Digital Journalism

Janet Jones, Lee Salter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446291894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comunicación empresarial

How can we make sense of the ongoing technological changes affecting journalism and journalists today?

Will the new digital generation break down barriers for journalism, or will things just stay the same?

These and other pertinent questions will be asked and explored throughout this exciting new book that looks at the changing dynamics of journalism in a digital era. Examining issues and debates through cultural, social, political and economic frameworks, the book gets to grip with today?s new journalism by understanding its historical threats and remembering its continuing resilience and ability to change with the times. In considering new forms of journalistic practice the book covers important topics such as:

• truth in the new journalism

• the changing identity of the journalist

• the economic implications for the industry

• the impact on the relationship between the journalist and their audience

• the legal framework of doing journalism online.

Vibrant in style and accessible to all, Digital Journalism is a captivating read for anyone looking to understand the advent of a new journalism that has been altered by the latest digital technologies.

1 Journalism as a Practice

Everyone is a witness, everyone is a journalist (Indymedia)

The suggestion that the internet offers to ordinary people wishing to write, comment and report has led to a plethora of responses. The idea that everyone is a journalist has led some to bemoan the ‘end of journalism’, whilst others have celebrated it.

The array of new forms of digital news production has caused consternation in some circles. In an article for the Press Gazette in 2006 Linda Jones argued that bloggers should not be considered journalists, for they are simply not subject to the same processes and pressures as ‘real’ journalists. Bloggers are not pressured by sub-editors, editors and lawyers at their place of work; they are not trained to consider content that might be libellous or contemptuous; they do not consider the value of their writings to audiences; and do not consider grammatical and stylistic issues. In other words, Jones implies that journalists are defined as such through their institutional context, which bloggers in particular lack (Jones, 2006).

On the other hand, during an address to the Heyman Centre for the Humanities at Columbia University, John Pilger noted that ‘It is said the internet is an alternative; and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as journalists should.’ Similarly, in an article for the Washington Post, Jay Rosen emphasised ‘how disruptive web technology is to traditional journalism’. He explains how the internet has ‘busted open’ the ‘system of gates and gatekeepers’ by allowing sources communicate direct to the public and by facilitating collaborative journalism, resulting in a ‘new balance of power between producers and consumers’.

We cannot seriously consider the possibilities of online journalism, or evaluate it, without considering first what journalism is. The question of whether blogging ‘is’ journalism really depends on what one means by journalism and what sort of blog one refers to. According to Technorati in May 2010 of the five most popular blogs, four were musings on gadgets and technology. Indeed, many bloggers dedicate their time to releasing lists of links to everything from pirated computer software to pornography sites. So, some blogs are self-consciously journalistic, but others are not. Consequently such blanket assertions as ‘bloggers are …’ are as unhelpful as those that tell us ‘journalists are …’.

Journalism and Old New Technologies

It was perhaps inevitable that journalists would construe the early internet as a threat. As early as 1995 The New York Times referred to the ‘lure and addiction of life on line’ (18 March 1995). The Globe and Mail reported that ‘a growing number of on-line users have become junkies’ (15 October 1995). The drug metaphor would continue over the next year, with USA Today reporting that ‘Obsessive internet users have a true addiction’ (1 July 1996), and then pass across the Atlantic to The Sunday Times which informed us that the ‘internet traps surfers in addictive Web’ (9 June 1996) and the Daily Mail explaining the specific problem of a ‘“Cocaine-like rush” for users locked in a fantasy world’ (4 January 1996).

More specifically as relates to journalism, print journalists muddled the medium with an institution or even the practice of journalism. For instance the Toronto Star contrasted the internet with more familiar media. In contrast to the internet, ‘Conventional news media – newspapers, TV, radio – come equipped with editors whose job it is to cast a skeptical eye on stories’ (‘A media virus from internet’, 13 May 1995). The Denver Post reiterated the theme a couple of years later: ‘mainstream journalists are stuck with the facts, no matter how much they may spin them. But the internet … operates under no such restrictions and seems rather proud of it’ (‘Truth’s values plummet on “Net”,’ 2 November 1997).

So whereas other media are truthful, the internet is anthropomorphised into a liar. At the same time, however, it is not just the factual nature of other media that gives them an advantage, but also their communicative capacities. Indeed an analysis in Media Guardian informed us that ‘Newspapers offer a forum for debate and analysis which cannot be provided either by new computer services or by TV and radio. As well as breaking scoops, papers can explain the whys, whats and wherefores in a way other superficial media cannot’ (‘The online age and us’, 24 April 1995). The Sunday Times took a similar position, explaining to its readers, ‘The fact that consumers can now access an immense variety of unfiltered news sources raises issues of trust and credibility. Most newspapers and broadcasters are anchored in both history and accountability, and a great many websites have neither’ (‘Screening out the lies’, 23 January 2000).

