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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What Journalism Could Be asks readers to reimagine the news by embracing a conceptual prism long championed by one of journalism s leading contemporary scholars. A former reporter, media critic and academic, Barbie Zelizer charts a singular journey through journalism s complicated contours, prompting readers to rethink both how the news works and why it matters. Zelizer tackles longstanding givens in journalism s practice and study, offering alternative cues for assessing its contemporary environment. Highlighting journalism s intersection with interpretation, culture, emotion, contingency, collective memory, crisis and visuality, Zelizer brings new meaning to its engagement with events like the global refugee crisis, rise of Islamic State, ascent of digital media and twenty-first-century combat. Imagining what journalism could be involves stretching beyond the already-known. Zelizer enumerates journalism s considerable current challenges while suggesting bold and creative ways of engaging with them. This book powerfully demonstrates how and why journalism remains of paramount importance.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Imagining Journalism
Beginnings
2 Twelve Metaphors for Journalism
Thinking about Journalism
How Journalists Talk about Journalism
How Scholars Talk about Journalism
The Usefulness of Metaphors
Section I Key Tensions in Journalism
Cues for Considering Key Tensions in Journalism: With Jennifer Henrichsen and Natacha Yazbeck
3 “Eyewitnessing” as a Journalistic Key Word: Report, Role, Technology and Aura
Key Words as Markers of Culture
Eyewitnessing as a Journalistic Key Word
First-Stage Eyewitnessing – Report
Second-Stage Eyewitnessing – Report/Role
Third-Stage Eyewitnessing – Report/Role/Technology
Fourth-Stage Eyewitnessing – Report/Role/Technology/Aura
From “Having Been There” to “Not Being There”
4 How the Shelf Life of Democracy in Journalism Scholarship Hampers Coverage of the Refugee Crisis
The Shelf Life of Ideas
Shelf Life and the Democracy/Journalism Nexus
How Journalism Became Necessary for Democracy
Why Democracy is Not Central for Journalism
The Refugee Crisis and the Journalism/Democracy Link
Refugees, Democracy and Journalism
The Immunity of Democracy’s Shelf Life
Enabling Retirement
5 Practice, Ethics, Scandal, Terror
The Problem of Ethics
Temporality and Ethics
Geography and Ethics
Institutional Culture and Ethics
Technology and Ethics
On the Impossibility of Journalism Ethics
Section II Disciplinary Matters
Cues for Considering Disciplinary Matters: With Jennifer Henrichsen and Natacha Yazbeck
6 Journalism and the Academy, Revisited
The Shape of Journalism and Its Study
Interpretive Communities and Journalism’s Study
Blended Inquiry and Future Correctives
7 Journalism Still in the Service of Communication
Reconsidering the Establishment of the Field of Communication
How Journalism Helped to Establish the Field of Communication
Where Did Journalism Go Over Time?
How Journalism Challenges Assumptions about Communication
Journalism @ the Center of Communication
8 On Journalism and Cultural Studies: When Facts, Truth and Reality Are God-Terms
On Journalism from a Cultural Perspective
Cultural Studies and Journalism
On the Future of Journalism and Cultural Studies
Section III New Ways of Thinking About Journalistic Practice
Cues for Considering New Ways of Thinking About Journalistic Practice: With Jennifer Henrichsen and Natacha Yazbeck
9 A Return to Journalists as Interpretive Communities
The Dominant Frame: Journalists as Professionals
The Alternative Frame: Journalists as an Interpretive Community
Local Mode of Interpretation
Durational Mode of Interpretation
Watergate and McCarthyism
Discourse and the Interpretive Community
10 Reflecting on the Culture of Journalism
Culture as a Construct
What is the Culture of Journalism?
Who Inhabits the Culture of Journalism?
What is the Culture of Journalism For?
The Culture of Journalism
11 When 21st-Century War and Conflict Are Reduced to a Photograph
Why Do War and Conflict Turn to the Visual?
Visualizing Twenty-first Century Combat
When War and Conflict Are Reduced to a Photograph
Endings
12 Thinking Temporally about Journalism’s Future
Predicting the Future
On Knowledge Transfer and Time
Tools of Temporal Engagement
The Past and Reflexivity
The Present and Transparency
The Future and Proactivity
Toward Journalism’s Future
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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What Journalism Could Be
Barbie Zelizer
polity
Copyright © Barbie Zelizer 2017
Cues for Considering Section I, Section II, Section III © Barbie Zelizer, Jennifer Henrichsen & Natacha Yazbeck
The right of Barbie Zelizer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0790-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Zelizer, Barbie, author.Title: What journalism could be / Barbie Zelizer.Description: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016016611 (print) | LCCN 2016029002 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509507863 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509507868 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509507870 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509507876 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509507894 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509507900 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Journalism.Classification: LCC PN4731 .Z455 2016 (print) | LCC PN4731 (ebook) | DDC 070.4--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016611
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the kind permission of publishers to reproduce and rework chapters (listed here under their original titles) from the following publications:
Chapter 2: Definitions of Journalism. In Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Geneva Overholser (eds.), The Press. Oxford University Press, 2005, 66-80. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, http://global.oup.com/academic.Adapted from Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004. Reproduced by permission.
Chapter 3: On “Having Been There”: “Eyewitnessing” as a Journalistic Key Word. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24(5), December 2007, 408–28. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis.
Chapter 4: On the Shelf Life of Democracy in Journalism Scholarship. Journalism 14(4), June 2013, 459–73. Reproduced by permission of Sage.
Chapter 5: When Practice is Undercut by Ethics. In Nick Couldry, Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevsky (eds.), Ethics of Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 317–37. Reproduced by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 6: Journalism and the Academy. In Karin Wahl Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (eds.), Handbook of Journalism Studies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2008, 29–41.Adapted from Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously. Sage, 2004. Reproduced by permission.
