Journalism Between the State and the Market

Helle Sjøvaag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351035323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Using the Nordic media model as an empirical backdrop, Journalism Between the State and the Market defines and analyzes journalism's fundamental problem: its shifting location between the state and the market.

This book examines how this distance is decreasing as journalism steps closer to both the market (algorithmically monetizing audiences) and the state (lobbying governments for subsidies and attacking public service broadcasting). The book analyzes journalism's negotiated position between the market and the state in the age of disruptions, offering a theoretical foundation that seeks to account for the structural conditions of journalism in the digital age.

For scholars, graduates and students in journalism, news sociology and media and communication studies, Journalism Between the State and the Market provides a theoretical perspective that can be used as a valuable tool when studying and observing the current developments in journalism.

1 Journalism’s problem

Journalism’s fundamental and enduring problem is its position between the state and the market. Journalism, as an institution, as a business and as a public good, sits between the legal entity that is the state and the economic entity that is the market. Journalism’s social contract gives to the press the responsibility of overseeing the ruling powers on behalf of the citizenry. This gives considerable power to the journalistic institution. To ensure its legitimacy in this endeavor, journalism needs to maintain an appropriate distance from the state. The established arrangement for obtaining this distance is private ownership, secured through freedom of publication and freedom of expression. Journalism resides here – between the institution that legitimizes its power and the institution that renders it operational as such a power. These two institutions, however, serve as oppositional pulls on journalism. The danger in this position is sometimes referred to as the market failure thesis – the assertion that journalism cannot fully utilize the benefits of the market without hurting its public service. Journalism, however, cannot exist without either.

Journalism’s fundamental problem is therefore how to maintain the proper distance between itself and these two fields. Get too close to the state, and fourth estate legitimacy is compromised. Get too close to the market, and professional legitimacy is compromised. Journalism’s traditional business model has been based on this balance. Moreover, criticisms of journalism can often be traced to this problematic position. Attraction to the market conditions some forms of journalism that ensure commercial viability (sports, entertainment, consumer journalism etc.), which ensure the resources necessary to cover the state. At the same time, the draw of the market is precarious. Purely commercial news values are not wholly commensurate with democratically relevant journalism. At the same time, ties to the state can make certain forms of journalism possible, such as public service broadcasting. This also involves risk, however, as state subsidies, party ownership and state ownership are associated with political strings.

Journalism’s current problem is that its distance to both fields is decreasing simultaneously. Although journalism’s distance to these sectors has seen various degrees of closeness depending on historical and socio-political contexts, it is this dual proximity that suggests disruption. This balance is upset by digitalization, in particular: social media and third-party intermediaries. With the disruption of its dual income model (copy sales and advertising revenues), journalism has stepped closer to the market, specifically with algorithms collecting data on its users to personalize advertising, news diets and content marketing. At the same time, it moves closer to the legal institutions it is tasked with monitoring: differentiating towards more stable political segments to secure a subscription base, lobbying governments for incumbent-protecting subsidies or attacking public service broadcasting, organizations known for benchmarking quality standards in media markets. In trying to make up for losses in its advertising- and subscription-based funding model, journalism is drawn towards both spheres. As a result, the “neutral”, institutional middle is weakening.

Let’s begin to unpack some of the elements identified in journalism’s problem. The two conflicting positions that journalism must balance are its institutional and economic identities. On the one hand, journalism serves as a fourth estate, overseeing the state and power sectors through a social contract that sustains the legitimacy of its publication powers. The type of critical journalism that supports democracy is undertaken for the benefit of the citizenry, legitimized through a system of professionalism that binds journalists to certain ethics, standards and procedures. This is journalism’s institutional foundation, administered through the border patrolling mechanisms embedded in the boundary-maintaining properties of the profession. On the other hand, journalism is a business sustained by private ownership. As all owners have interests, and these interests inevitably affect the framework conditions under which journalism is performed, how these interests are served affects journalism’s ability to maintain its professional boundaries. Embedded in private media ownership are two essential aims: earnings and influence. Although the influence sought may be ideal as well as ideological – either aiming to strengthen democracy or aiming to strengthen a certain political idea – earnings is a rather straightforward goal.