More recently, The Australian complained:

all were going to be democratised by Web 2.0. But democratisation, despite its lofty idealisation, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience and talent. It is threatening the future of our cultural institutions.… [Web 2.0 is] the great seduction …[peddling] the promise of bringing more truth to more people: more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen … [Instead, all] the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the internet into the sheer noise of one hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves. (‘Disentangle it now, this web of deceit’, The Australian, 4 August 2007)

A year later The Independent railed against the BBC’s use of Twitter in its reporting of the Mumbai massacre. The commentary informed us that ‘whereas in the old days only professional journalists (weathered men with Press Cards tucked into their hat bands) would have been able to contribute to that news feed, now it appeared that anybody with a Twitter subscription could have a crack’, adding, ‘Twittering is not the way to provide news’ (2 December 2008). Of course today The Independent’s website utilises many of the technologies seen to debase journalism, including Twitter.

We see here a number of concerns about digital journalism based on varieties of technological determinism. This is to say that much of the discourse abstracts technologies from their use and suggests determinate, usually deleterious effects on journalism.

In fact, journalists and news organisations have a tradition of scepticism towards new technologies, yet this scepticism masks the intimate relations journalists and news organisations have with the technologies they use as well as the way in which uses are developed.

In the first instance, from the telegraph to the satellite, journalists have always utilised technologies in news gathering. Postal systems, phone networks, vox pops, and ‘wire’ services have uncontentiously helped journalists collect information.

For example, the method of writing news for newspapers takes the form of the inverted pyramid, which Stuart Allan (2004) shows emerged from an interaction with technology. He suggests that the use of the telegraph, especially by the Associated Press (AP) led to a training system in which the ‘inverted pyramid’ was taught because ‘unreliable telegraph lines made it necessary to compress the most significant facts’ into the lead paragraph. There was also an economic dimension to the conventionalisation of newspaper discourses. The expense of using the telegraph also meant that ‘Each word of a news account had to be justified in terms of cost’, leading to a more efficient, straightforward use of language (Allan, 2004: 16–18). Chapman (2005: 93) adds that the use of the telephone had the impact of concretising the division between field journalists who ‘became entirely responsible for the gathering and initial drafting of news’ and desk journalists who ‘stayed in the office and fine-tuned this output to the house style’.

In order to better understand the capacity journalism has for adaptation to new technologies, and to recognise the continual need to adapt, we need this historical perspective. This enables us to see that, against technological determinism, the approaches of the social shaping of technology in fact demonstrate that human influence is much greater than understood by technological determinists and that possible uses are far more flexible than might be thought. Indeed, a technology has no impact outside the context of its institutionalised forms of use (Salter, 2004). For example, ‘the internet’ should not be compared with newspapers at all – the proper comparator would be paper, of which the newspaper is an institutionalised form of use. Uses become conventionalised in practices, such as journalism. Indeed, paper may be used for money, pornography or newspapers. Television may be used for closed circuit television, shopping or comedy sketch shows. None of these uses are inherent in the medium and they are certainly not necessarily exclusive.

Television as New Media

New technologies only prescribe uses in a very minimal sense. Television news, for example, was not preformed for news. Rather, its use for journalism was first constrained by pre-existing conventions for other media, alongside entrenched interests that profited from those conventionalised forms of use. Specific television news conventions – initially borrowed from radio – were developed over a number of years, and continue to develop today, as do the technologies used.

The initial confusion over how to do television news in the UK is described by BBC journalist Andrew Marr:

The BBC’s first answer was to ignore the pictures almost entirely, in the cause of pure news. The newsreels were still being brought in, often out of date and lacking real sound … By the early 1950s the BBC had its own newsreel department … But [the newsreels] were really short feature films … For the BBC News people, who had grown up in the culture of words, this was fine. Moving pictures could never be serious. They conceded that news bulletins should be aired on television too. But how to marry the raw visual power of film with the sacred duty of news reporting? No one could figure that out. (Marr, 2004: 270)

Part of the problem, according to Marr, was that the audio and visual provisions at the time were located in different departments (it is worth remembering that the introduction of sound into film at the time was by no means natural. Technologies for playing sound to match images were available long before they were widely used). Consequently, a compromise was reached wherein ‘radio would provide the words, TV the pictures’. Marr describes the early television news service thus:

