Understanding Journalism

Lynette Sheridan Burns, Benjamin J Matthews

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526452597
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This bestselling, approachable textbook begins from the assertion that the practice of journalism should be driven by a commitment to service the public interest. With this goal in sight, Understanding Journalism explains in a clear and engaging manner both the principles and techniques required to become a successful – and valued – journalist.

This new edition:

• Includes expanded coverage of digital and social media platforms and visual storytelling
• Contains a brand new chapter on data journalism which gives students the knowledge and skills required to navigate, interpret and present data effectively
• Encourages students to confront the everyday decisions involved in journalistic practice through a series of scenarios and discussion questions
• Features a fresh, easy-to-navigate text design to enable easy progress through the book

By presenting the theoretical foundations of the profession alongside practical, step-by-step guidance, this book gives students everything they need to become effective and responsible journalists.

Part One From Knowing How to Being Able

Introduction

When the second edition of Understanding Journalism was published in 2013, the emergence of journalism distributed through social networks such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook was changing practices that had been largely unchanged for decades. At the time of writing this edition, the combined domination of social media platforms and technology companies challenges the very definition of journalism.The emergence of the Internet, and the principles of the open web that were initially underpinned by it, took control of information from the few and transferred it to the many. It was, at its core and in its design, a democratizing technology. The ubiquity of mobile technology has also changed communication practices. By 2022 there will be 6.1 billion smartphone subscribers, for many of whom the phone will provide the only means of access to the Internet (Lighterman, 2017). Five years ago, it was thought that interactive journalism, comments on articles, crowdsourcing and podcasting all offered exciting opportunities for journalism. This potential has been realized with varying degrees of success, while other developments present new challenges. For example, podcasts have been around for more than a decade (audiobooks and similar listening formats even longer) but have found a fast-growing audience in recent times. This is partly because audiences have tired of endlessly scrolling through screen media, and podcasts represent an alternative. However, the current generation of mobile devices and Internet speeds have also helped to accelerate the consumption of podcasts. In more economically developed countries, it’s possible to download new material almost anywhere, very quickly, and listen to podcasts without interference. The same can’t be said for TV shows and movies, as mobile screens are still too small for most users’ viewing preferences. Podcasts, meanwhile, are versatile and useful for travel, such as the commute to work (DeMers, 2017). In its annual consumer survey, Edison Research and Triton Digital found that 40 per cent of those surveyed had listened to a podcast in the last month, and one in four respondents had listened in the last week (Edison Research, 2017).

Digital publication such as podcasting has also inspired a renaissance of narrative-driven, long-form journalism, sometimes known as ‘slow journalism’, for both a range of new digital-first players and the legacy media (Blanding, 2015; Dowling and Vogan, 2014; Hiippala, 2016; Le Masurier, 2014). This change is in part attributed to a general dissatisfaction with the increasingly ‘sped up’ quality of the digital news cycle, where careful investigation is sacrificed in favour of supplying an endless high volume ‘feed’ of news content to audiences. It is also attributed to the affordances of digital publication, which is accessible to new players at a relatively small entry cost, and where large amounts of information can be presented in ‘multimodal’ form at no significant extra expense. This journalism is able to incorporate any web or application deliverable content such as text, images, audio-visual and interactive media.

Another major development is that we now get our news tailored to our interests, across multiple platforms, without knowing just how much is actually Personalized. It was technology companies like Google and Facebook, not traditional news organizations, that made it so. Personalization extends beyond how and where news providers meet their readers. Already, smartphone users can subscribe to push notifications for the specific coverage areas that interest them. On Facebook, users can decide – to some extent – which organizations’ stories they would like to appear in their news feeds. At the same time, devices and platforms that use machine learning to get to know their users will increasingly play a role in shaping ultra-personalized news products. While news personalization can help people manage information overload by making individuals’ news diets unique, it also threatens to create filter bubbles. The term ‘filter bubble’ has entered the lexicon to describe an effect created by using algorithms to filter and personalize information to the individual user of a news feed. This process tends to reinforce existing bias by offering the user only what they already prefer, placing the user in a ‘bubble’ that alternative perspectives do not penetrate.

