Inside the TV Newsroom

Profession Under Pressure

Line Hassall Thomsen

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783208838
• eBook ISBN: 9781783208845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In an era where the way people get news is ever-changing, how do broadcast journalists work? How do changes to the field affect journalists at traditional public broadcasters? And what similarities are there between license-funded news programmes – like those on the BBC – and commercial news?

This book, built on years of unique access to the newsrooms of BBC News and ITV News in the United Kingdom and DR TV Avisen and TV2 Nyhedeme in Denmark, answers those questions and more. Exploring the shared professional ideals of journalists, the study analyses how they conceive of stories as important, and how their ideals relating to their work are expressed and aspired to in everyday practice.

Part I

Journalists and Newsrooms as Objects of Research

Introduction

An introduction to the project and to the guiding research questions

Today, the free, instantly available news accessible through your mobile phone is challenging traditional media like never before. In 2007, as this study began, traditional TV news journalists were sensing this threat more and more.

Recently, values of the journalism profession have been under public scrutiny. With a number of high-profile controversies in Denmark and the UK, particularly the Public Service Broadcasters DR and BBC have been in the public eye. After Brexit in the UK, the partisanship of British public service media has been questioned (see for instance Preston 2016). In Denmark, most of the press reported that PM Lars Løkke would stay in his position, while in fact he stepped down – causing a huge public debate about the press partisanship and bias (see for instance Ringgaard 2014). While in the US, biased media coverage of the Trump vs Clinton election caused both journalists and readers to suggest that ‘the American journalism is collapsing before our eyes’ (Goodwin 2016).

In the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal, the Leveson inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press made professional values of journalism front-page material.¹ In the UK, in the autumn of 2012, incidents involving flagship news programme BBC Newsnight’s reporting (and lack thereof) of high-profile child abuse cases were the centre of public discussions surrounding BBC’s editorial values.² Following these controversies, BBC Director General George Entwistle resigned, the director of news and her deputy stepped aside and an enquiry into the chain of command inside the BBC news division was initiated.³ Commenting on the controversy, Culture Secretary Maria Miller wrote to the BBC Trust Chairman Lord Patten urging him to become more personally involved because ‘very real concerns are being raised about public trust and confidence in the BBC’ (according to Holton and Holden 2012).

Similarly, in January 2013, when a film crew employed by Danish public broadcaster DR were found to have constructed a demonstration in front of a local bank in Denmark in order to use footage of the demonstration in a news story, trust and confidence were highlighted as being at risk. The broadcast of a staged demonstration created public discussion of the ethical values not only of DR staff but the journalism profession as a whole.

Now that journalists are more outspoken than ever on social media, both news staff and news viewers often give their personal and uncensored reflections on the values of their profession. Thus, this study has been conducted at a time where journalists and the public are engaging in heated debates over values of the journalism profession.

While culture secretary Maria Miller’s quote above appears concerned with trust in BBC as an institution, these and other similar cases have not only impacted on the different journalistic institutions but on the profession of journalism as a whole. As Freidson writes of professionalism, one of the key defining elements is ‘an ideology serving some transcendent value and asserting greater devotion to doing good work than to economic reward’ (2001: 180). The recent controversies involving BBC and DR have questioned the very core of expectations of journalism’s professional values. From this perspective, the recent high-profile controversies at BBC, DR and other media institutions concern not only the institutions but the notion of journalistic professionalism as a whole.

In this book, I investigate the values of journalism professionalism today. I observe how ideal-typical values matter to the daily work, and through fieldwork I analyse how journalists strive towards shared goals.

Key questions: Differences and similarities

This book is the result of intensive fieldwork and constant contact with four newsrooms. The study began with 18 months of fieldwork inside the TV newsrooms of the four largest broadcasters in the UK and in Denmark, commencing in early 2007 and ending in 2008. After this, I have kept in constant touch with each of the newsrooms until 2017.⁴ Of the four broadcasters two are licence funded – the BBC and DR – and two are funded commercially but still have public service obligations – ITV and TV2. The specific interest fuelling my research was to study the everyday work of TV journalists and news workers at national newscasters.⁵

As research began, I expected to meet differences rather than similarities between the newsrooms that I visited. This expectation was founded on both experience of being a journalist and research of organisations. First, the private experience of being a journalist in a given newsroom where the newsrooms of other organisations were talked about as being different made me arguably socialised (cf. Harrison 2000) into believing that these differences do indeed exist. As I had a practice experience working within a newsroom, which defined itself by being different, I strongly believed in the ideology of this practice community. This arguably practice-stubborn approach can act as an example of how journalists define their values by those shared within the practice community (I return to the value of practice communities in Chapter 6). As it will be illustrated, journalists at the different broadcasters talk of their own way of working as very different compared to the ways of working at competing broadcasters.

