Journalism Studies: The Basics

Martin Conboy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136288487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Journalism Studies: The Basics provides an introductory overview of the emerging field of Journalism Studies, discussing key issues and contemporary debates. Drawing on Conboy's extensive experience in the field, the changing nature of journalism and its future directions are addressed, through chapters covering:

• the history and development of Journalism Studies
• how journalists are created through training and education
• changing research methods and processes in journalism
• the impact of the 'end product' in wider society
• global perspectives on journalism
• technology and the future of the discipline.

Situated within a fast growing and dynamic field of study, this engaging introduction will be valuable reading for students of journalism, media and communication, along with those seeking to develop a broader understanding of contemporary journalism.

STUDIES OF JOURNALISM

THE BEGINNINGS

INTRODUCTION

The systematic exploration within a university environment of the history, practices and processes of journalism and their political and cultural impacts has never been without its critics. Let’s start our exposition by considering the following statement by a senior journalist who has direct experience both of working at a leading university and of publishing both by himself and in co-operation with professional academics on the subject of journalism:

Professional journalists, especially British ones, are given to disdain for the work of media scholars … but … journalists would do a better job for the citizens they presume to serve if they encouraged more critical interrogation of the way journalism works.

(Hargreaves, 2005)

This book will explore the development in Britain of an area of academic study which has emerged quite recently: Journalism Studies. The subject of this introductory text is, institutionally, the name often given to the study of journalism within a critical and often academic setting. It is located almost exclusively within the university sector, although this book will stress the often essential contributions made by journalists from outside this arena. It will look at the sorts of critical interrogation which both scholars and journalists who are interested in the civic and cultural impact of journalism have brought to contemporary considerations of its practice. On the one hand, such study could be considered as having had a long gestation period; on the other hand, it could be considered as constituting, especially in Britain, a short yet dynamic moment in the longer history of communication studies.

WHAT IS THERE TO STUDY?

So how can we begin to define our subject? What is journalism? Within a wide geographical, historical and generic range it seems to be definable by two aspects: its aim is to provide a truthful account of the contemporary world; and it is committed to reporting information that is new about that world, whether in terms of fact or opinion based in fact. This initial definition can be refined. Beyond these assertions, it is, in addition, a variety of technologically mediated communication, a traditional contribution to our democratic culture and a form of entertainment or commentary. Analytically, journalism tends to shape specialist knowledge for a non-specialist readership. On account of this characteristic, in order to produce journalism we need people who can digest complex information and prepare it for general consumption. Journalism explores, for instance, the decisions of politicians and other socially important groups and measures them against socially shared frameworks of ethical and legal behaviour. Furthermore, it is published on a regular basis and in a consistent format with a title and an editorial identity which most often includes a stable political worldview. In addition, it is directed towards a geographically dispersed and anonymous community. It achieves all this while articulating its audience within a clearly defined idiom, meaning that it is accepted as authentic by its audience because it speaks the same language. Given all that journalism aims to achieve, you can see that there is a lot to study!

JOURNALISM AS ENGAGEMENT WITH AUDIENCE

As we have defined it above, journalism is nothing new. The careful construction of an audience for discussions of topical matters can be seen in the periodicals of the early eighteenth century such as the Tatler and the Spectator as they sought to express the tastes and opinions of the rising bourgeois classes. Two hundred years later, in the very different media of first radio and then television, the BBC fashioned a national audience through its news bulletins and, in the popular press, from Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the paper in

1969, the Sun has provided a hugely successful and profitable articulation of a blue-collar, anti-authoritarian conservative populism for its community of readers.

Journalism is, in all its aspects, a type of communication which invites, at least in theory, the public into discussion. This is not just a modern consideration pandering to the possibilities of electronic communication of texts and e-mail but a traditional characteristic of journalism which goes all the way back to its beginnings. At one point in journalism’s evolution, this communication with readers as contributors was a literal transaction. Periodicals were so restricted by political pressure in their provision of news and commentary that any controversial contributions came from the pens of the letter-writers, and in fact these often provided the main fare. A notable political commentator wrote under the alias of ‘Cato’on the London Journal in the early eighteenth century. His provocative criticism of the South Sea Bubble investment disaster – a ruinously speculative financial venture with remarkably modern parallels with the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis and the economic disaster it triggered – was demonstration enough of the need for direct government intervention. Prime Minister Walpole bought the paper and replaced its staffin order to ensure the restriction of its political authority. Later in the century, a second notorious and anonymous letter writer was ‘Junius’, who boosted the sales and therefore also the standing of the Public Advertiser with withering commentary on the King’s conduct of politics, including one particularly famous contribution on 19 December 1769 when he observed:

Sire – it is the misfortune of your life … that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people. It is not, however, too late to correct the error.