As data-tracking becomes more sophisticated, voice recognition software advances and tech companies leverage personalization for profit, personalization will only become more acute. This is potentially alarming given the growth of websites – news-oriented and otherwise – inhabiting the political extremes, which on a social platform such as Facebook are easy to mistake for valid sources of news. When users can customize their news, and customize to these political and social extremes, civic discourse can suffer. Cadwalladr (2016) argues the denial by platform companies that they are not in the business of publishing is no longer plausible. The evolution of this relationship points to a critical question for news organizations. Google’s business model is built around the idea that it’s a neutral platform. That its magic algorithm waves its magic wand and delivers magic results without the sullying intervention of any human. It desperately does not want to be seen as a media company, as a content provider, as a news and information medium that should be governed by the same rules that apply to other media. But this is exactly what it is. (Cadwalladr, 2016)

Personalization has rendered mass media advertising increasingly obsolete and destroyed the historical interdependence between legacy news media and the advertising that paid for its production. In turn, this has led to a worldwide reduction in traditional (also known as legacy) media outlets, and a consequent decrease in employment opportunities for journalists on a scale not seen before (Shirky, 2008). This unprecedented decline in jobs for journalists has been brought about because the journalist’s privileged access to the means of production has been irrevocably lost. The impact of this decline has also impacted on quality in some legacy media, particularly newspapers, where cost cutting has seen crucial, previously in-house practices such as sub-editing outsourced to private companies that may be remote from the communities they serve.

This is also an example of one of the defining characteristics of the new environment – the growing distance between journalistic ‘work’ and journalistic ‘labour’. As discussed in Chapter 2, the distinction between journalism work and journalism labour is important because work is ‘physical or creative effort that produces a deliverable product or accomplishes a task’, and labour ‘is the delivery of services/work by an individual for payment’ (Rottwilm, 2014: 6). This decoupling of the work and labour that underpins the practice of journalism is far reaching in its implications, not least in the reconstitution of the institutional structures and practices journalism relied on during the industrial era. In fact, the very definition of what constitutes journalism in the twenty-first century is contestable. It is clear that journalism can no longer be described simply in terms of employment status, nor limited to the processes used to complete the work of journalism. Such descriptions attach no social obligations to the power that individual journalists exercise in framing the world for audiences, and also fail to account for new media forms that have already emerged during the twenty-first century.

This book takes the view that journalism is distinguished from other media activities by its ideology, which is driven by the notion and ideal of service to the public interest. In this frame the journalist can be anyone, but only if they adhere to the normative principles and processes prescribed by the ideological framework for journalism that emerged alongside its professionalization during the late twentieth century. This framework remains dominant despite the pressures and failings of the last 25 years, and in this sense journalism may still be defined as bringing to public attention something that ‘someone, somewhere, wants concealed’. This is the definition of acting in the public interest, whether the journalist is telling the story with words, images or both.

Open access to digital dissemination platforms has also allowed for a rise in entrepreneurial and social enterprise-based journalism, where producers are not constrained by the usual market-driven imperatives. This space has seen the development of new ways of organizing journalism work, based around emerging organizational models that are primarily collaborative rather than commercial, and able to foster the professional and ideological features associated with a longer history of journalism. An example is the expanding prevalence of entrepreneurial journalism, which is based on smaller, more independent and agile – if less stable – enterprise constructs that are a feature of creative industries.

Sheridan Burns and Matthews (2017) found that these digital sites, while organized differently to legacy media, still meet the definition of journalism. Whether social enterprise, not-for-profit, profit-driven start-ups or a hybrid of these, the primary motif of the organizations is an ideological definition of journalism; and the journalistic work produced by these new organizations meets the ‘professional’ requirements of verification, transparency and public interest (Sheridan Burns and Matthews, 2017: 68).

A feature of these new organizations is that they embrace entrepreneurial thinking and discard the notion of a ‘wall’ between editorial and advertising/marketing functions. Mensing and Ryfe (2013) define entrepreneurship as ‘pursuing change rather than resisting it’, and argue that it offers hope for journalism:

It holds promise as an antidote to resistance to change found in some newsrooms and to the despair that many people feel about the future of journalism … advocates of the entrepreneurial model see a need for journalists to invent new forms of journalism that add value to new forms of democratic politics. (p. 2)

In the search for new forms of journalism, some scholars have proposed new values, such as transparency and engagement, or new practices, such as community organizing and facilitation (Singer, 2015). The significance of changing news values is explored in Chapter 4. The digital environment also facilitates collaboration between journalists across space and time to investigate stories of shared interest. For example, the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) is an international association of non-profit organizations that support, promote and produce investigative journalism. GIJN holds conferences, conducts training, provides resources and consulting, and encourages the creation of similar non-profit groups. The network has grown to 155 member organizations in 68 countries (GIJN, 2017).

At the 2017 Global Shining Light Awards, sponsored by GIJN, the top prizes went to investigations into missing funds in Iraq and extra-judicial killings in Nigeria, with citations of excellence to exposés of arms trafficking in Eastern Europe and complicity behind anti-Muslim riots in India.