Secondly, from an institutional perspective, I found it interesting to explore how differences in funding affected news production routines. As Helland (1995: 53–54) has pointed out, economic and political factors of the two different models of broadcasting can be assumed to reflect on the way of working and presenting reality. Particularly at a time where traditional broadcasters are challenged by an ever-increasing media market, I was keen to study how the two different models of broadcasting, public service and commercial, approached the challenge in their everyday work.

Within each broadcaster, I met journalists who told me that their way of working was different and better than the way they worked at competing broadcasters. Exploring how staff defined themselves and their way of working as different to competing broadcasters therefore became one of my first interests. From the articulated differences, my interest turned to what I found to be fundamental similarities between the newsrooms.

During fieldwork at the four different newsrooms, I was struck by how similar the working routines and ideals of news workers were. Moreover, fieldwork showed a remarkable cultural similarity between the newsrooms, a similarity which seemed to encompass what news workers described as ‘a family-relation’ across the four different newsrooms. I therefore decided to abandon the focus on differences between broadcasters in favour of an exploration of the myriads of ways in which I found the newsrooms and news divisions to be connected and similar. Thus, the project turned from a study of many institutions to the study of one profession. In moving from studying differences to similarities between newsrooms, I thus moved from what Soloski (1989: 218) terms the intraorganisational policies to the transorganisational ideology and professional norms of journalists (see Chapter 1.2.).

When I left the newsrooms, the overall sense I returned with was that the news journalists I had studied perceived themselves to be constantly struggling to reach an ideal of being a ‘good journalist’. The two primary similarities between journalists in one broadcast newsroom and others I have found to be: the sense of struggle and tension between ideals and everyday working condition, and the definition of ideal values of the profession. This ideal-typical value carried with it key concepts, such as objectivity, individualism and the idea of ‘doing good’, which I found central to the everyday work of all the journalists I worked alongside. The notion of all journalists across broadcasters working towards a shared ideal suggested that I should view journalists as distinguished by shared professional values rather than institutional or organisational ones. Thus, I came to agree with researchers of journalism who contend that it is possible to talk of a ‘shared culture’ of journalists (Harrison 2000), in a sense that journalists can even be talked about as sharing ‘family resemblance’ (Ryfe 2017), making it possible to give a ‘portrait of a European Journalist’ (O’Sullivan and Heinonen 2008). In order to accommodate the findings I made during fieldwork, I posed the following different research question:

TV news journalists at both licence-funded and commercial broadcasters understand their work to be a constant struggle towards being a ‘good journalist’. How are these struggles played out in everyday life inside the newsrooms?

To answer this question, I rely on my own experience as a participant observer as well as many other collected sources of data, such as interviews and materials collected in the field. In analysing the observations I made during fieldwork, I employ theories from within studies of professions and studies of work (Brante 2010; Evetts 1999; with emphasis on Freidson 2001) as well as journalism research focusing on professionalism (such as Deuze 2005; Alridge and Evetts 2003; Singer 2003, 2004; Witschge and Nygren 2009; Witschge 2013) and communities of practice (see Wenger 1998a, 1998b).

Inspired by Freidson (2001), I have found ideal typical values during the study such as definitions of the good news story and ideals of public service to be important for understanding journalists’ notion of professionalism. However, as emphasised by Larson (1977: xii) discussing the professional project: ‘ideal-typical constructions do not tell us what a profession is, only what it pretends to be’. Rather, Larson argues, researchers should ask ‘what professions actually do in their everyday life to negotiate this special position’ (1977: xii). Inspired by this approach, it is the aim of this study to both consider the way professions talk about their work and the way they are observed to work. During participant observation, I kept a particular interest in the social and the cultural. Culture here is best seen as a series of processes, actions, beliefs, rituals and rhetoric of a group. Inspired by Frederik Barth (1989), this study treats culture not as a bounded entity, but as the interface between groups and the inter-relatedness of news workers in a newsroom.

Why study the news media?

An important point of departure for this study has been the idea that news are crucial in shaping the world and public debate – a view much heralded by various strands within social sciences and humanities, such as cultural studies and media communication studies (see for instance Giddens 1991; Gauntlett and Hill 1999: 54; Lewis 1991; Schudson 1982). Thus, I believe the Danish minister of Culture, Bertel Haarder, had a point when he lamented in a reader’s letter in a national Danish newspaper that ‘DR has much more influence than a political party does’ (Haarder 2011, my translation from Danish).⁶ As Knut Helland has expressed it: ‘[…] the television as a medium is both shaped by, part of shaping and passes on a kind of ideological foundation for how the world should be understood’ (2001: 231, my translation from Norwegian).