Such letters had the effect of boosting the circulation of a publication whose other content was a rather dull digest of commercial information, official court announcements and, as the title of the publication implies, the extremely profitable complement to journalism: advertising. The necessity for the public to be invited into the discussions of journalism has remained and is today extraordinarily prominent not only in letters and phone calls but in e-mails, texts, blogs and tweets on the topics and personalities of the moment.

WHO ARE THOSE DOING THE STUDYING?

Journalism Studies is chiefly the work of academics and critics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including off-duty journalists, in dialogue with the work of students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Together they make the case why, in the words of American journalism professor Barbie Zelizer, we need to take journalism seriously. It has been in evidence in our universities for a little over fifteen years under its present name and has come to combine both academic critique and research, together with thoughtful interventions from practitioners, some of whom are now working themselves as educators and researchers within the academy. It is this, often imperfect but still stimulating, exchange of views from commentators, consumers and producers which makes the field as vibrant and full of potential as it is today.

Academic research into journalism and even an appreciation of journalism as a range of communicative styles and genres has lagged behind the historical development of its subject, certainly in comparison to other fields of professional practice. This is almost certainly on account of the disdain of elite culture for much of journalism’s output, a suspicion that this ‘fugitive literature ’ – tomorrow’s cat-tray liner – is at best a form of sub-literary output and at worst a form of communication ultimately corrupted by its overriding need to turn a profit. The figure of the desperate and unscrupulous journalist who will sell his children’s toys for a decent story and who knows no bottom to the barrel in his pursuit of the squalid and the sensational is a familiar character in the popular imagination and has been represented in various guises in book, film and television programme over the years. In fact, as I write this book, this squalid tradition of journalism is taking on a new and very shocking sense of reality; no need for fictional accounts of grubby and illegal practices in July 2011, when the reality of the hacking into the mobile phone of the murdered teenager Millie Dowler by the News of the World was all too prominent in the world’s news media!

A DECLINING REPUTATION

Such negative assessments of journalism are nothing new. They were already much in evidence in the early nineteenth century even as it began to establish itself as a political and economic force. Newspapers began to flourish commercially following the lifting of taxes on them after 1855, yet social, political and cultural elites tended to disapprove of the very tendencies towards popularization which made them so enormously profitable. The success of daily journalism from this point marks a separation between journalism and literature. Before this period, many contributors to journals and periodicals had also spanned a dual existence as writers who aimed at posterity in their creative endeavours, whereas popular journalism required professional journalists whose aim was to fulfil the demands of readers very much rooted in the present. The stuffof this new commercially successful journalism as well as its practitioners tended to be looked down upon, as they were considered to be producing a form of writing which was designed for the moment, an ephemeral product as opposed to the serious writing which traditionally aspired to lasting influence in Victorian Britain, beyond the concerns and tastes of the everyday and aspiring to the immortal uplands of classic status. Serious writing was considered to need investment in time and effort, a reservoir of artistic talent, and was presumed therefore to be a slow business. Journalism, by comparison, appeared to suffer through being composed in haste. The increasing commercial drive to sensationalization which accompanied the success of journalism over the century did not help and the corresponding genre of melodrama so prevalent within journalism was perceived by elite cultural critics as cheap, formulaic and only of interest to the lower classes. Debates on the nature and values of journalism echoed through the century, as the argument centred on whether the press influenced the people or whether the reverse was true and the press was, as it often claimed itself, genuinely reflecting the views of its readers. Journalists themselves, particularly of the everyday kind, had little inclination and still less time to add to these discussions and the debate was led, by and large, by elite commentators with their own political perspectives, not to mention prejudices, to pursue. So journalism arrived in the twentieth century with a great deal of negative cultural baggage, despite being a hugely profitable and influential communication form.

WHY STUDY JOURNALISM?

If Journalism Studies is, put simply, the study of journalism (as opposed to its transient consumption), then we might stop to ponder why we should study it at all rather than treat is as it is apparently intended: consume and move on! To a large extent, the role of this book is to explore why it is worth investing effort in studying a product intended for the moment. In short, we can answer that journalism draws upon and contributes to social and political realities. It goes a long way to creating our shared understanding of the world and of the place of our communities in that world. Surely, therefore, it is important to study these contributions. Even though it may be designed for consideration in the present, studying the longer-term impact of journalism enhances debate on why journalism matters in contemporary society and how we can enable it to preserve its best social impulses into the future.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOURNALISM STUDIES: THE BRIEF ACCOUNT!

