Journalism History and Digital Archives

Henrik Bødker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000227024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This book showcases various ways in which digital archives allow for new approaches to journalism history. The chapters in this book were selected based on three overall objectives: 1) research that highlights specific concerns within journalism history through digital archives; 2) discussions of digital methodologies, as well as specific applications, that are accessible for journalism scholars with no prior experiences with such approaches; and 3) that journalism history and digital archives are connected in other ways than through specific methods, i.e., that the connection raises larger questions of historiography and power.

The contributions address cases and developments in Asia, South and North America and Europe; and range from long-range, big-data, machine-leaning and topic modelling studies of journalistic characteristics and meta-journalistic discourses to critiques of archival practices and access in relation to gender, social movements and poverty.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

A CENTURY OF JOURNALISM HISTORY AS CHALLENGE

Digital archives, sources, and methods

Thomas Birkner

, Erik Koenen

and Christian Schwarzenegger

Approaching journalism history through digital archives, digital sources, and digital methods is a demanding task for media historians, but also offers prospects. We explore some of the challenges and potential benefits in the light of a concrete research project that investigates journalism history in Germany from 1914 to 2014. The project focuses on the development of journalistic news storytelling following the inverted pyramid model. This paper mainly discusses the difficulties of assembling an adequate corpus. The German case is complicated, mainly because the country’s violent history, with two World Wars and two dictatorships, has left several desiderata for historical journalism research. We subdivide a hundred years of journalism history into different phases, and for each of these we discuss different approaches with regard to the availability, accessibility, and usability of sources in digital form. We conclude that digital archives and digital sources open up new techniques for historical journalism research, including methods such as automated content analysis and text mining. Nevertheless, new technological and cultural environments of news pose genuinely new challenges and require new skills and literacies to cope with journalism history through digital archives.

Introduction

Journalism history research is hard work.¹ Reconstructing history via a trade that serves “for the day” and is not concerned with archiving sources for historians is difficult. In the early years of radio and TV, for instance, storage space was limited and expensive, which has produced enormous desiderata when researching journalism history. In Germany, World War II destroyed a tremendous number of sources and this adds to more general challenges. As journalism researchers, we know that the past is essential to understand the present and prepare for the future and we therefore have to cope with these challenges. Surrounded by gaps, we try to find new paths opened up by digitalization.

In times when much of the crisis of journalism (Blumler 2010; Brüggemann et al. 2016; Russial, Laufer, and Wasko 2015) is related to the internet era, digitalization in general, and the World Wide Web in particular (for a very useful distinction between internet, the Web, and digitalization, see Brügger 2012a), we discuss the challenges but also the advantages of these developments for journalism historiography. Our interests are twofold: on the one hand, we focus on the digitalization of editorial content in analog forms, together with the infrastructure of the Web, which offers new possibilities for journalism historians. On the other hand, we discuss how online journalism has produced digitally born editorial content for more than two decades now. Collectively, we can term both types of news sources “digital reborn sources” (Brügger 2012b, 104), because the processes of archiving and making available sources to some degree change both types of sources.

In this paper, we reflect on the benefits but also the disadvantages (Bingham 2010) of writing journalism history through digital archives, sources, and methods, through a project that covers 100 years of German journalism, from the reinstallation of censorship at the beginning of World War I to the challenges of the twenty-first century on the World Wide Web. German journalism history is seldom told due to the country’s violent history and the sources destroyed during conflicts. This project investigates how the journalistic news format of the inverted pyramid has evolved over the decades of the last hundred years in Germany.

The aim of this paper is not to provide findings but rather to use the project to illustrate and exemplify some of the advantages and the disadvantages of digital sources. The paper reflects mainly on the problems of constructing a corpus of texts for the project. The existing digital archives are incredibly heterogeneous and cannot entirely cover the irrecoverable destruction of sources; yet, the archives can still help to discover entirely new methods for journalism history research. In this paper, we illustrate some of the new venues digital archives open for journalism historiography, but also reflect on the methodological and other research-related implications of the available and accessible sources and their peculiarities. We conclude that journalism history in particular, and communication history in general, will have to deal with digital archives and digital sources in the future, and that this is a challenge media historians need to be equipped for both intellectually and methodologically (Birkner and Schwarzenegger 2016; Koenen et al. 2018).

The Inverted Pyramid Model

The research project we take as the point of departure for our methodological and source-critical reflections is conceptualized as a follow-up to a study researching the history of German journalism from the first newspaper in 1605 to the breakthrough of modern journalism in 1914, before the outbreak of World War I (Birkner 2012, 2016). The broader aim of this was an attempt to write journalism history as closely connected to social history.

Modern journalism emerged in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century as journalists developed new forms of writing news stories that “evolved in a culture that was being reshaped on all sides by advances and changes in science, technology, industrialization, education, religion and a host of other human activities” (Stensaas 2005, 49). That also applied to a new news format that flipped the ordinary way of storytelling upside down in the sense that modern news storytelling advanced the chronology of events by starting with the essential fact(s). There are several explanations for the emergence of this model, e.g. “the telegraphic transmission of news may have provided a model of how news reporting might be more brief and interpretive” (Schudson 1982, 109). Moreover, more rational and faster news consumption by readers might have supported this new strategy (Pöttker 2005), which makes the argument for investigating journalism history as social history even stronger.

