Advancing Media Production Research

With a history going back to at least the 1950s, long-term research in media production environments remains challenging. Much of the research on news production has come from a sociological direction that examines the process of production. By choosing this route, research has tended to focus on interactions among journalists at the small group and organizational levels. This vein of research mainly emphasizes the limitations and constraints on what might become the news product.

One rationale for the renewed focus on media production is the rapid and deep changes in the media and cultural industries. Media studies in general and production studies in particular have had problems keeping up. In many areas we simply do not know what is going on. Thus, there is a need for catching up and recruiting young researchers. But at the same time as we specialize and focus on media production, we ought to remind ourselves that our field is a sub-discipline in cultural sociology, itself an interdisciplinary subfield between humanities and the social sciences with ambitions to do critical and creative research across established disciplines and to expand methodological repertoires in the interdisciplinary borderlands. Our new emphasis on media production must therefore be understood as a strategic response to societal changes and not as an invitation to break with the fundamental understanding of media and cultural research as occupied with what John B. Thompson once coined as a ‘tripartite approach’ (Thompson, 1990: 307). There will always be, and should always be in media and cultural research, a sense of unity across the division of labour between researchers focusing on production, content and reception. Future media and cultural production research should continue to link these areas of research, and also investigate the connections between them.

In order to understand the changing content, dynamics, and practices of media production, we need more theory. But time is over for the one theory that can explain it all for the years and decades to come. In a fast-changing digital world, we need many new theories—theories of all sizes and shapes.

The problem of access is enduring and significant for fieldwork-based research on media production, but some periods are more challenging than others. When scholars gathered in Leeds in 2013 to discuss advancing the field, the United Kingdom news media were in a turbulent time. The phone-hacking practices of certain newspapers and the subsequent scrutiny of the Leveson Inquiry had scholars wondering whether the notoriously uncooperative private press, attempting to show goodwill and best behaviour, might open its doors to independent research in the context of an imminent change in the regulatory regime (Brock, 2012; Grayson and Freedman, 2013). Meanwhile, the public broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), was under intense scrutiny for its failure to broadcast an investigation into the criminal behaviour of one of its star presenters, Jimmy Savile. What had been a slightly more open door for production research was closing, and my own research on relations between journalists and Muslim sources in Glasgow, Scotland, suffered because of this process. Whatever goodwill gestures may or may not have occurred among private broadcasters and the press, they did not manifest in an invitation to pick up the BBC’s slack.

It was only after I finished my PhD thesis that I learned that my research related to production studies. Departing from the question of ethics in documentary filmmaking, I investigated both the perspective of filmmakers and participants on ethical issues in the documentary filmmaking practice, using quantitative and qualitative research methods respectively (Sanders, 2012). For the latter, I extensively interviewed four participants who had participated in documentary film projects. The analysis of the participants’ interview accounts resulted not just in an understanding of their take on ethical issues in documentary filmmaking, but also in an understanding of the complexity of their involvement in documentary film projects, which included contributing unsolicited content and the taking on of production responsibilities, such as arranging for locations and recruiting additional participants. Hence, I theorized them as co-creators, who contribute to their own representation in the resulting film. My research was firmly situated within documentary film studies and I refrained from including perspectives from media ethics and journalism ethics explicitly, arguing that the former is too general and the latter too specific. I also excluded discussion of other—more or less documentary—formats such as docu-soaps and reality TV. Instead, I approached documentary filmmaking as an artistic practice of its own.