Industrial Journalism

Singapore.


The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Tim Markham, who shifts our focus to war reporting - what impact do the conditions of reporting have on the way journalists relate to one another? In this, he takes on journalists' identities, values, and ethics as strategic. There are two symbolic economies that underpin war reporting - mystification (why journalists have differing standing and jobs is unclear to them) and ambivalence (a downplayed distanced relationship to their journalistic work). This ties into a broader trend of anti-establishment attitudes.

Singapore.


And we're back for another day of ICA 2010. I'm afraid I may not see much of today, through, both as I'm still backing up from the football last night and as I still have to finish our slides for tomorrow. The first session I'm seeing, then, starts with Scott Rodgers, whose interest is in the relationship between the newspaper and the city. He highlights the series The Wire as a useful fictional study of the sociology of city journalism; its underlying message is that the hollowing out of the local newspaper has serious implications for the city.

Singapore.


The second paper in this ICA 2010 session is by Wolfgang Donsbach, who begins by outlining three broad traditions of journalism: the subjective tradition (pursuing individual goals), the public service tradition, and the commercial tradition. Each can be characterised along a number of criteria (goals, dominant relationships, prototypes, dominant values, dominant content, and the journalist's role).

In his view, the public service tradition - selecting relevant and verified information - is the crucial one for journalism, but it is now under threat: from within the media, through the tabloidisation of content (increasing levels of pop politics, personalisation, scandalisation and sensationalism, negativity) and the attendant changes in format (growing emotionalisation, fragmentation and sound bites, a race to maximise audience reach, and bottom line pressures on journalists). Journalists increasingly complain about bottom line pressures and about how frequently their content is changed by others after filing, for example.

Singapore.


I'm afraid in the battle between lunch and the second plenary, lunch won out, so I'm skipping Ien Ang's keynote at ICA 2010, and jumping right to the first of the post-lunch sessions. I may miss some of those as well as I've got a few meetings in the afternoon, but we'll see how we go. We start the afternoon with a paper by Wiebke Loosen from the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, whose interest is in the relationship between journalism and its audiences. One of the key issues here is the change in the sender/receiver relationship - always a complicated and paradoxical relationship (journalism provides a service and needs an audience, but that audience plays a subordinate role - journalists are often oriented more towards their colleagues than towards audiences).

Singapore.


The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Matthew Weber, who shifts our focus to online news and begins by noting the gradual decline of the traditional print news community and the rise of online news usage. Newspaper organisations - the news industry - form a community made up of individual populations of professionals, which compete with one another for users; within this, in turn, there are individual news organisations pursuing specific corporate strategies.

What effect does such strategy have over time? Strategic change can increase the likelihood of survival during periods of disruption; interorganisational linkages can provide economic and reputational benefits, and increase legitimacy; hyperlinks between organisations can be instrumental in this. News organisations make strategic choices on how to link and whom to link to; at times of change, this is a question especially of how to deal with new entrants.

Hong Kong.


The final speaker in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Alice Lee, who continues the focus on online news. She says that online news sites in a Web 2.0 operate like a digital marketplace where people get together and exchange news, and explores how Web 2.0 has affected these sites. The format of online media is particularly important, in other words - the breaking of previously existing boundaries which has occurred with Web 2.0 has upset the previous equilibrium and led to significant changes.

Hong Kong.


The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Stuart Allan, who focusses our attention on the history of journalism on the Internet. He highlights the continuing questions of what counts as news, and who can be described as a journalist, in this changing environment, and notes that we have gradually shifted from journalism on the Internet to journalism of the Internet.

But to understand this shift better, it is useful to step back to consider the historical trajectory of journalism both online and in other media - by way of illustration, Stuart notes how over time, TV news bulletins have settled into a format that is now near-universal around the world, and which seems natural to us from life-long exposure, but is far from the only possible approach. Early TV newscasts were strongly influenced by newspaper journalism, of course, and replicated its conventions to some extent; another influence was radio journalism, which was better placed to do current, close to real-time reporting; yet another was newsreel journalism which had the expertise for presenting news stories in visual formats. Today, these have coalesced into a globally near-uniform format, with very few exceptions.

Hong Kong.


The final presenter at The Internet Turning 40 today is Iris Chyi, whose focus is on users' emotional attachment to online news. In the US, newspapers currently appear to be in crisis: print circulation is declining, and online usage has not translated into significant revenue. Paid content is positioned as a potential solution, but may remain an impossible dream - and that debate, too, has gone on for a decade already.

Media usage does not always correspond to the attitudinal factors that drive the media selection process - online news users' response to online news is not necessarily enthusiastic, and may be an inferior good. In the past, media choices were made between scarce goods, and the only alternative to using specific media was not to use the media at all; today, choice has increased, and media use follows a preceding process of media selection - and that process is driven by user perceptions of the various media options available to them. Attitudinal factor deserve more attention, then.

Cardiff.


The final presentation at the Future of Journalism 2009 conference, then, is by Ivar John Erdal, whose interest is in the relationship between technological changes and journalistic practices, examined through a study of journalists; experiences with digital production systems. Media organisations now rely increasingly on content management systems, which embed some specific technological and socio-cultural constraints and opportunities; in line with Giddens's structuration theory, these institutional structures (determined by intangible rules and tangible resources) affect journalistic practice.

Cardiff.


The next speakers at Future of Journalism 2009 are Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell, whose interest is in business news and the portrayal of corporate images as influenced by the relationship between media and business, with bloggers throw in as another complication. This is connected also with research into the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has become better-known in recent years especially as a result of being promoted by the media.

The way the media have portrayed specific corporations is changing as a result; corporations are framed in different ways depending on whether a CSR perspective is included or not. To understand such different portrayal it is necessary to understand the production of business news, too, and to investigate the sources for different articles. Blogs now play a growing role in this context, and the study presented here especially examined articles about blogs in the business press (print, online, radio) as well as interviewing and surveying business journalists in Sweden.