The news was … dealt with in words alone, with carefully printed captions, like paragraph headings in a newspaper, held up in front of the camera while an unseen announcer read the appropriate item of news. There then might be a series of still pictures or … hand drawn maps. Sometimes a hand would appear from off screen … helpfully pointing to something. (Marr, 2004: 270–1)

In addition to the internal wrangling between departments within the BBC, Stuart Allan has noted the impact of institutional constraints on the early conventions of television news. He explains that the:

ten minutes of news was read by an off-screen voice in an ‘impersonal, sober and quiet manner’, the identity of the [always male] newsreader being kept secret to preserve the institutional authority of the BBC. (Allan, 2004: 36)

Things fared little better in the US. The 28 January 1952 edition of Time Magazine reported the perceived debacle of television broadcasting there:

In the first years of television, US newspaper editors worried that the new medium would capture many of their readers by covering news as it happened. So far, the worries have been groundless; TV news programs have added little to the technique of reporting, have often been no better than radio newscasts – and sometimes not as good.

It then went on to report on a new innovation in television news reporting at NBC, ‘an ambitious two-hour global news roundup’ called Today, recounting two significant incidents:

the ranging TV eye fixed on Admiral William M. Fechteler, Chief of Naval Operations, on the steps of the Pentagon on his way to work. ‘Can you give us a pronouncement on the state of the Navy?’ asked NBC’s reporter. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Admiral Fechteler. ‘When I left it yesterday, it was in great shape.’ ‘Thank you, Admiral Fechteler,’ cried the reporter triumphantly. Said critic Crosby: ‘The fact is Admiral Fechteler hadn’t opened his mail yet.’

Communicator Garroway went on with his program: ‘Hello, Ed Haaker in Frankfurt. Tell me the news in your part of the world.’ Replied Haaker: ‘The big news is the weather. We had our first big storm of the year. We’re really chilly.’ Said Garroway: ‘You’re not alone. Goodbye, Ed.’ (Time Magazine, 28 January, 1952).

We can see then, that in each case, there were no pre-existing conventions for using these new media, and a period of adjustment emerged. Debates raged about whether it was even possible to ‘do’ news on television, and even whether television itself would last – Andrew Marr cites a BBC executive opining that ‘Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan’! (Marr, 2004: 268). Once it was recognised that television would not go away, newspaper people expressed anxiety over the future of newspaper publishing – would newspapers survive the television age? Similarly, radio people questioned whether there was a future for radio.

Binds and Opportunities

Despite the initial scepticism towards television, it would appear very strange today to question its value to journalists. The attempt to shoehorn the practices of newspaper journalism into television seem misguided now that we regard television as a form of journalism in its own right. The same is proving to be the case with the internet and associated technologies today as new forms of journalism and new journalistic conventions are being established.

Indeed, despite the misgivings outlined above, we see that there have always been more sober voices within the industry. Some commentators recognised early on that the core elements of the practice of journalism are maintained despite the medium. Editor and Publisher reported on the head of Associated Press’ take on the impact of the internet on journalism: Lou Boccardi was reported as suggesting, ‘Whether it appears on a printed page, or a series of pixels on a computer screen, journalism must be accurate, objective and fair … As we look excitedly at the interactive world and its promise, with its changing tools of communication, it is important to remember that the principles of the news piece do not change’ (‘AP chief: Beware of yellow journalism in cyberspace’ Editor and Publisher Magazine, 11 February 1995.). Perhaps Boccardi overstates the continuity, for the principles of a news piece surely do change, but the principles behind good journalism do not.

Indeed, concerns over the veracity and quality of information on the internet may go some way to explaining the conservatism of early internet news ventures. When the big news corporations moved onto the internet, they did much the same as the newspapers companies that first went on to television – they simply transferred the data to the new medium, in the main without considering the potential of the internet.

For example, in September 1994, The Times trumpeted its new ‘internet computer network’, wherein ‘From today, readers in any country will be able to call up articles from these pages on their personal computers, using a modem. They will also be able to communicate their ideas and questions directly to our specialist media writers and to other readers, using the same basic tools’. The Times network would offer a ‘daily summary of the main items in The Times, other specialist content and, eventually, an archive’. It would provide access to databases in academic institutions, associations and corporations ‘on every continent’, and access to a variety of other sites from the CIA World Factbook to humorous and entertainment sites (‘Welcome to The Times internet computer network’, 21 September 1994). Almost a year later, the parent company of The Times,...