Because unprofitable business is unsustainable, journalistic enterprises need to make money. How that money is made indicates what degree of disruption we are talking about. While quality journalism can indeed be expected to attract enough paying customers to sustain a costly investigative news operation, more often than not, audiences are attracted to the distractions offered by the press – entertainment, lifestyle, celebrity, drama. This is when market failure can occur, when the investments needed to fulfill the social contract fail to justify the cost. But journalism also needs another source of income. Journalism’s main sources of funding have always been the interests that seek news reading, and ultimately purchasing or voting, audiences: advertisers selling consumer goods or ideologues selling either a political message or an ideology. One financial attraction is the market, where growth is the main goal; the other is the state, or the wannabe state, where control is the main goal. Whether or not the control that states seek is benevolent – whether it is for the benefit of democracy or for the benefit of some political, military or industrial interest – is beside the point. Journalism’s legitimacy rests on its independence from these interests.

The root causes of the current crisis in journalism are usually identified as economic or a mixture of technological and economic causes. Crisis, in itself, signals disruption, uncertainty and indecision – the lack of confidence in strategies as old, familiar forms dissolve. As the forces disruptive to journalism are largely thought of as external to the field, primarily identified as the internet, the market is often seen as both the source of the crisis and its solution. Indeed, the story that many scholars tell about the current crisis in journalism is one of failed market strategies.

The story begins when the internet arrived in the mid-1990s, changing the way business and communication are conducted. Failure number one in this situation was to give away the news for free (Chyi, 2013). This eroded the two-sided business model where income can be expected from both audiences and advertisers. Then, when the financial crisis hit in 2008, newspaper companies moved to consolidate operations. Because the cost of borrowing rose at the same time, news firms centralized operations, laid off staff, sold buildings or closed down altogether to save money (see Lacy & Sohn, 2011). The second strategic failure was therefore to continue to expect high margins through times of crisis, which in turn hurt the product companies were trying to convince people to buy. As revenues remained lost to new substitutes in the advertising industries, primarily third-party intermediaries such as Facebook, Google and YouTube, companies began to disregard their main product, news, in favor of their secondary product, audiences. Metrics emerged as the new gold in the industry, the capitalization of which relies on corporate resources – technical knowledge, infrastructures and economies of scale.

In this crisis narrative, proposed solutions concerning how to emerge from this disruption have more often been about markets than content. While external commentators are urging news organizations to focus on their main asset – connecting with audiences through quality journalism – industry players tend to focus on securing and expanding their markets. As the industry has lost faith that there may be new audience markets to be found, the effort to secure reader markets leads journalism down a path of segmentation, polarization and politicization. Identifying stable readership segments in the fringes provides more financial predictability than aiming for the middle market, where willingness to pay is low. As classified and retail advertising markets begin to look as if they are lost forever to social media platforms, news organizations move in on the audience metric market. Here, a new competitive arena has emerged in the area of personalization – an area where the global tech giants are already experts. Competitiveness in this arena requires a certain size, infrastructure and skill set, as programmatic advertising is based on big user data and algorithms to sort and use this data. In the two-sided market, then, news companies have given up competing on two fronts. Instead, they seem content to divide audience segments among themselves, where there are still certain revenues to be found in customer loyalty, concentrating instead on winning the battle in the advertising markets. As information is the thing that moves people through the networks of the internet, this may indeed prove to be a sound strategy – capitalizing on the value of journalism as the information environment becomes more precarious, with growing amounts of propaganda and fake news.

Professionalism, authority and boundaries

While news organizations try to move out of this crisis using economic strategies, journalism is not, as Alexander (2016, p. 7) observes, just a market-responsive business; it is also a profession. The elements embedded in this professional dimension refer to journalism’s democratic role in society – the social contract of the press that holds journalists responsible for overseeing the state on behalf of the citizenry. This is essentially journalism’s main selling point – the claim that a professionalized, expert vocation with established ethics and norms performs a critical function in society on which all other spheres depend. Citizens, states and markets are each served by the free flow of information, laws that guarantee this freedom and rules that regulate its conduct. To maintain the position that this role yields, journalism – in its weak semi-professional status – is in constant need of boundary maintenance.