Chapter 7: Journalism in the Service of Communication. Journal of Communication, February 2011, 1–27. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.
Chapter 8: When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-Terms: On Journalism’s Uneasy Place in Cultural Studies. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(1), March 2004, 100–19. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis.
Chapter 9: Journalists as Interpretive Communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10, September 1993, 219–37. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis.
Chapter 10: The Culture of Journalism. In James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society (4th edition). London: Edward Arnold (Bloomsbury Academic), 2005, 198–214. Reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.
Chapter 11: When War is Reduced to a Photograph. In Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds.), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004, 115–35. Reproduced by permission of Routledge.
Chapter 12: Tools for the Future of Journalism. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, July 2013. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis.
1Imagining Journalism
Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that logic can take people from A to B, but imagination will take them everywhere. What Journalism Could Be draws from that sensibility. Imagining journalism into its margins, across its corners and beyond its limitations is an exercise that invites the accommodation of change. It calls on scholars of journalism to interrogate the commonly accepted and generally unchallenged contours of journalism’s practical accomplishment and intellectual conceptualization. And it calls on journalists to consider the possibilities of novelty and transformation, while being mindful that the risks this entails may complicate an already tenuous landscape.
Why should we rethink journalism today? The change in its environment suggests that doing so might be fruitful, but not in any immediately obvious or predictable fashion. From moves into automated news copy, user-generated content, wearables and virtual reality to newspaper closures and layoffs, many presume that journalism is currently at its point of exhaustion. The lines of that reasoning, embraced by many journalists and journalism scholars alike, are clear: they rest upon stress points of many kinds that offer either spirited proclamations of how the news must move with the times or depressed lamentations of what has been irretrievably lost. One side – the enthusiasts – sees change as the omnipotent enabler of all things new, the other – the naysayers – as the elimination of a legacy gone too soon. Neither invokes an incremental understanding of change as reciprocal give and take, adjustment, modification or turn-taking. And yet each of these activities regularly comes to the fore when change is on the horizon.
This book is situated in-between the naysayers and the enthusiasts. I argue that change in journalism can be embraced by considering it as a gradual back-and-forth between positions, where journalism’s practitioners, observers and analysts might imaginatively assess both what change can bring and how it resonates with where journalism has been. By accommodating new ways of understanding tensions in journalism, of thinking disciplinarily about journalism and of conceptualizing journalistic practice, this book thus charts a path toward a more textured environment through which to imagine what journalism could be.
Imagination does not inhabit journalism without qualification. A slew of factors – historical, social, cultural, economic, political, moral, ideological, technological – has separated it from most understandings of the news. An alignment with narrow understandings of modernity and reason, an identity that highlights its preoccupation with realism, an institutional neighborhood whose most proximate residents – politics or the economy – privilege truth-telling over making-up, a university environment that accommodates its relevance for the public good are some of the variables that have pushed imagination aside. Though imaginative thinking invariably slips into theories and discussions of journalism – Adam (1993, 1), for instance, defined journalism “as a product of the imagination,” while Schudson (1996, 96) observed how “making [news] is not faking, not lying, but . . . it cannot be done without play and imagination” – by and large thinking about journalism in conjunction with imagination has been confined to the art of narrative storytelling (Fishkin, 1985).
And yet its relevance in journalism is practically airborne. The very essence of journalism is creating an imagined engagement with events beyond the public’s reach. How that is accomplished is also imagined because journalism operates largely out of the public eye (Zelizer, 1992a). Journalists gather their information in ways and from domains that remain largely invisible. Acting much like shamans who journey to inaccessible worlds and return with some critical insight, journalists act as “stabilizing agents who solidify consensus and reinstate social order on their return” (Zelizer, 1992a, 21). What the journalist knows is valued precisely because no one else shares that knowledge, rendering it necessarily the target of public imagination. Even journalism education, wrote Keeble (2007, 2), “needs to encourage the creative spirit just as practitioners need to acknowledge and further explore its creative possibilities.” There is, then, far more of a connection to imagination in journalism than just narrative craft.
The focus on imagination draws too from beyond journalism. It has long been the focus in social and cultural theory, where multiple scholars have invested efforts in understanding what imagination could bring. Often aligned with the US sociologist C. Wright Mills in his description of the discipline of sociology – as “the capacity to shift from one perspective to another . . . to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two” (Mills, 1959, 7) – or with what Anthony Giddens (2001, 699) later paraphrased as the “application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of sociological questions [in which someone] . . . thinks oneself away” from what is already known, imagination has been invoked by scholars in wide-ranging disciplines: Benedict Anderson (1983) in history and political science, John Thompson (1984) in sociology, Arjun Appadurai (1996) in anthropology, and Charles Taylor (2002) in philosophy, among others.
More a response to concerns over a particular version of modernity than to other obstacles obstructing its fuller accommodation, the current turn toward imagination constitutes for many a redress to modernity’s impacts and burdens, where it was to be disciplined via an insistence on instrumental reason and rational thought. As Theodor Adorno (1976 [1969], 51) famously said, fantasy – his word for imagination – “is only tolerated when it is reified and set in abstract opposition to reality.” Imagination’s current reclamation is seen instead as an enterprise that can “either be used to compensate for the shortcomings of existing realities or to produce new ones” (Schulte-Sasse, 1986, 25). With that in mind, scholars have elaborated the layers of its presumed use-value: imagination, wrote Appadurai (1996, 31), “has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”
So it is with journalism. Though running free with the fields of possibility through which journalism itself can be conceived has always been diminished by the aforementioned obstructions to imagination’s inclusion, this book makes a pitch for thinking anew about the mindset that has unwisely – and, in this view, unproductively – set reason on one side of the fence and imagination on the other. Though surveying the field is always in part reductive, we need to rethink how we can understand their relationship more productively. What has been lost in imagination’s compartmentalization? What might be gained by reviving its centrality?