The inverted pyramid model is an integral part of research on the broader “form of news” (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001; Barnhurst 2012) and “objectivity as strategic ritual” (Tuchman 1971, 1978). For our project, we thus decided to focus on how the inverted pyramid model evolved over the decades of the twentieth century. This format became global as part of journalism as an “Anglo-American invention” (Chalaby 1996; see also Chapman 2005) along with the diffusion of the news paradigm (Høyer and Pöttker 2005; Schudson 1982, 2005). And, as Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, 21) explain, while the “capacity to change news designs had been available for quite some time, … journalists considered the existing form of news fully functional,” which stresses the interrelations of social and journalistic developments. Until now, however, we have no empirical evidence for how this form of news developed, and we consider the German case with its changing political systems throughout the twentieth century to be extremely interesting and we therefore focus on this form throughout the decades of the twentieth century characterized by different political systems (the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the Cold War in East and West Germany) and changing media environments from printed newspapers to radio, TV, internet, and the media convergence of the twenty-first century.

As we follow the inverted pyramid model through the decades, we address new opportunities offered through the digitalization of newspapers, including new techniques of distant reading and scrutinizing vast amounts of news content. The main focus of this paper is, however, on the difficulties of assembling an adequate corpus for our project, difficulties that raise more general questions for historical journalism research.

Difficulties in Selecting a Sample

We see our study in line with Pöttker (2005), who saw “the inverted pyramid model established at the New York Herald in 1895 when nearly 30 percent of the articles with more than fifty words followed that model” (Birkner 2016, 159). German textbooks for journalism students did not include this form of news writing and continued to follow a chronology model. La Roche famously described how the New York Times and Vossische Zeitung from Berlin each reported the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914 (La Roche 2006). While in Germany, they died in the penultimate sentence of the news story, the New York Times wrote (La Roche 2006, 88): “Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot and killed by a Bosnian student here today.” We were, however, somewhat skeptical about the broader implications of La Roche’s example, which caused us to take a look at German news the day after the assassination. In 1914, German news was a very heterogeneous field, from small papers in the countryside up to the large new mass press in the big cities and we consequently coded a sample of eight newspapers selected according to geography, regional diversity, typology of newspapers, and the size of their readership. However, sampling was also driven merely by accessibility. The center for German press research (Deutsche Presseforschung) in Bremen had most of the papers that we used for the first phase of the project. What we found—in opposition to the example given by La Roche—was that the inverted pyramid model was established in German journalism in 1914, especially in the mass press of the time (Birkner 2012, 2016). The percentages of articles in the sampled newspapers that followed the inverted pyramid thus ranged from 16 to 44 percent.

Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) characterize this style of news as relatively stable. The situation in German in the twentieth century is, however, not yet described. Besides the two World Wars, there are other influences on journalism history that might affect news storytelling. For example, the development of technology—the distribution of news using the telegraph, telephone, or satellite—is highly relevant. Other relevant aspects include the rise of the mass press, radio and TV and, finally, the internet, all of which have affected routine journalistic practices; as Weischenberg and Birkner noted (2015, 409), “different narrative structures and forms have emerged in print, broadcast, and interactive media.”

In order to investigate how the inverted pyramid has developed we divided the century from 1914 onwards into 10-year brackets as we detected events of social and political importance also relevant to media history in the years 1924, 1934, and so on. The goal is thus to analyze the news in different media every 10 years, using the following time divisions:

• 1924, shortly after the introduction of radio in Germany. How was radio news structured, and did this change news articles in the press?
• 1934, shortly after Hitler and the National Socialists seized power. Was their new regime already observable in the style of writing news stories?
• 1944, shortly after the Allies invaded Normandy. How were German news outlets alike in an already-destroyed country?
• 1954, shortly after the (West-) German team winning the football World Cup gave the new television medium a boost. Did this change news articles in the press and radio news broadcasts?
• 1964, shortly after the second German television station (ZDF) started. How was TV news structured then?
• 1974, when, again, the (West-) German team won the football World Cup, this time at home. How was the tournament perceived in (East-) German media?
• 1984, shortly after private broadcasting was established in Germany. Did this change news articles in the press and radio news broadcasts?
• 1994, shortly after the German unification and the process of Western media companies buying Eastern newspapers. How is news presented in a unified German media landscape?
• 2004, after the dot-com collapse. Has the acceleration of news distribution online changed the printed and broadcast news?
• 2014, after the distribution of news via social media immens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Journalism history and digital archives
• 1 A Century of Journalism History as Challenge: Digital archives, sources, and methods
• 2 Excavating Concepts of Broadcasting: Developing a method of cultural research using digitized historical periodicals
• 3 Exploring Machine Learning to Study the Long-Term Transformation of News: Digital newspaper archives, journalism history, and algorithmic transparency
• 4 In Search of America: Topic modelling nineteenth-century newspaper archives
• 5 Journalism History, Web Archives, and New Methods for Understanding the Evolution of Digital Journalism
• 6 Saving Data Journalism: New strategies for archiving interactive, born-digital news
• 7 The Politics of Women's Digital Archives and Its Significance for the History of Journalism
• 8 Digital Archiving as Social Protest: Dalit Camera and the mobilization of India's "Untouchables"
• 9 Digital Archives as Subaltern Counter-Histories: Situating "Favela Tem Memoria" in the Rio de Janeiro media and political landscape
• 10 @franklinfordbot: Remediating Franklin Ford
• Index