Abstract
Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. Cultural codes not only trigger technological and economic changes, but also provide pathways to control them, allowing the democratic practices of independent journalism to be sustained in new forms. Even as they successfully defend their professional ethics, however, journalists experience them as vulnerable to subversion in the face of technological and economic change. Indeed, independent journalists and the social groups who support them often feel as if they are losing the struggle for autonomy. Just as current anxieties have been triggered by computerization and digital news, so were earlier crises of journalism linked to technological shifts that demanded new forms of economic organization. Digital production has created extraordinary organizational upheaval and economic strain. At the same time, critical confrontations with digital production have triggered innovative organizational forms that allow new technologies to sustain, rather than undermine, the democratic culture and institution of news production. If news producers are making efforts to adapt professional journalism to the digital age while maintaining journalistic civil values, there are parallel adaptations from the digital side: digital journalism becoming more like professional journalism.
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Notes
Whether journalistic news platforms are more or less differentiated from political parties and their ideologies, or for that matter from religious, ethnic, economic, or racial groups, is an empirical question that has been intensely debated over the course of three decades of historical and comparative sociology (Schudson 1978; Alexander 1981; Chalaby 1996; Hallin and Mancini 2004, 2012; Jones 2013; Mancini 2013). What has not been subject to debate, however, is the factual self-presentation of journalists, whatever the nature of their more implicit connections. Putative neutrality allows news media to present themselves as third-party alternatives to partisan struggles between openly ideological parties and their depictions of social reality. For example, a recent lead editorial in the New York Times (2013), headlined “The Facts About Benghazi,” suggested “an exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.” As grounds for confidence that its journalists had discovered “the facts,” this Times’ editorial referenced evidence, proof, publicity, and interviews, implicitly linking these fact-finding methods to the integrity of paper and reporters: “The report, by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. [Republican Representative Mike] Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has called Benghazi a ‘preplanned, organized terrorist event,’ said his panel’s findings [were] based on an examination of 4,000 classified cables. If Mr. Rogers has evidence of a direct Al Qaeda role, he should make it public. Otherwise, The Times’s investigation, including extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack, stands as the authoritative narrative.”
The Economist has hailed Shirky, a Professor of New Media at NYU, as “one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the internet” (Ottawa 2011).
“Newspapers from the start were caught in a frustrating dilemma. Overwhelmingly, the culture of the Web is that content is free. If newspapers put the content of the newspaper online for free, they would encourage subscribers to drop their subscriptions and undermine the circulation of their print version. If they charged for content, the prospective audience would avoid them and go instead to other sites where content was free” (Jones 2009: 186).
“Search engines and Web portrayals such as Google and Yahoo and AOL are all major providers of news, but very little of it’s originated by them. They are ‘free riders,’ who get the benefit of offering their audience a range of reported news that has been generated by newspapers and other traditional media … Google, in other words, makes money from the news article while the newspaper does the work. The ‘free rider’ syndrome is also at the heart of the portion of the burgeoning blogosphere devoted to news and public affairs, because all of their commentary is based on the traditional media’s reporting” (Jones 2009:187).
This iconic phrase, which has assumed an almost folkloric status, is attributed to a presentation that Stuart Brand made at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand was the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Shirky’s predictions that Internet will destroy journalism are based upon the same reductionist logic, equating professional form with a specific type of economic production: “The definition of journalist, seemingly a robust and stable profession, turns out to be tied to particular forms of production” (Shirky 2008: 70).
“We are undoubtedly in an information age … The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital world, that future is driven almost 100 % by the ability of that company’s product or services to be rendered in digital form … Media will become digitally driven by the combined forces of convenience, economic imperative, and deregulation. And it will happen fast” (Negroponte 1995a, b: 11–13).
Yale University seminar, January 28, 2014.
Bourdieu’s field theory of society ignores the relative independence of cultural power, insisting that group struggles inside and between fields are utilitarian efforts to increase symbolic capital, efforts that are themselves expressions of meta-conflicts among classes and their class-fractions (Alexander 1995). If journalism does have significant autonomy as an independent field (Benson and Neveu 2005), it is because of the cultural force of professional ties; the meaning that self-regulation has for journalists motivates intense efforts to defend their distinctive sacred creed. That their professional morality complements that of the civil sphere guarantees warrants that the “performances” of journalist struggling to sustain autonomy can resonate with significant segments of the citizen-audience.
“Publicness is an emblem of epochal change. It is profoundly disruptive. Publicness threatens institutions whose power is invested in the control of information and audiences … Publicness is a sign of our empowerment at their expense. Dictators and politicians, media moguls and marketers try to tell us what to think and say. But now, in a truly public society, they must listen to what we say…with respect for us as individuals and for the power we can now wield as groups—as publics” (Jarvis 2011). The section headings in Jarvis’ chapter on “The Benefits of Publicness” are: “Publicness Builds Relationships,” “Publicness Disarms Strangers,” “Publicness Enables Collaboration,” “Publicness Unleashes the Wisdom (and Generosity) of the Crowd,” “Publicness Defuses the Myth of Perfection,” “Publicness Neutralizes Stigmas,” “Publicness Grants Immortality … or at Least Credit,” and “Publicness Organizes Us” (Jarvis 2011: 43–59).
In his empirical study of The Guardian online, Ahmad (2010: 151) observed “the levels of bilious and abusive comments under any given article,” suggesting that the “bitterly negative” tone often seems to undermined journalism civil code and solidaristic aspirations.
In fact, journalism has been of little interest to social theory generally (Hardt 2001). Max Weber once intended to study journalism, but managed to compose only a fragmented proposal.