Journalism in Society

The role of the journalist in society has changed too. For almost 200 years, newspapers were the dominant medium through which society ‘spoke to itself’. The newspaper seemed to be a ubiquitous and fixed part of the communication landscape and those who prepared the news were seen as similarly integral. With social media so powerful, we are now seeing the consequences of a global free information society. Errors of fact and interpretation, opacity and carelessness are amplified by new technology and new capabilities. Bell argues that in this context, journalism performs a vital function: ‘Journalism is a thin thread in a vast new global tapestry of conversation and information. But that thread, I would argue, keeps the whole cloth together, because when it works as it should, it gives people a daily feed of important, entertaining, interesting and vital information’ (Bell, 2015). Using this analogy, journalism binds and organizes the fabric of public communication. It can be argued social media disrupts this function, and has not lived up to aspirations that it would allow audiences easy access to the facts, unmediated by news organizations or other interest with an agenda. Instead we are in an environment where Facebook has greater reach as a news organization than any media corporation, where algorithms are used to define and write news, and fabricated ‘news’ is all around us.

The 2016 US presidential election made it clear that social media and the Internet could be used to fabricate ‘news’ intended to mislead that was almost impossible to detect for both journalists and other consumers. Good reporting is not currently algorithmically privileged on many platforms. Not on Facebook, not on YouTube, not on Instagram, not even on Twitter – though Twitter’s open environment does allow more rigorously presented journalism to be elevated within informed groups.

At the same time, the costs of producing high-quality journalism can be great, while distributors of fake or misleading content are able to make tens of thousands of dollars on stories that take seconds to write. At the benign end, this situation promotes human-interest stories, or these days more often animal-interest stories. But at the other end of the spectrum, it means stories can become successful by playing on fears or partisan allegiances, and exaggerating or even fabricating for effect. For example, a 40-year-old father of two living in California set up Disinfomedia.com as a shell company through which to proliferate fake news sites, like Denver-guardian.com. What started as an exercise by a political activist to expose and ‘infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right’ with totally fabricated stories ended by creating similarly false stories, which spread like wildfire. They were adopted as true by partisan groups who did not care whether the stories were true or not, and the man claimed he could earn between US$10,000 and US$30,000 in advertising in one month (Sydell, 2016).

Other technical developments in the digital space reinforce the importance of journalism in helping citizens navigate through more content than they could ever consume. For example, developments in data-mining software now mean that individuals may be targeted for news feeds based on their personalities and beliefs, not just their spending habits. Arvanitakis (2017) described Cambridge Analytica, an artificial intelligence (AI) data-mining organization, as ‘weaponizing’ AI to manipulate opinions and behaviour. Originally developed by a Cambridge University psychology academic, the algorithm correlates an individual’s Facebook ‘likes’ with their scores on the OCEAN personality questionnaire. The questionnaire measures five traits – openness to experience, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. By correlating the two data sets, the algorithm identifies an individual’s gender, sexuality, political beliefs and personality traits with remarkable accuracy, and claims to be better at the task than its human acquaintances. Arvanitakis (2017) identifies the danger this holds for democracy:

Our data can be harvested to not only predict our behaviour, but ultimately to modify it. That has to have an impact on democracy. In a democracy, we assume that we understand where information comes from, but this is no longer the case. The sources we have come to rely on for gathering information are themselves reliant on algorithms that can be gamed.

Democracy relies on us knowing where the information we rely on comes from. When an algorithm becomes opaque, convoluting the path information takes from a source to us, our sense of reality is challenged. How we satisfy ourselves that we believe what we believe will continue to challenge us all under these conditions, and journalism has an important role to play in this process. In 2018 an undercover investigation by the British ITN network revealed secretly recorded interviews with the Managing Director of Cambridge Analytica in which he told a potential client that the company has influenced elections in Kenya, Nigeria, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina as well in the United States. In the televised interview, Mark Turnbull explains how CA uses data:

The two fundamental human drivers when it comes to taking information on board effectively are hopes and fears and many of those are unspoken and even unknown. You didn’t know it was fear until you saw something that evoked that reaction from you. There is no point fighting an election campaign on facts because actually it is actually all about emotions (ABC, 2018).

According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center for Research, the current environment allows ‘“fake news” and “weaponized” narratives to flourish, but there is nothing resembling consensus ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the author
• About the Book
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One From Knowing How to Being Able
• Introduction
• Chapter 2 Who is a Journalist?
• 3 Journalism as Decision Making
• Part Two Journalism in Action
• 4 Finding Stories
• 5 Choosing Stories
• 6 Researching Stories
• 7 Researching Stories Interviews
• 8 Researching Stories Data
• 9 Telling Stories
• 10 Editing Stories
• 11 Long-Form Stories
• Glossary
• References
• Index