short answer

Chapter 10

Who’s a Journalist Now? The Expanded Reportorial Community

Objectives

To understand:

How the demarcation lines between journalists, non-journalists, and audience-participants are dissolving

How the definitions and roles of journalists have changed over the past 100 years

How eyewitness accounts and interventions in the news-gathering process have been enabled by new media technologies

What we mean by “citizen-journalism”

What this suggests for the future of published and broadcast news and information

Who’s Who in the Digital Zoo?

With the Internet, anyone can be an author and publisher

New media are changing the relationship between the producers and consumers of news

Reportorial community: those who report in a variety of media, old and new, using traditional journalistic genres and forms

Citizen Kane to Citizen-Journalist?

Volatile fault lines are cutting through the world of new media

Who gets to define, shape, edit, and present news?

Citizen-journalist: independent person who is not attached to or employed by a media organization who witnesses an event and then provides an account of that event using traditional and new journalistic forms

Citizen Kane to Citizen-Journalist? cont’d

Argument about whether journalism is an art form, a craft, a profession, or just another form of wage labour

Until recently, consensus was that reporters, news photographers, and editorial staff were a distinct type of labour, defined by their relationship to both media outlet and audience

Beginning of twentieth century to 1945: journalism came to be understood as a craft

Journalism in the Twentieth Century: Craft or Profession?

In early twentieth-century North America the combination of commercial ownership and mechanization of newspaper production directed the pace and structure of media work

Time dependence meant news itself became a perishable commodity

Time-Dependent News

Division of labour organized:

Information would be telephoned in to the office from the field (reporter)

It would be composed and typed up as a story (the writer)

It would be evaluated, corrected, and decided if and where it would be placed in the newspaper (editor and layout)

Sent to be reproduced (the printers)

Since the newspaper depended on advertising for revenue, the news would be filled in after the advertisements. With advertising, time, and speed as the primary directives, the reporters’ and writers’ jobs were neither glamorous nor secure.

The Professional Journalist

Specialization of media: training of reporters at university; journalist as a professional designation

Ethos of objectivity emerged

Inverted pyramid (organization of news into who, what, where, when, and why) set as the standard for writing content

Copy was written such that information could be removed in descending order more easily to accommodate advertising

The Professional Journalist, cont’d

Journalists were trained to write copy this way and accept that news values were also exchange values

The ultimate goal was not to engage, motivate, and activate the public-as-citizens, but to sell news to a public-as-consumer

Journalism ethics application of moral philosophy to the practices of journalism that may be formalized in public statements addressing the conduct of the journalist as well as decisions regarding media organizational goals and objectives, content, labour, and other social relations

Journalists and Technology

Whistle-blower: person who witnesses or collects evidence of corruption, illegalities, or malfeasance, against a corporation, military or government department and passes it onto the media for exposure

Investigative journalism: in-depth, long-term, comprehensive research and reporting; finds and reveals information hidden from the public and focuses on the accountability of institutions and individuals wielding power

Journalists and Technology, cont’d

Use of computers recognized in the early 1990s—“computer assisted” or “online” journalism

Public relations: all news stories are composed and therefore socially constructed, but public relations’ stories are deliberately constructed to sell the public a particular way of thinking that benefits the campaign and the client that paid for it

Ownership convergence: content produced for one media is now expected to be flexible enough for all platforms

Journalists and Technology, cont’d

Technological change and business decisions that combine to reduce both the number of journalists and the time that each reporter has to research negatively impact the ability of the journalist to do investigative reporting

The reporter becomes more reliant on the public relations and press releases.

Balance of power shift away from citizens towards powerful institutions

Journalism, Technology, and Labour

Persuading people that it is normal to pay for content is fundamental to the process of commodification and essential to capitalism

The Times in London instituted subscription charges for its online content

There is never a one-to-one correlation between technology and any form of labour

The commercial reality of journalism is that new technology often means a change in the way the work is managed, and new and different skill sets are being required

Journalism, Technology, and Labour, cont’d

Fewer workers are doing more work, there is less time to do creative and investigative research, and owner/ management/employee relationships are strained

Workers don’t know from one day to the next whether they will be told not to come to work again

Outsourcing (easy with digitization)

Robot journalism

Journalism, Technology, and Labour, cont’d

Algorithms search data to determine what content consumers are seeking, what content advertisers are willing to pay for, and what content can be profitably produced

No more news meetings or newsrooms—editorial workforce is freelance, compensated by the piece

Freelance labour is promoted as favourable for the knowledge society today and in the future

Participatory journalism: role of a citizen or groups of citizens in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information

Participatory Journalism

Any literate citizen in any corner of the globe who has a computer or mobile computing device with an Internet connection can create his or her own interactive news media

Pressure on experienced journalists, journalism students, and journalism educators to maintain the distinguishing features of the profession

Developments in podcasting and news alerts via mobile phones are changing the ways we consume news products

Blog, Blog, Blog. Blog, Blog!

Blogging: an Internet publication of the views and opinions of an individual

Can be totally personal, like a diary, or places to express crazy ideas that some people will find amusing enough to return to, or a counterpoint news publication

While on one end, writers who contribute to blogs and post freelance work hope that sheer exposure and talent will eventually result in payment, influx of user-generated content provides another reserve army that commercial media can draw on for content

Blog, Blog, Blog. Blog, Blog! cont’d

Crowd-sourcing: distributed labour, initiated by an online call for participation and collaboration in textual composition, problem-solving, or decision-making

Identifying the political economy of UGC indicates that commercial media are incorporating such content in an effort to attract more people to online advertising

Power relations: while participation in the production of content has increased, the decision-making and media ownership structures have not

The Future of Journalism?

Argument that podcasting, weblogs, and other forms of interactive information-sharing on the Internet will create a new and more democratic public discourse is seductive, but not all that solid

Digital technology challenges both the old media and our conception of what journalism is

Breaking down the practice of journalism so that it is accessible to everyone, anywhere, anytime, risks collapsing important theoretical and practical distinctions that still have a purpose