Professions, according to the sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn (1983), are involved in a continuous struggle for authority, power and resources. Because threats to professionalism primarily amount to a perceived lack of exclusivity and knowledge-based jurisdiction, journalism’s permeability – the high level of mobility and the constant competition for entry into the professional definition – means that a lack of exclusivity and monopoly requires significant boundary work. Boundary maintenance involves borders of demarcation: distinguishing the work of members from the practices and products of non-members. These kinds of boundary disputes signal contests for authority, involving the knowledge, methods, values and organizations that separate journalism from non-journalism. As journalism finds itself in a demanding jurisdictional battle – involving contests with anything from fake news to right-wing media, propaganda, processes of capture, commercialization and content marketing – the norms and myths of the institutional dimension of journalism become increasingly important.

Because institutions can be thought of as social practices that are durable across time and space (Giddens, 1984), institutions consist of rules and resources. As agents act within the institution, they invoke the institutional order, making it meaningful by reproducing it through action, referred to as a “logic of appropriateness” (March & Olsen, 1984). The durability of institutions can thus be observed in how context conditions action and in how these conditions are reproduced by individuals engaging in regularized social practice. In the relationship between individuals and institutions, the institutional frame contributes practical reasoning (Hall & Taylor, 1996) – frameworks for expanding patterns of action and reactions that give meaning within the context they occur. When contexts change, however, questions about institutional self-maintenance become crucial.

The direction in institutional theory called new institutionalism is particularly helpful in looking at this situation, as it considers how institutions perform under social and political changes (Scott, 1995). New institutionalism focuses on the multiplicity and flexibility of goals within social systems and considers collectives to be in a reciprocal relationship with their socioeconomic environments. As an institution, journalism is constantly involved in the conflict between economic gain and the struggle for legitimacy (Ryfe, 2006, p. 204). Embedded in the journalistic institution is therefore this constant boundary work, to which the profession has naturally built up an arsenal of defense mechanisms that can be mobilized in the face of disruption, crisis and challenges to authority. These defenses consist of the myths, norms and ideals of the profession embedded in the social contract of the press. Hence, although journalism faces disruption, the rules that guide journalistic production remain relatively stable – communicating the foundations of journalism as an institution of news production.

As boundaries assist in marking the difference between what is news and what is not news, journalists are mobilized in this endeavor. Journalists follow the rules of the institution because they want to be recognized as journalists. Because journalism becomes even more norm-dependent as the complexity of institutions surrounding the field increases, the boundaries of journalistic practice become more pronounced, signaling the difference between real journalism and non-journalism, including fake news, public relations, advertising and editorializing. In this way, regularized practices – fact checking, right of reply and sourcing – serve as countermeasures to the increasing complexities facing the profession (Cook, 1998). When journalists engage in these practices, they confirm the institutional order, demarcating the boundaries between journalism and other fields, such as the political and economic fields. Although the internet both enables and restrains traditional journalistic practices, enduring vocational procedures also largely determine how these resources are utilized and how new rules are formed. This type of border patrol behavior by institutional members circulates norms and myths within the profession to an orthodoxy that helps to create stability within the field, even in the face of a marked disruption.

Crisis, market and civil society

Even though the crisis in journalism, as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (2016) points out, speaks to several different crises at once rather than a universal one, the market gets the bulk of the blame for this situation. The fact that the market is a reality, though, puts the news economy in a position of pressure. Whether this pressure is seen in a stakeholder light, where the market consists of a number of interlinking processes, practices and strategies, or in a critical light, where creative industries are capitalist institutions involved in the creation of symbolic commodities, the market holds several points of entry for analysis. When journalism is seen as a business, then, we quickly run into issues of control, interest and power, exercised through the mechanisms of the market.

Most of the debates on journalism and its place between the state and the market are nested in the concept of the public sphere – where political life is contrasted with private life, where consumption takes place. The public sphere is often painted as the space between the state and the market (Garnham, 1986). It is where public debate takes place, where battles for hegemony are fought (Raeijmaekers & Maeseele, 2015) through asymmetries of power (Dahlberg, 2007) determined by class (Hallin, 1994, p. 6). This space is, in Habermas’ terms (1971), compromised both by private economic interests in the market and by state interests, particularly through the close embeddedness of private citizens into the welfare state (Dawes, 2014).