The chapters in this book aim to address these questions. Though extensively revised, the work assembled here has by and large made claims to imagination before, if less definitively than it does so in these pages. Offering an updated set of articles and book chapters that originally saw the light at some point over the last 25 years, this book engages vigorously with the idea of imagining journalism, focusing on how imaginative thinking – and its prevailing associated concepts and practices – fare in journalism today.
The current moment has been characterized as one of radical uncertainty, but the fields of possibility for thinking it through have been smaller than they need to be. When asked to predict developments for journalism on the eve of 2016, most responses tended to avoid the task’s broader contours and chose to focus almost unilaterally on technology. Headlines such as “Technology Trends Journalists Should Watch in 2016” (Ciobanu, 2015) or “The Most Likely Media and Tech Developments in 2016” (Sutcliffe, 2015) were plentiful. While useful for hedging against technology’s push forward, such efforts nonetheless suggest a paring down of imaginative thinking. Where are the people and texts of journalism? Its craft and culture? Its ideology and mindset? Its labor, workplace politics or relations with other institutions – all products of what C. Wright Mills classified as the stuff derived from the “playfulness of mind” (Mills, 1959, 211)?
Five attributes of the current moment make the essays collected here newly relevant. Because each revisits earlier arguments and applies them to different dimensions of journalism’s contemporary environment, each asks us to reconsider journalism today through the prism of imaginative thinking. Each suggests new vantage points through which to reenergize the exhausted quality of much of journalism’s current discussion.
A first reason to accommodate imagination has to do with craft. Because so much of journalism takes place out of the public eye, much of the initial drive toward journalistic activity has never been codified sufficiently for academics in search of repeatable results. What G. Stuart Adam (1976, 3) called “the journalistic imagination” is overloaded with individualized doses of curiosity, autonomy, improvisation, adventure and exploration that are central to newsmaking. Though other modes of thinking about journalism have been developed in academe – and are engaged in the pages that follow – the best one can hope for in understanding the idiosyncrasies of journalistic craft is to consider them against their many fields of possibility. Thus, for instance, how journalists scramble to cover politics when its contours are aggressively shifting – as seen in the US presidential race or the UK’s decision to exit the European Union – or how journalists improvise the disconnect between their visions of journalistic activity and a diminishing institutional landscape for its practice are examples of journalistic craft rising to the fore. Imaginative thinking lays open the potential for assessing its relevance.
A second reason to reconsider imaginative thinking is political – the evolving nature of what journalism must necessarily address in the current political environment. Though journalism has always adapted to evolving topics of newsworthy interest, many of today’s political news stories are bigger, more widespread and more broadly impactful than much of what passed as news in earlier time periods: the global refugee crisis and its diminution of human dignity in scores of nations around the world is a powerful and much more challenging follow-up to the local, regional or even national political stories of earlier times that tended to reflect more precisely the jurisdiction of conventional news outlets. Thus, an older scandal like Watergate – US-centric, involving US politics and US legacy journalism – was more directly and readily covered by journalism of the time than was the more recent scandal involving the Murdoch news empire. As the latter’s authority spread in nondescript ways across institutional, generic, technological and geographic arenas, when its underside surfaced with the 2011 News of the World scandal, it impacted politics, the police, technology and journalism across multiple continents, revealing institutional collusion writ large. Here, too, imaginative thinking helps clarify the contours of a previously unforeseen environment.
A third element relevant to inviting imagination into considerations of journalism is technological. Data repeatedly confirm that the old/ new media split is more complicated than either the naysayers or enthusiasts of change proclaim. Over half of all newspaper readers in the US retrieve their news from print only (Barthel, 2015), while social media serve as the main source of political information for the Millennial generation in a way that resembles what local TV did for Baby Boomers (Mitchell, Gottfried & Matsa, 2015). Old and new media remain mixed, mutually adaptive, with boundaries often blurred. Thus, embracing “the new” does not necessitate abandoning “the old,” emblematized by a proclamation by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos following his 2015 buy-out of the Washington Post that he intended to make it the “new paper of record” (Owen, 2015b), or Twitter’s development of a feature that could accommodate tweets 10,000 characters in length (Wagner, 2016). Understanding the shape of the fusion between old and new needs more inventiveness than shown till now: while an early governmental fall-out like McCarthyism was covered in identifiable – though problematic – ways by the then-existing conventional news media, the new pan-national entity of Islamic State expertly uses a sophisticated mix of conventional and social media to ensure that its message is distributed successfully, regardless of who helms the controls of conventional news outlets. Imagining an amalgamation of what has long been with what is already resting ahead – more fully understanding the bridge of new and old media, rather than pushing one aside at the expense of the other – might force both the naysayers and enthusiasts of change to consider each other’s vantage point more fully.
A fourth reason to reconsider imagination is economic. Most reports of contemporary journalism note that journalists recognize that their environment is changing and are on board to accommodate it (Picard, 2015; State of the News Media, 2015). Trends include an orientation toward entrepreneurial modes of newsgathering, more attention to branding techniques and greater adaptation to multi-tasking and multiple sources of part-time employment. There are surprises in this landscape: the Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister publications – Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com – were donated in January 2016 to a newly formed non-profit media institute in a move “designed to ensure that quality journalism endures in Philadelphia for generations” (Gammage, 2016). Though it is too early to predict how much its innovative linkage of news company, media institute and foundation will impact public-interest journalism, the move nonetheless burst with imaginative ways to ease economic pressures on news outlets. But there is sobering evidence too: Nieman Journalism Labs predicts that there will soon be half as many local daily journalists as existed in 1990 (Doctor, 2015). As Rottwilm (2014, 6) observed, we are seeing “evidence of a decoupling of acts of journalism (work) and journalistic employment (labor).” Reflective of larger social transformations that favor temporary, specialized work, multi-tasking, outsourcing and a service economy, today’s economic circumstances suggest a need to rethink how journalism sees itself and articulates its creed. Thus, the eyewitnessing activity that was prevalent in journalism’s early days and so central to its sense of self today depends more on disembodied technology and user-generated content than on journalists per se, a development born mainly – though not exclusively – of economic pressures. A global reliance on live-streaming in covering the Paris attacks of November 2015 and the Brussels attacks of March 2016 showed how tenuous current journalistic claims to being an eyewitness have become. But applying imaginative thinking to these transforming parameters might engender more creative alternatives that continue to qualify as journalism, as the recent change in Philadelphia media ownership suggests.