“This very crisis, by letting go thousands of reporters and editors, has provided a workforce of talented and experienced journalists [and] some of them have been able to quickly produce quality news reporting with small staffs, low costs, and alliances with other online organizations, with traditional newspapers and broadcasters, and with philanthropists who believe that the withering of news institutions threatens the vitality of local communities and national well-being” (Schudson 2010: 17).
“The pile of paywall money is still growing, and for the first time, the Times Company has broken out how big it is: More than $150 million a year … To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue” (Chittum 2013). By the end of 2013, NYT.com had 30 million unique visits monthly within the U.S., 45 million worldwide, and an additional 20 million visitors from mobile devices and tablets. On all platforms combined, the paper had 1,926,800 daily paid subscribers and 2,409,000 Sunday (The New York Times Company Annual Report 2013). When it called off 2-year paywall experiment in 2007, the Times’ circulation from all platforms totaled only 787,000, including 227,000 online, and its website generated 13 million unique visitors monthly (Perez-Pena 2007).
“In his first conspicuous move as the new owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has approved a budget hike this year that will enable the paper to boost staffing after years of cutback … Several blogs and print sections will get more resources and staff additions throughout the year …The Fix, a political blog, will get more reporters. The paper is also starting a new blog that will use data to explain public policies. “Our staff of politics reporters will grow by five early this year," [editor Marty] Baron said. They will work with an expanded staff of photo editors, data specialists and graphics and photo staffers, he said. The paper’s website will be redesigned this year, which will require new hires. A new breaking-news desk will operate from 8 a.m. until midnight with the mission of posting stories more quickly online. Money will be spent on print products as well. The Sunday magazine will be given more pages and a new design. A new Sunday Style and Arts section will be introduced in the spring … Adam Kushner, executive editor of the National Journal, was named recently to head a new digital team for online commentary and analysis. The paper is currently hiring for the team. Fred Barbash, who was running White House and congressional coverage for Reuters, is returning to the Post to oversee an overnight staff that will refresh news for morning readers” (Yu 2014).
“Steven Hills, Washington Post president told the Financial Times, “Bezos is focusing on developing a great digital audience 10 years from now, 20 yeas from now, rather than immediate profits” (Luckerson 2014).
Nonprofit financing of digital platforms for professional journalism in the USA has begun to play a significant role on the national level as well: “Bill Keller, a columnist at The New York Times and its former executive editor, will leave the paper to become editor in chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism start-up focused on the American criminal justice system. “It’s a chance to build something from scratch, which I’ve never done before,” Mr. Keller said, “and to use all the tools that digital technology offers journalists in terms of ways to investigate and to present on a subject that really matters …” Formed late last year by Neil Barsky, a journalist turned Wall Street money manager, The Marshall Project is a non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering criminal justice. “Since the day I was born, I have been aware that the criminal justice system in American is bizarrely horrible and weirdly tolerated,” Mr. Barsky said. “The main reason is that it’s been that way for such a long duration that we don’t challenge it anymore.” With The Marshall Project, Mr. Barsky said that he hoped to ignite a national conversation about the criminal justice system” (Somaiya 2014).
Michael Spence (1973) conceptualized “signaling” as a way parties to an economic exchange can communicatively overcome the problem of asymmetric information. He did so by drawing from the theorizing of Erving Goffman, who developed a micro approach to the performative dimensions of social life.
The deeply damaging controversy that linked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to a three-day traffic jammed on the George Washington Bridge is a case in point. On September 9, 2013, two traffic lanes were closed on the Fort Lee side, bringing outgoing traffic to a snail’s pace. In their initial response to complaints, officials claimed the closings were part of a traffic control study, but suspicions of a political vendetta by Christie-appointees soon surfaced. Only when these were reported in a small town weekly, The Record newspaper in Bergen County, N.J., did a de-legitimation process begin that culminated in a national scandal engulfing the prominent Republican Governor, until then a leading Republican contender for President in 2016. In an exhaustive reconstruction of the scandal-creating process, the New York Times emphasized the power of small things: “As a news story, the bridge backup seemed minor. After all, if you were going to write about traffic jams in New Jersey you might as well also report on someone getting a cold sore or the fact that a man had his driveway paved. But at The Record newspaper in Bergen County, the publisher heard from a friend that it was taking hours to cross the bridge, a tidbit that founds its way to John Cihowski, who writes the paper’s ‘Road Warrior’ column. His first thought was, ‘Oh gosh, the George Washington Bridge is tied up every day.” On the other hand, he reasoned, ‘I tend to follow-up the dumbest things.’ He poked around, found that delays had persisted all week and wrote a column that was published on Friday, September 13” (Kleinfeld 2014).
Such a performative approach to the cultural effects and democratic potential of journalism connects with Schumpeter’s (1975 [1942]: 235–283) anti-classical, realist theory of democracy: “The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (269). Rejecting the classical ideal of the body of rational citizens participating in a polis, Schumpeter introduced a minimalist definition of democracy, requiring not full participation but competition for votes and the institutional separation of powers and rule of law that allow it. Just so, the idea of news media providing information to rational citizens, while normatively compelling—and culturally powerful—is not sociologically realistic. The discourse of civil society assumes rationality and widely inclusive participation, but it is their presupposition not their empirical reality that allows interpreting journalists, empowered by their professional institution, to affect judgments and actions vis-à-vis the powers that be.
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Alexander, J.C. The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Cultural Power. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 8, 9–31 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-014-0056-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-014-0056-5