see little value in inviting observation of their work, to pressure on scholars to produce more with less – leading to faster and easier modes of research. Full-scale immersive ethnographies are still relatively rare and tend to be undertaken by PhD researchers, due to their resource-intensive nature (however, brief ethnographic immersion has become far more common, as Ryfe maintains in Chapter 3). Access is still a vital issue, due to the ongoing need to deal with and convince gatekeepers to media organizations, although researchers are far more visible now than before in terms of their research profiles and writing being available online.

As noted by Schlesinger (1980) and others, the process of gaining the access to conduct long-term observational research within media organizations is usually challenging, and that access, when granted, can be tenuous. Paterson (2011: xi) observed in the introduction to his partially ethnographic study of (previously almost entirely unresearched) television news agencies, a longstanding obstacle to genuinely ethnographic production research ‘is that organizations risk criticism when they permit independent analysis of what they do: what makes sense in the context of their business may look irresponsible or arrogant to people outside of that context.’ Suspicion and caution about the purpose of media production research from inside media organizations continues to be a problematic issue for researchers. In Chapter 10, Munnik explores how recent events such as the Jimmy Savile and newspaper phone-hacking scandals in the UK have made access even more difficult than before. At the same time, we have seen an explosion in recent decades in forms of cultural production, making the object of analysis ever harder to identify. Some of the authors in this volume challenge us to expand our conceptions of cultural production along with our methodological repertoire, as with Lesage’s examination of software in our final chapter. And there is a continued focus in production research on media power and interactions between journalists, governments, lobbyists and public relations workers as well as consideration of how news is funded and influenced. As much of the work in this anthology demonstrates, questions of power, access and observation remain as vital today as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

The transformation of the media industries

In the last decades media production has raised the interest of investors and policy-makers for its economic potential, supported by a general turn towards neo-liberalism. Deregulation and the promotion of the ‘creative industries’¹ as sources of new revenue have driven policy initiatives – not only in the Western world (see Hesmondhalgh, 2013). The subsequent growth of media organizations followed by centralization and integration created a media ecology consisting of both large multinational media corporations and small-scale, even DIY, media production. Substantial competitive pressure and commodification of media texts characterize this environment and validate the continuity of classic production study questions about the influence of commerce, power and the role of creativity. In addition to such important continuities, industry transformations since the 1990s/2000s have also broadened the subjects of production research and widened the methodological canon of the field, supporting necessary shifts towards multinational, multi-sited and multi-method research to explore these developments. Media production research has spread beyond its traditional focus on news and television production, studying other forms of media and cultural production including popular culture and entertainment in diverse media industries such as music, publishing and new media. Furthermore, the investigation has been extended beyond the work of primarily creative media personnel to include workers ‘below the line’ (e.g. Mayer, 2011).

Research examining media production as an occupation has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years, stimulated to some degree by the optimistic policy discourse surrounding creative work as well as the growth and the flexibilization of the workforce. Critical cultural labour research explores, amongst other things, the consequences of the casualization of employment, the nature of creativity, and the division of work roles as well as questions of ethics and diversity in media production. A growing body of literature on media work provides in-depth discussions of these matters both from a sociological and cultural studies perspective (e.g. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Banks et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2014). This scholarship provides us with important insights into media producers’ experience, yet methodologically such research relies mainly on the traditional interview, and to some degree, observation. Although we do not explicitly focus on labour in this volume, the chapters by Sanders, Perrin and Alacovska suggest alternative approaches to expand our understanding of what media workers do.

Whilst our knowledge of labour conditions continues to grow, production research related to digital technologies is still nascent. The substantial technological developments of recent decades (most notably digitalization), the emergence of the Internet, and the related convergence of texts and media devices, have deeply affected media production. This includes the emergence of new forms of media and communication including, for example, social media, online blogs/vlogs, and interactive virtual books, but it also adds another dimension to the production of ‘traditional’ media texts. Important work has been undertaken especially within journalism production research as scholars investigated the particularities of online news production (e.g. Paterson and Domingo, 2008; Domingo and Paterson, 2011). Other studies have focused on multiplatform production, interactive media texts and the virtual world of CGI (e.g. Bennett et al., 2012; Sorenson, 2012; Nash, 2012). However, further research is needed to explore the role of technologies in media production including, for example, the influence of grassroots production, participatory and collaborative production, the impact of social media, as well as the use of production software and hardware as suggested in Lesage and Perrin’s chapters.

The expansion of media production as a business sector combined with technological development has made transnational media production and distribution more important for media producers. The media are both shaping and are being shaped by economic, political and cultural globalization; and scholarship needs to investigate the international connections, processes and influences of media production. Production research – partially due to its resource-intensive nature and its reliance on case studies – so far tends to focus on single national settings. Particular cultural or geographical sites certainly remain of high importance for media production research, as does domestic production for media producers, but the movement of labour (and therefore skills but also cultural consciousness), finance (including certain forms of subsidies), and goods (especially the easily reproducible, immaterial media texts) across national borders is of great significance for the nature and production processes of media texts.

Research has been carried out especially in the study of international media distribution as well as the global trade and local adaptation of media texts (e.g. Steemers, 2004; Moran, 2006). Increasingly, there is also interest in contemporary transnational collaboration and runaway productions especially in the film industry. Yet, multiple international research sites and comparative research designs, such as discussed in Chapter 6 by Lowrey and Erzikova, are still a rare occurrence. More work is needed to explore the international dimensions of media production in more detail and, in the course of this, to question concepts of national culture and identity.

Cultural studies of production

There has also been a significant shift in theoretical focus within (some) production research. Influential research on contemporary media production has drawn extensively on a range of social theories, in particular those that focus on the shaping of the self within late modernity (McRobbie, 2002b; Ursell, 2000; Gill, 2011). This has led to attention being paid to the subjective experiences of cultural workers, with concepts such as emotional labour (Hochschild, 2003), governmentality (McRobbie, 2002b) and moral economy (Hesmondhalgh, 2011) coming to the fore as tools for understanding media production within a new context.

In addition, a relatively new field of research (particularly in the US) has emerged that draws more explicitly from cultural studies. Cultural studies has generally been seen as interested primarily in texts and audiences, but as Havens (2014) points out there is a history, albeit an unrecognized one, of cultural studies that are more interested in media and cultural production (see Williams, 1973; Frith; 1981; Gitlin, 198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Debates and Transitions
• Part II  Theory and Research
• Part III  Matters of Method
• Part IV  Beyond the Newsroom
• Epilogue
• Index