A fifth variable that foments imaginative thinking consists of moral considerations. The twenty-first century is filled with difficult events that seem to endure forever and encompass more of the world than ever before – often in unpredictable and intertwined ways. Spanning national, racial, religious and ethnic boundaries, they raise questions of who is responsible for recurrent indignities and violence and what might be a responsible response to them, especially when they stretch across widespread territory. Though we are only a bit short of two decades into the twenty-first century, even a handful of such events is far-reaching: the first and second Intifada, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq War, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, the Syrian conflict and the current refugee crisis, none of which has been easily identified by burgeoning and differentiated publics as moral, or its opposite. The difficulty with taking a moral position has intensified in the 2010s, as vigorous activity in the digital media environment has made clear that having just one moral stance is a thing of the past. Thus, coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement was both hailed as a Twitter Revolution and denigrated for affixing a racial prism to its ensuing activity. Videos of people about to be beheaded by Islamic State were spread across social media, but when conventional news outlets considered their display, decisions were splayed across the spectrum of possibilities. Each instance calls stridently for new, less binary, more nuanced ways of envisioning the moral charter connecting the news and its multiple publics.
Thus, on craft, political, technological, economic and moral grounds, the current environment lays bare circumstances that push journalism to accommodate change, but in a thoughtful fashion. Each of the events mentioned above inhabits the pages that follow, though not necessarily demarcated in the ways just suggested. Rather, journalism in the current landscape wrestles continuously with all of the aforementioned challenges, as different combinations of craft, politics, technology, economics and morality impact its viability. The texture of that landscape – its instability, internal contradictions and resistance to resolution – overflows with evidence that marks the need to take journalism’s centrality seriously. It challenges both the naysayers and champions of change to speak to each other more so than they have done until now.
Considering journalism through its field of possibilities thus has a value-for dimension that extends to knowledge acquisition, writ large. In the ensuing chapters, I highlight multiple characteristics that align with imagination in the journalistic context – contingency, flux, noise, contradictions, the emotions, inclusiveness, interdisciplinary sharing, multiple vantage points – while urging for the reduction of those attributes that have prevented imagination from taking flight – didacticism, insularity, binaries, absolutism, linearity. While recognizing that these qualities by definition always coexist in some fashion, I argue that journalism needs imagination to survive. I also believe that journalism offers a clear harbinger of the richness that might ensue when practical and theoretical knowledge complement rather than constrain each other. Imagination is central to both.
Though many of the following chapters argue for a more fluid and unstable embrace of the categories that comprise journalism’s environment, I usher us into this volume by embracing one final binary: the flip side of the exhaustion of a phenomenon is its triumph. This book makes the argument that, with journalism’s exhaustion, comes the potential for journalism’s height and rebirth, not as a phenomenon markedly different from earlier days but as a complex and nuanced enterprise that forces us to stretch beyond reason into the imagination so as to better understand and appreciate its trappings. John Dewey (1929, 294) noted how “knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.” I hope that what follows resonates with that thought in mind.
Beginnings
2Twelve Metaphors for Journalism
Metaphors for understanding journalism are direct reflections of the prisms through which newsmaking has come to be understood. Though implicit in the many notions of journalism – among them, a profession, industry, ideology and craft – is the ability to inform, individuals involved in doing or thinking about journalism take different pathways of address and thereby scatter definitional efforts in multiple directions. Naming, labeling, evaluating and critiquing journalism and journalistic practice reflect populations and their individuals, types of news work, media and technology, and the relevant historical time periods and geographical settings. No wonder, then, that the distinguished broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr noted that journalism was not only a livelihood for him but “a frame of mind” (Schorr, 1977, vii). By extension, journalism as a frame of mind varies from individual to individual. Twelve metaphors for understanding journalism prevail – seven of them among journalists, five among journalism scholars.
Thinking about Journalism
Though the fluidity and complexity implicit in imaginative work tend to largely retract when orienting to the precise nature of definitions, a particular set of terms has nonetheless given journalism its contours over time. The most frequently used terms for journalism – news, the press, the news media, information and communication – reference its different aspects and suggest subtle differences in what individuals consider “journalism” to mean and what expectations they have of journalists. Although the term journalist initially denoted someone who systematically kept a public record of events in a given time frame, today it is applied to individuals with a range of skills, including publishers, photographers, field producers, digital content providers, bystanders, fixers, citizen journalists and bloggers. Largely associated with journalism’s craft dimensions, the term tends to reference the evolving skills, routines and conventions involved in making news. The term news – widely thought to have derived from the word new during the late sixteenth century – tends to signal a commercial aura that surrounds the ongoing provision of information about current affairs. News media, by contrast, and the press as one of its forms, came into use in association with the industrial, institutional and technological settings in which journalists began to work in the eighteenth century. More recently, a focus first on communication and then on information – drawn from, first, the ascent of academic curricula in communication that took over journalism training programs in the mid twentieth century, and then the rise of digital media that opened the journalism field to non-journalists in the twenty-first, in many cases diminishing conventional understandings of news – reflects the complex role that journalism can and does play as a central information provider.