This space – civil society – is positioned by Ryfe (2017) as one of the forces “pulling” on journalism. Civil society is, in Ryfe’s terms, the set of institutions between the state, the economy and the family, orbiting around the state. Ryfe says, however, that journalism does not itself constitute the civil or public sphere. It “never lies completely within one sphere of public life” (p. 43). For one thing, Ryfe says that journalism has a different purpose in civil society than it has in the market. Moreover, to him, professionalism itself should be seen a separate force in the creation of journalism as it emerged between the state, the market and civil society. Hence, in the discussion of what forces influence journalism in the construction of news, researchers tend to emphasize different aspects of the larger structures and processes influencing journalism. Journalism, then, is a civil institution – one among several. Journalism is not the public sphere in itself; it is part of the public sphere. Hence, when we talk about journalism’s fundamental problem as its position between the state and the market, we are talking about binary forces that influence and condition journalism. The condition we are talking about here is one of closeness – journalism’s movement towards the fields that enable its existence. Civil society or the public sphere legitimizes journalism and its function, but it is not something that journalism can move closer to – certainly not to an extent that may shake its boundaries.

The main difficulty in pinning down these influences is largely geographical. At least in the context of digital disruption, business model disintegration and questions of legacy media sustainability, the geographical dimension is important. Whereas the state is national, the market is global. As analytical variables, these are problematic entities. Communication systems are still largely national, regulated at the state level; political systems are similarly situated. Forces of political or ideological control exist within a defined nation-state context, rarely spilling over into extranational spheres. But whereas journalism’s relationship to the state and the polity is a national nexus, its relationship to the market is increasingly global. Advertising and audience markets used to be nationally bound. Now they are potentially global. They are definitely global for the big platform players currently assuming larger and larger shares of national advertising markets. Thus, the media consumer market is global, allowing audiences to access global product markets. The sphere of political influence for journalism, however, is national. Journalism’s main products – voters and consumers – now operate in spheres of different sizes. Voters remain nation-bound, tied to a confined market space of political choices. Consumers, and indeed advertisers, operate across state lines, moving in long-tail markets bound only by the imagination.

Theoretical basis and empirical focus

The amount of literature on the relationship between journalism and politics, democracy and the public sphere is considerable, if not absolutely enormous. Although investigations into media democracy, media regulations, political communication and journalism and civic culture add great insight into journalism’s relationship with the state, many of these perspectives fail to comprehensively attend to the market. Moreover, these perspectives are largely normative. That is why democratic or political theory is not really all that helpful in our current endeavor. The only theoretical perspective that really considers both states and markets in the constitution of journalism is institutional sociology.

The argument presented in this book is rooted in institutional sociology, resting on three strands of theory related to journalism studies. At the base of this theoretical architecture is Giddens’ theory of structuration (1984), where action is possible within the duality of structure. Giddens explains how our ability to act as agents within a larger social structure is dependent on the rules and resources we can access within that structure. As agents, we are to some extent restricted by the structures that surround us, but what we do can also affect their composition. Giddens’ vantage point for the theory of structuration is to balance the constraining influence of structure over human action embedded in the established sociological framework. By abandoning “the equation of structure with constraint” (p. 220), Giddens instead bases his theory “on the proposition that structure is always both enabling and constraining, in virtue of the inherent relation between structure and agency” (p. 169). Journalism is shaped by the rules of the structure, but the application of available resources also contributes to maintaining or changing those rules. Here, the sociology of professions explains how professional power is assumed and maintained within the field, including the boundary maintenance (Gieryn, 1983) needed to ensure distance to other fields. New institutionalism is useful here in describing how institutions negotiate social power and field disintegration in periods of complex and fast-moving changes. Institutional sociology thus provides the vantage point for looking at journalism as situated between the state and the market while considering the interplay between fields and retaining some agency to the institution within this position.

Second, to properly understand the relationship between journalism and states and markets, political economic theory offers an entry point that allows for analyses of institutional influences and macro forces, including the mobilization of Marxist ideas about power and change. Although critical politica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Journalism’s problem
• 2 Between the state and the market
• 3 The Scandinavian media system
• 4 Too close to the state
• 5 Too close to the market
• 6 Conclusions
• References
• Index