Today, news media has made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to make news stories, thus enabling both amateurs and professionals to compete in the constant flow of information and news. The possibility for anyone to be a journalist has been expressed by journalists and researchers alike as a threat to the profession. In this vein, Deuze warned that ‘a profession of journalism without journalists cannot bode well for the necessary checks and balances on a future global capitalist democracy’ (Deuze 2009: 317). At a time where it is possible for people, whether trained in journalism or not, to be journalists, I find it worthwhile to explore the values and ideals of journalists employed at traditional public service media broadcasters. According to Witschge, there is a ‘need to be creative and think of how we can inject new life into public-service journalism, acknowledging the value this has for democracy’ (2013: 171). In order to think up ways of injecting new life into public service journalism, it may be useful to explore the core values of public-service journalism today. With this study I hope to begin such exploration.

Through an increasing amount of platforms, news are a primary information source for what takes place in the world around us. In this sense, the media has what Danish media researcher Anker Brink Lund (2002) calls editorial power over the information that the public receives and how this is defined and presented. Thus, news frames the reality and constructs debate. National news plays a crucial role in creating the nation’s shared memory, history, knowledge and identity. Further, I agree with the idea that through televising ‘media events’, such as a terror attack, the death of a cultural icon, an election, reporting from sports events such as the Olympics, the media creates a ‘We-feeling’ among viewers (Curran and Gurevitch 1996: 27; Lund 2000). This rhythmic ordering of news can be seen as a continual reaffirmation process, a part of what Giddens (1990) terms the project of ‘ontological security’, strengthening the national idea of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ (Bonde 1998). Particularly at a time when the audiences are ‘ever-fragmenting’ (Broersma and Peters 2013: 1), there is a need to reconsider the role of the journalist at work today.

Why study the TV profession today?

Newsrooms and news workers have been studied by interdisciplinary scholars since the mid-1950s and the dominating literature stems from the late 1970s (see e.g. Epstein 1973; Tuchman 1973, 1978; Schlesinger 1978; Gans 1979; Fishman 1980). This first wave of newsroom studies agreed to a remarkable extent that news is the outcome of routine, largely implicit, organisational rules that all news workers follow. From this perspective, news workers and the entire news industry in general work and function rather mechanically by doing what Tuchman calls ‘routinizing the unexpected’ (Tuchman 1973). Since then, newsrooms have changed considerably, and thus there is a need to re-enter the newsroom if we want to include the lived experience and perception of the journalists at work in debates of news, journalism and media practices today.

The working situation inside TV newsrooms today is very different from how it was only a couple of years ago. As I have seen during the last decade of studying newsrooms, the everyday working routines are changing rapidly. As Cottle (2000) has argued in his article ‘New(s) times: Towards a “second wave” of news ethnography’, the change in media ecology means that it is now crucial to bring audiences up-to-date and revise the first wave’s earlier findings and theory by using empirical observations as the main foundation for conducting research.

Being in touch with the same four newsrooms over a period of 10 years has given me in-depth insights, a shared history with my informants and a near-experience of the struggles faced by news workers over a longer period. One of the crucial struggles that the newsrooms have all battled with over the last 10 years is economic: how to make money from TV news bulletins in an ever more competitive market? In early 2007, as I begun this study, market logic was beginning to matter more and more in the everyday work. Today, 10 years later, the need to generate money is even more talked about at all levels of the newsrooms. Various different business plans, paywalls and selling of video feeds have been set up by newscasters, but today as viewer figures on TV are dwindling, all four newsrooms studied are still struggling to find ways of making money. As Head of News at TV2 Nyhederne Jacob Kwon told me in 2016: ‘The biggest challenge for us today is figuring out what we shall live from in five years. This is a nut that we have yet to crack. I do not know of any newscaster who has found a solution to this problem – yet’ (interviewed 27 October 2016).

Since the first wave of newsroom studies, the reality of newsrooms and news has changed dramatically. The newsrooms of today have much more competition than 30 years ago: both from an increasing amount of possible news outlets, nationally, globally and digitally, and from ever-increasing platforms of alternative news media (Atton 2002, 2009; Atton and Hamilton 2008), bringing news not at the same hourly bulletin but as-it-happens. This competition puts new demands on news workers and on each news outlet to be flexible and innovative in keeping the audiences, which has been said to leave some of the basic rules of journalism today in a state of profound flux (see for instance Preston 2009: 1; Steensen 2011). With this increased amount of new news providers, a new criticism of the national TV news in general and Public Service Broadcasting in particular has emerged, arguing that the national news is no ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part I: Journalists and Newsrooms as Objects of Research
• Part II: An Anthropologist among Journalists
• Part III: Introducing the Four News Divisions and a Relationship of Constant Competition
• Part IV: Inside the New Newsrooms
• Part V: New Struggles and Old Ideals
• Part VI: Exiting the Newsroom
• Epilogue
• Summary
• Appendix
• References
• Index