None of these ways of understanding journalism provides the complete picture of what journalism is. And none of them reflects all of the expectations we might have of the news media. Instead, each underscores a search for the universal nature of what we call news work, regardless of how limited those attempts might be. For journalism is anything but universal: we need only recognize that Lester Holt, John Oliver and Perez Hilton – a professional broadcast journalist, popular television satirist and widely followed celebrity blogger – convey authoritative news of contemporary affairs to a particular public, despite the questions raised about what kind of journalism they might promote.
Thus, journalism today reflects many contradictory sets of people, dimensions, practices and functions, making it unsurprising that different terms for journalism have been unequally invoked – by journalists themselves, the journalism educators who teach students aiming to be budding reporters, the scholars who study journalism’s workings and the publics which journalism is presumed to serve. Perhaps because of this, discussions of journalism tend to be reduced to one variant of practice – hard news in conventional legacy establishments. And though discourses about journalism among journalists, educators, students and scholars necessarily inform one another, by and large the stubborn dissonance between “the realities of journalism” and its “official presentation of self” (Dahlgren, 1992, 7) has grown more severe as the popular eye on journalism becomes ever more attuned to its various and often internally contradictory permutations.
How Journalists Talk about Journalism
Journalists are notorious for knowing what news is but not being able to explain it to others. More prone to talking about writing or getting the story than providing definitions of news, journalists easily trade sayings such as “News is what the editor says it is” or “News is what sells papers or drives up ratings.” As one early journalistic textbook commented, “It is easier to recognize news than [to] define it” (Johnson & Harris, 1942, 19).
Nonetheless, journalists do repair to collective ideas about the news, though they do not readily discuss them. As Theodore Glasser and James Ettema (1989a, 18) argued, there remains a “widening gap between how journalists know what they know and what students are told about how journalists know what they know.” Yet journalists talk about journalism in patterned ways. Revealing what the sociologist Robert Park (1940) called “synthetic knowledge” – the kind of tacit knowledge that is “embodied in habit and custom” rather than that which forms the core of a formalized knowledge system – journalists display much of how they think about journalism in journalistic guidebooks, how-to manuals, columns, autobiographies and catchphrases associated with journalistic practice. The metaphors they invoke illustrate potentially problematic, and not altogether revered, dimensions of journalistic practice, providing a venue to talk about journalism in ways that are true to experience but not necessarily respected by the journalistic community.
Seven metaphors are prominent in journalists’ discussions of their craft: a sixth sense, container, mirror, story, child, service and engagement. Not all of them surface across the landscape of journalistic interventions. For instance, “journalism as a mirror” tends to be invoked most frequently by traditional journalists working in legacy media outlets, while “journalism as engagement” is widely referenced when news is discussed in social media platforms. Nonetheless, together they comprise the meaning set by those widely engaged in journalistic activity.
Journalism as a Sixth Sense
Journalists make frequent mention of what they call a “news sense,” suggesting a natural, seemingly inborn, talent or skill for locating and ferreting out news. Because “news” refers to both a phenomenon out there in the world and its report, journalists who can seamlessly track it are said to have a news sense with olfactory qualities – having “a nose for news” or being able to “smell out news.” As the Poynter Institute stipulates, journalists need to write with their noses: “Good reporters have a nose for news. They can sniff out a story. Smell a scandal. Give them a whiff of corruption and they’ll root it out like a pig diving for truffles” (Scanlan, 2003).
Most directly associated with the idea of news as craft, the news instinct is so central to journalism that it has been referenced in journalistic textbooks, campaigns to recruit new reporters and the development of new modes of reporting and public relations strategies. “ABC Seeks Publicity Director with a Nose for News,” proclaims the typical recruitment ad (Cheung, 2011). Journalists often maintain that one is either born with a news sense or not. Lord George Allardice Riddell, a longtime newspaper editor in both the United Kingdom and Australia, wrote in 1932 that all “true journalists” possess an itch to communicate the news (Riddell, 1932, 110). Having “a nose for news” was so important to the US journalism educator Curtis MacDougall that he used the expression to title a section in the many editions of his text Interpretative Reporting (MacDougall & Reid, 1987). A nose for news also prompted former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee to publish Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the My Lai massacre, the 1968 massacre of unarmed civilians by US troops during the Vietnam War. “This smells right,” Bradlee was rumored to have said (cited in Glasser & Ettema, 1989b, 25). Even the rise of data-driven journalism is expected to perfect the news sense. In the view of technology platform ITworld.com, big data provide journalism with “a nose for news (via) analytics-inspired journalism” (Khan, 2012).
It thus makes sense that when journalism falls short of expectations, its failings are often blamed on a faulty development of its sixth sense. Journalists are said to miss the scent trail of a story or to have “underdeveloped noses” (Gibson, 1998; Overholser, 2001; Cherbonnier, 2003). And sometimes the metaphor works backward: when NBC news anchor Brian Williams fabricated a war story in 2015, the New York Post ran a February 6 cover called “A Nose for News,” on which Williams sported a Pinocchio-like snout under the headline “Lyin’ Brian War Scandal Engulfs NBC.”
Journalism as a Container
Journalists talk about journalism as a phenomenon with volume, materiality, dimension and complexity. Thought “to contain” the news of a certain time period, journalistic relays are said to hold information for the public until it can appraise what has happened. “Containing” in this regard has two meanings – keeping the news intact and keeping the news within limits, or checking its untoward expansion. Journalism as a container thus facilitates access to information while putting limits on the information that can be accessed.
Seeing journalism as a container is reflected in the idea of “journalistic depth.” Good journalism is said to go beyond the superficial and play to the volume and complexity of information in the world. Journalism’s role is to reflect that depth by turning complex events and issues, and their unobvious, often embedded dimensions and meanings, into understandable stories. VICE News, for instance, was created in 2013 as a way to promote more extended engagement via YouTube with the underreported stories associated with current affairs. Certain modes of journalistic practice – investigative journalism, muckraking, journalistic reformers, news sleuths and exposés, to name a few – are premised on the notion that journalists dig deep to find their stories. No wonder, then, that events and issues are said to be “in the news” and journalists “in the know.”