This chapter will briefly assess the development of studies of journalism from the frenzied discussions of the mid-Victorian period to the foundation of the first schools of journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the steady reinvigoration of these studies through the twentieth century to the present day.

Journalism Studies is a new coinage for something which has been going on for some considerable time. Indeed journalism has been studied for a lot longer than it has been called journalism. Two dates frame that observation: 1690 and 1833. In 1690, a young German scholar, Tobias Peucer presented a doctoral dissertation which is believed to be the first formal and extended study of news and news reporting, processes and practices: De relationibus novellis (Atwood, 2001).What he had studied was variously referred to in English at that time as Newes, Information, Advices, Observations, Tydings, Passages, Relations, Posts and Accounts, and these were produced by authors referred to variously as curranters, mercurists, newsmen, newsmongers, gazetteers, diurnalists and eventually journalists. The second date is the moment when the word ‘journalism’ first entered the English language from the French in an article in the Westminster Review in 1833. Its arrival in the language is considered to be exactly the moment at which a new word became necessary in order to capture the particular range of the periodical publications which encompassed both discussion of high politics side by side with accounts of crime and scandal from the police courts.

The import of ‘journalism’into the English language is a convenient moment to begin a consideration of how journalism began to be studied: first, informally, and, later, with an increasingly formal critical edge. At the point when the word was coined, we are beginning to see the division between styles of writers. Some were primarily political pamphleteers – often with literary ambitions – such as English radical pamphleteer William Cobbett (1763–1835), the essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) and the revolutionary scribe whose work paved the way for both the American and French revolutions, Thomas Paine (1737–1809). In contrast to these, there were others of a more commercial bent who were content to target specifically commercial audiences with their writing. This tendency became consolidated once the taxes on newspapers, which had hitherto restricted circulation growth, were lifted from 1855, and a free market in journalism was inaugurated in Britain.

Discussion of journalism was rife in the quarterly periodicals, the prestigious publications of the Victorian era. There may not have been the institutional framework of the university to provide a sustained level of enquiry into the popularity and influence of journalism at this time, but these critical quarterlies and, later in the century, the monthlies, nevertheless provided a great deal of commentary and opinion on the subject. One of the most famous and influential analyses of journalism came in one such journal, the Nineteenth Century , in 1887. It dealt with the introduction of a range of stylistic features, largely imported from the better developed commercial environment for journalism in the United States. This style was named the ‘new journalism’by cultural critic Matthew Arnold, who claimed that despite its evident energy it suffered from one irredeemable fault: it was ‘feather-brained’. Despite such elitist disdain, journalism proved enormously profitable, the more so, it seemed, as it embraced a mass market which was willing to consume it. As a consequence the characteristics of popular journalism were disseminated throughout newspapers and were continually refined in their impact on culture in general.

Until this point, studies of journalism had been, by and large,

restricted to occasional outbursts of prejudice, often informed by a fear of an increase in the influence of the poor, who had been further encouraged to read through the introduction of compulsory and free primary education from 1870. The journalists themselves generally kept out of discussions of journalism and its cultural impact unless, in the case of senior members of the industry, they turned their hands to writing celebratory accounts of their own working lives. This meant that the range of opinion on journalism seemed to be restricted to a span between elite cultural revulsion and self-regarding autobiography. This is not to say that more established academic disciplines had not already begun to consider journalism as a subject worthy of attention. Historians in particular had begun to produce the first of a number of Victorian accounts of English journalism. Alexander Andrews’s The History of British Journalism , which appeared in 1859, and Bourne’s English Newspapers , in 1887, provided something of the grand narrative of which the Victorians in particular were fond, as well as the template for many contemporary accounts within academe and among journalists themselves reflecting on the history of their ‘trade’.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the general elite response to any analysis of journalism ranged from suspicions of the motives of the press barons of the early twentieth century to the anxieties of influential commentators such as Queenie Leavis, the wife of famous English literary scholar F.R. Leavis, concerning what she perceived as the damaging moral effects of the popular press. This continued up until the 1930s, when an American stream of applied social investigation prised open the door to a more fruitful engagemen...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Journalism Studies
• The Basics
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Studies of journalism: the beginnings
• 2. Education and training: between a hack and a hard place
• 3. Journalism studies and research approaches
• 4. Debates on the processes of journalism
• 5. Products
• 6. Journalism across borders: imperial, international, global
• 7. Journalism studies: engagements with technology and industrial change
• Bibliography
• Index