Against this background, the material in the container of news is unevenly valued. Though hard news tends to be the bread and butter of most news outlets, the news world sports multiple rankings of what matters. Most longstanding news outlets continue to divide their relays by world news, national news and local news, and they further segregate information about business from that about sports, lifestyle or the arts; less space is left for topics like religion or self-improvement. The Huffington Post delineates between what it calls “Weird News” and “Good News” (in that order), while BuzzFeed offers nearly 30 sections of non-traditional content, including “Ideas,” “Parents” and “DIY.” Regardless of the type of news platform, the ranking of content is driven primarily by concerns over audience engagement.
Conversely, the journalistic “scoop,” or the advantage gained by being first on an important news story, almost always rises to the top of the container. Made famous as the title of Evelyn Waugh’s booklength lampoon of England’s newspaper business during the 1930s, the “scoop” references not only the victorious activity of filing a story before anyone else but also the news items themselves, positioning them as evidence of journalistic triumph over usually adverse circumstances. Memorable scoops include the Washington’s Post’s revelation of the Watergate Affair or the Guardian’s relays of both the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified NSA material. Often scoops help legitimate peripheral members of the journalistic community – TMZ.com’s report of Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 or reports of Manti Te’o’s imaginary girlfriend by Gawker Media’s Deadspin in 2013.
The rush to score a scoop often engages with tenuous territory, as reflected in the criticism of erroneous information circulated by numerous news outlets after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Calling CNN “the human centipede of news,” comedian Jon Stewart lampooned the organization for reporting that was exclusive because it “was completely fucking wrong” (Logiurato, 2013). Scoops, argued The American Prospect, “are beside the point . . . Americans . . . don’t care whether you got a scoop. They want to understand what happened” (Waldman, 2013). Yet the provision of scoops remains a journalistic accomplishment for many journalists, as the Columbia Journalism Review noted in a column titled “In Defense of Scoops” (Grueskin, 2013). Scoops help journalists stay connected with their sources, their publics and the very flow of news.
Relevant to the idea of journalism as a container is the corresponding notion of the “news hole” – the capacity of a newspaper, newscast or digital platform to deliver the news across available spaces within a given time period, whether it be a day, an hour or a 24/7 news cycle. Responding to the fact that journalists always face more information than can be processed in any given period, the news hole offers journalists cues for systematically and reliably culling that information and filling the spaces available: a large news hole suggests that journalists need to find more news; a small one indicates an inability to take new copy. Thus, one early US textbook provided novice practitioners with this advice: “‘We’re filling up,’ the news editor warns. ‘Boil hard.’ The copy editor hears this warning often. There is almost always more news than space” (Neal, 1933, 27).
The relevance of the news hole has changed with today’s digital environment, in which seemingly unlimited space and constant connectivity might appear to shrink the anxieties connected to the news hole. Multiple observers now claim that the news hole no longer exists. “It’s never an issue on the web. The news hole is what we make it,” said digital reporter Jeffrey Katz (cited in Kern, 2008). However, constraints on information processing can still be found – in algorithms, headline aggregators, feed readers and search engines that wrestle with a news user’s time constraints: Twitter’s “Trending Topics,” Mashable’s line-up of “What’s Rising” and Politico’s category of “Most Read” all reflect a recognition that news coverage continually experiences changes in value, and those changes foster different degrees of attention. Though limitations are more in the audience’s hands than before, it is nonetheless unsurprising that anxiety over journalism’s capacity to hold the news prevails in today’s information environment, where mobile start-ups and social media platforms cohabit with the websites associated with traditional news outlets. Thus, the New York Times decided not long ago to cede control of its audience by publishing some of its stories through Facebook. At the same time, BuzzFeed accompanies its quizzes, lists and memes with a declaration that it supplies “the most shareable . . . most interesting and important stories, handpicked by our editors and reporters around the globe,” and in that light it periodically revisits and revamps the available categories by which it organizes its content.
Journalism as a Mirror
Journalists see journalism as the work of observation, tantamount to gazing on reality, or the objective happenings taking place in the so-called “real world.” News, in this view, is equated to an objective reflection of all that happens of importance, without additional filtering activity on the part of journalists. Journalism as a mirror is central to professional notions of objectivity, still prominent in the United States and elsewhere, and it presumes that journalists function primarily as recorders, observers and scribes, reliably taking account of events as they unfold.
A central part of existing journalistic lore, the metaphor of journalism as a mirror surfaces among some of the most highly regarded reporters. Lincoln Steffens remembered his years on the New York Evening Post by recounting that “reporters were to report the news as it happened, like machines, without prejudice, color, or style” (Steffens, 1931, 171). Ernie Pyle’s dispatches from the foxholes of World War II were said to have a “worm’s eye” point of view, and Walter Cronkite’s famous nightly signoff on CBS – “And that’s the way it is” – was built on the notion of journalism as a mirror. As Daniel Schorr (1977) told it, “the word ‘reporting’ was always closely associated in my mind with ‘reality.’”
Many journalists and news outlets use the metaphor of journalism as a mirror when promoting themselves publicly. It surfaces in catchphrases by which journalists often describe their work – providing “a lens on the world,” producing “newspaper copy,” compiling “journalistic relays,” offering “all the news that’s fit to print.” MSNBC’s collaborative social media website Newsvine defines itself as “an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.” Names for news outlets regularly play to the idea of journalism as a mirror of events, likening them to a sentinel, beacon, watch, post, emblem, report, scout, herald, standard, reflector or chronicle.
Seeing journalism as a mirror also has particular resonance for the visual side of journalism. Not only do catchphrases like “having an eye on the news” or relying on “the camera as reporter” crop up, but the epithet for many local television news stations – “eyewitness news” – builds on the idea that journalists are able to reflect what they see into the processing of news. The camera is said to be a reliable and objective recorder of reality, echoing noted photographer Robert Capa’s maxim that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” (cited in Hagen, 1994, C26). As news photographer Don McCullin said of his time in Vietnam, Biafra and Lebanon, “Many people ask me, ‘why do you take these pictures?’ It’s because I know the feeling of the people I photograph. It’s not a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’; it’s a case of ‘I’ve been there.’ . . . My eyes [seem] to be the greatest benefactor I had” (McCullin, 1987, 11, 13). The ability to provide a lens on current affairs is also prominent across citizen journalism platforms, particularly when coverage involves the user-generated content and amateur footage recording warfare and human rights violations: Global Voices, Human Rights Watch and Witness (Ristovska, 2016) are three such examples.
And yet the idea of journalism as a mirror is today often critiqued as a less than viable way of explaining journalism. Its limitations are particularly problematic for news platforms whose focus on current affairs is expected to come through the prism of perspective. Examples abound: Sean Hannity is described on his show’s webpage as “a gutsy talk-show host who always lands on the right side of the issues”; Democracy Now! provides “access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the US corporate-sponsored media.” Digital media often provide opportunities for even the most diehard proponents of the mirror frame to voice perspective: Lasorsa, Lewis and Holton (2012), for instance, found that when microblogging online, mainstream journalists freely express opinions in ways that are counter to norms of impartiality and nonpartisanship.
In fact, however, degrees of skepticism about the viability of the mirror metaphor have been around almost as long as the metaphor itself. As Pete Hamill noted nearly 20 years ago, “Things ain’t always what they seem to be. . . . If you want it to be true, it usually isn’t . . . [and] in the first twenty-four hours of a big story, about half the facts are wrong” (Hamill, 1998, 89). While this hints at the understated fact that reporters have multiple opportunities to engage with a story’s particulars over time, the mirror metaphor tends to prevail across all of them.
Journalism as a Story
For many journalists, journalism is reflected in notions of the “news story.” The “story” – a narrative form that carries news information – describes what journalists produce when gathering and presenting news. Different kinds of news stories – items, briefs, reports, series, records, chronicles, accounts, opeds, features, vines, tweets – vie for public attention, and each draws upon different expectations about the most valuable kind of information, the style in which it is presented, the presentational position that it occupies and the role that it plays.
Journalists distinguish most frequently between the kinds of stories typical of hard and of soft news (Tuchman, 1978a), with the front pages and top items of websites, newspapers and broadcast line-ups commonly favoring the former over the latter. As Michael Schudson (1978) demonstrated in his history of American newspapers, practices of storytelling have long been central to distinctions made between journalism that informs and journalism that tells a gripping tale. Among journalists, hard news has been associated with an absence of storytelling, involving no narrative technique whatsoever, though that notion is complicated by an increasing degree of attention to what Hugh Kenner called “the plain style” – a storytelling mode that strategically involves brevity, simplicity and explicitness (Kenner, 1985; Adam, 1993). Soft news, by contrast, uses a variety of narrative techniques that produce dramatic and heartrending stories, moral lessons and compelling plotlines. Both are impacted by the generic and technological platforms used to relay the news, and they exist more often than not in blended forms, as shown by Bird’s (1992) discussion of mainstream and tabloid storytelling and Carey’s (1986a) study of the telegraph’s impact on storytelling form.
Getting the story is the imperative of every reporter. As one editor commented, “There are so many times when I hear reporters gripe about the fact that ‘there just isn’t a story there.’ And that ‘they can’t believe they have to make a story out of this; nothing happened.’ And yet, there in the paper the next morning is 12 inches of informative non-story” (Awtry, 2003). Journalists aspire to producing a “top or lead story,” often a “special report”; in-depth efforts secure labels of the “story behind the story” or a “news series.” Ironically, good stories often come at the expense of good journalism. As National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg said in reference to stories that she had worked on and then thrown away, “I’ve had more good stories ruined by facts” (cited in Newton, 1999, 143).
Journalism is often characterized by the kinds of stories it uses: human interest news, new journalism and literary journalism commonly take on storytelling forms that diverge from default assumptions about journalistic relays. Hunter S. Thompson, credited with founding “gonzo journalism,” consciously turned his writing into a blend of fact and fiction because, paraphrasing William Faulkner, “the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have always known this” (Thompson, 1972, 2).
The form of journalistic stories changes with the ascent of each new medium, and journalism’s accommodation to digital media is no exception. New forms in part always adapt old forms: podcasting, for instance, which saw a huge rise in 2015 thanks to NPR’s podcast Serial, played upon the growing centrality of mobile devices to update the longstanding value of audio, while a return that same year to long-form journalism was evident in the increase in audiences for magazines like The Atlantic and Rolling Stone (State of the News Media, 2015). Similarly, the telegraphic relays of the early 1900s are called to mind by both the brevity of tweets and the progressive layering of information in live blogging. But each new form also introduces degrees of singularity: for instance, Twitter’s conventions for sharing 140-character relays on its newsfeed have produced a succinct way of telling a journalistic story, with its newest venture, Project Lightning, aiming to position short breaking-news updates at the platform’s center. The dynamic nature of digital media storytelling, which incorporates interactive, hypertextual and non-linear forms, continues to change as mobile devices take the web’s place of primacy. Though the questions surrounding the role of bursts of digital information vis-à-vis the larger environment are still unsettled – do they drive the public to more traditional story forms or stand on their own? – the story forms available in 2016 differ markedly from those of earlier times.
Journalism’s capacity to thrive as a story is undermined, however, by various violations involving storytelling – plagiarism, fabrication and misquotation among them. The plight of journalists whose reputation was destroyed for such violations – Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, Sabrina Rubin Erdely – is often said to have developed on the backs of their strong storytelling skills. As the Washington Post said after NBC’s Brian Williams fabricated accounts of his journalistic exploits, it was “the intimacy of his storytelling . . . that was at the root of his undoing” (Roig-Franzia, Higham & Grittain, 2015).
Journalism as a Child
For many journalists, the news is a child that requires careful nurturing by caretakers. Journalism is seen here not only as fragile and vulnerable – a phenomenon in need of attention, supervision and care – but also as often demanding an unreasonable and unpredictable on-call presence, which is readily offered so as to protect journalism’s perceived value. No surprise, then, that journalists can and do adopt a parental stance toward the news, in which they necessarily attend to its well-being at all times. That position, which according to professional lore has been variously held responsible for journalists’ fabled premature professional burnout, high divorce rates and uneven social lives, tends to figure prominently in popular cultural representations of journalists in fiction, television and cinema. From the title character of Lou Grant to The Newsroom’s Will McAvoy, journalism’s tempestuous personalities owe their unsettled nature to a heartfelt and oversized devotion to the news.
Seeing journalism as a child forces on journalists the combination of a watchdog role – by which they stand guard over its shaping – and a gentler nurturing role – by which they protect it against those forces aiming to dismantle it. Catchphrases like “putting the paper to bed” (closing the press for the night), “sitting on a story” (taking care of a story until it is time for publication), and “pampering” or “coddling” a story (elaborating a “thin” or unsubstantiated story line) all build on this idea. “Feeding the beast,” a reference to an always hungry journalistic impulse, describes journalists’ reaction to situations in which journalism’s demands are excessive and go too far, not unlike those of an overly demanding child.
The 24/7 news cycle of the digital environment complicates the capacity to nurture the news, rendering it even more akin to the unending parental duties of caring for a child. One reporter remarked on the overwhelming demands of the 24/7 news cycle thus:
Where the news cycle used to be fueled by muckrakers and gumshoes, today those whose jobs require interpreting and offering opinions on the news of the day . . . saturate the industry. The result is a media effort drained of its ability to feed the beast with hard news stories. Don’t let the 24/7 news beast fool you; we’ve become a culture of repeaters relying on a diminishing cadre of real reporters for our news.
(Smerconish, 2010)
In one view, the drive to feed the beast in the digital era has produced an insatiable focus on page-view journalism, forcing journalists to pair stories about risky topics with sure-fire ones that will generate audience views (Foremski, 2010). In another, the 365-day news cycle leaves “little time, money, or staffers to spare to try experimental reporting methods” (Lichterman, 2014).
Seeing journalism as a child helps legitimate journalists’ need to remain invested in their craft. Without journalists to organize and process the news, the assumption is that current affairs would remain unruly and incomprehensible, much like the actions of a child without guidance or care.
Journalism as a Service
Journalists think of journalism as a service in the public interest, one that is shaped with an eye toward the needs of healthy citizenship. A notion of service to both the profession and the community permeates the language that journalists use in referencing journalism – news service, wire services and news as being in the general interest. Journalists are said to “serve” London, Washington and Beijing. Central to the concept of the Fourth Estate, the aspiration to serve underlies notions of “good” journalism.
Serving the public surfaces frequently in journalists’ discussions of their craft. Addressing journalists’ isolation from the lives of poor and working-class individuals, Columbia Journalism Review reminded its readers that “we in the press have a responsibility to engage everyone” (Cunningham, 2004, 32). Longstanding ombudsman Michael Getler complained that the tendency of newspaper chains to “work on the cheap” shortchanges “readers and our democratic foundations” (cited in Kelliher, 2004, 49). Drawing upon the growing presence of the non-profit media, a call to launch a new news venture “Report for America” was envisaged as an enhanced service-based journalistic model that could save local journalism (Waldman, 2015). Awards – the Pulitzer Prizes, National Magazine Awards and Dupont Awards, to name a few – are regularly given for journalistic service.
Significantly, references to serving the public rarely make explicit the specific parameters of identity that characterize and flavor the engagement. Race is a useful construct in this regard, for its unequal distribution tempers the broad contours associated with the notion of public service. On the one hand, the coverage of stories like Hurricane Katrina in 2004 or the 2015 Baltimore unrest brought to light how unequal the foregrounding of race was for the publics being served by that coverage (Zelizer, 2017 in press). On the other hand, journalists themselves provide an unrepresentative reflection of US racial distribution. As The Atlantic noted, with the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, the lack of minority journalists diminishes journalism’s service aspirations. “Homogeneity,” it observed, “is a big problem in an industry whose ambition is to serve and inform an increasingly diverse public” (White, 2015). Discussions of journalism serving its public tend instead to be generally void of detail about which kinds of journalists serve which kinds of publics.
Mission statements of platforms associated with current affairs regularly highlight the goal of serving the public: AlterNet notes on its front web page that its mission is to “inspire action and advocacy” on a variety of news topics; Politico proclaims a “promise of delivering nonpartisan news . . . exactly what readers and advertisers need”; and the non-profit Center for Public Integrity aims to “serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.”
From older platforms like PBS and NPR to newer ones like ProPublica, IowaWatch and First Look Media, news outlets regularly proclaim themselves as being “in the public interest.” The idea of journalism as a service received renewed attention in the early 1990s with the ascent of the public journalism movement, which defined journalism in conjunction with its ability to serve the public. Journalists’ willingness to break with old routines, a desire to reconnect with citizens, an emphasis on serious discussions as the foundation of politics, and a focus on citizens as actors rather than spectators all position journalism squarely in the service mode (Charity, 1995; Merritt, 1997; Rosen, 1999). Though the frenzy initially associated with public journalism eventually died down, its mission to serve the public energized new media start-ups. By 2014, the potential for realizing journalism as a service drew marked optimism, when a number of well-known journalists launched start-ups in that vein – producing what the New Yorker
